Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) (12 page)

Robert looked thoughtful. ‘I did not mean to say that she could ride the horse here and now,’ he said hesitantly. ‘I was just saying the horse is not so black as he’s been painted.’

‘Yes you did,’ Mr Smythies said, back into his stride as a bully. ‘You said (and my friends here will bear witness) that you’d put money on your little housemaid staying on his back. Well, fifty pounds says she cannot get near him, Mr Robert Gower. If you can’t put that up you’d better give me my money back and a handsome apology with it.’

Robert glanced around; it was beautifully done. ‘All right,’ he said unwillingly. ‘Fifty pounds it is. But she only has to sit on him.’

‘Keep her seat for three minutes by my watch,’ said the drunken man, sobering suddenly at the prospect of some sport.

‘And not here,’ Robert said suddenly, looking at the cobbled yard. ‘In the parish field in ten minutes.’

‘Right!’ roared Smythies. ‘Anyone else want to bet on a housemaid who can stay on a horse which has thrown me? Anyone else with money burning a hole in his pocket? I’ll take bets at two to one! I’ll take bets at five to one!’ He suddenly reached around Robert and grabbed my arm and pulled me forward. I made a half-curtsey and kept my face down. Da and I had sold several pups in this town at one time or another and I didn’t want to be recognized. ‘Damn it, I’ll take ten to one!’ Mr Smythies yelled.

‘I’ll put a guinea on the wench!’ someone from the back shouted. ‘She looks as if she’d keep her legs together! I’ll risk a guinea on her!’

I stepped back in apparent confusion and tugged at Robert’s
sleeve again. He bent down to me with an expression of benign concern.

‘Start a book, for God’s sake,’ I hissed in an undertone. ‘And find someone to put money on me for you.’

‘No bets now,’ Robert said authoritatively. ‘We’ll start a proper book down at the field. Come on! Who’ll bring the horse?’

I watched as a stable lad ran to tack the horse up. It was a man’s saddle, and a whole tanner’s shop of leather to keep the poor beast from throwing his head up or pulling too hard, a martingale to keep him from bolting. Everything but a safety strap to bind the rider into the saddle. I slipped across the yard unnoticed.

‘My master don’t want that stuff on him,’ I said pleasantly to the lad. ‘He told me to tell you, just the saddle and the bridle with a simple bit. Not the rest of that stuff.’

The lad thought to argue, but I was gone before he could query the order. I followed the crowd down to the field. We picked up a good couple of dozen on the way. I saw Robert had got hold of a small weasel-faced man who was passing among the noisier famers and placing bets with them. The odds were getting better all the time. I took great care to walk in Robert’s shadow in mincing steps and keep my eyes on the backs of his heels.

In the field they formed into an expectant circle. The horse was led down the path from the inn, he jinked at the leaves rustling on the ground at his feet. The little lad at his head led him at arm’s length, wary of a sudden nip. The horse’s ears were laid back hard and his face was bony and ugly. His eyes were white all around.

‘Damn,’ Robert said softly. The horse was worse than he remembered.

I looked at him as he came towards me under the blue wintry sky and I smiled as if I was warmed through at the very sight of him. I knew him. I felt as if I had known him all my life. As if he had been my horse before I was born, as if he had been my mother’s horse, and her mother’s too. As if he and I had ridden on Wide ever since the world had been made.

‘Sea,’ I said softly, and stepped into the middle of the circle to wait for him.

I had forgotten my bonnet and he shied and wheeled as the ribbons were whipped by the wind. There was a chorus of ‘Look out! Mind his back legs!’ as he backed suddenly and three drunk young bloods swayed backwards out of harm’s way. But then I pulled my bonnet and my cap off too and felt the cold wind in my hair and on my face.

I stepped forward. Robert at my side took the reins from the stable lad and waited to help me up. There was a continual mutter of men placing bets behind me and some part of my mind knew that I was going to make Robert a small fortune this day, but the most important thing was that I was going to win Sea for my very own horse.

I went to his head; he sidled anxiously. Robert was holding the reins too tight, and he could sense the tension among all the people. Robert turned, waiting to throw me into the saddle; but I took a moment to stand absolutely still.

Sea dropped his head, Robert loosened his hard grip on the reins. Sea dropped his head towards me and put his long beautiful face towards me and snuffed powerfully at the front of my dress, at my face, and at my curly hair. Behind us there was a sudden rush of talk as the odds shortened and some people tried to recall bets which had not been recorded. I hardly heard them. I put a gentle hand up to his neck and touched him on that soft piece of warm skin behind the right ear and rubbed him as gentle as a mare her foal. He blew out, as if he had lost his fear and his anger and his remembered pain at that one touch and then I lifted my eyes to Robert and smiled at him and said, ‘I’ll go up now.’

