Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) (24 page)

I did not even check him when he turned sharply to the left, though it was obviously a private drive. I could not find it in me to care. We went past a little lodge cottage and past the high
wrought-iron gates. The cottage windows were dark and the drive was soft mud. We made no noise. We rode past like a pair of ghosts, a ghost horse and a ghost rider, and I let Sea go where he wished. It was not just that I was so weary that I was dreamy with tiredness, but I also felt as if I were in the grip of one of my dreams of Wide. As if all the dreams had been leading me steadily here, till I had nothing left of my real life at all, no ties, no loves, no past, no future. All there was for me was Sea’s bobbing head and the rutted drive, the woods and the smell of violets on the night air. Sea walked carefully up the drive and his ears flickered forward as the dark bulk of a building showed itself against the lighter sky.

It was a little square house, facing the drive, overshadowed by the trees. There were no lights showing at any of its windows, all the shutters were bolted as if it were deserted. I looked at it curiously. I felt as if the front door should have been open for me. I felt as if I should have been expected.

I thought Sea might check and go around to the stable block but he walked past it, as steadily as if he had some destination in mind. As assured as if we belonged somewhere, instead of wandering around in circles under a pale springtime sky. His ears went forward as we went under the shadow of a great spreading chestnut tree and I smelled the flowers as fat and thick as candelabra on the tree as he broke into a trot.

We rounded the bend of the drive and I pushed the cap back on my head a little, and leaned forward. After all these years of dreaming and hoping, of waiting and being afraid to hope, I thought I knew where I was at last. I thought I had come home. I thought this was Wide.

The drive was right, the drive where the man I called Papa had taken the little girl up on the horse and taught her how to ride. The trees were right, the smell of the air was right, and the creamy mud beneath Sea’s hooves was right. The horse was right as well. There had been other beautiful grey hunters here before. I knew it, without knowing how I knew. Sea’s stride lengthened and his ears were forward.

There was a great chestnut tree on the corner of the drive and
I recognized it, I had seen it in my dreams for years. I knew the drive would bend around to the left, and as Sea drew level and we went around the corner I knew what I would see, and I
did
see it.

The rose garden was on my left, the bushes pruned down low and the rose-beds intersected by little paths all leading to a white trellised summerhouse, a smooth-cropped paddock behind it, and behind that a dark wall of trees which were the parkland.

On my right was the wall of the terrace. It ran around the front of the house bordered by a low parapet with a balustrade and stone plant pots with bushy heads of flowers, dark against the darkness. In the middle of the terrace was a short flight of shallow steps leading to the front door of the house. I checked Sea then; he was on his way around the house to where I knew, and he seemed to know, there was stabling and straw on the floor and hay in the manger; but I stopped him so that I could look and look at the house.

It was a lovely house, with a smooth rounded tower at one side, overlooking the rose garden and the terrace. Set in the middle of the façade was a double front door made of some plain pale wood, with a brass knocker and a large round ring door-handle. It was as if it spoke to me with easy words of invitation, as if to say that this was my house which I had been travelling towards all the weary journeys of my life.

There were no lights in the house, it looked deserted, but in measureless confidence I slid from Sea’s back and went stiffly up the steps and to the front door.

Out the back, from the kitchen quarters, I heard a dog bark, insistently, anxiously. I turned around on the doorstep and looked outwards over the terrace. I looked once more at the rose garden and beyond it the paddock, and beyond that the darker shadow of the woods, and high above it all the high rolling profile of the Downs which encircle and guard my home.

I breathed in the smell of the night air, the sweet clean smell of the wind which blows from the sea, over the clean grass of the Downs. Then I turned and put my small hand in the wide ring of the door, twisted the handle around, and leaned against the door so it slowly swung inwards and I stepped into the hall.

