The Favoured Child

  ‘Want to walk her?’ Ralph offered. Richard nodded again. ‘Just take her down the track a little way,’ Ralph advised. ‘Get the feel of her on your hand.’

  Richard moved off delicately, trying to walk smoothly on the rutted sand.

  ‘No need to be too careful!’ Ralph called after him. ‘She’s used to my limping, and she’ll find you as smooth as a yacht in calm seas.’

  Richard walked a little faster, and we could see the hawk bobbing to keep her balance.

  Ralph smoothed Sea Mist’s neck and glanced up at me. ‘No trouble at home, after the sowing?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Is he staying long?’ he asked, nodding his head to where Richard was turning and walking back to us.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘he’s leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘We are ploughing the common field tomorrow,’ Ralph said laconically.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I said steadily.

  Richard came up to us, and I could tell, without knowing how, that the hawk was afraid. I felt a pricking in my thumbs, in the thumbs of both hands, as sharp as darning needles. The sensation was so acute and so sudden that I exclaimed and looked down at my riding gloves to see if I had gorse thorns stuck in the leather. Then I looked back at the hawk and saw her breast feathers tight. She was skinny with fright.

  As soon as she saw Ralph, she opened her wings and flung herself towards him. Richard had the leash tight and it jerked on her legs, catching her in mid-flight. In a second she was upside-down, spinning around on the leash, her wings flailing wildly in a panic to get herself upright again.

  ‘Steady,’ Ralph said quickly; he thrust Prince’s reins at me and took two rolling strides towards Richard.

  Richard’s face was murderous. He jerked at the hawk as if she were a doll on a piece of string, not a living creature at all. ‘Back to me!’ he shouted, and he snatched his hand up so she bounced helplessly at the end of the leash.

  Prince threw his head up and Misty pulled away, her ears flat against her head. I nearly lost my seat trying to hold the two restive horses.

  ‘Steady!’ Ralph shouted in a tone I had never heard him use before. He grabbed Richard’s arm and held it still, then he put his other hand under the twisting flailing bird and cradled her breast. Richard still had the leash tight in his hand so Ralph lifted her gently, as gently as if he were holding a fledgling, back to Richard’s glove.

  The second her feet were on it she bated again, directly towards Ralph, as in a panic to be with him and away from Richard. Ralph instinctively put his hands out to catch her and released Richard’s arm. Richard jerked hard on the leash, as he would have pulled a dog to heel, and we all heard a horrid crack, crack, like two twigs breaking.

  Misty reared up as if the ground had opened beneath her front hooves, and I tumbled from her back with a spinning thud which knocked the breath out of me. I ducked my head down and bunched up small in instinctive fright while she reared over me and wheeled away, then slowed and dipped her head to some fresh heather a few yards away. I had kept my hold on Prince’s reins, and he stood steady, though his eyes showed white.

  Ralph snatched the leash from Richard’s fist and looped it quickly around his own. Then he caught his bird, pinning her two wings to her side so she could flutter no more. He held her head into his jacket with one broad hand while he searched in his gamebag with the other. He brought out a little hood, intricately worked and made of exquisite soft leather, with a little crest of hen’s feathers on the top. He hooded her smoothly, pulling the hood tight with his teeth and hand on the leather thongs. Then he pulled out something like a stocking from the bottom of the bag and pulled it over her head so her wings were held to her side; he laid her in the bag, on top of the rabbit she had killed when she had been a proud free hawk and not a trussed bird.

  Only then, when she was safely hooded and muffled and lying soft in his bag, did he turn to look at me and ask, ‘All right, lass?’

  I nodded and got to my feet. We both stared at Richard who stood, guilty, in front of us.

  Ralph eyed him warily. ‘What ails you?’ he asked very low.

  Something in the way he said that made me cold.

  He was not asking Richard in the way a man with a beloved hawk just injured would speak. He was not shouting in hot anger. He was not even icy with rage. He asked Richard in a voice which put Richard at a distance so that Ralph could inspect him. He spoke as if Richard had some secret dangerous ailment which could infect us all. He stared at him as if he would see into his very soul.

