Meridon. Philippa Gregory

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