The Favoured Child

by Philippa Gregory

  His hand came down under my chin and lifted my face up. For no reason he squeezed my chin until I could feel the strength in his long fingers, killer’s fingers. The blood drummed in my head, but I did not speak and my grey eyes on his face never wavered.

  ‘I think I shall come to your room tonight,’ he said with a little sigh. ‘I think I should like to lie with you.’

  There were a few moments of utter silence while my reeling head tried to take in what he was saying.

  ‘You cannot!’ I said stupidly. ‘Richard! You are my brother!’

  Richard’s hand left my chin and lingered on my bare shoulder, caressing the slope of my neck, one finger negligently trailing down to touch the warm rounded top of my breast.

  ‘Oh, I don’t regard it,’ he said idly. ‘It was just something they said to frighten us.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I tried to step back, but Richard’s other arm was around my waist holding me tight beside him. ‘No, they meant it, Richard. It was the truth, I am sure of it.’

  I was still not afraid – I was too stunned to be afraid. My brother, and the killer of my mama, had me held tight to his side and was stroking my breast and my neck with confident, bloodstained fingers.

  ‘I don’t regard it,’ Richard said again. ‘I do not think we need regard it. They will not be saying it again, after all!’ He gave me one of his most charming smiles, as if that were the wittiest sally he could make, and he put one hard finger under my chin and tipped my face up to receive his kiss.

  In the pit of madness which was all that was left of my will, there was nothing to stop him. His mouth came down upon mine and I gritted my teeth to stop myself retching, and I put my hands on his waist to hold myself steady while the world reeled around me.

  ‘Whore,’ he said gently, and put me from him. ‘Go and get into bed. I shall have you tonight.’

  My will was broken and my mind was dead.

  I went up the stairs to my bedroom for there was nowhere else I could go. Jenny Hodgett undressed me in silence and looked anxiously at my face so pale that it was deathly. I slipped between the sheets of my bed and blew out my candle. Then I lay in the half-darkness with the firelight flickering on the looming furniture of the room; an owl was calling and calling outside.

  He was late coming to bed. In my strange calm state I even dozed while I waited for him. I was afraid no longer. I had lost my fear. I was not a virgin – I did not think it would hurt. I could not cry for help and shame Richard, and shame our family name, and shame myself. When he pulled the covers roughly off me, I lay as still as a corpse. Only the little hairs on my arms and my legs lifted and prickled at the cold night air. But I held still.

  The bed dipped with his weight as he came in beside me. His night-time candle showed his face still rosy and young. There was the smell of spirits on his breath – brandy. His hair smelled of cigar smoke.

  He was at a loss to know how to begin. I opened my eyes and looked at him steadily, expressionless, not moving. He fidgeted with the things on my bedside table, shifted the glass of water, knocked over the little wooden owl Ralph had given me.

  ‘D’you remember Scheherazade?’ he asked unexpectedly.

  I held my face blank, but my mind was racing.

  ‘You really loved her, didn’t you?’ he asked. His voice was a little stronger. It held some resonance of his old childhood hectoring tone. ‘You were heartbroken when she was killed, weren’t you, Julia?’

  My silence irritated him.

  ‘Weren’t you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I was unwilling to speak and I did not know why he asked. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You cried for her,’ Richard reminded me. ‘And yet you could never really believe that Dench had cut her.’

  I sighed. It was all such a long time ago and the losses then had been mere forerunners of what came later.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Richard rolled on to one elbow, the better to see my face. ‘The horse was cut, then they smashed her in the face with a hammer,’ he said. ‘And Dench was sacked and had to run for his life. Remember? If Grandpa Havering had caught him, he would have had him hanged for sure.’

  ‘I remember,’ I said.

  Richard was getting excited, his eyes sparkling, his face bright. ‘It was me!’ he said exultantly. ‘All along! And none of you ever guessed. None of you ever came near to guessing. I cut Scheherazade and I made sure all the blame would fall on Dench. So that stopped you riding my horse all right! And I made sure that I would never have to ride her again, and I got rid of Dench who was ganging up with you against me. I did all of that on my own! And I made you cry for weeks, didn’t I?’

