Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) (45 page)

The thought of being known by name to everyone for hundreds of miles around was a comforting one. I slid down on the pillows a little deeper. And I slept again.

I woke in the morning hot and blinded with my eyelids so red and swollen I could hardly open them. I was wakened by a squawk when my maid, coming to my bedside, caught sight of me and dashed for the door. I opened my eyes slightly and shut them again quickly. Even with the window curtains closed the room seemed far too bright and the flicker of the newly lit fire was so loud it made my head ache. I was burning up with fever and my throat was so sore that I could not have spoken even if I had wanted to.

The bedroom door opened again and there was Lady Havering’s maid Rimmings herself looking very tall and regal despite the curl papers sticking out from under her nightcap. She ignored my maid, who was twittering behind her and approached my bed and looked down at me. When I saw her face change I knew that I was very ill indeed.

‘Miss Sarah…’ she said.

I blinked. I tried to say ‘Yes?’ but my voice was burned away in the hotness of my throat. I nodded. Even that slight movement made all the swollen muscles in my neck shriek with a pain which clanged inside my head like an echoing belfry.

‘You look very ill, do you feel unwell?’ Rimmings voice was so sharp it cut into the tender places behind my eyes and inside my ears.

‘Yes,’ a little whisper of sound managed to creep out. She heard it, but she did not bend closer to hear me better. She was keeping her distance from my breath.

‘It’s the typhus for sure!’ said Sewell, my maid. I turned my head stiffly on the sweaty pillow and looked at her. If it was the typhus I was done for. I had seen my Rom ma die of it and I knew how hard the illness was, like a harsh master who breaks your spirit before throwing you aside. If I had been on Wideacre I think I might have stood against it, I might have fought it. But not in London where I was always tired, always ill at ease, and with so little joy in my days.

‘That’ll do!’ Rimmings said abruptly. ‘And not a word of this in the servants’ hall if you want to keep your place.’

‘I don’t know I do want my place with typhus in the house,’ the girl said defiantly, backing towards the door, her eyes still on me. ‘’Sides, if it’s typhus she won’t need a dresser will she? She won’t need a maid at all. Her la’ship had best get a nurse for as long as Miss lasts.’

Rimmings nodded. ‘I don’t doubt she’ll have a nurse,’ she said. I watched her through half-closed eyelids. I did not think I could bear to have a stranger pushing me around the bed, pulling me around, stripping me and washing me. I knew the London nurses. They worked as layers-out and midwives too; dirty-handed, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking women who treated their patients – quick and dead – the same: as corpses already.

Rimmings remembered me. ‘Some of them are very good,’ she lied. Then she turned to Sewell. ‘Get some fresh lemonade, and a bowl of water. You can sponge her face.’

‘I’m not touching her!’ The girl stood firm.

‘You’ll do as you’re ordered, miss!’ Rimmings burst out.

She didn’t care. I closed my eyes and the squabble came to me dimly in great heaving waves of noise.

‘I won’t touch her! I’ve seen typhus before,’ she hissed defiantly. ‘It’ll be a blessed miracle if we don’t all of us get it. Besides, you just look at her face! She’s not long for this world, she’s grey already. Sponging ain’t going to bring down that fever. She’s a goner, Miss Rimmings, and I ain’t going to nurse a dying woman.’

‘Her la’ship will hear of this Sewell – and you’ll be out on the streets without a character!’ Rimmings boomed, her voice seemed to echo again and again in my head.

‘I don’t care, it ain’t right! I’m a lady’s maid, hired for a lady’s maid! No one can say I don’t keep her clothes right and it ain’t my fault that she wears riding habits all the time. It ain’t my fault she’s been so peaky ever since she came to London. I’ve dressed her right and I ain’t ever said one word about her coming up out of the hedgerow. But I won’t nurse her. It’d be up and down those stairs twenty times a day and certain to take it and die too. I won’t do it!’

