The Favoured Child

‘Calm down!’ he said to horse and rider. ‘You two will have to learn to calm down together. You are like a pair of violin strings wound too tight. What the hell’s the matter with your stirrup, Richard?’

‘Nothing, sir,’ Richard said; his voice was thin. It was the first thing I had heard him say since he had mounted, and with a shock I realized his voice was strained and he sounded afraid. ‘I could not find it at first,’ he said, ‘but I have it now.’

‘Well, learn to find it without digging your toe into her,’ Grandpapa said unsympathetically. ‘Don’t bother the animal. She needs to be gentled. Not kicked about.’ He twitched the reins out of Dench’s hands and a look passed between them which I was too far away to read. Dench turned and came towards me, his face as expressive as a lump of chalk.

‘Now,’ said Grandpapa, back in his own saddle. ‘Ride towards me.’

Richard dropped his hands in a stiff motion and Scheherazade minced forward. She walked as if she feared the earth were hollow, as if it might open up underneath her hooves. Seeing her gait, I sensed her unease and found I was clenching my hands in two fists under my chin, as wary as she was.

She did not like Richard.

That was the reason for the look between my grandpapa and Dench. That was why Scheherazade flinched when Richard was in the saddle’ That was why Richard sat awkwardly and his face was white. Something about him bothered the animal. She was as irritable as a cat with its fur rubbed up the wrong way from head to toe. She was sparky with her dislike. She was not easy, and I could smell her sweat, sharp with fear.

I could watch no more. When Richard stopped her with a short jab on the mouth and my grandpapa leaned over from his mount and loosened the reins between Richard’s fingers, I flinched in sympathy. When Scheherazade followed my grandpapa’s lead around the field, with Richard sitting stiffly on top of her, as awkward as though he were on a cart seat, I could feel my own shoulders slump as I willed him to be easy with her, to sink into the saddle so that she might feel his weight.

Then I could not stand to see any more of it. Richard’s face had lost its flush of temper and was pale again, his eyes narrowed with concentration, his face set. He did not look like a knight from a story book any more. He made me uneasy. I slid down from the fence, careful to guard my muslin dress from the splinters of the rotting timbers, and went back to the house, to the parlour, where ladies, in any case, should be.

I knew that Richard’s much heralded first lesson had not been a success, because I had seen it, but I would never have known it from Richard. When he came in for dinner, changed and washed, his smile was bright and his answers to Mama were confident. She believed him delighted with the mare, and I thought perhaps things had gone better after I had left my seat on the fence.

‘He’s heavy-handed,’ Grandpapa said dourly to Mama’s inquiry. ‘But riding’s in his blood. He should do well enough. And Harry Lacey – the old squire – had hands like mutton chops too. We used to laugh about it! I’d never let him touch one of my horses. But he taught Beatrice, y’know, and Harry. And Beatrice had the best pair of hands I’ve ever seen in this country. None to match ‘em.’ He broke off, his smile reminiscent; perhaps he could see on the faded wallpaper of the parlour a bright redheaded girl who could whisper a horse out of a field. ‘She was a rider!’ he said. Odd that her son’s so awkward.’ He glanced over at Richard, who was straining to hear the conversation while he talked with Grandmama. ‘He’ll get accustomed,’ he said.

But Richard did not get accustomed. He had a round dozen of lessons from my grandpapa at Havering Hall and rode out with him in the Havering woods and up over the common. But he was never easy with Scheherazade. He sat on her back as if she were a tinder-box which might accidentally burst into flames. He and Scheherazade simply could not deal together. I saw it, and I wondered at it, but I could not have described it. Grandpapa was brutally frank.

‘Scots blood,’ he said to Mama. We were in the back garden of the Dower House, and Richard and Grandpapa had ridden over from the hall. Grandpapa judged that Richard might now keep his horse in the Dower House and ride without supervision whenever he wished. In any case, my grandpapa had wearied of teaching and was happy to hand over the job of coaching Richard to our groom Jem, or to Dench, the Havering man. Grandpapa was off back to London. He felt he had rusticated long enough.

