The Favoured Child

by Philippa Gregory

  He was heavy. He was half on me, half beside me. The weight of the unborn child kept me pinned to the bed. He put his hand back on the great swelling of my belly and stroked down the slope when his devil-begotten child shifted uneasily as if it knew my fear.

  Oh, Julia,’ he said longingly, half to himself. ‘I had forgotten this. It is only this that saves your life tonight.’

  I tried to keep my face impassive.

  ‘I meant to strangle you,’ he said dreamily. ‘I am sick of your long face around the house. There are other women I could have here if you were gone. There are other girls I could marry. I wanted you because you had Wideacre, but now it is mine, and I want you no more.’

  The candle guttered, throwing menacing shadows on the ceiling above me. But nothing was more menacing than the shadow which was in my bed, which spoke such obscenities in such an intimate whisper.

  ‘I did love you once,’ he said as if he needed to reassure himself. ‘When we were very little children, before we knew who we were, or what we were to inherit. I think I loved you then.’ He broke off. He was talking to himself; it seemed he was in a dream of other times.

  ‘I loved Mama-Aunt too,’ he said. His voice was suddenly higher in pitch, childlike. I realized with an instinctual shudder that Richard had gone. He was back in the sunlight of his Wideacre childhood with an aunt who adored him and a cousin who would cross the world for him. The world where he had been the beloved little tyrant.

  ‘I loved Mama-Aunt so much,’ he said sweetly. A shadow crossed his face. ‘But you were always trying to be first in Acre,’ he said, cross as a petulant child. ‘Always trying to come between me and Mama-Aunt. You would push in where you were not wanted, Julia. And though I could forgive you if you were very, very sorry, I could not help but be so angry, so very angry, with the people you tried to take away from me . . . Are you listening to me, Julia?’ Richard said with quick irritation.

  I nodded, as obedient as a child in school. His grip had tightened on my mouth again. I feared I was going to retch at the smell of his hand against my teeth and gums, the odour of horse-sweat, cigar smoke, Hollands gin. And beneath it all the heart-wrenching smell of Richard, the cousin I had loved for so many years. So very many years.

  ‘I killed her,’ he said, speaking, at last, the unspeakable. ‘Your friend Clary. I tried and tried to be friends with her. I even tried pretending I was in love with her. She laughed in my face!’ His voice was shocked. ‘She said you were worth ten of me.’ He paused. ‘I knew I’d pay her out for that.’

  I watched him, and said nothing. His blue eyes had become hazy.

  ‘She saw us,’ he said, ‘when I raped you in the summer-house. I looked up and saw her. I think she was going to nm towards us, to help you. But she saw my face. She ran off as fast as she could towards Acre. I expect she thought to get help. I caught her at the Fenny,’ he said languidly. ‘I put my hand around her throat. She was like you, actually, because she was quite strong too. But do you know, she was so afraid, she hardly fought at all. She just choked and then her tongue and her eyes came out. Rather horrible. She looked so nasty I pushed her in the river and went home. I knew it would be all right for me. Everything always is all right for me.’

  He sighed quietly. ‘I killed your mama too,’ he said. A petulant expression crossed his face; I could see the droop of his disappointed mouth in the firelight. ‘She was running off with John. That was so horrible for her to do such a thing. She had joined with John against me. She sent me away as soon as he came home. I had thought she was a beautiful woman, a wonderful woman. A woman like an angel. But she was just a whore like all of them. Like you. As soon as my father came home, she was running after him like a bitch in heat. She forgot all about me. It was his idea to disinherit me, and she was going to do anything he wanted. She was going to overturn our marriage, and I would have been disinherited.’ He paused. His face became calm again, his words measured, judicious. ‘That was a very bad thing to do. You do not understand business, Julia, because you are just a woman, but that was a very meddlesome thing for Mama-Aunt to do.’ He paused again. ‘I am surprised she dreamed of it,’ he said simply, with grave respect. ‘She was, apart from that, such a feminine sort of woman.’

  I lay as still as stone. I could feel my heart beating and I knew that in a moment the sound would remind Richard that underneath him, in his power, was another woman who had forgotten her place, who had tried to meddle with the ownership of the land.

