‘Were you sick at the thought of it?’ Robert demanded. He was so stunned he had forgotten to eat and was still holding his bread in mid air. ‘Was that it, lass? Or are you ill?’

‘I am not ill,’ I said. The metalic slick in my mouth made me swallow and reach for my mug of small ale. ‘I’m not ill in myself,’ I said. ‘But the thought of having to go up high on one of those things does make me ill. I am sick with fright.’

Jack looked at me with interest. ‘Well that’s an odd thing,’ he said unsympathetically. ‘I’d never have thought Meridon was nervy. But she’s as missish as a lady.’

‘Leave her be,’ Dandy said calmly. ‘You leave her be, Robert. I’m happy to learn how to do it. And if I am doing the Aerial Act you’ll need Meridon to do the horses. She can’t do both.’

‘Maybe not,’ Robert said half convinced. ‘And if the worst comes to the worst I could always buy a poorhouse girl and have her trained.’

I gulped again, thinking of the girl straight out of the workhouse in conditions worse than a prison and up a ladder to swing on a trapeze. But I nodded to Robert. I had no sympathy to waste on a stranger. I had no tenderness to spare. There was only one person in the world for me, and she was happy.

‘Yes, you do that,’ I said. ‘You know I’d try anything with the horses. But I cannot go up a ladder.’

Robert smiled. ‘You’re to give it a try,’ he said firmly. ‘A fair try. No one will force you to go up high but you’ll wait and see the swing before you make up your mind, Meridon.’

‘I’ll have too much to do with the horses,’ I said defensively. ‘I can’t be a bareback rider and swing on a trapeze.’

‘Jack will,’ he said. ‘You can too. I give you my word, Meridon; I won’t force you, but you’re to give it a try. That’s fair.’

It was not fair, but I had reached the hard core in Robert where he would not be moved.

‘All right,’ I said sullenly. ‘I promise I’ll try, and you promise that if I can’t do it, you get someone else in.’

‘Good girl,’ he said as though I had agreed rather than been forced into it. ‘And you’ll have plenty of learning with the horses. I’ll have you dancing bareback, aye, and going through a hoop of fire before the next season.’

I thought that was ambitious and I glanced at Jack but he had never in his life spoken one word against his father.

‘Can I learn it that quick?’ I asked.

‘Going to have to, lass,’ Robert replied with finality. ‘I’m not housing you and feeding you all winter for love of your green eyes. You’re going to work for your living at Warminster as you do now. Training the horses, and learning a bareback act, and doing what the trapeze man tells you. And you, miss,’ he turned sharply to Dandy. ‘You will get yourself off to a wise woman in the village and have her tell you about how to avoid getting a belly on you. I’m not spending a fortune training you how to swing from a trapeze to see you up there fat with a whelp. And you keep away from the village lads, too, d’you hear? It’s a respectable village, Warminster, and I go there every winter. I want no trouble with my neighbours.’

We both nodded obediently. But Dandy caught my eye and winked at me in anticipation. I smiled back at her. I had never slept under a roof but always a wagon, always in a narrow bunk within touching distance of four other people. It would make me feel like Quality to get into my own bed. It would be like being a lady. It would be like being at Wide.

I took that thought with me to bed, after I had rubbed down the horses and eaten my supper nodding over my bowl with weariness. That thought took me in my dream to Wide.

I saw it so clearly that I could draw a map of it. The pale lovely sandstone house in the new style with a round turret at one end which makes a pretty rounded parlour in the west corner. That room catches the sun in the evening and there are window seats upholstered with pink velvet where you can sit and watch the sun set over the high high green hills which surround the little valley. The house faces south, down a long winding avenue of tall beech trees which would have been old when my ma was young, even when her ma was young. At the bottom of the drive is a pair of great wrought-iron gates. They have rusted on their hinges and are left open. The family, my family, never wants them shut. For out of the drive and down the lane is the source of their wealth, or our wealth. The little village with a new-built church and a row of spanking new cottages one side of the only street; and a pretty vicarage and a cobbler and a smithy and a carter’s cottage and stable yard on the other side.

These are the people of Wide. These are my people, and this is where I belong. However much I might love the travelling life with the Gowers, I knew this was my home. And in my dream of Wide I knew – knew without a shadow of doubt – that I was not a gypsy’s brat. I was not Meridon Cox of Gower’s Amazing Equestrian Event. I was Sarah. Sarah of Wide. And one day I would be back there.

I awoke on that thought and stared at the ceiling of the wagon. This caravan was not 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.