Meridon

34

I lay for more long hours. No one came to see me. The house was silent around me in the early morning quietness which Lady Clara demanded. Outside in the street a ballad-seller started singing a snatch of song, and I heard our front door open and close and one of the footmen tell him briskly to be off. The church clock at St George’s struck the hour. I started trying to count it but there were so many echoes in my head from each chime that I lost count and could not make it out. I thought it was about ten.

I could feel my throat closing tighter and I could feel panic rising in me as I thought that soon I would not be able to breathe at all. Then I supposed that I would die. I could no longer feel resigned and ready for death. When I thought of dying, clutching for my breath in this stuffy little room, I knew that I was most terribly afraid. It was as bad as it, had been up on the trapeze when I had hung in utter terror of falling. Now as I sucked each gasp of air down into my body I felt the same shameful terror. Soon I should not be able to breathe at all.

I shut my eyes and tried to drift into sleep so that my dying would not be a terror-driven scrabble for breath; but it was no good. I was awake and alert now, my throat dry as paper, my tongue swollen in my mouth. I felt as if I were dying of thirst – never mind typhus. The jug of lemonade hovered like a mirage, well out of my reach. The phial of laudanum, which would have eased my pain, was beside it.

I could hear a horrid rasping noise in the room, like a saw on dry wood. It came irregularly, with a growing gap between the sound. It was my breath, it was the noise of my breath as I struggled to get air into my lungs. I opened my eyes again and listened in fear to the noise, and felt the pain of each laboured heave at air. I remembered then my ma in the wagon and how she had kept us awake with that regular gasp. I was sorry then that I had cursed her in my hard little childish heart for being so noisy and interrupting a dream I had been having. A dream of a place called Wide.

The bedroom door opened as the clock started chiming the half past the hour. I tried to open my eyes and found they were stuck together. I was blinded and for a moment I thought I was stone-blind with the illness.

‘Sarah, I hear you are unwell,’ Lady Clara’s voice was clear, confident. I shuddered at the noise of her footsteps which echoed and banged in my head. Then I heard her quick indrawn breath. I heard the noise of her skirts whisk as she crossed to the bell-pull by the fireplace, and then the running feet of Rimmings, Sewell and Emily.

She ordered a bowl of warm water and in a few moments I felt someone gently sponging my eyes until they fluttered and I could open them and see Rimmings holding me as far from her body as possible and sponging my face at arms’ length. Sewell was weeping quietly in the corner with her apron up to her eyes and I guessed that the low-voiced exchange I had heard had been her refusing to touch me and Lady Clara’s instantaneous dismissal.

‘You may go, Sewell,’ she said. ‘Pack your bags and be out by noon.’

Sewell scurried from the room.

‘She needs a nurse, your ladyship,’ Rimmings offered, turning my pillow so that the cool side was under my hot neck. ‘She needs a nurse.’

‘Of course she needs a nurse, you fool,’ her ladyship said from my writing table. ‘And a doctor. I can’t think why I wasn’t called.’

‘I feared to disturb your ladyship, and she was sleeping well after Emily gave her some laudanum.’

‘Did you?’ Lady Clara shot a look at Emily who bobbed a curtsey with melting knees.

‘Yes’m,’ she said faintly.

‘How many drops?’ Lady Clara demanded.

Emily shot an anguished look at Rimmings who cut in smoothly: ‘I thought three, your ladyship, for Miss Sarah had lost her voice this morning but she was not overheated.’

Lady Clara nodded. ‘None the less she is seriously unwell now,’ she said firmly. ‘Rimmings, take this note to a footman and tell him to take it round to Doctor Player at once.’

Rimmings stepped back from my bedside gladly enough and whisked out of the room.

‘You,’ Lady Clara said to Emily. ‘You clear up in here, understand?’

Emily dipped a curtsey.

Lady Clara came and stood at the foot of my bed. ‘Sarah, can you understand me?’ she asked.

I managed a small nod.

‘I have sent for the doctor, and he will be here soon,’ she said. ‘He will make you well again.’

I was so weak with fear and so hopeful of being able to breathe again I could have wept. Besides, I remembered my ma’s weak terror as she died alone, fighting for her breath. I didn’t want to be alone like her, I wanted someone to smooth my forehead and tell me that I would be well.

