Meridon

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.’

I nodded. ‘What do you think she wants with me?’ I asked.

Mr Fortescue shrugged. ‘She has done well for gowns and hats while she has been dressing you,’ he said. ‘She enjoys moving in the best society and it would be no hardship for her to take you around with her next Season. I had thought that you may be a diversion for her – she must find it dull in the country.’ He hesitated. ‘She may well enjoy thinking that I do not like her influence.’

‘But you can do nothing,’ I confirmed bluntly.

He nodded. ‘I can do nothing,’ he said. ‘I am a trustee of the estate only; you are not my ward. I can control your finances until you are of age or until you are married. I can advise you, but I may not order you.’

‘You could refuse to let me have any money,’ I pointed out to him.

James Fortescue smiled. ‘I would not so coerce you,’ he said gently. ‘I may seem very dull compared with the Haverings but I am not a little shopman tyrant, Sarah. I loved your mother very much and for her sake I wish only for your happiness. If a society lady like Lady Clara pleases you, then I am glad you have her company. Certainly she can do a better job of introducing you into Quality society than anyone I would have known.’

I was suddenly impatient. ‘I want the best!’ I exclaimed. ‘The lady you spoke of, the one who would have come and lived with me, she was second-rate! I knew it as soon as I heard of her! She would have taught me how to live here, quietly in the country, and be grateful for a card party in Chichester! I don’t want that! There’s no point in me coming all this way from the gypsy wagon to here, if at the end of it I don’t get the best, the very best there is!’

James Fortescue looked steadily at me and his smile was very weary. ‘And do you think Lady Clara is the best?’ he asked. ‘And Lord Peregrine?’

I hesitated. One part of my mind knew full well that Lady Clara was an adventuress as tough and as wily as myself. That she was as hard and sharp and cunning as any old huckster selling short measure. And her son was a lovely child, nothing but a weak and lovely child, with nothing to recommend him but blond curls and blue eyes and a nature sweetened with drink.

But they made me laugh, and they had made me welcome, and they had promised to help me win my fortune back from the villagers and the land-shearers of Wideacre.

‘Yes I do,’ I said lying stubbornly. Lying to James Fortescue’s disappointed face. Lying to myself. ‘I think they are the best of the Quality, and I want to be part of their world.’

He nodded. ‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘I have written you and Lady Clara a note to tell you how much you can spend a quarter, and the bank you can draw on for funds, and my London and Bristol offices. I shall like to see you every month or so wherever you are, whether London or here. And if you should change your mind about the Haverings you must write to me at once and I shall come and take you away.’

I nodded, ignoring the feeling that I was making a rather serious mistake. ‘All right,’ I said tightly.

‘If you should change your mind, Sarah,’ he said kindly, ‘if you should change your mind after a little of that life and want to come back to Wideacre, your home is always here for you, remember. We can find someone you would enjoy living with here. You do not have to go to the Haverings.’

I shook my head. ‘I like them,’ I said defiantly. ‘I am not your sort of person, Mr Fortescue. You would not understand. Their life, their society life, will suit me very well.’

‘I am sorry for it,’ he said gently, then he gave a little bow. He did not offer to kiss my hand as he had done once before, and he left the room.

I sat in silence for a while. I supposed I should feel triumphant for I had taken on a powerful man, and the manager of my fortune, and come out best, come out with my own way. But it did not feel like a victory. It felt instead as if I had been offered a little gold but had preferred to take false coin. I felt around my neck where I still wore, out of habit, the string with the gold clasps. And I wondered what Celia would have made of me, a vagrant granddaughter. And what my long-dead mama Julia would think if she could see me rejecting the man she had loved and turning my back on the land she called home.

I was silent and blue-devilled for that night only. The very next day, Lady Clara swept down on to Wideacre Hall, exchanged documents and addresses with Mr Fortescue, ordered my bags packed, and took me away. I only saw James Fortescue once more, when he rode over to bid me farewell the day before he went back to Bristol. He did not even cross the threshold but held his horse and stood on the terrace till I went out to join him.

‘Will Tyacke will call on you tomorrow and take you out riding,’ he said as we stood on the terrace. ‘It is my wish, Sarah, that you ride with him and learn all you can about the estate. I know your heart is set on London and your Season but Lady Clara herself will tell you that you can be in the best of society and still know what is grown in your fields.’

