Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3)

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘No,’ I said husky, and turned my face away so that he should not see that my mouth was turning downwards in an ugly grimace of pain, and my eyes were going red and hot. I dared not start crying. I knew that if I started I would never stop. A lifetime would not be long enough to have my cry out for the loss of her and the loneliness I was left with.

  ‘No,’ I said again.

  ‘We’ll go back over the Common,’ he said suddenly, as if he had forgotten what we had been talking about. ‘There’s some land there which could take trees. I want you to tell me what you think about it. They’re mining a lot of coal quite deep in Kent these days and there’s a good market for small straight timber to prop up the ceilings of the galleries where they dig for coal. We could plant pine trees and they would be ready for cutting in as little as ten years’ time.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. My throat was still tight.

  ‘And you can have a look at the north side of the Common and the Havering estate,’ he went on. He was talking faster, louder than usual, giving me time to pack my heartbreak away again, where no one could see it. ‘You’ve never been around that side, I don’t think, unless you’ve been with Lord Peregrine. D’you ride much with him?’

  ‘Hardly at all,’ I said huskily, but I had myself back in hand.

  Will glanced at me, gave me one of his fleeting sweet smiles. ‘He’ll be off to town soon, I daresay. Or wherever else they go in summer.’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘He’s staying with us for a while longer.’

  We were riding side by side in an easy walk, eastwards along the crest of the Downs, following an old drovers’ road which goes all the way into Kent. Will looked sideways at me, his brown eyes questioning.

  ‘He’s never stayed in the country so long before,’ he said. ‘Why’s he stopping now?’

  I gave him a clear look back. I would never trouble to mince words for Will Tyacke. ‘He likes me,’ I said blankly.

  ‘His ma’d have something to say about that,’ he said.

  ‘She likes me,’ I said with a little smile.

  He saw my smile and scowled at me. ‘Is that what you’re after?’ he asked. ‘With all you could have? Is that what you want?’

  I grinned at him, it was funny to see him so vexed. ‘I’m not wedding,’ I said. ‘I’m not the type. I’ll never marry, I don’t burn for a husband, I never have.’

  Will nodded, as if what I had said confirmed a thought of his. His satisfied expression rubbed me wrong. ‘But if I were husband-hunting, I can’t think of a better-looking man,’ I said, my deceitful voice clear. ‘He’s as lovely as an angel, and never out of temper. He’s fun to be with, he makes me laugh. And he’s gentle with me, as sweet as a lover.’

  Will lost the smile from his face as if I had slapped him. ‘Don’t bring him here as squire,’ he warned me with sudden impatience. ‘We’d none of us stand for Havering ways on this land.’

  ‘Oh, leave be,’ I said, suddenly irritable myself. ‘I get sick of hearing what you will and won’t have on Wideacre. I spoke so to vex you, I don’t expect to hear threats for something that’ll never happen.’

  I dug my heel into Sea’s side and let him have his head along the smooth track so that we raced ahead of Will and Beau and increased our lead until they were just a toy-sized horse and rider far away down a grassy track. I pulled up then and waited for him to come alongside me, my temper blown away with the gallop. And when he thundered up, Beau blowing hard, his grin was rueful. He leaned across and slapped me on the shoulder, like he would another lad to mend a quarrel.

  ‘I’m done,’ he said with his open, friendly grin. ‘I know you don’t want him. He sets my teeth on edge with his ways, but I’m glad he’s good company for you. I’d begrudge you nothing, Sarah, you know that. I’m sorry I spoke hard to you.’

  I smiled back, and then we rode together over the Common, and looked at the place where we might plant pine trees, and then checked the blossom in the apple orchard where the petals were falling like snow, before we rode side by side homeward.

  That was the last cross word between us that afternoon, and it was a typical afternoon with laughter and temper. We never bored each other, we never rode in a sullen silence. We might ride quietly through fields, looking all around us, or through hushed woodlands, or stand motionless looking up at the sky where a rare buzzard circled; but we never stayed silent for lack of things to say.

