Lady Clara and Basil had risen from their seats and were coming towards us.

‘You should have run when you had the chance,’ Maria said to me. ‘When I first met you, when you were just up from the country. I thought then that if you’d had any wit you’d have got out of Mama’s clutches. But you wanted to be a lady, didn’t you? I hope it brings you much joy!’ she laughed, a hard bitter laugh which made a few people turn around and look at us, and made Lady Clara come to her side.

‘It’s time to hear La Palacha sing,’ she prompted. ‘I’m longing to hear her, Maria, Basil has been telling me how charming she is.’

Maria nodded obediently and turned to summon one of the footmen.

‘I have to go,’ I said firmly. Lady Clara turned to me with a frown.

‘Don’t you start,’ I said warningly and she heard the old toughness in my voice and hesitated. ‘It’s my first time out and I can’t abide standing around,’ I said. ‘Perry said he’d take me home. I’ve come as you bid me, and I’ll be staying in London as you wish. But don’t push me, Lady Clara, I won’t have it.’

She gave me a tight little smile at that. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Make your curtsey to the princess as you go out. You are going to her luncheon tomorrow.’

‘Yes ‘m,’ I said in imitation of Emily’s servitude. ‘Thank’ee ‘m.’

Lady Clara’s eyes narrowed, but she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. I smiled at her, my clear showground smile and then made for the door. Perry was swaying slightly on his feet, his eyes glazed, a glass in his hand.

‘Time to go,’ I said tightly. Perry nodded. We paused for a moment by the princess to bid her good evening. She exclaimed over my cropped head and my paleness and said I must promise to come to her luncheon tomorrow and eat some good Russian food. And now I was a wife too! How had that been?

‘Private,’ Perry said owlishly. ‘’Stremely private.’

The princess’s sharp little eyes were bright with curiosity. ‘So I had heard!’ she said. ‘Was only your family there?’

‘’Stremely private!’ Perry said again.

The princess looked to me, she was waiting for an answer.

‘It was during my illness, your highness,’ I said. ‘A quiet ceremony, at home. We were anxious to be married and we foresaw a long illness.’

Perry made his bow. ‘’Stremely private indeed,’ he said helpfully.

The footman mercifully opened the door and I put my hand on Perry’s arm and pinched him hard to get him out.

‘You drunken doddypoll, Perry!’ I said irritably. ‘I wish to God you’d stay sober!’

‘Oh, don’t scold, Sarah!’ he said, feckless as a child. ‘I had enough of that with you and Mama at dinner. Don’t scold me, I can’t bear it. Be nice, and I’ll see you home.’

I took his arm and we went downstairs, he was steady enough on his feet.

‘You need not,’ I said. ‘You can go straight to your club if you will promise me that you’ll come away if you start losing.’

‘Yes, I promise,’ Perry said carelessly. ‘I’ll come away if I lose and I’ll only drink another glass or two. And tomorrow Sarah, if you’re well, we can go riding in the park together.’

‘I’d like that,’ I said. The link boy outside the house waved for our carriage and it came up. Perry helped me in and kissed me on the hand. His lips were wet. Unseen, I wiped my hand on the cushions of the chaise.

‘Call me tomorrow morning,’ he said, ‘’bout ten.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Good-night.’

I watched him as the carriage drew away from the brightly lit doorway. The petulant rosebud mouth, the mass of golden curls, his downcast blue eyes. He was exactly the same young man as he had been on the London road that day, who was too drunk to find his home.

The same, and yet not the same. For when I had met him then he had worn his joy in life about him, like a cloak from his shoulders. But the young man outside the wealthy house stood as if, in reality, he had nowhere to go, and would find no pleasure in anything he did.

37

I tumbled out of the carriage and up the broad stairs without a word to the butler or the footmen. I could have wept with my tiredness, there were some times when I thought I would never get my strength back. At those times, if I had been little Miss Sarah, a lady born and bred, I should have wept and taken the next day in bed, and the next, and the next after that.

But I was not one of the Quality, I was a hard little Rom chavvy and I would not rest. I let my new maid undress me, and tuck me into bed; but then I told her to call me at eight for I was going riding, and I ignored her murmured advice. I would get well by fighting through. All my tough work-hardened life I had got sick and got well again by fighting through. I knew of no other way. I did not even know when I was sick and tired deep into my very soul, and that fighting and struggling and trying would not make that any better.

