Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) (50 page)

‘Yes ‘m,’ I said in imitation of Emily’s servitude. ‘Thank’ee ‘m.’

Lady Clara’s eyes narrowed, but she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. I smiled at her, my clear showground smile and then made for the door. Perry was swaying slightly on his feet, his eyes glazed, a glass in his hand.

‘Time to go,’ I said tightly. Perry nodded. We paused for a moment by the princess to bid her good evening. She exclaimed over my cropped head and my paleness and said I must promise to come to her luncheon tomorrow and eat some good Russian food. And now I was a wife too! How had that been?

‘Private,’ Perry said owlishly. ‘’Stremely private.’

The princess’s sharp little eyes were bright with curiosity. ‘So I had heard!’ she said. ‘Was only your family there?’

‘’Stremely private!’ Perry said again.

The princess looked to me, she was waiting for an answer.

‘It was during my illness, your highness,’ I said. ‘A quiet ceremony, at home. We were anxious to be married and we foresaw a long illness.’

Perry made his bow. ‘’Stremely private indeed,’ he said helpfully.

The footman mercifully opened the door and I put my hand on Perry’s arm and pinched him hard to get him out.

‘You drunken doddypoll, Perry!’ I said irritably. ‘I wish to God you’d stay sober!’

‘Oh, don’t scold, Sarah!’ he said, feckless as a child. ‘I had enough of that with you and Mama at dinner. Don’t scold me, I can’t bear it. Be nice, and I’ll see you home.’

I took his arm and we went downstairs, he was steady enough on his feet.

‘You need not,’ I said. ‘You can go straight to your club if you will promise me that you’ll come away if you start losing.’

‘Yes, I promise,’ Perry said carelessly. ‘I’ll come away if I lose and I’ll only drink another glass or two. And tomorrow Sarah, if you’re well, we can go riding in the park together.’

‘I’d like that,’ I said. The link boy outside the house waved for our carriage and it came up. Perry helped me in and kissed me on the hand. His lips were wet. Unseen, I wiped my hand on the cushions of the chaise.

‘Call me tomorrow morning,’ he said, ‘’bout ten.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Good-night.’

I watched him as the carriage drew away from the brightly lit doorway. The petulant rosebud mouth, the mass of golden curls, his downcast blue eyes. He was exactly the same young man as he had been on the London road that day, who was too drunk to find his home.

The same, and yet not the same. For when I had met him then he had worn his joy in life about him, like a cloak from his shoulders. But the young man outside the wealthy house stood as if, in reality, he had nowhere to go, and would find no pleasure in anything he did.

I tumbled out of the carriage and up the broad stairs without a word to the butler or the footmen. I could have wept with my tiredness, there were some times when I thought I would never get my strength back. At those times, if I had been little Miss Sarah, a lady born and bred, I should have wept and taken the next day in bed, and the next, and the next after that.

But I was not one of the Quality, I was a hard little Rom chavvy and I would not rest. I let my new maid undress me, and tuck me into bed; but then I told her to call me at eight for I was going riding, and I ignored her murmured advice. I would get well by fighting through. All my tough work-hardened life I had got sick and got well again by fighting through. I knew of no other way. I did not even know when I was sick and tired deep into my very soul, and that fighting and struggling and trying would not make that any better.

I slept at once, as soon as the door closed behind her, and in my deepest early sleep I dreamed of a day of sunshine, when I rode by the sea and someone loved me. Suddenly, I started awake. I had heard something which did not fit with the usual night-time sounds. Soft footsteps past my bedroom door, a slight noise from the stairs and then I heard the well-oiled click of the front-door latch and a carriage drive away down the street. I guessed then that Peregrine had come back for something.

Some instinct, some old hungry Rom instinct made me raise myself half up on one elbow and stare in the flickering firelit darkness across my bedroom. Something was not right.

I pushed back the covers and stepped out of my bed, walked unsteadily across the room, opened my bedroom door and looked into the hall. It was all quiet down there. A footman dozing on a chair, the butler back in his own private room. I shrugged, and
turned back for my room, irritated with myself for losing the rest I needed for some nervous fancy.

Then I heard a carriage draw up outside the house and saw the footman unfold himself out of the chair in a hurry and rush to the butler’s room. I turned, silent in my bare feet, and scurried back to my room, shut my door in a hurry and slipped back into my bed and shut my eyes to feign sleep. I heard the front door open and Lady Clara’s high-heeled slippers tapping loudly on the marble floor as she crossed the hall. I heard her ask the butler if I was well and his quieter reply. I lay still and listened for her footsteps to go past my bedroom to her own.

I waited until I heard her door close for the last time and I heard her maid sigh as she carried the soiled clothes down the corridor towards the back stairs where they would have to be washed and perhaps ironed overnight if Lady Clara wanted them in the morning.

