I smiled into the darkness. I need not fear the charms of Jack Gower nor the anger of his father if the man of the trapeze act would just flirt a little with Dandy for the two months that he was with us – and then go.
He was prompt, anyway. He walked into the yard at six o’clock on a bitterly cold November morning, a small bag in his hand. He was dressed like a working farmer, good clothes, made of good quality cloth, but plain and unfashionable. He had a greatcoat on and a plain felt hat pushed back. His impressive moustaches curled out gloriously along his cheeks and made him look braggish and good-humoured. William took one look at him and bolted into the house to tell Robert that he had arrived. Dandy and I observed him minutely from our loft window.
Robert came out at once and shook his hand like an equal. William was told to take the little bag into the house.
‘He gets to sleep inside,’ Dandy whispered to me.
‘But where will he eat?’ I replied, guessing that it was the entry to the dining room which was the significant threshold.
Jack came out at once and was introduced to the visitor.
‘My son Jack,’ Robert said. ‘Jack, this is Signor Julio.’
‘Foreign,’ whispered Dandy, awed.
‘Call me David,’ the man said with a beaming smile. ‘Signor Julio is just a working name. We thought it sounded better.’
Robert turned so quickly that he caught sight of us as we ducked back from the window.
‘Come down you two,’ he called.
We clattered down the stairs. Dandy pushed me before her. I was wearing my working breeches and a white cut-down shirt which once belonged to Jack. I flushed as I saw him look me over. But when I raised my eyes I saw that he was measuring my strength, as I would look at a new colt and wonder what it could do. He nodded at Robert as if he were pleased.
‘This is Meridon,’ Robert said. ‘She’s horse-mad. But if you could get her up high I’d be obliged. She’s the one who doesn’t fancy it, and I’ve given my word she won’t be forced. She’s scared of heights.’
‘There’s many like that,’ David said gently. ‘And sometimes they are the best in the end.’ His voice had a singing lilt I’d heard only once before, from a Welsh horse-trader who sold Da the smallest toughest pony I had ever seen.
‘And this is Dandy, her sister,’ Robert said.
Dandy walked slowly forward, her eyes on David’s face, a hint of a smile around her lips as she watched him scan her from the top of her dark head to the glide of her feet.
‘They’ll pay just to see you,’ David said to her, very softly.
Dandy beamed up at him.
‘Right,’ Robert said briskly. ‘Let’s go to the barn. My lad said he’d set the rigging as you ordered but if there’s anything amiss we can set it right at once. If it is all to your liking then the girls and Jack are ready to start the training at once.’
David nodded and Robert led the way through the stable gate into the garden and then down to the paddock at the end of the garden. David looked around him as he followed Robert and I guessed he was thinking, as I had done, that this was a man who had come very far with very little except his own hard work and brains.
Robert threw open the door of the barn with something of a flourish and the Welshman stepped inside and looked all around. His shoulders squared, his head came up. I watched him narrowly and saw him change from the new employee in the stable yard to a performer at home in his element.
‘It’s good,’ he said nodding. ‘You understood my drawings then?’
‘I had them followed to the letter,’ Robert said proudly. ‘But the carpenter had no idea what was wanted so part of it was done by guess.’ He took his pipe from his pocket and tamped down the tobacco.
‘Good guesses,’ David said. He went over to the rope-ladder and swung it gently. It quivered up its length like a snake. He cast his eye over the ring.
‘Good and level,’ he said approvingly.
He went over to the practice trapeze and his walk was not like that of an ordinary man. He was muscled so hard and he walked so tight that he looked as lean and as fit as a stable cat ready to pounce. I glanced at Dandy; she met my eyes with a wink.
David the Welshman made a little spring with his hands above his head and I saw his knuckles turn white as he gripped on the bar. For a second he hung there, motionless, and then he brought his straight legs up before him and then beat them back with a smooth fluid force which sent the swing flying forward. Three times he swung and the third time he let go and spun himself head over heels towards us, and landed smack on his feet, solid as a rock, his blue eyes gleaming, his white smile bright.