  We often flared up; Will had a knack of igniting my temper, and as I knew him better I grew more and more able to fire up at him and then make friends. He was like a traveller, a wagon dweller. You could flare up in utter and absolute anger and ten minutes later it was forgotten. There was nothing to remember. Everyone had said all they wanted to say, the scene was closed. Only in houses, where people have to keep their voices down and to keep smiles pinned on their faces did quarrels rumble on and on in sweet voices and range over every thing.

  When we clattered in to the stable yard I remembered my instruction and turned to Will with a considering look on my face.

  ‘Would you like a drink of ale, Will? It’s a hot day,’ I said.

  He was about to accept but he checked and looked more closely at me. ‘You have a voice,’ he said pleasantly, ‘and a look in your green eyes which always warns me when something comes from these new-found airs and graces of yours. I suppose if I say “yes” then you tell me I may go to the kitchen?’

  I felt myself flush up.

  ‘Gracious of you,’ he said with irony. ‘I’ll go to the kitchen for a drink of small beer gladly. You’ll come with me?’

  I hesitated, and his face suddenly cleared and he smiled at me with all his heart in his eyes.

  ‘Oh Sarah!’ he said, and he jumped off his horse and came around to me and lifted me down from the side-saddle. ‘Come and have an ale, Sarah!’ he said his voice warm with the invitation. ‘Come with me into the kitchen and have an ale and stop pretending to be what you’re not.’

  I let him hold me, his arms were warm and safe around me, and I suddenly wanted to go with him to the clean kitchen and sit at the scrubbed table and drink a great deep draught of cold ale and watch the cook peeling the vegetables for my dinner.

  His hands on my waist were firm, and he kept one hand around my waist as we turned for the kitchen door. I did not pull away from his touch.

  ‘Sarah!’ the voice was Lady Clara’s, she was standing on the end of the terrace which overlooks the stable yard. I flushed and pulled away from Will. I knew very well she had been watching me.

  ‘Come in out of the sun, Sarah!’ she said. Her voice was low but it carried clearly to me in the stable yard, the Quality voice which does not have to be raised to give orders and be obeyed. ‘You will get as tanned as a field labourer standing there!’

  I moved in unthinking obedience towards her, then I turned back to Will.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You can see I have to go, I’ll ride with you tomorrow.’

  His face was as black as thunder. He turned back to his horse and swung himself up high on his back.

  ‘No,’ he said curtly. ‘Tomorrow I am busy. You may go up to the Downs barn on Thursday if you want to see some shearing. They will start at seven.’

  ‘Will?’ I called him, but he rode past me without another word. He went so close that Beau’s flicking tail stung me in the face.

  ‘Will?’ I said again, hardly crediting that the warm smile had gone from his face as quickly as a summer storm blows up, just because I had turned to do Lady Clara’s bidding.

  He did not hear me or he chose not to hear me. He hunched low over Beau’s neck and he set him to a canter as soon as he was past the terrace. He went past Lady Clara without a nod or salute. As soon as Beau’s hooves touched the earth of the track towards Wideacre he gave him his head and they went as if all the fiends in hell were after them.

  I turned slowly, and went up the terrace steps to Lady Clara. She smiled at me as if she had seen something which had amused he
r very much and then she drew me into the parlour where there was a jug of iced lemonade waiting with two chilled sugar-rimmed glasses.

  26

  I saw Will Tyacke hardly at all for the rest of the summer. He held to his promise to James to teach me about the land, but that was the last ride we took when he teased me and harangued me and quarrelled with me and let me ride away and then caught up with me so that we were the best of friends after all.

  From that day onwards it was much more like work. He would make me known to the leaders of the haymaking gang or tell me the name of the shepherd and leave me with them, riding off as if always there was something more important to be done elsewhere. I thought the people changed towards me too. They no longer smiled slyly when they saw Will and me riding close. Somehow they knew we were no longer easy friends, and they were more businesslike with me. They would tell me what they were doing clear enough, well enough, but they did not smile and wave at me when I rode past a field.

