by Caro Peacock
‘I feel like my feet’s flying away from me.’
‘People are looking at us,’ I said.
I didn’t like to curb her exuberance, but in my business I often needed to blend into the background. A dancing lady’s maid wouldn’t help.
By the time I’d got her back to Abel Yard it was late afternoon. I remembered that Celia was expecting me to call, so dashed off a note to her saying that I’d be out of town for a few days. In case she wanted to write to me, letters could be addressed care of the mail office in Maidenhead. I gave the note to Tabby to deliver. That left just enough time for the most important part of my preparations. I went alone, crossing Park Lane, walking northwards through the park in golden sunlight, towards Bayswater Road. There weren’t many people in the park because the fashionable had finished their afternoon promenades on horseback or in carriages and gone home to change for dinner. That meant the end of the day’s work for their horses. By the time I reached the livery stables where Amos Legge worked and Rancie lodged, the grooms and boys were in the middle of the evening’s routine, cleaning tack, filling hay nets and water buckets. I asked for Mr Legge and was directed to the fodder room. He was measuring out buckets of oats, barley, bran and split peas to each horse’s individual needs, giving them to the boys to distribute as instructed. It was responsible work. Amos was one of the mainstays of the stable now, paid accordingly, as you could guess from the fine quality of his boots and breeches. I stood outside the fodder room until the last of the boys had gone. Amos put the lid down on the oat bin, secured it with a lead weight to keep out the rats, and turned to me, beaming.
‘Haven’t seen you for a few days, Miss Lane. You all right, then?’
He dusted down an old wooden chair and invited me to sit down.
‘Yes, thank you. I’ve been pretty busy.’
‘That business of the man in the crate? I heard you were there.’
Nothing escaped Amos. As long as society depended on horses, grooms would be at the hub of everything. They might be silent in front of their customers, but they listened and gossiped over their pints in the evening. Thanks to Amos, I had access to that network and often found out more there than in offices or drawing rooms.
‘What else did you hear?’ I said.
‘Not a lot. He was a bit of a bad ’un by most accounts–drink and so forth.’
‘Did you hear that from Miles Brinkburn?’
‘No. He didn’t talk about it and neither did I. Just what people are saying.’
‘You’ve met Miles Brinkburn since it happened, then?’
‘I was out at the Eyre Arms with him this morning, having another practice.’
‘How did he do?’
‘No better than middling. I had to hold back, otherwise I’d have had him out of the saddle again.’
‘Did he seem downcast or worried?’
‘I wouldn’t say so, no. His normal self, quite cheerful like.’
So Miles Brinkburn had good powers of recovery.
‘What kind of armour was he wearing?’
‘The same you saw him in, the suit he’d hired from Pratt’s. I took particular note of that.’
Because he knew I’d ask. It would have been callous of Miles Brinkburn to wear the ancestral armour after what had happened.
‘What about Stephen Brinkburn–was he there?’
‘No. I heard their friends have been trying to keep them apart, after what happened. I’ll be seeing Mr Stephen tomorrow. He wants me to look out for a couple of new horses for him.’
By common consent, we got up and strolled across the yard to Rancie’s box. She was eating her feed, but looked up and blew hrrrr through her nostrils when she saw me. Her black cat watched her, golden-eyed, from the hay manger.
‘I’m going out of town for a few days,’ I said to Amos.
‘So I hear. The Emerald to Bristol, seven o’clock tomorrow morning, getting down at Maidenhead. They’re trying out a new lead horse as far as Hounslow, so I hope you have a smooth journey.’
‘Now how did you know all that?’
‘I’ve got a friend helps out here sometimes, sold a horse to the man who works at the Spread Eagle. He knows the lad who’s a clerk in the office where they keep the passenger lists.’
No point in asking why the lad noticed my name. Amos’s network could probably tag each individual sparrow.
‘I don’t know how long I’ll be away,’ I said. ‘Do you think you could keep an eye on the Brinkburn brothers for me, and let me know if anything else happens?’