He was too much of a showman to gawp at me, but his eyes were disbelieving as he nodded and clasped his hands together for my boot and threw me up, astride, into the saddle.

‘Stand aside,’ I said swiftly. It was as I had feared. At the touch of weight in the saddle the horse could remember nothing but the pain of breaking and the cruelty of training and the hard sharp joy of ripping back at the men who tormented him. He
reared at once above Robert and only Robert’s quick cowardly dive to the ground and swift roll kept him out of range of those murderous hooves.

‘Catch him!’ screamed one man at the stable lad.

But Robert was on his feet. ‘Wait!’ he ordered. ‘There’s a bet on.’

I had clung like a louse when that white neck soared up. When he thudded down I had waited for him to rear again but it had not happened. I stayed as still as a novice rider. My weight was so light, compared to the fat farmers who had tried to train him, he might even think he had thrown me, and all I would have to do was to sit still for three minutes. I saw the man with the watch out of the corner of my eye and I hoped to God he was sober enough to see the moving hand crossing off the minutes.

The horse was frozen. I reached a hand down to his neck and I touched his warm satiny skin. At my touch the fretwork of muscles in his neck trembled as if a human touch was a gadfly.

‘Sea,’ I said softly. ‘Darling boy. Be still now. I am going to take you home.’

His ears went forward his head went up so that he was as trim and as proud as a statue of a horse. I touched him lightly with my heels and he moved forward in a fluid smooth stride. I checked him with a little weight on the reins and he stopped. I looked forward over his alert, forward-pointing ears and saw Robert Gower’s face blank with amazement, jaw dropped. I gave him a little smile of triumph and he recollected himself and looked correctly judicious and unsurprised.

‘Two and a half,’ the drunk with the watch said.

They stared at me as if they would have preferred to see me on the ground at their feet with my neck broken. I glanced around and saw the hungry faces of an audience, avid for a show. Any show.

‘Three,’ the drunk said solemnly. ‘Three minutes, definite. By my watch. Timed it myself.’

‘Fixed!’ bawled Mr Smythies. ‘The horse was trained to let the girl ride him. Damn me, I bet she isn’t even a girl but that dratted son of yours, Robert Gower! Fixed to make a fool of me and rob me of half a fortune!’

At his voice Sea went mad. He shot up on his hind legs so fast that I felt myself falling off the back and had to grab to the saddle to stay on his back and then he took two ludicrous strong strides still on his back legs, his hooves raking at the air. The men before us scattered, shouting in fright, and the noise made him worse. He plunged down, shoulder first to the ground, to throw me off, and I soared hopelessly over his head and smashed into the frosty ground with a blow which knocked the breath out of me, and my senses out of me.

When I came to, it was all over bar Mr Smythies’ complaints. I sat quietly, with my head between my knees dripping blood on to my new grey gown while Robert ticked off his winnings in the book. Once a man patted my bowed head and dropped a sixpence beside me, one man bent down and whispered an obscenity. I pocketed the sixpence – I was not
that
faint – and waited for the shiny topboots to shuffle past me and away. I lifted my head and saw Robert looking at me.

The little weasel man was counting up the take in a big book. Robert’s pockets were bulging. The little lad had hold of the horse again but was standing nervously waiting for someone to take him off him.

‘He’s mine,’ I said. My voice was croaky, I hawked up some blood from the back of my throat and spat it out, wiping my face on my shawl. As I got to my feet I found that I was badly bruised. I hobbled towards him, putting my hand out for the reins.

The stable lad handed him over with open relief. ‘You’ve got a shiner,’ he said.

I nodded. A haziness around everything warned me that one eye was closing fast. I patted it gently with the corner of my pinny which had been so clean and white this morning.

‘I thought it was fixed till I saw you come off like that,’ he said.

I tried to smile, but it was too painful. ‘It wasn’t fixed,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen the horse before.’

‘What’ll you do with him now?’ he demanded. ‘How will you keep him?’

‘You’ll feed him with the others, won’t you Mr Gower?’ I said, turning to Robert. There were still a few stragglers leaving the field. They waited for his reply. But I think he’d have treated me fairly even without witnesses.

