‘God bless you, Merry,’ she said, and I was ashamed of my prickly coldness.
‘I am sorry,’ I said awkwardly, and I stepped forward and offered her my forehead for her kiss.
She put her hands on my shoulders, gently, as I would handle a touchy young foal.
‘Keep safe, dear,’ she said softly. ‘If you are ever in trouble and I can serve you, you should send for me.’
I stepped back and looked in her face. ‘How can I keep Dandy safe?’ I asked her, demanding an answer as if she should know everything, just because she was a woman old enough to be my mother who had put out her arms to me.
Her pale eyes fell before my urgent gaze.
‘You cannot,’ she said.
14
We only travelled a short way, that first day. I think Robert had planned the route to see how the journey went, to test the pace of the horses. We went north from Warminster, a little chalk-white lane still sticky with winter wet which skirted the great slope of Warminster Down on our right. We went slowly through the village of Westbury, and past the mill where the miller’s wife sold us some fresh-baked bread rolls which we ate as we rode. Robert had a hand-drawn map on his knee and ignored the signpost to Trowbridge. Katie and Dandy looked longingly down the road as we went past but Robert’s wagon led the way into a bank of trees ahead called Castle Wood. Jack and I were riding and we left the lane and the swaying wagons and rode ahead. Sea and Snow were well matched but we did not race, we cantered side by side under the fretwork of bare branches. Deeper in the wood to my left, a robin was singing.
When the horses were sweating and blowing we pulled them up and walked slowly, waiting for the wagons to catch us up. Robert’s wagon was in the lead and I trotted back to him.
‘We’ll stay at Melksham tonight,’ he said. He was back in his element on the driving box of the wagon, his pipe sending little contented puffs upwards to the wintry white sky. ‘You can ride on ahead and pick somewhere for us to pull in. Make sure there’s firewood near, we’ll need a good fire tonight.’
‘Cold?’ I challenged him.
He grinned and hunched his coat up around his shoulders. ‘It’s not midsummer,’ he conceded.
‘You’re well served,’ I said unsympathetically. ‘No one I know sets out in the middle of winter.’
‘Go ahead you hedge-bit,’ he said unperturbed. ‘And get the fire going before I pull in.’
Jack and I rode on and pulled in at the left of the road where there was some common ground and a little brake of woods with plenty of kindling. Jack hobbled the horses and rubbed them down while I went into the woods to fetch sticks for the fire. We had it lit and burning by the time the first wagon turned in.
William was handy at lining up his wagon, but Dandy had to take over from Katie who could only drive in a straight line. Then while we were taking the horses out of the shafts and feeding and watering them, Dandy strolled quietly off deeper into the wood. Katie watched her go with a scowl and muttered in Robert’s hearing that Dandy was skipping off without doing any work. Robert glanced at me as he was setting up the trivet for the pot and I told Katie to wait and see where Dandy had gone. Sure enough, she came back within the hour with three plump brown trout with a string through their gills swinging from her hand.
‘Tickled ‘em,’ she said to Robert’s glance of inquiry. ‘I know this stream, I’ve been here with Da and Zima. The keeper’s old and the squire don’t care about fish, he only cares about his game. I’d never touch a pheasant in these woods, not if it dropped dead at my feet I wouldn’t.’
She gutted the fish and washed them. There was a little bacon in our stores and she fried that and then tossed them into the smoking fat. They sizzled and grew brown. Katie and I took the bread from the crock and unpacked the plates and the knives, and by the time Robert, William and Jack had come from hobbling the ponies the meal was ready.
‘Damn,’ Robert said suddenly. ‘Forgot the salt again.’ He smiled at us all, impartially. ‘There’s always something,’ he said. ‘I can’t think how many years I’ve been on the road and yet there’s always something you forget. I made a list this time as well and Mrs Greaves packed every darned thing on it. And then I forget the salt!’
‘We’ll buy some,’ Dandy said. ‘I could go into Melksham this afternoon and get some. We’ll need some more bread too, and bacon.’
