Meridon

7

In my apprehensive fright of the ropes and the swings and the high vaulting roof of the barn I had been certain that David would insist we should climb right to the top on that very first morning. But he did not. Even before Dandy reappeared from the house looking sulky and beautiful in a pair of baggy homespun breeches belonging to William and a linen shirt of Jack’s, David had ordered Jack and me to trot and then sprint around the barn on five increasingly fast circuits.

Then he had us running backwards and dancing on the spot until our faces were flushed and we were all panting. Dandy’s careful coronet came down and she twisted it carelessly into a bun on the nape of her neck. But the three of us were as fit as working ponies. Jack and I had been training hard every night on the bareback act and were as quick and as supple as greyhounds. And for all that Dandy would sneak off to doze in the sun at every opportunity, she had been raised as a travelling child and to walk twenty or thirty miles in a day was no hardship to her – and to swim races at the end of it.

‘You’ll do,’ David himself was puffing as we dropped to the wood shavings for our first rest. ‘I was afraid that you would all be plump and lazy, but you are all well muscled and you’ve got plenty of wind.’

‘When do we go up?’ Dandy demanded.

‘Any time you like,’ he said carelessly. ‘I’ll check the rigging while you go to your breakfast and then you can go up and down whenever you wish. I’ll show you how to drop into the net, and once you know that you can come to no harm.’

‘I don’t know I can,’ I said. I was keeping my voice steady but the flutter of fear in my belly kept snatching my breath away.

David smiled at me, his enormous moustaches still curly on his sweaty cheeks.

‘I know you are afraid,’ he said reassuringly. ‘I understand that. I have been afraid too. You will work at the speed you wish. You’ve the build for it, and the body, I should think. But this is something you can only do if your heart is in it. I’d not be party to forcing anyone up a ladder.’

‘How did you come into it?’ Jack asked.

David smiled. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said lazily. ‘The pressgang snatched me from my home at Newport and I was pressed on board a man-of-war – big it was, frightening for a country lad. I jumped ship as soon as I could, Portugal actually, Lisbon, and lived rough for a while. Then I joined a travelling show of contortionists. I didn’t have the body for that, but they put me at the bottom of the heap and I could hold the rest of them up. Then I saw an act up high on Roman Rings and I set my heart on it.’ He twirled his moustache. ‘It made me,’ he said simply. ‘I apprenticed myself to the man I saw doing it, and he taught me. Then we used a trapeze instead of the rings which meant we could swing out and not just hang like other performers were doing. First I was the only one. But then his young son started to learn and we found he could swing out and reach for me, and I could catch him and swing him back to his trapeze. It was a good act.’

He paused. I saw his eyes narrow with grief at some memory. I felt my belly clench with fear.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘The lad fell,’ he said simply. ‘He fell and broke his neck and died.’

Nobody said anything for a moment.

‘Merry, you’re green,’ Jack said. ‘Are you going to be sick?’

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Go on, David. What did you do then?’

‘I came back to this country and found a partner to help me with the rigging and to stand the other side and reach out and catch my feet as I swung over. But your father is the man with the ideas! I’d never have thought of putting lasses up high. The people will love it.’

‘He’ll be paying you a good sum,’ Dandy said acutely. ‘You’re the only man in England who can swing on a trapeze. Yet you’re teaching us. And you say yourself that girls will pull a crowd.’

David beamed. ‘I’m getting old,’ he said frankly. ‘I get tired after two shows and my partner is getting slow. I’ve no savings, nothing at all. Robert is paying me a king’s ransom to teach you three something that I’ll have no use for in two seasons’ time. And he’ll pay me more yet – to refuse to teach other people the tricks I’ve taught you.’ He grinned at Jack and moistened his fingers with his tongue so that he could curl the ends of his moustache. ‘That’s no secret,’ he said. ‘Your father knows it as well as I do.’

Jack nodded. ‘How long do you last on the trapeze?’ he asked.

