Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) (48 page)

I was no longer little Miss Sarah with her hopes of a brilliant London season and her eagerness to learn how society people lived, her belief in the best. I was Meridon who had been cheated until my heart was hard all my childhood, and had been robbed in adulthood by the people I had thought of as a refuge.

‘We’re well suited,’ I said wearily. ‘But I don’t have a lot of hopes for us.’

Perry looked dashed. ‘You wanted to go home…’ he offered ‘Home to the country. When you’re well enough for the journey, we could go to Havering,’ he glanced at me. ‘Or Wideacre if you’d prefer.’

I nodded. ‘I would like that,’ I said. ‘I would like to go to Wideacre as soon as possible. I should be well enough to travel in a few days. Let’s go then.’

He gave me a little smile, as appealing as a child.

‘You’re not really angry are you Sarah?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t mean to make you angry, or disappoint you. It was Mama who was sure. Everyone was certain that you would die, I didn’t think you’d mind doing it. It would have made no difference to you, after all.’

I got to my feet, steadying myself with a hand on the mantelpiece.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t really mind. There was no one else I wanted to marry. It is not what I planned, that’s all.’

Perry stumbled as he went to hold the door open for me. ‘You are Lady Havering now,’ he said encouragingly. ‘You must like that.’

I looked down the long years to my childhood to where the dirty-faced little girl lay in her bunk and dreamed of having a proper name, and a proper home, and belonging in a gracious and beautiful landscape. ‘I should do,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve wanted it all my life.’

That reassured him and he took my hand and kissed it gently. I held still. Perry had inherited his mother’s diffidence, he would never grab me, or overwhelm me with kisses, or brush against me for the pleasure of my touch. I was glad of that, I still liked a distance between me and any other person. He let me go and I went past him and up the shallow stone stairs to my bedroom to lie on the bed and look at the ceiling and keep myself from thinking.

For the next week I worked at becoming stronger. Lady Clara complained that I never went into society at all. ‘Hardly worth your while to make me take the title of Dowager if you’re going to be a hermit,’ she said to me at dinner one day.

I gave her half a smile. ‘I am too grand to mix with the common people,’ I said.

That made her laugh and she did not tease me further. She was still too busy trying to keep Maria with her husband to waste much time on me. A notice of our private marriage had appeared in the paper but all of Lady Clara’s friends knew that I had been seriously ill. They would hold parties for me later on. I told everyone I met in the park that I was not well enough to do more than ride a little and walk, at present.

Sea was very good. He had missed our daily rides and the grooms in the stables did not like to take him out because he was frisky and naughty. If a high-sided coach went past him he shied, if someone shouted out in the street he would be half-way across the road before they could steady him down, and if they so much as touched him with a whip he would be up on his hindlegs in a soaring rear and they could not hold him.

But with me he was as gentle as if he were a retired hack. The first outing I let the groom lift me into the saddle and I gathered up the reins and waited to see what would come. I would have felt a good deal safer astride, but we were in the stable courtyard and I was in my green riding habit, pale as skimmed milk in the rich colour.

I had a silly little cap perched on my head instead of my usual bonnet – but with only short curls no pins would hold. Lady Clara had been scandalized when I had threatened to ride bareheaded.

Sea snuffed the air, as if wondering whether to race for the park at once, but then he tensed his muscles as he felt my lightness.

‘Sea,’ I said, and at my voice his ears went forward and I felt him shift a little beneath me. I knew he remembered me, remembered the red-faced man who had been his owner before I had come to him. Remembered the little stable in Salisbury behind the inn, and how I had sat gently on him, half the weight of his usual rider, and spoken to him in a quiet voice. I thought he would remember the journey home, tied to the back of Robert Gower’s whisky cart, with me dripping blood and drooping with tiredness, my head on Robert’s shoulder. I thought he would remember the little stable at Warminster, and how I would go down to him in the morning, clattering down the little wooden staircase to greet him before going in to breakfast and bringing him back a crust of a warm roll. And I was sure he would remember that night when there had been no one on the land but him and me. No one in the whole world but the two of us going quietly through the sleeping Downland villages. Me, as lost as a child without its mother, and him quietly and certainly trotting along lanes where he had never been before, drawn like a compass point to our home.

I reached down and patted his neck. He straightened and obeyed the touch of my heels against his side. He moved with his smooth flowing stride out of the stable yard and into the mews lane, then down the busy roads towards the park. The groom fell into step behind us, watching me nervously, certain that I was not well enough to ride, that Sea would be sure to
throw me at the first sight of a water cart, or a shrieking milk maid.

He did not. He went as steady as a hackney-horse with blinkers. Past open doors and shouting servants, past wagons, past delivery carts and street sellers. Past all the noise and bustle of a big city to the gates of the park. And even then, with the smooth green turf before him and the soft furze beneath his feet he did nothing more than arch his neck and put his ears forward as we trotted, and then slid into a smooth steady canter.