The floor was wood, with dark-coloured rugs scattered on top of the polished planks. There were four doors leading off the hall and a great sweep of stairs coming down into the hall. There was a newel-post at the foot of the stairs, intricately carved. There was a smell of dried rose petals and lavender. I knew the house. I knew the hall. It was as if I had known it all my life, as if I had known it for ever.

The dog from the kitchen at the back was barking louder and louder. Soon he would wake the household and I should be in trouble if I was found trespassing, my old boots on the new rugs. But I did not care. I did not care what became of me; not tonight, not ever again. There was a great bowl of china raised on wooden legs and I went over to it curiously. It was filled with dried rose petals and lavender seeds, sprigs of herbs, and it smelled sweet. I took up a handful and sniffed at it, careless that it spilled on the floor. It did not matter. I could not feel that anything mattered at all. Then I heard a noise outside on the terrace and the stone steps, and there was a shadow blocking the moonlight in the doorway, and a kind voice said softly:

‘What d’you think you’re doing?’

I turned and saw a working man in the doorway, blocking the moonlight, his face half in shadow. A rugged, ordinary face, tanned with weather, smile-lines etched in white around the eyes. Brown eyes, broad mouth, a shock of brown hair, ordinary homespun clothes. A yeoman farmer, not Quality.

‘What are you doing here?’ I replied, as if it were my own house and he a trespasser.

He did not challenge my right to ask.

‘I was watching in the woods,’ he said politely. ‘There’ve been some poachers, out from Petersfield I think. Using gin traps. I hate gin traps. I was waiting to catch them and see them off when I saw you riding down the drive. Why are you here?’

I shrugged, a helpless weary little gesture. ‘I’m looking for Wide,’ I said, too tired to think of a better story. Too sick at heart to construct a clever lie. ‘I’m looking for Wide, I belong there,’ I said.

‘This is Wideacre,’ he replied. ‘Wideacre estate, and this is Wideacre Hall. Is this the place you are looking for?’

My knees buckled a little under me, and I would have fallen but he was at my side in one swift step, and he caught me and carried me out to the night air and dumped me gently on the terrace step and loosened my shirt at the throat. The gleam of the gold clasp on the string caught his eye and he touched it gently with one stubby forefinger.

‘What’s that?’ he said.

I unfastened it and drew it out. ‘It was a necklace of rose pearls,’ I said. ‘But all the pearls were sold. My ma left it to me when she died, I was to show it when they came looking for me.’ I paused. ‘No one ever came looking for me,’ I said desolately. ‘So I kept it.’

He turned it over in his hands and held it close so that he could read the inscription. ‘John and Celia,’ he said. He spoke the names like an incantation. As if he had known what the inscription would say before he looked at it in the moonlight, as if he knew that was what he would see in the old worn gold. ‘Who are they?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe my ma knew, but she never told me. Nor my da. I was to keep it and show it when they came looking for me. But no one ever came.’

‘What’s your name?’ he asked. His gaze under the ragged fringe of hair was acute.

I was about to say ‘Meridon’, but then I paused. I did not want to be Meridon any more. Mamselle Meridon the bareback rider, Mamselle Meridon on that damned killer trapeze. I did not want the news of Gower’s Amazing Show to reach me here, I wanted to leave that life far behind me as if it had never been. As if there had been no Meridon, and no Dandy. As if Meridon were as dead as Dandy. As if neither of them had ever been.

‘My name is Sarah,’ I said. I cast about in my mind for a surname. ‘Sarah Lacey.’

The next few days were a blur, like a dream you cannot remember on waking. I remember that the man who hated gin traps picked me up in his arms, and that I was so tired and so weary that I did not object to his touch but was a little comforted by it, like a hurt animal. He took me inside the house and there were two other people there, a man and a woman, and there were a great many quick questions and answers over my head as it rested on his shoulder. The homespun tickled my cheek and felt warm and smelled reassuring, like hay. He carried me upstairs and the woman put me to bed, taking away my clothes and bringing me a nightgown of the finest lawn I had ever seen in my life with exquisite white thread embroidery on the cuffs and hem and around the neck. I was too tired to object that I was a vagrant and a gypsy brat and that a corner of the stables would have suited me well. I tumbled into the great bed and slept without dreams.

