Meridon

12

We all missed David, but the routine of our days went on as if he had been there. Jack called the beat instead of the sweet low Welsh voice, and the three of them quarrelled and argued and settled on the way they would train and practise. Jack came out often to Robert and me in the paddock and we would practise our new acts with the horses.

Robert’s seed of an idea of an act with challenging people to ride Sea had developed into a comical routine. Firstly I was to ride Bluebell around the ring, vaulting on and off and then dancing on her back. I had yet to learn to jump through the hoop but I managed a couple of flat-footed jumps and a couple of skips.

‘Straighten up!’ Robert yelled at me time after time as I went bow-legged with my bottom stuck out backwards trying to keep my balance.

Straightening my legs on horseback was an act of pure will, I found. It was no easier in the ungainly crouch which came natural to me. I was probably making it harder for myself. But I found it such a relief to be within grabbing distance of the skewbald mane. Then:

‘Straighten up!’ Robert would yell again, and I would force myself to stand tall and even to look straight ahead with my chin up instead of gazing longingly at Bluebell’s broad back.

The act we planned would have me skipping and then jumping through an open hoop on Bluebell’s back. Then Jack, dressed in fustian breeches and gaiters, would come out from the back of the crowd like a drunken young farmer and demand a turn. At first I was supposed to refuse and turn my head away from him, at which Jack was to take a run from the far side of the ring and vault on to my place, pushing me off the other side.

Often we cracked heads, occasionally we would bounce off each other and fall back, off our own sides. Bluebell was excellent and stood as steady as a rock, even when Jack went up and I failed to drop off and we clung to each other and howled with exhausted laughter.

Then I was supposed to try to carry on with my act while Jack vaulted on to the horse. As long as I stayed well towards the tail and out of the way we were in little danger of collision. Jack vaulted on and ended up facing the tail, then he spun himself around so that he was facing the head, but both his legs were the same side. Then he lay flat on his back, his legs and arms on either side of the cantering horse. Then he spun around like a sack of meal. In the finale he crawled all around under Bluebell’s belly and then under her neck.

We practised it so often that we grew skilled and quick at it but it did not seem funny to us. We only realized how good it would be in the show when Dandy and Katie finished their practice early one day and came over to watch us, and actually collapsed on to the grass they were laughing so loud.

Robert, who had stood in the centre of the field for day after frozen day, had looked very thoughtful at that and had wandered off chewing on the stem of his pipe muttering to himself: ‘Lady and the Jester, the Girl and the Tramp, the Clowns on Horseback.’

Next day he had a sign-writer up and spent a long time with him in the stable yard while I worked the team of ponies in the paddock and Jack and Dandy and Katie practised in the barn.

The horse acts had grown almost beyond recognition now that I could ride in the ring and we had two rosinbacks. I did not yet know what order Robert planned to run the show but we had the dancing pony team, Snow doing his tricks with counting numbers and flags, Jack and me doing a two-horse bareback riding act, my dancing on the back of Bluebell, and then the second part of the act when Jack came in dressed as the farmer. The little ponies could still do the Battle of Blenheim of course; and it was rather more impressive now that the flower of British cavalry outnumbered the French by four to three, and for the end of the show Robert planned some kind of historical tableau.

‘Summat like Saladin, but with the three lasses,’ he said to himself, chomping on his pipe as he did when he was struggling with an idea. He walked around the stable yard in a small half-circle. The pipe puffed a little cloud of triumph. ‘Rape of the Sabine Women,’ he said to himself.

We would be an impressive sight on the road, too. There was Snow, Robert’s grey stallion; Sea, my grey stallion; Bluebell and Morris, the two rosinbacks; Lofty, the new wagon horse; and seven little ponies. Lofty was a heavy draught horse bought with Robert’s profits from the Salisbury gamble to pull the new wagon which would carry the heavy flying rigging and the new screens he ordered. Bluebell and Morris would pull the two sleeping wagons. This summer William would come on the road too, for the first time. Robert might be parsimonious but even he could see that Jack and he could not set the rigging alone. We would need help with the horses at the end of two shows as well.

Then we worked. Worked and waited. It snowed hard in January and when I fell off the back of Bluebell I fell soft into drifts on either side of my track. I fell wet and cold too and Robert took pity on me and ordered me two new pairs of breeches and smocks so that I could change into dry clothes at each break. Mrs Greaves kept them warming for me on the front of her stove and I would dash into the kitchen, my teeth chattering with the cold and strip off my icy cold breeches and smock and drop them on the floor.

