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‘He’s mine,’ I said. My voice was croaky, I hawked up some blood from the back of my throat and spat it out, wiping my face on my shawl. As I got to my feet I found that I was badly bruised. I hobbled towards him, putting my hand out for the reins.
The stable lad handed him over with open relief. ‘You’ve got a shiner,’ he said.
I nodded. A haziness around everything warned me that one eye was closing fast. I patted it gently with the corner of my pinny which had been so clean and white this morning.
‘I thought it was fixed till I saw you come off like that,’ he said.
I tried to smile, but it was too painful. ‘It wasn’t fixed,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen the horse before.’
‘What’ll you do with him now?’ he demanded. ‘How will you keep him?’
‘You’ll feed him with the others, won’t you Mr Gower?’ I said, turning to Robert. There were still a few stragglers leaving the field. They waited for his reply. But I think he’d have treated me fairly even without witnesses.
‘I said you could have him if you could stay on him,’ he said. ‘I’ll feed him and shoe him, for you. Aye and I’ll buy you tack for him as well. That do you, Meridon?’
I smiled at that and felt the bloodstained skin crack around my eye.
‘Yes,’ I said. Then I put one hand on Sea’s neck for support, and started to hobble from the field.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_010bd067-d86a-5421-bfb2-fbb7f91a2ce1)
Robert sent me back to the inn where we had left the whisky cart and I led Sea into a loose box and curled up in the corner myself on a bale of straw, too tired and too battered and bruised to care where I was; and much too shy and dirty to order myself a hot drink and my dinner in the parlour as Robert had instructed. Hours later, when the stable was getting dark and the cold winter twilight was closing the horse fair, he came clattering into the yard with two big horses and three little ponies tied reins to tail behind him.
I stumbled to my feet as groggy and weary as if I had been riding all day and peered over the stable door. Sea blew gently down my neck.
‘Good God,’ Robert said. ‘You look like a little witch, Merry. Stick your head under the pump for the Lord’s sake. I can’t take you home like that.’
I put my hand up to my head and found my cap was lost and my curls all matted with dried blood. The eye which I had bruised was almost closed, and smeared all around my mouth and nose was dried blood.
‘Are you badly hurt?’ Robert asked as I came carefully out of the stable.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It probably looks worse than it is.’
He shouted for a stable lad and tossed the reins of the two big horses towards him.
‘Come here,’ he said gruffly, and worked the pump for me as I dipped my head underneath it.
The icy water hit me like a blow and rushed into my ear and made me gasp with shock. But I felt better as soon as my face was clean. I rinsed most of the blood out of my hair as well.
Robert sent another lad running for a kitchen towel and I rubbed my hair dry. I was shivering with the cold and I had horrid trickles of icy water running down my neck inside my gown, but at least I had woken up and felt fit enough to face the drive home.
‘Or do you want me to ride?’ I asked, eyeing the string of horses we had to get home somehow.
‘Nay,’ Robert said contentedly. ‘You’ve done a day and a half’s work today, Merry, and I’m better pleased with you than I ever have been with any living soul, and that’s the truth. You won me £300 in bets, Merry, and it’s a gamble I’d never have dared take if you hadn’t urged me to it. I’m obliged to you. You can have your horse with my blessing, and I’ll give you ten guineas for your bottom drawer as well. You’re a fine lass. I wish I had a dozen of you.’
I beamed back at him, then I shivered a little because with the falling darkness a cold breeze had sprung up.
‘Let’s get you home,’ Robert said kindly; and he sent the lad back inside to borrow a couple of blankets and wrapped me up on the seat of the whisky as if I were a favoured child instead of the hired help.
He decided against bringing all the horses home in the dark on his own. He tied only the big horses on the back of the carriage with Sea tied behind as well, and ordered stabling for the ponies overnight. Then he swung himself up beside me, clicked to Bluebell and we set off for home in the fading light.
He hummed quietly under his breath as we left the outskirts of the town and then he said abruptly to me:
‘Did you do that with your da, Merry? Take a wager on your riding and then gull people out of their money?’
‘Sometimes,’ I said cautiously. I was not sure if he would approve. ‘But, often it was too well known that I trained horses for my da and so people wouldn’t bet heavily like they did today.’ I shrugged. ‘I looked different, too,’ I said. ‘Today I looked like a housemaid. With Da I always looked like a gypsy.’
Robert nodded. ‘I’ve never made so much money in one day in my life,’ he said. ‘I’d give half of it away if I could do it again.’
I shook my head regretfully. ‘I couldn’t do it with any other horse,’ I said. ‘It would be a grand trick to earn money. But Sea was special. I knew he was my horse the moment I saw him. I knew he would not hurt me.’
