Dandy said not a word. We were both spellbound by Jack’s story.
‘How was he a hard man?’ I asked, going to the central question for me. How he would treat us, how he would treat Dandy if the tide of luck started going against us? ‘Did he used to hit you? Or your mother? Did she travel with you too?’
Jack shook his head and bent down so that Dandy and I could lift the screen on to his back. He walked with it towards the wagon, dragging it behind him, and then he came back.
‘He’s never raised his hand to me,’ he said. ‘He never laid a finger on my ma. But she didn’t believe in him. He left her and the three little ones in the village and went on the tramp with the horse. He’d have left me behind too but he knew I was the only one that believed he could do it. He had me trained to ride on the horse within days. I was only a littl’un and I was scared of nothing. Besides, it’s a very big horseback when you’re only five or six. It was easy to stay on.
‘At the end of the summer we went home. He’d been sending money back when he could. And after the winter we started out again. This time there was a cart we could borrow. Ma wanted to come too, but Da was against it. But she cried and said she needed to be with him. I wanted her. And Da wanted the little ones along with him. So we all went on the road.’
Jack stopped. Then he bent for the final section of screen and loaded it in silence. Dandy and I said nothing. He came back and picked up a couple of halters and slung them towards the wagon. He turned and went for the gate as if the story was over.
We went after him.
‘What happened then, Jack?’ I asked. ‘When you were all travelling together?’
Jack sighed and leaned on the gate, looking across the field as if he could see the wagon and the woman with the two small children and the baby at the breast. The man walking with his son at the horse’s head, the horse which he had trained to dance for pennies.
‘It was a grand season,’ he said. ‘Warm, and sunny. A good harvest and there was money about. We went from fair to fair and we did well at every one of them. Da had enough money to buy the cart and then he exchanged it for a proper wagon. Then he saw a horse he fancied and bought her. That’s Bluebell that we have now. He saw she had a big enough back for me as I grew bigger. And she’s steady.
‘We had two horses then so we didn’t work the street corners any more but we took a field and started to take money at the gate. I had an act jumping from one horse to another, and through a hoop. I was still quite small you see – I must have been about seven or eight.
‘Ma was on the gate, and the little babbies sold sweets that she made to the audience. We were making good money.’
He stopped again.
‘And?’ Dandy prompted.
Jack shrugged. Shook the past off his shoulders with one quick movement and then a long stretch. ‘Oh!’ he said wearily. ‘She was just a woman! Da saw Snow and wanted to buy him. Ma wanted to go back to the village with the money we’d made and settle down and Da go back to cartering.
‘They argued about it – night and day. Da wanting Snow with all his heart and promising Ma that he’d make his fortune with the horse. That she’d have a cottage of her own and a comfortable wagon for travelling. That we’d move up in the world. He knew he could do it with Snow.
‘Ma couldn’t win the argument. She didn’t understand the business anyway. So she went to a wise woman and got herself a brew from the old witch and then told Da – pleased as punch – that she was pregnant and that there would be no money for Snow. And that she would not give birth to a child on the road but that they would have to go home.’ Jack smiled, but his dark brown eyes were like cold mud. ‘I can remember her telling him: “I’ve caught you now,”’ he said. ‘She got a belly on herself to trap him.’
‘What did your da do?’ I asked.
‘He left her,’ Jack said briefly. ‘All this happened at Exeter, our home was outside Plymouth. I never knew if she got herself home. Or the babbies. Or what happened to the one she had in her belly. He took the money he had been saving and bought Snow and we moved the next day. He wouldn’t let her in the wagon though she begged and cried and my brothers and sister cried too. He just drove away from her, and when she tried to get up on the step he just pushed her down. She followed us along the road crying and asking him to let her in, but he just drove away. She only kept up for a mile or so, she had the little ones and they couldn’t walk fast. And she was carrying the babby, of course. We heard her calls getting fainter and fainter as she fell further and further behind.’