  Richard was scarlet to his hairline. ‘I don’t know,’ he said awkwardly. ‘She flew off my wrist and I did not know what to do. I did not know what I was doing.’

  There was a desert of silence.

  ‘I am sorry, Mr Megson,’ Richard said. His voice had gathered strength and I saw him shoot a sideways glance at Ralph. ‘I would not have frightened your hawk for the world. I hope she is not hurt?’

  ‘You know full well that both her legs are broken,’ Ralph said evenly. ‘You heard them snap when you jerked on the leash. Why did you pull her like that?’

  ‘I did not!’ Richard said, blustering. ‘That is not so! She simply flew out and I held the leash to keep her safe!’

  ‘You did not,’ said Ralph, and his voice was like ice. ‘You jerked her back in a rage.’

  He hesitated, and he looked at Richard thoughtfully. ‘Many people have held her and she has never bated before,’ he said to himself. There was a long silence while Ralph thought something through. ‘Animals don’t like you, do they?’ he said.

  Richard said nothing. I reached out a hand to touch Prince’s thick neck, as if to reassure myself that the real world was still there. The voices in my head had grown in strength like a dozen, twenty people murmuring at me to be warned, to listen, to take care, to know real danger when I saw it. I felt hazed, almost snow-blinded. There was a buzzing in my head as if Beatrice were very near to me, somehow trying to summon me, a hard insistent calling. I should be listening to something, I should have ears to hear her message. The balls of both my thumbs were as sore as if they were bleeding from a hundred tiny pinpricks.

  I was distressed for the hawk and afraid of Ralph’s anger, and concerned for Richard.

  Ralph turned abruptly to me. ‘You have the sight, Julia,’ he challenged me. ‘You should know. What do you see when you look at Richard?’

  I turned my eyes to my cousin and he looked at me with his clear blue stare. The noise in my head was too loud for me to think of anything. I saw Richard, my beloved Richard, my coheir and the playmate of my childhood. And I saw as well some awful danger and fear and horror.

  ‘I can see nothing. Nothing,’ I said desperately. ‘I can hear nothing and see nothing. I do not have the sight as you think. I cannot see.’ I turned my head from Ralph and spoke to Richard. ‘I want to go home,’ I said, as pettish as a schoolgirl.

  Ralph limped over to where Sea Mist restlessly cropped the heather. As she saw him coming, she wheeled around and put her hindquarters to him as if she thought of kicking – Misty, who had never shown an ounce of spite in all the time we had known her.

  ‘Give over,’ Ralph said gruffly, and walked towards her and took her reins to lead her back to me. He threw me up into the saddle and said not a word more, not to Richard, not to me. We rode away in silence. He let us leave without a word. We left him standing before that little coppice with his gamebag on his back and his black dog lying at his feet. As we left him, I felt his eyes on my back and I felt him brooding, brooding, over the two of us, and watching us all the way home.

  20

  We rode home in silence, Richard and I. The accord we had formed after the quarrel on the downs had been broken by the odd, disturbing incident with Ralph’s goshawk. Mama and Uncle John were laughing at some private joke over dinner and did not notice that Richard and I were awkward and quiet. When it was my bedtime, I gave Richard my hand and said my farewell
s then; he would have left for the early stage-coach in the morning before I was awake.

  Richard kissed my hand, and then drew me to him and kissed my cheek. ‘All all right?’ he asked in the phrase from our childhood.

  ‘All all right,’ I confirmed.

  But we both knew that it was not.

  Scheherazade had feared him. The sheep had mobbed him. And now Ralph’s goshawk had been afraid of him.

  I expected Ralph to speak to me about Richard as soon as I rode into the common field on Monday morning – a grey damp Monday morning with no joy or magic to it that day – but he just tipped his hat to me and said not a word.

  ‘How is your hawk?’ I asked him when we stopped for breakfast.

