Meridon Read online

  ‘Bloody hell,’ she said.

  I gave a little croak of laughter and she jumped back as if I could bite.

  ‘Beg pardon, miss,’ she said hopelessly. Then when I made no more sound she held out the bottle at me. ‘They said I was to give you this,’ she said.

  I could imagine how a strong dose would take the pain away. I forced my head to nod, the movement made my senses swim and I closed my eyes while the room swirled and the bed heaved like a ship in a rough sea.

  ‘I’ll put it ‘ere then,’ she said helplessly, and moved my pitcher of lemonade and put the phial and the water on the bedside table. ‘You helps yourself when you wants it.’

  She looked around the room for something that came within her experience. ‘I’ll make your fire up again!’ she said brightly, and went to the hearth.

  The little part of me which had clung to life like an obstinate succubus in the wagon through beatings, even through the deadly pain in my heart on that night when she died, held me tight now; and ordered my throat to cry out. I strained and strained to speak, looking desperately from her turned back as she worked on the fire, to the little glass of water and the laudanum alongside it. If the laudanum took the pain away I would sleep. If I slept I would not be weary when the crisis of the fever came and then I might fight it. I might win.

  I tried to cry out, but all I could make were little choking noises which she could not even hear above the rattle of the fire irons and the poker knocking ashes in the grate. She got a blaze going and straightened up. The room which had been hot and stuffy was now a furnace, the firelight stabbed my eyes with its fierce heat.

  ‘That’s better!’ she said. She approached the bed a little closer. ‘’Ave you got everythink you want then?’ she looked around. The lemonade was out of reach, I could not raise myself up to get the laudanum. ‘Got everythink? Good.’

  ‘Emily,’ I croaked.

  She was instantly alarmed. ‘Don’t you try to talk now,’ she said. She came a little closer but she did not dare to touch me. She had been ordered too often out of the good rooms, told to use the back stairs, to avoid the Quality and to curtsey low when they went past. She was too well schooled to dare to lay a finger on me. ‘Don’t you try to talk,’ she said again.

  She scuttered towards the door and dipped a little curtsey, and was gone. I tried to call her back but my throat was swollen so badly I could make no sound. I stared at the painted ceiling, at the pretty frieze at the top of the walls showing cupids and love-birds in white and gold. I remembered Meridon the gypsy and her sly toughness and I heaved myself upwards in my bed.

  It was no good, I was Meridon no longer. I was little Miss Sarah Lacey with my throat closing so tight that I could not breathe and the smell of stale sweat and death all around me, and the pain behind my eyes and in the very bones of my face so bad that I could have cried except my tears had dried in the heat of the fever.

  I dropped back on the pillow again and tried not to be afraid. I knew why Sewell had refused to nurse me, I knew why Rimmings would not touch me. I knew why Emily had said ‘bloody hell’ when she had seen my face. I had caught a brief glimpse of myself in my mirror when I was sitting upright for that moment. My face was so white I looked like a corpse already, my eyes were rimmed orange, my lips were so dark and so cracked that they looked black with dried blood. The typhus fever had me.

  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 so