Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) (5 page)

‘What about Meridon?’ Dandy said surly. ‘You don’t warn her off your precious son.’

Robert shot a quick look at me and then smiled. ‘She’s not a whore-in-the-making,’ he said. ‘All Meridon wants from Jack and me is a chance to ride our horses.’

I nodded. That much was true.

‘D’you see?’ Robert asked again. ‘I’d not have taken you into my wagon if I’d known you and Jack were smelling of April and May. But I can put you out here and you’d still have a chance of finding your da again. He won’t have got far – not with that damned old carthorse of his pulling that wagon! You’d best go if you’re hot for Jack. I won’t have it. And it won’t happen without my letting.’

Dandy looked once more at the back of Jack’s head. He had started on the other boot. The first one was radiantly white. I thought he had probably never worked so hard on it before.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘You can keep your precious son. I didn’t want him so much anyway. Plenty of other young men in the world.’

Robert beamed at her, he loved getting his own way. ‘Good girl!’ he said approvingly. ‘Now we can all live together with a bit of comfort. I’ll take that as your word, and you’ll hear no more about it from me.

‘And I’ll tell you something, pretty-face. If you keep those looks when you are a woman grown, there’s no telling how high
you might aim. But don’t go giving it away, girl. With looks like yours you could even think about a gentry marriage!’

That was consolation enough for Dandy and she went up into her bunk early that night to comb her hair and plait it carefully. And she did not exchange another languorous smile with Jack. Not for all the time we were in Salisbury.

It was a fine summer, that hot sunny summer of 1805. I changed from the dreary unhappy girl I had been in my da’s wagon to a working groom with pride in my work. My skirt grew bedraggled and my shoes wore out. It seemed only natural to borrow Jack’s smock and then, as he outgrew them, his second-best breeches and his old shirt. By the end of the summer I dressed all the time as a lad and felt a delight in how I could move and my freedom from the looks of passing men. I was absorbed by the speed of the travel, by the way we went from one town to another overnight. Never staying longer than three days at any site, always moving on. Everywhere we went it was the same show. The dancing ponies, the clever stallion, the cavalry charge, Jack’s bareback ride, and the story of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin.

But every night it was somehow a little bit different. The horses would go through their paces differently every time. For a while one of the little ponies was sick and went slower than the others and spoiled the dancing. Then Jack ricked his ankle unloading the wagon and had trouble with his vaults on to the horse, so all of that act was changed until he was strong again. Little changes – but they absorbed me.

It was soon my business to care for the horses from the time Jack and Robert had changed into their costumes. I had been steadily doing more and more from the first night when I had stayed behind for the sheer joy of stroking the velvety noses and smoothing the hot sides. But now it was my job. Dandy worked in the caravan. She bought the groceries and poached what food we needed. She kept the caravan as clean as Robert Gower thought fit – which was a lifetime away from Zima’s rank sluttery. Then she came to the field and kept the gate while Robert did the barking for the show.

All the while we were learning the business. All the time we were getting to love the contrast between the hard life of the travelling and the magic of the costume and the disguise. And all the time we were growing addicted to the sound of delighted applause, and to the sense of power from being the centre of attention, making magic before scores and sometimes hundreds of people.

While we were learning, Robert was planning. Every time we were anywhere near another show he would go and see it. Even if it meant missing one of our own performances he would put on his best jacket – a tweed one, not his working red coat – take the big grey stallion, and ride for as much as twenty miles to see another show. But it was not horse shows which drew him. I realized that when Jack came back from crying up the show around Keynsham with a bill in his hand, and said with confidence:

‘This’ll interest you, Da.’

It was not a bill for a horse show but a brightly coloured picture of man swinging upside down from a bar which had been hung high in the ceiling. He looked half-naked, in a costume like a second skin and spangled. He had great broad mustachios and was beaming down as if he had no fear at all.

‘Why, you’re white as a sheet,’ Robert said looking at me. ‘What’s the matter, Meridon?’

‘Nothing,’ I said instantly. But I could feel the blood draining from my head and I knew that I might faint at any moment.

I squeezed past Robert and that terrifying picture and stumbled to the caravan step and sat gulping in the fresh air of a warm August evening.

‘Be all right to work, will you?’ Robert called from inside the wagon.

‘Yes, yes…’ I assented weakly. ‘I just felt faint for a moment.’