Robert glanced at my battered face. ‘You hardly came off scot-free,’ he observed.
I made a little grimace. ‘That was because he heard that horrid man’s voice,’ I said. ‘It scared him all over again. But he was all right with me.’
Robert nodded and said nothing as the horse trotted between the shafts and the light from the lamps on either side of the cart dipped and flickered. It was growing darker all the time, I heard an owl hoot warningly. The moon was coming up, thin and very pale, like a rind of goat cheese.
‘What about an act where we challenge all comers to ride him?’ Robert said slowly, thinking aloud. ‘Outside the field, before the show starts. We could call him the killer stallion and challenge people to stay on his back. Charge them say tuppence a try, with a purse if they stay on for more than a minute.’ He hesitated. ‘Make that five minutes,’ he amended. ‘Then, after we’ve called up a crowd and they’ve seen him throwing a few men, out you come in a pretty dress and ask for your turn. Jack makes up a book, you ride the horse, and we all make a little profit.’
He turned and looked at me, beaming.
I took a deep breath. ‘No,’ I said quietly. At once, his good-humoured smile vanished.
‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘You’ll get a cut of the profits, Merry. You did well today remember. I’ve not forgotten I promised you ten guineas. I’ll pay up and all.’
‘No,’ I said steadily. ‘I am sorry, Robert, but I won’t do that with my horse.’
Something in my voice checked his bluster. ‘Why not, Merry?’ he asked. ‘Wouldn’t do any harm.’
‘Yes it would,’ I said certainly. ‘I don’t want him taught to be wild and vicious. I don’t want him frightened any more. I want to teach him to be a good saddle horse, a hunter. I don’t want him throwing every fool with tuppence who thinks he’s a rider. I want him to have a soft mouth and a sweet temperament. He’s my horse, and I won’t have him working as a killer stallion.’
Robert was silent. Bluebell trotted, the clatter of the hooves behind us sounded loud in the darkness. Robert hummed under his breath again and said no more.
‘You promised to keep him for me,’ I said, calling on Robert’s sense of fair trade. ‘You didn’t say he had to work for it.’
Robert scowled at me, and then broke into a smile. ‘Oh all right, Merry!’ he said gruffly. ‘You’re a proper horse-dealer for you haggle like a tinker. Keep your damned horse, but you’re to ride him when you’re calling up the act, and you’re to look to training him for tricks in the ring. But he won’t do anything you don’t like.’
I smiled back at him, and in one of my rare gestures of affection I put my hand on his sleeve.
‘Thank you, Robert,’ I said.
He tucked my hand under his arm and we drove home in the darkness. My head nodded with weariness and my eyelids drooped. Some time in the journey I felt him draw my head down to rest on his shoulder, and I slept.
Dandy undressed me and put me to bed when we got home, exclaiming over my hurts, and the loss of my cap, and the bloodstains on my grey gown and white apron. Mrs Greaves brought a tray with soup and new-baked bread, a breast of chicken and some stewed apples for me to have dinner in bed. Jack came up to our room with a basketful of logs and lit the fire for me in the little grate in our room, and then he and Dandy sat on the floor and demanded to know the whole story of the horse fair, and the winning of Sea.
‘He’s a beautiful animal but he hardly let me near him,’ Jack said. ‘He went for my shoulder when I took his bridle off. You’ll have your work cut out for you trying to train that one, Merry.’
Dandy wanted to know how much Robert had earned, and they both opened their eyes wide when I told them of the guinea bets which had been called all around me, and that Robert had promised me ten of my very own.
‘Ten guineas!’ Dandy exclaimed. ‘Merry, what will you do with so much money?’
‘I shall save it,’ I said sagely, dipping my bread into the rich gravy around the chicken. ‘I don’t know what money we will need in the future, Dandy. I’m going to start saving for a house of our own.’
They both gaped at me for that ambition, and I laughed aloud though my bruised ribs made me gasp and say: ‘Oh! Don’t make me laugh! Please don’t make me laugh! I hurts so when I laugh!’
Then I asked them to tell me what they had been doing all the day; but they both complained that it was the same as the day before, and looked like being the same for ever. They had both swung up high on the trapeze in the roof of the barn, but most of their work had been on the practice trapeze at ground level, and pulling themselves up and down on the bar.
‘I’m aching all over,’ Dandy complained. ‘And that dratted David just makes us work and work and work.’
Jack nodded in discontented agreement.
‘I’m starving too,’ he said. ‘Merry, we’ll go over and get our dinners and come back to you after. Is there anything you need?’
‘No,’ I said smiling in gratitude. ‘I’ll lie here and watch the firelight. Thank you for making the fire, Jack.’