I was ill then for two days. The man who hated gin traps brought a doctor from Chichester and he asked me how I felt, and why I would not eat. He asked me where I had come from and I feigned forgetfulness and told them I could remember nothing except my name and that I was looking for Wide. He left a draught of some foul medicine, which I took the precaution of throwing out of the window whenever it was brought to me, and advised that I should be left to rest.

The man who hated gin traps told me that Sea was safe in the stables and eating well. ‘A fine horse,’ he said, as if that might encourage me to tell of how I got him, how a dirty-faced, stunned gypsy brat came to be riding a first-class hunter.

‘Yes,’ I said, and I turned my face away from his piercing eyes and closed my eyelids as if I would sleep.

I did sleep. I slept and woke to the sunlight on the ceiling of the bedroom and the windows half open and the smell of early roses and the noise of pigeons cooing. I dozed again and when I woke the woman brought me some broth and a glass of port wine and some fruit. I ate the soup but left the rest and slept again. In all of those days I saw nothing but the light on the ceiling of the bed chamber and ate nothing but soup.

Then one morning I woke and did not feel lazy and tired. I stretched, a great cat-like stretch with my toes pointing down to the very foot of the bed and my arms outflung, and then I threw back the fine linen sheets and went over to the window and pushed it open.

It had rained in the night and the sunlight was glinting on the wet leaves and flowers of the rose garden and mist was steaming off the paddock. Immediately below me the paving stones of the terrace were dark yellow where they were damp, paler where they were drying. Beyond the terrace was the gravel of the drive where Sea and I had ridden that first night, beyond that the rose garden with pretty shaped flower-beds and small paths running between them. A delicate little summerhouse of white painted wood stood to my left; as I watched, a swallow swooped in through the open doorway, beak full of mud, nest-building.

Beyond the rose garden was a smooth green paddock with Sea, very confident, cropping the grass with his tail raised, a stream of silver behind him. He looked well, perhaps even a little plumper for his stay in a good stable with fine hay and spring grass to eat. Behind the paddock was a dark mass of trees in fresh new foliage, copper beeches red as rose-shoots, oak trees with leaves so fresh and green they were lime coloured, and sweet green beeches with branches like layers of draper’s silk. And beyond the woods, ringing the valley like a guardian wall, were the high clear slopes of the Downs, striped with white chalk at the dry stream beds, soft with green and lumpy with coppices on the lower slopes. The sky above them was a clear promising blue, rippled with cloud. For the first time in my life I looked at the horizon and knew that I was home. I had arrived at Wide, at last.

There was a clatter of horse’s hooves and I looked along the drive and saw the man who hated gin traps riding up towards the house, sitting easily on an ungainly cob. A working horse, a farmer’s horse, able to pull a cart or a plough or work as a hunter on high days and holidays. He scanned the windows and pulled up the horse as he saw me.

‘Good morning,’ he said pleasantly, and doffed his cap. In the morning sunlight his hair showed gleams of bronze, his face young, smiling. I guessed he was about twenty-four; but a serious young man appears older. For a moment I thought of Jack, who would have been a child at forty as long as he was under his father’s thumb; but then I pushed the thought away from me. Jack was gone. Robert Gower was gone. Meridon and her sister were gone. I could remember nothing.

‘Good morning,’ I said. I leaned out of the window to see his horse better. He sat well, as if he spent much of his day in the saddle. ‘A good working horse,’ I observed.

‘Nothing like your beauty,’ he replied. ‘But he does well enough for me. Are you feeling better? Are you well enough to dress and come downstairs?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am quite better. But that woman took my clothes.’

‘That’s Becky Miles,’ he said. ‘She took them and washed them and ironed them. They’ll be in the chest in your bedroom. I’ll send her up to you.’

