Philippa Gregory: Meridon

I went back to the wagon. Dandy wriggled out, pulling the baby behind her.

‘I want to take the babby,’ she said.

‘No Dandy,’ I said, as if I were very much older than her and very much wiser. ‘We’ve pushed our luck enough.’

We were on our best behaviour for the rest of that week at the Salisbury fair. Dandy went out to the Common outside the town and brought back a meat dinner every day.

‘Where are you getting it from?’ I demanded in an urgent whisper as she spooned out a rabbit stew thick and chunky with meat.

‘There’s a kind gentleman in a big house on the Bath road,’ she said with quiet satisfaction.

I put the bowls out on the table and dropped the horn-handled spoons with a clatter.

‘What d’you have to do for it?’ I asked anxiously.

‘Nothing,’ she said. She shot me a sly smile through a tumbling wave of black hair. ‘I just have to sit on his knee and cry and say, “Oh! Please don’t Daddy,” like that. Then he gives me a penny and sends me out through the kitchen and they give me a rabbit. He says I can have a pheasant tomorrow.’

I looked at her with unease. ‘All right,’ I said unhappily. ‘But if he promises you a rib of beef or a leg of lamb or a proper joint you’re not to go back again. Could you run away if you had to?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said airily. ‘We sit near the window and it’s always open. I could be out in minutes.’

I nodded, only slightly relieved. I had to trust Dandy with these weird frightening forays of hers into the adult world. She had never been caught. She had never been punished. Whether she was picking pockets or dancing to please elderly gentlemen with skirts held out high; she always came home with a handful of coins and no trouble. She was as idle as a well-fed cat around the caravan. But if she sensed trouble or danger she could slip through a man’s hands and be gone like quicksilver.

‘Call them,’ she said, nodding towards the doorway.

I went out to the step and called: ‘Robert! Jack! Dinner!’

We were on first-name terms now, intimate with the unavoidable closeness of caravan-dwellers. Jack and Dandy sometimes exchanged a secret dark smile, but nothing more. Robert had seen how they were together the very first evening we had spent in the caravan and had pulled off his boots and started blacking them, looking at Dandy under his blond bushy eyebrows.

‘Look here, Dandy,’ he had said, pointing the brush at her. ‘I’ll be straight with you, and you can be straight with me. I took you on because I thought you’d do nicely in the show. I have some ideas which I’ll break open to you later. Not now. Now’s not the time. But I can tell you you could have a pretty costume and dance to music and every eye in the place would be on you. And every girl in the place would envy you.’

He paused, and satisfied with the effect of this appeal to her vanity went on: ‘I’ll tell you what I want for my son,’ he said. ‘He’s my heir and he’ll have the show when I’m gone. Before then I’ll find him a good hard-working girl in the shows business like us. A girl with a good dowry to bring with her, and best of all an Act and a Name of her own. A Marriage of Talents,’ he said softly to himself.

He broke off again, and then recollected where he was and went on. ‘That’s the best I can do for the both of you,’ he said fairly. ‘Where you weds or beds is your own affair, but you’ll not lack offers if you keeps clean and stays with my show. But if I catch you mooning over my lad, or if he puts his hand up your skirt, you just remember that I’ll put you out of this wagon on the high road wherever we are. However you feel. And I won’t look back. And my lad Jack won’t look back either. He knows which side his bread is buttered, and he might have you once or twice, but he’ll never wed you. Not in a thousand years.’

Dandy blinked.

‘See?’ Robert said with finality.

Dandy glanced at Jack to see if he had anything to say in her defence. He was resolutely buffing the white of his topboots. His head bent low over his work. You would have thought him deaf. I looked at the dark nape of his neck and knew he was afraid of his father. And that his father had spoken the truth when he said that Jack would never go against him. Not in a thousand years.

‘What about Meridon?’ Dandy said surly. ‘You don’t warn her off your precious son.’

Robert shot a quick look at me and then smiled. ‘She’s not a whore-in-the-making,’ he said. ‘All Meridon wants from Jack and me is a chance to ride our horses.’

I nodded. That much was true.

‘D’you see?’ Robert asked again. ‘I’d not have taken you into my wagon if I’d known you and Jack were smelling of April and May. But I can put you out here and you’d still have a chance of finding your da again. He won’t have got far – not with that damned old carthorse of his pulling that wagon! You’d best go if you’re hot for Jack. I won’t have it. And it won’t happen without my letting.’

Dandy looked once more at the back of Jack’s head. He had started on the other boot. The first one was radiantly white. I thought he had probably never worked so hard on it before.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘You can keep your precious son. I didn’t want him so much anyway. Plenty of other young men in the world.’

Robert beamed at her, he loved getting his own way. ‘Good girl!’ he said approvingly. ‘Now we can all live together with a bit of comfort. I’ll take that as your word, and you’ll hear no more about it from me.

‘And I’ll tell you something, pretty-face. If you keep those looks when you are a woman grown, there’s no telling how high you might aim. But don’t go giving it away, girl. With looks like yours you could even think about a gentry marriage!’

That was consolation enough for Dandy and she went up into her bunk early that night to comb her hair and plait it carefully. And she did not exchange another languorous smile with Jack. Not for all the time we were in Salisbury.

It was a fine summer, that hot sunny summer of 1805. I changed from the dreary unhappy girl I had been in my da’s wagon to a working groom with pride in my work. My skirt grew bedraggled and my shoes wore out. It seemed only natural to borrow Jack’s smock and then, as he outgrew them, his second-best breeches and his old shirt. By the end of the summer I dressed all the time as a lad and felt a delight in how I could move and my freedom from the looks of passing men. I was absorbed by the speed of the travel, by the way we went from one town to another overnight. Never staying longer than three days at any site, always moving on. Everywhere we went it was the same show. The dancing ponies, the clever stallion, the cavalry charge, Jack’s bareback ride, and the story of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin.

But every night it was somehow a little bit different. The horses would go through their paces differently every time. For a while one of the little ponies was sick and went slower than the others and spoiled the dancing. Then Jack ricked his ankle unloading the wagon and had trouble with his vaults on to the horse, so all of that act was changed until he was strong again. Little changes – but they absorbed me.

It was soon my business to care for the horses from the time Jack and Robert had changed into their costumes. I had been steadily doing more and more from the first night when I had stayed behind for the sheer joy of stroking the velvety noses and smoothing the hot sides. But now it was my job. Dandy worked in the caravan. She bought the groceries and poached what food we needed. She kept the caravan as clean as Robert Gower thought fit – which was a lifetime away from Zima’s rank sluttery. Then she came to the field and kept the gate while Robert did the barking for the show.