My cracked lips parted in a little smile as I heard them wrangling, though my head was thudding like an enlisting drum. It had all gone wrong then. Sewell was right with her sharp servant’s eyes and her quick wits. I was worm’s meat already, she had seen the look in my face which I remembered from my ma. When the typhus fever puts its hot sweaty finger on you, you are gone. Perry would not clear his gambling debts with my dowry, I would never be Lady Havering. Her ladyship would never have an heir from me.

All our work and lies and lessons would be for nothing. I had always thought they were good for nothing, and now nothing would come of them, except that I should have a fashionable funeral instead of being tossed into a common grave. But I would die in this beautiful London town house as surely as I would have died in that dirty little wagon if we had taken the infection when we were chavvies. The disease which had taken my weary travel-worn ma in her poverty and her hunger could slip past the butler and take me too.

I was not even sorry. Not even sorry that I would die and not see my seventeenth year. I could not find it in my hot shivering body to care a ha’pence either way. Ever since she had died I had been marking my time out, waiting. Now I was going too and if there was such a thing as the gorgio God, and a gorgio heaven, then I would see her there. I thought of her with her hair tumbled down, dressed in shining white with pink fluffy wings rising up behind her. She would be lovely. I wanted to be with her.

‘The kitchenmaid can do it,’ Rimmings said decisively.

‘Em’ly?’ my maid asked. ‘Of course! The kitchenmaid should do it. Will you wake her la’ship and tell her about this?’

‘This’ was me on my deathbed, not a fit subject to broach to Lady Havering before she had woken in her own good time and rung the bell for her morning chocolate.

Rimmings hesitated. ‘I suppose so,’ she said slowly. ‘She’ll have to send for the doctor for her, I can’t take the authority. But I doubt he’ll be able to make much difference, she’s that far gone.’

She looked at the clock on my mantelpiece. ‘I daren’t wake my lady before eight,’ she said. ‘Not even if she was breathing her last already! It won’t make much difference to her whether she waits till nine or later. I’ll give Emily some laudanum to give her.’

She came back to my bedside and stood a judicious three feet away. ‘Can you hear me, Miss Lacey?’ she asked. I gave a painful nod.

‘I shall send Emily to nurse you, she shall give you some laudanum. That will make you feel better.’

I nodded again. Emily or Sewell, it made little odds. Sewell was right. The fever had me in its grip like a hard rider forcing a horse at a gallop towards a cliff. I did not expect to leap across.

They took themselves off then, still fretting, and I lay in the throbbing hot pain of the stuffy little room and let my red eyelids close on my hot eyes, and I dozed.

At once I dreamed of a girl who looked like me and rode like me, but dressed in bulky uncomfortable clothes. She had a riding habit of grey velvet, but thicker and heavier cut than my smart outfit. She had eyes even greener than mine, as green as mine are when I am happy. She looked happy enough. She looked as if she had never shed a tear in her life.

I heard her laugh, I saw someone lift her into the saddle and I saw her smile down at him with love. But though her face was warm I knew that all the time she was teaching herself to be cold and hard, that she would throw him away, she would throw away anyone who stood in her way. I knew she was my grand-dame.
The great Beatrice Lacey who made the land grow and made it eat up the people who worked it. Beatrice whom they had stopped with fire and anger. Nothing else would have made her even pause. I knew then, that I was a Lacey indeed, for that bright hard smile was my smile when I stood in the ring and knew I had an audience in the palm of my dirty little hand. And that coldness which she swung around her, like an icy cloak, was the coldness which I had been born and bred to. The coldness which says: ‘Me! Me! Who is going to care for me?’ It seemed odd, that this moment when I was galloping like an arrow towards my death should be the time when I saw her, when I knew at last that I was a Lacey through and through.

My bedroom door opened and I stirred in my sleep and saw poor little Emily the kitchenmaid with her hands swiftly washed and her cap pulled straight and her dirty pinny swapped for a clean one.

‘Please’m,’ she said. ‘They said I had to give you this.’ She held a bottle of laudanum in one hand and glass of water in another. ‘They said I should be your maid while you’re ill, until her la’ship gets a nurse,’ she said. ‘But please’m I ain’t never done it and I don’t know nohow what’s to do.’