‘Till you’re twenty-five or so,’ David said consideringly. ‘Depends how fit you are to start with. I’ve been hungry and ill most of my life. I don’t expect to be working much after thirty.’

‘It’s a hard life,’ I said looking at him. His skin was flushed pink and the wonderful moustaches were curly, ebullient. But the bags under his eyes were deep and shadowed.

‘Isn’t every trade hard?’ he asked me; and I nodded, hearing an echo of my own half-starved worldliness.

‘Now!’ he said, suddenly active. ‘To work.’

He set Jack to exercises, five hundred paces of running on the spot and then lying flat and pushing up and down using his arms. He gave Dandy a metal bar and ordered her to run on the spot holding it before her, and then above her head, and then push it up and down as she ran. But me he took around the waist and lifted me up so that my fingers closed around the smooth hardness of the low-slung trapeze bar.

I hung like a confused bat while he stepped back and called me to raise my legs and beat them down hard. I did so, and the swing rocked forward.

‘Keep your legs together! Let the swing take you back!’ he called. ‘Now at the back-up, at the return of the swing stick your arse out, force your legs down together! Beat!’

Again and again he called the timing for me, and the barn faded, and Jack and Dandy’s sweating faces faded, and my fear faded until there was nothing but a voice saying, ‘Now!’ and my irritatingly slow body taking too long to beat down with the legs so that I swung forward, arched like the prow of a boat.

I could not get my legs to go down fast enough, smoothly enough. Each time he said, ‘Now!’ I was conscious of being too late, too slow. I had never felt so fat and awkward and flustered in my life. Then when the swing bore me forward I could not bring up my legs high enough to give me the space to beat back. I worked till I was near tears with frustration and with a longing sense that I could do it – that I was only a few lazy muscles away from doing it right – when he said gently: ‘That’s enough Meridon. Have a rest now.’

I shook my head then and the swing drifted to a standstill and I found my arms were aching with fatigue. I dropped down off the swing and crumpled to sit where I landed. Dandy and Jack were watching me and David had a quizzical smile.

‘You like it,’ he said certainly.

I nodded ruefully. ‘I feel so close to getting it right!’ I said angrily. ‘I just can’t get to the beat at the right time.’

‘I’ll try,’ Jack offered and picked himself up off the floor. His hands and wrists were plastered with wood shavings and he brushed them off. I moved aside and squatted on my haunches to watch him. My arms and shoulders were tingling with the strain and my hard-worked belly was quivering. My hands and legs were shaking but it was a trembly exhilaration from exhausted muscles and a singing delight in stretching my body to a new skill.

I had been angry with myself for missing the beat of it, but I was glad to see that I was better than Jack. It had irritated me for months, the way he could stand so easily on Bluebell’s back while I was still dependent on his shoulder or on the strap for balance. David called the beat for him, and counted it. But Jack was nowhere near. He dropped off the trapeze red-faced and cursing under his voice. One level look from David’s blue eyes hushed him but he stalked off to where a bar was set into the wall and started hauling himself up and down on it in irritable silence.

Dandy swayed forward. ‘My turn?’ she asked David.

‘Your turn,’ he said and put his big hands on her small waist to lift her up.

She was better than Jack. She had a sense of rhythm as natural as dancing and she could sway forward and back with the trapeze rather than struggling against it. Her upraised arms strained the shirt over her breasts and I watched David’s eyes to see if he was looking at her. He was not. He was watching the beat of her legs as she tried to work the trapeze forward and back. I gave a little secret smile. I had nothing to fear from David. He might notice Dandy’s looks, but he was not a man to go mad for her. He would not forget that he had a job of work to do here and a small fortune to make if he did it right.

We worked like that all the early morning until William came down to summon us for breakfast in the kitchen. We ate as if we were half starved, Mrs Greaves bringing tray after tray of fresh-baked rolls to the table with home-made creamy butter, ham, beef, and cheese. Jack and David drank great pints of ale while Dandy and I drank water. Even then, I could not resist snatching an apple from the bowl as I passed the Welsh dresser on our way out again.

