Perry dumped the lot on the hearthrug before the fire, quite unaware.

‘Now we can be comfortable,’ he said with satisfaction.

I giggled. ‘Yes we can,’ I said. And we toasted each other in the remainder of the wine and we ate soggy plum cake and redstained biscuits, and then we curled up together like drunken puppies and dozed before the fire until the maid tapped on the door and told me it was time to dress for dinner.

29

Lady Clara had told me that I was fit for London society and I had doubted her when every move I made in Sussex was somehow subtly wrong. But once we were in London she criticized me very little, and I remembered with a wry smile how Robert Gower would never criticize a performance in the ring. It was the rehearsals where he was an inveterate taskmaster. In the ring he smiled encouragement.

Lady Clara was like that, and my life in London was like one long performance where I showed the tricks she had taught me and relied on her to skim over the errors I made. She covered for me wonderfully. When a young lady went to the piano to play and turned to me and said, ‘Do you sing, Miss Lacey?’ it was Lady Clara who said that I was training with one of the best masters and he insisted that I rest my voice between lessons.

They all nodded with a great deal of respect at that, and only the young lady at the piano looked at all put out.

Dancing I was excused until we had been to Almacks, some sort of club where I should dance my first dance with Perry.

Sketches were loaned to me from the schoolroom and Lady Clara insisted that I squiggle my initials at the foot of them, and had them framed. They attracted much praise and I thought my modesty was particularly becoming. The embroidery which was cobbled together by the governess in the schoolroom as an extra unpaid duty I left scattered around the drawing room, and Lady Clara would sweetly scold me in front of visitors for not putting it away. My flower arrangements were done by one of the parlourmaids who had once been apprenticed to a flower-seller. Only my horse riding and my card-playing were entirely my own and they were skills from my old life.

‘Far too good for a young lady,’ Lady Clara said. She wanted me to ride a quiet lady’s mount and offered me a bay from her stables. But I held true to Sea and she sent down to Sussex for him. The stables were around the back of the house, down a cobbled street. Some afternoons, when Lady Clara was resting, I would wear a hat with a veil pulled down and sneak round to the stables to see him. I was not supposed to walk out without a footman, the horses should be brought to the door. But I did not trust the London stable lads to keep his tack properly clean. I was not sure they were reliable about his feeds and his water. To tell the truth, I simply longed to be with him and to smell him and to touch the living warmth of him.

Lady Clara would have known within a few days what I was doing. She said nothing. I think she knew, with her cunning common sense, that there was only so much I could bear to be without. If I had to live without the land, without travelling, and without the girl who had been my constant companion since the day I was born, I had to find things which would make me feel as if I touched earth somewhere. Sea, and sometimes Perry, were the only things in London which seemed real at all.

I was allowed out riding early every morning, provided I took a groom as a chaperone and did not gallop. When the clocks were striking seven we would trot through the streets which were busy even then. Down Davies Street, across Grosvenor Square which was dusty from the building work, and along Upper Brook Street to the park where the green leaves were looking dry and tired, and some of the bushes were yellowing at their edges. Sometimes the gate-keeper at the Grosvenor Gate lodge would be up, and tip his hat to me, more often only the groom and I were the only people in the park. There were ducks silent beside the still pond, there were great flocks of pigeons which wheeled around us. One morning I heard a low rushing creaky noise and looked up to see a pair of white swans circling the water and landing with a great green bow-wave of stagnant water cresting against their broad white breasts.

On Wideacre at this time of year I thought the berries would be very bright and ripe in the bushes. The nuts would be in thick clusters on the trees. In the London park there was fruiting and nutting going on, but it seemed more like a diversion. It hardly seemed a matter of hunger, of life or death. The squirrels in the trees and the ducks by the reservoir seemed like stuffed pets, not like live hungry animals.

The groom rode behind me at half a dozen paces, but I was as aware of him watching me as if he had been a gaol keeper. Sea longed for a gallop but I had to keep him on a tight rein. The noises of the city puzzled and fretted him, his ears went back all the time as we rode home through the crowded streets. When I rode him down the cobbled mews and left him in his stables I thought he looked at me reproachfully with his great dark eyes as if to say that the place he had found for us, that night when we had been quite lost, had been better than this. I would shrug as I walked home, as if I were trying to explain in my head that we had to be here. He had to live in a street filled with other stables where rich carriages and beautiful horses awaited their owners’ commands. Among all that wealth and elegance I could not understand why I did not feel triumphant. I had wanted the best, the very best. And now I had it.

Perry would never ride with me in the early mornings. He was out too late every night of the week. Sometimes he went to gambling hells, sometimes he went to cock pits or boxing rings. Once he went to a riding show and offered to take me. I said I did not want to go, that his mama would not approve of me going, and he went alone. I did not even ask him who were the riders and what tricks they did.

He did not rise until midday and would sometimes take breakfast with us dressed in a brilliant-coloured dressing gown. When his head was aching badly he would take strong black coffee cut with brandy. When he was well he would drink strong ale or wine and water. Whether he ate well, or whether his hands were shaking and his face white, his mama never seemed to notice. She read her letters, she chatted to me. One time he was swaying in his chair and I thought he might faint, but Lady Clara never said one word. She never tried to check his drinking. She seldom asked him where he had been the night before. He grew paler and paler every week of the Season, but Lady Clara seemed to see nothing but her own pretty reflection in the mirror over the mantelpiece; she watched no one but me.