William came in one time, as I stripped from my snow-encrusted smock, and dropped the pallet of wood he was carrying and had a tongue-lashing from Mrs Greaves and was banned from the kitchen. But then she turned to me.

‘You must cover yourself, Merry,’ she said gently. ‘You’re not a little girl any more.’

She reached behind the dresser and pulled out a big looking glass, at least a foot square. She held it up for me to see myself, and I craned my neck trying to see all of me in the one glass. I had shot up in height, I was nearly full grown and I had fattened up at last, I was no longer wiry and scrawny. I had filled out. The curves of my body were usually hidden by my smock or by the cut-down shirts of Jack’s I wore for work. Now, in my chemise I could see that my breasts had grown. I had a shadow of hair in each armpit and at my groin. My buttocks were smooth and as tightly muscled as a racehorse. My legs were long and lean, bruised like a charity schoolboy. I took a step closer to the mirror and looked at my face.

The hair I had hacked off in the summer had regrown and now fell to my shoulders in thick copper waves. The tumbling colour of it softened the hungry hard lines of my face and when I smiled the reflection which I saw was that of a stranger. My eyes seemed to have grown more green this winter, they were still set slanty as a cat, black-lashed. My nose was slightly skewed from the fall from the trapeze, my face would never be perfect. I would never have Dandy’s simple rounded loveliness.

‘You will be a great beauty,’ Mrs Greaves said. She took the mirror gently from me and tucked it back. ‘I only hope it will bring you some joy.’

‘I don’t want beauty,’ I said, and though I was a young girl and not very wise I told her the truth. ‘I don’t want beauty and I don’t want a man,’ I said. ‘All I want is a place of my own and some gold under my mattress. And Dandy safe.’

Mrs Greaves chuckled and helped me tie the strings at my cuffs. ‘The only way for a lass like you to get that is to find yourself a man and hope he’s a rich one,’ she counselled. ‘You’ll like it well enough when you’re older.’

I shook my head but said nothing.

‘What about that sister of yours?’ she asked me. ‘She’s set her sights on Master Jack, hasn’t she? Small change she’ll get there.’

I looked warily at Mrs Greaves. She worked in silence at the dinner table, she cooked in silence in the kitchen. But she saw a good deal more than anyone might expect. I knew she was not in Robert’s confidence, but I feared what she might tell him.

‘Who says?’ I asked, cautious as a hedgerow brat.

Mrs Greaves chuckled. ‘Think I’m blind, child?’ she asked me. ‘My tea doesn’t have great lumps in the pot, yet night after night that poor lad has drunk down God knows what nonsense. Is it working for her?’

My face was guarded. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

I did know. And it was working. The love potion, or the boredom of the short winter days and the long winter evenings. The flattery of two pretty girls or the importance of being their catcher. Something was calling Jack over to our little room above the stable for evening after evening while his father pored over maps and over almanacs of fairs.

We would hear his step on the foot of the stair and then his low: ‘Hulloa!’ and Dandy would call back: ‘Come up, Jack!’ in a voice of lazy sweetness.

She would toss a handful of lavender seeds on the fire so it smoked with an acrid sweetness. She would kick a pair of soiled clouts under the mattress, and she would loosen the top of her bodice so that it showed the creamy curves of the tops of her breasts. Then she would wink at Katie and me and say, ‘Ten minutes, mind,’ in quite a different voice to the two of us.

Night after night Jack’s head came through the trapdoor wearing his half-rueful, half-roguish smile.

‘Hello Meridon, Dandy, Katie,’ he would say. ‘I brought you some apples from the store room.’

He would hand them out and we would sit and munch the icy fruit and talk about the work we had done that day. The tricks that had worked or failed and our hopes for the season ahead of us.

After about ten minutes or so Katie, who had now seen the golden guinea she was to collect at Easter, would prompt me.

‘I’ll help you water-up, Merry,’ she would say; and the two of us would go down the stairs to check all the horses had water and hay for the night and that they were safe in the paddock. Snow and Sea were kept indoors and we would check them too. Sometimes we would idle then, in the loose-boxes, giving Dandy and Jack time to be alone together. I would half listen to Katie’s chatter about lads in Warminster and one time a real gentleman from as far away as Bath, but most of the time I would lean my cheek against Sea’s warm neck and wish we were far away.