David declared an hour’s rest while he checked the rigging, and Dandy went to raid Jack’s wardrobe for something more becoming while he and I went to check the ponies. After we had seen they were well, and watered them and humped a hay net down to them, the church clock was ringing the hour and we were due back in the barn.

Already there was a blacksmith working on a second-hand stove in the corner, rigging a chimney through a gap in the wall. I noted the speed with which David’s demands were met; but I said nothing.

Dandy and Jack were wild to go up the shaking ladder to the platform at the top and David said that they might climb up. He showed Jack how to hold the ladder while Dandy climbed, by stepping into the bottom rung and weighting it for her, and then he held it steady while Jack went up too. I sat in the corner of the barn like an unfledged squab and peered at them through the cracks in my fingers. I did not dare move my hands from covering my face. David, courteously, paid no attention to me at all.

He showed them how to climb the ladder, toe-heel, toe-heel, all up the shaking length of it. And he laughed gently when Dandy called down that she was out of breath just from climbing the twenty-five steps.

‘You must practise then!’ he said. ‘If you are going to be Mademoiselle Dandy, the Angel without Wings, then you must seem to soar up the ladder. Not waddle up like a pinioned duck!’

He went up the ladder behind Jack, with no one to hold it still for him, and he looked as if he were running upstairs he took it so swiftly. I peeped through my fingers at them, sickeningly high, and I caught parts of his low-voiced instructions. He was thoughtful for me, because he called down to warn me.

‘Meridon, I am teaching them to fall into the net, so you will see us all falling, but we shall all be quite safe.’

I uncovered my face at that so that he could see me nod to show I understood. I even watched as he took hold of the trapeze firmly in his hands and stepped off the little platform, swinging gently out, letting its swing die down of its own accord until it was still – then he dropped from it. As he fell he turned his legs up so that he landed on his back and on his shoulders. He sprang to his feet and walked with an odd, bouncy, graceless stride to the edge of the net and vaulted down.

‘Like that!’ he called. ‘Keep your legs up, your chin tucked on your chest and you cannot be hurt.’

Jack’s distant white face nodded and he reached out a shepherd’s crook and hooked the swinging trapeze and drew it towards him. I watched as he took a grip of it and then I had to shut my eyes as I saw his expression harden and knew he was nerving himself to step off the platform clinging to it.

The twang of the net told me he had landed safely, and his yell of elation up to Dandy. ‘Come on, Dandy! It is fine! It is a wonderful feeling. Better than riding even! And the fall is scary, but it is so good to feel yourself safe! Come on, Dandy!’

That broke something in me. ‘Don’t make her! Don’t make her!’ I screamed and whirled up from the wood shavings on the floor of the barn. Jack had sprung down from the net and turned and fairly caught me as I launched myself at him. ‘You shouldn’t! You shouldn’t!’ I said. I was beyond myself, not knowing what I was saying. My hands were in fists and I went to thump Jack hard in the face, but he parried the blow. ‘Don’t make her!’ I shrieked again. ‘It ain’t safe!’

Jack could not manage me, but David, a clear foot taller than him and much heavier, grabbed my arms and hugged me tight, pinning my arms to my sides.

‘It is safe,’ he said, his voice a low rumble in my ear. ‘I would not let your sister come to harm. I would not let her up there if I thought her in danger. I want her to do well, and so do you. She wants to learn this trick. You must not be selfish and stop her going her way.’

‘It’s not safe for her,’ I said. I was weeping in the hopeless effort to make him understand me. ‘It’s not safe for her! I know! I am a gypsy! I have the Sight! It’s not safe for her!’

He turned me in his arms, turned me to face him and scanned my frantic wet face. ‘What is safe for her?’ he asked gently. ‘This is the way she chooses now. She could choose worse.’

