Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) Read online

  ‘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 s
cratching 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.

  ‘Dust,’ Lady Clara said walking into the parlour stripping off her gloves and handing them to the waiting maid.

  The butler, the Havering man who had set off early yesterday night from Sussex to be here to greet us, shot a furious glance at the housekeeper, a London woman I had not seen before.

  Lady Clara sat down before the fire and put her feet up on the brass fender. She held out her hands to the blaze and looked at them all, parlourmaid, housekeeper, butler, without a smile.

  ‘Dust on the outside windowsills,’ she said. ‘Get them scrubbed. And bring me my post and a cup of mulled wine at once. And bring a cup for Miss Lacey and Lord Perry as well.’

  The butler murmured an apology and backed from the room. The housekeeper and the maid flicked out shutting the door behind them. Lady Clara gleamed her malicious smile at me.

  ‘There’s never any call to be pleasant to servants, Sarah,’ she said. ‘There are thousands who would give their right arms for a good place in a London household. Treat them firmly and sack them when you need to. There’s no profit in doing more.’

  ‘Yes, Lady Clara,’ I said, and I pulled out a chair from the fireside and sat down beside her.

  The door opened and Perry came in with the parlourmaid behind him carrying a tray.

  ‘’Llo, Mama,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Sarah!’ He waved the maid to the table and flapped her from the room and handed us our cups himself.

  ‘Load of letters,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Mostly for you, Mama. Half a dozen for me. Bills, I suppose.’

  He handed the tray of Lady Clara’s letters over to her and watched her as she sipped her drink and started to slit them open with an ivory paper knife. While her attention was distracted he reached deep into an inside pocket of his jacket and brought out a dark little flask and slopped a measure of some clear liquid into his drink. He winked at me, as roguish as a lad, and then sipped at his mulled wine with greater appetite.

  ‘Invitations,’ Lady Clara said with pleasure. ‘Look, Sarah, your name on a gilt engraved card!’

  She handed me a stiff white card and I put my fingers under the words and spelled out slowly: ‘The Hon. Mrs Thaverley requests the pleasure of the Dowager Lady Clara Havering and Miss Sarah Lacey to a ball…’

  ‘Lord! She mustn’t do that in public, Mama!’ Perry said, suddenly alarmed.

  Lady Clara looked up from her letters and saw me, tortuously spelling out words.

  ‘Good God no!’ she said. ‘Sarah, you must never try to read in public until you can do so without putting your finger under the words and moving your lips.’

  I looked from one to the other of them. I had been so proud that I had been able to make out at all what the invitation said. But it was not a skill I had learned, it was a social embarrassment. Whatever I did it was never good enough for high society.

  ‘I won’t,’ I promised tightly. ‘Lady Clara, may I go to my room and take my hat off?’

  She looked sharply at me and then her gaze softened. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘I had forgotten you felt ill. Go and lie down and I will send your maid to call you in time for you to dress for dinner.’

  She nodded me to pull the bell rope by the mantelpiece, and I looked at the clock. It said three o’clock.

  ‘We will not dine for hours yet!’ Lady Clara said airily. ‘We keep town hours now! We will dine at six today, even later when we start entertaining. Mrs Gilroy can bring a slice of bread and cake up to you in your room.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. Peregrine held the door for me and then followed me out. The parlourmaid appeared from the back of the long corridor where I guessed the servants’ stairs were, dipped a curtsey to both of us and waited. Perry’s gaze was blurred, he had been drinking as he rode and the gin in the mulled wine had added to his haziness.

  ‘I’ll fetch the cake,’ he offered. ‘We’ll have a little picnic. It can be like it was in the woods that first day when I thought you were a stable lad, and we said we’d be friends.’

  ‘All right,’ I said desolately.

  I followed the maid down the corridor trailing my new bonnet by the ribbons so that the flowers on the side brushed on the thick pile of the carpet. The maid threw open a panelled door and stood to one side. It was a spacious pretty bedroom which I guessed had belonged to the vixen Maria before her marriage. There was a white and gold bed and matching dressing-table with a mirror atop and a stool before it. There was a hanging cupboard for dresses and cloaks. There was a window which was painted tight shut and looked out over the street where carriages went to and fro and errand boys and footmen sauntered. It smelled of indoors as if clean winds never blew i
n London. I wrinkled my nose at the stale scent of perfume and hair-powder. I could not imagine how I would ever manage to sleep there. It would be like living in a prison.

  There was a great crash outside my door as Perry stumbled against it, tray in hands. I crossed the room and opened it and he weaved unsteadily in. The open bottle of wine had tipped over and was rolling on the tray, wine streaming out over plum cake, fairy cakes, little biscuits and slices of bread and butter. The little dish of jam had skidded to the back of the tray and was sticking, unnoticed, to his waistcoat. The tray was awash with red wine, the food sodden.

  Perry dumped the lot on the hearthrug before the fire, quite unaware.

  ‘Now we can be comfortable,’ he said with satisfaction.

  I giggled. ‘Yes we can,’ I said. And we toasted each other in the remainder of the wine and we ate soggy plum cake and redstained biscuits, and then we curled up together like drunken puppies and dozed before the fire until the maid tapped on the door and told me it was time to dress for dinner.

  29

  Lady Clara had told me that I was fit for London society and I had doubted her when every move I made in Sussex was somehow subtly wrong. But once we were in London she criticized me very little, and I remembered with a wry smile how Robert Gower would never criticize a performance in the ring. It was the rehearsals where he was an inveterate taskmaster. In the ring he smiled encouragement.

  Lady Clara was like that, and my life in London was like one long performance where I showed the tricks she had taught me and relied on her to skim over the errors I made. She covered for me wonderfully. When a young lady went to the piano to play and turned to me and said, ‘Do you sing, Miss Lacey?’ it was Lady Clara who said that I was training with one of the best masters and he insisted that I rest my voice between lessons.

  They all nodded with a great deal of respect at that, and only the young lady at the piano looked at all put out.

  Dancing I was excused until we had been to Almacks, some sort of club where I should dance my first dance with Perry.