The Favoured Child (37 page)

‘It is here!’ I called to Ralph, and I was utterly afraid.

And Ralph – that creature of madness and bad weather-smiled at me as I knew he had smiled at Beatrice when he and the storm had come for her. ‘Well, they are ready,’ he said, and he might have been speaking of a field fit for sowing.

I stepped down from the lich-gate and was going towards him, afraid of being too close to the church, when a sudden rumble of thunder, infinitely menacing, made me lose my footing and stagger to one side. I was on the patch of grass they called Miss Beatrice’s Corner and the rain was sheeting down on me like a river off a water-wheel. The thunder was right overhead in a bang like a thousand cannon, and I spun around and saw the lightning come down, an angel’s arrow, and split the church spire like a cleaver through a carrot. I screamed then, but in the storm and the thunder I made no noise, and, deafened by the thunder, in a silence as deep as the dream, I saw the spire topple and fall on to the three empty cottages and the cloud of dust grow from the rubble.

It was not dust, it was smoke, heavy dull-red smoke, and then bright flames leaped and stretched out, seeking to swallow all of Acre. Misty threw up her head and shrieked in her terror, and Ralph had tight hold of her reins. I wanted to go to her, but I
found I was on my knees in the soaking grass, trembling with fright and waiting for the horror of the burning child and the wreck of the village.

The chain was handing buckets down the line towards the fire. They had thought of that -I had not. And they were soaking the ruins of the Smiths’ cottage and the Coopers’ cottage so that the greedy flames had nowhere to go but up into the grey sky, into the rain, and they grew more and more smoky and I choked in the smoke when the wind spun the clouds of grey around, and then I got to my feet and stumbled through the rain and the smoke towards Ralph. He spoke to me, but my head was full of the noise of the thunder, and my eyes were blinded by the lightning, and I heard nothing, nothing at all. I just put out my hands to him, and my knees buckled beneath me, and I went down before he was near enough to catch me.

‘I
don’t understand exactly what you are saying, Mr Megson.’ The voice was my mama’s, and it was the anxiety in her tone which pulled me from my sleep. I opened my eyes and leaned up on one elbow. I was not in my bedroom at home. I blinked at the pretty patterned wallpaper and the pale curtains at the window. The air smelled of smoke.

‘She came to my cottage and said she had a dream.’ Ralph was patient, reassuring. I had heard him use that tone with frightened animals, I had seen him still them with his voice.

I looked around the room. It was the guest bedroom at the vicarage; I was lying on top of the counterpane, covered with a thick wool shawl, still dressed in my damp riding habit. Through the thin walls I could hear Mama as clearly as if we were in the same room.

‘It is not unusual,’ Ralph said gently. ‘She is a very sensitive and perceptive young woman.’

‘Are you saying she had some kind of premonition of the lightning strike?’ That was Uncle John’s voice. He had himself under tight control, but I knew he hated talk of anything outside an ordered universe. He was a logical man, my Uncle John.

Ralph knew that too. ‘Why not?’ he asked easily. ‘Everyone knows that animals can sense a storm coming. Many a farmer will tell you of horses or stock breaking out of a stable before a storm and the stable catching fire. Miss Julia seems to have a gift to sense danger for Acre. That is special, but it is not unheard of.’

There was silence from downstairs. I sat up in bed and put my hand to my head. I felt light-headed and dizzy, but filled with
the most enormous elation. The Carter child had not been burned. The baby had not been left inside a blazing cottage. Ted Tyacke and his mother had not been buried under tons of rubble. Acre was safe.

‘It is the illness of that family.’ Uncle John sounded appalled. ‘Julia has the unbalanced nature of the Laceys. I have feared it, I have seen it coming. They bred too close and it has come out in her.’

‘No!’ I heard Mama exclaim. ‘She is
my
daughter. She is not bred badly. She has been overwrought and distressed. She has been worked too hard. It is our fault for not taking better care of her, John. It is not her fault, nor the fault of her family.’

‘She looked strange…’ Dr Pearce said, his voice very low. ‘For a moment I mistook her, I thought it was…’

‘No!’ my mama interrupted sharply. ‘Julia has been overworked. It is my fault, it is our fault. It has made her look pale and she has got thinner.’

