Philippa Gregory - Meridon

I was a bad travelling companion for Lady Clara. She had a book to read but I was still unable to read anything but the simplest of stories and the jogging of the chaise meant I could not put my finger under a line and follow it. I had with me some of the accounts of Wideacre in the days of my mama Julia, but I could not read her copperplate script and Lady Clara would not trouble herself to help me. And to my surprise, and then increasing discomfort, I found I was sickly with the movement of the carriage.

I did not believe it when I started to feel headachy and dizzy. Me, who had spent all my life on the driver’s seat of a wagon, or eating or dozing behind! But it was true. The chaise was slung on thick leather straps and it bounced like a landlady’s bubbies, and it swayed from side to side too. A great lolloping pig of a chaise, lined with sickly blue. I would have blessed the highway-man who stopped us. I would have been out of the chaise in a moment and begged him a ride on his horse.

‘You’re pale,’ Lady Clara commented, looking up from her book.

‘I’m sickly,’ I said. ‘The chaise makes me feel ill.’

She nodded. ‘Don’t say “sickly”, say “unwell”,’ she said, and reached for her reticule. She pulled out a little bottle of smelling salts and handed it over to me. I had never seen such a thing before.

‘Is it drink?’ I asked, holding it to the light and trying to see.

‘No!’ said Lady Clara with her rippling laugh. ‘It’s smelling salts. You hold it under your nose and smell it.’

I took the stopper off and held the little bottle under my nose. I gave a hearty sniff and then gasped with the shock of it. My head reeled, my nostrils stung.

Lady Clara rocked on her seat. ‘Oh, Sarah!’ she said. ‘You are a little savage! You wave it under your nose and breathe normally. I thought it might help.’

I stoppered the bottle again and handed it back to her. I fumbled in my pocket for my handkerchief and rubbed my sore nose and mopped my eyes.

‘I should feel better if I could ride,’ I said.

‘Out of the question,’ Lady Clara said, and that was the end of the conversation.

I shut my eyes against the swaying dizziness of the movement, and after a little while I must have slept, for the next thing I knew the wheels of the coach were squeaking and banging on cobblestones. I woke with a jump of shock and all round me was the bustle of the city and the shouts of the porters. The smell was appalling and the noise was as bad as Salisbury on market day, and it went on for mile after mile. I could not believe there were so many people in the world, so many carriages, so many paupers, beggars, hucksters, tradesmen.

‘London!’ Lady Clara said with a sigh of relief which showed how hard her stay in the country had been for her.

I nodded but instead of excitement I felt only dread. I would rather have done anything in the world than be where I was, Miss Sarah Lacey, come to town for my first Season as a young lady, driving up to the Haverings’ town house with little Miss Juliet in the nursery and the newly wedded Lady Maria de Montrey coming to see her mama in the morning.

‘You will not dislike my daughters,’ Lady Clara said to me, her blue eyes veiled as if she could guess my thoughts as I grew paler and quieter.

‘No,’ I said without conviction.

‘You will not dislike them, because they will mean nothing to you,’ she said equably. ‘Juliet is an ignorant schoolgirl, a little forward for her age, quite pretty. Maria is a little vixen. I married her well before her husband discovered the sharpness of her tongue. She ought to thank me for that but she will not.’ Lady Clara gleamed over the top of her fan. ‘She will hate you,’ she said candidly, with a smile.

I hesitated. Sarah Lacey the young lady was in conflict with Meridon the gypsy. Meridon won. ‘I hate cat fights,’ I said bluntly. ‘I don’t want her scratching at me. It will be bad enough without that.’

Lady Clara smiled mischievously. ‘Don’t say “cat fights”, Sarah,’ she said. ‘And don’t be dull. It will not be bad. It is your coming-out into your rightful society. And you may rely on me to curb the worst excesses of my daughter’s malice.’

I hesitated. ‘You won’t always be there,’ I said. ‘And Perry…’

Lady Clara’s fan flicked the dusty air. ‘Perry is as afraid of Maria as he is of me,’ she said. ‘He’ll be no help to you, my dear. So I will always be there. Maria is selfish enough and conceited enough to try to make a fool of you in public. I shan’t permit that. You will do well enough with me.’

‘I’m grateful,’ I said. There was a world of irony in my voice but Lady Clara chose not to hear it.

Instead she leaned forward. ‘We’re nearly here,’ she said. ‘This is Grosvenor Street, and here is our street, Brook Street, and here, on the corner, is our house.’

She spoke with pride, I stared in surprise at it. It was a handsome white house with a flight of four shallow steps down to the pavement, a great army of black iron railings around it, and a heavy triangular carving of stone over the doorway. They must have been waiting for us, for as the carriage drew up the double doors were flung open and two footmen in livery and half a dozen maids in black dresses and white aprons came out and stood in a row up the steps. Lady Clara put her hand to her bonnet and cast a swift look over me.

‘Straighten your cape, Sarah,’ she said abruptly. ‘And don’t smile at them.’

I nodded and tried to look as haughty and as disdainful as she did. Then they opened the carriage door and let down the steps and Lady Clara glided into the house nodding as the maids rippled down in a curtsey on either side of her, and I followed her in.

I was not awkward then. I was not gawkish. I had stood in a show ring before now and been stared at till the crowds had their full pennyworth. A row of housemaids would not discomfort me. I nodded impartially at their bowed capped heads, and followed Lady Clara indoors.

It was a grand lovely hall. If Lady Clara had not shot me a quick frown I should have gasped. The stairs came curling down the wall on our right, broad and shallow with a fancy curved banister. The wall behind it was crusty with plasterwork making picture frames and niches for white statues – indecent, I thought they were, but I barely had time for more than a glimpse. Inside the square gilt plaster frames were painted pictures of people wrapped up in coloured sheets and rolling in waves or lying about in woods. There was a door on our left to a room which would overlook the street but Lady Clara walked past it and followed the butler up the stairs to a parlour immediately above it, facing the street.

He threw open the door. ‘We lit a fire in the parlour, my lady, thinking you might be chilled or tired from your drive,’ he said. ‘Would you like some tea m’lady? Or mulled wine?’

I stepped into the room behind her. It was the most extraordinary room I had ever seen in my life. Every wall was done up fancy with great mouldings and painted so that every wall was like a frame for a picture, or for the four tall windows. The fireplace was so covered with swags and curls and ribbons that you wondered they could ever find where to light it in the mornings. It was very grand. It was very imposing. I missed the simple comfort of Wideacre the moment I was over the threshold.

‘Dust,’ Lady Clara said walking into the parlour stripping off her gloves and handing them to the waiting maid.

The butler, the Havering man who had set off early yesterday night from Sussex to be here to greet us, shot a furious glance at the housekeeper, a London woman I had not seen before.

Lady Clara sat down before the fire and put her feet up on the brass fender. She held out her hands to the blaze and looked at them all, parlourmaid, housekeeper, butler, without a smile.