‘Scots blood,’ he said ominously. ‘His papa, John MacAndrew, rides well enough, I grant you. But they’re not a nation of horsemen. No cavalry, damn small animals. No breeding, m’dear. On the distaff side he’s a Lacey, and there was never one of them who was not at home in a saddle; but he does not have the heart for it. He does not have the hands for it. He’s a good jobbing rider and he can get around safe enough. But he’ll never match his mama, Beatrice. God rest her soul!’

‘Well, I cannot regret that,’ my mama said in her soft voice, her face turned towards the orchard where Richard was trotting backwards and forwards. Scheherazade’s pace was steady and smooth, but her ears flickered warily. ‘Beatrice may have been a joy to watch on the hunting field, but she scared her family half to death with the horses she rode. And I cannot forget that her father died in a riding accident.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ said Grandpapa impatiently. ‘You’re safer on horseback than walking down those damned uncarpeted stairs of yours, Celia. But have it as you will. The boy will never be a neck-or-nothing rider, he’ll never cut a dash. But I’ve done What I can for him. I’ve started him off and I’ll pay for his stabling.’

‘Yes,’ said Mama gratefully. ‘And we both thank you.’

Grandpapa nodded and blew a perfect circle of smoke out into the still afternoon air. ‘What about little missy?’ he asked. I was standing with my back to them at the orchard fence. And I gripped the paling of the fence post waiting for Mama’s answer.

‘I think we should leave it until she is older,’ she said. ‘She has no habit and we have no side-saddle.’

Grandpapa waved a careless hand. ‘Soon right that,’ he said.

Mama lowered her voice, but I could still hear her. ‘Julia has been raised too wild and too free,’ she said softly. ‘She is twelve now and she has to learn to be a young lady before she needs to learn to ride. I am happy that she should stay indoors with me.’

I said nothing, I did not turn my head. I felt my colour rising and I had a pain where my heart was thudding. Unless Grandpapa insisted, I should not be able to ride Scheherazade. Unless he declared that I was a Lacey and riding was in my blood and I must be taught to ride, I should be confined to the parlour and my only pleasure from Scheherazade would be to see Richard’s growing confidence with her. I was glad for Richard, of course, of course I was – but some little rebellious spark inside me said, ‘Not fair, Mama! Not fair!’

‘As you wish,’ said Grandpapa. And the decision against me was taken.

I lost my chance of being a rider, and I had to wait for Richard’s bounty. But as that summer turned into autumn, slowly but surely Richard suffered a greater loss. A greater loss than I could imagine. His voice started going.

It was like a new game for him at first. Sometimes it would be high – his familiar clear golden notes – and sometimes he could make it low and husky. One evening in the parlour he created an entertainment as good as a play, telling the adventures of a butterfly exactly in the style of the novel Chrysal; or the Adventures of a Guinea. The butterfly he did in a high squeaky voice, and the villains which it encountered on its journey through London thundered with his deepest bass. I played rippling chords and imposing fanfares for when the butterfly was received at court, and Mama laughed so much that the tears poured down her face.

She laughed a good deal less when she discovered that we knew the novel because Richard had ordered it from Grandmama Havering’s circulating library. My name was on the order, and my morals were the ones most likely to be corrupted from reading fiction. I took the blame; and Richard took the credit for his wit and imagination. He played with his surprising new voice and I believe he never thought – and I never knew – that his voice was altering for ever.

Its range was not always steady. It was not always controllable. Sometimes in mid-sentence it would suddenly go high or suddenly break and become husky. Richard ceased to find it amusing and snapped at me when I laughed. Then, worst of all-while he was singing a simple high sweet song and I played a lilting harmony on the pianoforte – his voice broke.

He frowned as if something small and trivial had happened, like a doorknob coming off in his hand. ‘Play it again, Julia!’ he said. ‘This stupid voice of mine …’

I played it, but my fingers had lost their confidence and I hit a shower of wrong notes. He did not even reproach me. It was only a high G, and he could not hit it. Three times we tried, my piano part sounding worse and worse all the time. Richard did not even complain. He just looked at me in great perplexity and then turned his face to look out of the window at the grey sky and the heaped clouds.

‘It seems to have gone,’ he said, very puzzled. ‘I can’t do it.’

