Lady Clara looked up from her letters and saw me, tortuously spelling out words.

‘Good God no!’ she said. ‘Sarah, you must never try to read in public until you can do so without putting your finger under the words and moving your lips.’

I looked from one to the other of them. I had been so proud that I had been able to make out at all what the invitation said. But it was not a skill I had learned, it was a social embarrassment. Whatever I did it was never good enough for high society.

‘I won’t,’ I promised tightly. ‘Lady Clara, may I go to my room and take my hat off?’

She looked sharply at me and then her gaze softened. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘I had forgotten you felt ill. Go and lie down and I will send your maid to call you in time for you to dress for dinner.’

She nodded me to pull the bell rope by the mantelpiece, and I looked at the clock. It said three o’clock.

‘We will not dine for hours yet!’ Lady Clara said airily. ‘We keep town hours now! We will dine at six today, even later when we start entertaining. Mrs Gilroy can bring a slice of bread and cake up to you in your room.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. Peregrine held the door for me and then followed me out. The parlourmaid appeared from the back of the long corridor where I guessed the servants’ stairs were, dipped a curtsey to both of us and waited. Perry’s gaze was blurred, he had been drinking as he rode and the gin in the mulled wine had added to his haziness.

‘I’ll fetch the cake,’ he offered. ‘We’ll have a little picnic. It can be like it was in the woods that first day when I thought you were a stable lad, and we said we’d be friends.’

‘All right,’ I said desolately.

I followed the maid down the corridor trailing my new bonnet by the ribbons so that the flowers on the side brushed on the thick pile of the carpet. The maid threw open a panelled door and stood to one side. It was a spacious pretty bedroom which I guessed had belonged to the vixen Maria before her marriage. There was a white and gold bed and matching dressing-table with a mirror atop and a stool before it. There was a hanging cupboard for dresses and cloaks. There was a window which was painted tight shut and looked out over the street where carriages went to and fro and errand boys and footmen sauntered. It smelled of indoors as if clean winds never blew in London. I wrinkled my nose at the stale scent of perfume and hair-powder. I could not imagine how I would ever manage to sleep there. It would be like living in a prison.

There was a great crash outside my door as Perry stumbled against it, tray in hands. I crossed the room and opened it and he weaved unsteadily in. The open bottle of wine had tipped over and was rolling on the tray, wine streaming out over plum cake, fairy cakes, little biscuits and slices of bread and butter. The little dish of jam had skidded to the back of the tray and was sticking, unnoticed, to his waistcoat. The tray was awash with red wine, the food sodden.

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.