‘No smoking in here,’ he said pleasantly to Robert.
Robert had just got his pipe going and took it from his mouth in surprise.
‘What?’ he demanded.
‘No smoking,’ David replied. He turned to Jack and Dandy and me. ‘No smoking in here, no eating, no drinking, no fooling around. Never play tricks on each other in here. Never show off on the ropes or the swings. Never bring your temper in here, never come in here courting. This place is where you are going to learn to be artistes. Think of it as a church, think of it as a royal court. But never think of it as an ordinary place. It has to be magic.’
Robert went quietly outside and knocked the hot ember out of his pipe into the wet grass. He said nothing. I remembered the time he had told Jack and me that we were never never to fight inside the ring. Now the barn was to be half sacred! I shrugged. It was Robert’s money. If he wanted to build a barn where he was not allowed to smoke his pipe and pay a man to give him orders it was his affair. He saw my eyes on him and gave me a rueful smile.
Dandy and Jack were spellbound. They were awed by the idea of the practice barn becoming a special place where they would become special people.
‘It is magic,’ David went on, the lilt in his voice more pronounced. ‘Because here you are going to become artists – people who can make beauty, like poets or painters or musicians.’
He turned abruptly to Robert. ‘Is there no heating?’ he asked.
Robert looked surprised. No,’ he said. ‘I know you had a stove on your drawing but I thought you’d all be warm enough, working in here.’
David shook his head. ‘You can’t keep the sinews of the body warm by working them,’ he said. ‘They get cold and then they strain and even snap. Then you can’t work for weeks while they heal. It’s a false economy not to heat the building. I won’t work without a stove.’
Robert nodded. ‘I was thinking of how we work with the horses,’ he said. ‘I always get hot enough working with them. But I’ll have one put in this afternoon. Can you use the building until then?’
‘We can make a start,’ David said grandly. He looked at Dandy. ‘Do you have some breeches like your sister?’ he asked.
Dandy’s face was appalled. ‘I’m to wear a short skirt!’ she said. ‘Robert promised! I’m not to be in breeches!’
David turned to Robert, smiling. ‘A short skirt?’ he asked.
Robert nodded. ‘In pink,’ he said. ‘A little ruffled skirt with shiny buttons, and a loose matching shirt at the top.’
‘She’d be safer with bare arms,’ David said. ‘Easier to catch.’
Robert puffed on the cold stem of his pipe. ‘Bare arms and a naked neck with a little stomacher top, and a skirt above her knees?’ he asked. ‘They’d have the Justices on me!’
David laughed. ‘You’d make your fortune first!’ he said. ‘If the lass would do it!’
Robert pointed the stem of his pipe at Dandy. ‘She’d do it stark naked given half a chance, wouldn’t you Dandy?’
Dandy lowered her black eyes so that all one could see was the sweep of dark eyelashes on her pink cheek. ‘I don’t mind wearing a skirt and a little bodice top,’ she said demurely.
‘Good,’ David said. ‘But you must practise in breeches and a warm smock with short sleeves.’
‘Go to the house, Dandy,’
Robert ordered. ‘Mrs Greaves will fit you with something from Jack or William. Make haste now.’ He looked at Jack and me wearing our riding breeches and our stable smocks. ‘These two all right?’
‘Yes,’ David said.
‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ Robert Gower said reluctantly. ‘You’ll remember our agreement is that they can spring to the trapeze and swing out to Jack and back to their platform inside two months.’
‘I remember,’ David said steadily. ‘And you will remember my terms.’
‘Daily payments in coin,’ Robert concurred. ‘If you work till eleven you can all take breakfast in the kitchen. Then an afternoon session until dinner in the kitchen at four.’
‘Then they’ll need to rest,’ David said firmly.
Robert nodded. ‘The girls can make their costumes then,’ he said. ‘But tomorrow I promised Merry she could come to the horse fair with me.’
David nodded and waited for Robert to go out and close the barn door behind him. Then he looked at Jack and me.
