by M C Beaton
Ginny Bloggs was very, very tired. The journey had been long and boring. A garrulous old lady had shared her compartment as far as London. The train to London had been stuffy and overheated and the slow local train into the dark reaches of Kent had been cold and chilly. She stepped down onto the wooden station platform at the small country station of Gyrencester, the nearest to home, and wondered at the vagaries of the English climate. Bolton had been relatively warm for November and she was therefore underdressed for the freezing temperatures of Kent.
“Kerridge is waiting, mum,” said the porter, picking up her bags. “Been waiting this half hour or more. Bad for them horses. Told ’im to walk them but he don’t speak none.”
The porter, Ginny knew, was old and garrulous and quite likely to hold her on the platform until she froze unless she simply kept on walking to the carriage. She accordingly bolted for the haven of the carriage, which she could see standing in the stable yard. To her surprise the silent figure on the box made no move to jump down and assist her into the carriage but the door was standing open—letting all that nasty cold air into the coach, thought Ginny angrily—and Ginny climbed inside and resolved to have a few sharp words with whatever servant was responsible as soon as she got home.
The servant did seem to have come to life, she noticed sourly, as a dark figure appeared outside the window and fiddled with the catch of the door. There was a slight jerk as her bags were strapped up on the back, another bump as the coachman climbed back on the box, and the carriage began to move slowly at first and then with increasing speed as the lights of the station were left behind. Then Ginny noticed with surprise that there were no rugs in the carriage and that the floor was covered in straw. Just like an old-fashioned four-wheeler, she thought.
The carriage took a bend at breakneck speed and Ginny rapped on the roof of the coach with her umbrella. Still the carriage hurtled on.
Ginny stared out vacantly at the dim, flying landscape of unfamiliar trees and fields, now shining with frost under a pale moon. Whatever direction the carriage was traveling, it was not going to Courtney. Slowly she edged toward the door and lifted the strap. The door would not open. She jerked at the strap, first on one side and then the other, and then she began to bang on the roof again with her umbrella.
But still the carriage would not stop.
Lord Gerald started to walk toward his motor. He climbed in and adjusted his driving goggles and prepared to move off. He would just let those idiots in that carriage get by first. At the rate they were driving they were liable to end up in a ditch.
Four steaming horses raced around the bend, vapor pouring from their mouths and sparks flying from their hooves, a dark, muffled figure crouched on the box.
The carriage flew past.
And the white, frightened face of Ginny Bloggs stared out at him through the window of the carriage. And then it was gone.
I’m seeing things, thought Gerald, determinedly giving chase just the same. I’ve thought so much about that dratted girl, I’m seeing things.
He raced after the coach, honking his horn furiously, but still it raced on. Above the sound of his engine he thought he could hear a crash like breaking glass. Then as the trees on either side of the road vanished and the faint moonlight washed over the frosty fields, he saw Ginny’s head and shoulders appearing out of the window of the hurtling carriage. He tried to shout to her to wait, that he was gaining, that he would soon rescue her.
But suddenly her slight figure went hurtling straight through the window of the carriage and landed with a sickening thud on the road. He swerved like a madman, and the only tree on that stretch of road loomed up in front of him and his Lanchester ploughed straight into it.
His windscreen shattered into a thousand fragments, and with the part of his brain that still seemed to be working, he realized that if he had not been so muffled and goggled and scarfed and wrapped up, his face would have been cut to ribbons. The thought of fire galvanized him and without waiting to see whether he had any broken bones or not, he scrambled from the wreck of his car and stumbled across the icy road to where the still figure lay in the road.
Ginny had removed her hat and coat in order to make her escape. She still clutched the tattered remains of an umbrella in her hand. He guessed she must have smashed the window of the carriage with its heavy silver handle.
He knelt down in the road beside her, frightened to touch her in case she had broken bones, frightened she was dead.
And then “Hullo, Lord Gerald,” said Ginny Bloggs faintly, opening her eyes and staring up at him.
“Are you all right?” he whispered, as if the sound of a raised voice might hurt her.
“I don’t know,” said Ginny with much of her old irritatingly vague manner.
“Well, you’d better move yourself and find out before you freeze to death,” he said, starting to take off his coat.
Ginny sat up very slowly and carefully and cautiously moved her arms and legs.
“No bones broken,” she said, with a sigh of relief.
He wrapped his heavy motoring coat around her and helped her to her feet, noticing with a strange pang of worry that she seemed to have lost a great deal of weight.
“We had better try to walk back to that inn,” said Lord Gerald. “I could leave you here and go on to fetch help—”
“Don’t,” said Ginny. “He might come back.”