  He was sitting on horseback beside me, and the plough-boys and the sowing girls were standing in the squelchy mud to eat their breakfasts. He sank his teeth into a crust of bread and chewed slowly before he answered me.

  ‘I wrung her neck,’ he said, his voice even. ‘Her legs would not have mended strong enough to kill again, and I don’t keep pets. She was a working bird; I’d not have liked her to grow fat and idle.’

  The shock showed on my face, but I did not offer Ralph Megson a sympathetic word.

  ‘Her nerve had gone,’ he said briefly. The words sounded very ominous. ‘She had never bated from the hand before in her life, not since I waked her – sat up all night with her – and trained her to the glove three years ago. But she didn’t like Richard, did she? Something about him scared her. Scared her so badly she broke her legs trying to get away from him.’

  I said nothing. I sat on my horse like a grey statue against a grey sky. In my head was that deep low murmur as if a hive of sleepy bees were stirring, swarming.

  ‘You say you cannot hear it, or see it,’ Ralph said thoughtfully. He was staring out into the darkness, but he swung around in the saddle and scanned my face. ‘God lack! You’re a fool, Julia Lacey,’ he said abruptly. ‘I thought you’d learned to use the sight, but you only use it when it suits you. Listen to your voices. See with your eyes.’

  I put out a hand to him, but he shrugged me off, and his horse, always sensitive to his movements, shifted to one side.

  ‘I’ve no patience with you!’ he said abruptly. ‘Beatrice would have taken her riding crop to you!’ He clicked to his horse and went to check the binding on the ploughshares, which was sound, and the state of the horses, which was good, and the straightness of the furrows, which was adequate. Then he called them back to work a couple of minutes before they were due, which was unheard of.

  I watched them for half an hour after the breakfast rest and then I trotted over to Ralph and asked him if he had any errands for me. When he scowled and said, no, I said that I would come back to the field in an hour or so, but that I wanted to exercise Sea Mist on the common.

  He nodded curtly. I was not forgiven, and every working day over the next few weeks there was a reserve between us because Ralph thought me wilfully stupid, and I was offended. If it had been in the middle of harvesting, we should both have been out of the sullens in a day because we would have been too busy for resentments, but the urgency of the early weeks of the spring was over. The ploughing was done, and the men and women could sow without being watched. The sheep on the downs had broken down some of the fences, and they had to be repaired, but that was swiftly done. The lambs were weaned and out on the grass and caused no trouble. The Fenny was flooded with melt-water and with water from some days of rain, and I went out daily to check that the banks were holding, for some of Beatrice’s cornfields had been dangerously close to the river edge and I was regretting that we had followed her lead.

  Uncle John had bought half a dozen cows and a bull and we had turned them out on the lower fields by the Fenny. He was a great red animal with a strong ring in his nose. I was afraid of him at first and inspected the animals through the gate. But as I grew accustomed to them, and they to me, I would ride Misty right into their field to see that they were all sound.

  I was starting to find myself with time on my hands. My work checking the land would take me all the morning, but in the afternoon there was little for me to do. It was a warm spring. I could feel the sun warming the land like my own skin. Everything on Wideacre was pairing, courting that spring. Everywhere I went I could hear birds calling and calling for a mate, or pairs of birds playing tender silly courtship games, feeding each other, feathers fluffed out and mouths agape, or nest-building together in a frenzy of displaced desire. When I walked down to the Home Farm, I saw the great shire stallion in the field tossing his mane as thick as sea spume and hollering for a mare.

  On the downs the lambs were growing strong and the ewes were surrounded by dozens of young. In the field by the river the bull grazed with his herd, his favourite cow always at his shoulder, their heads rubbing together when they walked. They would freeze for minutes at a time while he licked their faces with his massive rubbery tongue as if there were love between them as well as an insistent need to couple.

  I missed James more than I could have believed possible. I walked alone under trees full of birds singing love-songs, under a sky criss-crossed with nest-building flights, watched the red deer nuzzling together in the twilit evenings; at night I could not sleep, for I fancied even the owls were calling to each other of their passion and their desire under an enlarging moon.

