Meridon

I watched him shamble back to the wagon. He was not moving on today. He was running away before Robert Gower changed his mind on the deal. He would celebrate getting a guinea for a pony and cheating Robert Gower – a warm man – out of an eleven shilling profit. But I had a feeling that Robert Gower had planned from the start to pay a guinea for the pony and for me. And maybe he knew from the start that he would have to take Dandy too.

I went back to the wagon. Dandy wriggled out, pulling the baby behind her.

‘I want to take the babby,’ she said.

‘No Dandy,’ I said, as if I were very much older than her and very much wiser. ‘We’ve pushed our luck enough.’

We were on our best behaviour for the rest of that week at the Salisbury fair. Dandy went out to the Common outside the town and brought back a meat dinner every day.

‘Where are you getting it from?’ I demanded in an urgent whisper as she spooned out a rabbit stew thick and chunky with meat.

‘There’s a kind gentleman in a big house on the Bath road,’ she said with quiet satisfaction.

I put the bowls out on the table and dropped the horn-handled spoons with a clatter.

‘What d’you have to do for it?’ I asked anxiously.

‘Nothing,’ she said. She shot me a sly smile through a tumbling wave of black hair. ‘I just have to sit on his knee and cry and say, “Oh! Please don’t Daddy,” like that. Then he gives me a penny and sends me out through the kitchen and they give me a rabbit. He says I can have a pheasant tomorrow.’

I looked at her with unease. ‘All right,’ I said unhappily. ‘But if he promises you a rib of beef or a leg of lamb or a proper joint you’re not to go back again. Could you run away if you had to?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said airily. ‘We sit near the window and it’s always open. I could be out in minutes.’

I nodded, only slightly relieved. I had to trust Dandy with these weird frightening forays of hers into the adult world. She had never been caught. She had never been punished. Whether she was picking pockets or dancing to please elderly gentlemen with skirts held out high; she always came home with a handful of coins and no trouble. She was as idle as a well-fed cat around the caravan. But if she sensed trouble or danger she could slip through a man’s hands and be gone like quicksilver.

‘Call them,’ she said, nodding towards the doorway.

I went out to the step and called: ‘Robert! Jack! Dinner!’

We were on first-name terms now, intimate with the unavoidable closeness of caravan-dwellers. Jack and Dandy sometimes exchanged a secret dark smile, but nothing more. Robert had seen how they were together the very first evening we had spent in the caravan and had pulled off his boots and started blacking them, looking at Dandy under his blond bushy eyebrows.

‘Look here, Dandy,’ he had said, pointing the brush at her. ‘I’ll be straight with you, and you can be straight with me. I took you on because I thought you’d do nicely in the show. I have some ideas which I’ll break open to you later. Not now. Now’s not the time. But I can tell you you could have a pretty costume and dance to music and every eye in the place would be on you. And every girl in the place would envy you.’

He paused, and satisfied with the effect of this appeal to her vanity went on: ‘I’ll tell you what I want for my son,’ he said. ‘He’s my heir and he’ll have the show when I’m gone. Before then I’ll find him a good hard-working girl in the shows business like us. A girl with a good dowry to bring with her, and best of all an Act and a Name of her own. A Marriage of Talents,’ he said softly to himself.

He broke off again, and then recollected where he was and went on. ‘That’s the best I can do for the both of you,’ he said fairly. ‘Where you weds or beds is your own affair, but you’ll not lack offers if you keeps clean and stays with my show. But if I catch you mooning over my lad, or if he puts his hand up your skirt, you just remember that I’ll put you out of this wagon on the high road wherever we are. However you feel. And I won’t look back. And my lad Jack won’t look back either. He knows which side his bread is buttered, and he might have you once or twice, but he’ll never wed you. Not in a thousand years.’

Dandy blinked.

‘See?’ Robert said with finality.

Dandy glanced at Jack to see if he had anything to say in her defence. He was resolutely buffing the white of his topboots. His head bent low over his work. You would have thought him deaf. I looked at the dark nape of his neck and knew he was afraid of his father. And that his father had spoken the truth when he said that Jack would never go against him. Not in a thousand years.

‘What about Meridon?’ Dandy said surly. ‘You don’t warn her off your precious son.’

Robert shot a quick look at me and then smiled. ‘She’s not a whore-in-the-making,’ he said. ‘All Meridon wants from Jack and me is a chance to ride our horses.’