‘Did you ever see her again?’ I asked, appalled. This calculated cruelty was worse than any of Da’s drunken rages. He would never have left Zima so, whatever she had done. He would never have pushed Dandy and me off the step of the wagon.
‘Never,’ Jack said indifferently. ‘But don’t you forget that if my da can do that to his wife of fifteen years, who bore him four children and had his fifth in her belly, he can certainly do it to you two.’
I nodded in silence. But Dandy was angry.
‘That’s awful!’ she exclaimed. ‘Your ma most likely had to go on the Parish and they’d have taken her children away from her. She was ruined! And she had done nothing wrong!’
Jack swung up into the wagon and started stowing blankets and bedding for the journey.
‘He thought she’d done wrong,’ he said from the dark interior. ‘That’s enough for me. And she was cheating, getting a belly on her like that. Women always cheat. They won’t do a straight deal with any man. She got what she deserved.’
Dandy would have said more, but I touched her on the arm and drew her away from the step, around to the back of the wagon to help me hump feed.
‘I can hardly believe it!’ she said in a muttered undertone. ‘Robert always seems so nice!’
‘I can believe it,’ I said. I was always more wary than Dandy. I had watched Jack’s unquestioning obedience to his father; and I had wondered how that round-faced smiling man could exert such invisible discipline.
‘Just remember not to cross him, Dandy,’ I said earnestly. ‘Especially at Warminster.’
She nodded. ‘I’m not going to be left on the road like his wife,’ she said. ‘I’d rather die first!’
That odd shudder, which I had felt when Jack started talking about his mother, put icy fingers down my spine again. I put out my hand to Dandy. ‘Don’t talk like that,’ I said, and my voice was faint as if it were coming from a long way away. ‘I don’t like it.’
Dandy made an impudent laughing face at me. ‘Miss Misery!’ she said cheerily. ‘Where are these buckets to go?’
It was sunset before we were packed and ready to leave – the sudden red sunset of autumn. Bluebell was between the shafts, her head nodding with pretended weariness. Jack was in his working breeches and smock. He was going to ride Snow the stallion, who was too valuable to be tied for a long journey like the ponies. He offered me the ride, but I was tired and felt lazy. If Robert did not order me to drive the wagon I would lie in my bunk and doze.
‘You’re getting as lazy as Dandy,’ Jack said to me in an intimate undertone as we tied the ponies in a string at the back of the wagon. Da’s little pony had settled down with the others and went obediently into line.
‘I feel idle today,’ I confessed, not looking up from the halter I was knotting.
His warm hand came down over my fingers as I tied the rope, and I looked up quickly to see his face, saturnine in the twilight.
‘What do you dream of in your bunk, Meridon?’ he asked softly. ‘When you lie in your bunk and daydream and the ceiling is rocking above you. What d’you dream of then? Do you think of a lover who will take off your clothes, strip those silly boy’s breeches off you, and kiss you and tell you that you are beautiful? Don’t you dream of a clean bed in a warm room and me, lying in bed beside you? Is that what you think of?’
I left my hand under his warm clasp and I met his eyes with my steady green gaze.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I dream that I am somewhere else. That my name is not Meridon. That I do not belong here. I never dream of you at all.’
His handsome dark face turned sulky in an instant. ‘That’s twice you’ve said that,’ he complained. ‘No other girl has ever turned away from me, not ever.’
I nodded fairly. ‘Then chase them,’ I said. ‘You’re wasting your time with me.’
He turned on his heel and left me abruptly. But he did not go back to the lighted wagon. I nearly bumped him as I came around the wagon with a hay net to hang on the side. He had been leaning against the wagon, brooding.
‘You’re cold, aren’t you?’ he accused. ‘It is not that you don’t like me. I’ve just been thinking. Dandy smiles at the old gentlemen and they chuck her under the chin and give her a ha’penny. But you never smile, do you? And now I think of it, I’ve never seen you let anyone touch you except Dandy. You don’t even like men to look at you, do you? You won’t come out to cry-up the show with me because men might look at you and desire you, and you don’t like that, do you?’