  After I had finished my farming work in the morning, I was free for the afternoons. Mama and Uncle John took out the gig for little drives together and I put on my coolest muslins with a light shawl and walked and walked in the deep greening woods and daydreamed of how my life would be when James came home and we were married. Above me, in the great trees of Wideacre, the birds mated and nested and then brooded under the safe canopy of the opening leaves. Wideacre swelled with life like the fat buds on the trees. Everything was courting, mating, birthing that spring, and I was full of longing for my own lover as I wandered alone in the woods with my straw hat on my fair head, my muslin pale among the green shadows, my feet awash in the bluebells.

  Richard was due home before May Day and wrote that he would be in on the early-morning stage-coach. I had Misty saddled and rode up the lane towards the stop leading Prince to meet him.

  The stage-coach sets down passengers for Acre at the corner where the lane meets the Chichester-London road, and I sat there on Misty’s back in the spring sunshine, waiting for it. It had been warm and dry the previous week, and the deep rutted tracks of the lane were dried out at last from the winter mud. I turned my face up to the sunshine and felt its warmth on my closed eyelids. Prince dropped his head to the fresh leaves of the hedge and cropped them, his bit jingling as he munched. In the distance I could hear the creaky rumble of the stage-coach and the chink of the harness. The road was hilly, and I could see the hats and shoulders of the roof-passengers rising and falling as the coach breasted the hills and sank into the hollows of the road. The horses were labouring as they came into sight towards the Acre corner, and when the guard saw me waiting, he blew his horn and shouted a ribald comment about a lucky passenger being met at Acre corner.

  The coachman pulled his horses up and tipped his whip to me. I smiled and nodded and watched as they let down the steps and Richard came out of the coach, rubbing his eyes and yawning. They passed down his box and Richard humped it over towards me.

  I bent down for his kiss and hugged him around the shoulders. Some wag on the roof of the stage-coach cheered, but many of the passengers were Midhurst people and knew me by sight and nudged him into silence.

  ‘What about my box?’ Richard asked. ‘It weighs a ton.’

  ‘Oxford fashions?’ I teased him.

  ‘Holiday reading,’ he said with a grimace. ‘My Greek is still supposed to be a disgrace. I’m bid to work with Dr Pearce through this holiday.’

  ‘You can leave it here,’ I said. Richard pushed it into the hedge behind the stage-coach. The Acre carter could collect it for us later in the day. ‘I thought y
ou’d like a ride.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve been cooped up in that coach for half a lifetime.’

  He swung into the saddle and we turned the horses’ heads for home. Richard made me laugh with sketches of his fellow passengers – the farmer’s wife who would insist on carrying a basket with a live hen in it on her lap, the country wench who giggled every time she caught Richard’s eye.

  ‘And how’s everything here?’ he asked. ‘Papa and Mama-Aunt all right? You?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, nodding. ‘Everything is just the same. Mama is quite well again now, though she still gets a little tired. She and Uncle John have a ritual drive out for her health every afternoon in the gig like a pair of tenant farmers.’

  ‘Heard from Mr Fortescue?’ Richard asked with careful nonchalance.

  I kept my eyes on the greening hedge. ‘Yes,’ I said. I could not keep the tenderness from my voice. ‘He writes to me every week and I reply when I have an address for him. He is back in Belgium at the moment, but he has been travelling around. His father is importing lace and James is responsible for finding reliable suppliers.’

  ‘Any date for the wedding?’ Richard asked lightly.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘His papa’s lawyers and Uncle John’s man are drawing up the marriage contract to arrange the dowry and an allowance for me. We can hardly plan until we know when he will come home.’

  Richard nodded. ‘It could be some time, then,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I could not keep the longing out of my voice. ‘It sometimes seems like years and years. It should be this summer. We can announce our betrothal when he comes home.’

  ‘And the hall?’ Richard said. ‘The builders are working well? Are the roofbeams in place?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said reassuringly. ‘You would be the first to hear if anything had gone amiss. It is all working well. And the crop is just about showing in some fields already!’