He turned his horse and rode past the front door round to the back of the house to the stables. I shut the window and opened the chest for my clothes.

There was warm water in a jug with a bowl beside it in exquisite cream china with little flowers painted on the outside, and a posy at the bottom of the jug. I splashed a little water on my face and dried myself reluctantly on a linen towel. It was so fine I didn’t like to dirty it.

I dressed and felt the luxury of ironed linen and clean breeches. There was a minute darn on the collar of Jack’s old shirt where I had torn it weeks ago. I shrugged on the old jacket as well – not that I would need the warmth, but because I felt
awkward and vulnerable in this rich and beautiful house in my shirtsleeves. My breasts showed very clear against the thin cotton of the shirt; I pulled the jacket over to hide them.

There was a comb, a silver-backed hairbrush, a small bottle of perfume and some ribbons laid out before a mirror of the purest glass I had ever seen on the dressing-table and I stopped in front of it to brush my hair. It was full of tangles as always, and the riot of copper curls sprang out from the ribbon bow I tried to tie around them. I gave up the struggle after the third time and just swept it back from my face and left it loose. The man who hated gin traps did not look as if he were a connoisseur of female fashions. He looked like a simple working man, and one who could be trusted to deal with a person fairly, however they looked. But the house, this rich and lovely house, made me feel awkward in my boy’s clothes with my red hair all tumbled down my back. It was a fine house, I somehow wanted to be fine to suit it. I didn’t look right there, in darned linen and someone else’s boots.

There was a tap at my door and I went to open it. The woman he called Becky Miles stood outside. She smiled at me. She was taller than me, a large-built woman running to plumpness, her fair hair starting to turn grey at the temples, a little sober cap on her head, a dark dress and a white apron.

‘Hello,’ she said kindly. ‘Good to see you up. Will sent me up to bring you down to the parlour when you’re ready.’

‘I’m ready,’ I said.

She walked ahead of me, talking over her shoulder as she went towards the shallow curving staircase and down the stairs to the hall.

‘I’m Becky Miles,’ she said. ‘Mr Fortescue put us in here, me and Sam, to work as housekeeper and caretaker. If there’s anything you want, you just ring the bell and I’ll come.’

I nodded. There was too much to take in. I wanted to ask why they should wait on me, and who was Mr Fortescue but she led me across the shadowy hall, her heels clicking on the polished wooden floor, silent on the bright rugs, and opened a door at the front of the house and gestured that I was to go in.

‘I’ll bring you some coffee,’ she said, and shut the door behind her.

The room was a parlour, the walls lined with a silk so pale as to be almost cream, but pink in the darker corners. The window-seat, scattered with cushions of a deep rose colour, ran around the inside of the tower at the corner of the room and overlooked the terrace, the rose garden and the drive in its circular sweep. The carpet, set square on the polished floorboards in the main part of the room, was cream with a pattern of pink roses at the border. The half-circular turret part of the room had its own circular rug in deep cherry. There was a harpsichord on the wall beside the fireplace, and a number of occasional tables standing beside comfortable rose-cushioned chairs. In the middle of all this pinkness was the man who hated gin traps, with his brown cap clutched in his big hands.

We smiled at each other in mutual understanding of each other’s discomfort.

‘It’s a lady’s room really,’ he said. ‘It’s the parlour.’

‘A bit pink,’ I said.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘It’ud suit some.’

He paused and looked at me, as awkward as himself in my hand-me-down boots and my plain riding breeches and my too-big jacket.

‘We could go into the dining room,’ he suggested.

I nodded and he led the way across the hall and through handsome double doors into a dining room dominated by a massive mahogany table which would seat, I thought, sixteen people. On one side was a huge sideboard gleaming with silver, on another a table set with chafing dishes. The man who hated gin traps pulled out a chair for me at the head of the table and sat by my side.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘We’ll wait the main business until Mr Fortescue comes and I’m pledged to tell you nothing till he arrives. He’s the trustee for this estate. He came down from his London offices when I sent word that you had come here. He’ll be in to take coffee with us in a moment.’

