Philippa Gregory - Meridon

‘I’ll try,’ Jack offered and picked himself up off the floor. His hands and wrists were plastered with wood shavings and he brushed them off. I moved aside and squatted on my haunches to watch him. My arms and shoulders were tingling with the strain and my hard-worked belly was quivering. My hands and legs were shaking but it was a trembly exhilaration from exhausted muscles and a singing delight in stretching my body to a new skill.

I had been angry with myself for missing the beat of it, but I was glad to see that I was better than Jack. It had irritated me for months, the way he could stand so easily on Bluebell’s back while I was still dependent on his shoulder or on the strap for balance. David called the beat for him, and counted it. But Jack was nowhere near. He dropped off the trapeze red-faced and cursing under his voice. One level look from David’s blue eyes hushed him but he stalked off to where a bar was set into the wall and started hauling himself up and down on it in irritable silence.

Dandy swayed forward. ‘My turn?’ she asked David.

‘Your turn,’ he said and put his big hands on her small waist to lift her up.

She was better than Jack. She had a sense of rhythm as natural as dancing and she could sway forward and back with the trapeze rather than struggling against it. Her upraised arms strained the shirt over her breasts and I watched David’s eyes to see if he was looking at her. He was not. He was watching the beat of her legs as she tried to work the trapeze forward and back. I gave a little secret smile. I had nothing to fear from David. He might notice Dandy’s looks, but he was not a man to go mad for her. He would not forget that he had a job of work to do here and a small fortune to make if he did it right.

We worked like that all the early morning until William came down to summon us for breakfast in the kitchen. We ate as if we were half starved, Mrs Greaves bringing tray after tray of fresh-baked rolls to the table with home-made creamy butter, ham, beef, and cheese. Jack and David drank great pints of ale while Dandy and I drank water. Even then, I could not resist snatching an apple from the bowl as I passed the Welsh dresser on our way out again.

David declared an hour’s rest while he checked the rigging, and Dandy went to raid Jack’s wardrobe for something more becoming while he and I went to check the ponies. After we had seen they were well, and watered them and humped a hay net down to them, the church clock was ringing the hour and we were due back in the barn.

Already there was a blacksmith working on a second-hand stove in the corner, rigging a chimney through a gap in the wall. I noted the speed with which David’s demands were met; but I said nothing.

Dandy and Jack were wild to go up the shaking ladder to the platform at the top and David said that they might climb up. He showed Jack how to hold the ladder while Dandy climbed, by stepping into the bottom rung and weighting it for her, and then he held it steady while Jack went up too. I sat in the corner of the barn like an unfledged squab and peered at them through the cracks in my fingers. I did not dare move my hands from covering my face. David, courteously, paid no attention to me at all.

He showed them how to climb the ladder, toe-heel, toe-heel, all up the shaking length of it. And he laughed gently when Dandy called down that she was out of breath just from climbing the twenty-five steps.

‘You must practise then!’ he said. ‘If you are going to be Mademoiselle Dandy, the Angel without Wings, then you must seem to soar up the ladder. Not waddle up like a pinioned duck!’

He went up the ladder behind Jack, with no one to hold it still for him, and he looked as if he were running upstairs he took it so swiftly. I peeped through my fingers at them, sickeningly high, and I caught parts of his low-voiced instructions. He was thoughtful for me, because he called down to warn me.

‘Meridon, I am teaching them to fall into the net, so you will see us all falling, but we shall all be quite safe.’

I uncovered my face at that so that he could see me nod to show I understood. I even watched as he took hold of the trapeze firmly in his hands and stepped off the little platform, swinging gently out, letting its swing die down of its own accord until it was still – then he dropped from it. As he fell he turned his legs up so that he landed on his back and on his shoulders. He sprang to his feet and walked with an odd, bouncy, graceless stride to the edge of the net and vaulted down.

‘Like that!’ he called. ‘Keep your legs up, your chin tucked on your chest and you cannot be hurt.’

Jack’s distant white face nodded and he reached out a shepherd’s crook and hooked the swinging trapeze and drew it towards him. I watched as he took a grip of it and then I had to shut my eyes as I saw his expression harden and knew he was nerving himself to step off the platform clinging to it.

The twang of the net told me he had landed safely, and his yell of elation up to Dandy. ‘Come on, Dandy! It is fine! It is a wonderful feeling. Better than riding even! And the fall is scary, but it is so good to feel yourself safe! Come on, Dandy!’

That broke something in me. ‘Don’t make her! Don’t make her!’ I screamed and whirled up from the wood shavings on the floor of the barn. Jack had sprung down from the net and turned and fairly caught me as I launched myself at him. ‘You shouldn’t! You shouldn’t!’ I said. I was beyond myself, not knowing what I was saying. My hands were in fists and I went to thump Jack hard in the face, but he parried the blow. ‘Don’t make her!’ I shrieked again. ‘It ain’t safe!’

Jack could not manage me, but David, a clear foot taller than him and much heavier, grabbed my arms and hugged me tight, pinning my arms to my sides.

‘It is safe,’ he said, his voice a low rumble in my ear. ‘I would not let your sister come to harm. I would not let her up there if I thought her in danger. I want her to do well, and so do you. She wants to learn this trick. You must not be selfish and stop her going her way.’

‘It’s not safe for her,’ I said. I was weeping in the hopeless effort to make him understand me. ‘It’s not safe for her! I know! I am a gypsy! I have the Sight! It’s not safe for her!’

He turned me in his arms, turned me to face him and scanned my frantic wet face. ‘What is safe for her?’ he asked gently. ‘This is the way she chooses now. She could choose worse.’

That made me pause. If Dandy could delight in the applause from hundreds of people and earn a fair share of the profits then she would not go running after strangers and let them put their hands up her ragged skirts for a penny. If I knew Dandy, she would learn airs and graces as soon as she became Mademoiselle Dandy. I could trust Robert Gower to keep his investment away from men who would hurt her. I could trust him not to leave her on the road once she was a trained act in her own right and any showman in the world would give his eye-teeth for her.

I gave a little sob. ‘She’ll fall,’ I said uncertainly. ‘I’m sure she will.’

His grip tightened on me. ‘You can will her into falling,’ he said ominously. ‘If you carry on like this you will have wished her into a fall. You are frightening yourself and you are frightening her. You are robbing both of you of the confidence you need, and you are wrecking my training. And you’re a fool if you do that, Meridon. You and I both know that Robert Gower won’t keep her if she’s idle.’

I shrugged off David’s restraining arms and looked up into his face. I knew my eyes were blank with despair. ‘We keep on travelling,’ I said. ‘But there is nowhere to go.’

His blue eyes were sympathetic. ‘You’re no gypsy,’ he said. ‘You want a home.’