by M C Beaton
She fled from the room and locked the door behind her.
Amanda sat very still. Now she had the guilt of Susan’s grief to add to the other guilt. Poor Susan, whose very fragile self-esteem, whose newfound confidence, had been smashed by the thought that Richard only wanted her money. Why else would a thief and a highwayman be interested in her?
Amanda rose stiffly and walked to the window and looked out. An open carriage was turning the square with two elaborately dressed ladies holding parasols over their heads. One of them dipped her lace parasol. It was Miss Devine. For a moment it seemed as if she looked full at Amanda. Then she raised her parasol and the carriage bowled past.
Amanda drew in a deep shuddering breath. Miss Devine brought back vividly the assembly at Hember Cross, where it all seemed to have begun.
But at the bottom of her misery a little spark of anger was beginning to burn. What did any of these people know of the fear of poverty? If one had been brought up to assume that members of one’s class never worked, then how was one supposed to think of work?
We should have stayed at Fox End and turned the whole garden over to vegetables and kept geese and chickens, thought Amanda.
But we had no one sensible to advise us. We never thought for a moment that Aunt Matilda would make some shift to help us out of trouble.
She turned as the lock clicked in the door again. A tray was pushed into the room by means of a long pole. The scared face of a servant briefly appeared in the doorway, and then the door was slammed and locked.
It appeared as if the tale of her severe infectious disease was already all over the house.
Amanda was amazed to find she was very hungry despite her misery. After she had eaten a good meal and drunk two glasses of claret, she began to search around in her mind for a way out of her predicament. It was all right for herself—well, not all right, but not as bad as poor Richard, faced with years at sea.
Amanda sat up very straight. Somehow, she had to get to Oxford before he left and warn him. She had the five-hundred guineas.
But how to get out of the room?
She sat all day puzzling over it, until she felt she had hit on a sort of plan. She ate her evening meal and then settled down to wait until the whole house was asleep.
She began to feel tired and wondered whether to try to catch a few hours’ sleep herself, but dreaded the idea of waking up and finding it morning.
Amanda waited and waited until the clock on the mantel chimed three silvery notes and the hoarse-voiced watch in the square outside called three o’clock in the morning and added it was a fine starlit night.
She took a bodkin from her dressing table, slid a sheet of paper halfway under the door, and poked and fiddled, trying to make the key fall onto the paper so that she could draw it underneath the door to her side.
At first she was too anxious, too nervous, and her hands perspired so much that the bodkin kept slipping in her grasp. At last she took a deep breath and forced herself to concentrate on her task.
After what seemed a very long time, the key suddenly fell with a satisfying plop on the paper on the other side. Amanda drew it under the door with trembling hands.
Now, to escape!
She made her preparations carefully, packing up only two handboxes full of clothes. She put on a wool gown and a warm cloak and then took a deep breath and let herself out into the passageway.
Very carefully, frightened to make a sound, she made her way down to the back entrance that John the coachman had shown her. Once down the passageway beside the mews, she stopped and waited for the mad thumping of her heart to subside.
She had done it! Now to warn Richard.
But the early-morning stage to Oxford turned out to be fully booked, and she had to wait impatiently until eight-twenty in the evening, which was when the Oxford Mail took the road.
The day had turned very warm and she was hot and tired and dusty by the time she climbed aboard the coach at The Swan with Two Necks in Lad Lane. She settled back in her seat with a sigh of relief, feeling some of the tension easing from her body.
The Royal Mail coaches were still regarded as a miracle of speed and Amanda stared wide-eyed at the timetable posted outside the inn:
London—Edinburgh (400 miles) 45 1/2 hours
London—York (197 miles) 20 hours
London—Manchester (185 miles) 19 hours
Imagine being in Scotland in a mere 45 1/2 hours! The world was shrinking in an exciting way, thought Amanda. To be able to see all those faraway places, to have them brought magically within reach.
The Royal Mail kept to a strict timetable. The mail guards on the coaches carried a sealed watch and a timetable, which was handed on from one to the other. It gave the precise schedule for the journey, and it was the mail guard’s task to see that any delay in starting was made up during the journey to the next stage.
Riding the mail coach was still considered quite a daring thing to do, although the timid Aunt Matilda had somehow taken it in her stride. There were many stories of people who had died from fright when the coach went over fifteen miles an hour, and many a physician learnedly explained that the celerity would give rise to an affection of the brain.
The mail coaches were all the same design, painted maroon and black, and built in the Millbank yard by a man called Vidler.
The mail guard was the only Post Office figure on the coach and he was an imposing sight. His coat was scarlet with blue lapels and white ruffles.
