Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) (38 page)

‘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 in 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.

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.

Sketches were loaned to me from the schoolroom and Lady Clara insisted that I squiggle my initials at the foot of them, and had them framed. They attracted much praise and I thought my modesty was particularly becoming. The embroidery which was cobbled together by the governess in the schoolroom as an extra unpaid duty I left scattered around the drawing room, and Lady Clara would sweetly scold me in front of visitors for not putting it away. My flower arrangements were done by one of the parlourmaids who had once been apprenticed to a flower-seller. Only my horse riding and my card-playing were entirely my own and they were skills from my old life.

‘Far too good for a young lady,’ Lady Clara said. She wanted
me to ride a quiet lady’s mount and offered me a bay from her stables. But I held true to Sea and she sent down to Sussex for him. The stables were around the back of the house, down a cobbled street. Some afternoons, when Lady Clara was resting, I would wear a hat with a veil pulled down and sneak round to the stables to see him. I was not supposed to walk out without a footman, the horses should be brought to the door. But I did not trust the London stable lads to keep his tack properly clean. I was not sure they were reliable about his feeds and his water. To tell the truth, I simply longed to be with him and to smell him and to touch the living warmth of him.

Lady Clara would have known within a few days what I was doing. She said nothing. I think she knew, with her cunning common sense, that there was only so much I could bear to be without. If I had to live without the land, without travelling, and without the girl who had been my constant companion since the day I was born, I had to find things which would make me feel as if I touched earth somewhere. Sea, and sometimes Perry, were the only things in London which seemed real at all.

I was allowed out riding early every morning, provided I took a groom as a chaperone and did not gallop. When the clocks were striking seven we would trot through the streets which were busy even then. Down Davies Street, across Grosvenor Square which was dusty from the building work, and along Upper Brook Street to the park where the green leaves were looking dry and tired, and some of the bushes were yellowing at their edges. Sometimes the gate-keeper at the Grosvenor Gate lodge would be up, and tip his hat to me, more often only the groom and I were the only people in the park. There were ducks silent beside the still pond, there were great flocks of pigeons which wheeled around us. One morning I heard a low rushing creaky noise and looked up to see a pair of white swans circling the water and landing with a great green bow-wave of stagnant water cresting against their broad white breasts.

On Wideacre at this time of year I thought the berries would be very bright and ripe in the bushes. The nuts would be in thick clusters on the trees. In the London park there was fruiting
and nutting going on, but it seemed more like a diversion. It hardly seemed a matter of hunger, of life or death. The squirrels in the trees and the ducks by the reservoir seemed like stuffed pets, not like live hungry animals.

The groom rode behind me at half a dozen paces, but I was as aware of him watching me as if he had been a gaol keeper. Sea longed for a gallop but I had to keep him on a tight rein. The noises of the city puzzled and fretted him, his ears went back all the time as we rode home through the crowded streets. When I rode him down the cobbled mews and left him in his stables I thought he looked at me reproachfully with his great dark eyes as if to say that the place he had found for us, that night when we had been quite lost, had been better than this. I would shrug as I walked home, as if I were trying to explain in my head that we had to be here. He had to live in a street filled with other stables where rich carriages and beautiful horses awaited their owners’ commands. Among all that wealth and elegance I could not understand why I did not feel triumphant. I had wanted the best, the very best. And now I had it.

Perry would never ride with me in the early mornings. He was out too late every night of the week. Sometimes he went to gambling hells, sometimes he went to cock pits or boxing rings. Once he went to a riding show and offered to take me. I said I did not want to go, that his mama would not approve of me going, and he went alone. I did not even ask him who were the riders and what tricks they did.

He did not rise until midday and would sometimes take breakfast with us dressed in a brilliant-coloured dressing gown. When his head was aching badly he would take strong black coffee cut with brandy. When he was well he would drink strong ale or wine and water. Whether he ate well, or whether his hands were shaking and his face white, his mama never seemed to notice. She read her letters, she chatted to me. One time he was swaying in his chair and I thought he might faint, but Lady Clara never said one word. She never tried to check his drinking. She seldom asked him where he had been the night before. He grew paler and paler every week of the Season, but Lady Clara
seemed to see nothing but her own pretty reflection in the mirror over the mantelpiece; she watched no one but me.

I met Juliet and her governess that first evening. She came downstairs to be introduced before dinner, but she did not stay to dine with her mama. She made her curtsey to me without raising her eyes, and when she was told that Perry and I were to marry and that she and I would be sisters she gave me a cold kiss on the cheek and wished me very happy.

I made no effort to get on closer terms with her. I did not want a sister.

Lady Maria arrived in a flurry of ostrich plumes the first morning after our arrival.

‘Expensive,’ her mama said coolly as she fluttered into the room. Maria kissed her and then stood back and twirled around so that Lady Clara might see the full effect of a blue velvet walking gown, blue jacket, blue hat and blue feathers with a dark fur cape thrown over the shoulders.

‘Vulgar,’ Lady Clara said simply.

Maria laughed, not at all abashed. ‘Where’s the pauper-heiress?’ she demanded.

Lady Clara frowned and affected deafness. ‘Sarah, may I present to you my daughter, Lady de Monterey. Maria this is Miss Sarah Lacey.’

Maria gave me a gloved hand and a look as cold as ice. ‘I hear you and Perry are to be married,’ she said coolly. ‘I hope you will be very happy I am sure.’

I smiled, as cold as her. ‘I am sure we will,’ I said. ‘I believe you are newly wed aren’t you? I’m sure I wish you very happy.’

We stood smiling at each other as if we had lemon slices in our mouths. Lady Clara stood back as if enjoying the spectacle.