  I went down to the haymaking and watched them scything the crop under a pale warm sky, and tossing the sweet-smelling green grass to dry in the summer wind. The girls with the rakes smiled and called, ‘Good day,’ to Will with a note of affection, but to me they nodded and said nothing.

  I knew what was happening and I did not blame Will for blabbing about our breach. I did not think he was the tattling sort and I did not think he would take every village slut into his confidence. But they knew that I was staying with the Haverings to learn to become a young lady. They knew that I was riding with Will to learn all I could about my land to strengthen my hand against them when the time came for me to make changes. They knew that although I had come home I was not at ease on the land, I was still rootless, hopeless in my heart. And so they wasted neither love nor words on me. They knew I did not belong. They knew I did not want to belong. I wanted to own the land. I did not care about loving it.

  Every day that I rode with Will he became more like a clerk, or a bailiff or some middling sort of servant. He stopped calling me Sarah and speaking directly to me. Then one day he called me Miss Lacey and I knew myself to be set at a distance indeed. I could have summoned him back. I could have recalled the affection which had been growing between us. But…but I was damned if I would. When I saw his stiff back and his proudly held head trotting away from me I could have sworn and slung a flint under his horse’s hooves for being a stubborn fool. But I was learning to be a lady; and ladies do not swear and throw things.

  I thought he was foolish and proud and I decided to ignore him. So I made no effort either to challenge or reconcile with him. Instead I was as haughty and as ill-tempered as he through all the hot summer days when the birds called for their mates and the swallows dipped and dived in the lingering lonely twilights. When I was alone at the top of the Downs, with Sea cropping the grass around me, I knew that I was missing my friends – not just her, but James Fortescue whom I had sent away, Will whom I had put at a distance, and all the people of Acre who had welcomed me with smiles and bright curious faces, and who had then learned that I would not live at Wideacre Hall, that I would not stay with them, that I was hard set on changing things, on changing everything.

  I knew myself then to be bereft, but I had been so lonely and so hungry for so long that I did not jump up on Sea and ride down to Acre to seek Will out and make things clear with him. Instead I hunched up my shoulders and hugged my knees and watched the sun set redly in the sky, and huddled my feelings of loneliness and sadness within me, as a familiar longing.

  In Will’s absence I rode with Perry, and sometimes Lady Clara took me around her own fields, or ordered her bailiff to drive out with me in her pale-blue lined-landau. He was a sharp hard-faced man; I could not like him. But I could recognize his ability to price a crop while it showed just inches above the soil, or to adjust a rent in his mind during the walk from the gate to the back door.

  Will was right about the hardship on the Havering land. I saw it on every drive. Havering village was more like a campsite than a village. The houses were ready to tumble down and half were down already with their tenants sheltering in the lee of a wall with a half-thatched roof over their heads. The slops were thrown out in the village street, the stink under the hot summer sun was enough to turn your stomach. The people worked from dawn to dusk for wages which were as low as Lady Clara and Mr Briggs could keep them. More and more work was being done by the wretches brought in by a jolting wagon daily from Midhurst poorhouse. ‘It’s a service to the community to save them from idleness,’ Mr Briggs explained to me, smiling.

  They planned to clear the village of Havering altogether. Lady Clara was sick of the dirt of it and the continual complaints which not all of Mr Briggs’s smiling threats could keep from her ears. The villagers who lived in the dirt and the squalor believed that if she really knew of their poverty she would pity them, she would do something.

  ‘All I’m likely to do is to set the soldiers on them and burn them out,’ she said grimly. ‘It’s disgusting how they live! They must lack all sense of shame!’

  I said nothing. Will’s angry denunciations of the Quality were echoing in my head: ‘You leave them ignorant and then you complain they know nothing,’ he had said. I kept my eyes blank and I said nothing when Lady Clara threatened to clear the village.

