Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) (32 page)

There was silence in the pink elegant parlour. James was looking at me as if I had taken some long-beloved dream away from him.

‘I thought that this would be the best for you,’ he said gently. ‘It would have been your mother’s first choice.’

Lady Clara snapped her fan shut with a little click, got to her feet and shook out her skirts.

‘Well then,’ she said. ‘I must go, and we are agreed. Sarah may come and visit me while she continues learning her way around her estate, and I will advise her as to clothes and behaviour and how to go on. When you are ready to go back to London, Mr Fortescue, then Sarah can stay with me until the start of the Season. My lawyers will contact you with details of how her allowance should be paid.’

She moved towards the door but James Fortescue made no move to open it for her.

‘Is this your wish, Sarah?’ he asked me again.

I flared up. ‘For God’s sake!’ I exclaimed. ‘Haven’t I just said so?’

Lady Clara tapped her fan sticks on her hand with a little click and I turned to her. ‘Don’t swear,’ she said. ‘Don’t raise your voice. Don’t answer a question with a question. Now try again.’

I looked at her, my eyes blazing with temper at her, and at James Fortescue and at this whole world of choices and decisions where there was nothing and no one I could trust.

Lady Clara looked back at me, her blue eyes limpid. She reminded me of Robert Gower, and how he trained me to his trade. Then I saw how she had got her way with James without raising her voice. You could use Quality manners as sharp and as hard as a honed knife blade. She raised her eyebrows at me, reminding me she was waiting.

I turned to James and I smiled at him with no warmth in my face. ‘It is my wish to go to London for a Season,’ I said. ‘It is where I belong, I want to be there.’

Lady Clara put her hand out to me and I walked with her to the carriage. ‘Well done,’ she said, when we were out in the hall, ‘You’re a quick learner. I’ll send Perry around with the carriage and he can take you for a drive this evening, then you can ride over to the Hall tomorrow and I will have a dressmaker from Chichester come to fit you. Perry will come and fetch you.’ She paused. ‘I think you and Perry will enjoy each other’s company,’ she said. Then she got into her carriage, spread her blue parasol, and was gone.

She was right. In the days that followed, Perry and I found an easy, undemanding friendship together, and the instant liking I had felt for him when he had come weaving down the road at his lame horse’s head grew almost without my knowing. He was the easiest man or boy I had ever known. He was never sour, he was never impatient. I never saw him anything but smiling and happy.

His mother encouraged our friendship. When she wanted me to come to Havering Hall she sent Perry over to fetch me, rather than one of the footmen. When it grew late and I had to go home she would let me go on horseback if Perry was with me, she did not make me take a carriage. When she wanted to show me how to curtsey when a man bowed it was Perry who stood opposite me with his hand on his heart.

He was seldom drunk as I had seen him on that first day. He was rarely unsteady on his feet, and if he had taken too much port after we had left him for dinner he was clever at concealing the fact that the floor was wavering at every step. If his mother was in the room he would lean nonchalantly against a chair, or sit at a stool at my feet. Only if he had to rise and walk would his look of owlish concentration betray him.

I was not sure if she noticed. She was an inscrutable combination of manners and frankness. Sometimes Perry would say something which would amuse her and she would throw back her head and laugh. Other times her eyes, as blue as his but never as warm, would be veiled and she would look at us under her lashes as if she were measuring me. I did not think she missed much, and yet she seldom checked Perry, and I never heard her caution him against drinking.

But they were Quality – a Quality family as I had never seen
before. They lived by different rules entirely, in a world apart. Lady Clara would laugh till she wept over her letters from London and read aloud titbits of scandal about the royal dukes and the society ladies. The Quality behaved in ways which we would never have dared, even on a showground. There was no one to gainsay them. There was no one to watch them, order them. There were no parish authorities, or justices, or vicars or beadles watching them. No wonder they were lovely and feckless and wicked. The whole world belonged to them.

But Lady Clara was no fool. I could not take her measure because she had lived a life I could not imagine. She was born the daughter of an Irish peer, married young and beautiful to Lord Havering who had been rich and gouty and cross. I had a few glimpses into that marriage from Perry who spoke of long lonely years for his ma in the country, while his lordship drank and gambled in town. She knew she’d been bought and she did her duty, stony faced. While he was alive she gave him the sons he needed. When he allowed her up to town she spent as much of his fortune as she could. I guessed she must have waited, waited and longed, for his death. When she would still be young, and still be lovely, and rich and free. But when he was gone it was not as she had thought. There was money, but less than she had hoped. It must have been bitter for her then, to have waited all those years and find the old lord had cheated her at the end.

