by M C Beaton
She carried them back down to her room and put hat and cloak on. She hoped she looked like a lady. She felt she did. But when she met Sir George, a grand figure in a many-caped coat and shining top-boots, she felt just like a servant in borrowed clothes.
He helped her into his carriage exactly as if she had been a lady and Hannah began to feel a little more assured.
The well-sprung carriage bowled down the drive. Hannah looked out eagerly, rubbing at the misted glass with her glove and pressing her crooked nose against the window.
‘Miss Pym,’ he said, ‘it is like escorting a prisoner out of jail. Did you never leave the grounds?’
‘Hardly ever, sir. There was so much to do, you see. When I was younger, I would sometimes go to the play – that was when Mrs Clarence was here, but not for a very long time now.’
‘Have you no relatives? No friends?’
‘Such friends as I had, sir, were among the staff,’ said Hannah, ‘but they gradually all found posts in other households. My family were all killed in the smallpox epidemic of ninety-two.’
‘You were with the Clarences a long time?’
‘I started as scullery maid at the age of twelve. They were newly married then, Mr and Mrs Clarence. I rose up the ranks and became housekeeper eighteen years later. But it was shortly after that that Mrs Clarence ran away. She would have been about thirty-five years then, sir, and the footman only twenty-five.’ Hannah squinted down her nose in sudden embarrassment. He might consider it vulgar of her to regale him with such gossip.
Hannah turned her attention back to the moving scene outside. She was a gossip and knew it. Time after time, she had tried to stop her clacking tongue, and time after time it had got her into trouble. But not for ages. There had been no one really to talk to.
Hannah was very disappointed in the lawyer’s office. It was dark and musty. Could do with a good scrub, thought Hannah with a sniff. She had somehow imagined that everywhere she went with Sir George would be grand and elegant. Mr Entwhistle gave her a bank draft for one hundred pounds. ‘It is the same bank as mine,’ said Sir George. ‘We are going there now, Mr Entwhistle, to arrange an account for Miss Pym. Now, there are various other things I would like to discuss with you …’
Hannah drifted over to the window which looked out on to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A fine snow was beginning to fall from the leaden sky. Then, as she watched, the flakes grew thicker, but still buoyant on a mischievous wind, scurrying in circles, swirling up to the window and spiralling down again. Five thousand pounds! The full impact of the legacy hit Hannah in all its glory. The spectre of the workhouse receded. She was a lady of independent means. She brushed the fine velvet of the cloak she wore with a complacent hand.
Sir George quickly completed his business and took Hannah to Child’s Bank. The bank was every bit as grand as Hannah could wish, but instead of feeling happy and confident she began to feel diminished. A friend of Sir George’s approached him while they were waiting for the bank manager. To Hannah’s confusion, Sir George introduced her to his friend, a Mr Cadman. She was so used to being invisible to the Quality that she stammered and blushed. ‘How goes the world?’ Sir George asked Mr Cadman. ‘Still gambling on everything and anything?’
‘Had the most miserable run of luck at White’s,’ said Mr Cadman. ‘Lost fifteen thousand guineas last night. But I shall come about.’
Hannah felt herself shrivelling. Here was a world in which gentlemen could lose such vast sums in one night. And she had thought five thousand pounds had raised her to the ranks of the gentry!
An usher came up and said the manager was ready to see them. Hannah’s mercurial spirits went soaring up again like a balloon. For the manager treated her with deference and seemed to find nothing odd in the fact that she knew absolutely nothing about banking. She apologized for her ignorance, but he smiled and said, ‘The ladies. The ladies. Never bother their pretty heads about such mundane things as money,’ and then proceeded to give her a simple lecture on how to draw money as and when she needed it.
He then rang the bell and ordered tea and biscuits. Hannah asked a few questions and drank tea. Her voice began to sound strange and ugly in her ears. She had trained herself not to drop her aitches and to watch her grammar but now she felt it had a coarse sound compared to the cool and incisive voice of Sir George and the polite, cultured tones of the manager.
