The Favoured Child Read Free Page B

improve,’ she said.
    He took her hand and bowed over it as though she were a great lady receiving a courtier. ‘I’ll go back, then,’ he said. ‘The mood in the village is going to be very ugly. But I’ll do what I can.’
    ‘Will they listen to you?’ Mama asked.
    Dr Pearce pulled his gloves on, and for the first time that day he smiled his sweet helpless smile. ‘I doubt it,’ he said wryly. ‘They have never done so before. But I will do what I can.’
    He was right in thinking there was little he could do. The quicker parents had hidden their children as soon as the carriage had come into the village. In the end only six children were taken, taken away to work in the mills in the north. The roundsman said that they would serve a proper apprenticeship and be able to send home good wages. They would have an education and a religious upbringing. They would probably be home in a few years, a credit to their parents and to their employers. Acre heard that out in silence, and let the children go.
    My grandmother took us to Chichester Cathedral in her carriage every Sunday for a month. Mama did not want to go to Acre church. But then Dr Pearce wrote her a note to say that there was no cause for concern in Acre, we could come and go quite safely. It was as it had been before.
    Only I noticed that it was not as it had been before.
    The children who sometimes used to come and peep through our front gate came no more. The girls who would bob a curtsy to Mama as we went down the aisle from church no longer looked at her or grinned impertinently at me. The whole village became as quiet as if every child had been stolen away by some malevolent Pied Piper. And every child learned to run like the wind up to the common and hide if they saw a strange coach come down the lane.
    There were only six children lost, but it was not as it had been before.
    It stayed hot all that summer. Hot, and quiet. Mama was illwith headaches and weariness; she trusted us to go no further than the common and the Wideacre estate and let us roam. Not for the first time I asked her where the money had gone, and why the hall had been burned, and why she – who was all powerful in my little world – could do nothing in the wider world of Acre and Chichester. And not for the first time her face took on that frozen look which both Richard and I had learned to dread, and she said softly, ‘Not now, darling. I will explain it all to you when you are old enough to understand it. But I will not tell you now.’
    And with that Richard and I were content. We had only the casual curiosity of children. Having seen the hall in ruins and the land idle all our lives, we could hardly imagine a time when it had been whole any more than we could imagine a time when we were not there. Left to ourselves for that hot summer, we walked, and lazed, and dreamed, and played, and talked.
    ‘I wish I were a Lacey,’ Richard said to me, as we lay sprawled in the bracken of the common, looking up at the blue sky rippled with white clouds.
    ‘Why?’ I asked, as idle as he. I had a grass stalk between my thumbs and I was blowing and blowing, producing the most painful shrieks from it.
    ‘To be a Lacey of Wideacre,’ he said. ‘To be known as the owner of Wideacre. To have been landowners for so many years that no one could ever challenge you…’
    I dropped my grass stalk and rolled over beside him, my head butting companionably against his skinny chest. ‘When we are married, you can take my name,’ I offered. ‘Then you’ll be a Lacey, if you like.’
    ‘Yes,’ he said, pleased. ‘And we can rebuild the hall and make it all just as it was. And I shall be the squire as my mama wanted me to be.’
    I nodded. ‘Let’s go to the hall on our way home,’ I said.
    I pulled Richard to his feet and we went in single file down the narrow sandy path that leads to the back of Wideacre woods from the common. There were gaps all around the smooth perimeterof the park wall,