His coat lining of blue matched the blue of his heavy cloth waistcoat. He wore nankeen breeches and white silk stockings, and his hat had a gold band on it. The curved bugle of Elizabethan days, although still used as the insignia of the Posts, had given way to a long brass horn on which the guard could play his own composition, so that every innkeeper, every stableboy, and every turnpike guard would know who was in charge of the mail that day.
At eight-twenty precisely, the many-caped coachman up on the box shouted to the guard at the back, “All right behind?”
“All right,” came the reply.
“Off she goes!” cried the coachman.
The guard blew an elaborate fanfare on his horn as the mail coach surged forward. Then he put his instrument away in a little tunnel of a basket fastened to the coach side and began to ask everyone on the roof his destination.
Inside the coach, in all the luxury of a comfortable seat, Amanda said farewell to London.
Her eyes filled with tears as the City streets fled past, until London wavered like a drowned metropolis in front of her.
At last, weary with emotion and heat and fatigue, she fell asleep.
The Mail took only a mere six hours to reach Oxford, depositing Amanda in the middle of that city at two-twenty in the morning. She decided to put up for the rest of the night at the Gold Lion, and visit Richard at his college as soon as daylight arrived.
But standing in the innyard, a portmanteau beside him, waiting for the southbound Mail, was Richard.
Amanda screamed his name, and, racing across the yard, flung herself on his chest, crying, “Oh, you’re safe. He has not sent you away!”
“Quiet down, Amanda,” said Richard, pushing her a little away so that he could look at her. “A groom arrived not so long ago, waking up the whole college with the news that I was summoned to London by Lord Hawksborough immediately.
“Hawksborough has so many carriages. He has his own travelling carriage and then there’s that antique thing of his mother’s that we held up. I thought he might have sent one… Why, Amanda! You are shaking.”
“He knows about the robbery, Richard. He… he said he could not turn us over to the law because of Aunt and his family, but… Oh, Richard, I am to be locked in my room until the end of the Season, and you are to be sent to sea for years and years and years.” Here Amanda burst into noisy tears while Richard looked at her in horror. They were gradually collecting a small audience, and one blood strongly advised Richard to “marry the girl and do the g
entlemanly thing.”
“Here!” said Richard. “You’d best come into the inn and tell me all about it.”
Like all posting inns, the Gold Lion was as busy in the middle of the night as it was during the day.
Soon they were seated over a bottle of wine. Richard’s eyes grew wider and wider as Amanda told him the whole story.
“So you see,” said Amanda, finished, “I cannot go back. I had to rescue you. I have five hundred guineas, Richard. Well, a bit less because of the coach fare. But we can both go back to Fox End and… and… dig over the garden and plant vegetables and keep chickens and…” Her voice trailed away before Richard’s hard stare.
“No, Amanda,” he said. “I’m going to face Hawksborough. He’s not in love with me. Yes, you may stare! But that’s the main reason you could not explain things properly to him. The man’s in love with you. I noticed it a good while ago. You go to Fox End. A Mail goes from here to Hember Cross. Mr. Cartwright-Browne should have left. You stay there. If Lord Hawksborough still wants to send me to sea, then I’ll need to take the punishment. We’re lucky we didn’t hang, Amanda. We did a pretty rotten thing and we’re lucky to be alive.”
A horn sounded from the yard.
“The Mail,” said Richard, springing up. He gave Amanda a swift hug.
“Don’t go,” she said, clinging to him desperately.
“I must. You’ve had a hard time of it, sis, and it’s my turn now.”
A kiss on her cheek and he was gone.
Amanda sat back in her chair and buried her head in her hands.
They were paying for their crime. How long must they go on paying?
Richard wandered the streets of London for several hours, not quite knowing where he was going.
The day was sunny and still and warm, with only the faintest chill in the air to remind him of winter past.
He was determined to assemble all the facts and explanations in his head before he saw Lord Hawksborough.
He somehow had to explain that the highway robbery, which had seemed so reasonable, a sort of justified revenge, such a short time ago should now seem so wicked and childish. He was inhibited by the knowledge that Lord Hawksborough was in love with Amanda, a fact Richard found very strange. What such a man of the world could be doing falling for a chit like Amanda, thought Richard with affectionate brotherly contempt, was beyond his reasoning.
But what was even more inhibiting was his own feeling for Susan Fitzgerald. There was something about Susan that always brought out the knight-errant in Richard. From first thinking her a decent sort of a girl when he had pretended to Betty Barrington that he had only gone to the seminary because he was in love with Susan, Richard’s feelings had grown gradually warmer. Other girls were prettier, more feminine, but when Susan smiled, she seemed to light up the whole day. He had hoped shortly to ask her to wait for him, to wait until he finished his studies and found some position in life. Now all that was gone, and he had to fight not to feel bitter.
At last, after hours of walking, he decided the time had come to beard his lordship in his den. For the more he thought and worried about it, the more impossible the task seemed.
