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.

I knew Lady Clara well enough to know that she was not doing this for love for her daughter, nor for her respect for the holy estate. She was in mortal terror that Basil would throw Maria out, and she would be back home with the piano tutor in tow, her reputation ruined: a costly disgrace to her family.

Lady Clara said as much to me when we passed on the stairs that afternoon.

‘I am glad to see you up, dear,’ she said. ‘And glad to see you are well enough to dine downstairs. Perry is home from Newmarket tomorrow, is he not?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I hesitated, my hand on the cold metal banister. ‘You look tired, Lady Clara.’

She made a little face. ‘I am,’ she said. ‘But I have to go out at once to Maria. Basil is coming home to dine this evening and I dare not let the two of them be alone together. Maria has such a sharp tongue she’ll goad him, I know it. There are enough people who would tell him what has been going on if he were willing to hear it. I shall have to be a peace-maker.’

I looked at her coolly. ‘You specialize in profitable marriage-making,’ I said. ‘But making the marriage stick is more difficult, is it not?’

She met my eyes with a gaze as hard as my own. ‘Not when it suits both parties,’ she said bluntly. ‘Maria is a fool and cannot see beyond her own passions. You are not. You have access to Perry’s fortune and to your own. You are welcome to live in the country, in the town, or on the moon for all I care. You wanted to be launched into society and I did that for you. I will sponsor you at Court, your child will be the biggest landowner in Sussex. You consented to your marriage Sarah, and it will serve you well. I’ll take no blame.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll learn to live with it,’ I said and my voice was hard. ‘But I did not consent.’

She shrugged. She was too wise and too clever to be drawn. ‘It will serve you well,’ she said again. ‘And anyway, now you have no choice.’

I nodded, but I still had a gleam of hope that I might get free. It was one thing to consent to marriage to Perry when I pitied him, and pitied myself and respected – almost loved – Lady Clara. It was another damned thing altogether when I had seen Perry steal from my purse when I was ill, and seen Lady Clara rob me of my lands when she thought I was dying. If I could break free I would. And if I could break free there would be Wideacre, waiting for me. And Will might still be there.

I sent a footman flying with a note to James Fortescue’s lawyer and took him privately into the dining room and told him bluntly what had happened. His jaw dropped and he strode around the room like a restive cat before placing himself before the hearth.

‘I did not know!’ he said. ‘All I heard was a special licence because you were unwell. And I knew you had been living in this house as part of the family for months.’

I nodded. ‘I’m not blaming you,’ I said. I had little energy for this conversation and I wanted to hear if I was indeed, trapped tight. ‘I’m not blaming you,’ I said. ‘It is no one’s fault. But tell me if the marriage is valid. If I have any choice now?’

He turned to the fire and studied the logs. ‘Has he slept in your bed?’ he asked delicately.

I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They took care of that. But we never did it.’

His whole body jumped as if I had stuck him with a pin at my indelicacy. But I was little Miss Sarah no more.

‘I see,’ he said slowly, to cover his nervousness. ‘So a medical examination, if you could bear to allow such a thing would establish that you are indeed…’ he hesitated.

‘An examination by a doctor?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘To prove non-consummation of the marriage, with a view to obtaining an annulment,’ he said watching the hearthrug beneath his boots and blushing like a schoolboy.

I thought of the horses I had ridden and the tumbles I had taken. I thought of riding bareback and climbing trees. I made a grimace at his turned-away face.

‘I’ve not had a man, but I doubt I could prove it,’ I said. ‘Where I come from there’s few girls who stain their sheets on their wedding night. We all live too hard.’

He nodded as if he understood. I knew damn well he did not.

‘Then we would be faced with the problem of obtaining a divorce,’ he said carefully. ‘And a divorce would not return your lands to you, even if it were possible.’

I leaned back against the padding of the chair. I was very weary indeed. ‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘I cannot get the marriage annulled.’

He nodded.

‘I might be able to get divorced.’

‘Only for flagrant abuse and cruelty,’ he interjected softly.

I shot an inquiring look at him.

‘Imprisonment, torture, beatings, that sort of thing,’ he said quietly.

I nodded. Where I came from, if you were tired of your husband or he was tired of you, you could stand up in a public place and announce you were man and wife no more. That was the end of it and you went your ways. But the Quality had to think about land and heirs.

‘I’ve had none of that,’ I said. ‘But even if I had, and I could make a divorce stick, are you telling me that I’d not get my land back?’

The lawyer turned from the fire and faced me, and his expression was kindly but distant.

‘It is his land now,’ he said. ‘He is your husband and master. Everything you owned at marriage became his, at marriage. It is his to do with as he pleases. This is the law of the land, Lady Havering.’ He paused. ‘And you have been offered a most generous allowance and settlement,’ he said. ‘I have seen the contract and it is very generous indeed. But both religion, law and our traditions insist that it is better if the husband owns everything.’

‘Everything?’ I asked. I was thinking of the beech coppice on the way up to the Downs where the sun filters through the leaves and the shadows shift on the nutty brown leaf-mould at the foot of the treetrunks.

‘Everything,’ he said.