‘Who is he?’ I asked. I was nervous, but the man who hated
gin traps gestured to me to sit in one of the high-backed chairs and I gained confidence from his ease.

‘He’s the trustee of the estate,’ he said. ‘The executor of the will. He’s a straight man. You can trust him.’

I nodded. I thought, ‘I can trust you too,’ but I sat down in silence, and put my hands together on the polished table as if we were about to start some business.

The door opened and Miss Miles came in carrying a tray with a silver coffee pot, some biscuits and three cups. Behind her came a tall man dressed like Quality, but he held the door for her. He made much of helping her with the tray and setting the biscuits on the table and the cups before the three of us but I knew that he had taken in my appearance in his first quick glance as he came into the room, and that he was scanning me under his dark eyelashes still.

He was about the age of Robert Gower, with clothes cut so soberly and so well that I had never seen their like. He had an air of such authority that I thought he must have been born wealthy. His face was lined and severe, as if he were sad. I thought that he was being polite to Becky Miles to cover his searching survey of me but also because he was always polite to her, to all servants.

He set the things to his satisfaction and then he gave an assumed and unconvincing little start of surprise. ‘I’m not introducing myself,’ he said to me. ‘I am James Fortescue.’

He held out his hand and looked at me inquiringly. The man who hated gin traps said nothing, so into the little silence I volunteered my own introduction.

‘I’m Sarah,’ I said.

The hand that clasped mine tightened a little, and his sharp gaze narrowed. ‘Have you used that name all your life?’ he asked me.

I hesitated for a moment. I thought, with my quick tinker’s brain, about stringing some lie together; but nothing came.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I had a dream, like a belief that it was my real name. But the people I lived with called me by something else.’

He nodded, let my hand go and gestured for me to sit down. In the silence that followed the man who hated gin traps pulled
the tray towards himself and carefully poured three cups of coffee. When he handed one to James Fortescue I could see that the gentleman’s hands were trembling.

He took a sip of coffee and then looked at me over the rim of the cup. ‘I think I would have known her anywhere,’ he said softly, almost to himself.

‘You need to be sure,’ the man who hated gin traps said in a level voice. ‘For your own sake, for all our sakes.’

I turned and looked at him. ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. There was an edge of irritation in my voice and the man heard it. He gave me a slow reassuring smile.

‘You’ll know at once,’ he said. He nodded to James Fortescue, ‘He’ll tell you in a moment.’

Mr Fortescue put down his cup and took some papers and a pen and ink-pot out of a little case beside him.

‘I have to ask you some questions,’ he said.

Ask he did! He asked me everything about my life from my earliest memories until the time when I rode up the drive to Wideacre Hall. After two or three slips I dropped the pretence that I could not remember and told him all he wanted to know: all that I could remember of my ma, what her family name had been, where her gypsy family travelled and where they stayed. Then I shook my head.

‘She died when we were just little babbies,’ I said. ‘I can hardly remember her at all.’

Then he asked me everything I could remember of my early life. I told him about Da, and the travelling around. The grand projects and the few jobs. I glided over the bad horses and the cheating at cards. And I found, although I tried to say her name once or twice, that I could not say it at all. Even to think of her was like scratching at an unhealed scar on my heart.

I did not want them to know about Gower’s Show and Mamselle Meridon, so I told him only that I had been apprenticed to a man who trained horses, that I had chosen to leave him, and found myself here. I came to a standstill and trailed into silence. James Fortescue looked at me over the top of his coffee cup as if he were waiting for more.

‘There are things I do not want to talk about,’ I said stubbornly. ‘Nothing criminal. But private.’

He nodded at that, and then asked to see my string and clasps and asked me once more where I had got it. He looked at it carefully through a special little glass he took from his pocket, and then finally he handed it back to me.