She was disappointed when the hundred pounds was handed to her in notes and silver. Hannah distrusted bank-notes, weak, flimsy pieces of paper. She preferred the hard, comfortable feel of gold.
When they left the bank and climbed in the coach, Sir George hesitated before giving instructions to his coachman to drive them back to Kensington. There was something very rewarding about taking this odd housekeeper about. There was a wonderment in her eyes as she looked about the busy streets of London, something childlike. On a sudden impulse he raised the trap and said, ‘Gunter’s.’
Hannah flashed a look at him and then sat very still, the rigidity of her body hiding the bubbling excitement within. Gunter’s was the famous pastry cook’s and confectioner’s in Berkeley Square. She wished that wretched and perfidious under-butler could see her now, Hannah Pym, entering the famous Gunter’s on the arm of a gentleman, sitting down and eating cakes, like the veriest aristocrat.
‘My brother must have been a sore trial to you in his latter years, Miss Pym,’ said Sir George.
‘Mr Clarence was never unkind or unreasonable, sir,’ said Hannah. ‘I felt for him. He had a broken heart. I do not know how Mrs Clarence, who was the soul of kindness, could have treated him so.’
‘I do not think hearts break,’ sighed Sir George. ‘My brother was always moody and depressed even as a young man. Letitia Renfrew, as she was before she married him, was a great reader of Gothic novels. What she saw in my brother was brooding passion, very romantic. She was sadly mistaken. He must have been a sore trial to her.’
‘Sir!’ Hannah looked at him in amazement, her eyes suddenly as blue as her cloak. ‘You surely do not condone such behaviour.’
He shrugged. ‘I can understand it. My brother was set to become a recluse whether she stayed or went, in my opinion.’
‘Do you know where Mrs Clarence is?’ asked Hannah.
He shook his head.
‘So pretty and kind,’ mused Hannah. ‘She is probably dead by now.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘She was not brought up to work or even to scrimp and save. A footman’s wages, even if he got another post, could not keep her, and besides, footmen are not allowed to marry or even to pretend to be married.’
‘Letitia was a wealthy woman in her own right.’
‘But surely that money would become her husband’s when she married him?’
‘No, she was protected by the marriage settlements. She would have enough to keep herself and her footman in comfort for life. Does that shock you?’ he asked, looking at the housekeeper’s startled face.
‘I have been brought up to believe that the wicked are always punished,’ said Hannah primly.
‘Quite often not in this world. She was not wicked, only young and heedless, and tied to a man who must have made life seem like a desert.’
‘But she has to live with her guilty conscience,’ said Hannah.
‘Perhaps. Have another cake. So where do you plan to travel first?’
‘Exeter, sir.’
‘Exeter! In midwinter with the snow falling? Why Exeter? Why not Brighton? That’s a short run.’
‘But it is the Exeter Fly that I watch going past,’ said Hannah. ‘I want to be on it. I want to see the house from the road.’
He took out his card case and extracted a card. ‘I fear for you, Miss Pym,’ he said. ‘Take my card and come and see me on your return and let me know your adventures.’
‘Oh, sir, I should be most honoured. How soon may I leave?’
‘Let me see, Mr Entwhistle is coming in two days’ time to Thornton Hal
l to pay off the few servants who qualify for the two hundred pounds. All the servants may as well be paid off at the same time. I will put a caretaker and his wife into Thornton Hall to keep it aired and cleaned until I decide to sell it. This can all be arranged quite quickly and there is really not much more for you to do. Say, in a week’s time. Now what is troubling you?’ he asked, seeing those odd eyes of hers lose colour.
Hannah gave a genteel cough. ‘I have to confess, sir, that this cloak and hat are not my own. They belong to Mrs Clarence. She left all her clothes behind and … and … I could not … did not want to appear in servant’s clothes on this momentous day. I wondered, sir, if I might pay you for them.’
‘There is no need for that. Take what you wish, although no doubt everything is sadly outmoded. All your worries are over, Miss Pym. Relax and enjoy your cakes and look forward to your first journey on a Flying Machine.’