‘Sarah, have you made a will?’ Lady Clara demanded.

I choked with shock.

‘Have you made a will?’ she asked again, thinking I had not heard.

I shook my head.

‘I’ll send for your lawyers then, as well,’ she said brusquely. ‘Don’t be alarmed my dear, but if it is typhus then I know you would want to be on the safe side. I’ll have the footman go for him as soon as he gets back.’ She paused. ‘Is there anything you would like?’

I forced myself to speak, to force a word through the sandpaper of my throat. ‘Drink,’ I said.

Lady Clara came no closer but she nodded Emily to the bed. ‘Pour Miss Sarah a drink,’ she said sharply. ‘Not like that. Up to the brim. Now lift her up. Yes, hold her around the shoulders and lift her. Now take the glass and hold it for her.’

The cold glass touched my lips and the sweet clear liquid slid into my mouth. The first few mouthfuls choked me and Emily nearly drowned me before Lady Clara snapped at her to stop and let me breathe. But then the sweet clear ease of it opened my throat and I drank three glasses before Emily lowered me to the pillow again and said softly:

‘Beg pardon, m’m.’

Lady Clara ordered her to sit by my bedside and give me more lemonade if I asked for it. Emily hesitated, but then sank into a chair when her ladyship scowled.

‘Beg pardon, m’m,’ she said.

Lady Clara gave a swift comprehensive look around the room, and at me. I was breathing a little easier now I was higher on the pillows but that eerie rasping noise came every time I drew a breath. I saw a shadow cross her face and I knew she thought I would die and she would have to find another biddable heiress to marry her son, and she would have to find her quickly before his gambling debts ruined them all.

‘I’ll see you in a moment,’ she said shortly and left the room.

Emily and I sat in silence, listening to the awful hoarseness of my breath. Then I was too weary to do anything more but doze again.

That was my last lucid moment for days.

A lot of the time was very hot, but there were also long times when I shivered with cold. There was a man who came from time to time whose touch was gentle, and I mistook him for Robert Gower and thought I was back in the parlour hurt from falling from the trapeze. There was a woman, a nurse I suppose, who smelled of spirits and who rolled me from side to side when she had to change the sheets on the bed. My skin flinched when she touched me with her hard dirty hands and she used to laugh in a loud beery voice when I winced.

Sometimes Lady Clara was there, always asking me if I felt well enough to sign something. Once she actually put a pen in my hand and held a paper on the bed before me. I remember I thought she was going to take Sea from me – an odd fancy from my fever – and I let the pen fall on the white sheets and closed my eyes to shut her out. I remember my hair became matted with sweat and tangled and the nurse had her way and hacked it off. I wandered a little in my mind after that; with the short ragged bob I thought I was Meridon again.

Often, very often, Perry was there. Sometimes drunk, sometimes sober. Always gentle and kind to me. He brought me little posies of flowers, he paid a ballad singer to sing songs under my window one afternoon. He brought hot-house grapes and pineapples and sliced them up small so that I could eat them. When I was rambling in fever I always knew Perry, his hand was always cool against my cheek and the smell of gin and his favourite soap was distinctive. One time when the nurse was out of the room he leaned over me and asked if he could take some guineas out of my purse.

‘I’m desperate short, Sarah,’ he said.

I knew I should not allow it. I knew he had promised me, in what seemed another lifetime, hundreds of years ago, that he would never never gamble again. But I had no will to match against his imploring blue eyes.

‘Please Sarah,’ he said.

I blinked, and he took that for assent and I heard the chink of gold coins and then the soft closing of the door behind him as he left me.

The doctor came again and again. Then one day, when I felt so weary and so sick that I half wished they would all leave me, leave me and let me die in peace, I saw him nod to Lady Clara and tell her there was nothing he could do. They would have to wait and see. I realized, only dimly, that they were talking about my death.

‘Her mother died of childbed fever,’ Lady Clara said.

The doctor nodded. ‘But it’s strong stock,’ he said. ‘Squires, the backbone of the country.’

Lady Clara nodded. I knew she would be thinking that I had not been reared as a squire’s child, with nothing but the best to eat and drink.