I met Juliet and her governess that first evening. She came downstairs to be introduced before dinner, but she did not stay to dine with her mama. She made her curtsey to me without raising her eyes, and when she was told that Perry and I were to marry and that she and I would be sisters she gave me a cold kiss on the cheek and wished me very happy.

I made no effort to get on closer terms with her. I did not want a sister.

Lady Maria arrived in a flurry of ostrich plumes the first morning after our arrival.

‘Expensive,’ her mama said coolly as she fluttered into the room. Maria kissed her and then stood back and twirled around so that Lady Clara might see the full effect of a blue velvet walking gown, blue jacket, blue hat and blue feathers with a dark fur cape thrown over the shoulders.

‘Vulgar,’ Lady Clara said simply.

Maria laughed, not at all abashed. ‘Where’s the pauper-heiress?’ she demanded.

Lady Clara frowned and affected deafness. ‘Sarah, may I present to you my daughter, Lady de Monterey. Maria this is Miss Sarah Lacey.’

Maria gave me a gloved hand and a look as cold as ice. ‘I hear you and Perry are to be married,’ she said coolly. ‘I hope you will be very happy I am sure.’

I smiled, as cold as her. ‘I am sure we will,’ I said. ‘I believe you are newly wed aren’t you? I’m sure I wish you very happy.’

We stood smiling at each other as if we had lemon slices in our mouths. Lady Clara stood back as if enjoying the spectacle.

‘How is Basil?’ she asked briskly, pulling the bell pull for morning coffee.

Maria unpinned her hat before the mirror and patted the tightly crimped blonde curls into place. She turned and made a face at her mother.

‘Just the same,’ she said. ‘Still working, working, all the time; just like a tradesman.’

‘A rather successful tradesman,’ Lady Clara said wryly. ‘He did not quibble about the price of that ball gown which you wrote to me about?’

Maria beamed. ‘I slipped it in along with a whole lot of bills from his estate,’ she said. ‘Compared to a forest of trees which he is planting I am positively paltry.’

Lady Clara smiled. ‘It would be as well not to play that trick too often,’ she warned. ‘You’ve only been married a quarter.’

The maid set the coffee tray before me and then waited to pass the cups around when I had poured them. My hand was as steady as a rock and I did not spill a drop. Lady Clara was watching me from the corner of her eyes. Maria had forgotten I was there.

‘I’m flush now,’ she said airily. ‘I had this quarter’s dress allowance and I doubled it last night playing vingt-et-un at Lady Barmain’s. I had such a run of luck, Mama, I vow you would not have believed it! Four hundred pounds I won clear! You should have seen her ladyship’s face! She was nearly sick when I rose from the tables a winner. They say she rents her house on her winnings at the table, you know. I must have cost her a month at least!’

Lady Clara laughed her sharp London laugh, and Maria told her some more gossip about people whose names I did not know, but whose vices and sorrows, drink or gambling or unfulfilled desire, were the same in high society as in a showground.

I was surprised at that. In my first month in London my greatest lesson was that there was less difference than I had seen when I had been at the bottom, the very bottom of the heap of society looking up. I had been dazzled then by the cleanliness and the food they ate, at the fineness of the gowns and the way the ladies were so dainty, and dressed so bright. But now I too was washed and fed, and could talk in a high light voice as they did. I could curtsey to the right depth, I could spread a fan and smile behind it. I could mince across a room, not stride. They were all signals, secret code-words, as impenetrable as the signs of the road which tell you where it is safe to camp and where you can poach. Once I had learned them, I had the key to a society which was the same as that of a fairground: nothing more and nothing less. They were drunkards and gamblers, wife-beaters and lovers, friends, parents and children; just the same. The greatest difference between the world of the gentry and those of the landless was just that: land. When I had been on the bottom of the heap I owned nothing and they had taught me to think the worse of myself for that. The only thing which had brought me to the top of the world was land and money, they would forgive me everything if I remained rich. I would never have got beyond the area railings if I had stayed poor.

And while I rode Sea on my lonely way in the park in the mornings, or watched dancers swirl around on the floor while the clock struck midnight and footmen yawned behind gloved hands, I recognized more and more that the wealth of the ballroom and the poverty of the farmyard were alike unjust. There was no logic to it. There was no reason. The wealthy were rich because they had won their money by fair means and foul. The poor were poor because they were too stupid, too weak, or too kindly to struggle to have more and to hold it against all challenges. Of the people I met every day, only a few had been rich for many years, the vast majority were quick-wined merchants, slavers, soldiers, sailors, farmers or traders only a generation ago. They had succeeded in the very enterprises where Da had failed. And so Da had grown poorer and more miserable, while they had grown rich.

I did not become a Jacobin with these observations! Oh no! If anything it hardened my heart to Da and those like him. It strengthened me. I was never going to fall out of the charmed circle of the rich. I was never going to be poor again. But I saw the rich clearly, as once I had not. I saw them at last as lucky adventurers in a world with few prizes.

And, by the way, for all the extravagant profits they made, the wealth they earned, not one of them worked half as hard as we had done for Robert’s show. Indeed few of them worked as hard as feckless, idle Da.