Philippa Gregory - Meridon

We walked that evening in the garden. It was getting colder at nightfall and he put his silk embroidered evening jacket around my shoulders and offered me his arm. I took it. We must have made a pretty sight, the two of us, my auburn ringlets brushing his shoulder and my head held high. My green gown hushing the grass and Perry as golden and as lovely as an angel. We walked together in the twilit garden and we talked of money and friendship. We did not talk of love. It never entered our heads. When Perry saw me to my bedroom door at night he stooped and kissed me on the lips and his touch was as cool as his mama’s social pecks.

I stopped him as he turned to leave. ‘Will you never feel desire, Perry?’ I asked.

He looked frankly alarmed. ‘I doubt it, Sarah,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘Would you ever want me to?’

I paused. It was as if there were two people inside me: one the girl who could not bear to be touched except by one other person, the girl who had seen too much and heard too much at too young an age to ever think that love could have anything to do with a heaving bunk and a rocking wagon. The other was a girl growing into womanhood who had seen a man look at her as if she had murdered him by leaving him. A man who looked at her with passion and love and then turned and walked away.

‘No Perry,’ I said honestly. ‘I would never want desire from you.’

He smiled at that, his blue eyes a little blurred for he was a little drunk as usual. ‘That’s fine,’ he said encouragingly. ‘For I do like you awfully, you know.’

I smiled wryly. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It is all I want from you.’

I opened the heavy panelled door and slipped inside. I paused and heard his footsteps go waveringly down the long corridor. There was a sudden clash and clatter as he stumbled into the suit of armour which stood at the corner and his owlish, ‘I beg your pardon,’ to it. Then I heard his feet scrabble on the stairs and step one after another, until he reached the top and was gone to his room.

28

I went over to the window to draw back the curtains. It was still early and the moon was coming up. As I stood, looking out towards the moonlit Common, I saw a horseman come riding down the silvery track towards the back garden of Havering Hall. I saw him ride under the lee of the wall and then I lost sight of him. He must have left his horse tied up, because in a few moments the figure appeared on the top of the wall, swung a leg over and dropped down into the informal garden at the back of the house. I watched in silence. I would have known Will Tyacke from fifty miles away.

He walked across the lawn as if he did not care who saw him trespassing in darkness, and then he stopped before the house, scantling the windows as if he owned the place. A low laugh escaped me and I leaned forward and pulled up the sash window and stuck my head out. He raised a hand in greeting and came unhurriedly to the flower bed beneath my window and for a moment I thought of some other Lacey girl, and some other young man, who had whispered together on the night air and known they were talking of love.

‘What is it?’ I said peremptorily.

Will’s face was in shadow. ‘It’s this,’ he said. He had something white in his hand. I could not see what it was. He stooped to the path at his feet, and straightened up, wrapping the paper around a stone.

‘I thought you would want to know,’ he said. He was almost apologetic. ‘From something you once said, earlier this summer, when we were friends.’

He made as if to throw it, and I stepped back before I could ask if we might still be friends. His aim was sure, the stone came sailing through the window wrapped in the white paper. By the time I picked it up and was at the window again he was walking across the lawn and scaling the wall. I watched him go. I did not call him back.

Instead I unwrapped the stone he had thrown for me and smoothed out the paper. The white was the wrong side, the blank side. On the inside, very creased as if half a dozen people had pored over it, spelling out the words, was a bright scarlet picture with a white horse in the middle and two trapeze flyers going over the top: a man and two girls. In curly letters of gold it said: Robert Gower’s Amazing Equestrian and Aerial Show.

It was them. Their tour had brought them here. I should have expected them earlier if I’d had my wits about me. Selsey to Wideacre was just a little way, they must have gone on down the coast, or perhaps they stopped for a while after burying her. Somewhere they must have found another fool for the trapeze. They were going on as if nothing had happened.

For a moment there was a rage so hot and so burning that I could see nothing, not even the garish poster, for the red mist which was in my head and behind my eyes. It had made no difference to them…the thing which had happened. Robert was still working and planning, Jack was still standing on the catcher frame, still smiling his lazy nervous smile. Katie was as vapid and as pretty as ever. They were still touring, they were still taking good gates. It had made no difference to them. It had killed her, it had killed me. It had made no difference to them at all.

I dropped the handbill and walked to the window and threw it open again to breathe in the cold night air to try to slow the rapid thudding of my heart. I was so angry. If I could have killed every one of them I would. I wanted to punish them. They were feeling nothing; although her life was over, and mine was an empty shell. I stood there for a long time in the cold but then I steadied and I turned back to the room, picked up the paper, smoothed it out again and looked to see where they were working.

They were playing outside Midhurst. They were doing three shows, the last one a late, lantern-lit show in an empty barn just a little way down the road. If I had wanted I could have gone and seen them tonight.

I gave a deep shuddering sigh. I could let them go. I could let them work my neighbouring village. I could let Rea poach the odd rabbit from my Common. I could let them pass within four miles of me. They did not know I was here. I had no need to tell them. They could go on into the high roads and byways of travellers, of gypsies. These people were my people no longer. Their ways were not my ways. We would never meet. I would never have to see them. They were a life I had left behind. I could cut myself in two and say, ‘That was the old life, the old life with her; it is gone now, all gone.’

I smoothed out the handbill and put my finger under the words, spelling them out, looking at the pictures again. There were the clues which had made Will bring it to me. ‘Robert Gower’ it said in curly letters. I had told him I worked for a man called ‘Robert’ and beside the picture of the white stallion it said ‘Snow the Amazing Arithmetical Horse’. I had told him of a horse called Snow which could do tricks. I knew that he remembered things I said to him, even light, silly things. He perhaps thought that these friends, these old friends from another life might help me look at the Haverings and at Perry with new eyes. He knew that he had lost me, that Wideacre had lost me, that I belonged nowhere now. Perhaps he had thought that the old life might call me back, might help me to find myself again.

He did not know that to think of the old life made me more careless about myself, more feckless about my future than anything else could have done. For they, and I, were still alive. But she was dead.

I sat in the window-seat and watched the moon for a while, but I was uneasy and could not settle. I looked at the little ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, there was still time. If I wished, I could ride and see the show, see how it was for them without her, without me. I could go and be concealed by the crowd, watch them in silence and secrecy, satisfy my curiosity. I could watch them and learn how it was for them, now we two were gone. Then leave among the crowd, and come slowly home.