‘That’s where you’re wrong!’ Dandy said triumphantly. ‘Everyone has noticed how he is about you. Mrs Greaves, David, even Jack himself. Jack said that he was as worried about your fall as if you had been his own daughter. He’s softer with you than he is with any of us, even Jack. You’re the key to Robert Gower, Merry! He wants you to work for him for always. He wants you to train his horses for him. He sees now that you’re as good as he is, he’ll soon see that the way to keep you with his show is to marry one of us into it. He knows you’d never marry so that only leaves me. Me and Jack!’ she concluded.

I closed my eyes and tried to think. It was possible. Robert Gower could not have taken more care of me if I had been his own child. The surgeon’s fees alone would run into pounds. It was true that I trained horses better than anyone I had ever seen. I had won him a fortune that day in Salisbury. There were other shows looking for horses and trainers. I had only Sea, but he could be made into a wonderful act if I wished. Dandy was only an apprentice, but there could not be a prettier girl flyer in the world. She was certainly the only girl flyer in the country.

But…I stopped and opened my eyes. Dandy had tucked away her little bag of herbs inside her shift and was tying her pinny around her waist. ‘You’d never persuade Robert,’ I said. ‘Not in a hundred years, not on your own. The only person who could turn him around would be Jack. And you will never get Jack to stand up to his da.’

Dandy’s face was as clear as a May morning. ‘I will,’ she said confidently. ‘When he’s my lover he’ll do anything for me.’

If I had been stronger I should have argued more. Even then, as I closed my eyes against the dizzy hazy pain of headaches and old bruises, I knew that I should sit up and make Dandy see sense. That she needed my protection more than she had ever done in her life. But I failed her. I leaned back against the wall and rested until she had pinned her cap and was ready for us to go to dinner. Even then, as the three of us walked over to the house, I should have told Katie that the promised guinea was mine and not Dandy’s, and that I should not pay it. She could have Jack with my blessing.

But I was tired and ill and, I suppose, lazy. I had not the strength to go against Dandy’s overpowering conviction. I did not even have the wit to keep my eyes open to see if she palmed the herbs and got them into his cup of tea at dinner. I just let her go her own way, even though there was something in the back of my mind which told me that I had let the dearest person in the world slip through my fingers and had not put out a hand to save her.


My sense of miserable foreboding stayed with me so long that Robert spoke of sending for the surgeon again.

‘You’ve lost your smiles, Merry,’ he said. We were in the stable yard and I was ready to start working Sea. I had decided to treat him as if he were unbroken – train him to a lunge rein, and take him slowly through all the stages of a young horse as if he had never been ridden before. His head nodded to me over the loose-box and I was anxious to begin, but Robert touched my arm.

‘I’d send for the surgeon,’ he offered. ‘He’ll not be working from Christmas Eve tomorrow till Twelfth Night, but if you feel ill, Merry, he’ll come out for me.’

I paused and looked at Robert. His face was kindly, his eyes warm with concern.

‘Robert,’ I said directly. ‘Would you let me be a partner in your business? The ten guineas I have – would you let me buy more horses with them and we could work them jointly? Would you let Dandy and me be joint owners with you?’

Robert stared at me blankly for a moment, as if he could not think what the words meant. Then I watched the coldness spread across his face. It started at his eyes which lost their affectionate twinkle and became as hard and stony as a man driving a bad bargain. The smile died away from his lips and his mouth set hard in a thin line. Even the lines of his profile became sharper, and under the joyful, laughing showman I saw the bones and sinews of the ruined carter who staked his livelihood on his little boy dancing on the back of one horse, and drove away from the woman who had tried to trap him with her love.

‘No,’ he said, and his voice was icy. ‘No, Meridon. This is my show, my own show, and God knows I have worked hard enough for it and long enough for it. There will never be a share in it for anyone but Jack. It will never go out of my family. It is all the kin I now acknowledge. I’ll pay you a better wage, if you’re discontent. I’ll pay Dandy tuppence a show whenever she works. But I’ll not share it.’

For a moment his face was almost pleading, as if he were asking me to understand an obsession. He looked down at me. ‘I’ve come so far to make it my own,’ he said. ‘I’ve done things I’ll have to answer for to my Maker…’ He broke off and I wondered if he could hear in his head the voice of the woman calling him from behind the swaying wagon. ‘I can’t share, Merry,’ he said finally. ‘It isn’t in my nature.’

I waited, then put out a placatory hand to him. ‘Don’t be angry,’ I cautioned. ‘I want to ask you a question but don’t rip up at me.’

His face grew even more closed. ‘What?’ he said.

I had a moment’s intense impatience that I should have to stand in a stable yard and ask a man not to be angry with me for a question which I had not even yet voiced. Dandy’s intense female need had brought me to the slavish role of trying to prepare a man for a request which I myself thought was unreasonable. Something of this must have shown in my face, for Robert suddenly grinned:

‘Not like you to tread cautiously, Merry,’ he said. ‘Are you learning pretty pleasing girlish ways from your sister and the Warminster whore?’

I gritted my teeth and then, unwillingly, laughed. ‘No,’ I said. ‘But it’s a question you might dislike.’

‘Get on with it then,’ he said, weary of this fencing.

‘I want a share in the show,’ I said. ‘If you couldn’t abide strangers coming in, how would it be if Dandy and Jack were to make a match of it? I know you looked higher for him, but he and Dandy working together make a good team. They could make their fortunes. Marriage is the only way you’ll keep Dandy. And where she goes, I go.’

