I was not even sorry. Not even sorry that I would die and not see my seventeenth year. I could not find it in my hot shivering body to care a ha’pence either way. Ever since she had died I had been marking my time out, waiting. Now I was going too and if there was such a thing as the gorgio God, and a gorgio heaven, then I would see her there. I thought of her with her hair tumbled down, dressed in shining white with pink fluffy wings rising up behind her. She would be lovely. I wanted to be with her.

‘The kitchenmaid can do it,’ Rimmings said decisively.

‘Em’ly?’ my maid asked. ‘Of course! The kitchenmaid should do it. Will you wake her la’ship and tell her about this?’

‘This’ was me on my deathbed, not a fit subject to broach to Lady Havering before she had woken in her own good time and rung the bell for her morning chocolate.

Rimmings hesitated. ‘I suppose so,’ she said slowly. ‘She’ll have to send for the doctor for her, I can’t take the authority. But I doubt he’ll be able to make much difference, she’s that far gone.’

She looked at the clock on my mantelpiece. ‘I daren’t wake my lady before eight,’ she said. ‘Not even if she was breathing her last already! It won’t make much difference to her whether she waits till nine or later. I’ll give Emily some laudanum to give her.’

She came back to my bedside and stood a judicious three feet away. ‘Can you hear me, Miss Lacey?’ she asked. I gave a painful nod.

‘I shall send Emily to nurse you, she shall give you some laudanum. That will make you feel better.’

I nodded again. Emily or Sewell, it made little odds. Sewell was right. The fever had me in its grip like a hard rider forcing a horse at a gallop towards a cliff. I did not expect to leap across.

They took themselves off then, still fretting, and I lay in the throbbing hot pain of the stuffy little room and let my red eyelids close on my hot eyes, and I dozed.

At once I dreamed of a girl who looked like me and rode like me, but dressed in bulky uncomfortable clothes. She had a riding habit of grey velvet, but thicker and heavier cut than my smart outfit. She had eyes even greener than mine, as green as mine are when I am happy. She looked happy enough. She looked as if she had never shed a tear in her life.

I heard her laugh, I saw someone lift her into the saddle and I saw her smile down at him with love. But though her face was warm I knew that all the time she was teaching herself to be cold and hard, that she would throw him away, she would throw away anyone who stood in her way. I knew she was my grand-dame. The great Beatrice Lacey who made the land grow and made it eat up the people who worked it. Beatrice whom they had stopped with fire and anger. Nothing else would have made her even pause. I knew then, that I was a Lacey indeed, for that bright hard smile was my smile when I stood in the ring and knew I had an audience in the palm of my dirty little hand. And that coldness which she swung around her, like an icy cloak, was the coldness which I had been born and bred to. The coldness which says: ‘Me! Me! Who is going to care for me?’ It seemed odd, that this moment when I was galloping like an arrow towards my death should be the time when I saw her, when I knew at last that I was a Lacey through and through.

My bedroom door opened and I stirred in my sleep and saw poor little Emily the kitchenmaid with her hands swiftly washed and her cap pulled straight and her dirty pinny swapped for a clean one.

‘Please’m,’ she said. ‘They said I had to give you this.’ She held a bottle of laudanum in one hand and glass of water in another. ‘They said I should be your maid while you’re ill, until her la’ship gets a nurse,’ she said. ‘But please’m I ain’t never done it and I don’t know nohow what’s to do.’

I tried to smile and nod her to the bedside, but I could not move my neck at all now. I must be getting worse very quick for I had been able to speak earlier in the morning and now it had gone altogether.

She was made bold by my stillness and silence. ‘Are you very bad, miss?’ she asked. I blinked my eyes and she came a little closer.

‘Bloody hell,’ she said.

I gave a little croak of laughter and she jumped back as if I could bite.

‘Beg pardon, miss,’ she said hopelessly. Then when I made no more sound she held out the bottle at me. ‘They said I was to give you this,’ she said.

I could imagine how a strong dose would take the pain away. I forced my head to nod, the movement made my senses swim and I closed my eyes while the room swirled and the bed heaved like a ship in a rough sea.