He would have gone faster, and I was finished with the conventions of polite society for ever: I would have let him. But I could tell by the light buzzing in my ears, and the strange swimmy feeling, that I was pushing my new strength too far, and I should go home.

We turned. Sea went willingly enough though I knew he longed for one of our wild gallops. He went back through the streets as gentle as he had come, and pulled up outside the front door as sweet as a carthorse on a familiar delivery round.

‘He’s a marvel with you,’ the groom said. ‘I wish he’d be as good with us. He was off with me last week and I thought I’d never get him turned around for home. I couldn’t pull him up, the best I could do was bring him around in a circle. All the old ladies were staring at me an’ all! I was ashamed!’

‘I’m sorry, Gerry,’ I said. I had one hand on the balustrade to support me and I patted Sea’s cool flank with the other. ‘He’s never liked men very much, he was ill-treated before I got him. It spoiled his temper for a man rider.’

The groom pulled his cap and slid from his own horse. ‘I’ll lead them both,’ he said. ‘That way I won’t get pulled off if he plays up as soon as you’re gone.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll come around to the stables tomorrow, same time.’

‘Yes, miss,’ he said politely. Then he corrected himself. ‘I mean, yes, Lady Havering.’

I hesitated on hearing my title, ‘Lady Sarah Havering’; then I shrugged my shoulders. It was a long way from the dirty little wagon and the two hungry children. She would laugh if she knew.

I grew stronger after that ride. I rode every day, I walked every day. Sometimes Perry was awake and sober and he came with me. Otherwise, in the middle of a dazzling London season I lived alone, in quietness and isolation. Sometimes they stopped in their carriages in the park to bid me good day and ask me if I would be coming to one party or another. I always explained I did not yet have my strength back, and they let me be excused. Sometimes I would be in the parlour when Lady Clara’s guests came in and I would sit quietly in the window for some time before saying that I needed to go to my room for I was still a little tired. They let me go. They all let me go.

I did not need to stay. I was accepted, I was an heiress in my own right, I had a title, I was married to the largest landowner in Sussex and, apart from Perry’s growing scandalous drunkenness, there was not a breath of rumour about me. I was odd and unsociable, certainly. But they could not complain of that. And I think the hard eyes of Meridon looked out from under the short-cropped hair, and they knew that I was strange and alien in their world. And they let me go.

Two days later I received a letter:

Dear Sarah,

I cannot tell you how sorry I am that I should have been away from home when you were ill and that in my absence your marriage took place. I understand from Penkiss and Penkiss that you have consulted them as to the legality of such a marriage and they have told you, and confirmed to me, that the marriage is legal. I feel deeply unhappy that I was not available to help you at that time. It is as if I had lost your mother all over again to serve you so badly.

I can offer you little consolation except to say that I do indeed believe that your husband may steady now that he is married, and that if he does not, he is well used to having his estate run by a woman. You may find yourself in the position of being responsible for the running of both Havering and Wideacre estates and you will find that work rewarding and enjoyable.

It would have been my wish that you had made a marriage of choice, for love. But I believe that you yourself had little wish for a ‘love marriage’. If that were the case then no arranged marriage could have been more suitable, if you and Lord Peregrine can agree. I know you liked him when you first met him, it will be my most earnest prayer, Sarah, that you continue to enjoy his company and that he treats you well. If there is anything I can do to assist you in any way, I beg you will ask me. If you two should not agree, I hope you know that whatever the world may say, you may always make your home with me, and I would provide for you.

I hope you forgive me for not being able to protect you from
this marriage. I would not have left the country if I had known how ill you were. I would have come to London to see if I could serve you. Regrets do nothing, but I hope you believe that mine are sincere; and when I think of your mother and the trust she placed in me, my regrets are bitter.

Yours sincerely,

James Fortescue

PS. I have just this day heard from Will Tyacke. He tells me that he gave you notice that he would not serve under Lord Peregrine and he writes to offer his formal resignation which will take place at once. This worry I can help with. I shall advertise at once for a new manager to take his place. He will be sadly missed by his friends on Wideacre but perhaps a new manager to start with the new squire is advisable. Will has only just seen the notice of your marriage, apparently he did not know you were unwell. He has taken a post in the north of England and is leaving at once.

I read the letter through several times, sitting at the mahogany table in the parlour, the noises from the street very loud in the room. I was sorry James was so grieved that he had not protected me against the Haverings’ marriage plans. I could shrug that off. No one could have predicted that I would fall ill. No one could have foreseen that I would get well again. If I had died, as everyone had expected me to do, then there would have been little harm done. The Wideacre corporation, the great brave experiment of Wideacre would have been ended under a new squire, either way. It was bitter indeed that I should be persuaded of the rightness of running an estate as if the very poorest villager’s life was of value at the very moment when I had put a new man in the squire’s chair. But James was right, I would be the mistress in my house, the land would be run as I wished, and I would run Wideacre as Will had done. I made a sad little face. It would be a different place without him.