  I lay very still, trying to absorb what Richard was saying. But trying even harder to understand Richard’s sudden elation. Then he moved closer towards me and I understood. He fumbled under the covers for the hem of my shift and pulled it up. I checked my movement to grab for it and hold it down. If it came to a struggle, then Richard would win. And I knew, with some secret perverse knowledge which I did not want, that he would like to feel me fighting against him.

  ‘And the goshawk…’ Richard’s breathing was fast; he had pulled his own nightshirt out of the way and was rearing up Over me. ‘Ralph Megson’s precious goshawk. When she bated from my fist, I pulled her back. The first time it was an accident, but she made me so angry when she would not sit still. The second time I wanted to hurt her, and I knew if I pulled her hard enough and quick enough, I would break her legs. D’you remember how they went click, Julia?’

  I was sweating, and the inside of my thighs were damp. Richard pushed inexpertly towards me and put a clumsy hand down to part my legs. He clambered, impeded by the bedclothes, on top of me. He giggled like a conceited schoolboy when he pressed down and his hard flesh met mine.

  ‘But you didn’t dare touch the sheep,’ I said. I spoke almost idly. My mind and my body were numb with fear and disgust and the horror of what Richard had told me, and my acceptance as I recognized the truth at once: that I had, in some deep and guilty way, always known; that I should have said something, done something; that once again I was Richard’s unwilling accomplice.

  But the sheep had gone against him.

  ‘D’you think they knew you were bad?’ I asked.

  Richard hesitated.

  ‘They went against you,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen sheep do such a thing. They mobbed you in the barn on the downs. D’you remember that, Richard? D’you remember how very afraid you were then?’

  ‘I wasn’t. . .’ Richard said quickly. ‘I’ve never been afraid.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you were,’ I said certainly. ‘You were afraid of Scheherazade from the moment you first saw her, and you were afraid of the sheep.’

  Richard glared at me, but he was losing his potency. I could feel his hardness melting away and I was filled with elation, with a sense of triumph.

  ‘You were scared to death of Scheherazade,’ I said. ‘That was why you cut her. Not just because you were jealous of me riding her. But you would have done anything not to ride her yourself. And the sheep were like a nightmare.’

  ‘It’s not so . . .’ he said. His eyes were sharp with dislike at my tauntings. He looked as he used to look when he was about to explode into one of his childhood rages. I knew I had defeated him and he would not touch me. But I was not ready for his instantaneous spite.

  He thrust his forefinger hard into me in a sharp jabbing movement, and I gave a muffled cry of pain and shock. The pain was sharp; it felt as if he were scratching me inside. I bit back the cry and made no sound. I shut my eyes and lay as still as a stone carving. Richard took his hand away and fumbled down to touch himself. He was starting to breathe heavily and I could feel him pulling at himself, rubbing himself against my legs.

  I opened my eyes and smiled at him. ‘It’s no good, Richard,’ I said coolly in a voice just like my mama’s when she sent him early to bed for spilling jam at the tea table. ‘It is no good.
You cannot touch me now and you will never be able to touch me. You had much better go to your own bed.’

  I pushed his spiteful hands away from me and rolled over on my side to present my back to him, indifferent to whether he stayed or went.

  I did not even open my eyes as he left the room.

  29

  Only that one night, only that once did he come to my bed in the months of my pregnancy. And only that once did he speak of the times which had passed, when all the warning signs had been there if we had been able to see them. I knew then what Acre had known, what every animal he had touched had known, what Ralph had seen on meeting him: that Richard was insane. All the clues had been there, but between an indulgent aunt and a weak girl he had managed to pass them off as eccentricity, or talent, or charm.

  I blamed myself. I thought of the times that Richard’s behaviour had been violent or passionate and I had concealed it from my mama. I thought of the times he had threatened me and I had loyally kept it from everyone, even from Clary and the village children. Ted Tyacke would have been glad enough to waylay Richard and give him a thumping to remind him to be gentle with me. But I had never told anyone. Never told them anything at all.