‘She is very strong,’ she said hopefully. ‘Wiry.’

The doctor inclined an inquisitive eyebrow. ‘What of the estate if she goes?’

Lady Clara looked bleak. ‘Back to the Laceys,’ she said. ‘All the contracts depend on marriage between Perry and her. Betrothal is not enough.’

The doctor nodded ‘You must be worried,’ he offered.

Lady Clara gave a little moan and turned towards the window where the winter sky was greying into darkness. ‘Perry will be ruined if he cannot get his hands on his capital soon,’ she said. ‘And I was counting on the revenues of the Wideacre estate. It is a gold mine, that place. My income depends on the Havering estate remaining strong. And if Perry does not marry at all…’ she trailed off but the desolation in her voice echoed in my head. She was thinking of the tumbled Dower House, and the Havering kin who would take her place.

Doctor Player glanced towards the bed and his look at me gleamed. I had my eyes shut and they thought I was sleeping. Indeed, I was only half conscious. I drifted in and out of awareness as they spoke. Sometimes I heard it all, sometimes I heard nothing.

‘Special licence…marriage,’ I heard him say, and I heard Lady Clara’s swiftly indrawn breath.

‘Would it be legal?’ she demanded.

‘Her guardian has already given his consent,’ Doctor Player said judiciously. ‘If she herself wished it…’

Lady Clara came swiftly to the bed and, forgetting her fear of the typhus, put her hand on my hot forehead.

‘Would she agree? Is she fit to consent?’ she asked. ‘She can scarcely speak.’

Doctor Player’s urbane voice held a gleam of amusement. ‘I should be happy to testify that she was fit, if there should be any dispute,’ he said softly. ‘Especially to oblige you, my dear Lady Havering. I have always thought so highly of you…and always loved your part of the world. How I have longed to be a neighbour of yours, perhaps a little house…’

‘There’s a pretty Dower House on the Wideacre estate,’ Lady Clara said. ‘If you would do me the honour…rent free, of course…a lease of say, thirty years…?’

I heard his stays creak as he bowed, and I heard the smile in Lady Clara’s voice. The special smile, when she obtained what she wanted.

‘Doctor Player, you have been most helpful,’ she said. ‘May I offer you a glass of ratafia? In the parlour?’

He took a little bottle of medicine from his bag, I heard it clink against the brass fastening.

‘I shall leave this for her, she should take it when she wakes,’ he said. ‘I can tell Nurse on my way out. And as for her marriage with your son, I should risk no delay, Lady Clara. She is very ill indeed.’

They went out together, I heard them talking in low voices as they went down the stairs and then I was alone in the silence of my room with only the soft ticking of the clock and the hushed flickering of the flames in the fireplace.

I slid into a hot daze, and then I woke again seconds later, chilled to the bone. If I had any voice other than a rasping breath I should have laughed. I had thought my da a big enough villain but even he would have balked at marrying his child off to a dying girl. He was a rogue but he had given me the string and the clasp of gold because his dying wife had asked it of him. In our world we took the wishes of the dying seriously. In this Quality world where everything looked so fair and spoke so soft, it was those with land who gave the orders, who had the world as they wished. Nothing was sacred except fortune.

Lady Clara did not dislike me, I knew her well enough and I knew that had I been her daughter-in-law she would have liked me as well as she liked her own Maria – probably better. She neither liked nor disliked anyone very strongly, her main concern was with herself. In her eyes it was her duty to preserve her personal wealth, her family’s wealth and name, and to increase it wherever possible. Every great family on the land had made itself rich at the expense of hundreds of little ones. I knew that. But I never knew it so clearly as that evening when I watched the ceiling billow like a muslin cloth as my hot eyes played tricks on me, and I knew that I was in the care of a woman who cared more for my signature than for me.

What happened next was like a nightmare in a fever. I woke one time to find Emily washing my face with some cool scented water. I pulled away from her touch. My skin was so sore and so burning that it stung when she touched me. She said, ‘Beg pardon, m’m,’ in an undertone and made a few more ineffectual dabs at me.

