Perry came to my bedside and looked down at me.
‘Not too close, Perry,’ his mother said.
‘I’m sorry about this, Sarah,’ he said. ‘I did not mean it to be like this for us. I really wanted us to marry and make each other happy.’
His anxious face was wavering as he spoke. That burst of temper had tired me.
‘You’re dying,’ he said bluntly. ‘And if I’m not married to you I’ll be ruined, Sarah. I have to have my fortune, please help me. It will mean nothing to you when you’re dead, after all.’
I turned my face away and closed my eyes. I was black with rage. I should do nothing for him, nothing for them, nothing.
‘She should have some laudanum to soothe her,’ I heard the doctor say. They were all here then. Emily’s nervous pulling at my shoulder raised me a little and I opened my mouth and let the draught slide down. At once I felt a golden glow inside me. It was far stronger than usual. It was strong enough to make me drunk with it. Clever Doctor Player was earning his fee – the Wideacre Dower House which belonged to me. My sense of anger and my panic-stricken scrabble for life eased away from me. My rasping breath grew quieter and steady. I was getting less air, but I minded less. I would have protested against nothing while the drug worked its magic on me. It all seemed a long way away and wonderfully unimportant. I felt easy; I liked Perry well enough, I did not like to see him look so afraid and so unhappy. He should have his fortune, it was only fair.
I smiled at him, and then I looked around the room, Maria’s room which I had disliked on sight, and yet would be the last thing I saw before I closed my eyes for the last time. They had put flowers on my writing desk, white lilies and carnations and the little flap was down ready for the ledger which the rector would bring. There was fresh ink and mended pens and a blotter and sealing wax. They were all ready. There were more flowers on the mantelpiece by the clock. The stuffy room was heavy with their perfume, I looked around at them and I laughed inside. They would do nicely for my funeral too. I guessed Lady Clara would choose white flowers for the wreath. She would never waste hot-house flowers in mid-winter.
There was a tap at the door and I heard Rimmings’ voice say: ‘The Reverend Fawcett, ma’am,’ and I heard a brisk tread into the room. Through half-closed eyelids I saw him go and make his bow to Lady Clara, and shake the doctor’s hand. He bowed to Perry then he approached my bed, halting a careful distance from me, and his smile was less assured.
‘Miss Lacey, I am sorry to see you so ill,’ he said. ‘Are you able to hear me? Do you know why I have come?’
Lady Clara came swiftly to my bedside, her silk morning dress rustling. She came to the other side of the bed and fearless for once, took my hand and put her other hand against my cheek as if she loved me dearly. I flinched. She knew I hated being touched, she was not a loving woman. All this was for show. I understood that. I had been a circus child.
‘Dear Sarah understands us, when her fever is abated,’ she said firmly. ‘This marriage has been her dearest wish since she and my son met last spring.’ She lowered her voice. ‘We none of us could bear to disappoint her,’ she said. ‘They have been betrothed for months, I could not deny her the right to marry before…’ she broke off as if her emotions were too much for her. My breath rasped in the silence. I had no voice to deny it, even if I had wished. Besides, the drug had robbed me of determination. I felt sleepy and lazy, idle and happy, as feckless as a child on a hot summer’s day. I did not care what they did.
The rector nodded and his dark shiny head caught the grey winter light from the window. ‘Is this your considered wish, Miss Lacey?’ he asked me directly.
Lady Clara looked at me, her wide blue eyes had a look of desperate pleading. If I found my voice and said ‘no’ her son would be ruined. I could hardly see her, I could hardly see the rector, or Perry. I was thinking of the high clean woods of Wideacre and how, when he was teaching me my way around the estate, Will used to ride with me. How very loud the birdsong was, in those afternoons, under the trees.
I thought of Will, and smiled.
They took it as consent.
‘Then I will begin,’ said the rector.