He went from the room slowly, with none of his usual swinging stride. As he went up the stairs to his room, I could hear him clearly, all the way up the first flight of stairs, singing the phrase over and over again. And over and over again the leap to the high G quavered and broke. He had lost the high aerial reaches of his wonderful voice. His gift, his very very special gift, was being reclaimed.

After dinner, when we were in the parlour, he said confidently, ‘I’d like to try that song again, Julia. The one we were doing this morning. I had a frog in my throat this morning, I think! I couldn’t hit the note at all. I can do it now, I know.’

I fetched the sheet of music and propped it on the stand. I bungled the introduction badly, and the ripple of arpeggio that should have been smooth was as lumpy as an apple crumble.

‘Really, Julia,’ Mama said with a frown. And then she turned to Richard and smiled.

He was sitting in the window-seat, looking out towards the trees, as beautiful as a black-headed cherub, utterly unchanged. He drew a breath ready to sing, and I hit the right chord for once.

The note was wrong.

Richard snapped it off short.

And tried again.

My hands dropped from the keys. I could not think of what to say or do. For a second Richard’s pure lovely voice was there, but then it quavered and broke and was gone. Richard looked at me in utter bewilderment, and then at Mama.

‘Your voice has broken, Richard,’ she said, smiling. ‘You are becoming a man.’

Richard looked at her as if he could not understand her.

‘Early,’ she said. ‘You’re an early starter, Richard, at only eleven. But your voice is definitely breaking. You will not be able to sing soprano again.’

‘His voice will go low?’ I asked. I had never thought about such a process. Richard’s golden voice seemed such a part of him that I could not think of him without it. By the stunned look on his face, he could not imagine himself without it either.

‘Of course,’ Mama said smiling. ‘He would not make much of a man with a voice like a choirboy all his life, would he?’

‘But what shall I sing?’ Richard asked. He looked almost ready to cry. His colour had rushed into his cheeks and his eyes were dark with disappointment. ‘What shall I sing now?’

‘Tenor parts,’ Mama said equably. ‘Julia will be the soprano of the household now.’

‘Julia!’ Richard spat out my name in his temper. ‘Julia cannot sing. She sings like she was calling cows home. Julia cannot sing soprano.’

Mama frowned at his words, but remained calm. ‘Hush, Richard,’ she said gently. ‘I agree, none of us have your talent for music. But there are many good tenor parts you will enjoy singing. Your uncle, Julia’s papa, had a wonderful voice. He used to sing all the tenor parts when we sang together. I still probably have some of the music at Havering. I will look them out for you when we are next there.’

‘I don’t want them!’ Richard cried out in passion. ‘I don’t want to be a tenor. I will never sing a tenor part. It’s such an ordinary voice! I don’t want an ordinary voice. If I cannot have my proper voice, I won’t sing at all! My voice is special. No one in the county sings like I do! I won’t become an ordinary tenor!’ He stormed from the room in a fury, slamming the door. I heard his boots pound upstairs, loud on the bare floorboards. There was a shocked silence in the little parlour. I closed the lid of the pianoforte softly. Mama snipped a thread.

‘It was never music for Richard,’ she said sadly. ‘He just wanted to be exceptional.’ I said nothing. ‘Poor boy,’ Mama said with a great deal of pity in her voice. ‘Poor boy.’

Richard did sing again in public. There was an experimental service with harvest hymns at Chichester Cathedral. Grandmama Havering took the two of us, and Richard joined in with a clear light tenor. An unexceptional voice. We both remembered the times when he had sung with a voice as bright as a choirboy and people in the pews all around us had craned their necks to see Richard, with his eyes on the altar, singing like the angel Gabriel. No one turned their heads at Richard’s pleasant tones now. Only I looked at him with a little glance which I was careful to keep neutral. If he had thought I pitied him, he would have been most angry.

I said nothing at all until we were home and Mama had gone upstairs to take off her hat. Richard was idling in the parlour. I went to the pianoforte and opened the lid.

‘Let’s sing something!’ I said as lightly as I could manage it. I brought my hands down in a ringing chord and for a mercy hit all the right notes. But when I looked up, Richard’s face was sombre.

‘No,’ he said softly, ‘I shall never sing again. Oh, I may groan on a little in church like I did today. But I shall never sing in the parlour, or in the kitchen, or even in my bathtub. I had the voice I liked, but now it has gone. And I’ll never get it back.’

