Philippa Gregory - The Favoured Child

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 taking 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.