  ‘It hurt her, I am afraid,’ he said regretfully. I half closed my eyes. I had to hang on to some shred of myself, some remnant of sanity not to cry out, not to scream at these words, as Mama’s murderer lay on top of me and told me in his sweetest voice the horror that I had tried all these months to evade.

  ‘It hurt her,’ he said again. ‘I shot Jem at once, you know. And then, with the other pistol, I shot John through the window. He had opened the door and was coming out at me. Rather brave of him, really. He was trying to protect Mama-Aunt, I expect. The shot threw him back into the carriage, over her knees, actually. She screamed. I expect the blood frightened her. But she didn’t do anything.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, there was nothing she could do really,’ he said fairly. ‘I was reloading, but that doesn’t take long. Then I waited.’

  His hand was slack on my mouth again, his mad blue gaze dreamy in the candlelight. This time I could not have moved. I was frozen with horror and with a macabre fascination at his story.

  ‘I waited,’ he said. ‘Then I got off the horse and opened the carriage door. The carriage horses were grazing at the verge, quite unafraid, even though there had been two shots. Funny that. I let my horse go beside them. Well, they’re usually turned out in the field together. But it looked odd to see the three grazing off the hedge outside Haslemere with Jem dead on the box, and John dead in the carriage, and your mama so silent inside.

  ‘I wanted to know what she was doing. Just that. Nothing more than that, really,’ he said confidentially. ‘I opened the carriage door with one hand. She was holding John’s head in her lap. He had bled all over the carriage floor, and there was blood on her dress too. It made me so angry that she should spoil her dress with his blood. You know, Julia, it just made me so angry that she should be sitting with his dead head in her lap when I was in such trouble with you, and the baby, and the marriage, and Wideacre.’ He broke off with a little reminiscent smile.

  ‘She knew me at once!’ he said, pleased. ‘As soon as I opened the carriage door, she said, “Oh, Richard, what have you done!” And I said’ – Richard’s smile turned into a grin of delight as if he were coming to the enormously amusing conclusion of a tremendously funny story – ‘I said, “I’ve killed you all, Mama-Aunt!” And then I shot her! I shot her right in the face!’

  He laughed aloud, the happy laugh of the best-loved child of the household, and then he broke off in the middle of the peal of laughter to look down into my face. ‘You’re not laughing!’ he said, instantly suspicious. ‘You don’t think it’s funny.’

  He took his hand from my mouth and my lips were stiff from being pushed back for so long.

  ‘No,’ I said, pursing my lips down over my gums again. ‘I don’t find it very funny, Richard.’

  ‘It is funny,’ he said, madly insistent.

  And I saw then – as bright as a knife-blade in a lightning strike – what I had to do.

  I went for my death.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said softly, provocatively. ‘I don’t think you did that. I don’t think you would dare do that!’

  ‘I did!’ said Richard. His voice was that of an aggravated child.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not you! You like to do things in secret. I know you, Richard. You like dark woods where you strangled Clary. You like breaking the legs of a little hawk. You like night-time stables to cut the tendons of your horse. You’d never hold up a carriage in broad daylight. You’re a coward, Richard. And everyone always knew.’

  I was t
aking him up into insanity. I saw his eyes go blank with rage, as bright as sapphires.

  ‘I did it!’ he insisted.

  ‘Prove it,’ I said instantly. ‘Put both hands around my neck and look me straight in the eye. You’re a coward and you dare not do it!’

  He put his hands at once on my throat, but his grip was slack.

  ‘You are not the favoured child,’ I said, goading him. ‘You never were! Everyone always loved me, and they loved Mama. You were only ever in second place.’

  ‘No!’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said sweetly. ‘What do you think Grandpapa Havering thinks of you, when everyone saw you could not ride? What d’you think Acre thinks of you, when everyone could see you were afraid of little village children? What d’you think Ralph thought of you? And Uncle John? They all despised you. Clary and I despised you! You killed Clary, but you dare not kill me!’

