Philippa Gregory - The Favoured Child

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. Then 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.

The tracks would lead Richard, sniffing blood like some predator, across the hall and to the front door. But outside it was dark and the wind was tossing the trees around. Soon it would rain and all trace of me and my little child would be gone. The Fenny would be up, the waters very high. You can hide anything in the Fenny when it is in flood. Richard, of all people, who had thrown a young woman’s body into the river, should have remembered that.

The front-door latch clicked, but the noise was masked by the squeak of the tree branches rubbing together in the wind outside. The gusts of air whipped into the hall, but the library door was tight shut, and Richard did not know his house was wide open to the storm. He did not know that his front door was open to the wind, to anyone. And that the child he longed for was out in the rain, and would never come back.

I gasped as the rain slapped my face like an unforgiving enemy.

A great scud of water, hard as hailstones, smacked me in the face, and stayed like tears on my cheeks. I shook my head like a dog coming out of a river and tucked the baby more securely into my side.

My feet stung with the cold as I crept down the garden path and out of the gate into the drive. I was a fool to go barefoot, but I was not thinking. I was not thinking at all. I was on my way to the Fenny, and neither the stony drive nor the nettles and old brambles of the Wideacre wood footpaths would stop me.

I was biting my lip to stop myself whimpering with the pain as I walked up the drive, stumbling on the chalk stones and splashing in the puddles until the cape and the nightdress were drenched. There was only one dry spot on me and that was the warm little bundle in my left arm. I could feel her breathing softly and sweetly, and some distant thought in my mind said to her, ‘This is Wideacre, and you are a Lacey.’ But no words crossed my lips. This child, my daughter, would go out of the world as she had come into it – owning nothing.