Philippa Gregory - Meridon

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 someone to smooth my forehead and tell me that I would be well.

‘Sarah, have you made a will?’ Lady Clara demanded.

I choked with shock.

‘Have you made a will?’ she asked again, thinking I had not heard.

I shook my head.

‘I’ll send for your lawyers then, as well,’ she said brusquely. ‘Don’t be alarmed my dear, but if it is typhus then I know you would want to be on the safe side. I’ll have the footman go for him as soon as he gets back.’ She paused. ‘Is there anything you would like?’

I forced myself to speak, to force a word through the sandpaper of my throat. ‘Drink,’ I said.

Lady Clara came no closer but she nodded Emily to the bed. ‘Pour Miss Sarah a drink,’ she said sharply. ‘Not like that. Up to the brim. Now lift her up. Yes, hold her around the shoulders and lift her. Now take the glass and hold it for her.’

The cold glass touched my lips and the sweet clear liquid slid into my mouth. The first few mouthfuls choked me and Emily nearly drowned me before Lady Clara snapped at her to stop and let me breathe. But then the sweet clear ease of it opened my throat and I drank three glasses before Emily lowered me to the pillow again and said softly:

‘Beg pardon, m’m.’

Lady Clara ordered her to sit by my bedside and give me more lemonade if I asked for it. Emily hesitated, but then sank into a chair when her ladyship scowled.

‘Beg pardon, m’m,’ she said.

Lady Clara gave a swift comprehensive look around the room, and at me. I was breathing a little easier now I was higher on the pillows but that eerie rasping noise came every time I drew a breath. I saw a shadow cross her face and I knew she thought I would die and she would have to find another biddable heiress to marry her son, and she would have to find her quickly before his gambling debts ruined them all.

‘I’ll see you in a moment,’ she said shortly and left the room.

Emily and I sat in silence, listening to the awful hoarseness of my breath. Then I was too weary to do anything more but doze again.

That was my last lucid moment for days.

A lot of the time was very hot, but there were also long times when I shivered with cold. There was a man who came from time to time whose touch was gentle, and I mistook him for Robert Gower and thought I was back in the parlour hurt from falling from the trapeze. There was a woman, a nurse I suppose, who smelled of spirits and who rolled me from side to side when she had to change the sheets on the bed. My skin flinched when she touched me with her hard dirty hands and she used to laugh in a loud beery voice when I winced.

Sometimes Lady Clara was there, always asking me if I felt well enough to sign something. Once she actually put a pen in my hand and held a paper on the bed before me. I remember I thought she was going to take Sea from me – an odd fancy from my fever – and I let the pen fall on the white sheets and closed my eyes to shut her out. I remember my hair became matted with sweat and tangled and the nurse had her way and hacked it off. I wandered a little in my mind after that; with the short ragged bob I thought I was Meridon again.

Often, very often, Perry was there. Sometimes drunk, sometimes sober. Always gentle and kind to me. He brought me little posies of flowers, he paid a ballad singer to sing songs under my window one afternoon. He brought hot-house grapes and pineapples and sliced them up small so that I could eat them. When I was rambling in fever I always knew Perry, his hand was always cool against my cheek and the smell of gin and his favourite soap was distinctive. One time when the nurse was out of the room he leaned over me and asked if he could take some guineas out of my purse.

‘I’m desperate short, Sarah,’ he said.

I knew I should not allow it. I knew he had promised me, in what seemed another lifetime, hundreds of years ago, that he would never never gamble again. But I had no will to match against his imploring blue eyes.

‘Please Sarah,’ he said.

I blinked, and he took that for assent and I heard the chink of gold coins and then the soft closing of the door behind him as he left me.