Hannah was by now Sir George’s devoted slave. No one in all her life had treated her with such courtesy. He was a god. But some innate sensitivity made her mask her adoration. She feared that he might misread any admiration on her part and think this family servant was getting ideas above her station. She covertly looked around her at the well-bred faces, at the fearfully expensive clothes, at the snow whirling outside the leaded windows, at the piles of sweetmeats and pineapples and chocolate and fruit, and then at the high, arrogant face of Sir George Clarence and wondered if it were possible to die from sheer happiness. When they rose to leave, she shot quick little glances about her so that she might stamp the memory of this glorious afternoon on her mind for life.
To her disappointment, Sir George said he would not be staying at Thornton Hall. He would return in two days’ time with the lawyer.
Hannah went up the stairs to Mrs Clarence’s rooms that night when the other servants were asleep and took out coats and pelisses and mantles and hats and fine underwear like gossamer. Mrs Clarence had been slim as a young woman and of the same height as Hannah. Hannah did not want the other servants to know about Mrs Clarence’s clothes. They were already bitterly jealous of her because of her large inheritance and the present of such fine clothes would only add to their jealousy.
The week passed like the stage-coach, rumbling off slowly and gathering momentum. Hannah tipped the Clarences’ coachman to drive her into the City to purchase an inside ticket for the Exeter Fly. She then recklessly promised him more money if he would rise during the night to get her to the City to join the coach, which left at five in the morning. The coachman pointed out that she would need to pay for two grooms and the outside man as well as there was no way he was going to face the perils of Knightsbridge on his own. Hannah thought of her fortune and threw thrift to the winds. All that mattered now was to get on that coach.
There were so many preparations to make in such a short time. But she had waited so long for an adventure, she could hardly bear to wait any longer. She took modest lodgings in Kensington Village and then packed as many of Mrs Clarence’s clothes as she could into large trunks. The outside man wheeled them in a cart to her new home, two rooms above a bakery.
All that was left was the trunk to take on the journey.
She did not go to sleep the night before the Great Adventure, as she mentally called it. She walked about the house from room to room, seeing herself in every corner. There was the scullery maid Hannah bent over the pots, then kitchen maid Hannah over the stove, chambermaid Hannah screwing up her face as she took down the slops, then between-stairs maid Hannah polishing the oaken treads on the main staircase, then housemaid Hannah in the drawing-room, darting here and there, quick and light, and then her last shell, housekeeper Hannah, proud of her black gown and starched cap and with the bunch of keys jingling at her waist.
How happy she had been then! There was so much to do, so much pride in her new position. But after Mrs Clarence had run away and the staff of servants had shrunk and all the parties and callers and entertaining had ceased, time had hung heavy on her hands and her employer’s depression seemed to permeate every room. And yet she was loyal to Mr Clarence and ever hopeful that one day Mrs Clarence might appear on the doorstep, gay and laughing, saying she had done it all for fun. But Mrs Clarence had never come back. At first Hannah had glanced idly out at the stage-coach going by. Bit by bit, she had begun to imagine herself on it, until she could not start her day until she had seen the coach thunder by. The sight of that coach made her feel less trapped in the gloom of Thornton Hall, where Mr Clarence grew more grey-faced and the servants moved silently about the house, as if in a house of mourning.
Sometimes she felt like yelling and singing, doing anything to shatter the grim silence, but respect for her employer was in her very bones. She had always been practical and busy until Mrs Clarence had run away, and then she gradually began to live in dreams of bowling along the dusty roads of England where the sun always shone, the birds always sang, and she was as free as the air. One Hannah saw that the rooms were aired and dusted and that the meals were served on time. The other Hannah, the inside Hannah, escaped far away outside the walls of Thornton Hall and into a dream country of endless travel and movement.
As the hour approached for the coachman to bring the carriage round, she began to worry and worry. What if the lazy old man was still snoring? What if the grooms had refused to come?
But just when she had decided to walk over to the stables and find out, she heard the snorting of horses and the rumbling of wheels. She drew the blue cloak around her and settled the beaver hat more firmly on her head. A new century, a new life, a new Hannah.