‘Your voice now is very nice, Richard …’ I offered hesitantly.

‘Nice!’ he shouted. But then at once he had himself under control. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is very nice, isn’t it? Before it broke I had a voice which was probably as good as anyone’s in Europe. But they would not let me use it, or train it, or even see good music teachers. Now it is gone, and all I have instead is a powerless tenor which you tell me is very nice. Well, as far as I am concerned, that is the same as having no voice at all.’

‘What will you do, Richard?’ I asked. I found my lips were trembling as if Richard were telling me of some mortal wound. In a way, I suppose, he was.

‘I shall do nothing,’ he said quietly. ‘I shall forget the voice I had, and very soon so will everyone else. I shall forget that I wanted to be a musician. I shall forget the plans I had to fill Wideacre Hall with music. I shall concentrate instead on learning to be the squire. The squire of Wideacre. Now it is all I have left. It is the only thing special about me now.’

Richard said no more, and I never asked him to sing with me again. My pianoforte lessons from my mama continued with even less motive or effect, and Richard seemed to think of nothing but his last route to being, as he said, ‘special’ – being the heir to Wideacre. So while I was kept indoors as much as ever, Richard rode out every day, trying to conquer his fear of the horse and trying to learn his way round the land. The land, his land, the only thing he had left which made him anything other than an ill-educated lad growing out of his clothes.

He might never be truly easy with Scheherazade; but she was a beautifully mannered mare, and once Richard had gained enough confidence to give her clear instructions, she obeyed him. Dench’s young nephew, Jem, was in charge of our one-horse stables and he advised that Scheherazade be exercised every day so that she did not become too frisky. Each afternoon that autumn was frosty and inviting, so Richard went out early and stayed out late.

Sometimes Mama and I would sit in the parlour and I would read to her while she sewed. Outside, the leaves on the copper-beech tree turned a lovely purple and the fronded chestnut leaves went as yellow as summer silks. I read two volumes of poetry from cover to cover in those afternoons, while Mama sewed for the poor-box, and I sat with my back to the window to catch the light on the page in that gloomy parlour; and so that the sight of those burning colours would not make my heart ache to be out.

Sometimes we went over to Havering Hall in a little gig we borrowed with a pony, with Jem driving. The frosty air whipped our faces pink, and the sound of hooves on the hard road made my heart leap as if I expected some great treat. But at the end of the drive there was only Grandmama Havering – left alone at the hall now the London season had begun, splendid in her solitary state, creating some kind of stark beauty out of the emptiness of her days.

She invited me to stay with her, and, weary with the quiet Dower House, I consented, and then enjoyed myself more than I had thought possible. It was pleasant to be the only child in the house. It was pleasant to live without having to consider Richard’s preferences. My grandmama had created an air of disciplined peace at Havering Hall, which a woman can do if she has the courage to live by her own standards. I learned a lot from her that autumn. I learned that it is possible to look at a bleak past without reproach and at a joyless future without complaint. And the way to do that, without failing and without an inner plaint, is to keep one little part of oneself untouched, and free, and brave.

In the morning we spoke to the housekeeper or the butler, and then we took our walk in the garden. The grounds were horribly dilapidated, as bad as the ruined garden of Wideacre, but Grandmama walked among them like a queen at Versailles. With one hand on my shoulder and the other holding a basket for the flowers she hoped to find among the weeds, she paced down the gravel paths, oblivious to the nettles blowing around us, the ungainly grass scattering seeds over the paths and the burrs catching the flounces of our walking dresses. The flowers which had managed to survive years of neglect in this enclosed wilderness were to be cut and taken indoors, where Grandmama taught me about the elegance of a single bloom or two in a vase against a sparse background of leaves.

‘The art of happiness is in being content with what you have,’ she would say, looking with apparent satisfaction out of the dusty windows at the garden, yellowing like an uncut hayfield in the October sunshine. ‘And good manners depend entirely on appearing content with what you have.’

And I, innately polite and content (for what child of my gentle mama’s could be other?), would nod sagely and split a chrysanthemum stem for Grandmama to place precisely in a crystal vase.

