Philippa Gregory - Meridon

I had tried a drive out in Lady Clara’s oversprung landau and was coming in, weary with overtaxing myself in my gritty struggle back to health. Perry was bright as a new guinea, golden-haired, blue-eyed, smiling like sunshine.

He was also drunk as a wheelbarrow. He fell out of the travelling chaise and giggled like a baby in sunshine. The footmen coming gracefully down the steps to fetch in his baggage suddenly put on a turn of speed and heaved him up out of the gutter. Perry’s legs went from under him and tried to race off in opposite directions while he laughed aloud.

‘Why Sarah!’ he said catching sight of me. ‘You up and about already! You look wonderful!’

I scowled at him. I knew I was as white as ice and my hair was a copper mop of curls again which looked ridiculous under a bonnet and half-bald under a cap.

‘I’ve had such luck!’ he said joyously. ‘I’ve won and won, I am weighed down with guineas Sarah! I’ll take you out to the theatre tonight to celebrate!’

‘Bring him in,’ I said abruptly to the footmen, and went ahead of them into the parlour.

Perry walked steadier when he was in the house. He dropped into a chair and beamed at me.

‘I really have done well, you know,’ he offered.

I managed a thin smile. ‘I’m glad,’ I said.

There was a tap on the door and the parlourmaid came in with tea. I took a seat by the fireside and my cup when she handed it to me. Perry drank his eagerly and refilled it several times. ‘It’s good to be home,’ he said.

‘I’ve seen my lawyer,’ I said abruptly. ‘The marriage is unbreakable and the contracts are going through. They’ll send the deeds of Wideacre to you at once.’

Perry nodded, his face sobering. ‘I was washed up, Sarah,’ he said. ‘I was quite under the hatches. It would have been the debtors prison for me if we had not married.’

I nodded, but my face was stony.

He shrugged. ‘Mama said…’ he started, then he broke off. ‘I’m damned sorry if you are angry with me, Sarah,’ he said. ‘But I could think of nothing else. The doctor told us you would die, I was not even thinking of getting Wideacre. I was just thinking of getting my own money, and I thought you would not mind. It’s not as if you wanted to marry anyone else, after all. And we are very well suited.’

I looked at him, I was too weary for anger. I looked at him and I saw him as he was. A weakling and a drunkard. A man too fearful to stand up to his own mother and too foolish to stay out of gambling and off the bottle. A man no woman could fall in love with, a man no woman could respect. And I thought about myself – a woman spoiled from the earliest childhood so she could not stand a man’s touch, nor accept a man’s love. A woman who had dreamed all her life of living in a certain way, of seeking a certain place. And when I had found it, it had meant very little.

I was no longer little Miss Sarah with her hopes of a brilliant London season and her eagerness to learn how society people lived, her belief in the best. I was Meridon who had been cheated until my heart was hard all my childhood, and had been robbed in adulthood by the people I had thought of as a refuge.

‘We’re well suited,’ I said wearily. ‘But I don’t have a lot of hopes for us.’

Perry looked dashed. ‘You wanted to go home…’ he offered ‘Home to the country. When you’re well enough for the journey, we could go to Havering,’ he glanced at me. ‘Or Wideacre if you’d prefer.’

I nodded. ‘I would like that,’ I said. ‘I would like to go to Wideacre as soon as possible. I should be well enough to travel in a few days. Let’s go then.’

He gave me a little smile, as appealing as a child.

‘You’re not really angry are you Sarah?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t mean to make you angry, or disappoint you. It was Mama who was sure. Everyone was certain that you would die, I didn’t think you’d mind doing it. It would have made no difference to you, after all.’

I got to my feet, steadying myself with a hand on the mantelpiece.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t really mind. There was no one else I wanted to marry. It is not what I planned, that’s all.’

Perry stumbled as he went to hold the door open for me. ‘You are Lady Havering now,’ he said encouragingly. ‘You must like that.’

I looked down the long years to my childhood to where the dirty-faced little girl lay in her bunk and dreamed of having a proper name, and a proper home, and belonging in a gracious and beautiful landscape. ‘I should do,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve wanted it all my life.’

That reassured him and he took my hand and kissed it gently. I held still. Perry had inherited his mother’s diffidence, he would never grab me, or overwhelm me with kisses, or brush against me for the pleasure of my touch. I was glad of that, I still liked a distance between me and any other person. He let me go and I went past him and up the shallow stone stairs to my bedroom to lie on the bed and look at the ceiling and keep myself from thinking.

For the next week I worked at becoming stronger. Lady Clara complained that I never went into society at all. ‘Hardly worth your while to make me take the title of Dowager if you’re going to be a hermit,’ she said to me at dinner one day.

I gave her half a smile. ‘I am too grand to mix with the common people,’ I said.

That made her laugh and she did not tease me further. She was still too busy trying to keep Maria with her husband to waste much time on me. A notice of our private marriage had appeared in the paper but all of Lady Clara’s friends knew that I had been seriously ill. They would hold parties for me later on. I told everyone I met in the park that I was not well enough to do more than ride a little and walk, at present.

Sea was very good. He had missed our daily rides and the grooms in the stables did not like to take him out because he was frisky and naughty. If a high-sided coach went past him he shied, if someone shouted out in the street he would be half-way across the road before they could steady him down, and if they so much as touched him with a whip he would be up on his hindlegs in a soaring rear and they could not hold him.

But with me he was as gentle as if he were a retired hack. The first outing I let the groom lift me into the saddle and I gathered up the reins and waited to see what would come. I would have felt a good deal safer astride, but we were in the stable courtyard and I was in my green riding habit, pale as skimmed milk in the rich colour.

I had a silly little cap perched on my head instead of my usual bonnet – but with only short curls no pins would hold. Lady Clara had been scandalized when I had threatened to ride bareheaded.

Sea snuffed the air, as if wondering whether to race for the park at once, but then he tensed his muscles as he felt my lightness.

‘Sea,’ I said, and at my voice his ears went forward and I felt him shift a little beneath me. I knew he remembered me, remembered the red-faced man who had been his owner before I had come to him. Remembered the little stable in Salisbury behind the inn, and how I had sat gently on him, half the weight of his usual rider, and spoken to him in a quiet voice. I thought he would remember the journey home, tied to the back of Robert Gower’s whisky cart, with me dripping blood and drooping with tiredness, my head on Robert’s shoulder. I thought he would remember the little stable at Warminster, and how I would go down to him in the morning, clattering down the little wooden staircase to greet him before going in to breakfast and bringing him back a crust of a warm roll. And I was sure he would remember that night when there had been no one on the land but him and me. No one in the whole world but the two of us going quietly through the sleeping Downland villages. Me, as lost as a child without its mother, and him quietly and certainly trotting along lanes where he had never been before, drawn like a compass point to our home.