Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) (37 page)

‘Meridon!’ he said. ‘It is Meridon, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said through my teeth. I could feel the anger and the grief rising like bile in my throat. ‘That blow was for Dandy.’

He blinked. I could see the weals from the whip growing red on his cheek. The people in the crowd behind me were murmuring, those at the doorway had turned back, trying to hear our low-voiced exchange.

Robert looked quickly around, fearing scandal. ‘What the devil is with you?’ he demanded, angry at the blow, his hand to his cheek. ‘And where the hell have you been? Whose clothes are they? And how dare you strike me?’

‘Dare?’ I spat out at him. ‘I
dare
strike you. When you killed her, when you let your whoreson murdering son kill her? And then you go on as if nothing had happened at all?’

Robert’s hand went from his red cheek to his forehead. ‘Dandy?’ he said wonderingly.

At her name something broke inside me. The tears tumbled out of my eyes and my voice choked as the words spilled out. ‘She did as she was told!’ I shouted. ‘David told her. “Let the catcher to his job,” he said. “You trust him to catch you. You throw the trick, let the catcher do the catching.”’

Robert nodded, his hand on the long ponies’ whip was shaking. ‘Aye, Meridon,’ he said. ‘Aye, I know. But what’s this to anything? An accident can happen. He caught her on that trick, we both saw him catch her. Then she slipped out of his hands.’

‘He threw her,’ I shouted.

He gasped and the blood drained from his face until the marks of the riding crop were livid streaks on his yellowish cheeks.

‘He threw her against the wall,’ I said, sparing him nothing. ‘He caught her perfectly and then as they swung back he threw her. He threw her out, beyond the safety net, against the back wall and broke her neck. She smashed into that wall, and was
dead before I could hold her. She was dead while I still heard her scream. She was dead like a broken doll. He broke her.’

Robert looked like a man struck dumb of apoplexy, his eyes started, his mouth was blue.

‘My Jack…’ he whispered to himself. Then he looked at me again. ‘Why?’ he asked, and his voice was like a little whipped child.

‘She was pregnant,’ I said wearily. ‘She hoped to catch him, carrying his baby, your grandson. He did no worse than you, when you left your wife on the road. He’s your son right enough.’

Robert blinked rapidly, several times. I saw him choke a little and swallow down the sour taste in his mouth.

‘He killed her,’ he said softly. ‘She was carrying his child, and she’s dead.’

I looked at him and felt no pity for him as his plans and his pride tumbled around him. I looked at him with hot hatred, staring out of eyes which were dry again. ‘Oh aye,’ I said. ‘She is dead. And I’m dead too.’

I turned on my heel and left him, left him alone in the ring under the gently swinging trapeze, with the two marks of a whip cut on his pale face and his mouth trembling. I walked through the crowd which had gathered at the doorway, craning their necks to see the scene. They were pointing like that crowd had pointed in Selsey, all those lifetimes ago. I found Sea where he was tethered and looked around for a gate to use as a mounting block.

‘Here,’ a voice said and I blinked the haze from my eyes and saw two calloused hands clasped ready for my boot. It was Will Tyacke, standing beside Sea, waiting for my return.

I nodded and let him throw me up into the saddle. I turned Sea’s head for home and rode off without waiting for him. In a few seconds I heard his horse trotting and he came alongside me, without a word. I glanced at him. His face was impassive, I did not know if he had seen me in the ring – but I could be sure he would hear all about it next market-day. I did not know if he had been in earshot of my anguished shout at Robert, if he had heard her name, if he had heard my name of Meridon.

But no one ever knew anything by looking at Will. The glance he gave me back was as discrete as stone. But his brown eyes were filled with pity.

‘Back to Havering?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. I was as desolate as a chrysallis after the butterfly has flown. A little dry dessicated thing which has outlived its time and can tumble over and over and crumble to dust. ‘Nowhere else for me to go,’ I said quietly.

He did not drop behind me, like a groom guarding his mistress as he might have done, given that he was as angry with me as he had ever been with anybody in his life; but he rode beside me as if we were equals. And in the empty heartbroken hollows of myself I was glad of his company and felt less alone as we rode up the drive to Havering Hall and the stars came out unseen above the dark canopy of the trees.

‘Thank you,’ I said as we reached the stables and the lad came out to take Sea. My throat was sore. I must have screamed at Robert, back there in the ring.