But it took a lot to beat Lady Clara. She got in a bailiff and told him she wanted profits off the land. She rack-rented the tenants – they had to pay a fee to keep their leases, they had to pay a fee to marry. They even had to pay a fee if they died. She planted wheat everywhere and she kept them on barley bread. She brought in pauper labour – and she even paid them less than she should. She was a sharp, hard master on the land, and she had made it pay its way until she had the sort of money she wanted. It was not enough – a king’s ransom would not have been enough for Lady Clara, she had a life of resentment to repay – but she had a fully-staffed Hall in the country, a beautiful London town house, a wardrobe full of dresses and a stable full of horses.

I watched her, and I learned from her. I did not like her, and no one could have loved her. But I understood her. I knew hunger and that hardness for myself. And I liked the thought of how she had taken an estate and made it pay.

I could not have chosen a more vivid contrast to my quiet dutiful guardian James Fortescue if I had ransacked the whole of England. We both knew it. I think it hurt him.

At the end of the second week when I had spent nearly every day at Havering Hall he asked me to wait a few moments before I went upstairs to bed. I went with him into the parlour and smoothed one of my new silk gowns over my knees.

‘It is time I prepared to return to Bristol and to my business, Sarah,’ he started cautiously. ‘I have given you this time to become acquainted with the Haverings and to take their measure. Lady Havering is a beautiful woman and Lord Peregrine an attractive young man; whatever their faults they are engaging people. I wanted you to see them for a little time before I asked you to decide whether or no you wanted to have Lady Havering as your sponsor in society.’

‘You don’t like her,’ I said bluntly.

He hesitated, then he smiled. ‘It’s better if I am frank,’ he said. ‘You are right, I do not like her. Her reputation was not good either as a wife or a widow. More importantly, I do not like how she farms. The tenants on her land are rack-rented down to the level of utter poverty and live in great hardship. She plants field after field of wheat and allows them no grazing for their animals, and nowhere to grow their own crops. Every time the price of bread goes up there are people who starve to death on that estate, die of hunger in ditches that run alongside wheatfield after wheatfield. Some people blame it on her bailiff, but she has told me herself that he obeys her orders. She may be charming in the parlour, Sarah, but if you were to see her as her servants or her workers see her she would not look so pretty.’

I nodded. ‘What do you think she wants with me?’ I asked.

Mr Fortescue shrugged. ‘She has done well for gowns and hats while she has been dressing you,’ he said. ‘She enjoys
moving in the best society and it would be no hardship for her to take you around with her next Season. I had thought that you may be a diversion for her – she must find it dull in the country.’ He hesitated. ‘She may well enjoy thinking that I do not like her influence.’

‘But you can do nothing,’ I confirmed bluntly.

He nodded. ‘I can do nothing,’ he said. ‘I am a trustee of the estate only; you are not my ward. I can control your finances until you are of age or until you are married. I can advise you, but I may not order you.’

‘You could refuse to let me have any money,’ I pointed out to him.

James Fortescue smiled. ‘I would not so coerce you,’ he said gently. ‘I may seem very dull compared with the Haverings but I am not a little shopman tyrant, Sarah. I loved your mother very much and for her sake I wish only for your happiness. If a society lady like Lady Clara pleases you, then I am glad you have her company. Certainly she can do a better job of introducing you into Quality society than anyone I would have known.’

I was suddenly impatient. ‘I want the best!’ I exclaimed. ‘The lady you spoke of, the one who would have come and lived with me, she was second-rate! I knew it as soon as I heard of her! She would have taught me how to live here, quietly in the country, and be grateful for a card party in Chichester! I don’t want that! There’s no point in me coming all this way from the gypsy wagon to here, if at the end of it I don’t get the best, the very best there is!’

James Fortescue looked steadily at me and his smile was very weary. ‘And do you think Lady Clara is the best?’ he asked. ‘And Lord Peregrine?’

I hesitated. One part of my mind knew full well that Lady Clara was an adventuress as tough and as wily as myself. That she was as hard and sharp and cunning as any old huckster selling short measure. And her son was a lovely child, nothing but a weak and lovely child, with nothing to recommend him but blond curls and blue eyes and a nature sweetened with drink.

But they made me laugh, and they had made me welcome, and they had promised to help me win my fortune back from the villagers and the land-shearers of Wideacre.

‘Yes I do,’ I said lying stubbornly. Lying to James Fortescue’s disappointed face. Lying to myself. ‘I think they are the best of the Quality, and I want to be part of their world.’

He nodded. ‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘I have written you and Lady Clara a note to tell you how much you can spend a quarter, and the bank you can draw on for funds, and my London and Bristol offices. I shall like to see you every month or so wherever you are, whether London or here. And if you should change your mind about the Haverings you must write to me at once and I shall come and take you away.’

