Philippa Gregory - Meridon

All wrong too.

And so wrong that I could not tell who I was nor what I should be doing.

I struggled awake with that, and reached out in the darkness for the lemonade. It was night then, night and going on for dawn. Someone had brought me a drink while I slept. Someone had made up the fire again. Some time in the night I had reached out for the glass and drained it for it was empty and the jug half full. In the cold grey light of the early morning before sun-up I was able to see enough to sit up in my bed and pour the drink.

It was icy. It made me shiver as if a finger of snow had passed down my throat into my very belly. I gulped it down to sate my thirst and then I huddled back down under the covers again. I was cold, chilled and cold. But when I put my hand to my forehead I found I was burning hot.

I knew I was ill then, and I knew that the dream of her, of seeing her as a fool and a cruel fool at that, was part of my illness. I had to hold to the things I knew. I had to remember her as she had been, my beloved. I had to hold on to Perry as I knew he could be, a careless youth who would grow into a good man. I had to remember that Will Tyacke was an angry, vindictive working man who had done very well out of my land and was now taking himself off in a rage, and good riddance to him.

I shivered in the grey coldness of the early morning. I had to hold on to those things or I did not know what would happen. If I opened my mind just a little crack, to the doubts and uncertainties, I would lose my memory of her and my love for her, I would lose my certain future.

‘I want to be Lady Havering,’ I croaked into the still cold air of the room. ‘I want to farm Havering and Wideacre together. I want to be the greatest landowner in the county. I want everyone to know who I am.’

The thought of being known by name to everyone for hundreds of miles around was a comforting one. I slid down on the pillows a little deeper. And I slept again.

I woke in the morning hot and blinded with my eyelids so red and swollen I could hardly open them. I was wakened by a squawk when my maid, coming to my bedside, caught sight of me and dashed for the door. I opened my eyes slightly and shut them again quickly. Even with the window curtains closed the room seemed far too bright and the flicker of the newly lit fire was so loud it made my head ache. I was burning up with fever and my throat was so sore that I could not have spoken even if I had wanted to.

The bedroom door opened again and there was Lady Havering’s maid Rimmings herself looking very tall and regal despite the curl papers sticking out from under her nightcap. She ignored my maid, who was twittering behind her and approached my bed and looked down at me. When I saw her face change I knew that I was very ill indeed.

‘Miss Sarah…’ she said.

I blinked. I tried to say ‘Yes?’ but my voice was burned away in the hotness of my throat. I nodded. Even that slight movement made all the swollen muscles in my neck shriek with a pain which clanged inside my head like an echoing belfry.

‘You look very ill, do you feel unwell?’ Rimmings voice was so sharp it cut into the tender places behind my eyes and inside my ears.

‘Yes,’ a little whisper of sound managed to creep out. She heard it, but she did not bend closer to hear me better. She was keeping her distance from my breath.

‘It’s the typhus for sure!’ said Sewell, my maid. I turned my head stiffly on the sweaty pillow and looked at her. If it was the typhus I was done for. I had seen my Rom ma die of it and I knew how hard the illness was, like a harsh master who breaks your spirit before throwing you aside. If I had been on Wideacre I think I might have stood against it, I might have fought it. But not in London where I was always tired, always ill at ease, and with so little joy in my days.

‘That’ll do!’ Rimmings said abruptly. ‘And not a word of this in the servants’ hall if you want to keep your place.’

‘I don’t know I do want my place with typhus in the house,’ the girl said defiantly, backing towards the door, her eyes still on me. ‘’Sides, if it’s typhus she won’t need a dresser will she? She won’t need a maid at all. Her la’ship had best get a nurse for as long as Miss lasts.’

Rimmings nodded. ‘I don’t doubt she’ll have a nurse,’ she said. I watched her through half-closed eyelids. I did not think I could bear to have a stranger pushing me around the bed, pulling me around, stripping me and washing me. I knew the London nurses. They worked as layers-out and midwives too; dirty-handed, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking women who treated their patients – quick and dead – the same: as corpses already.

Rimmings remembered me. ‘Some of them are very good,’ she lied. Then she turned to Sewell. ‘Get some fresh lemonade, and a bowl of water. You can sponge her face.’

‘I’m not touching her!’ The girl stood firm.

‘You’ll do as you’re ordered, miss!’ Rimmings burst out.

She didn’t care. I closed my eyes and the squabble came to me dimly in great heaving waves of noise.

‘I won’t touch her! I’ve seen typhus before,’ she hissed defiantly. ‘It’ll be a blessed miracle if we don’t all of us get it. Besides, you just look at her face! She’s not long for this world, she’s grey already. Sponging ain’t going to bring down that fever. She’s a goner, Miss Rimmings, and I ain’t going to nurse a dying woman.’

‘Her la’ship will hear of this Sewell – and you’ll be out on the streets without a character!’ Rimmings boomed, her voice seemed to echo again and again in my head.

‘I don’t care, it ain’t right! I’m a lady’s maid, hired for a lady’s maid! No one can say I don’t keep her clothes right and it ain’t my fault that she wears riding habits all the time. It ain’t my fault she’s been so peaky ever since she came to London. I’ve dressed her right and I ain’t ever said one word about her coming up out of the hedgerow. But I won’t nurse her. It’d be up and down those stairs twenty times a day and certain to take it and die too. I won’t do it!’

My cracked lips parted in a little smile as I heard them wrangling, though my head was thudding like an enlisting drum. It had all gone wrong then. Sewell was right with her sharp servant’s eyes and her quick wits. I was worm’s meat already, she had seen the look in my face which I remembered from my ma. When the typhus fever puts its hot sweaty finger on you, you are gone. Perry would not clear his gambling debts with my dowry, I would never be Lady Havering. Her ladyship would never have an heir from me.

All our work and lies and lessons would be for nothing. I had always thought they were good for nothing, and now nothing would come of them, except that I should have a fashionable funeral instead of being tossed into a common grave. But I would die in this beautiful London town house as surely as I would have died in that dirty little wagon if we had taken the infection when we were chavvies. The disease which had taken my weary travel-worn ma in her poverty and her hunger could slip past the butler and take me too.

I was not even sorry. Not even sorry that I would die and not see my seventeenth year. I could not find it in my hot shivering body to care a ha’pence either way. Ever since she had died I had been marking my time out, waiting. Now I was going too and if there was such a thing as the gorgio God, and a gorgio heaven, then I would see her there. I thought of her with her hair tumbled down, dressed in shining white with pink fluffy wings rising up behind her. She would be lovely. I wanted to be with her.

‘The kitchenmaid can do it,’ Rimmings said decisively.

‘Em’ly?’ my maid asked. ‘Of course! The kitchenmaid should do it. Will you wake her la’ship and tell her about this?’