I tried to smile and nod her to the bedside, but I could not move my neck at all now. I must be getting worse very quick for I had been able to speak earlier in the morning and now it had gone altogether.

She was made bold by my stillness and silence. ‘Are you very bad, miss?’ she asked. I blinked my eyes and she came a little closer.

‘Bloody hell,’ she said.

I gave a little croak of laughter and she jumped back as if I could bite.

‘Beg pardon, miss,’ she said hopelessly. Then when I made no more sound she held out the bottle at me. ‘They said I was to give you this,’ she said.

I could imagine how a strong dose would take the pain away. I forced my head to nod, the movement made my senses swim and I closed my eyes while the room swirled and the bed heaved like a ship in a rough sea.

‘I’ll put it ‘ere then,’ she said helplessly, and moved my pitcher of lemonade and put the phial and the water on the bedside table. ‘You helps yourself when you wants it.’

She looked around the room for something that came within her experience. ‘I’ll make your fire up again!’ she said brightly, and went to the hearth.

The little part of me which had clung to life like an obstinate succubus in the wagon through beatings, even through the deadly pain in my heart on that night when she died, held me tight now; and ordered my throat to cry out. I strained and strained to speak, looking desperately from her turned back as she worked on the fire, to the little glass of water and the laudanum alongside it. If the laudanum took the pain away I would sleep. If I slept I would not be weary when the crisis of the fever came and then I might fight it. I might win.

I tried to cry out, but all I could make were little choking noises which she could not even hear above the rattle of the fire irons and the poker knocking ashes in the grate. She got a blaze going and straightened up. The room which had been hot and stuffy was now a furnace, the firelight stabbed my eyes with its fierce heat.

‘That’s better!’ she said. She approached the bed a little closer. ‘’Ave you got everythink you want then?’ she looked around. The lemonade was out of reach, I could not raise myself up to get the laudanum. ‘Got everythink? Good.’

‘Emily,’ I croaked.

She was instantly alarmed. ‘Don’t you try to talk now,’ she said. She came a little closer but she did not dare to touch me. She had been ordered too often out of the good rooms, told to use the back stairs, to avoid the Quality and to curtsey low when they went past. She was too well schooled to dare to lay a finger on me. ‘Don’t you try to talk,’ she said again.

She scuttered towards the door and dipped a little curtsey, and was gone. I tried to call her back but my throat was swollen so badly I could make no sound. I stared at the painted ceiling, at the pretty frieze at the top of the walls showing cupids and love-birds in white and gold. I remembered Meridon the gypsy and her sly toughness and I heaved myself upwards in my bed.

It was no good, I was Meridon no longer. I was little Miss Sarah Lacey with my throat closing so tight that I could not breathe and the smell of stale sweat and death all around me, and the pain behind my eyes and in the very bones of my face so bad that I could have cried except my tears had dried in the heat of the fever.

I dropped back on the pillow again and tried not to be afraid. I knew why Sewell had refused to nurse me, I knew why Rimmings would not touch me. I knew why Emily had said ‘bloody hell’ when she had seen my face. I had caught a brief glimpse of myself in my mirror when I was sitting upright for that moment. My face was so white I looked like a corpse already, my eyes were rimmed orange, my lips were so dark and so cracked that they looked black with dried blood. The typhus fever had me.

I lay for more long hours. No one came to see me. The house was silent around me in the early morning quietness which Lady Clara demanded. Outside in the street a ballad-seller started singing a snatch of song, and I heard our front door open and close and one of the footmen tell him briskly to be off. The church clock at St George’s struck the hour. I started trying to count it but there were so many echoes in my head from each chime that I lost count and could not make it out. I thought it was about ten.

I could feel my throat closing tighter and I could feel panic rising in me as I thought that soon I would not be able to breathe at all. Then I supposed that I would die. I could no longer feel resigned and ready for death. When I thought of dying, clutching for my breath in this stuffy little room, I knew that I was most terribly afraid. It was as bad as it, had been up on the trapeze when I had hung in utter terror of falling. Now as I sucked each gasp of air down into my body I felt the same shameful terror. Soon I should not be able to breathe at all.

