Free Meridon (Wideacre Trilogy 3) by Philippa Gregory Page B

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 youare,’ 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.
    ‘I’ll have the show when he is too old to travel,’ he said with confidence. ‘Every penny he saves now goes into the show, or goes into our savings. We’ll never be poor again. He’ll see to that. And anything he says I should do…I do. And anything he says he needs…I get. Because it was him and one bow-backed horse that earned us food when the whole village wasstarving. No one else believed he could do it. Just me. So when he took the horse on the road I went with him. We didn’t even have a wagon then. We just walked at the horse’s head from village to village and did tricks for pennies. And he traded the horse for another, and another, and another. He is no fool, my da. I never go against him.’
    Dandy said not a word. We were both spellbound by Jack’s story.
    ‘How was he a hard man?’ I asked, going to the central question for me. How he would treat us, how he would treat Dandy if the tide of luck