“Now—what happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Ginny. “The carriage was waiting at the station and I just got in. I thought it was odd at the time, because usually there are the footmen to open the door and the coachman to give me a friendly welcome. But I was so cold and tired and Muggles—you know Muggles, the porter—seemed all set for a long chat and I wanted to get home as quickly as possible. Silly of me. The worst moment was when I tried the doors and found they would not open.”
She gave a sudden shudder and he put an arm around her as they walked along the road through the unearthly peace of the night, with the whitening fields stretched on either side and the great skeletal arms of the winter trees stretching up to a star-laden sky.
“I saw you at the inn,” Ginny went on. “I didn’t know you were following me. It looked to me as if my last chance of aid were going to simply stand there watching me go by. I became desperate, and then I started to smash in the window. If you hadn’t been behind us, he might have stopped when he heard the sound of breaking glass, but as it was—”
She suddenly pulled herself away from his arm and staggered to the side of the road and was violently sick. He stood shivering and waiting tactfully until she had recovered.
“Shock,” said Ginny finally, tottering back to him and gratefully accepting the help of his arm. “Do you think it was another practical joke?”
“No one would go to such lengths,” said Gerald, and then paused. Would they? Some pretty awful practical jokes were played.
There had been the case of young Felicity Bryce-Jones, who had been abducted on a London street in broad daylight by two ferocious-looking men, who had carried her off in a carriage at pistol point. They were ponces, they had told the terrified Felicity, and they were going to ship her off to Turkey, where they could get fifty pounds sterling for her. Felicity, half dead with fright, had been carried aboard a yacht anchored in Rye Bay to find herself welcomed by a party of cheering friends, all splitting their sides with laughter at the joke. They had all been terribly disappointed in Felicity and had called her a bad sport when she had damped the spirits of the party by throwing a screaming fit of hysterics and then taking to her bed with a high temperature for three weeks.
But only that evening, he, Gerald, had been remembering the explosion. “It probably was,” he said slowly so as not to frighten her anymore, “but I think we should certainly inform the police. There’s that business about the telegraph boy.” He told her how the boy had delivered her wire to Courtney and that someone had given him a sovereign. “So you see,” he en
ded, “whoever received the telegram knew you were coming back and did not tell the rest of the household. Whoever it was was the one who abducted you and whoever it was is someone at Courtney. Do you think Cyril or Jeffrey—”
“No,” interrupted Ginny with a shake of her blond head. “They are not ruthless enough.”
“We shall see the police as soon as possible,” said Gerald firmly, “and then I shall move my belongings to Courtney for a visit. I shall find some excuse. You need someone to look after you.”
He felt very strong and masterful despite the cold, which seemed to be eating into his very bones. And she looked so small and frail and vulnerable, dwarfed as she was in his large motoring coat.
“It is a pity,” he went on, “that the road is so deserted. I hope this walk will not prove too much for you after your experience. I am afraid my poor motor is a total wreck.”
“You’re as well without it,” said Ginny. “Nasty, smelly thing.”
He gritted his teeth. The old Ginny was back. “Do you realize, dear girl,” he said acidly, “that my Lanchester is a total wreck and all because of you? Had I not been able to command such a turn of speed, God knows what would have happened to you.”
“Anyway,” said Ginny, who seemed to be becoming infuriatingly chirpy, “your horse will be glad to have you back again. He must have felt sorely neglected.”
“Don’t be so infuriatingly sentimental,” snapped Lord Gerald, made doubly angry by the fact that he had felt rather guilty about his neglected horse, Brutus, and had actually been caught one embarrassing day telling the animal so by an amused groom.
“I think it would be better if we ceased to chatter,” he added in as nasty a tone of voice as he could manage, “and conserve all our energies toward getting to that inn before we freeze to death.”
“All right,” said Ginny mildly in exactly the same way as she had said those two little words when he had told her he never wished to see her again.
They marched on in silence through the winter night. Ice on the road crackled under their feet and Lord Gerald, looking down at the frozen puddles, could only wonder that the carriage that had abducted Ginny had not crashed.
He irrationally felt that it would have been easier to feel… well… warm and sympathetic toward Ginny if she had been hurt in any way. But apart from looking thinner, she seemed much the same as ever.
The inn was locked and bolted when they at last reached it. Lord Gerald pounded vigorously on the door until a nightcapped head appeared at one of the upper windows. The moonlight shone on the barrel of a game rifle and an angry voice told his lordship to stop it or the “perleece” would be fetched.
In a voice of weary patience Lord Gerald explained their predicament.
“Take yourselves off,” snorted the landlord. “I’ve never heard such a farradiddle in all my born, that I ain’t. Chases and crashes and the like. I know your sort. Trying to break in, that’s what.”
“My good man,” drawled Lord Gerald in tones as arctic as the night air, “I am Lord Gerald de Fremney and I command you to come down here instantly and let us in.”