He did Lady Clara’s work for her. He began at the beginning and missed out nothing – as far as I knew, for it was the first wedding service I had ever heard all the way through in all my life. When we were chavvies she and I used to hang around the back of churches at wedding-time for sometimes kindly people would give us a penny, pitying our bare legs and thin clothes. More often they would give us a ha’pence to scout off and leave the church looking tidy. We never cared for their motive, we only wanted the coppers. I knew some parts of the service, I knew there were questions to be answered, and I puzzled my tired hot mind with whether I should say ‘no’ and stop this farce while I could. But I did not really care enough for anything, the drug came between me and the land.
When he came to the section where I should have said ‘I do’ he slipped through it, and my confused blinkings were consent enough. Lady Clara was at my side, reckless of infection, and when she said firmly, ‘She nodded,’ that was consent enough.
I was fair game. I seemed to be back in time on Wideacre and it was night. I was riding Sea wearily down the hill from the London road. At the ford at the foot of the hill he splashed in and then paused, bent his head and drank. I could smell the coldness of the water and the scent of the flowers on the air. In the banks along the river the primroses gleamed palely in the darkness. In the secret darkness of the wood an owl hooted twice.
‘I now pronounce thee man and wife,’ a voice said from somewhere. Sea lifted his head and water dripped from his chin, loud drops in the night-time stillness, then he waded through the swift water and heaved up the far bank and on to the road again.
Lady Clara was pushing something into my hands, a pen. I scrawled my name as she had taught me to do on the paper she held before me. In the darkness on the land Sea headed purposefully between two open wrought-iron gates and a shadow of a man came out from under the trees and looked up at me. It was a man who was out looking for poachers because he hated gin traps. It was Will Tyacke.
‘She is smiling,’ said the rector’s voice from the foot of the bed.
‘It was her dearest wish,’ Lady Clara said quickly. ‘Where do you wish me to sign? Here? And the doctor for the other witness? Here?’
They were going. Silently in the dream Will reached up for me on the horse and silently I slid from Sea’s back into his arms.
‘We will leave her to rest now,’ Lady Clara said. ‘Emily, you sit with her in case she wakes and needs something.’
‘She will be mentioned in our prayers,’ the rector said. ‘It would be a tragedy…’
‘Yes, yes,’ Lady Clara said. The door closed behind them. In the world of the fever-dream Will Tyacke bent his head and I lifted up my face for his kiss. His arms came around me and gathered me to him, my hands went to his shoulders, tightened behind his neck to hold him close. He said. ‘I love you.’
‘Don’t cry, Miss Sarah!’ Emily said. She was patting my cheeks with a wad of damp muslin. There were hot tears running down my flushed cheeks, but my throat was too tight and I was too short of breath to weep. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said helplessly. ‘There’s no need to cry. Beg pardon,’ she added.
They were sure I would die, and they wrote to Mr Fortescue, telling him of my illness and of the wedding in the same letter. He was away in Ireland on business when the letter came, and it awaited his return to Bristol. With him away there was no one to tell them on Wideacre that they had a new master. That the London lord whom Will had warned them of had won their land indeed, and he and his hard-faced mama would run the land as they pleased. They carried on, using their own money to mend the ploughs, spending the common fund on seeds for the winter sowing, ploughing the land for the spring sowing, hedging, ditching, digging drains. They did not know they would have done better to save their money. No one in London troubled to
tell them of the changes they would face, as soon as Perry and his mama arrived in the country in springtime.
No one expected me to arrive. They expected me to die.
It grieved Perry. He had moved his things to the room next door, to reinforce his claim to the marriage if anyone should dispute it in the future, after my death. He kept the adjoining door unlocked and he often came through to sit with me. Often he would stumble in to see me after a night of gambling and he would sit at my bedside and mumble through the hands he had played and the points he had lost. When I was feverish I thought he was Da – forever bewailing his ill luck, forever blaming others. Eternally gulled by those he had set out to cheat. Perry was not a cheat but he was a ripe fat pigeon. I could imagine how the card-sharpers and the gull gropers would beam when he rolled into a new gambling hell and smiled around with those innocent blue eyes.
