The Favoured Child. Philippa Gregory

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      I am an old woman now. In my heart I am an old woman, tired, and ready for my death. But when I was a child, I was a girl on Wideacre. A girl who knew everything, and yet knew nothing. A girl who could see the past all around as she walked on the land – dimly, like firelit smoke. And could see the future in bright glimpses – like moonlight through storm-torn clouds. The unstoppable hints of past and future moulded my childhood like drips of water on a tortuous limestone stalactite that grows and grows into a strange racked shape, knowing nothing.

      Oh! I know now. I have been a fool. I was a fool over and over in the years when I learned to be a woman. But I am no fool now. I had to shed the shell of lies and half-truths like a summertime adder coming out of a sloughed skin. I had to scrape the scales of lies off my very eyes so that I blinked in the strong light of the truth at last; and was a fool no more. In the end I was the only one that dared to face the truth. In the end I was quite alone. In the end there was only me. Only me and the land.

      It is no ordinary land – that is our explanation and our excuse. This is Wideacre, set on the very chalk backbone of southern England, as beautiful and as rich as a garden, as the very first garden of Eden. The South Downs enclose the valley of the River Fenny like a cupped hand. High chalk downs, sweet with short-cropped grass and rare meadow flowers, dizzy in summer with tiny blue butterflies. These hills were my horizon. My little world was held inside them. And its centre was the hall, Wideacre Hall. A smoke-blackened ruin at the head of the chalk-mud and flint-stone drive, tumbling down amid an overgrown rose garden where no one walks. In the old days the carriages would roll past the front door and down the drive, passing fertile fields, passing the little square sandstone Dower House, stopping at the great iron gates at the head of the drive for the lodge-keeper to swing them open for a tossed coin or a nod. To the left is the village of Acre – a lane lined with tradesmen’s cottages, a whitewashed vicarage, a church with a pretty rounded spire; to the right is the lane which runs to the London road, meeting it at the corner where the stage-coach stops on its way north to Midhurst and beyond.

      I was born Julia Lacey, the daughter of the squire of Wideacre and his wife, Celia, of Havering Hall. I was their only child, the only heir. I was raised with my cousin Richard, the son of Beatrice, my father’s sister. Those two – my papa and his sister – made my cousin and me joint heirs to Wideacre. They changed the entail on the estate so that we two could jointly inherit. We always knew that we were to run Wideacre together.

      Those are the facts. But there is also the truth. The truth that Beatrice was desperate to own her brother’s estate, that she lied and schemed and ruined the land and murdered – oh, yes, the Laceys have always been killers. She stopped at nothing to put herself in the squire’s chair. She enclosed fields and shut footpaths, she raised rents and planted wheat everywhere to pay for her plans. She drove her husband half mad and stole his fortune. She dominated her brother in every way a woman can. And she outran her destiny for season after season until the village which had once adored her came against her with torches in their hands and a leader on a black horse riding before them.

      They killed her.

      They killed her. They burned down the house. They ruined the Lacey family. And they put themselves outside the law for ever.

      My papa, the squire, died of a weak heart. Beatrice’s husband, Dr John MacAndrew, went away to India, swearing to repay her creditors. And then there were only the three of us left: my mama, my cousin Richard and me in the square little box of a house, half-way down the drive from Wideacre Hall with the great trees of the Wideacre parkland leaning over the roof and pressing close to the windows. Three of us, two servants, and a whole world of ghosts.

      I could name them all. I saw them all. Not very clearly. Not well enough to understand with my child’s imagination. But at night when I was asleep, I sometimes heard a voice, a word or an echo of a word. Or once, very clearly, the ripple of a joyous laugh. And once I had a dream so intense that I awoke, in a start of terror, my bedroom windows bright with the reflection of flames from a fire as big as a house, the fire which burned down Wideacre Hall, my house. And killed the squire, my papa. And left three survivors in this house: the three of us and a family of ghosts.

      In real life there was my mama. Her face was heart-shaped, pale like a cream rose, her eyes pansy-brown. Her hair was fair when she was young but went grey – long ageing streaks of dullness among the gold, as if her sorrow and her worry had laid fingers on her smooth head. She was widowed when I was only two years old, so I cannot remember her wearing any colour other СКАЧАТЬ