‘I said you could have him if you could stay on him,’ he said. ‘I’ll feed him and shoe him, for you. Aye and I’ll buy you tack for him as well. That do you, Meridon?’

I smiled at that and felt the bloodstained skin crack around my eye.

‘Yes,’ I said. Then I put one hand on Sea’s neck for support, and started to hobble from the field.

Robert sent me back to the inn where we had left the whisky cart and I led Sea into a loose box and curled up in the corner myself on a bale of straw, too tired and too battered and bruised to care where I was; and much too shy and dirty to order myself a hot drink and my dinner in the parlour as Robert had instructed. Hours later, when the stable was getting dark and the cold winter twilight was closing the horse fair, he came clattering into the yard with two big horses and three little ponies tied reins to tail behind him.

I stumbled to my feet as groggy and weary as if I had been riding all day and peered over the stable door. Sea blew gently down my neck.

‘Good God,’ Robert said. ‘You look like a little witch, Merry. Stick your head under the pump for the Lord’s sake. I can’t take you home like that.’

I put my hand up to my head and found my cap was lost and my curls all matted with dried blood. The eye which I had bruised was almost closed, and smeared all around my mouth and nose was dried blood.

‘Are you badly hurt?’ Robert asked as I came carefully out of the stable.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It probably looks worse than it is.’

He shouted for a stable lad and tossed the reins of the two big horses towards him.

‘Come here,’ he said gruffly, and worked the pump for me as I dipped my head underneath it.

The icy water hit me like a blow and rushed into my ear and made me gasp with shock. But I felt better as soon as my face was clean. I rinsed most of the blood out of my hair as well.

Robert sent another lad running for a kitchen towel and I
rubbed my hair dry. I was shivering with the cold and I had horrid trickles of icy water running down my neck inside my gown, but at least I had woken up and felt fit enough to face the drive home.

‘Or do you want me to ride?’ I asked, eyeing the string of horses we had to get home somehow.

‘Nay,’ Robert said contentedly. ‘You’ve done a day and a half’s work today, Merry, and I’m better pleased with you than I ever have been with any living soul, and that’s the truth. You won me £300 in bets, Merry, and it’s a gamble I’d never have dared take if you hadn’t urged me to it. I’m obliged to you. You can have your horse with my blessing, and I’ll give you ten guineas for your bottom drawer as well. You’re a fine lass. I wish I had a dozen of you.’

I beamed back at him, then I shivered a little because with the falling darkness a cold breeze had sprung up.

‘Let’s get you home,’ Robert said kindly; and he sent the lad back inside to borrow a couple of blankets and wrapped me up on the seat of the whisky as if I were a favoured child instead of the hired help.

He decided against bringing all the horses home in the dark on his own. He tied only the big horses on the back of the carriage with Sea tied behind as well, and ordered stabling for the ponies overnight. Then he swung himself up beside me, clicked to Bluebell and we set off for home in the fading light.

He hummed quietly under his breath as we left the outskirts of the town and then he said abruptly to me:

‘Did you do that with your da, Merry? Take a wager on your riding and then gull people out of their money?’

‘Sometimes,’ I said cautiously. I was not sure if he would approve. ‘But, often it was too well known that I trained horses for my da and so people wouldn’t bet heavily like they did today.’ I shrugged. ‘I looked different, too,’ I said. ‘Today I looked like a housemaid. With Da I always looked like a gypsy.’

Robert nodded. ‘I’ve never made so much money in one day in my life,’ he said. ‘I’d give half of it away if I could do it again.’

I shook my head regretfully. ‘I couldn’t do it with any other horse,’ I said. ‘It would be a grand trick to earn money. But Sea was special. I knew he was my horse the moment I saw him. I knew he would not hurt me.’

Robert glanced at my battered face. ‘You hardly came off scot-free,’ he observed.

I made a little grimace. ‘That was because he heard that horrid man’s voice,’ I said. ‘It scared him all over again. But he was all right with me.’

Robert nodded and said nothing as the horse trotted between the shafts and the light from the lamps on either side of the cart dipped and flickered. It was growing darker all the time, I heard an owl hoot warningly. The moon was coming up, thin and very pale, like a rind of goat cheese.

‘What about an act where we challenge all comers to ride him?’ Robert said slowly, thinking aloud. ‘Outside the field, before the show starts. We could call him the killer stallion and challenge people to stay on his back. Charge them say tuppence a try, with a purse if they stay on for more than a minute.’ He hesitated. ‘Make that five minutes,’ he amended. ‘Then, after we’ve called up a crowd and they’ve seen him throwing a few men, out you come in a pretty dress and ask for your turn. Jack makes up a book, you ride the horse, and we all make a little profit.’