‘Surely. I can send word down by my friends as far as Maidenhead. Can you pick messages up from the Bear? If not, there’s probably a carter goes out to Brinkburn Hall.’
‘But I haven’t told you where…’
I stopped. He was laughing at me. It wasn’t often, these days, that he could surprise me by what he knew or guessed.
‘Well, that’s where the man in the crate came from, isn’t it?’ he said, pretending innocence.
‘I’m not supposed to be thinking about him. It’s the other matter.’
‘Well, I hope you get it fettled, then. It’s a bad business.’
Rancie had finished her feed now and come up to the half-door to join us. I stroked her head, tracing the comma-shaped blaze with my fingers.
‘I wish I could take you with me,’ I said to her.
‘Don’t you worry, I’ll look after her,’ Amos said. ‘And I’ll make sure nobody rides her unless she’s got hands lighter than the feathers in a lady’s hat.’
I gave her a last stroke, said goodbye to Amos and walked back home across the park. The carriage mender was just shutting up his shop. He kindly agreed that Tabby could spend the night in an old landau awaiting repair in his store shed. I didn’t want to spoil the good work by having her curl up in the shed by the midden, but I knew Mrs Martley wouldn’t tolerate her in the house. I fetched an old blanket, introduced Tabby to her temporary lodgings and reminded her that we’d have to start out at five o’clock in the morning to get to Gracechurch Street in the City in time to catch the stage. Upstairs, Mrs Martley had prepared Irish stew for our supper.
‘You’re gallivanting off again, then?’
‘Yes, I’m gallivanting. Not very far and not for long, I hope. I’ll call at the mail office when I can, in case there’s any news of Jenny.’
‘I hope you’ll bring our sheets back.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘And you look after yourself.’
Tabby and I walked to Piccadilly in the morning and took the local stage to the City. At this hour there were few people on the streets apart from crossing sweepers, patrolling policemen and costermongers trundling their barrows out early to secure the best pitches. Tabby clutched my arm when the horses broke into a fast trot along the Strand.
‘Are they running away with us?’
‘Of course not. Haven’t you ever ridden in a coach before?’
She bit her lip and shook her head. We got down at Gracechurch Street and walked to the Spread Eagle, with Tabby carrying my carpet bag as well as her own. The huge coaching yard there was in its usual state of bustle, full of passengers anxious in case they were put on the wrong coach, harassed clerks with boarding lists and ostlers yelling to people to get out of the way as they backed horses into shafts. As well as our Emerald, bound for Bristol and points between, there were half a dozen coaches due out at about the same time: the Courier, heading for Birmingham, the Sovereign for Brighton, the Magnet for Cheltenham, the Retaliator for Gloucester, the Star of Brunswick for Portsmouth, the Express for Gosport. The air was full of horse smells and all the excitement of the start of journeys. I left Tabby on a bench by the wall with our bags and strolled from coach to coach, admiring their bright paintwork and the glossy coats of the horses, matching the shine of the coachmen’s boots. After a while the cry of ‘Passengers for the Emerald’ went up, and we took our places on board.
The Spread Eagle coachyard was one of several in the same area, all contrib
uting their coaches to the morning rush, so the congestion, whinnying and shouting when they all ground on to the narrow streets, manoeuvring for precedence, was beyond belief. It was one of the reasons why coaches very seldom achieved the journey times advertised by their proprietors. But the new lead mare must have been good at her business because, once clear of the confusion, we covered the twelve miles to the first stage at Hounslow in an hour and a half. After Hounslow, the only other inside passengers were a middle-aged couple and a man in black who looked like a lawyer or a doctor. Throughout the journey, Tabby sat by the window, eyes wide, carpet bag clutched on her lap. She was so quiet that I thought she might be terrified by the experience. We arrived at Maidenhead Bridge only ten minutes behind time, three hours and twenty minutes after leaving London. Our coach had to halt in the middle of the bridge because of some obstruction at the other end. I looked down at the river bank, wondering if a roof visible among the trees to our left might be Brinkburn Hall. Then Tabby let out a cry, the first sound she’d made since leaving London.
