Philippa Gregory - Meridon

‘It has to be ploughed back,’ I said faintly. I could feel the beat of the fever starting deep inside my body again. Already the covers were feeling hot and heavy on the bed, soon I should start to shake and to shiver. Laudanum would stave off the pain, but nothing would hold back the waves of heat which drained my mind of thoughts and dried my mouth.

‘I can’t plough it back this year,’ Perry started. ‘Maybe next, if there is enough…’ But then he saw how my face had changed and he broke off. ‘Are you ill again, Sarah?’ he asked. ‘Shall I wake the nurse?’

I nodded. I was drowning in a wave of heat and pain, slowly, in the crimson darkness I could hear the rasp rasp of my breath coming slowly into me, and then I felt my throat thicken yet tighter and I knew I would not be able to get my breath for much longer.

Dimly I heard Perry shouting at the nurse and shaking her awake. She stamped across to the bed and her broad arm came under my shoulders and my head fell back against her sweaty gown. She tipped the laudanum down my throat in one smooth practised gesture and I retched and heaved for breath.

‘Her throat’s closing up,’ she said to Perry in her hard voice. ‘It’s the end. Best get her la’ship if she wants to bid her g’bye.’

Her voice seemed to come from a long way away. I did not believe it possible that this could be the end for me. I felt as if I had hardly lived at all. I had been raised in such a rough poor way, and I had been less than a year in luxury with the Quality. To die now, and of a disease which I could have taken at any time in a damp-clothed hungry childhood made no sense at all. The drug began taking hold and I felt the familiar sense of floating on a golden sea. If she was right and I died now I should have died without knowing a proper childhood, without knowing a proper mama, without knowing what it is to be loved honestly and truly by a good man. And worse of all, I would die without knowing what it was to feel passion. Any slut on a street corner might have her man; but I had been cold as ice all my life. I had only ever kissed the man I loved in my dreams. In real life I had whipped him around the face and told him I hated him.

I gave a little moan – unheard among the hoarse scraping noise as I breathed. Lady Clara came in and looked down at my face.

‘Is there anything you want?’ she asked.

I could not reply but I knew truly that there was nothing she could buy for me, or sell to me, or barter with me, which I could want. The only thing I wanted could not be bought. It was not the ownership of Wideacre, but the smell of the place, the taste of the water, the sight of that high broad skyline.

She looked at me as if she would have said far more. ‘I hope I have not treated you badly,’ she said. ‘I meant well by you, Sarah. I meant Perry to marry you and to live with you. I thought you might have suited. I did need Wideacre, and I am glad to have it, but I wanted it to be your free choice.’

She looked at me as if she thought I could answer. I could barely hear her. Her face was wavering like water-weed under the Fenny. I felt as if I could taste the cool wetness of the Fenny on my tongue, as if it were flowing over my hands, over my face.

She stepped back from the bed and Perry was there, his eyes red from weeping, his curls awry. He said nothing. He just pressed his head on my coverlet until his mother’s hand on his shoulder took him away.

Still I said nothing. I thought I could see the gates of Wideacre Hall as I had seen them on that first night, open, unguarded. Beyond them was the drive to the Hall edged with the tall beech trees and the rustling oaks. In the woods was Will, watching for the men who would set gin traps which injure and maim. It was dark through the gates. It was quiet. I was weary and hot to the very marrow of my bones. I wanted to be in that gentle darkness.

In my dream I waited beside the gates.

Then I stepped through into the blackness.

35

The blackness lasted for a long time. Then from far away there was the sound of a robin singing, so I knew it was winter. There was a smell of flowers, not the familiar clogged smell of sweat. There was no sound of the rasping breathing, I could breathe. I could feel the blessed air going in and out of my body without a struggle. I raised my chin, just slightly. The pillow was cool under my neck, the sheets were smooth. There was no pain, the rigid labouring muscles were at peace, my throat had eased. I was through the worst of it.

I knew it before anyone else. I had woken in the grey light of morning and I could see the nurse dozing before the embers of the fire. It was not until Emily came in to make up the fire and wake the nurse and send her away for the day that anyone looked at me. Emily’s face was there when I opened my eyes after dozing and I saw her eyes widen.

‘I’ll be damned,’ she said. Then she raced to the idle old woman at the fireside and pulled at her arm.

‘Wake up! Wake up! You ole butter-tub!’ she said. ‘Wake and look at Miss Sairey! She’s through ain’t she! She’s stopped sweatin’ ain’t she? She ain’t hot! She’s broke the fever and she’s well, ain’t she?’

The nurse lurched up from her chair and came to stare at me. I looked back. Her ugly strawberry face never wavered.

‘Can you hear me, dearie?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. My voice was thin, but it was clear at last.

She nodded. ‘She’s through,’ she said to Emily. ‘You’d best get her summat sustaining from the kitchen.’ She nodded magisterially. ‘I could do with some vittles too,’ she said.

Emily scooted towards the door and I heard her feet scamper down the hall. The fat old woman looked at me calculatingly.

‘D’you remember that they did marry you?’ she asked bluntly.

I nodded.

‘’E slept with your door open to ‘is room, an’ all,’ she said. ‘It’s right and tight. Was it what you wanted?’

I nodded. She could be damned for her curiosity. And I did not want to think of Perry, or Lady Clara, of the doctor who had been promised the Dower House on my land, nor of the rector who had married me while I could not speak. All I wanted to do was to hear the robin singing and look at the clouds moving across the white winter sky, and to feel the joy of my hand which was no longer clenched and sticky with sweat and a breath which came smoothly to me, like gentle waves on a light sea. I had come through typhus. I was well.

I was weary enough though. In the weeks that followed it was as if I were a chavvy again, learning to walk. It was days before I could do more than sit up in my bed without aching with tiredness. Then one day I made it to the chair by the fireside on my own. A little later on and I bid Emily help me into a loose morning dress and I made myself walk out into the corridor and to the head of the stairs before I called her and said I was too faint and would have to go back to my room. But the next day I got downstairs, and the day after that I stayed downstairs and took tea.

It was not little Miss Sarah who had come through the fever. It was not that faint shadow of a lady of Quality who had fought through. It was not little Miss Sarah who ordered Emily through gritted teeth to damn well give her an arm and help her walk, even while her legs turned to jelly beneath her.

It was the old strength of Meridon, the fighting, swearing, tough little Rom chavvy. A lady of Quality would have died. You had to be as strong as whipcord to survive a fever like that, and nursing like that. A lady of Quality would have been an invalid for life if she had survived. But I would not rest, I would not have a day bed made for me in the parlour. Every day I went a little further, every day I stayed up for a little longer. And one day, only a week after I had first walked across my room, I had them bring Sea round from the stables, up to the very front door, and I walked down the steps without an arm to support me and laid my white face against his grey nose and smelled the good honest smell of him.