They would all be in bed now, except for the kitchenmaid. Perry did not order his valet to wait up for him, a candle was left for him in the hall, and his fire was banked in to burn all the night and most of the morning in his empty bedroom. The last person working was the kitchenmaid – watching the copper in the kitchen and washing Lady Clara’s linen. She would wring them out and then leave them drying before she crept up the stairs to her little bed. Everyone else was quiet.

I slipped from my bed and threw my wrapper around my shoulders and stepped, quiet as a cat, barefoot to my bedroom door, opened it, listened. There were no lights shining, the house was in silence. I stepped delicately on to the carpet in the corridor and stole softly down towards Perry’s room. His door opened with the quietest click. I froze and listened. There was nothing. I opened the door a little way and slid inside and closed it carefully behind me. I stood in silence and waited. Nothing.

The flames flickered in the grate, a candelabra was by Perry’s bedside with three of the five candles lit. I lifted it and stood it on his washstand so I could have the best light, then I turned and opened his wardrobe doors.

He had been wearing his mulberry-coloured coat with the green waistcoat this afternoon, when I had told him our marriage contract had arrived, and the deeds with it. I opened his wardrobe door and the coat was hanging, along with twenty others on hangers. I put my hand in the right-hand pocket, and then in the left-hand one. I took the coat out of the wardrobe and felt in every pocket and I even shook the coat in case I could feel the weight of the bulky papers in some pocket which was concealed.

There was nothing there.

The deeds of Wideacre were gone. I laid the coat on the floor and smoothed my hands all over it, alert for the rustle of thick paper, waiting for the feel of bulky documents under my fingertips. The deeds were not there. I had known they would not be, but I still had held to a little flicker of hope. That was foolish of me. In the hard, hungry corner of my mind I knew the deeds were not mislaid. I knew I had been robbed.

I tossed the mulberry coat into the corner and took down another from the wardrobe. This was a fine ball coat of peach silk, wonderfully embroidered with green and gold thread, stiff with peach velvet at the collars and cuffs and the pocket flaps. I thrust my cold little hands into every pocket and felt thoroughly inside. I shook it hard in case I could feel the weight of the deeds. Then I spread it on the floor, careless of creases and smoothed it all over, feeling for the weight of the packet of papers which would give the owner title to my land, my land of Wideacre.

Northing.

I bundled the fine coat into a ball and tossed it into the corner with the other. I took down a third…and a fourth…a fifth. I took down every coat in the wardrobe and searched each one as if I thought I might find the deeds to Wideacre carelessly stuffed in a pocket. I searched as though I had any hope left. I had none. But I felt as if I owed it to Perry, to Lady Clara, to my own Quality self, to little Miss Sarah Lacey, that I should believe that the life of the Quality was not the life of the midden. I wanted to believe that Perry was not a drunkard and a liar, a gambler and a thief. So I gave every coat a thorough searching,
as if I thought I might find something more than disappointment and disillusion in every fine-stitched empty pocket.

Nothing.

I started on the drawers next. In the top were his fine linen shirts. I lifted each one out, shook it out of the carefully pressed folds and waited in case the deeds fell free. I dropped each shirt behind me on a chair, one after another until the drawer was empty and there was a snowdrift of creased fine white linen on the chair and on the floor. I took the drawer out then and threw aside the little muslin purse of dried lavender seeds, lifted the sweet-smelling paper lining of the drawer, and rapped with my fingers on the drawer base, in case Perry had taken care with the title deeds to my land. In case he had prized them so well that he had wanted to keep them safe, concealed where no one could steal them.

I knew they had been stolen. And I knew the name of the thief. But still I searched each drawer of the wardrobe, and then I went to the washstand and cast out his shaving tackle and his sweet-smelling soaps. His toilet water and the soft muslin cloth which he used to sponge his face. Everything I cast on the floor so that I could pull out the drawer and see if the deeds were safely hidden there.

Nothing.

I went to his writing desk, in the corner by the window. It was packed with papers, writing of every kind. I carried one drawer after another and heaped them on the centre of the bed. Small pasteboard calling cards, snippets of paper torn from dinner menus, sheets from notebooks, hot-pressed letter paper, a little mountain of papers and every one of them a note of gambling debts, written in Perry’s careless drunken scrawl. A score of them, a hundred of them, a thousand of them.

I moved the candelabra to the bedside table and lit the two new candles so that I might see better, then I smoothed the paper into a pile and sat amongst them, at the head of the bed. I drew the candles closer and lifted the first piece of paper, smoothed it out, and lifted it close to my eyes so that I could read. I spelled out the word carefully, whispering under my
breath: ‘Ten guineas George Caterham’. Then I laid it on a pile and reached for the next.

Minutes I sat there, taking one paper after another, smoothing it, struggling with the words, placing it with the others. All the time my brain was working, calculating, adding and adding until all the little pieces were in a pile and I knew Perry owed two and a half thousand pounds in gambling debts to his friends.

