Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) Read online

  ‘I’m fine,’ I lied promptly.

  We paused at the corner of David Street and I looked down the road to where the Havering House stood on the corner. I could see smoke coming from the chimneys as Emily went around lighting fires, back to her usual back-breaking work now the dirty work of nursing me was done.

  ‘Emily,’ I said.

  She had cared for me when no one else would do so. She had let me out to see Will and told no one about it. She had helped me get Perry up to bed and kept mum. And she had held me and bathed the sweat off my forehead and sat with me night after night with no thanks, and no tip, and no rest. She would go on lighting the fires and cleaning the grates and sweeping the stairs and sleeping in a cramped bare attic until she grew too old to work. Then Lady Havering would throw her out and if someone had said to her, ‘But the old woman will have to end her days in the poorhouse,’ her ladyship would widen her blue eyes and ask why Emily had never saved her wages since she had worked from childhood? and exclaim, ‘How improvident are the poor!’

  ‘Emily,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ Will asked. They were hesitating, ready to turn down the street, waiting for me. Sea champed at his bit, reined-in too tight.

  ‘I’m taking Emily,’ I said, deciding suddenly. ‘She shouldn’t be left there. She shouldn’t be left with Lady Havering, in that house. She should come with us to Wideacre.’

  Will’s face was a picture of rising rage. ‘You are taking your maid?’ he demanded. ‘You, a jumped-up gypsy brat, need to take a maid with you?’

  ‘No, you idiot,’ I replied briskly. ‘She was the only one in that whole household who ever showed me a ha’penny of love. I’m not leaving her behind. She’d be happy on Wideacre. She can ride pillion behind Gerry.’

  I slid down from Sea and tossed the reins to Will. He caught them, and before he could protest I had run up the street and tapped on the big front door. I heard Emily’s little feet pattering down the hall and her nervous: ‘I ain’t allowed to open the door…’ tail off as she opened the door and saw first a slim young man in grey, and then my face under the grey tricorne hat.

  ‘Sarah! I beg pardon m’m, I means your ladyship!’

  ‘Hush,’ I said peremptorily. Not all the escapes in the world could make me unstintingly pleasant. ‘Don’t chatter, Emily. Fetch your bonnet and all the money you have. You can come away with me if you want. I’m running away to my home in Sussex and you can come too. There’s work you can do there, farm work – but fairly paid and not too hard. You might like it. D’you want to come? I’m leaving now.’

  She flushed scarlet. ‘I’ll come,’ she said defiantly. ‘Dammit! I will!’ and she turned on her heel and bounded up the main staircase where she was not allowed to go, and then scuttered along the passageway to the attic stairs.

  I glanced back down the street. The daylight was getting brighter, the sun was up in a sky the colour of primroses, it would be a fine day. A cool clear day. A good day for travelling. Will made an impatient beckoning motion at me. I smiled and waved back.

  I was not afraid of being seen, I was not afraid of being caught. Since I had lain beneath Will in the darkness of the park, I had lost every scrap of fear I had ever known. There was a warmth and a lightness about me as if I would never fail or fear anything ever again. I did not fear Lady Havering, nor poor Perry. I knew at last who I was and where I was going. A lifetime of travelling had not taught me half so much.

  There was a rush along the hall and Emily came out, wrapped in a tatty shawl and with a bonnet on her head. She carried a shawl roughly knotted in one hand, and a little withy birdcage in the other with a starling in it.

  ‘Can I bring ‘im?’ she asked me anxiously. ‘I’ve ‘ad ‘im for a year, and ‘e sings marvellous.’

  I glanced down the street to Will who was now rigid with anger. ‘Of course,’ I said and my voice shook with laughter. ‘Why not?’

  Emily pulled the door gently to close and came down the steps. We walked back towards the horses.

  ‘Your young man,’ she said with quiet satisfaction as she saw Will. She did not seem in the least surprised.

  I held her bag and the cage as Gerry jumped down from his horse and lifted her up and then mounted behind her. I passed the bundle up and then the cage. The starling, annoyed by the jolting, began to sing loudly. I shot a sly look at Will.

  He was not fuming at all, he was not seething with irritation. He sat on his horse as easily and as calmly as if he were taking the air on Wideacre.

  ‘Quite ready, my darling?’ he asked me, and I started to hear an endearment from him and then smiled and coloured up like a silly wench.

  Quite ready? Nothing and no one you have forgotten? No one else you would like to bring with us? No chimney sweeps, or lap-dogs, or crossing boys?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I took back my reins and swung myself up into the saddle and then burst into laughter.

  ‘Do tell me you’re glad I brought the starling,’ I begged as Gerry led the way south, towards the river.

  Will laughed joyously, his brown eyes filled with love. ‘I am delighted,’ he said.

  40

  Gerry led us southwards, across the Green Park and then down the Vauxhall road, a part of the city I did not know. It was odd, sometimes like countryside, sometimes a town. There were little fields and byres where they kept dairy cattle, and carts with young women riding on them came down the road towards London and waved to us. There were a few grand houses too, and many many tumbledown cottages with barefoot children peeping out of unglazed windows. We crossed the river by the Vauxhall Bridge. Sea threw his head up at the sound of his hooves ringing hollow, and I held him still for a moment and looked downriver.

  The early morning mist was slowly lifting, the river was all silver and pearl. There were river-trading ships with sails, ghostly in the mist, and wherry boats and fishing smacks fading in and out of sight as the mist curled around them. The city eastwards gleamed like a new Jerusalem in the morning sunlight.

  ‘It could be a wonderful place,’ Will said softly beside me. ‘Even now, if they used the new machines they are inventing, and the new ideas they have, for the benefit of the poor. If they thought of the land and how to keep it sound, if they thought of the river and how to keep it clean. This could be the most wonderful city in the world, and the most wonderful country.’

  ‘People always say that,’ I said. ‘People always say it could have been good. But then they say it’s too late to go back.’

  Will shook his head. ‘If we go on as we are going, with people thinking of nothing but making fortunes and caring nothing for their workers and caring nothing for the land then they will regret it,’ he said certainly. ‘They think they can count the cost of living like that – a high rate of accidents perhaps, or no fish in a river where fish once used to spawn. But the cost is even higher. They teach themselves, and they teach their children a sort of callousness, and once people have learned that lesson it is indeed too late. There is nothing then to hold back rich people from getting richer at the expense of the poor, nothing to protect the children, to protect the land. The rich people make the laws, the rich people enforce them. Time after time we have a chance to decide what matters most – wealth, or whether people are happy. If they could only stop now, and think of the happiness for the greatest number of people.’

  I smiled at him. ‘They’d tell you that the way to make people happy is to make them rich,’ I said.

  Will shrugged and the horses moved forward. ‘I don’t think people can be happy unless they are well fed and well housed and have a chance at learning,’ he said. ‘And you’ll never do that by opening the market place and saying it’s all free to those with money to buy it. Some things are too important to be traded in a free market. Some things people should have as a right.’

  I thought of the Havering land and the clearing of the Havering village. I thought of some of the people I had met in London who had no more skill nor wit than Da, but