I hesitated, a denial on my lips. But then I nodded. It was true. I hated the fumblings and the giggling. The dirty hands questing inside lice-ridden clothes. The tumblings behind hedges and haycocks and emerging shame-faced. It was as if my body had a pelt missing, my skin was too sensitive for a stranger’s touch.
‘I don’t like it,’ I said honestly. ‘And I’ve never understood how Dandy can bear it. I hate the old men who want to touch me, I hate the way they look at me.
‘I don’t dislike you, Jack, but I will never desire you – nor anyone, I think.’ I paused, turning over in my mind what I had just said. ‘I’m not even sad about it,’ I said. ‘I’ve no father to care for me, and I wouldn’t know how to keep house for a lover. I’m better off as I am.’
‘Cold,’ he said, taunting me.
‘As ice,’ I confirmed, quite unruffled. Then I heaved the heavy hay net up to the hook and pushed past him and went into the wagon.
Dandy was already in her bunk, combing out her black hair and singing under her breath in a low languorous hum. I climbed up into mine, and dozed off at once, barely waking when the caravan started rocking over the field and into the lane. I just opened my eyes and saw the open doorway and the stars ahead of us and heard the noise of many unshod hooves on the hardpacked mud as we headed for winter quarters and Warminster.
We stopped one night on the road. I tumbled out of my bunk to rub down Snow and Bluebell, to walk them down to the stream and let them drink when they were cool, and then the little ponies. The little ones were nervous in the dark and shied. One of them scraped my leg and trod on my toe and I cursed in a voice still husky with sleep but I was too dozy to cuff him.
We put them out on stakes because we were camped by the lane-side and did not want them wandering. Robert himself checked that the blankets were tied safe on Snow and Bluebell to keep them warm. Then we all took our suppers of bread and milk into our bunks, saying not a word to each other. We were all tired and we were used now to saying nothing when we were hard-worked on the road. It was the best and easiest way. We ate in silence, each one alone with private thoughts. Then Robert’s tin mug clanked on the wooden floor as he dropped it down from his bunk empty and said, ‘G’night,’ into the darkness of the wagon. Then I heard Jack’s mug drop, and Dandy’s.
‘Sarah?’ Dandy whispered into the darkness, invoking my childhood love for her by use of my secret name.
‘Yes?’ I replied.
‘You don’t think he’d ever leave us behind, do you?’ she asked.
I was silent for a moment, thinking. In the wordy, bargaining part of my mind I was very sure that Robert would leave Dandy, would leave me, would leave Jack his own son, if his upward struggle from his poverty demanded it. But there was a part of my mind which gave me shivers down my spine. It had given me my dream of wide, it had taught me that my name was Sarah and reminded me constantly that I belonged at Wide with my family. And that part of my mind was heavy with some kind of warning, like the distant rumble of a summer storm.
‘I don’t think he’ll leave us behind,’ I said slowly. A noise like thunder rolled in my inner ears. ‘But there is no telling what he would do,’ I said. I was afraid but I could not have named my fear. ‘There is no knowing, Dandy. Don’t upset him, will you?’
Dandy sighed. Her fear was gone as soon as she had expressed it to me. ‘I can handle him,’ she said arrogantly. ‘He’s just a man like any other.’
I heard the slats of her bunk creak as she turned over and went to sleep. I did not sleep, even though I was tired. I lay awake, my hands behind my head, looking with unseeing eyes at the ceiling which was so near my face, pattering softly with the sound of light rain. I lay and listened to the rain on the canvas and I thought it told me in a hundred tiny voices that Dandy was wrong. She could not manage Robert like any man. Indeed she could not manage men: even while she picked their pockets they were getting her cheap. She thought she was managing them; she prided herself on her skill. But they were cheating her – enjoying watching or fingering a pretty gypsy virgin, and cheap, very cheap indeed.