  I blamed myself then. I sat on the window-seat and watched the hoar-frost melt on the lawn under the window as the sunshine warmed it on the last days of autumn, and I blamed myself for living in a sweet girlish pretence, believing that the world was kinder than it was, that adults were cleverer than they were, that Richard was normal.

  I leafed through the days of my childhood like old watercolour paintings in a folder. And this time I saw everything quite differently. I saw Richard as an impulsive, uncontrollable bully. I saw my mama as wilfully blind: blind to his cruelty to me, blind to his madness, blind because she knew my parentage and guessed at his. She had not the courage to face the Lacey madness in Richard’s eyes. She should have seen it. I should have warned her. And because I had not warned her, she had died most horridly, and left me to live in a long nightmare from which it seemed that I would never be free.

  I did not think about the rose pearls, how Richard came to have them, in that slim box which now lay on my dressing-table. Some days, when the sun was shining and the frost was bright and the air sharp and sweet, I would tell myself that he had seen some pearls in a Chichester shop and bought them for me, thinking that I would like them, to remind me of my mama. But at other times near the end of November when the days grew darker and the nights long, I looked into the embers of the fire and saw Richard in a dirty alehouse, paying a man to kill Mama and John. Richard, with that mad absent-minded smile and his blue eyes shining. Richard, as mad as a rabid dog. My brother, my husband, the father of my child.

  I blamed myself for not complaining of him, for not warning my mama, for not alerting my Uncle John. But for one thing I blamed myself no longer: that time in the summer-house. I was not to blame. Richard had raped me, as surely and as wrongly as if he had held a gun in my face to do it. I was in a daydream in the summer-house – but I had been thinking of James, not Richard. I had dreamed of love-making there once before, but that was with the sight, and it had been a dream of being Beatrice with Ralph. I had never thought of Richard as my lover and he had no right to court me, and no right to force me.

  It made me icy towards him, those days before Christmas. I knew then that I was trapped just as Ralph had warned me. Richard had raped me and isolated me till I had neither lover, nor friend nor parent to turn to. And the child which I was unwillingly carrying was a product of violence and incest.

  I think Richard knew that he had pushed me over the boundary into some cold certainty, for he left me much alone. I think he began to fear me, and indeed, when I caught sight of myself twisting the rose pearls around my throat and of my blank horror-struck eyes in a mirror, I could understand his fear.

  Stride and Mrs Gough prepared for a quiet Christmas and Richard ordered George to bring in some boughs of holly and a yule-log. They made their preparations around me as if I were some stone goddess, insensate but powerful, who had to be propitiated with the correct ceremonies. The whole household was aware of my growing strangeness and absence, and conspired to blame it on the pregnancy, on the weather, on my mourning for my mama, on anything, rather than face the fact that I was so sick in my heart that I was barely alive at all.

  Only Acre dared to tackle the blackness head-on, but Acre was wise in the madness of the Laceys. They had suffered from Laceys before and they knew the signs. I think they feared for me, for I had once been well loved.

  ‘What ails you, Miss Julia?’ Mrs Tyacke asked me. She had come to see Mrs Gough in the kitchen, and had begged leave to pay her respects to me as I sat idly in the parlour. I had called her out of her cottage before it was crushed by the falling spire. I had been her son’s friend and playmate, and she had not forgotten. They had not forgotten me in Acre. Her sharp eyes were bright on my face, but I could not summon a smile even for her.

  I heard her question. I heard it over and over in my head. Then I recognized it. She had used the same words Ralph had used to Richard that day on the common when Richard had broken the legs of his hawk. ‘What ails you?’ he had said then. Wise Ralph had seen the madness of the Laceys in Richard. He had not seen it in me.

  ‘Is the baby too much for you?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘I am quite well.’

  ‘We are all afraid for you,’ she said blankly. ‘No one in the village has seen you for so long. You do not come to church and we never see you in Acre. When we ask your husband, he just laughs in his merry way.’

  I looked up from the flames flickering around the logs. ‘Does he?’ I said.

  ‘It’s all gone wrong again,’ she said, and her voice quavered like a disappointed child’s. ‘It’s all gone wrong again.’

  I nodded. There was little I could say.