He left me in silence to look at the staked-out horses and the sun low in the sky behind a bank of pale butter-coloured clouds.

‘Not started your bleeding have you?’ he asked, standing in the doorway with rough sympathy.

‘It’s not that!’ I exclaimed, stung.

‘Well, it’s hardly an insult…’ he excused himself. ‘What’s the matter then?’

‘It was that picture, the hand-bill…’ I said. I could hardly explain my terror even to myself. ‘What was the man doing? He looked so high!’

Robert drew the hand-bill out of his pocket. ‘He calls himself a trapeze artiste,’ he said. ‘It’s a new act. I’m going into Bristol to see it. I’d like to know how it’s done. See…’ he pushed the hand-bill towards me but I turned my head away.

‘I hate it!’ I said childishly. ‘I can’t bear to see it!’

‘Are you afraid of being up high?’ Robert asked. He was scowling as if my answer mattered.

‘Yes,’ I said shortly. In all my dare-devil boyish childhood it had been the only thing which made me ill with fear. Only on birds’ nesting expeditions was I never the leader of a game. I always insisted on staying on the ground while other travellers’ children climbed trees. Only once, when I was about ten years old, I had forced myself up a tree for a dare, and then frozen, terrified, on a low branch, quite unable to move. It had been Dandy, of all people, who had climbed up with placid confidence to fetch me. And Dandy who had been able to give me the courage to scramble down. I pushed away the memory of the swaying branch and the delighted cruel upturned faces below me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am afraid of being up high. It makes me ill just thinking about it.’

Robert said: ‘Damn,’ under his breath and jumped down from the caravan step to pull on his boots. ‘Horses ready for the show?’ he asked absently. The little puffs of smoke from his pipe came out quickly, as they did when he was thinking hard and biting on the stem.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Not tacked-up yet, of course.’

‘Aye,’ he said. He stood up and stamped his feet down into the boots and then tapped his pipe out on the wheel of the caravan and put it carefully by the driving seat.

‘What about Dandy?’ he said abruptly. ‘I suppose she won’t climb. I suppose she’s no good up high too?’

‘Dandy’s all right,’ I said. ‘Were you thinking of something for the show? You’d have to ask her, but she used to climb trees well when we were little.’

‘I’m just thinking aloud,’ he said, snubbing my curiosity. ‘Just thinking.’

But as he went towards the show field I heard him muttering under his breath. ‘Amazing Aerial Act. An Angel Without Wings. The Amazing Mamselle Dandy.’

He visited the trapeze act at Bristol; but he came back late and said nothing about it in the morning. Only Jack was allowed to ask over breakfast: ‘Any good?’ Dandy and I were eating our bread and bacon on the sun-drenched step of the caravan, so only Jack heard more than a mumbled reply. But I had heard enough to guess that Robert’s promise to Dandy of being in the centre of the ring might come true.

She welcomed it when I told her what he had said. Already our work for the show had been expanded. When Jack went crying-up the show into new towns and villages he often took Dandy riding on the crupper behind him. I had seen Robert frown the first time he saw the white horse and his son with Dandy looking so pretty, riding behind him with her arms around his waist. But he was thinking of business and not love.

‘You should have a proper riding habit,’ he said. ‘A proper riding habit and be up on your own. It’d look grand. Robert Gower’s Amazing Equestrian Show with Lady Dandy in the Ring,’ he said.

He gave Dandy five shillings for a bolt of real velvet and she made herself a riding habit in two evenings, working under the lantern until her eyes were bleary from the strain. When Jack next cried-up the show, he took her up behind him with her beautiful blue riding habit sweeping down Snow’s shining side. Dandy’s smile under her blue tricorne hat was heart-stoppingly lovely. In the next village we had the best gate we had ever taken.

‘The public like lasses,’ Robert announced at supper that night. ‘I want you riding in the ring, Meridon. And Dandy you’re to cry-up the show with Jack every day. Stay in your costume to take at the gate.’

‘What shall I wear?’ I asked. Robert looked at me critically. I had wearied of brushing my thick mass of copper hair every day and had started cutting out the tangles and the hayseeds. Dandy had exclaimed at the ragged edges I had left and had trimmed it in a bob, like a country lad. The natural curl had made it into a mop of red-gold ringlets, which tumbled about my head like an unruly halo. I had gained no weight over the summer of good living with the Gowers though I had grown taller. I was as lanky and as awkward as a young colt while Dandy had the poise and the warm curves of a young woman.