There was a bigger pile, of proper paper, not crumpled scraps. Now I started on this. They were receipts from moneylenders against security and charging usorious rates of interest. They took me a long time to struggle through, I did not understand the words they used, nor some of the terms. I pulled my wrap around me and settled back with my back against the chair in the wreckage of the room. The deeds might be among them. They might be hidden among them. The bed was piled with papers, the chair heaped with Perry’s shirts, the floor covered with his coats. It looked as if someone had wrecked his room in anger. But I was not angry. I had been looking for the deeds of Wideacre. I cared for nothing in the world but my land. And as the clocks struck two all over the house in sweet muted tones I sat again in silence and knew what I should have known all along. That I loved Wideacre, that it was my home. And the man who tried to take it from me was my enemy. That whatever I had lost in the past, whatever I might cling to in the future, Wideacre was my source and my roots. I needed it like I needed air on my face and water in my cup. I had loved my sister and lost her. Wideacre I would keep.

I sat very still and gazed into the fire as if I could see my future there. I thought, for the first time ever, about my mother, my real mother, and thought how she had planned for me to be found and brought to Wideacre to be raised there as a country child. I thought of what James Fortescue had told me, that she had loved the land and loved the people. I thought that one of her friends had been a Tyacke, kin to the first man I met when Sea took me to my home. And for the first time my hardened roughened heart reached out to her memory and forgave her for letting me go, for throwing me out into that dangerous world. I
forgave her for failing me then, when I was new-born. And I gave her credit for trying to do the best for me by putting me in the care of the man who loved her, and bidding him teach me that the land belonged to no one.

I felt that now…I smiled at myself. The moment the deeds were held by someone else I felt that no one should hold them. But I thought it was not my simple quick selfishness which made me feel thus, I thought it was something more. A sense of rightness, of fairness.

You should not be able to buy and sell the land people walk on, the houses they call homes. You should not be able to gamble it away, or throw it away. The only people who can be trusted with the land are those who live on it, who need it. Land, and air, and sunshine and sweet water can belong to no single person. Everyone needs them, everyone should be able to claim them.

I sat there in silence, in silence and weariness. And I wondered where in all of the gambling dens and hells of London Perry had gone with the deeds to Wideacre in his pocket and the desire to gamble making him mad in his head. I had known at once what Perry was staking tonight. He had gone out gambling with our marriage deeds and the deeds of Wideacre in his pocket. The imp of mischief which had made him slip them into his jacket had been born in the parlour when I stopped him drinking, had grown strong at dinner when his mama and I pulled him and worried at him like a pair of hungry curs over a strip of cowskin. Perry would never stand up to her. Perry would never stand up to me. He was a coward. He would lie and steal and betray us all as he sought to prove himself to us, in his hundreds of little vengeances.

And I knew where he was playing, too. I knew that his new-found friends, Redfern and Thomas, were bilkers. I had seen all the signs – Perry’s amazing luck which started when he met them, just as he came into his fortune. They called him ‘Lucky Havering’ he had told me and I had not thought quick enough with my clever cheating mind. They were gulling him and tonight, when he was drunk and peevish, they would spring the trap.

I gnawed on my knuckle and pulled one of Perry’s expensive coats around me in the darkness. I was racking my brains to think of a way to find him, to trace him before it was too late.

There was a sudden rattle against the glass. A tapping like hailstones. It was someone in the street outside, throwing stones up at the bedroom windows. My heart leaped for a moment, perhaps it was Perry locked out and afraid to wake the house by knocking. Another shower of stones came, and I jumped out of bed and crossed to the window, afraid for the glass.

The windows had been sealed shut, thick with white paint. I could not open them. I pressed my face up to the glass and squinted down into the street below. Whoever was throwing stones was hidden by the angle of the house, but then a figure stepped back into the road to look up at my window and I recognized him at once.

It was Will Tyacke, standing in the dark street like an assassin come to murder me.

I ran to the bedroom door and wrenched it open. I flew down the hall, my bare feet making no noise on the thick carpet, and pattered down the icy stairs. The front door was bolted and chained, but I had often let myself out for my morning rides, and I pushed the bolts back and unchained the door and threw it open.

I tumbled out on the stone step, wearing only my nightdress, my arms outstretched. ‘Will!’ I said. ‘I need you!’

He fended me off roughly, pushed me away from him, and with a sudden shock I saw his face was dark with anger. I fell back.

‘I’ve no time for that now!’ I said suddenly. ‘You may be angry with me, but there is something that matters more. It’s Wideacre. You have to help me save it!’

Will’s face was as hard as chalk. ‘I have come to ask you one question,’ his voice was thick with rage. ‘One question only and then I will go.’

I shivered. It was freezing, the pavements glistened with hoar frost. I stood barefoot on the stone step.

‘Do you know what stake your husband is using to gamble with tonight?’ he asked.