He turned his gaze on me as dark as a magician. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Don’t marry him. It won’t hurt to wait a little.’

The yard was very quiet, the lad at my horse’s head stood still, stroking Sea’s white nose.

Will nodded. ‘The pain will fade,’ he said. ‘You will be less desolate in time.’

I shook my head, I even found a slight unconvincing smile. ‘No,’ I said huskily. ‘I never was very happy, even before I lost her. I don’t expect much joy now.’

He leaned forward and with his hardened dirty hand he touched my cheek, and my forehead, smoothing the tense hot skin, rubbing at my temples with roughened gentle fingers. Then, before I knew what he was doing he took my face in both his hands and kissed me, one soft kiss, full on the lips as confident as an acknowledged lover.

‘Good luck then, Sarah,’ he said. ‘You can always walk away from them all, you know.’

I didn’t pull away from his touch. I closed my eyes and let him do as he would with me. It made no difference at all. I put my
hands up and closed my fingers around his wrists and held him, held his hands against my cheeks and looked into his eyes.

‘I wish to God I was dead,’ I said to him.

We stood there for a moment, in silence. Then Sea shifted restlessly and our grip broke. The lad at Sea’s head reached up for me and jumped me down from the saddle. Will stayed unmoving on his horse, watched me walk across the yard, the water trough shining like ice in the moonlight, watched the yellow lamplight from the house spill out in a square on the cobbles as I opened the back door, and then watched me close the door behind me and heard me shoot the bolts.

The next day we left for London, so Lady Clara’s spies had not time to tell her of the show, and of the young lady who looked like me, but who answered to another name.

We travelled heavy. I thought of the old days, of one wagon carrying everything a family of five would need. Of the first season when we travelled with bedding for four, costume changes, saddlery and a scenery backdrop all loaded in two wagons. Lady Clara and I travelled in the Havering carriage, Lord Peregrine rode alongside for his own amusement. Behind us came the baggage coach with all our clothes and with Lord Peregrine’s valet and two maids. Behind that came a wagon with various essentials necessary to Lady Clara’s comfort: everything from sheets to the door-knocker, and either side of this little cavalcade ranged outriders – stable lads and footmen, armed for this journey with blunderbuss and bludgeon in case highwaymen might stop us and rob us. By the end of the first hour, bored and restless, I heartily hoped they would.

I was a bad travelling companion for Lady Clara. She had a book to read but I was still unable to read anything but the simplest of stories and the jogging of the chaise meant I could not put my finger under a line and follow it. I had with me some of the accounts of Wideacre in the days of my mama Julia, but I could not read her copperplate script and Lady Clara would not trouble herself to help me. And to my surprise, and then increasing discomfort, I found I was sickly with the movement of the carriage.

I did not believe it when I started to feel headachy and dizzy. Me, who had spent all my life on the driver’s seat of a wagon, or eating or dozing behind! But it was true. The chaise was slung on thick leather straps and it bounced like a landlady’s bubbies, and it swayed from side to side too. A great lolloping pig of a chaise, lined with sickly blue. I would have blessed the highway-man who stopped us. I would have been out of the chaise in a moment and begged him a ride on his horse.

‘You’re pale,’ Lady Clara commented, looking up from her book.

‘I’m sickly,’ I said. ‘The chaise makes me feel ill.’

She nodded. ‘Don’t say “sickly”, say “unwell”,’ she said, and reached for her reticule. She pulled out a little bottle of smelling salts and handed it over to me. I had never seen such a thing before.

‘Is it drink?’ I asked, holding it to the light and trying to see.

‘No!’ said Lady Clara with her rippling laugh. ‘It’s smelling salts. You hold it under your nose and smell it.’

I took the stopper off and held the little bottle under my nose. I gave a hearty sniff and then gasped with the shock of it. My head reeled, my nostrils stung.

Lady Clara rocked on her seat. ‘Oh, Sarah!’ she said. ‘You are a little savage! You wave it under your nose and breathe normally. I thought it might help.’

I stoppered the bottle again and handed it back to her. I fumbled in my pocket for my handkerchief and rubbed my sore nose and mopped my eyes.

‘I should feel better if I could ride,’ I said.

‘Out of the question,’ Lady Clara said, and that was the end of the conversation.