‘Look. What is it?’
We all looked where she was pointing. The thing we saw was as strange to me as it must have been to Tabby. On a level with us, perhaps half a mile away, a great horizontal column of whiteness was heading across the river, like a cloud that had somehow developed a sense of purpose and the speed of a bolting horse. A black line moved under the cloud, keeping pace with it. Below the black line, a more solid line of red remained motionless, the whole thing standing out against the blue sky. In that first surprised moment, I couldn’t have answered Tabby’s question. It was the middle-aged man who said: ‘It’s the North Star.’
I remembered then. The North Star was the Great Western’s locomotive. I’d even seen it close to, standing at the end of its track in Paddington, but I’d never witnessed it in motion and certainly not in this phenomenon of flying, apparently in mid air. Once the first visual shock had worn off, I thought of what Mr Lomax had said about the Great Western’s monstrously large bridge over the Thames. Only from here it looked more wonderful than monstrous, a breathtaking leap of red brickwork over the wide river from bank to bank.
‘That must be one of their trial runs,’ the middle-aged man said. ‘They’re not opening the Maidenhead to Twyford section to passengers until next month.’
So far, passengers could be drawn behind the North Star only from Paddington to the riverside opposite Maidenhead. I supposed Tabby and I could have travelled that way, but it simply hadn’t occurred to me. The cloud of steam hung over the bridge for some time after the locomotive had gone, then gradually melted away. The obstruction cleared itself and the Emerald trotted on over the old stone bridge that seemed so undramatic in comparison, up the main street to the yard of the Bear Hotel. It was well accustomed to the needs of coach travellers and when I asked about transport to the cottage on the Brinkburn estate, a curricle and driver were promised within an hour. I checked that my trunk had arrived and ordered lamb chops to be served to us in a side room. After such an early start, we ate with a good appetite.
By noon, we were driving back across the bridge in the curricle, to the Buckinghamshire side, with Tabby perched on the groom’s seat at the back. There was no locomotive to see this time, only young men on the river, racing each other in rowing boats. For a few hundred yards we ran back along the main road to London, then turned right on a road between fields and neat hedges. We must have been going more or less parallel to the river, though it was out of sight. We passed a fine wrought-iron gateway on our right, and a drive curving to an imposing red-brick house.
‘Is that Brinkburn Hall?’ I said.
‘That’s right, ma’am.’
‘Do you often have to drive people there?’
‘Not very often, ma’am. They keep their own coachman.’
Just past the entrance to the drive, we came to a village with a church, a duck pond and a public house called the Farrier’s Arms. The houses were mostly brick-built and thatched.
‘They had a funeral there this morning,’ the driver said cheerfully, pointing with his whip at the church and its surrounding graveyard.
‘Oh yes?’
A funeral was hardly a rare event, after all.
‘The coffin came all the way down from London overnight,’ the driver went on. ‘They buried him straight away, six o’clock in the morning.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Servant from the hall, from what I heard.’
We turned on to a rutted track through woodland, and came to a halt in a clearing just wide enough for the curricle to turn round, with a view of sunlight glinting on water.
‘Here we are, ma’am.’
The cottage was like a child’s playhouse only slightly enlarged, built in the picturesque style with a steep tiled roof and gables too large for it, like eyebrows raised in surprise. The garden was a mass of hollyhocks, penstemons, roses, all growing higgledy-piggledy together, with a row of red and white flowered runner beans on poles. Beyond the garden, a patch of rough grass sloped down to the river. In winter the cottage must be damp and probably quite often flooded, but in June it was so beautiful I wished I really were there on a holiday. I found a key left ready in the front door, opened it and let the driver and Tabby carry the trunk inside. A note was lying on the stone flagged floor inside the door from the steward, Mr Whiteley, addressed to me by name, trusting I would find everything satisfactory and recommending a woman from the village who would clean and cook. The curricle rumbled away and I set Tabby to unpacking.