Robert nodded his approval. ‘One of you girls go too,’ he said. ‘Or William. I don’t want any one of you girls wandering around on your own. The show’s got to seem classy. You little whores have got to be chaperoned like young ladies.’
Katie and Dandy giggled, I smiled. There was no malice in Robert. He was miles away from the town where respectability was his ambition. He was once more the man who had sat in the sun and watched me work the little pony. Who had praised me for a job well done and then bought me in a job-lot from my cruel and doltish stepfather. He could call me a little whore if he chose. We were none of us any better than we needed to be when we were working on the road. We were a team again, we belonged together.
The next day set the pattern for the rest of the days of the tour. We got up at dawn, around five or six o’clock, and gave the horses water. Sea, Snow and the carriage horses got some oats as well; Robert said the ponies were as fat as butter and should make do with the grass in the fields and waysides. He liked early rising. He was always the first to wake, and it was his knock on the side of our wagon which waked Dandy and me. When we tumbled out into the sharp morning air Robert would be stripped to the waist shaving in cold water and when he finished he would ask one of us to tip the bucket over his head and shoulders. He would burst out of the icy deluge puffing and blowing, ruddy with health.
Dandy would get the kettle on the fire and William and I would fetch dry crisp kindling for a quick blaze. We always carried some dry wood slung under the wagons for wet days. Jack never emerged until he heard the clink of the tin cups then he would come out, frowsy-eyed with his blanket huddled around his bare shoulders for his cup of tea – the last in the pot and as strong as it could be.
‘My God you’re an idle whelp,’ Robert would say; and Jack would smile apologetically and dip his face into the wide mug.
Katie was the worst of all. She would stay in her bunk until the last possible moment and not the hiss of the boiling kettle nor the smell of frying bacon was enough to get her out. Not until we were starting to pack up to leave and Robert was hammering on the side of the wagon and threatening to fetch her out would she come. She was a sight in the mornings! Her eyes red-rimmed and puffy, her hair in a straggly plait. Robert was at his most dour when he saw Dandy and Katie before they had combed their hair and washed their faces, and he often glanced over to Jack, convinced that his son could not desire such girls having seen them at their sleep-dazed worst.
But Robert was blind. He missed all the clues. It was some snobbery in him which made him oblivious to what was happening every day on the road. Dandy and Jack collecting kindling, Dandy and Jack fetching water from the stream, Dandy and Jack dropping behind and then running, flushed and sweaty to catch up with the wagons. Robert was looking for something else, he was watching for signs of tenderness, for Jack seeking one of us out. He did not know that Jack was well past the courtship time when he had halloed up the stairs and watched Dandy in the firelight. Now he needed her to slake his thirst, but between the repetitive cycle of lust and sating they did not seek each other out.
They were not companions. Dandy would always seek my company for choice. On the road once more we fell back into the casual companionship of our childhood. When I drove she sat beside me, leaning back against my shoulder. When she drove I would deal imaginary hands of cards on the driving seat, stacking hands with all hearts, dealing off the bottom, dealing off the top, dealing out of the middle.
‘Did ye see that, Dandy?’ I would ask her over and over. Her eyes were sharp enough but I often fooled her.
When she went poaching she would brin
g me back a little trophy – a blue feather shed by a jay, a single early white violet. When I rode Sea and she was driving I would sometimes rein him in to go alongside the wagon, glancing at her from time to time, watching her lazy absorption in her private dreams.
‘What are you thinking of, Dandy?’ I asked her once and she smiled at me her sweet feckless smile.
‘Same as you,’ she said, nodding at the thick muddy road and the leaden wintry sky. ‘Of a warm hearth and a good meal which has been caught and cooked by someone else.’
When we settled for the night and Katie was out of the way, rolled up tight in blankets in her bunk, Dandy would hand me her comb without speaking and I would comb and braid her hair as I had done since we were the smallest of chavvies. Then sometimes, if I was not feeling prickly and untouchable, I would let her tackle the tangles in mine, comb it smooth and plait it for the night.
