Philippa Gregory - Meridon

I was back first. I wore a shimmery blue shirt and a pair of thin white breeches, a scaled-down copy of Jack’s flying costume. I was not nervous of the low practise trapeze; and besides my job was only to whet the appetite of the audience for the main trapeze act. But my feet were icy in my clogs as I trudged back to the barn door. And I ached as if I had fallen and been kicked hard in the belly. Dandy and Katie’s elation at their record sales, and the smile the man from London had given them when he had said, ‘No thank you,’ went over my head. I hardly heard them. I had a deep dark feeling, as if I were a bucket going slowly down a deep well. The others’ voices came as an echo from far away.

‘You all right, Merry?’ Jack said as he joined us. ‘You look sickly.’

I looked around for him. My vision was slightly blurred and his face kept coming and going.

‘I feel ill,’ I said. I thought for a second and then recognised that cold feeling in my belly. ‘I feel frightened,’ I said.

Jack’s hand came on my shoulder and I held still and let him touch me.

‘Not that little practice trapeze!’ Katie said scornfully. ‘You can’t be scared of that!’

I looked for her in the fog that was gathering around me. ‘No,’ I said uncertainly. ‘I’m not scared of that.’

I was looking for Dandy. I could not see her. Robert came out and called for Jack to come and help finish rigging the catch-net with him and Rea.

I said: ‘Dandy!’ in sudden fright and then her beloved face was before me and she was saying kindly:

‘What’s the matter, Merry? You’re as white as if you’ve seen a boggart. It should be me that’s sickly!’

I could hear a distant rushing in my ears as if there was a waterfall far away pouring down a cliff. Something seemed to be coming towards us as fast as the tumbling water.

‘Why?’ I asked urgently. ‘Why should it be you who is sickly?’

Dandy threw back her head and laughed. ‘I wanted to tell you later,’ she said.

She paused and I heard Robert say from the ring inside the barn:

‘And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, Honoured Guest, Welcome Visitors All, We Commence the Second Half of our Nationally-Famous Show with Robert Gower’s Amazing Aerial Display. First with Mamselle Meridon on the trapeze!’

‘You’re on!’ Katie said urgently, holding open the door for me.

Through the gap I could see Rea and Jack checking the stakes which held the catch-net taut. Jack had his back to me, but I could see Rea’s face furrowed with concentration. I had a moment of relief from worry. I knew Rea would make sure the catch-net was safe.

I could hear the clapping, the noise an audience makes when they are excited, waiting. They were waiting for me in the barn, but my feet would somehow not go forward. Jack was coming out past me.

‘Go on Meridon!’ he said softly. ‘You’re on.’ He went on past me to check the set of his shirt in a little mirror Dandy had nailed up near the lantern.

I turned back to Dandy. ‘I won’t go until you tell me!’ I said. It was as if I were seeking for a light at the top of the deep well.

She gave me a little push in the back and her face was alight with triumph and laughter.

‘Go on, Merry!’ she said. ‘You’re stubborn as a mule! I’ll tell you it all later.’ Then as my feet made no movement, she gave me another little push and said, ‘Go on! It’s as I said it would be! I’ve caught Jack and I’m going to tell his da. I’m breeding his child so there’ll be a grandson Gower to inherit all this! And I’ll be his ma. I told you I’d win all this, and I have done! I’ve caught him now and he’ll not get away. I’ll tell him after the show.’

I spun around and caught her hands but Katie tore me away from her and pushed me through the barn door. I saw Jack wheel around from the mirror. I saw his stunned face, blank with incomprehension at what he had overheard. Rea had one of the doors and was pulling it shut behind me. I knew that Jack had heard. I knew he had caught Dandy’s exultant tone, I knew he had heard the words. He had turned in time to see her smile as she said: ‘I’ve caught him now, and he’ll not get away.’

I stood helplessly before the audience as if I had forgotten what I was there for. I looked behind me. The barn door had stuck on some roughness on the ground and Jack had come forward to help Rea shut it, obedient as ever to the orders of his father who said that it must always be kept closed during acts.

I walked over to the low trapeze slung underneath the girls’ frame and kicked off my clogs and held my arms above my head. Robert lifted me up and I hung for a moment as if I had forgotten what to do. Then I started working the trapeze and it seemed to go backwards and forwards like the clapper of a bell tolling inside my head.

I could make no sense of what Dandy had said to me. I was too weary and overworked to make any sense of it at all. And the show had its own inexorable rhythm. I saw the man in the front row look at me and I smiled my shallow unreal smile and turned and hooked my knees through the trapeze bar and hung upside down. There was a little ripple of clapping. I swung my head up and leaned outwards, gripping the trapeze with my hands behind my back, and held the bird’s nest pose. They clapped me again, more warmly. The trapeze seemed to go tick…tock…tick…tock in my head as I worked it to pick up speed.

I felt as if a long way away there was the red-haired woman in the big house waiting for her destiny to come to her. And that here I was, a ticking clock, waiting for mine to come to me. I raised myself up and over the trapeze in the pose that David called the kip, with the bar of the trapeze against my hips and my head up and smiling. My red ribbons blew across my eyes but I did not even blink. I was in a deep spiralling haze and I could not think nor see.

I leaped down from the trapeze with a cheating half-somersault and landed on my feet. They clapped me very loudly, someone cheered from the back. I looked around for Dandy.

‘And now!’ Robert yelled as the applause died down. ‘We Present. The Daredevil, the Amazing…Jack Gower!’ Jack came in and took a bow. I saw he was white as his breeches, his eyes dazed. He looked as if his life was about to collapse around him. He shot one bewildered look at me as I stood, my upraised hand gesturing towards him as David had taught us. His face was as puzzled and as scared as a lost child.

I tried to smile at him, he should be thinking of nothing but the task of catching the girls as they swung out towards him; but I found I could not. My lips were drawn back over drying gums in a blank parody of a smile. I was baring my teeth at the audience, not smiling. Jack looked at me as if I could help him. He looked at me as if he would ask me what he should do. He looked at me as if he was puzzled, disbelieving what he had heard.

My face was expressionless. I hardly even saw him. We were far, far away from each other. Somewhere deep down inside us we both knew that after the show there would be the end of this life. An end to the comfort and the friendship, the quiet early mornings and the hard-working days. The sense of belonging, all of us, one to all the others. There would be a row which would mean the end of this life. All the long months of training, and this afternoon’s triumph, would count for nothing.

Robert Grower would not be caught by a slut like Dandy. Dandy would never let go. Jack would be trapped between their two conflicting wills. And I would have to take her away, pregnant, idle, incapable of earning money. She and me, a horse and a small purse of guineas. Jack gestured towards me with his hand, directing the applause towards me, and his face was white and imploring. He took his bow as if all the thief-takers in London were after him and started to climb his ladder slowly.