I nodded. That much was true.

‘D’you see?’ Robert asked again. ‘I’d not have taken you into my wagon if I’d known you and Jack were smelling of April and May. But I can put you out here and you’d still have a chance of finding your da again. He won’t have got far – not with that damned old carthorse of his pulling that wagon! You’d best go if you’re hot for Jack. I won’t have it. And it won’t happen without my letting.’

Dandy looked once more at the back of Jack’s head. He had started on the other boot. The first one was radiantly white. I thought he had probably never worked so hard on it before.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘You can keep your precious son. I didn’t want him so much anyway. Plenty of other young men in the world.’

Robert beamed at her, he loved getting his own way. ‘Good girl!’ he said approvingly. ‘Now we can all live together with a bit of comfort. I’ll take that as your word, and you’ll hear no more about it from me.

‘And I’ll tell you something, pretty-face. If you keep those looks when you are a woman grown, there’s no telling how high you might aim. But don’t go giving it away, girl. With looks like yours you could even think about a gentry marriage!’

That was consolation enough for Dandy and she went up into her bunk early that night to comb her hair and plait it carefully. And she did not exchange another languorous smile with Jack. Not for all the time we were in Salisbury.

It was a fine summer, that hot sunny summer of 1805. I changed from the dreary unhappy girl I had been in my da’s wagon to a working groom with pride in my work. My skirt grew bedraggled and my shoes wore out. It seemed only natural to borrow Jack’s smock and then, as he outgrew them, his second-best breeches and his old shirt. By the end of the summer I dressed all the time as a lad and felt a delight in how I could move and my freedom from the looks of passing men. I was absorbed by the speed of the travel, by the way we went from one town to another overnight. Never staying longer than three days at any site, always moving on. Everywhere we went it was the same show. The dancing ponies, the clever stallion, the cavalry charge, Jack’s bareback ride, and the story of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin.

But every night it was somehow a little bit different. The horses would go through their paces differently every time. For a while one of the little ponies was sick and went slower than the others and spoiled the dancing. Then Jack ricked his ankle unloading the wagon and had trouble with his vaults on to the horse, so all of that act was changed until he was strong again. Little changes – but they absorbed me.

It was soon my business to care for the horses from the time Jack and Robert had changed into their costumes. I had been steadily doing more and more from the first night when I had stayed behind for the sheer joy of stroking the velvety noses and smoothing the hot sides. But now it was my job. Dandy worked in the caravan. She bought the groceries and poached what food we needed. She kept the caravan as clean as Robert Gower thought fit – which was a lifetime away from Zima’s rank sluttery. Then she came to the field and kept the gate while Robert did the barking for the show.

All the while we were learning the business. All the time we were getting to love the contrast between the hard life of the travelling and the magic of the costume and the disguise. And all the time we were growing addicted to the sound of delighted applause, and to the sense of power from being the centre of attention, making magic before scores and sometimes hundreds of people.

While we were learning, Robert was planning. Every time we were anywhere near another show he would go and see it. Even if it meant missing one of our own performances he would put on his best jacket – a tweed one, not his working red coat – take the big grey stallion, and ride for as much as twenty miles to see another show. But it was not horse shows which drew him. I realized that when Jack came back from crying up the show around Keynsham with a bill in his hand, and said with confidence:

‘This’ll interest you, Da.’

It was not a bill for a horse show but a brightly coloured picture of man swinging upside down from a bar which had been hung high in the ceiling. He looked half-naked, in a costume like a second skin and spangled. He had great broad mustachios and was beaming down as if he had no fear at all.

‘Why, you’re white as a sheet,’ Robert said looking at me. ‘What’s the matter, Meridon?’

‘Nothing,’ I said instantly. But I could feel the blood draining from my head and I knew that I might faint at any moment.

I squeezed past Robert and that terrifying picture and stumbled to the caravan step and sat gulping in the fresh air of a warm August evening.

‘Be all right to work, will you?’ Robert called from inside the wagon.

‘Yes, yes …’ I assented weakly. ‘I just felt faint for a moment.’

He left me in silence to look at the staked-out horses and the sun low in the sky behind a bank of pale butter-coloured clouds.

‘Not started your bleeding have you?’ he asked, standing in the doorway with rough sympathy.