I shut my eyes and tried to drift into sleep so that my dying would not be a terror-driven scrabble for breath; but it was no good. I was awake and alert now, my throat dry as paper, my tongue swollen in my mouth. I felt as if I were dying of thirst – never mind typhus. The jug of lemonade hovered like a mirage, well out of my reach. The phial of laudanum, which would have eased my pain, was beside it.

I could hear a horrid rasping noise in the room, like a saw on dry wood. It came irregularly, with a growing gap between the sound. It was my breath, it was the noise of my breath as I struggled to get air into my lungs. I opened my eyes again and listened in fear to the noise, and felt the pain of each laboured
heave at air. I remembered then my ma in the wagon and how she had kept us awake with that regular gasp. I was sorry then that I had cursed her in my hard little childish heart for being so noisy and interrupting a dream I had been having. A dream of a place called Wide.

The bedroom door opened as the clock started chiming the half past the hour. I tried to open my eyes and found they were stuck together. I was blinded and for a moment I thought I was stone-blind with the illness.

‘Sarah, I hear you are unwell,’ Lady Clara’s voice was clear, confident. I shuddered at the noise of her footsteps which echoed and banged in my head. Then I heard her quick indrawn breath. I heard the noise of her skirts whisk as she crossed to the bell-pull by the fireplace, and then the running feet of Rimmings, Sewell and Emily.

She ordered a bowl of warm water and in a few moments I felt someone gently sponging my eyes until they fluttered and I could open them and see Rimmings holding me as far from her body as possible and sponging my face at arms’ length. Sewell was weeping quietly in the corner with her apron up to her eyes and I guessed that the low-voiced exchange I had heard had been her refusing to touch me and Lady Clara’s instantaneous dismissal.

‘You may go, Sewell,’ she said. ‘Pack your bags and be out by noon.’

Sewell scurried from the room.

‘She needs a nurse, your ladyship,’ Rimmings offered, turning my pillow so that the cool side was under my hot neck. ‘She needs a nurse.’

‘Of course she needs a nurse, you fool,’ her ladyship said from my writing table. ‘And a doctor. I can’t think why I wasn’t called.’

‘I feared to disturb your ladyship, and she was sleeping well after Emily gave her some laudanum.’

‘Did you?’ Lady Clara shot a look at Emily who bobbed a curtsey with melting knees.

‘Yes’m,’ she said faintly.

‘How many drops?’ Lady Clara demanded.

Emily shot an anguished look at Rimmings who cut in smoothly: ‘I thought three, your ladyship, for Miss Sarah had lost her voice this morning but she was not overheated.’

Lady Clara nodded. ‘None the less she is seriously unwell now,’ she said firmly. ‘Rimmings, take this note to a footman and tell him to take it round to Doctor Player at once.’

Rimmings stepped back from my bedside gladly enough and whisked out of the room.

‘You,’ Lady Clara said to Emily. ‘You clear up in here, understand?’

Emily dipped a curtsey.

Lady Clara came and stood at the foot of my bed. ‘Sarah, can you understand me?’ she asked.

I managed a small nod.

‘I have sent for the doctor, and he will be here soon,’ she said. ‘He will make you well again.’

I was so weak with fear and so hopeful of being able to breathe again I could have wept. Besides, I remembered my ma’s weak terror as she died alone, fighting for her breath. I didn’t want to be alone like her, I wanted someone to smooth my forehead and tell me that I would be well.

‘Sarah, have you made a will?’ Lady Clara demanded.

I choked with shock.

‘Have you made a will?’ she asked again, thinking I had not heard.

I shook my head.

‘I’ll send for your lawyers then, as well,’ she said brusquely. ‘Don’t be alarmed my dear, but if it is typhus then I know you would want to be on the safe side. I’ll have the footman go for him as soon as he gets back.’ She paused. ‘Is there anything you would like?’