I shuddered and drew the covers closer up under my chin. The rain pattered softly, whispering like a priest in a Popish confession that there was only one safety for Dandy and me and that was to get away from this life altogether. To get away from the showgrounds and the fairs. To get away from the gawping villages and the street-corner mountebanks. I wanted to be safe with Dandy, safe in a Quality life with clean sheets, and good food on the table, fine dresses and days of leisure. Horses for riding, dogs for hunting, little canaries in cages and nothing to do all day but talk and sew and read and sing.
I wanted that life for Dandy and me – to save her from the world of the showgrounds and from the life of a whore. And for me: because I did not know what I would become. I could not stay in my boy’s breeches and care for horses for ever. Jack was a warning to me as much as a threat. He might desire me a little, in his vain coquettish way. But other men might desire me more. I could keep my hair cropped and green eyes down, but that would not save me. There was no one in my life who would fight to keep me safe, or who would refuse a good price for me.
There was only one place where I would be safe. There was only one place where I could take Dandy and give her the things which delighted her and yet keep her from danger – Wide.
I knew it was my home.
I knew it was my refuge.
I had no idea where it was.
I sighed like an old lady who has reached the end of her musings and found she is no further forward. One day I would find Wide; I was sure of it. One day I would be safe. One day I would be able to make Dandy safe.
I turned on my side with that thought…and I fell asleep.
5
I don’t know what I had expected of Warminster but the little grey-stoned main street with the three or four shops and two good inns pleased me. It looked like a place where nothing very much had ever happened or would happen. I looked around the broad main street and imagined the weekly market which would be held there: the stalls selling flour and bread and cheeses, the noise of the beasts from the sheep and cattle market. I was glad we were spending the winter here. It looked like a place where Dandy would find little scope for her talents of coaxing silver out of the pockets of old gentlemen – I was glad of that.
I leaned forwards to look about me and Robert Gower smiled at my eagerness, said proudly, ‘Nearly there now,’ and took a sharp left-hand turn off the cobbled main street down an unpaved mud lane. I expected a one-room upstairs, two-rooms downstairs cottage with a low roof and paper and rags stuffed in the windows, with a little patch of a kitchen garden at the front, and a field for the horses at the back.
‘Gracious!’ Dandy said as the wagon turned in off the track and we found ourselves in a handsome stable yard.
Robert Gower smiled. ‘Surprised, little Miss Dandy?’ he asked with satisfaction. ‘I t
hought you would be! All your little nosiness into how much I earn and how much I pay never discovered that I’m a freeholder in a market town! Aye! I have a vote and all!’ he said triumphantly.
He pulled the wagon up and Dandy and I got down. I went without thinking to the ponies at the back and untied them and brought them round. Robert nodded at me.
‘Stabling I’ve got!’ he said. ‘Stabling for every one of them if I wanted them inside all winter eating their heads off and getting fat. They’ll go out in the fields of course, but if I wanted to keep them in I could. Every single one of them. Ten loose boxes I’ve got here! Not bad, is it?’
‘No,’ I said, and I spoke the truth. It was a miracle of hard work and careful planning to bring a man from poverty to this secret affluence. And I respected him all the more that he could leave this comfort to travel in the wagon and work every day of the week for a long arduous season.
A door in the wall of the yard opened and a grey-haired woman came out dressed in her best apron with a matching white mob cap. She dipped Robert a curtsey as if he were Quality.
‘Welcome home, sir!’ she said. ‘There’s a fire in the parlour and in your bedroom when you are ready to come in. Shall I send the lad out for your bags?’
‘Aye,’ Robert said. ‘And set tea for two in the parlour, Mrs Greaves. These two young women, Meridon and Dandy, will take their tea in the kitchen with you.’
Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) Page 7