Robert looked at me and I could see the pinched impoverished man looking out of his eyes.

‘No,’ he said blankly. ‘No woman is irreplaceable. If Dandy gets a better offer she can go. You can go with her. There are times when I love you like a daughter, Merry, but I have loved and left a daughter before now, and never regretted it. If you can’t work for me on wages then you’d best leave.’ He nodded at the stable, at the barn beyond where Dandy and Jack were practising the only touring trapeze act in England. ‘I’d change my plans for the season, I’d throw away all my hopes rather than see Dandy wed Jack,’ he said. ‘You’re a pair of draggle-tailed gypsies and she’s as hot as a bitch in heat. I look a good deal higher for my son, I’d see you both dead at my feet rather than have him wed either of you and bring your tainted gypsy blood into my family and into my show.’

I took a deep breath of the cold winter air and I dropped him a curtsey, as low and as slavish as Zima’s broad-arsed bobs.

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, as if he had tipped me a farthing. ‘I quite understand now.’

I turned from him and walked towards my horse, Sea. I slid the bridle on his head and opened the door to let him out in a daze of anger and hatred. I walked past Robert – Robert who had been so kind to me and had held me when the surgeon pulled at my arm – I walked past him and I hardly saw him. There was a hot red haze around my eyes and I think if I had spat on his boots as I passed it would have come out as blood. My pulse was thundering in my head and my hand on Sea’s lunging reins gripped by instinct, not care. In the back of my mind I knew it was Dandy’s folly that had led me into this idiot’s babble of marriage and sharing. But I knew also that the warm summer days in the wagon and the hard wintry work at Warminster had led me to see Robert’s interests and ours as running in harness. Dandy’s foolish lust for Jack had blinded me as well as her. She had convinced me she could have him. She had nearly convinced me she could keep him. I had needed Robert’s coldness to sober me.

He had looked in my face and had spoken to me as a man of substance speaks to a servant girl. Worse. He had spoken to me as a freeholder and a citizen speaks to a dirty travelling slut. All the work I had done for him and the knocks I had taken for him had not served to alter the fact that he had bought me from Da as a job lot in with a pony and a girl they both knew was a slut. I walked away from him, and I walked away from the tiny growing hope I had felt that there might be bridges which I could build from the world of the people who belonged, who slept soft and kept clean, and mine. There were no bridges. There was an absolute division.

As I led Sea down to the paddock I longed for Wide with as much passion as if I were still in my lice-ridden bunk listening to Da humping Zima. I had not belonged there. I did not belong here. I felt as if I would belong nowhere until I could own my own land and command servants of my own. There was no middling course for me, there was no staging place. It seemed I was condemned to the very ditch of society unless I could somehow scramble my way, all alone, to the top. I had to get to the top. I had to get where I belonged. I had to go to Wide.

I stepped back from the horse and clicked to him to get going. He was new to the work or else he had forgotten the skill. I worked with him all morning though my hands were stiff and my cheeks were icy. It was only when I went into the kitchen for my breakfast that I found they had become red and chapped because I had been crying into the cold east wind for all of the time.


We hardly noticed the Christmas season. Robert was distant and cold to us all since that time in the yard. He spun a silver coin down the table to Jack at breakfast on Christmas morning and he gave Dandy and Katie and me a thrupenny piece each. Mrs Greaves had a bolt of material, William a penny, David a rather good pair of second-hand gloves.

That was it. We all went back to work, and Christmas was just another day of training horses for me and working on the trapeze for the rest of them.

The new ponies bought at Salisbury were going well with the others and Robert had taught me the moves with the stick in one hand and the whip in the other and the words to call at them. We had a pretty little act with them coming into the ring and splitting into two teams, crossing from one side to another, passing while they circled (I always lost the smallest one who would tag on to the wrong team), pirouetting on the spot, and finally taking a bow while I stood in the middle of them smiling at where the audience would be, with my back to them as if I could trust them on their own – which I absolutely could not.

I worked them every morning before breakfast, while Robert watched the trapeze practice or worked at his accounts inside the house. After we had eaten we took Bluebell and the new horse, Morris, into the field and I practised vaulting on them, and standing. Bluebell was steady as a rock, she had learned the job with Jack all those years ago and I was probably a welcome relief – a good deal lighter even if I did tend to overshoot and go flying off the far side.

‘Don’t jump!’ Robert would yell irritably from the centre of the ring while his pipe puffed little signals up at the cold blue sky. ‘Let the horse’s speed take you up. All you do is get your feet off the ground. Her canter will do the rest!’

I had mastered standing up on the horse with Jack to hold me, but with Robert keeping the horse at a steady pace I was learning to stand alone. First, hanging on like grim death to the strap, but gradually – as we trained every day, snow or shine – learning to let the strap drop and balance with my arms outstretched holding nothing, standing head up, my feet shifting and stepping on the horse’s bouncing haunches.

In the later afternoon Jack would come out of the barn to work with us. Dandy and Katie would train without him, sometimes flying tricks to David who would catch them, sometimes practising by flying a trick to the right position but dropping into the net, but most of the time practising the new trick David had taught them – a cross-over – where Dandy swung out on the trapeze and was caught by Jack as Katie took off on the returning trapeze. Dandy would somersault from Jack’s hands into the net as Katie was caught by him, then Katie could either try to swing back up to the pedestal board, or drop down to the net too. David, Jack and Robert all said it looked wonderful. It was to be the final trick of the show. Katie and Dandy preened themselves and looked smug once they had the timing right. I had no opinion on it at all. I simply could not watch it.