I was sweating still – burning up with fever. My bedroom door beyond Emily opened, the white paintwork seemed to shimmer as I looked at it, and Lady Clara came in. Something about her face struck me, even in my heat-tranced muddle. She looked determined, her mouth was set, her eyes, as she glanced to the bed, were as hard as stones I think I shrank back a little and looked to Perry.

He was ill from one of his drinking bouts, his, face was pale, his hair curly and damp from a wash with cold water in an effort to sober in a hurry. But most of all I noticed his clothes. He usually wore riding dress in the mornings, or one of his silk dressing gowns over white linen and breeches. But this morning he was dressed immaculately in pale grey, with a new waistcoat of lavender and a pale grey jacket. In one hand he carried pale grey gloves.

I think it was the gloves which made something in my mind click like a clockwork mechanism. I heard my old voice, my worldly gypsy-child’s voice say: ‘Damn me, they’re going to marry me as I lie here dying!’ and a sense of absolute outrage made me sweat with temper and made my eyes go bright and dizzy.

Perry came to my bedside and looked down at me.

‘Not too close, Perry,’ his mother said.

‘I’m sorry about this, Sarah,’ he said. ‘I did not mean it to be like this for us. I really wanted us to marry and make each other happy.’

His anxious face was wavering as he spoke. That burst of temper had tired me.

‘You’re dying,’ he said bluntly. ‘And if I’m not married to you I’ll be ruined, Sarah. I have to have my fortune, please help me. It will mean nothing to you when you’re dead, after all.’

I turned my face away and closed my eyes. I was black with rage. I should do nothing for him, nothing for them, nothing.

‘She should have some laudanum to soothe her,’ I heard the doctor say. They were all here then. Emily’s nervous pulling at my shoulder raised me a little and I opened my mouth and let the draught slide down. At once I felt a golden glow inside me. It was far stronger than usual. It was strong enough to make me drunk with it. Clever Doctor Player was earning his fee – the Wideacre Dower House which belonged to me. My sense of anger and my panic-stricken scrabble for life eased away from me. My rasping breath grew quieter and steady. I was getting less air, but I minded less. I would have protested against nothing while the drug worked its magic on me. It all seemed a long way away and wonderfully unimportant. I felt easy; I liked Perry well enough, I did not like to see him look so afraid and so unhappy. He should have his fortune, it was only fair.

I smiled at him, and then I looked around the room, Maria’s room which I had disliked on sight, and yet would be the last thing I saw before I closed my eyes for the last time. They had put flowers on my writing desk, white lilies and carnations and the little flap was down ready for the ledger which the rector would bring. There was fresh ink and mended pens and a blotter and sealing wax. They were all ready. There were more flowers on the mantelpiece by the clock. The stuffy room was heavy with their perfume, I looked around at them and I laughed inside. They would do nicely for my funeral too. I guessed Lady Clara would choose white flowers for the wreath. She would never waste hot-house flowers in mid-winter.

There was a tap at the door and I heard Rimmings’ voice say: ‘The Reverend Fawcett, ma’am,’ and I heard a brisk tread into the room. Through half-closed eyelids I saw him go and make his bow to Lady Clara, and shake the doctor’s hand. He bowed to Perry then he approached my bed, halting a careful distance from me, and his smile was less assured.

‘Miss Lacey, I am sorry to see you so ill,’ he said. ‘Are you able to hear me? Do you know why I have come?’

Lady Clara came swiftly to my bedside, her silk morning dress rustling. She came to the other side of the bed and fearless for once, took my hand and put her other hand against my cheek as if she loved me dearly. I flinched. She knew I hated being touched, she was not a loving woman. All this was for show. I understood that. I had been a circus child.

‘Dear Sarah understands us, when her fever is abated,’ she said firmly. ‘This marriage has been her dearest wish since she and my son met last spring.’ She lowered her voice. ‘We none of us could bear to disappoint her,’ she said. ‘They have been betrothed for months, I could not deny her the right to marry before…’ she broke off as if her emotions were too much for her. My breath rasped in the silence. I had no voice to deny it, even if I had wished. Besides, the drug had robbed me of determination. I felt sleepy and lazy, idle and happy, as feckless as a child on a hot summer’s day. I did not care what they did.

The rector nodded and his dark shiny head caught the grey winter light from the window. ‘Is this your considered wish, Miss Lacey?’ he asked me directly.