‘It’s not that!’ I exclaimed, stung.

‘Well, it’s hardly an insult …’ he excused himself. ‘What’s the matter then?’

‘It was that picture, the hand-bill …’ I said. I could hardly explain my terror even to myself. ‘What was the man doing? He looked so high!’

Robert drew the hand-bill out of his pocket. ‘He calls himself a trapeze artiste,’ he said. ‘It’s a new act. I’m going into Bristol to see it. I’d like to know how it’s done. See …’ he pushed the hand-bill towards me but I turned my head away.

‘I hate it!’ I said childishly. ‘I can’t bear to see it!’

‘Are you afraid of being up high?’ Robert asked. He was scowling as if my answer mattered.

‘Yes,’ I said shortly. In all my dare-devil boyish childhood it had been the only thing which made me ill with fear. Only on birds’ nesting expeditions was I never the leader of a game. I always insisted on staying on the ground while other travellers’ children climbed trees. Only once, when I was about ten years old, I had forced myself up a tree for a dare, and then frozen, terrified, on a low branch, quite unable to move. It had been Dandy, of all people, who had climbed up with placid confidence to fetch me. And Dandy who had been able to give me the courage to scramble down. I pushed away the memory of the swaying branch and the delighted cruel upturned faces below me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am afraid of being up high. It makes me ill just thinking about it.’

Robert said: ‘Damn,’ under his breath and jumped down from the caravan step to pull on his boots. ‘Horses ready for the show?’ he asked absently. The little puffs of smoke from his pipe came out quickly, as they did when he was thinking hard and biting on the stem.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Not tacked-up yet, of course.’

‘Aye,’ he said. He stood up and stamped his feet down into the boots and then tapped his pipe out on the wheel of the caravan and put it carefully by the driving seat.

‘What about Dandy?’ he said abruptly. ‘I suppose she won’t climb. I suppose she’s no good up high too?’

‘Dandy’s all right,’ I said. ‘Were you thinking of something for the show? You’d have to ask her, but she used to climb trees well when we were little.’

‘I’m just thinking aloud,’ he said, snubbing my curiosity. ‘Just thinking.’

But as he went towards the show field I heard him muttering under his breath. ‘Amazing Aerial Act. An Angel Without Wings. The Amazing Mamselle Dandy.’

He visited the trapeze act at Bristol; but he came back late and said nothing about it in the morning. Only Jack was allowed to ask over breakfast: ‘Any good?’ Dandy and I were eating our bread and bacon on the sun-drenched step of the caravan, so only Jack heard more than a mumbled reply. But I had heard enough to guess that Robert’s promise to Dandy of being in the centre of the ring might come true.

She welcomed it when I told her what he had said. Already our work for the show had been expanded. When Jack went crying-up the show into new towns and villages he often took Dandy riding on the crupper behind him. I had seen Robert frown the first time he saw the white horse and his son with Dandy looking so pretty, riding behind him with her arms around his waist. But he was thinking of business and not love.

‘You should have a proper riding habit,’ he said. ‘A proper riding habit and be up on your own. It’d look grand. Robert Gower’s Amazing Equestrian Show with Lady Dandy in the Ring,’ he said.

He gave Dandy five shillings for a bolt of real velvet and she made herself a riding habit in two evenings, working under the lantern until her eyes were bleary from the strain. When Jack next cried-up the show, he took her up behind him with her beautiful blue riding habit sweeping down Snow’s shining side. Dandy’s smile under her blue tricorne hat was heart-stoppingly lovely. In the next village we had the best gate we had ever taken.

‘The public like lasses,’ Robert announced at supper that night. ‘I want you riding in the ring, Meridon. And Dandy you’re to cry-up the show with Jack every day. Stay in your costume to take at the gate.’

‘What shall I wear?’ I asked. Robert looked at me critically. I had wearied of brushing my thick mass of copper hair every day and had started cutting out the tangles and the hayseeds. Dandy had exclaimed at the ragged edges I had left and had trimmed it in a bob, like a country lad. The natural curl had made it into a mop of red-gold ringlets, which tumbled about my head like an unruly halo. I had gained no weight over the summer of good living with the Gowers though I had grown taller. I was as lanky and as awkward as a young colt while Dandy had the poise and the warm curves of a young woman.