He turned and looked at me, beaming.

I took a deep breath. ‘No,’ I said quietly. At once, his good-humoured smile vanished.

‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘You’ll get a cut of the profits, Merry. You did well today remember. I’ve not forgotten I promised you ten guineas. I’ll pay up and all.’

‘No,’ I said steadily. ‘I am sorry, Robert, but I won’t do that with my horse.’

Something in my voice checked his bluster. ‘Why not, Merry?’ he asked. ‘Wouldn’t do any harm.’

‘Yes it would,’ I said certainly. ‘I don’t want him taught to be wild and vicious. I don’t want him frightened any more. I want to teach him to be a good saddle horse, a hunter. I don’t want
him throwing every fool with tuppence who thinks he’s a rider. I want him to have a soft mouth and a sweet temperament. He’s my horse, and I won’t have him working as a killer stallion.’

Robert was silent. Bluebell trotted, the clatter of the hooves behind us sounded loud in the darkness. Robert hummed under his breath again and said no more.

‘You promised to keep him for me,’ I said, calling on Robert’s sense of fair trade. ‘You didn’t say he had to work for it.’

Robert scowled at me, and then broke into a smile. ‘Oh all right, Merry!’ he said gruffly. ‘You’re a proper horse-dealer for you haggle like a tinker. Keep your damned horse, but you’re to ride him when you’re calling up the act, and you’re to look to training him for tricks in the ring. But he won’t do anything you don’t like.’

I smiled back at him, and in one of my rare gestures of affection I put my hand on his sleeve.

‘Thank you, Robert,’ I said.

He tucked my hand under his arm and we drove home in the darkness. My head nodded with weariness and my eyelids drooped. Some time in the journey I felt him draw my head down to rest on his shoulder, and I slept.

Dandy undressed me and put me to bed when we got home, exclaiming over my hurts, and the loss of my cap, and the bloodstains on my grey gown and white apron. Mrs Greaves brought a tray with soup and new-baked bread, a breast of chicken and some stewed apples for me to have dinner in bed. Jack came up to our room with a basketful of logs and lit the fire for me in the little grate in our room, and then he and Dandy sat on the floor and demanded to know the whole story of the horse fair, and the winning of Sea.

‘He’s a beautiful animal but he hardly let me near him,’ Jack said. ‘He went for my shoulder when I took his bridle off. You’ll have your work cut out for you trying to train that one, Merry.’

Dandy wanted to know how much Robert had earned, and they both opened their eyes wide when I told them of the guinea bets which had been called all around me, and that Robert had promised me ten of my very own.

‘Ten guineas!’ Dandy exclaimed. ‘Merry, what will you do with so much money?’

‘I shall save it,’ I said sagely, dipping my bread into the rich gravy around the chicken. ‘I don’t know what money we will need in the future, Dandy. I’m going to start saving for a house of our own.’

They both gaped at me for that ambition, and I laughed aloud though my bruised ribs made me gasp and say: ‘Oh! Don’t make me laugh! Please don’t make me laugh! I hurts so when I laugh!’

Then I asked them to tell me what they had been doing all the day; but they both complained that it was the same as the day before, and looked like being the same for ever. They had both swung up high on the trapeze in the roof of the barn, but most of their work had been on the practice trapeze at ground level, and pulling themselves up and down on the bar.

‘I’m aching all over,’ Dandy complained. ‘And that dratted David just makes us work and work and work.’

Jack nodded in discontented agreement.

‘I’m starving too,’ he said. ‘Merry, we’ll go over and get our dinners and come back to you after. Is there anything you need?’

‘No,’ I said smiling in gratitude. ‘I’ll lie here and watch the firelight. Thank you for making the fire, Jack.’

He leaned towards me and ruffled my hair so my curls stood on end.

‘It was nothing, my little gambler,’ he said. ‘We’ll see you in a little while.’

The two of them clattered down the stairs to the stable, I heard Dandy groan as she had to pull the trapdoor at the head of the stairs shut with her aching arms, and then their voices as they crossed the yard and went through the little gateway to the house. Then I heard the kitchen door open and close and there was silence.