She tugged open the main door and then turned briefly in salute, waving goodbye to her past, waving goodbye to her servant’s life, as she had waved so many times to the Flying Machine on the Kensington Road.
Hannah slammed the door behind her with a satisfying final bang, handed up her trunk to the coachman, and climbed inside.
2
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling
English road.
G.K. Chesterton
Miss Hannah Pym would have found it hard to believe that members of the Quality regarded a journey by stage-coach as a sort of lingering death, preferring their own fast well-sprung carriages and teams of horses.
For to Hannah, standing, slightly open-mouthed, in the courtyard of the Bull and Gate in Aldersgate in the City of London at quarter to five on a freezing-cold morning, the stage-coach was romance on wheels. The coach was faced in dull black leather, thickly studded by way of ornament with broad black-headed nails tracing out the panels, in the upper part of which were four oval windows with heavy red wooden frames and leather curtains. Up on the roof, there were seats for the ‘outsiders’, surrounded by a high iron guard. In front of the outsiders sat the coachman and the guard, who always held his carbine ready cocked on his knees. Underneath them was a very long, narrow boot, or trunk, beneath a large spreading hammer-cloth hanging down on all sides and furnished with a luxuriant fringe. Behind the coach was the immense basket, stretching far and wide beyond the body, to which it was attached by long iron bars, or supports, passing underneath it. Travelling in the basket was cheap but highly uncomfortable.
A flake of snow drifted down and landed on Hannah’s nose, then another. She climbed inside and, as she was the first, secured a seat by the window. The coachman, many-caped and red-faced, came lumbering and wheezing out and climbed up on the roof. Then came the other passengers. Hannah studied them eagerly as they climbed in and took their places. There was a dainty woman in widow’s weeds supported by a military-looking man who smelt strongly of brandy. They sat alongside Hannah. Opposite her was a beautiful young man, too fashionably dressed for coach travel. He saw Hannah looking at him in awe and hurriedly dropped his long lashes to veil a pair of violet eyes. Auburn hair glinted under a curly brimmed beaver and a slim boyish figure was wrapped in an immense cloak. Next to him was a very fat wom
an, and then, next to her, a dried-up stick of a man dressed in a black coat and breaches and sporting an old-fashioned Ramillies wig and a not-too-clean stock.
The City clocks began to chime five strokes. The guard on the roof blew a blast on his horn. And then a voice cried, ‘Hold hard!’ And the door beside Hannah was jerked open. Hannah noticed the youth opposite shrink back in his seat and pull his hat down over his eyes. The aristocratic-looking man who had jerked open the door had a hard, handsome saturnine face and black eyes. ‘No room, hey?’ he said. ‘Better travel on top.’ He slammed the door again. The coach dipped and swayed as he climbed on the roof. The guard blew a fanfare and the coach slowly lumbered forward.
The thin man in the black clothes was the first to break the silence. He passed cards all round and said he was a lawyer, name of Fletcher. ‘If,’ he said, ‘in spite of highwaymen, snow-drifts, ruts a yard deep, we compass the one hundred and seventy-two miles, we may thank our stars when we land safe at the Swan at Exeter.’ There was a murmur of agreement. The fat woman said she was Mrs Bradley, going home to Exeter after a visit to her married daughter. She fished in a capacious basket on her lap and produced a twist of paper which she said contained rhubarb pills, ‘the only cure for sickness caused by the motion of the coach.’ She said she hoped they would not go too fast, for she had a second cousin who had had an apoplexy brought on by the speed of a stage-coach. But, she went on, rummaging again in her basket, Dr Jameson’s powders were the best thing for apoplexy, so if the rate of speed became too great, she urged the other passengers to avail themselves of this wonderful medicine.
The military man introduced himself as Captain Seaton. ‘Never needed a pill or powder in me life,’ he bragged. ‘Little wife here knows that, don’t you, Lizzie?’ Lizzie blushed and murmured something inaudible. Hannah introduced herself briefly. The captain’s eyes fastened on the young man. ‘And what’s your monicker, me young sprig?’
