The Favoured Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

evening, you may well learn a lot that way. But you must not tease him to teach you, Julia. John is sending money from his salary for Richard’s education, not yours.’
    In the event I did very well. Richard was generous with his homework and shared it with me. When he came home with his books – old primers once used by Dr Pearce – he let me stand at his elbow in respectful silence while he tried to puzzle out the verbs and declensions.
    ‘What a bother it is,’ he would say impatiently and push thebook towards me. ‘Here, Julia, see if you can make head or tail of this. I have to translate it somehow and I cannot make out what they’re saying.’
    Trembling with excitement I would take the book and turn to the back for the translated words and scribble them down in any order.
    ‘Here, let me see,’ Richard would say, repossessing his goods with brutal suddenness. ‘I think I know what to do now.’ And then he would complete the sentence in triumph and we would beam at each other with mutual congratulation.
    Mama was glad to see us content, to see the different treatment of us so well resolved. She tried very hard to treat us fairly, to treat us alike. But she could not help favouring Richard, because he needed so much more. He took the best cuts of meat and the largest helpings, because he was growing so fast and was always hungry. He had new clothes; Mama could always cut down and turn her gowns for me, but she could not tailor jackets, so Richard’s clothes were made new. He had new boots more often as he grew quicker, and then he had proper schooling. If I had loved him any less, if I had not tried to be as good as a sister to him, I think I would have envied him. But I only ever begrudged him one thing for more than a moment, the only thing he ever had which I desired, which I could not help desiring: Scheherazade.
    She was Richard’s horse – the horse we had both been promised off and on since we were children by my Grandpapa Havering, that feckless charming rogue who breezed into the county half a dozen times a year on a repairing lease from London. On one of his visits, in June, when I was twelve and Richard eleven, he finally got around to honouring his promise. I first learned of it when he sent a message to my mama. She opened it in the parlour while I sat at her feet, my head leaning against her knees, idly gazing out of the window at the tossing trees which crowd so close around the little sandstone box of a house, waiting for Richard to come home from his lessons. Mama broke the seal on the note and then paused. ‘What is that singing?’ she asked Stride.

    He cleared his throat, embarrassed. ‘It’s Master Richard,’ he said. ‘He came in by the kitchen door, and Mrs Gough stopped him and asked him for a song. She loves to hear him sing.’
    Mama nodded and listened in silence. The clear pure arc of sound swept unstoppably through the house. Richard was singing an Italian song – one he had despaired of teaching me to play aright – but I had guessed at an English version of the words for him, and he was singing them. His high sweet voice had a more tremulous tone than usual: ‘If there is ever a favourite – then let it be me,’ came the chorus. And then more quietly, more entreatingly, to the cruel gods who are never just to needy mortals: ‘If there is ever a favourite – oh, let it be me!’
    Stride, Mama and I were as still as statues until the last echo of the last note had died, then Stride recollected the dinner table not yet laid and left the room, closing the door behind him.
    ‘It is a great gift,’ Mama said. ‘Richard is fortunate.’
    ‘Does Uncle John realize how good Richard is?’ I asked. ‘If he really understood, surely he would find the money from somewhere for Richard to have a music master?’
    Mama shook her head and spread out the note on her knee. ‘Music is a luxury we cannot afford, my darling. Richard has to enter the university and obtain the