There were just four rooms, none of them large. The main one downstairs looked out on the garden and the river, with a cubbyhole of a kitchen at the back. Upstairs was a bedroom and a box room, both with beds and wash stands. I set up my spirit stove, found my tea caddy and sent Tabby to dip a kettleful of water from the river. We drank our tea without milk, sitting on a bench by the porch. Tabby started talking again and it was a relief to find she hadn’t been terrified by the journey as I feared, simply noticing everything. She could describe almost every building of any size we’d passed on the way, and imitated the nervous cough of the lawyer-like man so perfectly that he might have been sitting beside us. I was almost envious. I’ve had to cultivate my powers of observation as a professional necessity. Tabby seemed to have them as naturally as a bird sings.
‘So what do we do now we’re here?’ she said.
I’d been wondering that myself.
‘I think we’ll walk to the village to see if there’s anywhere we can buy bread and milk,’ I said.
It was about four in the afternoon by then, the air warm and languorous. I could happily have sat there for hours, with the bees buzzing in the hollyhocks and the murmur of the river in the background, but there was work to be done. The first thing was to find a way into village gossip and ascertain, as delicately as possible, the local opinion of the lady of the manor’s sanity.
We walked together up the path through the woods, Tabby carrying my empty travelling bag for our shopping. The village seemed almost deserted, with most of the men likely to be out working in the fields because it was hay harvest time. There was a village shop of a kind, consisting of the front room of one of the cottages, with a drowsy-looking young woman behind the counter. When Tabby and I went inside, the three of us filled up the small room almost completely. Of the small stock available, I managed to buy a pint of milk, with the loan of a lidded can to carry it, some cheese, a none-too fresh loaf of coarse bread and about half a pound of strawberries, over-ripe and weeping their pink juice. I reminded myself not to be critical. It was a Saturday afternoon in a village probably not much used to visitors. I paid for the groceries and told Tabby to carry them home.
‘Can you find your way back all right?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
She sounded doubtful. I saw her to the start of the path through the woods then turned back to the village, looking for the cottage of the woman who would clean and cook. According to Mr Whiteley
’s note, she was called Mrs Todd and lived next to the church.
Mrs Todd came to the door with a scarf round her hair, a child clinging to her skirt and another one yelling in the background. She looked so tired that I felt guilty about asking her, but she was eager to work every day from ten till one, Sundays excepted. Goodness knows what I’d find for her to do in our tiny residence. A side gate into the churchyard stood open opposite her cottage. There was only one fresh grave there, a hump of brown soil in the closely mown turf, in the far corner of the churchyard by the wall, in a space on its own. I was almost certain I knew who was lying under that hump of soil. Naturally there was no cross or headstone on it, as the burial had taken place just that morning, but what was odd was the complete lack of any floral tributes, not a flower or a laurel leaf. I stood for a while, then strolled away from it, past gravestones recording many generations of the same family names, and out of the main gate back to the village street, just in time to see something happening.
It would have been no event at all in London, simply a builder’s wagon, loaded with pieces of squared stone, drawn by a cobby grey. The horse was standing quietly with nobody holding it, while two men unloaded a few pieces of stone and some tools from the wagon into a handcart. When the handcart was half full, they dragged it across the road and through the churchyard gate, straining to pull it up the incline. Then they manoeuvred it past the gravestones towards the hump of fresh earth. At first I thought that people were concerned about the new grave after all, and these were memorial masons come to give it a stone surround. But they dragged their cart past the grave, right to the corner. They set it down, produced a hammer and chisel from the cart and set about demolishing the existing wall. It looked to me a perfectly good wall as it was. I went closer and watched, unnoticed, as they removed a course of stone blocks from the top of the wall and piled them up neatly. They’d started on the second course when an elderly man came running out from the church porch, shouting at them.