All I had to do to stop this courtship in its tracks was to tell Robert. He would be angry but it would be no worse than one of his bawled tirades. I could cool Jack’s ardour by just a hint of such a thing. Or I could promise Katie a further guinea if she intrigued with him behind Dandy’s back. But for some reason I felt powerless. I felt as if Dandy’s hex on Jack had bound us all, so that Katie and I lingered in the stables though neither of us wished the affair well. And I lied to Mrs Greaves who might have told me what to do.

‘Dandy doesn’t fancy Jack,’ I said unconvincingly. ‘We’re all three of us close, through being on the road together and working together like we do. Robert’s aiming higher than us for his son; and Dandy has her work.’

Mrs Greaves nodded and let it go at that. ‘Dinner in twenty minutes,’ she said and picked up my wet things from the floor.

I nodded and went out into the gathering darkness to the stable yard. William should have lit the fire in our little room by now and I thought I would steal some moments on my own. Half-way up the ladder I heard voices and I paused. I heard Jack’s voice, and Dandy’s amused ripple of laughter.

‘I think you’ve hexed me, Dandy, with some damned gypsy brew,’ he said. ‘I truly do!’

‘Only the magic that’s in your breeches,’ Dandy said softly, a smile in her voice. ‘What’s this then, my bonny lad, if it isn’t magic?’

‘Oh Dandy,’ Jack sighed. ‘Nay, keep your hands off, lass. I won’t be teased by you. You’ll make me too weak to catch you at practice tomorrow.’

‘David told me to fly to you as if I loved you,’ she said. ‘I can do that Jack. I can fly to you as if I love you. I do love you, you know.’

‘Dandy,’ Jack sounded uncomfortable.

‘D’you love me?’ she asked earnestly.

‘Dandy,’ Jack said again.

‘You love me when I touch you there,’ she said in a soft breathy voice. ‘You love me well enough when I open my bodice like this, don’t you Jack? You love me well enough when I kiss you like this, don’t you Jack?’

I could hear Jack’s breathing suddenly grow harsher and I heard an abrupt scuffle as he broke away from her.

‘Now stop this, Dandy,’ he said rapidly. ‘We’ve got to stop this. If my da finds out he’ll throw us both off the show and we’ll have nowhere to go and nothing to live on. He warned us both. I’m a fool to come up here and be with you on my own, and you’re a devil to lead me on like this. You know I can’t promise to love you. I don’t promise to love you. When we started you said it was just all for fun. I can’t make promises to any lass, you know that.’

There was utter silence in the little room. I crept a bit closer to the trapdoor and strained my ears to hear. I thought that Dandy would be mad with anger that he should pull away from her, but I had not realized how clever she was with him.

‘All right,’ she said sweetly and the laughter was back in her voice. ‘All right, bonny Jack. We’ll play by your rules and we won’t upset your da. You make no promises to me and I’ll make no promises to you.’

I heard the floorboard creak as she stood up and the whisper of her petticoat as she slid down her gown.

‘Now,’ she said, and her voice was full of potent female power. ‘Now you tell me, and you can tell me true. Not whether you love me, bonny Jack, for we’ve agreed not to say that word. But tell me if you like the look of me, mother-naked.’

I heard a sound from Jack that was like a groan and then the tumbling sound of them falling together back on to a bed. I heard my sister gasp as he thrust into her and then her little whimpering cries as they sought their pleasure together. He gave a muffled shout and then a little later I heard Dandy sigh deeply as if she had finally got what she wanted.

I sat with my chin cupped in my hands on the draughty stairs and waited for them to have done so that I could get into my room. I felt neither shock, nor that second-rate desire which comes from watching or hearing. I had heard and seen my da and Zima ever since I was a baby and it meant nothing to me except the increased likelihood of more quarrels later when their appetites were slaked.

I had warned Dandy off, Jack had warned her against asking him for love. She had been hot for him since the summer day she first saw him in his red shirt and his white breeches in the field outside Salisbury fair. Now she had wooed him and had him. I did not know if that would be enough for her. I felt, in every aching bone of my chilled body, that no good would come to us of this, Jack might be as randy as a stud dog, but he was not in love. If she was counting on him to treat this romp as a betrothal she would be sorry before she was done.

