Philippa Gregory - Meridon

‘I thought that this would be the best for you,’ he said gently. ‘It would have been your mother’s first choice.’

Lady Clara snapped her fan shut with a little click, got to her feet and shook out her skirts.

‘Well then,’ she said. ‘I must go, and we are agreed. Sarah may come and visit me while she continues learning her way around her estate, and I will advise her as to clothes and behaviour and how to go on. When you are ready to go back to London, Mr Fortescue, then Sarah can stay with me until the start of the Season. My lawyers will contact you with details of how her allowance should be paid.’

She moved towards the door but James Fortescue made no move to open it for her.

‘Is this your wish, Sarah?’ he asked me again.

I flared up. ‘For God’s sake!’ I exclaimed. ‘Haven’t I just said so?’

Lady Clara tapped her fan sticks on her hand with a little click and I turned to her. ‘Don’t swear,’ she said. ‘Don’t raise your voice. Don’t answer a question with a question. Now try again.’

I looked at her, my eyes blazing with temper at her, and at James Fortescue and at this whole world of choices and decisions where there was nothing and no one I could trust.

Lady Clara looked back at me, her blue eyes limpid. She reminded me of Robert Gower, and how he trained me to his trade. Then I saw how she had got her way with James without raising her voice. You could use Quality manners as sharp and as hard as a honed knife blade. She raised her eyebrows at me, reminding me she was waiting.

I turned to James and I smiled at him with no warmth in my face. ‘It is my wish to go to London for a Season,’ I said. ‘It is where I belong, I want to be there.’

Lady Clara put her hand out to me and I walked with her to the carriage. ‘Well done,’ she said, when we were out in the hall, ‘You’re a quick learner. I’ll send Perry around with the carriage and he can take you for a drive this evening, then you can ride over to the Hall tomorrow and I will have a dressmaker from Chichester come to fit you. Perry will come and fetch you.’ She paused. ‘I think you and Perry will enjoy each other’s company,’ she said. Then she got into her carriage, spread her blue parasol, and was gone.

24

She was right. In the days that followed, Perry and I found an easy, undemanding friendship together, and the instant liking I had felt for him when he had come weaving down the road at his lame horse’s head grew almost without my knowing. He was the easiest man or boy I had ever known. He was never sour, he was never impatient. I never saw him anything but smiling and happy.

His mother encouraged our friendship. When she wanted me to come to Havering Hall she sent Perry over to fetch me, rather than one of the footmen. When it grew late and I had to go home she would let me go on horseback if Perry was with me, she did not make me take a carriage. When she wanted to show me how to curtsey when a man bowed it was Perry who stood opposite me with his hand on his heart.

He was seldom drunk as I had seen him on that first day. He was rarely unsteady on his feet, and if he had taken too much port after we had left him for dinner he was clever at concealing the fact that the floor was wavering at every step. If his mother was in the room he would lean nonchalantly against a chair, or sit at a stool at my feet. Only if he had to rise and walk would his look of owlish concentration betray him.

I was not sure if she noticed. She was an inscrutable combination of manners and frankness. Sometimes Perry would say something which would amuse her and she would throw back her head and laugh. Other times her eyes, as blue as his but never as warm, would be veiled and she would look at us under her lashes as if she were measuring me. I did not think she missed much, and yet she seldom checked Perry, and I never heard her caution him against drinking.

But they were Quality – a Quality family as I had never seen before. They lived by different rules entirely, in a world apart. Lady Clara would laugh till she wept over her letters from London and read aloud titbits of scandal about the royal dukes and the society ladies. The Quality behaved in ways which we would never have dared, even on a showground. There was no one to gainsay them. There was no one to watch them, order them. There were no parish authorities, or justices, or vicars or beadles watching them. No wonder they were lovely and feckless and wicked. The whole world belonged to them.

But Lady Clara was no fool. I could not take her measure because she had lived a life I could not imagine. She was born the daughter of an Irish peer, married young and beautiful to Lord Havering who had been rich and gouty and cross. I had a few glimpses into that marriage from Perry who spoke of long lonely years for his ma in the country, while his lordship drank and gambled in town. She knew she’d been bought and she did her duty, stony faced. While he was alive she gave him the sons he needed. When he allowed her up to town she spent as much of his fortune as she could. I guessed she must have waited, waited and longed, for his death. When she would still be young, and still be lovely, and rich and free. But when he was gone it was not as she had thought. There was money, but less than she had hoped. It must have been bitter for her then, to have waited all those years and find the old lord had cheated her at the end.

But it took a lot to beat Lady Clara. She got in a bailiff and told him she wanted profits off the land. She rack-rented the tenants – they had to pay a fee to keep their leases, they had to pay a fee to marry. They even had to pay a fee if they died. She planted wheat everywhere and she kept them on barley bread. She brought in pauper labour – and she even paid them less than she should. She was a sharp, hard master on the land, and she had made it pay its way until she had the sort of money she wanted. It was not enough – a king’s ransom would not have been enough for Lady Clara, she had a life of resentment to repay – but she had a fully-staffed Hall in the country, a beautiful London town house, a wardrobe full of dresses and a stable full of horses.

I watched her, and I learned from her. I did not like her, and no one could have loved her. But I understood her. I knew hunger and that hardness for myself. And I liked the thought of how she had taken an estate and made it pay.

I could not have chosen a more vivid contrast to my quiet dutiful guardian James Fortescue if I had ransacked the whole of England. We both knew it. I think it hurt him.

At the end of the second week when I had spent nearly every day at Havering Hall he asked me to wait a few moments before I went upstairs to bed. I went with him into the parlour and smoothed one of my new silk gowns over my knees.

‘It is time I prepared to return to Bristol and to my business, Sarah,’ he started cautiously. ‘I have given you this time to become acquainted with the Haverings and to take their measure. Lady Havering is a beautiful woman and Lord Peregrine an attractive young man; whatever their faults they are engaging people. I wanted you to see them for a little time before I asked you to decide whether or no you wanted to have Lady Havering as your sponsor in society.’

‘You don’t like her,’ I said bluntly.

He hesitated, then he smiled. ‘It’s better if I am frank,’ he said. ‘You are right, I do not like her. Her reputation was not good either as a wife or a widow. More importantly, I do not like how she farms. The tenants on her land are rack-rented down to the level of utter poverty and live in great hardship. She plants field after field of wheat and allows them no grazing for their animals, and nowhere to grow their own crops. Every time the price of bread goes up there are people who starve to death on that estate, die of hunger in ditches that run alongside wheatfield after wheatfield. Some people blame it on her bailiff, but she has told me herself that he obeys her orders. She may be charming in the parlour, Sarah, but if you were to see her as her servants or her workers see her she would not look so pretty.’