  Other places manage,’ she said. Other villages have estates which make a profit and keep a village and have a mill which keeps grinding. Why does it never work for Acre?’

  Other places have squires who leave the land alone,’ I said listlessly. ‘Acre has always had squires who care so much for the land that they cannot leave be. Richard wants Wideacre to be the first estate in the land in the new century. He wants it to be the finest inheritance in the land for the son he is hoping will be born.’

  ‘And you?’ she asked me sharply. ‘You wanted something special for Acre too. You and Ralph Megson made Acre all sorts of promises.’

  ‘I was a Lacey squire too,’ I said dully. ‘The future I planned for the place was very different from the future it will have under Richard. But I was still a Lacey squire imposing my will on Acre then. Mrs Tyacke, I believe things will be wrong for Acre until there is no Lacey family on Wideacre and no squire in the hall, and no master over the village. I think Ralph was right all along, but much good that thought does the village now I am no longer the squire, but just the squire’s lady. And much good that does Ralph, locked away in some cell in London. And much good that thought does me,’ I added, my voice low.

  ‘And you’ll be the mother of the next Lacey squire,’ she said. ‘You’ll keep the line going.’

  ‘No,’ I said with certainty. ‘Not I.’

  She nodded at my swelling belly as I sat carelessly, legs half apart to carry the load. ‘Too late to be rid of it now,’ she said. Her face was hard.

  ‘It’ll be born,’ I said bitterly. ‘I cannot prevent that. But it will never inherit if I can help it.’

  She gave a sad, rueful smile, the smile of Acre when it knew it had lost the greatest gamble a landless people can play, when the stakes are land and independence against a servitude of uncertain and low-paid work. It was the smile of a woman legally bound to a master, who cannot prevent conception and cannot stop the birth of a child.

  ‘you cannot help it,’ she said sadly. ‘We are all trapped now.’

  There was silence in the little room, a silence so quiet that th
e noise of the flames flickering around the logs was quite clear.

  ‘I’ll be off,’ she said, moving towards the door. ‘My son Ted, and many others in the village, wanted to know how you were. I’m sorry to have no better news for them.’

  ‘I’ll live,’ I said dourly. ‘You can tell them I do not ail.’

  ‘I’ll tell them you are sick unto death in your heart,’ she said plainly. ‘And so you are at one with the land again, Miss Julia, and at one with Acre too. For the land is muddy and lifeless, and Acre is cold and hungry and idle and in mourning.’

  Our eyes met in one level look which exchanged no warmth except the bleak comfort of shared honesty. Then she was gone.

  In all that hard cold month she was my only visitor, Mrs Tyacke, the widow from Acre. No Quality visited me while I sat, idle and plump, in my black mourning. Grandpapa Havering had been taken ill in town and Grandmama had gone up to nurse him. She was afraid she would be away as I neared my time, but I wrote to her that it did not matter, she was not to worry.

  Indeed it did not matter.

  I thought that nothing mattered very much.

  I thought that nothing would ever matter very much again.

  The baby grew in my belly, as babies will, unbidden. I slept less and less at nights while the little growing limbs pressed inwards against me, or dug outwards against the soft wall of my belly. Towards the end of December I could sometimes discern a little limb pushing out, and once I felt with my fingertips the outline of a perfect tiny hand as the child flexed against the walls of its soft prison. It put me in mind of Ralph, in a prison where the gates would not open, where it was not warm and dark and safe. But as I sat in my chair, or gazed out of the window, or lay on my back on my bed, I could not even feel that Ralph mattered very much.

  Richard was much away from home. I knew that they talked of it, in the kitchen, in the stable. Some nights he did not come home at all but appeared at breakfast, bright-eyed and rumpled, speaking quickly and loudly of a cocking match at Chichester, or once of a bull which someone had brought on to Acre. It had been baited with dogs, and it had killed two fine mastiffs. When Richard told me how it had ripped out the belly of one dog, I turned pale and the breakfast table swam before my eyes. I saw Stride give a quick movement as if he would stop Richard from speaking, but Stride had been in service all his life, and could not stop the squire. No one could stop Richard.