I opened the letter again and re-read the postscript. I nodded. He had said he would go when we had parted in anger, that day in the park. He had tried to warn me and I had refused to listen.
He had tried to keep Wideacre safe as one of the few places, one of the very few, where the wealth of the land could go to those who earned it. Where people could work and earn the full benefits of their work – not what was left after the squire had taken his cut, and the merchant, and the parson. I had been on the side of the squires and the merchants and the parsons then. I was not now. Since then I had been as close to death as most people ever get, and I had felt someone take my sweating hand and sign away my land for me. I would never again believe that some people deserved higher wages or finer lives than others. We all had needs. We all sought their satisfaction. Some people were clever rogues, they managed to get a little more – that was all the difference there ever was.

I would never be able to tell him that. He had gone, as he had sworn he would go, to a new corporation, a new attempt at creating some real justice in the way England was run. Not words on paper, not ideas in people’s minds, not pleasant civilized chat across a dinner table. Real changes for real people. And I knew that after that experiment failed – as fail it surely would, for it was too little in a world too big and too implacable – after that he would go to another, and to another and another. And though Will might never win he would never stop, travelling from one place to another, doing whatever he could in small brave ways to set a wall against the greed and corruption of the world we of the Quality were building.

I folded the letter carefully and then I bent down and poked it into the fire. It would be of no help to me, nor to any of the Haverings if they knew that I would have gone against their wishes if I could. I had spoken once against Lady Clara, I had accepted Perry’s awkward apology. They had won as the rich always win. They write the rules. They make the world. They win the battles.

I was sorry it had taken me this long to learn it. I had come from a poverty so grinding that I had seen the Quality as a race apart, and knew nothing more than a longing to be part of them. They made it look so easy! They made fine clothes and good food and polite chatter look like a God-given right. You never
saw their struggle to keep their money earning more and more money. You never saw the ill-paid servants and clerks who serviced their needs, who earned the money for them. All you ever saw was the smooth surface of the finished work – the Quality world. I leaned against the mantelpiece and looked down at the fire. It was as if I were to say that marble like this of the mantelpiece came straight from the ground smooth and carved, and never needed working. They managed to pretend that their wealth came to them naturally – as if they deserved it. They hid altogether the poverty and the hardship and the sheer miserable drudgery which earned the money which they spent smiling.

I had been as bad as any of them – worse; for I had known what life was like down at the very bottom, and I had thought of nothing but that
I
should be free from that hardship, that
I
should win my way up to the top. And sour it was to me, to learn when I made it there, when I was little Miss Sarah Lacey, that I felt as mean and as dirty as when I had been a thieving chavvy in the streets.

It is a dirty world they’ve made – the people who have the power and the talents and who show no pity. I had had enough of it. I would be little Miss Sarah Lacey no more.

There was a knock on the parlour door. ‘Lady Sarah, there is a parcel for you,’ the parlourmaid said.

I turned with a scowl which made her step swiftly back. I had forgotten I was little Miss Sarah no more. Now I was Lady Sarah and damned nonsense it was to talk of being on the side of the poor while I sat in the parlour of the great Havering town house and was waited on by a dozen ill-paid people.

I took the parcel with a word of thanks and opened it.

It was from my lawyer, Mr Penkiss. It was the contracts for the marriage and the deeds of Wideacre for Perry. Wideacre was out of the hands of the Laceys. Wideacre was mine no more.

I spread the old paper out on the parlour table and looked at it. It meant nothing to me, the writing was all funny, and the language was not even English. But I liked the heavy seals on the bottom, dark red and cracked, and the thick glossy pink
ribbon under them. I liked the curly brown lettering and the old thick manuscript. And now and then, in the text I could see the word ‘Wideacre’ and knew it was telling of my land.

The Laceys had earned it in a grant from the king. The Norman king who came over some time and beat the people in a war and won the country. That was how it was told in the gentry parlours. In the taproom at Acre they said that the Laceys had stolen it, robbed farmers like the Tyackes who had been there for years. In the wagons of the Rom they said that once they had held all the land, that they had been the old people who had lived alongside fairies and pixies and old magic until the coming of men with swords and ploughs. I smiled ruefully. All robbers: generation after generation of robbers. And the worst theft of all was to take someone’s history from them. So the children who went to school from the Havering estate believed the Haverings had always been there. And they were taught that there was no choice but to doff their caps to the power of the rich. And no alternative but to work for them – and try to become rich yourself.