  That did it. His hands on my throat clenched hard in a convulsive spasm of rage, and I shut my eyes and prayed to God that it would be quick and clean and that once I was dead, everyone would know it had been Richard and he would be hanged.

  The land would be free of us Laceys for ever.

  ‘Coward,’ I croaked through my closing throat. ‘Show me you’re not a coward!’

  Then there was an agonizing pain deep, deep inside me, right up high where I carried the baby who would die inside a dead womb. My whole body quivered like a terrier shaken by a rat. And I knew I had lost my chance to die.

  Richard’s incestuous rape-conceived bastard was moving on its way to be born. My little girl was ready for her birth.

  Richard, heavy on my belly, felt the sudden movement and slackened his grip.

  I would have kept silent and let him do it. I thought I had the will for it. I knew I had the will for it. But he suddenly released my neck and said in a frightened whisper, ‘What is it? Is it the baby?’

  And like a fool I nodded and said, as well as I could for a bruised throat, ‘Yes.’

  He bundled out of my bed at once in real fright, and I smiled wryly at the sight of him looking so like a husband with his bride about to give birth. Then the imperative needs of my body overcame thought, and I could feel and know nothing but the baby making her own potent way to the world. There was a sudden strange feeling, like an explosion of wetness, and the sheet below me was soaked with warm wet liquid, red as blood but clear as good wine.

  Richard said, ‘Ugh’ in utter distaste, and his face was appalled.

  ‘Get dressed,’ I said, staring at the spreading stain. ‘And go for the accoucheur.’

  ‘I’ll send Jenny to stay with you,’ Richard said, tearing the door open in his hurry for help and in his hurry to leave my room with its sweet insistent smell of birth.

  ‘No,’ I said with quiet, mean cunning.

  I knew what I would do next. I think I had known it from the day in Acre when I said I would not give birth to the next squire.

  In France they would kill the King and end the line.

  I was going to do the same.

  But I could not stop the heir being born; I gritted my teeth on my terror of being alone and on my horror at the way my body was suddenly racked with a pain which seemed to last for ever for long unbelievable seconds. Then the pains came as insistently as waves sucking at a shingle bank with an unforgivable undertow. Jenny came in and found me squatting on the floor like some pauper outside an almshouse, and begged me to get back into bed. But then she saw the mess on the sheets and took me to the window-seat. I could see the moonlight ghostly and silver on the tops of the bare trees of the Wideacre woods and I heard an owl cry that seemed to say, ‘Whooo, ooooh’ for my pain.

  In the room behind me I heard the bustle as she changed the sheets and the clang of the brass jug filled with hot water, but I did not look around. Then Stride was at the door with a basket full of wood to make up my bedroom fire. All the ordinary work went on around me and I was a little island of loneliness in the middle of it all with these sudden grips like a savage animal eating me, its teeth in my belly.

  I started walking as if I could get away from the pain, walking in the cramped little space of the room along the far wall past the fireplace, into the bow of the window, turning before the dressing-table, and then back again. My nightdress brushed Jenny as I hobbled past her. I had to hold myself very tall not to grab her arm and cling to her and beg her not to leave me, for there were moments when I felt I was nothing but a young girl too small and too slight to give birth, with a terror in her mind and a baby in her belly, both of them tearing her apart.

  ‘I’m afraid!’ I said, with a little hopeless gasp.

  Jenny looked at me with pity and rose from the fireplace. A thin flickering yellow flame lit the room and made the shadows bounce on the walls. The pain gripped me again and I gave a little gasp and started pacing. I had never felt so alone.

  ‘The master has sent to Chichester,’ she said. ‘He’s in the library. Shall I ask him to come and sit with you?’

  I looked at her scathingly. ‘I’d rather sit with the devil,’ I said fiercely, and then my pain doubled me up with agony for long hard seconds and I could not catch my breath for another word.

  ‘Would you see Mrs Merry from Acre?’ Jenny asked diffidently. ‘She’s old, but she saw my ma through all of us.’

  ‘No,’ I said as I straightened up and wiped the sweat off my face with the back of one careless hand. Mrs Merry knew her business too well to leave me alone with the child when I had sworn to end the line. ‘No,’ I said. ‘But go and get things ready, Jenny.’