I shut my eyes against the swaying dizziness of the movement, and after a little while I must have slept, for the next thing I knew the wheels of the coach were squeaking and banging on cobblestones. I woke with a jump of shock and all round me was the bustle of the city and the shouts of the porters. The smell was appalling and the noise was as bad as Salisbury on market day, and it went on for mile after mile. I could not
believe there were so many people in the world, so many carriages, so many paupers, beggars, hucksters, tradesmen.

‘London!’ Lady Clara said with a sigh of relief which showed how hard her stay in the country had been for her.

I nodded but instead of excitement I felt only dread. I would rather have done anything in the world than be where I was, Miss Sarah Lacey, come to town for my first Season as a young lady, driving up to the Haverings’ town house with little Miss Juliet in the nursery and the newly wedded Lady Maria de Montrey coming to see her mama in the morning.

‘You will not dislike my daughters,’ Lady Clara said to me, her blue eyes veiled as if she could guess my thoughts as I grew paler and quieter.

‘No,’ I said without conviction.

‘You will not dislike them, because they will mean nothing to you,’ she said equably. ‘Juliet is an ignorant schoolgirl, a little forward for her age, quite pretty. Maria is a little vixen. I married her well before her husband discovered the sharpness of her tongue. She ought to thank me for that but she will not.’ Lady Clara gleamed over the top of her fan. ‘She will hate you,’ she said candidly, with a smile.

I hesitated. Sarah Lacey the young lady was in conflict with Meridon the gypsy. Meridon won. ‘I hate cat fights,’ I said bluntly. ‘I don’t want her scratching at me. It will be bad enough without that.’

Lady Clara smiled mischievously. ‘Don’t say “cat fights”, Sarah,’ she said. ‘And don’t be dull. It will not be bad. It is your coming-out into your rightful society. And you may rely on me to curb the worst excesses of my daughter’s malice.’

I hesitated. ‘You won’t always be there,’ I said. ‘And Perry…’

Lady Clara’s fan flicked the dusty air. ‘Perry is as afraid of Maria as he is of me,’ she said. ‘He’ll be no help to you, my dear. So I will always be there. Maria is selfish enough and conceited enough to try to make a fool of you in public. I shan’t permit that. You will do well enough with me.’

‘I’m grateful,’ I said. There was a world of irony in my voice but Lady Clara chose not to hear it.

Instead she leaned forward. ‘We’re nearly here,’ she said. ‘This is Grosvenor Street, and here is our street, Brook Street, and here, on the corner, is our house.’

She spoke with pride, I stared in surprise at it. It was a handsome white house with a flight of four shallow steps down to the pavement, a great army of black iron railings around it, and a heavy triangular carving of stone over the doorway. They must have been waiting for us, for as the carriage drew up the double doors were flung open and two footmen in livery and half a dozen maids in black dresses and white aprons came out and stood in a row up the steps. Lady Clara put her hand to her bonnet and cast a swift look over me.

‘Straighten your cape, Sarah,’ she said abruptly. ‘And don’t smile at them.’

I nodded and tried to look as haughty and as disdainful as she did. Then they opened the carriage door and let down the steps and Lady Clara glided into the house nodding as the maids rippled down in a curtsey on either side of her, and I followed her in.

I was not awkward then. I was not gawkish. I had stood in a show ring before now and been stared at till the crowds had their full pennyworth. A row of housemaids would not discomfort me. I nodded impartially at their bowed capped heads, and followed Lady Clara indoors.

It was a grand lovely hall. If Lady Clara had not shot me a quick frown I should have gasped. The stairs came curling down the wall on our right, broad and shallow with a fancy curved banister. The wall behind it was crusty with plasterwork making picture frames and niches for white statues – indecent, I thought they were, but I barely had time for more than a glimpse. Inside the square gilt plaster frames were painted pictures of people wrapped up in coloured sheets and rolling in waves or lying about in woods. There was a door on our left to a room which would overlook the street but Lady Clara walked past it and followed the butler up the stairs to a parlour immediately above it, facing the street.

He threw open the door. ‘We lit a fire in the parlour, my lady,
thinking you might be chilled or tired from your drive,’ he said. ‘Would you like some tea m’lady? Or mulled wine?’

I stepped into the room behind her. It was the most extraordinary room I had ever seen in my life. Every wall was done up fancy with great mouldings and painted so that every wall was like a frame for a picture, or for the four tall windows. The fireplace was so covered with swags and curls and ribbons that you wondered they could ever find where to light it in the mornings. It was very grand. It was very imposing. I missed the simple comfort of Wideacre the moment I was over the threshold.