Philippa Gregory - Meridon

‘Dust on the outside windowsills,’ she said. ‘Get them scrubbed. And bring me my post and a cup of mulled wine at once. And bring a cup for Miss Lacey and Lord Perry as well.’

The butler murmured an apology and backed from the room. The housekeeper and the maid flicked out shutting the door behind them. Lady Clara gleamed her malicious smile at me.

‘There’s never any call to be pleasant to servants, Sarah,’ she said. ‘There are thousands who would give their right arms for a good place in a London household. Treat them firmly and sack them when you need to. There’s no profit in doing more.’

‘Yes, Lady Clara,’ I said, and I pulled out a chair from the fireside and sat down beside her.

The door opened and Perry came in with the parlourmaid behind him carrying a tray.

‘’Llo, Mama,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Sarah!’ He waved the maid to the table and flapped her from the room and handed us our cups himself.

‘Load of letters,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Mostly for you, Mama. Half a dozen for me. Bills, I suppose.’

He handed the tray of Lady Clara’s letters over to her and watched her as she sipped her drink and started to slit them open with an ivory paper knife. While her attention was distracted he reached deep into an inside pocket of his jacket and brought out a dark little flask and slopped a measure of some clear liquid into his drink. He winked at me, as roguish as a lad, and then sipped at his mulled wine with greater appetite.

‘Invitations,’ Lady Clara said with pleasure. ‘Look, Sarah, your name on a gilt engraved card!’

She handed me a stiff white card and I put my fingers under the words and spelled out slowly: ‘The Hon. Mrs Thaverley requests the pleasure of the Dowager Lady Clara Havering and Miss Sarah Lacey to a ball…’

‘Lord! She mustn’t do that in public, Mama!’ Perry said, suddenly alarmed.

Lady Clara looked up from her letters and saw me, tortuously spelling out words.

‘Good God no!’ she said. ‘Sarah, you must never try to read in public until you can do so without putting your finger under the words and moving your lips.’

I looked from one to the other of them. I had been so proud that I had been able to make out at all what the invitation said. But it was not a skill I had learned, it was a social embarrassment. Whatever I did it was never good enough for high society.

‘I won’t,’ I promised tightly. ‘Lady Clara, may I go to my room and take my hat off?’

She looked sharply at me and then her gaze softened. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘I had forgotten you felt ill. Go and lie down and I will send your maid to call you in time for you to dress for dinner.’

She nodded me to pull the bell rope by the mantelpiece, and I looked at the clock. It said three o’clock.

‘We will not dine for hours yet!’ Lady Clara said airily. ‘We keep town hours now! We will dine at six today, even later when we start entertaining. Mrs Gilroy can bring a slice of bread and cake up to you in your room.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. Peregrine held the door for me and then followed me out. The parlourmaid appeared from the back of the long corridor where I guessed the servants’ stairs were, dipped a curtsey to both of us and waited. Perry’s gaze was blurred, he had been drinking as he rode and the gin in the mulled wine had added to his haziness.

‘I’ll fetch the cake,’ he offered. ‘We’ll have a little picnic. It can be like it was in the woods that first day when I thought you were a stable lad, and we said we’d be friends.’

‘All right,’ I said desolately.

I followed the maid down the corridor trailing my new bonnet by the ribbons so that the flowers on the side brushed on the thick pile of the carpet. The maid threw open a panelled door and stood to one side. It was a spacious pretty bedroom which I guessed had belonged to the vixen Maria before her marriage. There was a white and gold bed and matching dressing-table with a mirror atop and a stool before it. There was a hanging cupboard for dresses and cloaks. There was a window which was painted tight shut and looked out over the street where carriages went to and fro and errand boys and footmen sauntered. It smelled of indoors as if clean winds never blew in London. I wrinkled my nose at the stale scent of perfume and hair-powder. I could not imagine how I would ever manage to sleep there. It would be like living in a prison.

There was a great crash outside my door as Perry stumbled against it, tray in hands. I crossed the room and opened it and he weaved unsteadily in. The open bottle of wine had tipped over and was rolling on the tray, wine streaming out over plum cake, fairy cakes, little biscuits and slices of bread and butter. The little dish of jam had skidded to the back of the tray and was sticking, unnoticed, to his waistcoat. The tray was awash with red wine, the food sodden.

Perry dumped the lot on the hearthrug before the fire, quite unaware.

‘Now we can be comfortable,’ he said with satisfaction.

I giggled. ‘Yes we can,’ I said. And we toasted each other in the remainder of the wine and we ate soggy plum cake and redstained biscuits, and then we curled up together like drunken puppies and dozed before the fire until the maid tapped on the door and told me it was time to dress for dinner.

29

Lady Clara had told me that I was fit for London society and I had doubted her when every move I made in Sussex was somehow subtly wrong. But once we were in London she criticized me very little, and I remembered with a wry smile how Robert Gower would never criticize a performance in the ring. It was the rehearsals where he was an inveterate taskmaster. In the ring he smiled encouragement.

Lady Clara was like that, and my life in London was like one long performance where I showed the tricks she had taught me and relied on her to skim over the errors I made. She covered for me wonderfully. When a young lady went to the piano to play and turned to me and said, ‘Do you sing, Miss Lacey?’ it was Lady Clara who said that I was training with one of the best masters and he insisted that I rest my voice between lessons.

They all nodded with a great deal of respect at that, and only the young lady at the piano looked at all put out.

Dancing I was excused until we had been to Almacks, some sort of club where I should dance my first dance with Perry.

Sketches were loaned to me from the schoolroom and Lady Clara insisted that I squiggle my initials at the foot of them, and had them framed. They attracted much praise and I thought my modesty was particularly becoming. The embroidery which was cobbled together by the governess in the schoolroom as an extra unpaid duty I left scattered around the drawing room, and Lady Clara would sweetly scold me in front of visitors for not putting it away. My flower arrangements were done by one of the parlourmaids who had once been apprenticed to a flower-seller. Only my horse riding and my card-playing were entirely my own and they were skills from my old life.

‘Far too good for a young lady,’ Lady Clara said. She wanted me to ride a quiet lady’s mount and offered me a bay from her stables. But I held true to Sea and she sent down to Sussex for him. The stables were around the back of the house, down a cobbled street. Some afternoons, when Lady Clara was resting, I would wear a hat with a veil pulled down and sneak round to the stables to see him. I was not supposed to walk out without a footman, the horses should be brought to the door. But I did not trust the London stable lads to keep his tack properly clean. I was not sure they were reliable about his feeds and his water. To tell the truth, I simply longed to be with him and to smell him and to touch the living warmth of him.