When I was cool and the fever had given me a moment’s respite I would ask him how it was with him, whether his creditors had given him time now that it was known he was married. He dropped his voice so low that it would not disturb the rough night nurse who sat, snoring, by the fire, and he told me that everyone had offered him extra credit, that he had gone through the figures with his lawyers and that he thought he could very well manage to live the life he liked on the profits from the joint Havering-Wideacre estates.
‘It has to be ploughed back,’ I said faintly. I could feel the beat of the fever starting deep inside my body again. Already the covers were feeling hot and heavy on the bed, soon I should start to shake and to shiver. Laudanum would stave off the pain, but nothing would hold back the waves of heat which drained my mind of thoughts and dried my mouth.
‘I can’t plough it back this year,’ Perry started. ‘Maybe next, if there is enough…’ But then he saw how my face had changed and he broke off. ‘Are you ill again, Sarah?’ he asked. ‘Shall I wake the nurse?’
I nodded. I was drowning in a wave of heat and pain, slowly, in the crimson darkness I could hear the rasp rasp of my breath coming slowly into me, and then I felt my throat thicken yet tighter and I knew I would not be able to get my breath for much longer.
Dimly I heard Perry shouting at the nurse and shaking her awake. She stamped across to the bed and her broad arm came under my shoulders and my head fell back against her sweaty gown. She tipped the laudanum down my throat in one smooth practised gesture and I retched and heaved for breath.
‘Her throat’s closing up,’ she said to Perry in her hard voice. ‘It’s the end. Best get her la’ship if she wants to bid her g’bye.’
Her voice seemed to come from a long way away. I did not believe it possible that this could be the end for me. I felt as if I had hardly lived at all. I had been raised in such a rough poor way, and I had been less than a year in luxury with the Quality. To die now, and of a disease which I could have taken at any time in a damp-clothed hungry childhood made no sense at all. The drug began taking hold and I felt the familiar sense of floating on a golden sea. If she was right and I died now I should have died without knowing a proper childhood, without knowing a proper mama, without knowing what it is to be loved honestly and truly by a good man. And worse of all, I would die without knowing what it was to feel passion. Any slut on a street corner might have her man; but I had been cold as ice all my life. I had only ever kissed the man I loved in my dreams. In real life I had whipped him around the face and told him I hated him.
I gave a little moan – unheard among the hoarse scraping noise as I breathed. Lady Clara came in and looked down at my face.
‘Is there anything you want?’ she asked.
I could not reply but I knew truly that there was nothing she could buy for me, or sell to me, or barter with me, which I could want. The only thing I wanted could not be bought. It was not the ownership of Wideacre, but the smell of the place, the taste of the water, the sight of that high broad skyline.
She looked at me as if she would have said far more. ‘I hope I have not treated you badly,’ she said. ‘I meant well by you, Sarah. I meant Perry to marry you and to live with you. I thought you might have suited. I did need Wideacre, and I am glad to have it, but I wanted it to be your free choice.’
She looked at me as if she thought I could answer. I could barely hear her. Her face was wavering like water-weed under the Fenny. I felt as if I could taste the cool wetness of the Fenny on my tongue, as if it were flowing over my hands, over my face.
She stepped back from the bed and Perry was there, his eyes red from weeping, his curls awry. He said nothing. He just pressed his head on my coverlet until his mother’s hand on his shoulder took him away.
Still I said nothing. I thought I could see the gates of Wideacre Hall as I had seen them on that first night, open, unguarded. Beyond them was the drive to the Hall edged with the tall beech trees and the rustling oaks. In the woods was Will, watching for the men who would set gin traps which injure and maim. It was dark through the gates. It was quiet. I was weary and hot to the very marrow of my bones. I wanted to be in that gentle darkness.
In my dream I waited beside the gates.
Then I stepped through into the blackness.