Then I would kiss her good-night as she lay in her bunk. Her skin smelled musky: the smell of female sweat and warmth, hay and cheap perfume. The beloved familiar smell of my sister.
She and Jack were not friends. When Jack wanted company, wanted to walk alongside someone on the road, wanted someone beside him on the driving seat, he would crane his neck around the side of his wagon and whistle, ‘Hey! Merry!’
When he rode Snow I was often riding Sea and we sometimes left the road for a canter across the fields or a gallop to the top of a hill. If I was walking behind the wagons he would fall into step beside me and we would chat – idly, easily. He would tell me about the villages and towns he had worked, I would tell him about breaking horses, cheating gulls and sharping cards. He learned to leave me alone when I shook my head and strayed away from the line of wagons. He learned to keep his hands out of my wind-blown curls and his arm from around my shoulders.
‘Don’t pull me about,’ I said irritably, one evening when we were watering the horses down by a stream and he had put a careless hand around my waist.
He took his hand away. ‘I barely touched you!’ he complained. ‘And I wasn’t pulling, I was…’ he searched for a word. ‘Patting. Like I would a horse.’
I giggled. ‘Well, don’t pat me then,’ I said. ‘I’m not a pony.’
He grinned back at me and kept his hands to himself as I had bid him. Friendly-like.
He was a healthy young animal at the pitch of fitness, hot for a mate. He would have flirted with me if I had given him the smallest of welcomes. He eyed Katie when he thought no one was watching. And Dandy and he strayed off the road together to kiss and hump every day or so. Purely for lust, I think he did not even like her.
For Dandy he was the first man she had ever had, and she revelled in the pleasure he gave her. Jack was no virgin, but with Dandy he had discovered a passionate partner whose desire matched his own. They were never in love, but they were addicted. That spring, as we headed east into the sunrise every morning, they sought and found each other, regular as a water-wheel turning over, every other day. Between times they were merely civil.
Katie watched them with her knowledgeable smile. She thought Jack would tire of Dandy, and she was right. She gave him not a word of encouragement nor a smile – she had her mind on my gold guinea. But I was sure that once the debt had been paid the bargain would be off and she would flirt and tease Jack until he took her, in preference to Dandy. What would happen then I could not imagine. But I did turn it over and over in my mind, worrying whether Dandy would fly out at her, or whether she would disdain to struggle.
‘Mother Merry!’ Dandy said laughing as she saw my downcast face.
Least happy of us all was William. He did not complain but his round face grew moonlike and his eyes were sad. Robert asked him at the end of the second week what was troubling him and he confessed that he did not like travelling. He felt as if we ought to arrive somewhere; not just go on and on. Dandy and I stared at him in utter incomprehension but Katie nodded as if she understood.
‘I ‘specs he’s never been out of Warminster in all his life until now,’ she said. ‘Is that right, William?’
He nodded mournfully.
Robert tossed his enamel plate on the grass and leaned back, picking his teeth with a grass stem.
‘Well, if you dislike it so much I daresay I can send you home,’ he offered. ‘There’s work enough for you there, lord knows. Mrs Greaves would have had to take on a lad to do the garden and the vegetables alone.’
William’s face lit up as if someone had placed a candle behind a round Chinese lantern.
Robert tapped his teeth with his thumbnail. ‘I’ll have to find a lad to come in your place,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘One that’s handy with horses and knows how to travel.’
He said nothing more but when we stopped outside Winchester he put on his best brown coat and went into town on Snow. He came back with a skinny young lad in poorhouse homespun breeches behind him. I recognized a gypsy as soon as I saw him.
‘His whole family’ve been gaoled,’ Robert said by way of introduction. ‘His da’ll likely hang. His ma’ll be transported. And his grandparents will be in gaol for seven years apiece. They couldn’t prove he’d been in on it, so they just put him in the poorhouse.’
‘In on what?’ I asked eyeing the black-eyed vagrant askance.
‘Thieving with violence,’ Robert said. He swung the lad down from Snow’s high back, and slid off himself.
