Meridon. Philippa Gregory

damp like the other and there were no strange-shaped damp patches to make boggart faces and frighten me. I squeezed my finger into the hole in my straw mattress and felt for the scrap of cloth which I had twisted and hidden there. I hooked it out and unwrapped it, leaning on one elbow to hold it to the grey light filtering in through the sprigged curtains at the window. The string was grimy and old but the clasp was still shiny. It still said ‘Celia’ on one side and ‘John’ on the other, names of people I did not know. But they must have known me. Why else should I have all that was left of Celia’s necklace? And I heard a voice, not my own voice but a voice in my head, call longingly, but without hope of an answer: ‘Mama.’

      The next day was our last day and we gave only one performance which was ill attended. It was too cold for people to relish sitting on the damp grass for long, the horses were surly and unwilling to work, and Jack was chilled in his shirtsleeves.

      ‘Time to move,’ Robert said counting the gate money in the swinging bag. ‘We’ll start now and stop at suppertime. Get the loading done, you three, I’m going to the village.’ He shrugged on his tweed jacket and pulled on his ordinary boots and set off down the lane. Dandy scowled at his back.

      ‘Aye, push off when there’s work to be done,’ she said softly. ‘Leave two girls and your son to do all the hard work.’ She looked at me. ‘The more money that man makes, the greedier and the lazier he becomes,’ she said.

      ‘Is he making money?’ I asked. I had noticed no great change, but Dandy kept the gate and knew as well as Robert how the money bag had been growing heavier.

      ‘Yes,’ she said shortly. ‘He is taking shillings and pounds every day and he pays us in pennies. Hi Jack!’ she called suddenly. ‘How much does your da pay you?’

      Jack was folding up the costumes and putting them carefully in a great wooden chest bound with hoops which would slide under one of the bunks. The props and saddles and feed were strapped on top or slung alongside the wagon. He looked up at Dandy.

      ‘Why d’you want to know?’ he asked suspiciously.

      ‘Just curious,’ she replied. She undid the bolts which held the screen together and unhitched one of the panels. ‘He’s doing all right, isn’t he, your da?’ she said. ‘Doing all right for money. And this new show he’s planning for next season. That’ll be a big earner, won’t it?’

      Jack slid a sideways glance at her, his eyes crinkled. ‘So what, Miss Dandy?’ he asked.

      ‘Well what d’you get?’ she asked reasonably. ‘Me and Meridon get pennies a week – depending what we do. If I knew how much you got, I’d know how much I ought to ask for the flying act.’

      Jack straightened up. ‘You think you’re worth as much as me?’ he said derisively. ‘All you’ve got is a pretty face and nice legs. I work with the horses, I paint the screen, I plan the acts, I cry it up, I’m a bareback rider with a full riding act.’

      Dandy stood her ground. ‘I’m worth three-quarters what you are,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I never said I should have as much. But I should get at least three-quarters what you earn if I’m on the trapeze.’

      Jack gave a triumphant shout of laughter and swung the heavy box up on to his shoulder. ‘Done!’ he said. ‘And may you never make a better deal! Done, you silly tart! Because he pays me nothing! And you’ve just bargained your way into three quarters of nothing.’

      He marched towards the wagon, laughing loudly at Dandy’s mistake and swung the box down to the floor with a heavy crash. Dandy exchanged a look with me, lowered the wing of the screen gently to the grass and went to unbolt the other side.

      ‘That’s not right,’ she said to him when he came back to steady the screen for her. ‘That’s not fair. You said yourself how much work you do for him. It’s not right that he should pay you nothing. He treats us better and we are not even family.’

      Jack lowered the centre section of the screen down to the ground and straightened up before he answered. Then he looked from Dandy to me as if he were wondering whether or no to tell us something.

      ‘You don’t know much, you two,’ he said finally. ‘You see the show and you hear about Da’s plans. But you don’t know much. We weren’t always show people. We weren’t always doing well. You see him now at his best, how he is when he has money in the sack under his bed and a string of horses behind the wagon. But when I was a little lad we were poor, deathly poor. And when he is poor he is a very hard man indeed.’

      We were standing in a sheltered field in bright autumn sunshine but at Jack’s words I shivered as if the frost had got down my neck, his face was as dark as if there were snow clouds across the sun.

      ‘I’ll have the show when he is too old to travel,’ he said with confidence. ‘Every penny he saves now goes into the show, or goes into our savings. We’ll never be poor again. He’ll see to that. And anything he says I should do … I do. And anything he says he needs … I get. Because it was him and one bow-backed horse that earned us food when the whole village was starving. No one else believed he could do it. Just me. So when he took the horse on the road I went with him. We didn’t even have a wagon then. We just walked at the horse’s head from village to village and did tricks for pennies. And he traded the horse for another, and another, and another. He is no fool, my da. I never go against him.’

      Dandy said not a word. We were both spellbound by Jack’s story.

      ‘How was he a hard man?’ I asked, going to the central question for me. How he would treat us, how he would treat Dandy if the tide of luck started going against us? ‘Did he used to hit you? Or your mother? Did she travel with you too?’

      Jack shook his head and bent down so that Dandy and I could lift the screen on to his back. He walked with it towards the wagon, dragging it behind him, and then he came back.

      ‘He’s never raised his hand to me,’ he said. ‘He never laid a finger on my ma. But she didn’t believe in him. He left her and the three little ones in the village and went on the tramp with the horse. He’d have left me behind too but he knew I was the only one that believed he could do it. He had me trained to ride on the horse within days. I was only a littl’un and I was scared of nothing. Besides, it’s a very big horseback when you’re only five or six. It was easy to stay on.

      ‘At the end of the summer we went home. He’d been sending money back when he could. And after the winter we started out again. This time there was a cart we could borrow. Ma wanted to come too, but Da was against it. But she cried and said she needed to be with him. I wanted her. And Da wanted the little ones along with him. So we all went on the road.’

      Jack stopped. Then he bent for the final section of screen and loaded it in silence. Dandy and I said nothing. He came back and picked up a couple of halters and slung them towards the wagon. He turned and went for the gate as if the story was over.

      We went after him.

      ‘What happened then, Jack?’ I asked. ‘When you were all travelling together?’

      Jack sighed and leaned on the gate, looking across the field as if he could see the wagon and the woman with the two small children and the baby at the breast. The man walking with his son at the horse’s head, the horse which he had trained to dance for pennies.

      ‘It was a grand season,’ he said. ‘Warm, and sunny. A good harvest and there was money about. We went from fair to fair and we did well at every one of them. Da had enough money to buy the cart and then he exchanged it for a proper wagon. Then he saw a horse he fancied and bought her. That’s Bluebell that we have now. He saw she had a big enough back for me as I grew bigger. And she’s steady.

      ‘We had two horses then so we didn’t work the street corners any more but we took a field and started to take money at the gate. I had an act jumping from one horse to another, and through a hoop. I was still quite small you see – I must have been about seven or eight.

      ‘Ma was on the gate, and the little babbies sold sweets