‘How is Basil?’ she asked briskly, pulling the bell pull for morning coffee.

Maria unpinned her hat before the mirror and patted the tightly crimped blonde curls into place. She turned and made a face at her mother.

‘Just the same,’ she said. ‘Still working, working, all the time; just like a tradesman.’

‘A rather successful tradesman,’ Lady Clara said wryly. ‘He did not quibble about the price of that ball gown which you wrote to me about?’

Maria beamed. ‘I slipped it in along with a whole lot of bills from his estate,’ she said. ‘Compared to a forest of trees which he is planting I am positively paltry.’

Lady Clara smiled. ‘It would be as well not to play that trick too often,’ she warned. ‘You’ve only been married a quarter.’

The maid set the coffee tray before me and then waited to pass the cups around when I had poured them. My hand was as steady as a rock and I did not spill a drop. Lady Clara was watching me from the corner of her eyes. Maria had forgotten I was there.

‘I’m flush now,’ she said airily. ‘I had this quarter’s dress allowance and I doubled it last night playing
vingt-et-un
at Lady Barmain’s. I had such a run of luck, Mama, I vow you would not have believed it! Four hundred pounds I won clear! You should have seen her ladyship’s face! She was nearly sick when I rose from the tables a winner. They say she rents her house on her winnings at the table, you know. I must have cost her a month at least!’

Lady Clara laughed her sharp London laugh, and Maria told her some more gossip about people whose names I did not know, but whose vices and sorrows, drink or gambling or unfulfilled desire, were the same in high society as in a showground.

I was surprised at that. In my first month in London my greatest lesson was that there was less difference than I had seen when I had been at the bottom, the very bottom of the heap of society looking up. I had been dazzled then by the cleanliness and the food they ate, at the fineness of the gowns and the way the ladies were so dainty, and dressed so bright. But now I too was washed and fed, and could talk in a high light voice as they did. I could curtsey to the right depth, I could spread a fan and smile behind it. I could mince across a room, not stride. They were all signals, secret code-words, as impenetrable as the signs of the road which tell you where it is safe to
camp and where you can poach. Once I had learned them, I had the key to a society which was the same as that of a fairground: nothing more and nothing less. They were drunkards and gamblers, wife-beaters and lovers, friends, parents and children; just the same. The greatest difference between the world of the gentry and those of the landless was just that: land. When I had been on the bottom of the heap I owned nothing and they had taught me to think the worse of myself for that. The only thing which had brought me to the top of the world was land and money, they would forgive me everything if I remained rich. I would never have got beyond the area railings if I had stayed poor.

And while I rode Sea on my lonely way in the park in the mornings, or watched dancers swirl around on the floor while the clock struck midnight and footmen yawned behind gloved hands, I recognized more and more that the wealth of the ballroom and the poverty of the farmyard were alike unjust. There was no logic to it. There was no reason. The wealthy were rich because they had won their money by fair means and foul. The poor were poor because they were too stupid, too weak, or too kindly to struggle to have more and to hold it against all challenges. Of the people I met every day, only a few had been rich for many years, the vast majority were quick-wined merchants, slavers, soldiers, sailors, farmers or traders only a generation ago. They had succeeded in the very enterprises where Da had failed. And so Da had grown poorer and more miserable, while they had grown rich.

I did not become a Jacobin with these observations! Oh no! If anything it hardened my heart to Da and those like him. It strengthened me. I was never going to fall out of the charmed circle of the rich. I was never going to be poor again. But I saw the rich clearly, as once I had not. I saw them at last as lucky adventurers in a world with few prizes.

And, by the way, for all the extravagant profits they made, the wealth they earned, not one of them worked half as hard as we had done for Robert’s show. Indeed few of them worked as hard as feckless, idle Da.

It took me only a month to see through the Quality life and thereafter I was not afraid of them. I had seen Lady Clara condemn a woman for hopeless vulgarity and cite her bad connections, and yet include her on the guest list for a party. I learned that a great many mistakes would be forgiven me if I could keep my wealth. And all the little obstacles which they liked to invent: the vouchers for Almacks, the proper costume for presentation, the sponsor at court – all these things were just pretend-obstacles to weed out those with insufficient capital or land, to challenge those who did not have enough money for three tall ostrich-plumes to be worn once, for half an hour of an evening only, to complete the formal court gown.

But I had enough money. I had enough land. And if I forgot how to hold my knife once or twice when I came across a new dish at dinner, or if I spoke a word out of place, it was quickly forgotten and forgiven to the beautiful rich Miss Lacey of Wideacre.

They thought I was beautiful, it was not just the money. It was the fine clothes, and how I rode Sea in the park. The young men liked how I walked with them, long easy strides and not the hobbled minces of usual young ladies. They called me a ‘Diana’ after some old Greek lady. They sent me housefuls of flowers and asked me to dance. One of them, actually a baronet, asked me to break my engagement with Perry and become engaged to him. He took me into a private room as he led me back from the ballroom and flung himself at my feet swearing eternal love.

I said, ‘No,’ brusquely enough and turned to leave but he jumped to his feet and grabbed me and would have kissed me. I brought my knee up sharply and I heard the hem of my gown rip before I had time to stop and think what a young lady should do. Lady Clara came spinning into the little lobby room in time to see him gasping and heaving on a sofa.

‘Sir Rupert! what is this?’ she demanded. Sir Rupert was white as a sheet and could only gasp and clutch his breeches.

Lady Clara turned on me. ‘Sarah?’ she said. ‘I saw Sir Rupert take you from the supper room, he should have brought you back to the ballroom. What are you doing here?’