That made me pause. If Dandy could delight in the applause from hundreds of people and earn a fair share of the profits then she would not go running after strangers and let them put their hands up her ragged skirts for a penny. If I knew Dandy, she would learn airs and graces as soon as she became Mademoiselle Dandy. I could trust Robert Gower to keep his investment away from men who would hurt her. I could trust him not to leave her on the road once she was a trained act in her own right and any showman in the world would give his eye-teeth for her.

I gave a little sob. ‘She’ll fall,’ I said uncertainly. ‘I’m sure she will.’

His grip tightened on me. ‘You can will her into falling,’ he said ominously. ‘If you carry on like this you will have wished her into a fall. You are frightening yourself and you are frightening her. You are robbing both of you of the confidence you need, and you are wrecking my training. And you’re a fool if you do that, Meridon. You and I both know that Robert Gower won’t keep her if she’s idle.’

I shrugged off David’s restraining arms and looked up into his face. I knew my eyes were blank with despair. ‘We keep on travelling,’ I said. ‘But there is nowhere to go.’

His blue eyes were sympathetic. ‘You’re no gypsy,’ he said. ‘You want a home.’

I nodded, the familiar longing for Wide rising up inside me so strongly that I thought it would choke me like swallowed grief. ‘I want to take Dandy somewhere safe,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘You keep the pennies,’ he said softly. ‘She’ll earn well with this act when I’ve finished training her. You watch how Robert Gower did it. You keep the pennies and the gold and within a season or two you could buy your own home for her. Then you can take her away.’

I nodded. Dandy was still waiting on the little board, I could see it swaying in the air currents at the roof of the barn.

‘She’ll need to hear you,’ he said. ‘You’d better tell her you’re all right.’

‘Very well,’ I said, surly. ‘I’ll tell her.’

Dandy’s pale distant face peered at me from the side of the platform, looking down to where I stood far, far below her.

‘All right, Dandy,’ I called up. ‘I’m all right now. I’m sorry. You jump if you want to. Or come down the ladder if that’s all you want to do today. You’ll never hear me try to stop you again.’

She nodded and I saw her hook the trapeze towards her.

‘I’ve never seen you cry before,’ Jack said wonderingly. He put a hand up to touch the tears on my cheek but I jerked my head away.

It didn’t stop him. ‘I didn’t think you were girl enough for tears, Meridon,’ he said. His tone was as soft as a lover.

I shot him a hard sideways look. ‘She’ll never hear me call her down again,’ I promised. ‘And you’ll never see me cry again. There’s only one person in the whole world I care for, Jack Gower, and that’s my sister Dandy. If she wants to swing on the trapeze then she shall. She won’t hear me scream. And you’ll never see me cry again.’

I turned my shoulder on him and looked up to the roof of the barn. I could not see Dandy’s face. I did not know what she was thinking as she stood there on that rickety little platform and looked down at us: at the fretwork of the brown rope catch-net, the white wood shaving floor, and our three pale faces staring up at her. Then she snatched the bar with a sudden decision and swooped out on it like a swallow. At precisely the centre of its return, at the very best and safest place, she let go and dropped like a stone, falling on to her back into the very plumb centre of the net.

There were hugs all around at that, but I stood aloof, even fending Dandy off when she turned to me with her face alight with her triumph.

‘Back to work,’ David called, and set us to exercises again.

Jack was ordered to hook his legs over the bar on the wall and practise trying to haul his body up so that it was parallel with the ground. I worked beside him, hanging from my arms and pulling myself up so that my eyes were level with the bar and then dropping down again in one fluid motion.

Dandy he lifted up to the trapeze and set her to learning the time to beat again.

Then we all took a short rest and swapped around until dinner-time.

Robert Gower came into the kitchen when we were at our dinner and took Mrs Greaves’s seat at the head of the table, a large glass of port in his hand.