I forced myself to speak, to force a word through the sandpaper of my throat. ‘Drink,’ I said.

Lady Clara came no closer but she nodded Emily to the bed. ‘Pour Miss Sarah a drink,’ she said sharply. ‘Not like that. Up to the brim. Now lift her up. Yes, hold her around the shoulders and lift her. Now take the glass and hold it for her.’

The cold glass touched my lips and the sweet clear liquid slid into my mouth. The first few mouthfuls choked me and Emily nearly drowned me before Lady Clara snapped at her to stop and let me breathe. But then the sweet clear ease of it opened my throat and I drank three glasses before Emily lowered me to the pillow again and said softly:

‘Beg pardon, m’m.’

Lady Clara ordered her to sit by my bedside and give me more lemonade if I asked for it. Emily hesitated, but then sank into a chair when her ladyship scowled.

‘Beg pardon, m’m,’ she said.

Lady Clara gave a swift comprehensive look around the room, and at me. I was breathing a little easier now I was higher on the pillows but that eerie rasping noise came every time I drew a breath. I saw a shadow cross her face and I knew she thought I would die and she would have to find another biddable heiress to marry her son, and she would have to find her quickly before his gambling debts ruined them all.

‘I’ll see you in a moment,’ she said shortly and left the room.

Emily and I sat in silence, listening to the awful hoarseness of my breath. Then I was too weary to do anything more but doze again.

That was my last lucid moment for days.

A lot of the time was very hot, but there were also long times when I shivered with cold. There was a man who came from time to time whose touch was gentle, and I mistook him for Robert Gower and thought I was back in the parlour hurt from falling from the trapeze. There was a woman, a nurse I suppose, who smelled of spirits and who rolled me from side to side when she had to change the sheets on the bed. My skin flinched when she touched me with her hard dirty hands and she used to laugh in a loud beery voice when I winced.

Sometimes Lady Clara was there, always asking me if I felt well enough to sign something. Once she actually put a pen in my hand and held a paper on the bed before me. I remember I thought she was going to take Sea from me – an odd fancy from my fever – and I let the pen fall on the white sheets and closed
my eyes to shut her out. I remember my hair became matted with sweat and tangled and the nurse had her way and hacked it off. I wandered a little in my mind after that; with the short ragged bob I thought I was Meridon again.

Often, very often, Perry was there. Sometimes drunk, sometimes sober. Always gentle and kind to me. He brought me little posies of flowers, he paid a ballad singer to sing songs under my window one afternoon. He brought hot-house grapes and pineapples and sliced them up small so that I could eat them. When I was rambling in fever I always knew Perry, his hand was always cool against my cheek and the smell of gin and his favourite soap was distinctive. One time when the nurse was out of the room he leaned over me and asked if he could take some guineas out of my purse.

‘I’m desperate short, Sarah,’ he said.

I knew I should not allow it. I knew he had promised me, in what seemed another lifetime, hundreds of years ago, that he would never never gamble again. But I had no will to match against his imploring blue eyes.

‘Please Sarah,’ he said.

I blinked, and he took that for assent and I heard the chink of gold coins and then the soft closing of the door behind him as he left me.

The doctor came again and again. Then one day, when I felt so weary and so sick that I half wished they would all leave me, leave me and let me die in peace, I saw him nod to Lady Clara and tell her there was nothing he could do. They would have to wait and see. I realized, only dimly, that they were talking about my death.

‘Her mother died of childbed fever,’ Lady Clara said.

The doctor nodded. ‘But it’s strong stock,’ he said. ‘Squires, the backbone of the country.’

Lady Clara nodded. I knew she would be thinking that I had not been reared as a squire’s child, with nothing but the best to eat and drink.

‘She is very strong,’ she said hopefully. ‘Wiry.’

The doctor inclined an inquisitive eyebrow. ‘What of the estate if she goes?’

Lady Clara looked bleak. ‘Back to the Laceys,’ she said. ‘All the contracts depend on marriage between Perry and her. Betrothal is not enough.’

The doctor nodded ‘You must be worried,’ he offered.