‘I’ll put it ‘ere then,’ she said helplessly, and moved my pitcher of lemonade and put the phial and the water on the bedside table. ‘You helps yourself when you wants it.’

She looked around the room for something that came within her experience. ‘I’ll make your fire up again!’ she said brightly, and went to the hearth.

The little part of me which had clung to life like an obstinate succubus in the wagon through beatings, even through the deadly pain in my heart on that night when she died, held me tight now; and ordered my throat to cry out. I strained and strained to speak, looking desperately from her turned back as she worked on the fire, to the little glass of water and the laudanum alongside it. If the laudanum took the pain away I would sleep. If I slept I would not be weary when the crisis of the fever came and then I might fight it. I might win.

I tried to cry out, but all I could make were little choking noises which she could not even hear above the rattle of the fire irons and the poker knocking ashes in the grate. She got a blaze going and straightened up. The room which had been hot and stuffy was now a furnace, the firelight stabbed my eyes with its fierce heat.

‘That’s better!’ she said. She approached the bed a little closer. ‘’Ave you got everythink you want then?’ she looked around. The lemonade was out of reach, I could not raise myself up to get the laudanum. ‘Got everythink? Good.’

‘Emily,’ I croaked.

She was instantly alarmed. ‘Don’t you try to talk now,’ she said. She came a little closer but she did not dare to touch me. She had been ordered too often out of the good rooms, told to use the back stairs, to avoid the Quality and to curtsey low when they went past. She was too well schooled to dare to lay a finger on me. ‘Don’t you try to talk,’ she said again.

She scuttered towards the door and dipped a little curtsey, and was gone. I tried to call her back but my throat was swollen so badly I could make no sound. I stared at the painted ceiling, at the pretty frieze at the top of the walls showing cupids and love-birds in white and gold. I remembered Meridon the gypsy and her sly toughness and I heaved myself upwards in my bed.

It was no good, I was Meridon no longer. I was little Miss Sarah Lacey with my throat closing so tight that I could not breathe and the smell of stale sweat and death all around me, and the pain behind my eyes and in the very bones of my face so bad that I could have cried except my tears had dried in the heat of the fever.

I dropped back on the pillow again and tried not to be afraid. I knew why Sewell had refused to nurse me, I knew why Rimmings would not touch me. I knew why Emily had said ‘bloody hell’ when she had seen my face. I had caught a brief glimpse of myself in my mirror when I was sitting upright for that moment. My face was so white I looked like a corpse already, my eyes were rimmed orange, my lips were so dark and so cracked that they looked black with dried blood. The typhus fever had me.

34

I lay for more long hours. No one came to see me. The house was silent around me in the early morning quietness which Lady Clara demanded. Outside in the street a ballad-seller started singing a snatch of song, and I heard our front door open and close and one of the footmen tell him briskly to be off. The church clock at St George’s struck the hour. I started trying to count it but there were so many echoes in my head from each chime that I lost count and could not make it out. I thought it was about ten.

I could feel my throat closing tighter and I could feel panic rising in me as I thought that soon I would not be able to breathe at all. Then I supposed that I would die. I could no longer feel resigned and ready for death. When I thought of dying, clutching for my breath in this stuffy little room, I knew that I was most terribly afraid. It was as bad as it, had been up on the trapeze when I had hung in utter terror of falling. Now as I sucked each gasp of air down into my body I felt the same shameful terror. Soon I should not be able to breathe at all.

I shut my eyes and tried to drift into sleep so that my dying would not be a terror-driven scrabble for breath; but it was no good. I was awake and alert now, my throat dry as paper, my tongue swollen in my mouth. I felt as if I were dying of thirst – never mind typhus. The jug of lemonade hovered like a mirage, well out of my reach. The phial of laudanum, which would have eased my pain, was beside it.

I could hear a horrid rasping noise in the room, like a saw on dry wood. It came irregularly, with a growing gap between the sound. It was my breath, it was the noise of my breath as I struggled to get air into my lungs. I opened my eyes again and listened in fear to the noise, and felt the pain of each laboured heave at air. I remembered then my ma in the wagon and how she had kept us awake with that regular gasp. I was sorry then that I had cursed her in my hard little childish heart for being so noisy and interrupting a dream I had been having. A dream of a place called Wide.