Silence except for the flickering noise of the fire and the occasional rustle from Sea, safe in the stable beneath my room. I watched the shadows bob and fall on the wall beside me. I had never seen a fire light up a bedroom before, I had never lain in darkness and felt the warm glow of it on my face, and seen the
bright warmth of it behind my closed eyelids. I felt enormously comfortable and at peace and safe. For once in my life I felt that I need not fear the next day, nor plan our survival in an unreliable and dangerous world. Robert Gower had said that he wished he had a dozen of me. He had said that he was better pleased with me than he had been with any living soul. I had let him hold my hand, and I had not felt that uneasy anxious prickle of distaste at his touch. I had let Jack rumple my head and I had liked the careless caress. I watched the flames of the fire which Jack had lit for me, in the room which Robert had made ready for me, and for once I felt that someone cared for me. I fell asleep then, still smiling. And when Jack and Dandy came to see how I did, they found me asleep with my arm outflung and my hand open, as if I were reaching out, unafraid. They put an extra log on the fire and crept away.

I did not dream in the night, and I slept late into the morning. Robert had ordered Dandy not to wake me, and I did not stir until breakfast time. I went to the kitchen then and confessed to Mrs Greaves that I had lost her bonnet in the course of winning the master a fortune. She already knew the story and smiled and said that it did not matter.

The dress and the apron were a more serious matter. The apron was permanently stained with blood and grass stains, the grey dress marked as well. I looked cheerfully at them both as Mrs Greaves hauled them out of the copper and tutted into the steam.

‘I’ll have to wear breeches all the time then,’ I said.

Mrs Greaves turned to me with a little smile. ‘If you knew how bonny you looked in them you’d not wear them,’ she said. ‘You think to dress like a lad and no man will notice you. That may have been true when you were a little lass, or even this summer; but now you’d turn heads even if you were wearing a sack tied around your middle. And in those little breeches and your white shirt you look a picture.’

I flushed scarlet, suddenly uncomfortable. Then I looked up at her. She was still smiling. ‘Nothing to be afraid of, Meridon,’ she said gently. ‘You’ll have seen some bad doings when you
were a girl, but when a man loves a woman it can sometimes be very sweet. Very sweet indeed.’

She gave a little sigh and dumped the heap of wet cloth back into the copper and set it back on to boil.

‘It’s not all sluts in hedgerows and dancing for pennies,’ she said, turning her back to me as she laid the table for breakfast. ‘If a man truly loves you he can surround you with love so that you feel as if you are the most precious woman in the world. It’s like forever sitting in front of a warm fire, well fed and safe.’

I said nothing. I thought of Robert Gower keeping my hand warm under his arm as he drove home. I thought of my head dropping on his shoulder as I slept. For the first time in a cold and hungry life I thought that I could understand longing for the touch of a man.

‘Breakfast,’ Mrs Greaves said, suddenly practical. ‘Run and call the others, Merry.’

They were practising in the barn. David, Jack and Dandy; and Robert was watching them, his unlit pipe gripped between his teeth. Dandy was swinging from the practice trapeze and I could see that even in the day that I had been away she had learned to time herself to the rhythm of the swing. David was calling the beat for her but more and more often she was bringing her legs down at exactly the right moment and the swing was rising, gaining height, rather than trailing to a standstill as it had done on our first day.

They were glad enough to come back to the house for breakfast. David exclaimed over my black eye but it had opened enough for me to see clearly and I had taken enough knocks in my girlhood to rid me of vanity about a few bruises.

‘When we were chavvies I don’t think I ever saw Merry without a black eye,’ Dandy said, spreading Mrs Greaves’ home-made butter on a hunk of fresh-baked bread. ‘If she didn’t come off one of the horses then our da would clip her round the ear and miss. We didn’t know her eyes were green-coloured until she was twelve!’

David looked at me as if he did not know whether to laugh or be sorry for me.

‘It didn’t matter,’ I said. They were hurts from long ago, I would not let the aches and pains of my childhood cast a shadow over my life now. Not when I could feel myself opening, like a sticky bud on a chestnut tree in April.

‘Will you be too sore to train today?’ David asked me.

‘I’ll try,’ I said. ‘Nothing was broken, I was just bruised. I reckon I’ll be all right to work.’

Robert pushed his clean plate away from him. ‘If your face starts throbbing or your head aches, you stop,’ he said. Dandy and Jack looked at him in surprise. Mrs Greaves, at the stove, stayed very still, her head turned away. ‘I’ve seen some nasty after-effects of head injuries,’ he said to David, who nodded. ‘If she seems sleepy or in pain you’re to send her in to Mrs Greaves.’