Lady Clara gave a little moan and turned towards the window where the winter sky was greying into darkness. ‘Perry will be ruined if he cannot get his hands on his capital soon,’ she said. ‘And I was counting on the revenues of the Wideacre estate. It is a gold mine, that place. My income depends on the Havering estate remaining strong. And if Perry does not marry at all…’ she trailed off but the desolation in her voice echoed in my head. She was thinking of the tumbled Dower House, and the Havering kin who would take her place.

Doctor Player glanced towards the bed and his look at me gleamed. I had my eyes shut and they thought I was sleeping. Indeed, I was only half conscious. I drifted in and out of awareness as they spoke. Sometimes I heard it all, sometimes I heard nothing.

‘Special licence…marriage,’ I heard him say, and I heard Lady Clara’s swiftly indrawn breath.

‘Would it be legal?’ she demanded.

‘Her guardian has already given his consent,’ Doctor Player said judiciously. ‘If she herself wished it…’

Lady Clara came swiftly to the bed and, forgetting her fear of the typhus, put her hand on my hot forehead.

‘Would she agree? Is she fit to consent?’ she asked. ‘She can scarcely speak.’

Doctor Player’s urbane voice held a gleam of amusement. ‘I should be happy to testify that she was fit, if there should be any dispute,’ he said softly. ‘Especially to oblige you, my dear Lady Havering. I have always thought so highly of you…and always loved your part of the world. How I have longed to be a neighbour of yours, perhaps a little house…’

‘There’s a pretty Dower House on the Wideacre estate,’ Lady Clara said. ‘If you would do me the honour…rent free, of course…a lease of say, thirty years…?’

I heard his stays creak as he bowed, and I heard the smile in
Lady Clara’s voice. The special smile, when she obtained what she wanted.

‘Doctor Player, you have been most helpful,’ she said. ‘May I offer you a glass of ratafia? In the parlour?’

He took a little bottle of medicine from his bag, I heard it clink against the brass fastening.

‘I shall leave this for her, she should take it when she wakes,’ he said. ‘I can tell Nurse on my way out. And as for her marriage with your son, I should risk no delay, Lady Clara. She is very ill indeed.’

They went out together, I heard them talking in low voices as they went down the stairs and then I was alone in the silence of my room with only the soft ticking of the clock and the hushed flickering of the flames in the fireplace.

I slid into a hot daze, and then I woke again seconds later, chilled to the bone. If I had any voice other than a rasping breath I should have laughed. I had thought my da a big enough villain but even he would have balked at marrying his child off to a dying girl. He was a rogue but he had given me the string and the clasp of gold because his dying wife had asked it of him. In our world we took the wishes of the dying seriously. In this Quality world where everything looked so fair and spoke so soft, it was those with land who gave the orders, who had the world as they wished. Nothing was sacred except fortune.

Lady Clara did not dislike me, I knew her well enough and I knew that had I been her daughter-in-law she would have liked me as well as she liked her own Maria – probably better. She neither liked nor disliked anyone very strongly, her main concern was with herself. In her eyes it was her duty to preserve her personal wealth, her family’s wealth and name, and to increase it wherever possible. Every great family on the land had made itself rich at the expense of hundreds of little ones. I knew that. But I never knew it so clearly as that evening when I watched the ceiling billow like a muslin cloth as my hot eyes played tricks on me, and I knew that I was in the care of a woman who cared more for my signature than for me.

What happened next was like a nightmare in a fever. I woke
one time to find Emily washing my face with some cool scented water. I pulled away from her touch. My skin was so sore and so burning that it stung when she touched me. She said, ‘Beg pardon, m’m,’ in an undertone and made a few more ineffectual dabs at me.

I was sweating still – burning up with fever. My bedroom door beyond Emily opened, the white paintwork seemed to shimmer as I looked at it, and Lady Clara came in. Something about her face struck me, even in my heat-tranced muddle. She looked determined, her mouth was set, her eyes, as she glanced to the bed, were as hard as stones I think I shrank back a little and looked to Perry.