35
The blackness lasted for a long time. Then from far away there was the sound of a robin singing, so I knew it was winter. There was a smell of flowers, not the familiar clogged smell of sweat. There was no sound of the rasping breathing, I could breathe. I could feel the blessed air going in and out of my body without a struggle. I raised my chin, just slightly. The pillow was cool under my neck, the sheets were smooth. There was no pain, the rigid labouring muscles were at peace, my throat had eased. I was through the worst of it.
I knew it before anyone else. I had woken in the grey light of morning and I could see the nurse dozing before the embers of the fire. It was not until Emily came in to make up the fire and wake the nurse and send her away for the day that anyone looked at me. Emily’s face was there when I opened my eyes after dozing and I saw her eyes widen.
‘I’ll be damned,’ she said. Then she raced to the idle old woman at the fireside and pulled at her arm.
‘Wake up! Wake up! You ole butter-tub!’ she said. ‘Wake and look at Miss Sairey! She’s through ain’t she! She’s stopped sweatin’ ain’t she? She ain’t hot! She’s broke the fever and she’s well, ain’t she?’
The nurse lurched up from her chair and came to stare at me. I looked back. Her ugly strawberry face never wavered.
‘Can you hear me, dearie?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. My voice was thin, but it was clear at last.
She nodded. ‘She’s through,’ she said to Emily. ‘You’d best get her summat sustaining from the kitchen.’ She nodded magisterially. ‘I could do with some vittles too,’ she said.
Emily scooted towards the door and I heard her feet scamper down the hall. The fat old woman looked at me calculatingly.
‘D’you remember that they did marry you?’ she asked bluntly.
I nodded.
‘’E slept with your door open to ‘is room, an’ all,’ she said. ‘It’s right and tight. Was it what you wanted?’
I nodded. She could be damned for her curiosity. And I did not want to think of Perry, or Lady Clara, of the doctor who had been promised the Dower House on my land, nor of the rector who had married me while I could not speak. All I wanted to do was to hear the robin singing and look at the clouds moving across the white winter sky, and to feel the joy of my hand which was no longer clenched and sticky with sweat and a breath which came smoothly to me, like gentle waves on a light sea. I had come through typhus. I was well.
I was weary enough though. In the weeks that followed it was as if I were a chavvy again, learning to walk. It was days before I could do more than sit up in my bed without aching with tiredness. Then one day I made it to the chair by the fireside on my own. A little later on and I bid Emily help me into a loose morning dress and I made myself walk out into the corridor and to the head of the stairs
before I called her and said I was too faint and would have to go back to my room. But the next day I got downstairs, and the day after that I stayed downstairs and took tea.
It was not little Miss Sarah who had come through the fever. It was not that faint shadow of a lady of Quality who had fought through. It was not little Miss Sarah who ordered Emily through gritted teeth to damn well give her an arm and help her walk, even while her legs turned to jelly beneath her.
It was the old strength of Meridon, the fighting, swearing, tough little Rom chavvy. A lady of Quality would have died. You had to be as strong as whipcord to survive a fever like that, and nursing like that. A lady of Quality would have been an invalid for life if she had survived. But I would not rest, I would not have a day bed made for me in the parlour. Every day I went a little further, every day I stayed up for a little longer. And one day, only a week after I had first walked across my room, I had them bring Sea round from the stables, up to the very front door, and I walked down the steps without an arm to support me and laid my white face against his grey nose and smelled the good honest smell of him.
It was that smell, and the sight of him all restive in a London street which took me back in to the parlour, to rest again, and to ready myself for a talk with Peregrine.
I had hardly seen him, or Lady Clara, since my recovery. Lady Clara was out of the house at all hours. At first I could not understand why, and then Emily let slip some gossip from the servants’ hall. Lady Clara was running all around town trying to keep the lid on scandal about her daughter Maria. Only months into marriage Maria was humping her piano tutor, and if Lady Clara did not buy the man off and silence Maria’s complaints, and scotch the rumour fast, it would reach the ears of the hapless husband; and Basil was already weary of Maria’s dress bills, and her temper, and her sulks.