‘Better get to work,’ he said.
7
In my apprehensive fright of the ropes and the swings and the high vaulting roof of the barn I had been certain that David would insist we should climb right to the top on that very first morning. But he did not. Even before Dandy reappeared from the house looking sulky and beautiful in a pair of baggy homespun breeches belonging to William and a linen shirt of Jack’s, David had ordered Jack and me to trot and then sprint around the barn on five increasingly fast circuits.
Then he had us running backwards and dancing on the spot until our faces were flushed and we were all panting. Dandy’s careful coronet came down and she twisted it carelessly into a bun on the nape of her neck. But the three of us were as fit as working ponies. Jack and I had been training hard every night on the bareback act and were as quick and as supple as greyhounds. And for all that Dandy would sneak off to doze in the sun at every opportunity, she had been raised as a travelling child and to walk twenty or thirty miles in a day was no hardship to her – and to swim races at the end of it.
‘You’ll do,’ David himself was puffing as we dropped to the wood shavings for our first rest. ‘I was afraid that you would all be plump and lazy, but you are all well muscled and you’ve got plenty of wind.’
‘When do we go up?’ Dandy demanded.
‘Any time you like,’ he said carelessly. ‘I’ll check the rigging while you go to your breakfast and then you can go up and down whenever you wish. I’ll show you how to drop into the net, and once you know that you can come to no harm.’
‘I don’t know I can,’ I said. I was keeping my voice steady but the flutter of fear in my belly kept snatching my breath away.
David smiled at me, his enormous moustaches still curly on his sweaty cheeks.
‘I know you are afraid,’ he said reassuringly. ‘I understand that. I have been afraid too. You will work at the speed you wish. You’ve the build for it, and the body, I should think. But this is something you can only do if your heart is in it. I’d not be party to forcing anyone up a ladder.’
‘How did you come into it?’ Jack asked.
David smiled. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said lazily. ‘The pressgang snatched me from my home at Newport and I was pressed on board a man-of-war – big it was, frightening for a country lad. I jumped ship as soon as I could, Portugal actually, Lisbon, and lived rough for a while. Then I joined a travelling show of contortionists. I didn’t have the body for that, but they put me at the bottom of the heap and I could hold the rest of them up. Then I saw an act up high on Roman Rings and I set my heart on it.’ He twirled his moustache. ‘It made me,’ he said simply. ‘I apprenticed myself to the man I saw doing it, and he taught me. Then we used a trapeze instead of the rings which meant we could swing out and not just hang like other performers were doing. First I was the only one. But then his young son started to learn and we found he could swing out and reach for me, and I could catch him and swing him back to his trapeze. It was a good act.’
He paused. I saw his eyes narrow with grief at some memory. I felt my belly clench with fear.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘The lad fell,’ he said simply. ‘He fell and broke his neck and died.’
Nobody said anything for a moment.
‘Merry, you’re green,’ Jack said. ‘Are you going to be sick?’
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Go on, David. What did you do then?’
‘I came back to this country and found a partner to help me with the rigging and to stand the other side and reach out and catch my feet as I swung over. But your father is the man with the ideas! I’d never have thought of putting lasses up high. The people will love it.’
‘He’ll be paying you a good sum,’ Dandy said acutely. ‘You’re the only man in England who can swing on a trapeze. Yet you’re teaching us. And you say yourself that girls will pull a crowd.’
David beamed. ‘I’m getting old,’ he said frankly. ‘I get tired after two shows and my partner is getting slow. I’ve no savings, nothing at all. Robert is paying me a king’s ransom to teach you three something that I’ll have no use for in two seasons’ time. And he’ll pay me more yet – to refuse to teach other people the tricks I’ve taught you.’ He grinned at Jack and moistened his fingers with his tongue so that he could curl the ends of his moustache. ‘That’s no secret,’ he said. ‘Your father knows it as well as I do.’
Jack nodded. ‘How long do you last on the trapeze?’ he asked.