I nodded, ignoring the feeling that I was making a rather serious mistake. ‘All right,’ I said tightly.

‘If you should change your mind, Sarah,’ he said kindly, ‘if you should change your mind after a little of that life and want to come back to Wideacre, your home is always here for you, remember. We can find someone you would enjoy living with here. You do not have to go to the Haverings.’

I shook my head. ‘I like them,’ I said defiantly. ‘I am not your sort of person, Mr Fortescue. You would not understand. Their life, their society life, will suit me very well.’

‘I am sorry for it,’ he said gently, then he gave a little bow. He did not offer to kiss my hand as he had done once before, and he left the room.

I sat in silence for a while. I supposed I should feel triumphant for I had taken on a powerful man, and the manager of my fortune, and come out best, come out with my own way. But it did not feel like a victory. It felt instead as if I had been offered a little gold but had preferred to take false coin. I felt around my neck where I still wore, out of habit, the string with the gold clasps. And I wondered what Celia would have made of me, a vagrant granddaughter. And what my long-dead mama Julia would think if she could see me rejecting the man she had loved and turning my back on the land she called home.

*

I was silent and blue-devilled for that night only. The very next day, Lady Clara swept down on to Wideacre Hall, exchanged documents and addresses with Mr Fortescue, ordered my bags packed, and took me away. I only saw James Fortescue once more, when he rode over to bid me farewell the day before he went back to Bristol. He did not even cross the threshold but held his horse and stood on the terrace till I went out to join him.

‘Will Tyacke will call on you tomorrow and take you out riding,’ he said as we stood on the terrace. ‘It is my wish, Sarah, that you ride with him and learn all you can about the estate. I know your heart is set on London and your Season but Lady Clara herself will tell you that you can be in the best of society and still know what is grown in your fields.’

I nodded. ‘I want to learn,’ I said. I did not say, ‘So when I am of age I can make changes,’ but that thought hung in the air between us.

‘Maybe when you have seen how things are run on Wideacre and how things are run here, you will come to see things my way,’ Mr Fortescue said gently.

‘Maybe,’ I said.

He put out his hand and I held out mine, in the way I had been taught. I had already learned not to pull away. Lady Clara had scolded me for being missish about another person’s touch, and had forced me to stand still while she circled me and patted my cheeks, my shoulders, my arms, and messed my hair. ‘There!’ she had said at the end of the circuit. ‘I don’t expect you to drape yourself over your friends but you are a girl, and girls must be available for petting.’

So it was no hardship to step close to Mr Fortescue and wait for his kiss on my forehead, or even on my hand. But he did neither. He shook hands with me as if I were a young gentleman, and his grip was very firm and friendly.

‘You have my address,’ he said turning his back and getting on his horse. ‘And whatever you think of my trusteeship you should remember that I am your friend and I have tried to do the best I can, for both you and the land. If you are in any need at all you should send for me and I will come at once.’

I smiled wryly at that, thinking of the years when I had gone hungry. Now I was being offered help when I lived in a house with twenty servants and had four meals a day.

‘I think I can care for myself,’ I said.

He settled his reins and looked down at me. ‘We differ on that, too,’ he said gently. ‘I think you have tried to care for yourself for too long. I think that you have tried so hard to care for yourself that you have shut up all your pain inside you, so that no one can ease it for you, or comfort you. I should dearly have loved to see you settled here where you were cared for, where you could have had something of the childhood you missed.’

He tipped his hat to me, and to Lady Clara who waved a lacetrimmed handkerchief to him from the parlour window, and then he clicked to his horse and rode away down the drive.

I watched him go, his square shoulders and slightly bowed head. I watched him go and knew that if my real mama Julia had been able to choose, he would have been her husband. If she had lived, he would have been my papa. I watched him ride away and leave me with the Haverings and I refused to hear what he said about shutting my pain inside myself. I would not acknowledge any loss. I would not feel the loss of him. I refused to feel bereft.

‘Now,’ Lady Clara said as she joined me on the terrace and we watched his departing back. ‘Now, my girl, you are going to start work.’

I laughed at that, for I had known work that Lady Clara could never have dreamed of. But I laughed a good deal less once the work started.

Of course it was never hard, not like trapeze work or horsetraining. But it was wearying in a way that those skills had not been. I found I was as tired in the evenings as if I had been working hard each day, and I could not think what ailed me. Lady Clara never stopped watching me, she had me walk across the room a dozen times, she had me sit in a chair and get up again, over and over. She ordered the carriage out into the yard, and a phaeton and a curricle, and sent me up and down the steps
into each of them time after time, until I could engage not to tread on the hem of my gown, or bang my bonnet on the carriage roof.