Diamond Read online

  I was in earnest, but Hetty and Madame Adeline both started laughing, though the tears were pouring down their cheeks.

  ‘Dear Heavens, look at the three of us!’ said Madame Adeline. ‘We’re crying fit to rival Niagara Falls.’ She fetched several handkerchiefs from her dressing table. ‘There, girls, let us mop ourselves up. We’ve no call to be so sad. I am long past retiring age, as Tanglefield pointed out so unkindly. I am very lucky that dear Mr Marvel has made me such a generous offer.’

  ‘But do you love him, Madame Adeline?’ Hetty said doubtfully.

  ‘No, I can’t truthfully say I do, but perhaps I will grow to love him,’ said Madame Adeline. ‘He is a good kind man.’

  ‘Yes, he is. He’s been very good to me. I think I love him,’ I said. ‘And I know I love little Mavis. I will miss her so much as well.’

  ‘Oh dear, I wish I was as keen. I don’t really care for those ugly little monkeys. I hope Mr Marvel doesn’t expect them to be my babies too,’ said Madame Adeline. ‘I will invite him to tea, but I don’t really want the monkeys clambering over all my pretty things.’

  ‘Yes, maybe that would be just as well. They can be very rude at times and they do little messes everywhere,’ I said.

  ‘One of them once used the top of my head as a water closet!’ said Hetty, and we all laughed shakily.

  Mr Marvel came to tea wearing his best suit, an outfit he’d clearly not worn for many years. He must have been a much bigger man at one time, because he could have buttoned two Mr Marvels and all four monkeys inside the voluminous jacket, and the trousers rivalled Beppo’s clown costume, the hems trailing on the ground and totally obliterating his shoes. He had given himself such a fierce scrubbing that his face shone red and raw. His eyes were red too – perhaps he had had a private weep. But he presented Madame Adeline with a little posy of flowers and smiled at her radiantly. He gave me a kiss on my cheek and patted Hetty on the shoulder, but simply nodded shyly at Madame Adeline, clicking his heels together in salute.

  I saw Hetty and Madame Adeline exchange glances, and for an awful moment I thought they were going to laugh at him, and that would have been quite dreadful – but Madame Adeline composed herself, exclaimed over the flowers, and sat Mr Marvel down in her best armchair.

  She boiled a silver kettle on her spirit stove, made a large pot of tea and served her delightful pink and yellow cake, giving us all two big slices.

  Mr Marvel drew a picture for her of his cottage and labelled each room: our parlour; our kitchen. He delicately omitted pronouns for the two small bedrooms.

  ‘Perhaps you two little misses would like to come and stay with us next winter?’ he suggested.

  ‘Oh, yes please!’ I said, clapping my hands.

  ‘And if you will be kind enough to write down the exact address of this lovely cottage, Mr Marvel dear, I hope that you, Hetty, will write to me regularly to let me know how you both are,’ said Madame Adeline.

  ‘Oh, Hetty never writes letters,’ I said without thinking.

  I had paid close attention to her memoirs. I had begged to know more about Bertie the butcher’s boy and Freda the Female Giant in particular, but she had never managed to stay in touch. She didn’t even write to her own father, as far as I knew.

  Hetty looked stricken now. ‘I will write!’ she said. ‘I will write to you every week, Madame Adeline – and I will send you the schedule of our shows so that you will always know where to write back to me. You mean all the world to me, and I am going to keep in touch with you no matter what!’

  HETTY WAS AS good as her word. Every time we set up in a new field or meadow, she took her paper and pen and wrote at least two pages to Madame Adeline. She always left a little space at the end where I could scrawl Love from Diamond. At least I could spell my own name correctly now, though most long words still defeated me.

  It was wonderful getting letters back from Madame Adeline. She said she was settling in splendidly, and found Mr Marvel a very pleasant companion.

  ‘Does that mean she loves him now?’ I asked Hetty.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Hetty. ‘I think she’s maybe making the best of things.’

  Madame Adeline said the cottage had proved very damp and dirty at first, but she had spring-cleaned determinedly, and Mr Marvel had papered and painted every room. During most of the decoration he’d had to keep all the monkeys in their cage – after the first disastrous day when Marmaduke had snatched a brush and set about painting everything in sight, including himself, and little Mavis had gone for an ill-advised paddle in the bucket of wallpaper paste. But now the cottage was spick and span, and Madame Adeline had arranged all her pretty furniture and ornaments in her new parlour so that it looked almost like her wagon.

  She had given us her old wagon so that Hetty and I could travel together, with Sugar Poke to pull us to each new venue. Mister was totally against such an idea – but surprisingly, Marvo and Julip and Tag stuck up for me.

  ‘She’s already getting too big for that tiny hammock and there’s no room in our wagon for an extra bed,’ said Marvo.

  ‘She’s not such a tiny girl any more. It’s unseemly for her to share with us boys,’ said Julip.

  ‘Besides, she snores like a pig and keeps me awake half the night!’ added Tag.

  ‘I do not snore!’ I hissed.

  ‘I know, but I’m trying to help you get your own way, idiot,’ said Tag.

  It worked too! Maybe Mister knew that travelling together would be the only way to keep Hetty and me working hard at the circus, because we were missing Madame Adeline so sorely. He gave his permission for us to share the wagon – and for a while we were jubilant.

  It wasn’t quite such a splendid wagon without Madame Adeline’s furniture and trinkets, but Hetty begged Mr Tanglefield for another advance on her wages, and we bought two small second-hand beds, a battered chest of drawers, and a big sagging armchair, large enough for us both to squeeze into at one go. It all looked very bare and shabby and ugly at first, but Hetty made a blue and white coverlet for both beds, and big cushions embroidered with bluebirds for the chair. She showed me how to make a rag rug, and I sat on the bare floor in between practices and performances, tatting away, Hetty beside me.

  We also painted pictures for the walls. Hetty did the drawing part, but I came into my own when it came to applying watercolours. We did a portrait of dear Madame Adeline with her long red hair and her pink spangled dress. I was especially careful painting her face so that she looked beautiful, her eyes shaded blue, her cheeks very pink, her mouth a smiling crimson. Hetty drew a second picture of Midnight, though she had to stare long and hard at the new horses to make the legs bend the right way.

  I painted Midnight a glorious black, with streaks of white to emphasize his glossiness, and gave him lots of green grass to stand on, and a whole field behind him so that he could gallop around in carefree fashion whenever he fancied it.

  Madame Adeline assured us in her letters that he was loving his new settled life in the country and was nowhere near as lame now that he didn’t have to go through his paces three times a day. We hoped she was telling the truth and not just writing to reassure us.

  Hetty was similarly tactful in her letters to Madame Adeline. She never told lies, but she was often economical with the truth. She wrote about our daily life of course, and always said we were well and quite happy – which we were some of the time. She didn’t tell Madame Adeline that she was suffering from a series of sore throats, so that she had to gargle with salt water every day and gulp down Mr Tanglefield’s medicinal whisky to manage any kind of speaking voice for the show. One day she was so bad she could scarcely croak, and Mr Tanglefield called in a local doctor. He made Hetty open her mouth wide and shook his head gravely.

  ‘Her throat is very badly inflamed – she needs complete rest,’ he said.

  ‘She can’t rest. She’s a vital part of the show,’ said Mr Tanglefield.

  ‘That’s why she’s in such a state, shout