  She shot one scared glance at me and nodded and fled from the room.

  Almost as soon as she had gone, the pain came again and I clung to the post of the four-poster bed for a moment. There was another wave of agony which threw me to the floor, my face in the carpet, and then I rolled on my back and felt my belly stand up like a hard box as my child fought its way through corrupt flesh to see the world.

  I grabbed the foot of the bed and tried to haul myself into it, but as I reared up towards it, I could feel the passage between my legs opening like some magic cave and a feeling seized me as strong as lust. I sat on the floor with my back to the foot of the bed and pushed as hard as a man setting in fence posts.

  I felt its head come out into the world.

  Alone, in the darkened bedroom, with half the house running like mad things but no one with the wit to come to me, I held its little head, and then in a rush like thunder, my child, my little baby, slithered out kicking on to the carpet, and I picked it up in my arms.

  I felt the cord, purple and slithery, pulsing with my blood. I took the corner of my nightgown and wiped the little mucky eyes and the face and the mouth. The child squirmed and opened its mouth and gave a little wail of protest, and coughed, and began to breath.

  It was alive, then.

  She was alive.

  I held one of the skinny stick legs and saw the little pink female slit, and then I caressed the tiny foot, and ringed the small ankle with my forefinger and thumb.

  ‘Sarah,’ I said. And she opened her eyes and looked into my face.

  She was my child, in that moment. I knew her as well as I knew the horizon around Wideacre. And she was not mad, nor sick, nor corrupt, nor evil. She was just a little baby who needed nothing more than a chance to grow and live and be happy. She had some kind of right to that, as surely as every poor child born in Acre had a right to life.

  I struggled to my feet, and as I did so a great frightening slithery blob of flesh came away and fell to the floor. I froze, aghast, but I did not seem to be mortally wounded, though there was a great pool of blood where I had been. Then I saw the cord and realized, foolish Quality miss that I was, that it was the afterbirth and I could nibble off the cord in safety. My child was truly born and separate.

  I put my mouth down, as natural as a lambing ewe, and nipped away at the cord and put a clean handkerchief over the little trail of blood on her belly. T
hen I took a woollen shawl from the drawer and wrapped her up like a trussed chicken, and then another shawl on top again, for she and I were going out into the darkness of the night, and I could hear the storm getting up.

  Holding her tiny body firmly in the crook of my arm, I opened my cupboard door and pulled out my winter cape, a thick one of navy-dyed wool, and swung it around us both, and pulled the hood up. My bloodstained nightdress flapped at my ankles, but I paid little heed to it. I was barefoot, but it did not trouble me.

  The baby, pressed against my warmth, seemed quiet, sleepy. I held her tight, and then I opened my bedroom door and listened.

  Stride and Jenny were in the kitchen, for I could hear Jenny’s high-pitched anxious voice as they waited for the great brass pans to boil so they could bring more hot water to the room. Mrs Gough was in the bedroom above mine, clumping around in her slippers getting the cradle ready and the fire lit, and the linen aired. I tilted my head to listen, but I could not hear Richard.

  I shrugged as if it did not really matter, as if this madness could not be stopped by mischance. I held the precious slight bundle a little tighter under my cloak, and slid like a ghost to the top of the stairs.

  Then I heard it. The clink of a decanter against a glass. Richard was in the library, drinking and waiting. Waiting for the accoucheur from Chichester. Waiting for him to come down the stairs with the new heir to Wideacre in his arms and say, ‘Squire, your child has been born,’ like the last page of a happy novel.

  But that would never happen.

  I knew I could pay the price. I had faced it when I was ready to die in my own bed with a murderer’s hands on me. I was ready even now, with my most precious little girl held close to me. I had to pay a price for being a Lacey. She was the price that had to be paid.

  Richard would never see his child.

  Wideacre would never have an heir.

  Quiet as a shadow I crept down the stairs, my bare feet absolutely silent on the thick carpet. As I stepped delicately and quietly from one stair to another, little drops of blood ran down my legs and stained my feet so I left a spoor like a wounded animal.