My grandmama taught me more than the outward show of ladylike behaviour that autumn. She taught me an inner quietness which comes from knowing your strengths and your weaknesses – and the job you have to do. She taught me – without possibility of contradiction – that I was no longer a wild child. I would be a young lady. And it was I, and no one else, who would have to learn the self-control I would need to fulfil that role. So I learned to discipline myself, while Richard learned to ride.

And I think I had the better bargain of the two of us.

For Richard was afraid. He had learned that now, learned what I had seen when his face had gone white in the stable yard and Scheherazade had sidled away at his approach. She was not an old hack to tease in the meadow with a handful of stones thrown at her back hooves. She was not a bow-backed carriage horse that would strain for a carrot hung out of reach. She was a high-bred hunter, and when Richard and she were out alone on the common or the downs, he feared her. He was afraid of falling, he was afraid of being kicked. But more than that, he was afraid of all of her – of her bright colour, her brown eyes, her wide nostrils.

I spent three weeks at Grandmama’s and came home only when Grandpapa was expected again. Neither Grandmama nor Mama wanted me at Havering Hall when Grandpapa and his cronies from the London clubs fell out of their chaises swearing at the roads and lugging their cases of port.

Grandmama helped me pack, and sent me home with a bolt of muslin for a brand new gown as a farewell present.

‘You may be a Lacey,’ my grandmama said as she stood at the front door with me, watching Dench put my little box under the seat of the gig, ‘but you are also my granddaughter.’ She made it sound as though being a Lacey and a granddaughter of hers were positions of equal importance, of vast significance in an admiring world. ‘Lacey, or Havering, or married to someone with no name at all, I trust you will always remember you are first and foremost a lady.’

I nodded. I tried to concentrate, but I was only a twelve-year-old child and all I could think was that I was returning home to Richard and my mama, and maybe Richard would allow me to ride Scheherazade. I hardly heard my grandmama telling me that there was more to life than a name and an estate, more to life than the man one might marry. More to life, even, than love. More important than all these things was the retention of one’s pride, of a tenacious little scrap of dignity, whatever one’s name, whoever one’s relations.

‘You are anxious to go home to your mama,’ she said gently.

‘Yes, Grandmama,’ I said.

‘And Richard?’ she queried. Under her searching look, I coloured and my eyes fell.

‘That is quite suitable,’ she said equably. ‘You are joint heirs of Wideacre, and cousins. I can imagine no easier way of reconciling the problem of joint shares than to make the estate one again under Richard’s ownership. And he is a charming boy. Does he treat you kindly?’

I beamed, our childhood squabbles forgotten. Oh, yes!’ I said emphatically. ‘And he has said ever since we were little children that we should marry and rebuild Wideacre together.’

My grandmama nodded. ‘If John MacAndrew returns home wealthy, it would indeed be a most suitable match,’ she said. But then she looked at me more closely and her face softened. ‘He’s not going to grow into a man who will stomach petticoat rule,’ she said gently. ‘He has been indulged by your mama and he is used to ruling you. He will be the master in his house, and you will have to obey him, Julia.’

I nodded. I could have told her, but I did not, that I had already served a hard apprenticeship in giving way to Richard. It had been my choice to obey him since we had been small children. I could envisage no change. I did not even want a change.

‘It is not always easy, obeying one’s husband,’ my grandmama said, her words stilted. She gave a little sigh which should have told me of a lifetime of self-discipline, of temper bitten back and never expressed. Of complaints, and slights, and accidental cruelties. ‘They will tell you in church that marriage is a sacrament. But it is also a binding legal contract, Julia.’

Dench had stowed my box and was standing at the horse’s head, waiting out of earshot, patient.

Grandmama tutted under her breath. ‘You may marry for love, my dear; but I would want you to remember that marriage is a business contract, and after the love has gone you are still forced to keep your side of the bargain.’

I looked at her uncomprehendingly, my child’s eyes wide.

‘When love has gone, when liking has gone, you are still married,’ she said sternly. ‘There is no escaping that. And the services you performed out of love, you have still to do out of duty. That is when you are glad you can say, “I am a lady,” or “I am a Lacey”, or anything which reminds you in your heart that you are a person in your own right, even if you lead the life of a bondsman.’