The Favoured Child

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Book: The Favoured Child Read Online Free PDF
Author: Philippa Gregory
surprised when he drew me aside while Mama went to take tea in the parlour and said, ‘Julia, I cannot wait until tomorrow. I have to go and see the horse now. Come with me! We can be back by supper-time.’
    ‘Mama said…’ I started.
    ‘Mama said…’ he echoed cruelly. ‘I am going, are you going to come too? Or stay at home?’
    I went. It was a pattern I could not break, like a phrase of music which you hum even when you do not know you are singing. When Richard called to me, I went. I always went.
    ‘We should tell Mama,’ I said, hanging back. ‘She may ask for me.’
    ‘Tell her what you like,’ Richard said carelessly, shrugging on his jacket and heading for the door to the kitchen.
    ‘Wait for me!’ I said, but the door was already swinging and I only paused to catch up a shawl and run after him.
    Stride was sitting at the kitchen table. He looked at Richardwithout approval. ‘Where do you think you’re going, Master Richard?’ he asked. The remains of his dinner were before him, a half-pint of small beer beside the plate. Mrs Gough had Mama’s tea-tray laid and a kettle on the boil.
    ‘We are taking the air,’ Richard said grandly. ‘There is no need to open the door for us.’ And he swept towards the door with as good an imitation of Grandpapa Havering’s arrogance as an eleven-year-old boy could manage.
    I followed in his wake and peeped a look at Stride as I went. He shook his head reprovingly at me, but he said nothing.
    Outside, I forgot I had ever hesitated. The magic of the land caught me. I could feel it take me; anyone watching my face could have seen it take me.
    My mama once commissioned an artist – a poor travelling painter – to make a sketch of us when I was just seven and Richard was six years old. She wanted a parlour picture: the two of us seated on a blue velvet sofa in the drawing-room of the Dower House, the only piece of respectable furniture in the only properly furnished room. I can imagine the picture she saw in her mind. The two little children wide-eyed and formal, seated side by side. And even at the age of seven, as a little girl, I should have liked to have pleased my mama by posing for a picture like that.
    But the painter was a man with seeing eyes, and before he made his sketch, he asked Richard and me to show him a little of the estate. He walked with us in the woods of Wideacre and he saw how we could move as silently as deer under the trees so that the birds stayed in the branches even when we passed directly beneath them. And he felt that we trod the land as a living thing. And he sensed that Richard and the land and I belonged together in some unbreakable triangle of need and love and longing.
    So he made his picture in the woods of Wideacre, and Mama had it framed and hung on the chimney-breast of the Dower House drawing-room. It showed me, just a little girl in a sprigged muslin dress tied with a blue sash, with my hat off and my hair tumbling down, seated beneath one of the great floweringchestnut trees of Wideacre. It was May and the tree was in bloom with thick candles of red flowers, and all around me were drifts of petals as scarlet as blood; the sunlight on my light-brown hair turned it golden. My cousin Richard was standing behind me, looking down on me, posed like a little hero, half an eye on the effect he was creating. But my eyes were hazy grey and I was looking out of the picture. Away, past the painter, out of the frame of the picture, out of the little world of childhood, away from the safety of our little home.
    Richard stood like a small cavalier for the picture, because he had the knack of being what people desired. Mama wanted a formal picture, and there Richard was, behind me, one little fist on his hip, his shoulders squared. Unlike him, I looked fey and wild and dreamy in the picture, because I was seated under a blood-red chestnut tree. Wideacre brought out the wildness in me and I could not help myself.
    I heard a humming in my
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