I nodded. ‘I want to learn,’ I said. I did not say, ‘So when I am of age I can make changes,’ but that thought hung in the air between us.

‘Maybe when you have seen how things are run on Wideacre and how things are run here, you will come to see things my way,’ Mr Fortescue said gently.

‘Maybe,’ I said.

He put out his hand and I held out mine, in the way I had been taught. I had already learned not to pull away. Lady Clara had scolded me for being missish about another person’s touch, and had forced me to stand still while she circled me and patted my cheeks, my shoulders, my arms, and messed my hair. ‘There!’ she had said at the end of the circuit. ‘I don’t expect you to drape yourself over your friends but you are a girl, and girls must be available for petting.’

So it was no hardship to step close to Mr Fortescue and wait for his kiss on my forehead, or even on my hand. But he did neither. He shook hands with me as if I were a young gentleman, and his grip was very firm and friendly.

‘You have my address,’ he said turning his back and getting on his horse. ‘And whatever you think of my trusteeship you should remember that I am your friend and I have tried to do the best I can, for both you and the land. If you are in any need at all you should send for me and I will come at once.’

I smiled wryly at that, thinking of the years when I had gone hungry. Now I was being offered help when I lived in a house with twenty servants and had four meals a day.

‘I think I can care for myself,’ I said.

He settled his reins and looked down at me. ‘We differ on that, too,’ he said gently. ‘I think you have tried to care for yourself for too long. I think that you have tried so hard to care for yourself that you have shut up all your pain inside you, so that no one can ease it for you, or comfort you. I should dearly have loved to see you settled here where you were cared for, where you could have had something of the childhood you missed.’

He tipped his hat to me, and to Lady Clara who waved a lacetrimmed handkerchief to him from the parlour window, and then he clicked to his horse and rode away down the drive.

I watched him go, his square shoulders and slightly bowed head. I watched him go and knew that if my real mama Julia had been able to choose, he would have been her husband. If she had lived, he would have been my papa. I watched him ride away and leave me with the Haverings and I refused to hear what he said about shutting my pain inside myself. I would not acknowledge any loss. I would not feel the loss of him. I refused to feel bereft.

‘Now,’ Lady Clara said as she joined me on the terrace and we watched his departing back. ‘Now, my girl, you are going to start work.’

I laughed at that, for I had known work that Lady Clara could never have dreamed of. But I laughed a good deal less once the work started.

Of course it was never hard, not like trapeze work or horsetraining. But it was wearying in a way that those skills had not been. I found I was as tired in the evenings as if I had been working hard each day, and I could not think what ailed me. Lady Clara never stopped watching me, she had me walk across the room a dozen times, she had me sit in a chair and get up again, over and over. She ordered the carriage out into the yard, and a phaeton and a curricle, and sent me up and down the steps into each of them time after time, until I could engage not to tread on the hem of my gown, or bang my bonnet on the carriage roof.

At mealtimes we dined quite alone. Not even Perry ate with us; the servants laid the table and were then dismissed. Then patiently, like a warder with an idiot, she taught me how to hold my knife and, at the same time, to hold my fork, how to put them down on the plate between mouthfuls, how to drink from my glass only when my mouth was empty so there was no greasy stain left on the rim. How to talk while I ate, and how to cope with chicken wings and chop bones without seizing them up and gnawing and sucking at them. She taught me to wipe the tips of my fingers on my napkin, she taught me to balance it on my knees so that it did not slide to the floor. How much wine to drink, and when it was polite to refuse or polite to accept.

All the time, every minute of the day, she corrected my speech. By just raising one of her arched eyebrows she warned me that I was talking Rom, talking rough, or talking bawdy. Over and over again I would try to tell her something and she would make me try the phrase, like a horse at a difficult jump, until I could get it out with the right words and the right inflexion.

‘Fortunately, some of the best ladies in society talk like farm-hands,’ she said acidly. ‘And a good few can read and write no more than you. But still you will learn, Sarah. You are coming along fast.’

