Dandy gleamed. ‘I’ll get you a penny,’ she promised. ‘I’ll get us sixpence and we’ll run off all night and buy sweetmeats and see the booths.’

I smiled at the prospect and then rolled over to face the rocking caravan wall. I was still bruised from my falls and as weary as a drunken trooper from the day and night training of the pony. And I had that strange, detached feeling which I often felt when I was going to dream of Wide. We would be a day and a half on the road, and unless Da made me drive the horse there was nothing I had to do. There were hours of journeying, and nothing to do. Dandy might as well comb her hair over and over. And I might as well sleep and doze and daydream of Wide. The caravan would go rocking, rocking, rocking down the muddy lanes and byways and then on the harder high road to Salisbury. And there was nothing to do except look out of the back window at the road narrowing away behind us. Or lie on the bunk and chat to Dandy. Between dinner and nightfall Da would not stop, the jolting creaking caravan would roll onwards. There was nothing for me to do except to wish I was at Wide; and to wonder how I would ever get myself – and Dandy – safely away from Da.

2

It was a long, wearisome drive, all the way down the lanes to Salisbury, up the Avon valley with the damp lush fields on either side where brown-backed cows stood knee-high in wet grasses, through Fordingbridge, where the little children were out from dame-school and ran after us and hooted and threw stones.

‘Come ‘ere,’ Da said, shuffling a pack of greasy cards as he sat on the driving bench. ‘Come ‘ere and watch this.’ And he hitched the ambling horse’s reins over the worn post at the front of the wagon and shuffled the cards before me, cut them, shuffled them again. ‘Did yer see it?’ he would demand. ‘Could yer tell?’

Sometimes I saw the quick secretive movement of his fingers, hidden by the broad palm of his hand, scanning the pack for tell-tale markings. Sometimes not.

He was not a very good cheat. It’s a difficult art, best done with clean hands and dry cards. Da’s sticky little pack did not shuffle well. Often as we ambled down the rutted road I said, ‘That’s a false shuffle,’ or ‘I can see the crimped card, Da.’

He scowled at that and said: ‘You’ve got eyes like a damn buzzard, Merry. Do it yourself if you’re so clever,’ and flicked the pack over to me with an irritable riffle of the cards.