‘Lady Lacey is right,’ came Ralph’s reassuring rumble. ‘And she is a special girl with special gifts. She sensed the thunder coming and she did the right thing. It is nothing more than ships’ captains do at sea every day.’

I sat up in my bed and called out, ‘Mama!’

At once the parlour door opened and I heard her run up the stairs. She came breathlessly into my room. ‘Oh, my darling!’ she said. ‘Awake at last! You were just like the Sleeping Beauty up here. But John insisted you should be left until you were ready to wake. What a fright you have given us all!’ Her smile was forced. ‘Do you have any pain? Do you feel all right now?’ she asked.

‘I am quite well,’ I said, and it was true. ‘Just…’ I stretched like a lazy cat. ‘Just…oh, Mama!…so weary!’

‘We’ll have you home at once,’ she said. ‘The carriage is at the door. John and I came down as soon as Jem had the sense to tell us where you had gone. We’ll have you home at once and out of those wet things and into a warm bed, and you shall sleep all day if you need to.’

I rose to my feet and she steadied me with an arm around my waist. I was full-grown now, and our faces were on a level. It made me feel as if I were her equal, no longer a child. I looked at her shrewdly and saw the strain in her face. ‘It was nothing wrong, Mama,’ I said softly. ‘It was just a dream which came over and over. It did not feel bad, it did not feel frightening. I just knew the storm was coming.’

Her eyes flickered away from my face. She did not want to look at me. ‘No, my darling,’ she lied with her loving courage. ‘No one thinks there is anything wrong at all. You cleared Acre and saved many lives, which is a great blessing for all of us. We’ll talk about it more when you are rested, but now I want you to come home.’

I was too tired to insist and I leaned a little on her and let her help me downstairs. Dr Pearce was at the foot of the stairs, still in his dressing-gown, but with a smile for me which was strained and wary.

Uncle John stepped forward and gave me a hug and put his hand on my forehead to feel if I had a fever. ‘I am glad you slept,’ he said. ‘We’ll soon have you home, and you must rest some more. That little mind of yours has been under too much strain.’

I was about to deny that, but I said nothing, for Ralph Megson came in from the garden, his face alight to see me. Like me, he was still wet from the rainstorm, and he – alone of all of them-was beaming at me with unreserved joy. ‘Julia,’ he said, and his voice was full of love.

‘Ralph,’ I replied, and gave him both my hands as if we were lovers.

He tucked one hand under his arm against his wet fustian jacket, and put an arm around my waist and led me to the door. Miss Green, the vicar’s housekeeper, opened it and I saw it was still raining, a light end-of-storm shower which would soon pass.

Before the vicarage was the wreckage of what had once been the three little cottages, and the roofless ruins of the Smiths’ and
Coopers’ homes. The cottage where my friend Ted Tyacke had slept last night was a smouldering ruin, the smoke drifting into the lane.

At the gateway, around the carriage, was every man, woman and child belonging to Acre, and as the door opened and Ralph led me out, they cheered me in a great deafening wall of sound, so loud that I actually flinched; and Ralph laughed and tightened his grip around my waist.

‘Unharness the horses and we’ll pull her home!’ shouted someone, and there was a rush to turn John’s smart carriage into a triumphal chariot.

‘Nay!’ Ralph hallooed as he might order a ploughing team. ‘Julia is weary and she should be home at once in her bed. We’ll honour her another time, not today. She’s just a little lass and she’s wet and cold and tired.’

I smiled at Ralph protecting me – whom he had sent riding up to the downs to check on the sheep in every sort of bad weather-and he glanced down and smiled back. Then he handed me up the carriage steps, and stepped back and gave his hand to my mama. Uncle John climbed in after us, and Jem put the steps in and shut the door.

They did not cheer then, but each one of them called my name and smiled and waved, and the tears stung under my eyelids at my tiredness, and at my sense of wordless love for all of them, for the village, for the estate. And then slowly – with the wheels sticking badly in the mud – we went home.

‘Misty,’ I said as Jem lifted me from the carriage. He carried me up the front steps and all the way up to my bedroom, with my mama following behind and Mrs Gough and Stride making up the procession with a hot posset and hot water to wash, and a hot brick for the bed.

‘Ralph Megson’ll care for her,’ Jem said briefly. ‘I’ll walk down when I’ve stabled the carriage horses and bring her back.’