Lady Clara looked at me, her wide blue eyes had a look of desperate pleading. If I found my voice and said ‘no’ her son would be ruined. I could hardly see her, I could hardly see the rector, or Perry. I was thinking of the high clean woods of Wideacre and how, when he was teaching me my way around the estate, Will used to ride with me. How very loud the birdsong was, in those afternoons, under the trees.

I thought of Will, and smiled.

They took it as consent.

‘Then I will begin,’ said the rector.

He did Lady Clara’s work for her. He began at the beginning and missed out nothing – as far as I knew, for it was the first wedding service I had ever heard all the way through in all my life. When we were chavvies she and I used to hang around the back of churches at wedding-time for sometimes kindly people would give us a penny, pitying our bare legs and thin clothes. More often they would give us a ha’pence to scout off and leave the church looking tidy. We never cared for their motive, we only wanted the coppers. I knew some parts of the service, I knew there were questions to be answered, and I puzzled my tired hot mind with whether I should say ‘no’ and stop this farce while I could. But I did not really care enough for anything, the drug came between me and the land.

When he came to the section where I should have said ‘I do’ he slipped through it, and my confused blinkings were consent enough. Lady Clara was at my side, reckless of infection, and when she said firmly, ‘She nodded,’ that was consent enough.

I was fair game. I seemed to be back in time on Wideacre and it was night. I was riding Sea wearily down the hill from the London road. At the ford at the foot of the hill he splashed in and then paused, bent his head and drank. I could smell the coldness of the water and the scent of the flowers on the air. In the banks along the river the primroses gleamed palely in the darkness. In the secret darkness of the wood an owl hooted twice.

‘I now pronounce thee man and wife,’ a voice said from somewhere. Sea lifted his head and water dripped from his chin, loud drops in the night-time stillness, then he waded through the swift water and heaved up the far bank and on to the road again.

Lady Clara was pushing something into my hands, a pen. I scrawled my name as she had taught me to do on the paper she held before me. In the darkness on the land Sea headed purposefully between two open wrought-iron gates and a shadow of a man came out from under the trees and looked up at me. It was a man who was out looking for poachers because he hated gin traps. It was Will Tyacke.

‘She is smiling,’ said the rector’s voice from the foot of the bed.

‘It was her dearest wish,’ Lady Clara said quickly. ‘Where do you wish me to sign? Here? And the doctor for the other witness? Here?’

They were going. Silently in the dream Will reached up for me on the horse and silently I slid from Sea’s back into his arms.

‘We will leave her to rest now,’ Lady Clara said. ‘Emily, you sit with her in case she wakes and needs something.’

‘She will be mentioned in our prayers,’ the rector said. ‘It would be a tragedy…’

‘Yes, yes,’ Lady Clara said. The door closed behind them. In the world of the fever-dream Will Tyacke bent his head and I lifted up my face for his kiss. His arms came around me and gathered me to him, my hands went to his shoulders, tightened behind his neck to hold him close. He said. ‘I love you.’

‘Don’t cry, Miss Sarah!’ Emily said. She was patting my cheeks with a wad of damp muslin. There were hot tears running down my flushed cheeks, but my throat was too tight and I was too short of breath to weep. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said helplessly. ‘There’s no need to cry. Beg pardon,’ she added.

They were sure I would die, and they wrote to Mr Fortescue, telling him of my illness and of the wedding in the same letter. He was away in Ireland on business when the letter came, and it awaited his return to Bristol. With him away there was no one to tell them on Wideacre that they had a new master. That the London lord whom Will had warned them of had won their land indeed, and he and his hard-faced mama would run the land as they pleased. They carried on, using their own money to mend the ploughs, spending the common fund on seeds for the winter sowing, ploughing the land for the spring sowing, hedging, ditching, digging drains. They did not know they would have done better to save their money. No one in London troubled to tell them of the changes they would face, as soon as Perry and his mama arrived in the country in springtime.

No one expected me to arrive. They expected me to die.