I slept at once, as soon as the door closed behind her, and in my deepest early sleep I dreamed of a day of sunshine, when I rode by the sea and someone loved me. Suddenly, I started awake. I had heard something which did not fit with the usual night-time sounds. Soft footsteps past my bedroom door, a slight noise from the stairs and then I heard the well-oiled click of the front-door latch and a carriage drive away down the street. I guessed then that Peregrine had come back for something.

Some instinct, some old hungry Rom instinct made me raise myself half up on one elbow and stare in the flickering firelit darkness across my bedroom. Something was not right.

I pushed back the covers and stepped out of my bed, walked unsteadily across the room, opened my bedroom door and looked into the hall. It was all quiet down there. A footman dozing on a chair, the butler back in his own private room. I shrugged, and turned back for my room, irritated with myself for losing the rest I needed for some nervous fancy.

Then I heard a carriage draw up outside the house and saw the footman unfold himself out of the chair in a hurry and rush to the butler’s room. I turned, silent in my bare feet, and scurried back to my room, shut my door in a hurry and slipped back into my bed and shut my eyes to feign sleep. I heard the front door open and Lady Clara’s high-heeled slippers tapping loudly on the marble floor as she crossed the hall. I heard her ask the butler if I was well and his quieter reply. I lay still and listened for her footsteps to go past my bedroom to her own.

I waited until I heard her door close for the last time and I heard her maid sigh as she carried the soiled clothes down the corridor towards the back stairs where they would have to be washed and perhaps ironed overnight if Lady Clara wanted them in the morning.

They would all be in bed now, except for the kitchenmaid. Perry did not order his valet to wait up for him, a candle was left for him in the hall, and his fire was banked in to burn all the night and most of the morning in his empty bedroom. The last person working was the kitchenmaid – watching the copper in the kitchen and washing Lady Clara’s linen. She would wring them out and then leave them drying before she crept up the stairs to her little bed. Everyone else was quiet.

I slipped from my bed and threw my wrapper around my shoulders and stepped, quiet as a cat, barefoot to my bedroom door, opened it, listened. There were no lights shining, the house was in silence. I stepped delicately on to the carpet in the corridor and stole softly down towards Perry’s room. His door opened with the quietest click. I froze and listened. There was nothing. I opened the door a little way and slid inside and closed it carefully behind me. I stood in silence and waited. Nothing.

The flames flickered in the grate, a candelabra was by Perry’s bedside with three of the five candles lit. I lifted it and stood it on his washstand so I could have the best light, then I turned and opened his wardrobe doors.

He had been wearing his mulberry-coloured coat with the green waistcoat this afternoon, when I had told him our marriage contract had arrived, and the deeds with it. I opened his wardrobe door and the coat was hanging, along with twenty others on hangers. I put my hand in the right-hand pocket, and then in the left-hand one. I took the coat out of the wardrobe and felt in every pocket and I even shook the coat in case I could feel the weight of the bulky papers in some pocket which was concealed.

There was nothing there.

The deeds of Wideacre were gone. I laid the coat on the floor and smoothed my hands all over it, alert for the rustle of thick paper, waiting for the feel of bulky documents under my fingertips. The deeds were not there. I had known they would not be, but I still had held to a little flicker of hope. That was foolish of me. In the hard, hungry corner of my mind I knew the deeds were not mislaid. I knew I had been robbed.

I tossed the mulberry coat into the corner and took down another from the wardrobe. This was a fine ball coat of peach silk, wonderfully embroidered with green and gold thread, stiff with peach velvet at the collars and cuffs and the pocket flaps. I thrust my cold little hands into every pocket and felt thoroughly inside. I shook it hard in case I could feel the weight of the deeds. Then I spread it on the floor, careless of creases and smoothed it all over, feeling for the weight of the packet of papers which would give the owner title to my land, my land of Wideacre.

Northing.

I bundled the fine coat into a ball and tossed it into the corner with the other. I took down a third…and a fourth…a fifth. I took down every coat in the wardrobe and searched each one as if I thought I might find the deeds to Wideacre carelessly stuffed in a pocket. I searched as though I had any hope left. I had none. But I felt as if I owed it to Perry, to Lady Clara, to my own Quality self, to little Miss Sarah Lacey, that I should believe that the life of the Quality was not the life of the midden. I wanted to believe that Perry was not a drunkard and a liar, a gambler and a thief. So I gave every coat a thorough searching, as if I thought I might find something more than disappointment and disillusion in every fine-stitched empty pocket.