I shrugged and stood up. Dandy had been likely to lose her maidenhead young, and I could have stopped it as easily as stopping the wind blowing. The affair might cool within weeks and my worry would have been for nothing. Certainly when we were working together on the road under Robert’s eye there would be fewer opportunities for pleasuring. Jack had told her clearly that he would not love nor marry her, and she had taken him with that knowledge to satisfy his lust and hers. I judged they had enjoyed the private use of our room for long enough and crept down to the foot of the ladder. By the time I clattered slowly up they were huddled into their clothes and Jack was tending the fire. He nodded at my sullen face and took himself off to wash before dinner.

Dandy shot me a sideways glance. ‘I’ve had him,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I was on the stairs.’

She nodded. Neither of us had ever been house-dwellers, we never minded being overheard.

‘Will that be enough for you now?’ I asked her. ‘Have him for pleasure, as you said, and leave the rest alone.’

She pulled the bow that tied her hair and the great black wave tumbled down over her face. ‘Oh surely,’ she said, from underneath it, and retired to her pallet and started brushing it through.

I stared at her in silent frustration. She was putting up a wall around her thoughts as surely as if she had told me to mind my own business. We had both learned that trick. Dandy could lie with her lover, learn her skill, wash her body in front of me without embarrassment. She and I were raised in a wagon, we had no sense of private place. Our private rooms were all in our own minds and she could shut me out of her plans and imagination as surely as I could close her out of mine.

‘You won’t be able to have him without Robert knowing when we’re on the road,’ I said warningly.

Dandy swept back a wave of glossy black hair. She smiled at me, her eyes were sated. She looked as if she knew what she was doing and was well pleased.

‘I’ll be ready to move on by then,’ she said sweetly. ‘Don’t fuss, Meridon, you’re like an old mother hen. I know what I’m doing. I’ve got ten weeks.’

I turned from her and stared into the fire, the fire which Jack had tended for us. If I were a real Romany I should see in the fire what the danger was which sent shivers up my spine. If I had the Sight instead of pretending to it, and a few worthless dreams of Wide, I should know what I feared so. I turned my fears over in my mind like the mother hen she called me, turning her eggs. Robert could abandon us in his rage when he found that Dandy and Jack had lain together. I knew that did not matter now. There would be other shows which would be glad to have us. Dandy had a unique skill and I had special talent. Dandy was the only girl flyer in the country and I was the best trainer and rider I knew. We had ten guineas (nine, thanks to Dandy’s desires) and a fifty-pound hunter. We would not starve. It was not the fear of being left by Robert which clutched at my heart.

Dandy might fall. But Dandy always might fall. She was skilled and Jack was a good catcher. They had been taught well and they were practising daily. Robert had sworn that they would never work without the catch-net. The height might make me sick with fear but it did not trouble Dandy. And her happiness was sound enough. I knew she was hot for Jack but it was partly lust and partly pique because he had fancied Katie. I did not believe in love. I had never seen such a thing. I had never seen a man or a woman in love. I had never seen a man or a woman do anything except please themselves. While Dandy wanted Jack I thought she would be able to have him. If his da spoiled sport when we were on the road she could make her choice to leave him go, or find ways to be with him. Either way it was Dandy’s amusement. Not her life’s need.

‘Are you done? Old Mother Merry?’ Dandy asked me mockingly. She had tied up her hair again and had a fresh kerchief tied at her neck. She had been watching me as I stared at the flames, and she had read my face aright. ‘Worried all you can?’ she taunted me.

‘Yes,’ I said. Then I put my finger on the one, last fear. ‘You are sure the old woman showed you how to stop a baby,’ I said. ‘And told you when you are safe to lie with a man?’

Dandy chuckled, a deep rich laugh and her blackberry eyes danced. ‘Oh aye,’ she said. ‘There’s a time when you cannot make a child, and a time when you will. There’s herbs which will help you do it, and herbs which will make it less likely. There’s some nasty stuff which turns your guts half inside out but washes a baby out if one is started. I know how to make sure I don’t get with child.’ Her black eyes teased me. ‘And how to get a belly on me if I wish it,’ she said.

‘You would not wish it,’ I said stiffly.

Dandy chuckled. ‘And let Katie be the only one up on the high trapeze in a pink stomacher, Meridon? You must be mad!’