It grieved Perry. He had moved his things to the room next door, to reinforce his claim to the marriage if anyone should dispute it in the future, after my death. He kept the adjoining door unlocked and he often came through to sit with me. Often he would stumble in to see me after a night of gambling and he would sit at my bedside and mumble through the hands he had played and the points he had lost. When I was feverish I thought he was Da – forever bewailing his ill luck, forever blaming others. Eternally gulled by those he had set out to cheat. Perry was not a cheat but he was a ripe fat pigeon. I could imagine how the card-sharpers and the gull gropers would beam when he rolled into a new gambling hell and smiled around with those innocent blue eyes.

When I was cool and the fever had given me a moment’s respite I would ask him how it was with him, whether his creditors had given him time now that it was known he was married. He dropped his voice so low that it would not disturb the rough night nurse who sat, snoring, by the fire, and he told me that everyone had offered him extra credit, that he had gone through the figures with his lawyers and that he thought he could very well manage to live the life he liked on the profits from the joint Havering-Wideacre estates.

‘It has to be ploughed back,’ I said faintly. I could feel the beat of the fever starting deep inside my body again. Already the covers were feeling hot and heavy on the bed, soon I should start to shake and to shiver. Laudanum would stave off the pain, but nothing would hold back the waves of heat which drained my mind of thoughts and dried my mouth.

‘I can’t plough it back this year,’ Perry started. ‘Maybe next, if there is enough…’ But then he saw how my face had changed and he broke off. ‘Are you ill again, Sarah?’ he asked. ‘Shall I wake the nurse?’

I nodded. I was drowning in a wave of heat and pain, slowly, in the crimson darkness I could hear the rasp rasp of my breath coming slowly into me, and then I felt my throat thicken yet tighter and I knew I would not be able to get my breath for much longer.

Dimly I heard Perry shouting at the nurse and shaking her awake. She stamped across to the bed and her broad arm came under my shoulders and my head fell back against her sweaty gown. She tipped the laudanum down my throat in one smooth practised gesture and I retched and heaved for breath.

‘Her throat’s closing up,’ she said to Perry in her hard voice. ‘It’s the end. Best get her la’ship if she wants to bid her g’bye.’

Her voice seemed to come from a long way away. I did not believe it possible that this could be the end for me. I felt as if I had hardly lived at all. I had been raised in such a rough poor way, and I had been less than a year in luxury with the Quality. To die now, and of a disease which I could have taken at any time in a damp-clothed hungry childhood made no sense at all. The drug began taking hold and I felt the familiar sense of floating on a golden sea. If she was right and I died now I should have died without knowing a proper childhood, without knowing a proper mama, without knowing what it is to be loved honestly and truly by a good man. And worse of all, I would die without knowing what it was to feel passion. Any slut on a street corner might have her man; but I had been cold as ice all my life. I had only ever kissed the man I loved in my dreams. In real life I had whipped him around the face and told him I hated him.

I gave a little moan – unheard among the hoarse scraping noise as I breathed. Lady Clara came in and looked down at my face.

‘Is there anything you want?’ she asked.

I could not reply but I knew truly that there was nothing she could buy for me, or sell to me, or barter with me, which I could want. The only thing I wanted could not be bought. It was not the ownership of Wideacre, but the smell of the place, the taste of the water, the sight of that high broad skyline.

She looked at me as if she would have said far more. ‘I hope I have not treated you badly,’ she said. ‘I meant well by you, Sarah. I meant Perry to marry you and to live with you. I thought you might have suited. I did need Wideacre, and I am glad to have it, but I wanted it to be your free choice.’

She looked at me as if she thought I could answer. I could barely hear her. Her face was wavering like water-weed under the Fenny. I felt as if I could taste the cool wetness of the Fenny on my tongue, as if it were flowing over my hands, over my face.

She stepped back from the bed and Perry was there, his eyes red from weeping, his curls awry. He said nothing. He just pressed his head on my coverlet until his mother’s hand on his shoulder took him away.

Still I said nothing. I thought I could see the gates of Wideacre Hall as I had seen them on that first night, open, unguarded. Beyond them was the drive to the Hall edged with the tall beech trees and the rustling oaks. In the woods was Will, watching for the men who would set gin traps which injure and maim. It was dark through the gates. It was quiet. I was weary and hot to the very marrow of my bones. I wanted to be in that gentle darkness.

In my dream I waited beside the gates.

Then I stepped through into the blackness.