He leaned towards me and ruffled my hair so my curls stood on end.
‘It was nothing, my little gambler,’ he said. ‘We’ll see you in a little while.’
The two of them clattered down the stairs to the stable, I heard Dandy groan as she had to pull the trapdoor at the head of the stairs shut with her aching arms, and then their voices as they crossed the yard and went through the little gateway to the house. Then I heard the kitchen door open and close and there was silence.
Silence except for the flickering noise of the fire and the occasional rustle from Sea, safe in the stable beneath my room. I watched the shadows bob and fall on the wall beside me. I had never seen a fire light up a bedroom before, I had never lain in darkness and felt the warm glow of it on my face, and seen the bright warmth of it behind my closed eyelids. I felt enormously comfortable and at peace and safe. For once in my life I felt that I need not fear the next day, nor plan our survival in an unreliable and dangerous world. Robert Gower had said that he wished he had a dozen of me. He had said that he was better pleased with me than he had been with any living soul. I had let him hold my hand, and I had not felt that uneasy anxious prickle of distaste at his touch. I had let Jack rumple my head and I had liked the careless caress. I watched the flames of the fire which Jack had lit for me, in the room which Robert had made ready for me, and for once I felt that someone cared for me. I fell asleep then, still smiling. And when Jack and Dandy came to see how I did, they found me asleep with my arm outflung and my hand open, as if I were reaching out, unafraid. They put an extra log on the fire and crept away.
I did not dream in the night, and I slept late into the morning. Robert had ordered Dandy not to wake me, and I did not stir until breakfast time. I went to the kitchen then and confessed to Mrs Greaves that I had lost her bonnet in the course of winning the master a fortune. She already knew the story and smiled and said that it did not matter.
The dress and the apron were a more serious matter. The apron was permanently stained with blood and grass stains, the grey dress marked as well. I looked cheerfully at them both as Mrs Greaves hauled them out of the copper and tutted into the steam.
‘I’ll have to wear breeches all the time then,’ I said.
Mrs Greaves turned to me with a little smile. ‘If you knew how bonny you looked in them you’d not wear them,’ she said. ‘You think to dress like a lad and no man will notice you. That may have been true when you were a little lass, or even this summer; but now you’d turn heads even if you were wearing a sack tied around your middle. And in those little breeches and your white shirt you look a picture.’
I flushed scarlet, suddenly uncomfortable. Then I looked up at her. She was still smiling. ‘Nothing to be afraid of, Meridon,’ she said gently. ‘You’ll have seen some bad doings when you were a girl, but when a man loves a woman it can sometimes be very sweet. Very sweet indeed.’
She gave a little sigh and dumped the heap of wet cloth back into the copper and set it back on to boil.
‘It’s not all sluts in hedgerows and dancing for pennies,’ she said, turning her back to me as she laid the table for breakfast. ‘If a man truly loves you he can surround you with love so that you feel as if you are the most precious woman in the world. It’s like forever sitting in front of a warm fire, well fed and safe.’
I said nothing. I thought of Robert Gower keeping my hand warm under his arm as he drove home. I thought of my head dropping on his shoulder as I slept. For the first time in a cold and hungry life I thought that I could understand longing for the touch of a man.
‘Breakfast,’ Mrs Greaves said, suddenly practical. ‘Run and call the others, Merry.’
They were practising in the barn. David, Jack and Dandy; and Robert was watching them, his unlit pipe gripped between his teeth. Dandy was swinging from the practice trapeze and I could see that even in the day that I had been away she had learned to time herself to the rhythm of the swing. David was calling the beat for her but more and more often she was bringing her legs down at exactly the right moment and the swing was rising, gaining height, rather than trailing to a standstill as it had done on our first day.
They were glad enough to come back to the house for breakfast. David exclaimed over my black eye but it had opened enough for me to see clearly and I had taken enough knocks in my girlhood to rid me of vanity about a few bruises.
‘When we were chavvies I don’t think I ever saw Merry without a black eye,’ Dandy said, spreading Mrs Greaves’ home-made butter on a hunk of fresh-baked bread. ‘If she didn’t come off one of the horses then our da would clip her round the ear and miss. We didn’t know her eyes were green-coloured until she was twelve!’
David looked at me as if he did not know whether to laugh or be sorry for me.
‘It didn’t matter,’ I said. They were hurts from long ago, I would not let the aches and pains of my childhood cast a shadow over my life now. Not when I could feel myself opening, like a sticky bud on a chestnut tree in April.
‘Will you be too sore to train today?’ David asked me.
‘I’ll try,’ I said. ‘Nothing was broken, I was just bruised. I reckon I’ll be all right to work.’