‘Would you care for one of these, David?’ he asked, gesturing to his glass.

‘I’ll take one tonight gladly,’ David replied. ‘But I never drink while I’m working. It’s a rule you could set these young people, too. It makes you a little bit slow and a little bit heavy. But the worst thing it does is make you think that you are better than you are!’

Robert laughed. ‘There’s many that find that is its greatest advantage!’ he observed.

David smiled back. ‘Aye, but I’d not trust a man like that to catch me if I were working without a net beneath me,’ he said.

Robert sprang on that. ‘You use cushions in your other show,’ he said. ‘Why did you suggest we try a net here?’

David nodded. ‘For your own convenience mostly,’ he said. ‘Cushions are fine for a show which is housed in one place. But enough cushions to make a soft landing would take a wagon to themselves. I’ve seen a net used in a show in France and I thought it would be the very thing for you. If they were using the rings, and just hanging, not letting go at all, you could perhaps take the risk. But swinging out and catching, you need only be a little way out, half an inch, and you’re falling.’

The table wavered beneath my eyes. I took my lower lip in a firm grip between my teeth. Dandy’s knee pressed against mine reassuringly.

‘I’ve worked without cushions or nets,’ David said. ‘I don’t mind it for myself. But the lad I was working with died when he fell without a net under him. He’d be alive today if his da hadn’t been trying to draw a bigger crowd with the better spectacle.’ He looked shrewdly at Robert Gower. ‘It’s a false economy,’ he said sweetly. ‘You get a massive crowd for the next three or four nights after a trapeze artist has fallen. They all come for the encore, you see. But then you’re one down for the rest of the tour. And good trapeze artists don’t train quick and don’t come cheap. You’re better off with a catch-net under them.’

‘I agree,’ Robert Gower said briefly. I took a deep breath and felt the room steady again.

‘Ready to get back to work?’ David asked the three of us. We nodded with less enthusiasm than at breakfast. I was already feeling the familiar ache of overworked muscles along my back and my arms. I was wiry and lean but not all my humping of hay bales had prepared me for the work of pulling myself up and down from a bar using my arm muscles alone.

‘My belly aches as if I’ve got the flux,’ Dandy said. I saw Robert exchange a quick smile with David. Dandy’s coquetry had lasted only as long as her energy.

‘That’s the muscles,’ David said agreeably. ‘You’re all loose and flabby, Dandy! By the time you’re flying I shall be able to cut a loaf of bread on your belly and you’ll be as hard as a board.’

Dandy flicked her hair back and shot him a look from under her black eyelashes. ‘I don’t think I’ll be inviting you to dine off of me,’ she said, her voice warm with a contradictory promise.

‘Any aches, Jack?’ Robert asked.

‘Only all over,’ Jack said with a wry smile. ‘It’s tomorrow I’ll stiffen up, I won’t want to work then.’

‘Merry won’t have to work tomorrow,’ Dandy said enviously. ‘Why’re you taking her to the horse fair, Robert? Can’t we all go?’

‘She’ll be working at the horse fair,’ Robert said firmly. ‘Not flitting around and chasing young men. I want her to watch the horses outside the ring for me and keep her ears open, so I know what I’m bidding for. Merry can judge horseflesh better than either of you – actually better than me,’ he said honestly. ‘And she’s such a little slip of a thing no one will care what they say in front of her. She’ll be my eyes and ears tomorrow.’

I beamed. I was only fifteen and as susceptible to flattery in some areas as anyone else.

‘But mind you wear your dress and apron,’ he said firmly. ‘And get Dandy to pin your cap over those dratted short curls of yours. You looked like a tatterdemalion in church yesterday. I want you looking respectable.’

‘Yes, Robert,’ I said demurely, too proud of my status as an expert on horseflesh to resent the slight to my looks.

‘And be ready to leave at seven,’ he said firmly. ‘We’ll breakfast as we go.’