I could not help but respect her. She never so much as flickered one of her long-lashed eyes, whatever I did. Whatever the mistakes I made – and I was too ignorant even to know how much she must be offended – she never even looked surprised. One evening, after an especially hard day when she had been trying to teach me to pick flowers in the garden and arrange them in a glass, I had burst out:

‘Lady Clara, this is hopeless. It is driving me half mad, and you must be fashed to death of me. I’ll never learn it. I’ve started too late. You are trying to school me in tricks I should’ve learned when I was learning to walk. I am too old for them now. I’ll go back to my own place and I’ll get Mr Fortescue’s old lady to live with me. I’ll never learn all I ought, and you must have had a bellyful of teaching me.’

‘Don’t say bellyful,’ she said instantly. ‘Or fashed.’ Then she paused. ‘No, my dear,’ she said. ‘I am not weary of it, and I think you are learning well. I am not disposed to give it all up. I think you will be a credit to me, to all of us. I want us to go on. I am pleased with your progress.’

‘But Lady Clara,’ I said. ‘The Season starts in autumn. I shall never be ready in time.’

She leaned back her head on the parlour chair. We were in the Blue Parlour and the colour of the upholstery matched her eyes as if it had been chosen with her colouring in mind. It probably had.

‘You must leave that decision to me,’ she said. ‘I am your sponsor into this new world, you have to trust my judgement. I shall tell you what is best for you, and I shall tell you when you are ready.’

‘And then what?’ I asked baldly. ‘When I am ready, when I am introduced into your society? What happens then? What do you think happens then?’

She raised her eyebrows, her blue eyes were very distant, very cold. ‘Why, you amuse yourself,’ she said. ‘You are the heiress to a considerable estate. You are sponsored by a woman of immaculate credentials (that’s me) and you will be squired by the best-looking young man in London, a peer of the realm himself (that, God help us, is Perry). If you want to be in Society, you will have reached the pinnacle of your ambitions.’

‘And then what?’ I pressed her.

She gave me a weary cold smile. ‘Then you decide, my dear,’ she said. ‘Most young women marry the best offer, the highest bidder. Their parents judge for them, their elders advise. But you have no parents to judge for you, and the circles where I will take you would never receive Mr Fortescue. You are your own mistress. If you fall head over heels in love I suppose you could marry your choice, whether he is footman or groom. No one would stop you.’

I looked back at her, and my green eyes were as hard as her blue ones. ‘You know as well as I do, that will not happen,’ I said blankly. ‘I am not the sort for that kind of love affair. I don’t like it.’

‘Then I suggest a marriage of convenience,’ she said. ‘Once you are married you can take control of your own estates and you need no longer apply to Mr Fortescue for your allowance. You can run your land as you wish and send these land-sharers and profit-stealers packing. You can make Wideacre a highly profitable place again and live as you please. If you choose a husband who will not trouble you, you can pay him an income to stay away from you and you can live the life you wish.’

I looked at her, and suddenly I understood. ‘Peregrine,’ I said flatly.

She did not even flinch. ‘Peregrine if you wish,’ she conceded. ‘Or any other. The choice is yours, my dear. I should never coerce you.’

I nodded. I had been waiting a long time to discover what Lady Clara was after. I knew a pitch for a gull when I saw one, she had been patient with me, she had played me on a long line. But I understood now what she was after. And I admired her for not denying it.

‘I am sorry,’ I said flatly. ‘I should never want to marry. Not Peregrine, not anyone. I am ready to go home at once. Mr Fortescue will arrange a companion for me. I am grateful to you for your kindness. But you need teach me no more.’

The languid movement of her fan waved me back into my chair.

‘I said it should be as you wish,’ she said gently. ‘If you do not wish to marry Perry then you need not. I would have thought you would have liked to get your hands on your own land and on your own wealth; and if you do not marry Perry it will be a long and wearisome wait for you – five long years, Sarah! – but the choice is yours. Wideacre is yours, whatever happens. And I am happy to teach you and present you at Court – whatever happens.’

I dipped my head. Once again, as happened nearly every day, she had shown me the elegance and generosity which came so easy to those that had never been hungry, who had never been short of space, who were never pressed for time. She had the generosity of a woman who had never known hunger. It came easily to her. I longed to learn that same casual, easy nonchalance.

‘Thank you,’ I said gruffly.

‘Voice,’ she said, without a change in her tone.

I lifted my head and spoke more clearly. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

She smiled at me, her eyes an impenetrable blue. ‘Don’t mention it,’ she said charmingly.