Robert pushed his clean plate away from him. ‘If your face starts throbbing or your head aches, you stop,’ he said. Dandy and Jack looked at him in surprise. Mrs Greaves, at the stove, stayed very still, her head turned away. ‘I’ve seen some nasty after-effects of head injuries,’ he said to David, who nodded. ‘If she seems sleepy or in pain you’re to send her in to Mrs Greaves.’
Mrs Greaves turned from the stove and wiped her hands on her working apron, her face inscrutable.
‘If Meridon comes in ill you take care of her, ma’am,’ he said to her. ‘Put her on the sofa in the parlour where you can keep an eye on her.’ She nodded. Dandy was frozen, a piece of bread half-way to her mouth.
‘Meridon to come into the parlour?’ Dandy demanded tactlessly.
A flicker of irritation crossed Robert’s face. ‘Why not?’ he said suddenly. ‘The only reason you two girls are housed in the stable yard is because I thought you would like your own little place, and it is easier for you to mind the horses. The two of you are welcome in the house, aye, and in the parlour too if you wish.’
I flushed scarlet at Dandy’s slip, and at Jack’s open-mouthed stare.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said flatly. ‘I’m well enough to work and I won’t need to rest. In any case, I’d not want to sit in the parlour.’
Robert pushed his chair back from the table and it scraped on the stone-flagged floor. ‘A lot of to-do about nothing,’ he said gruffly and went out of the kitchen. David got to his feet as well.
‘Half an hour’s rest,’ he said to the three of us. ‘I’d like to see this famous horse of yours, Meridon.’
I smiled at that and led all of them, Mrs Greaves as well, out to the stable yard to see my horse, my very own horse, in daylight.
He was lovely. In daylight, in a familiar stable yard, he was even lovelier than I had remembered him. His neck was arched high, as if there were Arab blood in him. His coat was a dark grey, shading to pewter on his hind legs. His mane and tail were the purest of white and silver, down his grey face there was a pale white blaze, just discernible. And four white socks on his long legs. He whickered when he heard my step and came out of the stable with just a halter on, as gently as if he had never thrown and rolled on a rider in his life. He threw up his head and sidled when he saw the others and I called:
‘Stand back, especially you Jack and David. He doesn’t like men!’
‘He’ll suit Meridon, then,’ said Dandy to Jack and he smiled and nodded.
Sea stood quiet enough then, and I held his head collar and smoothed his neck and whispered to him to be still, and not to be frightened, for no one would ever hurt him or shout at him again. I found I was whispering endearments, phrases of love, telling him how beautiful he was – quite the most beautiful horse in the world! And that he should be with me for ever and ever. That I had won him in Robert’s bet, but that in truth we had found each other and that we would never part again. Then I led him back down through the path at the side of the garden to the field and turned him out with the others to graze.
‘You’ll be wanting time off to train him,’ David said wryly, watching my rapt face as Sea stretched his long neck and trotted with proud long strides around the field.
‘Robert wanted me to work the other horses anyway,’ I said. ‘I was never to be your full-time pupil.’
David nodded. ‘And you’ve started your little savings fund,’ he said. ‘You’ll be a lady yet, Meridon.’
I was about to smile and turn off the remark when I suddenly remembered the gypsy at the street corner in Salisbury, just before I saw Sea, just before the bet and the ride and the fall. She had said I would get my home, my gentry home. She said that my mother and her mother would lead me home, and that I would be more at home there than either of them. I would indeed be a lady, I would make my way into the Quality. David saw my suddenly absorbed expression and touched me on the shoulder. I did not flinch at his touch.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ he said.
‘I’ll not rob you,’ I replied at once. ‘I was thinking nothing which was worth sharing.’
‘Then I’ll interrupt your thoughts with some work,’ he said briskly and raised his voice so that the other two could hear: ‘Come on you two! A race back to the barn to warm you up. One, two, three, and away!’
That day’s training was the pattern for the following days of that week, and for the week after. Every day we worked, running, exercising, heaving ourselves up on the bar, pushing ourselves up from the floor using just our hands. Every day we grew stronger, able to run further, to do more of the exercises. Every day we ached a little less. I had learned the knack of swinging on the practice trapeze: I could build the swing higher and higher until it felt like flying. As the swing grew the swooping frightened feeling inside me grew, but I learned to almost enjoy that sudden down-rush with the air in my face and my muscles working to keep the swing moving, to build the speed and the momentum. Every day, though for some days I truly did not notice, David had raised the rigging on the trapeze so that it hung higher and higher from the floor until the only way to mount it was to go up the ladder at the side of the barn and swoop down with it.
