Philippa Gregory - Meridon

The flames flickered in the grate, a candelabra was by Perry’s bedside with three of the five candles lit. I lifted it and stood it on his washstand so I could have the best light, then I turned and opened his wardrobe doors.

He had been wearing his mulberry-coloured coat with the green waistcoat this afternoon, when I had told him our marriage contract had arrived, and the deeds with it. I opened his wardrobe door and the coat was hanging, along with twenty others on hangers. I put my hand in the right-hand pocket, and then in the left-hand one. I took the coat out of the wardrobe and felt in every pocket and I even shook the coat in case I could feel the weight of the bulky papers in some pocket which was concealed.

There was nothing there.

The deeds of Wideacre were gone. I laid the coat on the floor and smoothed my hands all over it, alert for the rustle of thick paper, waiting for the feel of bulky documents under my fingertips. The deeds were not there. I had known they would not be, but I still had held to a little flicker of hope. That was foolish of me. In the hard, hungry corner of my mind I knew the deeds were not mislaid. I knew I had been robbed.

I tossed the mulberry coat into the corner and took down another from the wardrobe. This was a fine ball coat of peach silk, wonderfully embroidered with green and gold thread, stiff with peach velvet at the collars and cuffs and the pocket flaps. I thrust my cold little hands into every pocket and felt thoroughly inside. I shook it hard in case I could feel the weight of the deeds. Then I spread it on the floor, careless of creases and smoothed it all over, feeling for the weight of the packet of papers which would give the owner title to my land, my land of Wideacre.

Northing.

I bundled the fine coat into a ball and tossed it into the corner with the other. I took down a third…and a fourth…a fifth. I took down every coat in the wardrobe and searched each one as if I thought I might find the deeds to Wideacre carelessly stuffed in a pocket. I searched as though I had any hope left. I had none. But I felt as if I owed it to Perry, to Lady Clara, to my own Quality self, to little Miss Sarah Lacey, that I should believe that the life of the Quality was not the life of the midden. I wanted to believe that Perry was not a drunkard and a liar, a gambler and a thief. So I gave every coat a thorough searching, as if I thought I might find something more than disappointment and disillusion in every fine-stitched empty pocket.

Nothing.

I started on the drawers next. In the top were his fine linen shirts. I lifted each one out, shook it out of the carefully pressed folds and waited in case the deeds fell free. I dropped each shirt behind me on a chair, one after another until the drawer was empty and there was a snowdrift of creased fine white linen on the chair and on the floor. I took the drawer out then and threw aside the little muslin purse of dried lavender seeds, lifted the sweet-smelling paper lining of the drawer, and rapped with my fingers on the drawer base, in case Perry had taken care with the title deeds to my land. In case he had prized them so well that he had wanted to keep them safe, concealed where no one could steal them.

I knew they had been stolen. And I knew the name of the thief. But still I searched each drawer of the wardrobe, and then I went to the washstand and cast out his shaving tackle and his sweet-smelling soaps. His toilet water and the soft muslin cloth which he used to sponge his face. Everything I cast on the floor so that I could pull out the drawer and see if the deeds were safely hidden there.

Nothing.

I went to his writing desk, in the corner by the window. It was packed with papers, writing of every kind. I carried one drawer after another and heaped them on the centre of the bed. Small pasteboard calling cards, snippets of paper torn from dinner menus, sheets from notebooks, hot-pressed letter paper, a little mountain of papers and every one of them a note of gambling debts, written in Perry’s careless drunken scrawl. A score of them, a hundred of them, a thousand of them.

I moved the candelabra to the bedside table and lit the two new candles so that I might see better, then I smoothed the paper into a pile and sat amongst them, at the head of the bed. I drew the candles closer and lifted the first piece of paper, smoothed it out, and lifted it close to my eyes so that I could read. I spelled out the word carefully, whispering under my breath: ‘Ten guineas George Caterham’. Then I laid it on a pile and reached for the next.

Minutes I sat there, taking one paper after another, smoothing it, struggling with the words, placing it with the others. All the time my brain was working, calculating, adding and adding until all the little pieces were in a pile and I knew Perry owed two and a half thousand pounds in gambling debts to his friends.

There was a bigger pile, of proper paper, not crumpled scraps. Now I started on this. They were receipts from moneylenders against security and charging usorious rates of interest. They took me a long time to struggle through, I did not understand the words they used, nor some of the terms. I pulled my wrap around me and settled back with my back against the chair in the wreckage of the room. The deeds might be among them. They might be hidden among them. The bed was piled with papers, the chair heaped with Perry’s shirts, the floor covered with his coats. It looked as if someone had wrecked his room in anger. But I was not angry. I had been looking for the deeds of Wideacre. I cared for nothing in the world but my land. And as the clocks struck two all over the house in sweet muted tones I sat again in silence and knew what I should have known all along. That I loved Wideacre, that it was my home. And the man who tried to take it from me was my enemy. That whatever I had lost in the past, whatever I might cling to in the future, Wideacre was my source and my roots. I needed it like I needed air on my face and water in my cup. I had loved my sister and lost her. Wideacre I would keep.

I sat very still and gazed into the fire as if I could see my future there. I thought, for the first time ever, about my mother, my real mother, and thought how she had planned for me to be found and brought to Wideacre to be raised there as a country child. I thought of what James Fortescue had told me, that she had loved the land and loved the people. I thought that one of her friends had been a Tyacke, kin to the first man I met when Sea took me to my home. And for the first time my hardened roughened heart reached out to her memory and forgave her for letting me go, for throwing me out into that dangerous world. I forgave her for failing me then, when I was new-born. And I gave her credit for trying to do the best for me by putting me in the care of the man who loved her, and bidding him teach me that the land belonged to no one.

I felt that now…I smiled at myself. The moment the deeds were held by someone else I felt that no one should hold them. But I thought it was not my simple quick selfishness which made me feel thus, I thought it was something more. A sense of rightness, of fairness.

You should not be able to buy and sell the land people walk on, the houses they call homes. You should not be able to gamble it away, or throw it away. The only people who can be trusted with the land are those who live on it, who need it. Land, and air, and sunshine and sweet water can belong to no single person. Everyone needs them, everyone should be able to claim them.

I sat there in silence, in silence and weariness. And I wondered where in all of the gambling dens and hells of London Perry had gone with the deeds to Wideacre in his pocket and the desire to gamble making him mad in his head. I had known at once what Perry was staking tonight. He had gone out gambling with our marriage deeds and the deeds of Wideacre in his pocket. The imp of mischief which had made him slip them into his jacket had been born in the parlour when I stopped him drinking, had grown strong at dinner when his mama and I pulled him and worried at him like a pair of hungry curs over a strip of cowskin. Perry would never stand up to her. Perry would never stand up to me. He was a coward. He would lie and steal and betray us all as he sought to prove himself to us, in his hundreds of little vengeances.