Philippa Gregory - Meridon

I leaned forwards to look about me and Robert Gower smiled at my eagerness, said proudly, ‘Nearly there now,’ and took a sharp left-hand turn off the cobbled main street down an unpaved mud lane. I expected a one-room upstairs, two-rooms downstairs cottage with a low roof and paper and rags stuffed in the windows, with a little patch of a kitchen garden at the front, and a field for the horses at the back.

‘Gracious!’ Dandy said as the wagon turned in off the track and we found ourselves in a handsome stable yard.

Robert Gower smiled. ‘Surprised, little Miss Dandy?’ he asked with satisfaction. ‘I thought you would be! All your little nosiness into how much I earn and how much I pay never discovered that I’m a freeholder in a market town! Aye! I have a vote and all!’ he said triumphantly.

He pulled the wagon up and Dandy and I got down. I went without thinking to the ponies at the back and untied them and brought them round. Robert nodded at me.

‘Stabling I’ve got!’ he said. ‘Stabling for every one of them if I wanted them inside all winter eating their heads off and getting fat. They’ll go out in the fields of course, but if I wanted to keep them in I could. Every single one of them. Ten loose boxes I’ve got here! Not bad, is it?’

‘No,’ I said, and I spoke the truth. It was a miracle of hard work and careful planning to bring a man from poverty to this secret affluence. And I respected him all the more that he could leave this comfort to travel in the wagon and work every day of the week for a long arduous season.

A door in the wall of the yard opened and a grey-haired woman came out dressed in her best apron with a matching white mob cap. She dipped Robert a curtsey as if he were Quality.

‘Welcome home, sir!’ she said. ‘There’s a fire in the parlour and in your bedroom when you are ready to come in. Shall I send the lad out for your bags?’

‘Aye,’ Robert said. ‘And set tea for two in the parlour, Mrs Greaves. These two young women, Meridon and Dandy, will take their tea in the kitchen with you.’

She smiled pleasantly at me, but I frankly gaped at her. By travelling a few miles down a road Robert Gower had transformed himself into Quality. He and Jack made the transition. Dandy and I were what we always had been: Romany brats.

Jack saw the change too. He slid off Snow’s back and handed the reins to me as if I were his groom. He passed Bluebell’s leading rein to me as well, so that I was holding the string of ponies and the two big horses.

‘Thank you, Meridon,’ he said graciously. ‘The lad will show you where they go,’ and then he walked past me through the doorway to the house. Dandy, still on the step of the wagon, exchanged one long look with me.

‘Phew,’ she puffed out, and jumped down from the wagon to take the string of little ponies off me. ‘Welcome to the servants’ quarters, Merry!’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘No wonder Robert Gower didn’t want Jack fancying either one of us. He must think he’s half-way to being gentry!’

An odd sly look crossed Dandy’s face, but she had her head down to the halter and was leading the ponies away so I could not see her properly. ‘Aye,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Our pretty Jack must be quite a catch for the young ladies of Warminster!’

Before I could answer her a lad came through the door to the stable yard. He was dressed well enough but cheaply in good breeches and a rough shirt and a fustian waistcoat. He took Bluebell’s reins from me and patted her neck in greeting.

‘I’m William,’ he said by way of introduction.

‘I’m Meridon Cox,’ I replied. ‘And this is my sister Dandy.’

His look went carefully over me, noting the slim-cut boy’s riding breeches and the cut-down shirt; my tumble of copper curls and my wiry strength; and then widened when he saw Dandy, her red skirt casually hitched up to show her ankles, her green shawl setting off her mass of loosely plaited black hair.

‘Do you work for Robert Gower?’ he asked incredulously.

‘I do the horses and Dandy does the gate,’ I said.

‘And are you the lasses that are going up on that swing?’ he demanded of me.

My stomach churned at the thought of it. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘My sister will, but I work with the horses. I just have to try it a little. I’m to be the bareback rider.’

‘He’s had the barn cleaned out, and the trapeze man came yesterday and put the ropes and the blocks and the pulleys up in it,’ William said in a rush. ‘Ever so high. And they’ve stretched a net like a fisherman’s net underneath, to catch you if you fall. We tested it too with a couple of bales of hay to see if it’s strong enough.

‘The barn’s filled with wood shavings from the wood mill – sacks and sacks of them. So when you’re done with practising on the rigging, he can use the barn for training the horses when the weather’s too bad to be outside.’

I nodded. Robert had meant it when he promised us a hard winter of work. ‘And where do we sleep?’ I asked. ‘Where do we take our meals?’

‘He’s had the rooms above the stables done up for you,’ William said. ‘We’ve put two beds of straw in for you, and your own chest for your things. And your own ewer and basin. There’s even a fireplace and we had the sweep in to clear it out for you. You’ll eat at the kitchen table with Mrs Greaves and me.’

He showed us the way into the stables. Each door had a horse’s name on it. William glanced at me and saw I was puzzling over the words, not knowing where I should take Snow.

‘Can’t you read?’ he asked surprised. And taking the horse from me he led Snow into the best stall, furthest away from the door and from the draughts. Bluebell went in next door; and then the ponies, two to a loose box. I looked over the doors to see they all had hay and water.

‘When they’re cooled down they’re to go out, all except Snow,’ William said. ‘Through that gateway, down the little path through the garden and there’s a field at the bottom. You’ll take them down.’

‘What do you do?’ I demanded, nettled at this allocation of work. ‘Don’t you look after them?’

William crinkled his brown eyes at me through his matted fringe.

‘I does whatever I’m told,’ he said, as if it were some private joke. ‘Robert Gower took me out of the poorhouse. If he tells me to be a groom, I’m a groom. I was that last winter, and the one before that. But now that’s your job and I do the heavy work in the house and anything else he asks me. Whatever he tells me to do, I does it. And as long as I please him, I sleep sound in a bed and I eat well. I ain’t never going back into the poorhouse again.’

Dandy shot a look at me which spoke volumes. ‘How much does he pay you?’ she demanded.

William leaned against the stable door and scratched his head. ‘He don’t pay me,’ he said. ‘I gets my keep, same as Mrs Greaves and Jack.’

‘Mrs Greaves gets no money?’ I demanded, the picture of the smart respectable woman clear in my mind.

‘He bought her out of the workhouse too,’ William said. ‘He gives her the housekeeping and she feeds well out of that. He gives her some money every quarter for her laundry bill and new aprons. But he doesn’t pay her. What would she want money for?’

‘For herself,’ I said grimly. ‘So that if she wanted to leave she could.’

William gave a slow chuckle. ‘She wouldn’t want to do that,’ he said. ‘No more than I would. Where would she go? There’s only the workhouse, for there are no jobs going in the town, and no one would take a servant who had left without a character. There’s plenty as tidy and neat as her in the workhouse – why should anyone take a woman off the street? Why should anyone pay wages when the workhouse is full of paupers who would work for free with their keep?’ William paused and looked at Dandy and me. ‘Does he pay you?’ he asked.