‘I’m damned if I know,’ Robert said chuckling. ‘I’d put you in a pierrot suit for half a crown. You look like a little waif, mophead. If you’re going to grow as bonny as your sister, you’d better make haste!’

‘What about dressing her as a lad?’ Jack said suddenly. He was wiping out his bowl with a hunk of bread, but he paused with sticky fingers and smiled his confident smile at me. ‘No offence, Meridon. But she could wear a silk shirt and tight white breeches and boots. You look at her when she’s in those old trews of mine, Da, she looks unladylike … but it would work in the ring. And she could do a rosinback act with me.’ Jack pushed his bowl to one side. ‘Hey!’ he said excitedly. ‘D’you remember that act we saw when someone came out of the crowd? The show outside Salisbury one time? We could do something like that and I could come out from the back, pretending to be a drunk, you know, and come up on the horse and knock Meridon off.’

‘More falls,’ I said glumly. ‘I had enough of them when I was breaking horses for Da.’

‘Pretend falls,’ Jack said, his eyes warm on me. ‘And they wouldn’t hurt. And then she could get up on the big horse, and do a bit of bareback work.’

Robert looked at me speculatively.

‘Bareback work in the breeches,’ he said. ‘The riding and clowning in a riding habit. That’d look better dressed as a girl. Two acts and only half a costume change.’ He nodded. ‘Would you like to do that, Meridon?’ he asked. ‘I’d pay you.’

‘How much?’ I said instantly.

‘Ha’penny a show, penny a night,’ he said.

‘Penny a show,’ I said at once.

‘Penny a day whether we have a show or not,’ he offered, and I stuck my grimy hand across the table and we closed the deal.

My training started the next day. I had seen Jack vaulting on and off the big skewbald horse, and I had ridden her often enough. But I had never tried to stand up on her. Robert set her cantering around the field and Jack and I rode astride together, me sitting before him. Then he got to his feet and tried to help me up. The pace, which seemed as smooth and as easy as a rocking chair when I had been seated on her back, was suddenly as jolting as a cart over cobbles. With a helpless wail I went off first one side, and then the other. And one time, earning myself a handful of curses and a cuff on the ear from Jack, I knocked him off the back of the horse as I went.

Robert called the practice to a halt when I had managed to get up and stand for a few seconds. ‘Do it again tomorrow,’ he said, as mean with praise as ever. ‘Not bad.’

Jack and I went down to the river together and stripped off down to our sweat-stained shirts, and waded into the water to cool our bruises and our tempers. I floated on my back in the sweet water and looked up at the blue sky. It was September and still as hot as high summer. My pale limbs in the water were as white as a drowned man. I kicked a fountain of spray upwards and then looked at my feet with the ingrained dirt around the toenails with no sense of shame. I turned on my front and dipped my face into the water and then dived right under until I could feel the cold water seeping through my curls to my scalp. That made me shudder and I surfaced again, kicking and blowing out, and shaking the wet hair out of my eyes. Jack was out already, lying on the grassy bank in his breeches, watching me.

I came out of the water and it flowed in streams down my neck. The shirt was slick and cold against me and Jack’s eyes followed the little rivulets of water down over my slight breasts where the nipples stood out against the wet thin fabric, down to the crotch of my legs where the shadow of copper hair showed dark under the cloth.

‘D’you not mind working as hard as a lad when you’re growing into a woman?’ he asked idly.

‘No,’ I said shortly. ‘I’d rather be treated as a lad by your father and you.’

Jack smiled his hot smile. ‘By my father, yes possibly. But by me? Wouldn’t you like me to see you as a young woman?’

I walked steadily on the sharp stones at the river edge on my hardened feet and picked up my jerkin and pulled it on. I was still bare-arsed but Jack’s knowing smile had never caused me any discomfort and I was untroubled by his sudden interest in me.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve seen how you are with women.’

His hand waved them away down river. ‘Those!’ he said dismissively. ‘Those are just sluts from the villages. I would not treat you in the way I treat them. You’d be a prize worth taking, Meridon. You in your funny breeches and my cut-down shirts. I’d like to make you glad to be born a woman. I’d like you to grow your hair to please me.’

I turned and looked at him in frank surprise.

‘Why?’ I said.

He shrugged, half moody, half wilful. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You never look twice at me. You never have looked twice at me. All this morning you have been in my arms and you have clung to me to save yourself from falling. All this morning you have had your body pressed tight against mine and I was feeling you, aye – and wanting you! And then you strip your clothes off in front of me and get into the water as if I was nothing more than one of the horses!’