  I had thought she was threatening idly something that would never take place. But one day I came down to the parlour in my riding habit pulling on my gloves and she looked at me very hard and bright, and said: ‘Don’t go to Havering village today, Sarah, it’s being cleared.’

  ‘Cleared?’ I asked.

  She nodded grimly. ‘I’ve had enough of them,’ she said. ‘Their complaints, their needs, their dirt and their diseases. There’s a case of the typhus fever been reported down there as well. I won’t have sickly people on my land.’

  ‘What will they do?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. She was wearing a peach silk morning gown and that elegant movement of her shoulders made the pattern of the gown shimmer.

  ‘They’ll go to the Midhurst poorhouse I suppose,’ she said. ‘Any of them who can claim rights in other parishes will go to where they can, if they have money for the fare. I don’t care, it’s none of my concern. I won’t have them on my land any more.’

  I hesitated. This blank ruthlessness was not new to me. I had been sold from a stepfather who despised me, to a master who loved me only when I earned him money. I saw no reason why I should worry over the fate of a dozen dirty villagers who were not even my tenants. And yet, in some part of my mind, I did worry. I did not feel comfortable to be sitting here in the sunny parlour looking at the sheen of Lady Clara’s peach silk while three miles away there were people arguing with bailiffs and begging them not to evict. I knew what it was to have nothing. I knew what it was to be homeless. I wondered what the people would do, those with young children who would be separated from them in the poorhouse. Those young women with husbands who would lose their homes and have to sleep apart.

  ‘I’ll ride the other way,’ I said uncertainly. ‘Towards Wideacre.’

  She put both hands up and carefully smoothed her cheeks as if she would stroke away the faint fretwork of lines from under her eyes.

  ‘Certainly my dear,’ she said pleasantly. ‘If you see any of the evicted tenants don’t go too near. They may be carrying the fever and they will certainly be ill natured. They did have fair warning of my intentions, you know. Mr Briggs told them a day ago.’

  I nodded, thinking that a day’s warning was perhaps not enough if you had been born and bred in a cottage and lived all your life there.

  ‘Perry can ride with you,’ she said. ‘Pull the bell.’

  I did. At Havering we all did what Lady Clara wished. Within the hour Perry and I were obediently riding together up towards the Common at the back of the Havering estate.

  The path wound through a little coppice of silver birches, their heart-shaped leaves shivering in the summer air. It was another h
ot day, the scent of the thick bracken heavy and sweet. When the path came out on a little hill Perry drew rein and we looked back.

  There was little trouble in the village. We could see from where we watched a couple of soldiers standing with Mr Briggs at the end of the village street while half a dozen men went workmanlike down one side, pulling off rotting doors and knocking axes through old dusty thatch. Drawn up in the street, ahead of the wreckers, was a large cart with a handsome shire horse between the shafts. The Havering people were loading their few goods on to the cart, a man standing on the cart helping them. I screwed my eyes against the glare of the sunlight but I hardly needed to see him to know it was Will Tyacke.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Perry asked me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I lied before I had even considered the lie. ‘Perhaps someone from the poorhouse.’

  ‘Oh,’ Perry said innocently, and we stood for a little while, watching in silence.

  The wreckers reached another house and there was a moment’s hesitation. We were too far to hear or see anything clearly but I guessed that someone inside had refused to leave. I shrugged. It was not my land and anyway Lady Clara was probably in the right. Since she was not going to spend money on making the cottages habitable they were better pulled down. The tenants would have to make lives for themselves elsewhere. There was no reason why Lady Clara should be responsible for each and every one of them.

  ‘What d’you think is happening?’ Perry asked. ‘The sun is so bright I can hardly see.’

  I shaded my eyes with my hand. Sea stirred restlessly as he felt my weight move on the saddle.

  ‘Someone, I think a woman,’ I said. I could just make out a little figure standing in the dark doorway of one of the hovels. As I watched, the wreckers made a rush for her and she grabbed the post which propped the thatched porch. In a ludicrous pose, like a comical print, one of the men got hold of her legs while she clung to the post of her house.