I nodded and said no more as I let my mama undress me like a baby and tuck me up into my own bed; then I fell asleep.

*

At once I had a dream, the oldest dream.

It must have come from the storm, from the rain and the storm, but it was not like the dream of the woman waiting for the Culler. Nor was it the dream of the church spire. It was a strange dream, one I knew as if I had dreamed it every night of my life. And it was full of the most anguished pain and sense of loss.

I was hurt, hurt physically, but also heartbroken with a pain. I felt I had lost everything – everyone who was most dear to me, every possession I had ever prized. My bare feet were sore from walking far on stony cold ground, and they were wet with mud, Wideacre mud, and blood from a hundred cuts from the sharp chalk and flint stones. I was cold and dressed only in my nightgown and my cloak, which dragged wet around my ankles. I was stumbling in midnight darkness through the woods near our house towards the river, the River Fenny, and I could hear the roar of its winter-deep waters, louder even than the howling and tossing of the wind in the treetops. It was too dark for me to see my way and I nearly fell in the blackness, stubbing my toes on the stones, gasping with fright when I stumbled, dazzled rather than helped by the shattering blasts of lightning.

I could have walked easier but for my burden. The only warm dry part about me was the little bundle of a new-born baby which I was holding tight to my heart under my cape. I knew that this baby was my responsibility. She was mine. She belonged to me; and yet I must destroy her. I must take her down to the river and hold that tiny body under the turbulent waters. Then I could let her go, and the little body in the white shawl would be rolled over and over by the rushing flood away from my empty hands. I must let her go.

The roaring noise of water got louder as I struggled down the muddy footpath, and then I caught my breath with fear when I saw the river – broader than it had ever been before, buffeting the trunks of the trees high on the banks, for it had burst out of its course. The fallen tree across the river which served as a bridge was gone, hidden by boiling depths of rushing water. I gave a little cry, which I could not even hear above the noise of the storm, for I did not know how I was to get the baby into the
river. And she must be drowned. I had to drown her. It was my duty as a Lacey.

It was too much for me, this fresh obstacle on top of my tears and the pain in my heart and the pain in my feet, and I started to struggle to wake. I could not see how to get this warm soft sleeping baby to the cold dashing river water, and yet I had to do it. I was stumbling forward, sobbing, towards the river, which was boiling like a cauldron in hell. But at the same time a part of my mind knew it was a dream. I struggled to be free of it, but it held me. I was imprisoned in the dream, even though I knew also that I was tossing in my bed in my little room and crying like a baby for my mama to come and wake me. But the dream held me, although I fought against it. I knew I was dreaming true. I knew that I saw now what I would one day be: an anguished woman holding a baby warm and safe in her heart, with an utter determination to drown her like an inbred puppy in the cold waters of the river which rushed from the slopes of the downs and through Wideacre and away.

I awoke to daylight and a blue sky with ribbons of clouds tearing northward from the sea winds. The dream of the darkness and despair should have faded before the bright sunlight. But it did not. It stayed with me, a hard lump of prescience and foreboding. I looked wan and low in spirits, and Mama insisted that I stay in bed all that day, and the next, as though I were in the grip of some strange unknown malady. I took her hand and kissed it as she smoothed my forehead. It was as if someone had told me, for the first time in my life, that everyone had to die one day. For the first time in my life I realized that my mama would not always be at my side when I needed her.

She patted my cheek. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You have been overworked and overtired, and your brain has become feverish. You shall rest and you will soon be well again.’

I felt tears starting to roll down my cheeks. I was as weak as if I were mortally ill. ‘Such a dreadful dream…’ I said. But she would not hear it.

‘No more dreams, my darling,’ she said gently, and bent and kissed my forehead with her cool lips. ‘I do not want to hear about them, and you must forget them as you wake. Dreams are meaningless. They are nothing. Go to sleep now for me, and sleep without dreaming. I shall sit here and do my sewing, and if you have a bad dream I shall wake you.’

She took a little wineglass from my bedside table and gave it to me. ‘John left this for you,’ she said. ‘It will help you to sleep without dreaming. So drink it all up and rest, my darling.’

I took it, obedient as an invalid and drank it up and lay back on my pillows. Through a golden sleepy glow I saw my mama pull a chair over to the window and take up her sewing. She sat beside me, a guardian of my peace, and I watched her until my eyelids closed and I slept.