‘I’m damned if I know,’ Robert said chuckling. ‘I’d put you in a pierrot suit for half a crown. You look like a little waif, mophead. If you’re going to grow as bonny as your sister, you’d better make haste!’

‘What about dressing her as a lad?’ Jack said suddenly. He was wiping out his bowl with a hunk of bread, but he paused with sticky fingers and smiled his confident smile at me. ‘No offence, Meridon. But she could wear a silk shirt and tight white breeches and boots. You look at her when she’s in those old trews of mine, Da, she looks unladylike…but it would work in the ring. And she could do a rosinback act with me.’ Jack pushed his bowl to one side. ‘Hey!’ he said excitedly. ‘D’you remember that act we saw when someone came out of the crowd? The show outside Salisbury one time? We could do something like that and I could come out from the back, pretending to be a drunk, you know, and come up on the horse and knock Meridon off.’

‘More falls,’ I said glumly. ‘I had enough of them when I was breaking horses for Da.’

‘Pretend falls,’ Jack said, his eyes warm on me. ‘And they wouldn’t hurt. And then she could get up on the big horse, and do a bit of bareback work.’

Robert looked at me speculatively.

‘Bareback work in the breeches,’ he said. ‘The riding and clowning in a riding habit. That’d look better dressed as a girl. Two acts and only half a costume change.’ He nodded. ‘Would you like to do that, Meridon?’ he asked. ‘I’d pay you.’

‘How much?’ I said instantly.

‘Ha’penny a show, penny a night,’ he said.

‘Penny a show,’ I said at once.

‘Penny a day whether we have a show or not,’ he offered, and I stuck my grimy hand across the table and we closed the deal.

My training started the next day. I had seen Jack vaulting on and off the big skewbald horse, and I had ridden her often enough. But I had never tried to stand up on her. Robert set her cantering around the field and Jack and I rode astride together, me sitting before him. Then he got to his feet and tried to help me up. The pace, which seemed as smooth and as easy as a rocking chair when I had been seated on her back, was suddenly as jolting as a cart over cobbles. With a helpless wail I went off first one side, and then the other. And one time, earning myself a handful of curses and a cuff on the ear from Jack, I knocked him off the back of the horse as I went.

Robert called the practice to a halt when I had managed to get up and stand for a few seconds. ‘Do it again tomorrow,’ he said, as mean with praise as ever. ‘Not bad.’

Jack and I went down to the river together and stripped off down to our sweat-stained shirts, and waded into the water to cool our bruises and our tempers. I floated on my back in the sweet water and looked up at the blue sky. It was September and still as hot as high summer. My pale limbs in the water were as white as a drowned man. I kicked a fountain of spray upwards and then looked at my feet with the ingrained dirt around the toenails with no sense of shame. I turned on my front and dipped my face into the water and then dived right under until I could feel the cold water seeping through my curls to my scalp. That made me shudder and I surfaced again, kicking and blowing out, and shaking the wet hair out of my eyes. Jack was out already, lying on the grassy bank in his breeches, watching me.

I came out of the water and it flowed in streams down my neck. The shirt was slick and cold against me and Jack’s eyes followed the little rivulets of water down over my slight breasts where the nipples stood out against the wet thin fabric, down to
the crotch of my legs where the shadow of copper hair showed dark under the cloth.

‘D’you not mind working as hard as a lad when you’re growing into a woman?’ he asked idly.

‘No,’ I said shortly. ‘I’d rather be treated as a lad by your father and you.’

Jack smiled his hot smile. ‘By my father, yes possibly. But by me? Wouldn’t you like me to see you as a young woman?’

I walked steadily on the sharp stones at the river edge on my hardened feet and picked up my jerkin and pulled it on. I was still bare-arsed but Jack’s knowing smile had never caused me any discomfort and I was untroubled by his sudden interest in me.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve seen how you are with women.’

His hand waved them away down river. ‘Those!’ he said dismissively. ‘Those are just sluts from the villages. I would not treat you in the way I treat them. You’d be a prize worth taking, Meridon. You in your funny breeches and my cut-down shirts. I’d like to make you glad to be born a woman. I’d like you to grow your hair to please me.’