I rolled up the parchment carefully and put it back in its package along with the marriage contract. If Peregrine were not too drunk tonight he might be well enough to take it to the lawyers tomorrow.

I glanced towards the window. It was getting dark with that cold, damp, end-of-January darkness which made me glad of the warm fire and the quiet room. I rang the bell and ordered more logs for the fire, and I heard the front door bang as Perry came home.

He was unsteady on his feet, but I had seen him a lot worse. He beamed at me with his good-natured drunkard’s smile.

‘It’s good to see you up,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’re well again. I missed you when you were ill.’

I smiled back. ‘You’d have made a tragic widower,’ I said.

Perry nodded, unabashed. ‘I’d have missed you all the same,’ he said. ‘But oh! it’s good to have as much money as I like!’

‘Are you winning or losing these days?’ I asked dryly.

‘Still winning!’ Perry said delightedly. ‘I don’t know what
devil is in the cards. I haven’t lost a game since I came back from Newmarket. No one will play with me any more except Captain Thomas and Bob Redfern! I must have had a thousand guineas off them both!’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Shall you mind leaving all this excitement to come home? I want to go back to Wideacre, and I’m well enough to travel now.’

Perry rang the bell and ordered punch made strong when the butler came.

‘When you like,’ he said. ‘But the roads will be bad. Why not wait until it is warmer, and the roads less dirty? We’ll get stuck for sure.’

The silver bowl came in and Perry poured himself a cup and handed me one. I sipped it and made a face.

‘Ugh Perry! It’s far too strong! It’s solid brandy!’

Perry beamed. ‘Keeps the cold out,’ he said.

‘Will you stop your drinking, once we are at Wideacre?’ I asked a little wistfully. ‘Will you really stop your drinking, and the gambling? Is it truly just being in London which makes you do it?’

Perry stretched out his legs to the fire. ‘I’ll tell you the truth,’ he said. ‘I started gambling because I was bored, and I started drinking because I was lonely and afraid. You know how it was for me before.’ He paused. ‘I am sure I could give it up like that,’ he snapped his fingers. ‘Any time I wanted to. I could just walk away from it and never touch it again.’

I looked at him curiously. ‘I’ve seen men who said that who would kill someone for a drink,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen men who would shake and vomit if they couldn’t get a drink when they needed it. I even heard of one man who went mad without it, and killed his little chavvy, and didn’t even know he’d done it!’

‘Don’t talk like that!’ Perry said with instant disdain. ‘Don’t talk about those horrid people you used to be with, Sarah. You’re not among them any more. It’s different for us. I’m not like that. I can take or leave it. And in London, in the Season, everyone drinks. Everyone gambles. You’d be gaming yourself if you weren’t ill and staying at home, Sarah, you know you would.’

I nodded. I was not sure. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But remember you promised to never use Wideacre as security against a loan.’

Perry smiled, too sweet to be scolded. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’d never use your land, or my own. Mama explained it all to me, how it has to be handed on intact if we have a child. All I’m doing now is spending some of the interest and the extra rents. No one was able to touch it for years, it’s just been mounting up in the bank. And anyway…’ he said conclusively, ‘I’m winning! I’m winning faster than I can spend it. D’you know what they call me down at Redfern’s club? “Lucky Havering”! That’s what they call me! Rather fine, isn’t it?’

‘Mmm,’ I said dubiously. But then I decided to let be. I had seen Perry in London, and down at Havering. And I knew he did not gamble when he was away from the city, and from the boredom of the London season. I knew he did not drink so hard when he was in the country. And I thought it very likely that he might not drink at all when we were on our own in the country.

I was not such a fool as to believe that he did not need drink. But we were wed and inseparable. There was little gain for me to scold him. The only thing I could do was get him into the country as quick as I could where I could have the keys to the wine cellar and Perry would be away from the clubs and his drinking, gambling, dissolute friends.

‘Are you out tonight?’ I asked.

Perry made a face. ‘You are too,’ he said glumly. ‘Don’t blame me, Sarah, it’s Mama. She says we’ve both got to go to Maria’s, she’s having a music party and Basil is to be there and we have to go too to look happy.’

‘Me too?’ I asked surprised. Since my illness I had done very well at escaping all the Quality parties. Lady Clara was content to let me rest and convalesce at home, she had done her duty and introduced me to her world as she had promised. She was working night and day to keep Maria and Basil shackled, and she did not care whether I took and returned calls or not.

‘Your mama wants me to go?’ I asked.

Perry ran a grimy hand through his hair and chuckled. ‘Scandal,’ he said briefly. ‘They’re saying Mama saddled Basil with a
light-skirt, and that we’ve robbed you and got you locked up at home. Mama’s had enough of it. You’re to come out to Maria’s party. Maria has to look happy and behave well, and you have to look happy and behave well.’