By the time he reached Berkeley Square, he was in a blue funk and could not help hoping Lord Hawksborough was not at home.
But his heart sank when the butler said his lordship was in the library and waiting for Mr. Colby. He had instructions to show Mr. Colby directly to his lordship the moment Richard arrived.
Richard slowly mounted the stairs, feeling as if he were mounting them on his knees.
Finally he was face to face with Lord Hawksborough. His lordship looked tired and grim. He was wearing an embroidered cambric shirt, leather breeches, and hessians. His shirt was open at the neck and somehow his casual dress made him appear less approachable than his usual impeccable formal wear.
His eyes were flat and cold and he raked Richard from head to toe with a contemptuous glance.
Richard broke the silence. “You found we took the jewels,” he said.
“Like your sister, you seem to have guessed from the look on my face,” said Lord Hawksborough. “Sit down!”
Richard sat down and laid his hat and cane on a nearby table. “I did not guess, my lord,” he said. “Amanda told me.”
“She told you! So that’s where she went!”
“Well, don’t you see, she felt she had to escape, to get away from you, because…” Richard quailed before the sudden blaze of fury in his lordship’s eyes.
“But of course she did,” said Lord Hawksborough sweetly. “Getting out of a locked room is as nothing to a girl who can hold up a coach.”
“I know we did a dreadful thing. And I know that to say we are sorry is not enough,” said Richard earnestly. “Hear me out… please.”
Lord Hawksborough leaned back in his chair and studied Richard’s face for a long moment, and then he nodded.
Richard took a deep breath and began. He talked for three-quarters of an hour and Lord Hawksborough did not interrupt him once.
Richard began with the death of their parents and with their upbringing by Aunt Matilda. He told him how they had lived on so little money that they had shunned social life, since social life would mean they had to buy clothes. He explained about the life he had led with Amanda, roaming the fields and woods, Amanda being more like a young brother than a girl.
Aunt Matilda, he said, had dinned into them the fact that the Colby’s were gentry and of a higher class than Mr. Brotherington or even the vicar. They had come to think of their elevated social position as something very special, until they had begun to think themselves outside the normal laws of the land.
“I never knew Amanda was leading the life of a household drudge and that her only entertainment was following me around the countryside,” Richard went on. “She never complained. She did not have any schooling, but that did not seem important, since she is only a girl. I never even thought of her marrying one day. I somehow thought we would always go on in the same way. Aunt Matilda did not give either of us much in the way of moral guidance.”
Then he described the assembly. Vividly he recalled his humiliation at the hands of Miss Devine, and vividly he recounted it. He described their desperation, their need to find money. Amanda’s description of what she thought was a great insult on the part of Lord Hawksborough had made them decide on the robbery.
It had seemed a game, said Richard. His voice sank as he told of their fear and shock when Amanda was nearly killed and of how they could not bear to look at the jewels. All they wanted to do was return them as soon as possible.
“Amanda is at Fox End,” he said. “She did not try to escape your punishment for herself. She did not want me to be sent away to sea and took the Oxford Mail so that she could rescue me. But I told her that I would face you and take my punishment. It is different for girls. They get frightened easily. Amanda was shaking so much I thought she was going to break.”
Lord Hawksborough half-turned his head away, and Richard said quickly, “I’m sorry, sir. I know you’re in love with her… Oh, lor’.”
“How do you know?” Lord Hawksborough stood up and looked down at Richard. The sun was behind him and his shadow fell across Richard’s face so that Richard could not read his expression.
“Oh…” faltered Richard. “A certain something in the air between the two of you, so strong it was almost tangible. I found it hard to believe. Of course, I could understand you being in love, but it seemed funny Amanda being so lost and spoony. She had been such a hoyden only such a short time ago. I suppose brothers are intolerant, but it is a bit upsetting to see one’s sister mooning around after another lady’s fiancé. That sounds rude, but what I meant was—Where are you going, my lord?”
“Fox End,” he said, striding to the door.
“But what about me? When would you like me to sign on?”
“Go back to Oxford, Colby.”
“But, my lord, I must take my punishment!”
<
br /> “Your punishment, Colby, will be to have me as a brother-in-law.”
The door slammed. Richard, who had risen to his feet at Lord Hawksborough’s departure, sat down again and cried in a most unmanly way out of sheer relief.
He finally dried his eyes, and helped himself to a glass of wine.
The door opened and Susan stood on the threshold, angry color rushing into her face as she saw him.
“Thief!” she screamed. “How dare you set foot in this house again?”
Richard marched over and picked her up in his arms and kissed her soundly. Then he plumped her down in a chair and sat opposite her. “You are going to listen to a story,” he said, while Susan stared at him, her mouth hanging open. “It all began when our parents died.…”