I stood up and pulled on my breeches. ‘D’you remember what your da said to Dandy our first evening?’ I asked. ‘I do. He warned her off you. He told her and he told me that he had a good marriage in mind for you and that if she ever became your lover he’d leave her on the road. She’s not looked at you since that evening, and neither have I.’

‘She!’ he said in the same voice as he had spoken of the village girls. ‘She’d come fast enough to my whistle. I know that. But don’t tell me that you don’t think of me to please my da, because I don’t believe it.’

‘No’, I said truthfully, careless of vanity. ‘No, it’s not the reason. I don’t think of you because I have no interest in you. It’s true: I don’t think of you any more than I do the horses.’ I considered him for a moment, and then some spark of devilry prompted me to say, absolutely straight-faced, ‘Actually, I think I like Snow better.’

He stared at me incredulous for a moment, then with one graceful easy movement he jumped to his feet and walked away from me. ‘Gypsy brat,’ he said under his breath as he went away. I dropped back down on the bank and watched the sunshine on the ripples of the river and waited until he was well out of earshot before I laughed aloud.

He did not bear me a grudge for that insult, for the next day he held me as firmly and as fairly as he had done the day before. It was my fault that I fell more and more often, and my fault when he lost his balance and fell backwards off the horse, and fell hard too, and hit his head.

‘Clumsy wench!’ Robert had scolded me, and clouted me lightly on my ear which made my own head ring. ‘Why don’t you lean back and let Jack guide you like you were doing yesterday? He’s had the practice. He’s got the balance. Let him take you. Don’t keep trying to pull away and stand on your own!’

Jack was holding his head in his hands but he looked up at that and he smiled at me ruefully. ‘Is that what’s going wrong?’ he asked frankly. ‘You won’t lean back against me?’

I nodded. His black eyes smiled into my green ones.

‘Oh forget it!’ he said gently. ‘Forget I ever said it. I can’t go on falling off a horse all morning. Let’s just do the act, shall we?’

Robert looked from one to the other of us. ‘Have you two had a fight?’ he demanded.

We were both silent.

He took three steps away from us and then turned and came back. His face was stony. ‘Now look here, you two,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you this once, and it’s the only time. Whatever goes on outside the ring, or even behind the screen, once you are in the ring and up on the horse you are working. I don’t care if you take an axe to each other when your act is over. You can’t work for me unless you take this seriously. And you are not serious unless you forget everything – everything – but your act.’

We nodded. Robert could be very impressive when he chose. ‘Now have another try,’ he said, and cracked the whip and called to Bluebell to canter.

Jack vaulted up and went astride her and put his hand out to catch me and pull me up before him. He held the leather strap and got to his feet, his bare toes splayed out on Bluebell’s sweaty white and brown back. Then I felt his hard hand clutching in my armpit and I got up to my feet, gracelessly bow-legged, and then, while Robert shouted encouragement and abuse, I cautiously straightened my knees and leaned back towards Jack and let his body guide mine and his arm steady me. We did one whole circle without falling and then Jack let me jump down with a triumphant yell and somersaulted off himself.

‘Well done!’ Robert said. He was beaming at us with red-faced delight. ‘Well done you both. Same time tomorrow.’

We nodded and Jack clapped my shoulder with a friendly hand as I turned away and took Bluebell by the head collar to lead her around and cool her down.

‘Mamselle Meridon the Bareback Horse Dancer!’ Robert said to himself very low, as he walked past the screen out of the field. ‘See Her Breathtaking Leaps Through a Hoop of Blazing Fire!’

Chapter 4

Dandy and I had not been raised as proper gypsy chavvies. When the weather had grown colder and the caravan was so clammy that even the clothes we slept in were damp in the morning, Da would get work as an ostler or a porter or a market lad in any of the bigger towns where people were not particular whom they employed, and the Parish officers were slow and lazy and did not move us on. We had no idea of a rhythm of seasons which took you regularly from one place to another and then returned you safe every winter to familiar fields and hills. With Da often as not we were on the run from card partners, little cheats or bad business deals, with no planned route or tradition of travelling. He never knew where he was going, other than to follow his nose for gullible card players, fools and bad horses, wherever they might be gathered together.