Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) Read online

  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 pow