‘Till you’re twenty-five or so,’ David said consideringly. ‘Depends how fit you are to start with. I’ve been hungry and ill most of my life. I don’t expect to be working much after thirty.’
‘It’s a hard life,’ I said looking at him. His skin was flushed pink and the wonderful moustaches were curly, ebullient. But the bags under his eyes were deep and shadowed.
‘Isn’t every trade hard?’ he asked me; and I nodded, hearing an echo of my own half-starved worldliness.
‘Now!’ he said, suddenly active. ‘To work.’
He set Jack to exercises, five hundred paces of running on the spot and then lying flat and pushing up and down using his arms. He gave Dandy a metal bar and ordered her to run on the spot holding it before her, and then above her head, and then push it up and down as she ran. But me he took around the waist and lifted me up so that my fingers closed around the smooth hardness of the low-slung trapeze bar.
I hung like a confused bat while he stepped back and called me to raise my legs and beat them down hard. I did so, and the swing rocked forward.
‘Keep your legs together! Let the swing take you back!’ he called. ‘Now at the back-up, at the return of the swing stick your arse out, force your legs down together! Beat!’
Again and again he called the timing for me, and the barn faded, and Jack and Dandy’s sweating faces faded, and my fear faded until there was nothing but a voice saying, ‘Now!’ and my irritatingly slow body taking too long to beat down with the legs so that I swung forward, arched like the prow of a boat.
I could not get my legs to go down fast enough, smoothly enough. Each time he said, ‘Now!’ I was conscious of being too late, too slow. I had never felt so fat and awkward and flustered in my life. Then when the swing bore me forward I could not bring up my legs high enough to give me the space to beat back. I worked till I was near tears with frustration and with a longing sense that I could do it – that I was only a few lazy muscles away from doing it right – when he said gently: ‘That’s enough Meridon. Have a rest now.’
I shook my head then and the swing drifted to a standstill and I found my arms were aching with fatigue. I dropped down off the swing and crumpled to sit where I landed. Dandy and Jack were watching me and David had a quizzical smile.
‘You like it,’ he said certainly.
I nodded ruefully. ‘I feel so close to getting it right!’ I said angrily. ‘I just can’t get to the beat at the right time.’
‘I’ll try,’ Jack offered and picked himself up off the floor. His hands and wrists were plastered with wood shavings and he brushed them off. I moved aside and squatted on my haunches to watch him. My arms and shoulders were tingling with the strain and my hard-worked belly was quivering. My hands and legs were shaking but it was a trembly exhilaration from exhausted muscles and a singing delight in stretching my body to a new skill.
I had been angry with myself for missing the beat of it, but I was glad to see that I was better than Jack. It had irritated me for months, the way he could stand so easily on Bluebell’s back while I was still dependent on his shoulder or on the strap for balance. David called the beat for him, and counted it. But Jack was nowhere near. He dropped off the trapeze red-faced and cursing under his voice. One level look from David’s blue eyes hushed him but he stalked off to where a bar was set into the wall and started hauling himself up and down on it in irritable silence.
Dandy swayed forward. ‘My turn?’ she asked David.
‘Your turn,’ he said and put his big hands on her small waist to lift her up.
She was better than Jack. She had a sense of rhythm as natural as dancing and she could sway forward and back with the trapeze rather than struggling against it. Her upraised arms strained the shirt over her breasts and I watched David’s eyes to see if he was looking at her. He was not. He was watching the beat of her legs as she tried to work the trapeze forward and back. I gave a little secret smile. I had nothing to fear from David. He might notice Dandy’s looks, but he was not a man to go mad for her. He would not forget that he had a job of work to do here and a small fortune to make if he did it right.
We worked like that all the early morning until William came down to summon us for breakfast in the kitchen. We ate as if we were half starved, Mrs Greaves bringing tray after tray of fresh-baked rolls to the table with home-made creamy butter, ham, beef, and cheese. Jack and David drank great pints of ale while Dandy and I drank water. Even then, I could not resist snatching an apple from the bowl as I passed the Welsh dresser on our way out again.
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