‘It wasn’t as it sounds,’ the lad said and Dandy and I smiled as we heard the gentle burr of the Rom accent. ‘My grandma was telling a fortune. A lady gave her a shilling to tell her if her own true love was faithful. My gran has the Sight and she looked into the lady’s palm and told her “no”.’ He sighed. ‘The lady tried to take the shilling back and she was rough with my gran. The old man went to help her and the lady’s footman hit him. My da went in, and so did my ma. The lady’s coachman whipped us all and yelled for the watch. They took us all up for thieving with violence because a lady couldn’t believe that her man preferred another woman.’
Robert shook his head. Katie and Dandy cooed in dismay and concern. I looked at the lad hard-eyed. I had nothing against him and what he said might well be true. I cared nothing one way or another. It was a world full of big thieves and little thieves. Little thieves like his family unquestionably were – for a shilling for a fortune is a gull and a thievery. And big thieves – for the lady and her lord would be the thieving sort who say that the land is theirs, and put up fences; or that the animals and birds which fly and run freely are theirs, and put in man-traps. I had no sympathy for him or his raggle-taggle kin. But I was glad he had joined us. He could do the poaching instead of Dandy, and if anyone hung to put meat in Robert Gower’s stewpot it would not be my sister.
I cared only for her. I had no love to waste on any other living human being. Dandy and Sea were all I loved in the whole world. One selfish young girl and a horse. It was not very much for one person to love, I thought, watching the tear roll down the lad’s face for the father who would hang and the mother who would go far, far away, and the grandparents who would undoubtedly die in gaol. But the years in the wagon with Da and Zima had somehow shrunk my heart so that there was no room in it for more than one young woman and one horse.
‘Can you handle horses?’ I asked him.
His face brightened. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I love horses. My da used to travel around training them in winter.’
I looked at Robert wryly. ‘So you have another rider if you need one,’ I said. The boy was slighter than Jack and wiry; a perfect body for a bareback rider.
Robert beamed back at me in satisfaction. ‘Aye,’ he said. He chinked a purse of coins in his pocket. ‘And they paid me to take him on,’ he said. He turned to William. ‘So you can go home,’ he said. ‘We’ll send you off first thing in the morning. I’ll show you the direction and give you coppers for your meals on the road. You can walk and take lifts. It shouldn’t take you long.’
William’s simple face glowed like a delighted child
. ‘Thank you, Mr Gower,’ he said, heartfelt. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘Thank you very much indeed,’ I thought to myself in silence, looking at William’s boots which I thought would not last the distance home and the roads he would have to walk waiting for a passing wagon or cart. But I said nothing. William was not my concern either.
‘The lad can sleep in with you girls tonight,’ Robert said. ‘Tomorrow he’ll come into William’s bunk with us.’
‘Not till he’s washed he won’t,’ I said firmly. ‘He’ll have fleas and lice. I won’t have him sleeping in our wagon until he’s stripped down and washed and gone over his clothes.’
Robert nodded. ‘You’re very nice all of a sudden, Merry,’ he said mildly. ‘I remember when I first saw you, you were all over flea-bites then; aye and lice.’
I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That was the last time. I like to be clean now, and I’ll stay that way. William can take the lad down to the river and make sure he washes clean.’
The lad clutched at the neck of his shirt as if he were afraid I was going to dip him in boiling oil as a cleansing method. I could not help but chuckle.
‘Don’t look like that, lad. What’s your name?’
‘Rea,’ he said sulkily. ‘What’s yours?’
‘I’m Meridon, and this is my sister Dandy,’ I said. ‘We’re Rom too; and we survived washing. Go now and get clean. And if you see a rabbit or a hare on the way home you can bring it back with you.’
Robert could judge people like he could judge horseflesh. Within days he had Rea setting the rigging as well as William ever did; and before the show he had him practising standing on horseback, and vaulting on and off. He was little, but he was wiry, and he would get up early in the morning and work all the day long without ever seeming to get tired. He was excellent with the ponies and even Sea, who still hated most men, would allow his touch. I was glad, for working with the horses and my little act on the trapeze at every show was tiring.