“Quite to the manner born,” murmured Ginny.
But his lordship’s name and autocratic tones had the desired effect. The head disappeared from the window and several minutes later they heard the sound of heavy bolts being drawn back on the main door.
The landlord held a dripping tallow candle up to Gerald’s face and appeared to be satisfied. “Come in, my lord,” he said, leading them into the bar. “I recognize you from earlier. You was in just afore I closed. Fact is, my boy is in hospital in Maidstone and Missus is over there with him. My hired man’s got leave to go see his mother, what is poorly, so you see I’m on my own and a man on this deserted spot can’t be too careful. It’s not as if we was on the main road,” he added, lighting the oil lamps and throwing logs on the fire.
“What is the matter with your son?” asked Ginny.
“Broke both his legs, mum, that he did, falling off a hayrick what he was told not to climb,” said the landlord. “I’m not that fit myself, mum, what with having just got over the plooreisy in the chest.” Here he gave a graveyard cough to bear out his words.
Ginny stumbled slightly as she made her way over to the fire, and Lord Gerald looked at her with reawakened concern. Her hands, he noticed, were torn and bleeding where they had been scraped on the road.
“We must find a doctor immediately,” he said. “You—what’s your name…”
“Figgs, me lord.”
“Well, Figgs, I shall guard your inn while you ride off and fetch help. We shall need a doctor and—”
“Utter rot!” said his fair companion. “I am not dying, and poor Mr. Figgs is certainly not going anywhere tonight with that bad chest of his. Why, the cold night air could kill him. It is very late, Lord Gerald. Since I do not suppose you have any spare bedchambers, Mr. Figgs, we shall make ourselves comfortable here in the public bar till morning.”
“Well, it ain’t as if we was a residential type of inn,” said Mr. Figgs. “We ain’t even got a private parlor or a snug—only the public here. But you’re both welcome to my own bedroom, and I’ll doss down the settle. Or there’s the single bed in my boy’s room.”
“We are not married, Mr. Figgs,” said Ginny firmly before Gerald could speak. “I feel it would be less compromising if we just stayed here for a few hours until dawn.”
“Have you got a horse?” asked Gerald. “I could ride for help.”
Mr. Figgs shook his head. “Missus took horse and cart over to Maidstone and won’t be back till morn.”
“Don’t be so stuffy, Lord Gerald,” said Ginny. “No one need know we spent the night in this inn together except the police when we put in our report, and neither they nor Mr. Figgs will feel we ought to get married. Mr. Figgs, if you could find us some nice hot punch and some sandwiches, I am sure we shall manage very well. No, my lord, I am not going to walk one step farther tonight.”
Lord Gerald gave in with bad grace while Mr. Figgs bustled about fetching the ingredients for a bowl of punch and cutting sandwiches. Ginny and Lord Gerald sat on either side of the now roaring fire while the landlord placed a scarred oak table between them and, having laid out the sandwiches and the bowl of steaming punch and informed Miss that the first-aid box was in the kitchen, he said good night.
Gerald felt angry. He felt Ginny should not have taken over like that and started giving orders, and she had made him feel like a callous, unfeeling brute over Mr. Figgs’s pleurisy and also because he had forgotten about her torn hands.
Instead of thinking that the girl had shown remarkable fortitude, he decided she was insensitive in the extreme and left her to rummage in the kitchen for the first-aid box by herself.
He was all set to enjoy a deep and—unusual for him—enjoyable fit of the sulks when he realized that she could not bandage her hands by herself and reluctantly got to his feet and followed her into the kitchen.
He found Ginny wincing as she bathed her hands in an enameled basin, watched by an interested audience of black beetles.
The kitchen was small and dark and not very clean, bearing witness to the fact that Mrs. Figgs had other problems on her mind. He took over and insisted on disinfecting the scissors before he cut the bandages, and then made a very neat and efficient job of binding Ginny’s hands up. With a sudden pang of concern he noticed that she had a lump the size of an egg on her forehead. A rattling at the window made them both jump, but it was only the wind, which had suddenly risen, shaking the branches of the ivy on the wall outside.
Gerald decided that the best way to get through this night of enforced intimacy was to treat Miss Bloggs with polite courtesy, as if they were both in the drawing room at Courtney instead of in this ancient relic of the Tudor age, with its low ceilings, tiny doorways, and blackened rafters.
“Do you think this was always an inn?” asked Ginny, looking around curiously as they reentered the bar.
; “I should think so,” said Gerald, ladling out the punch. “It has probably only turned respectable in the last couple of decades. It would be a type of hedge tavern in the old days—a thieves’ kitchen more like. They’ll get quite a bit of trade in the summer now, what with hop-pickers and day-trippers and picknickers—they like to explore these lanes away from the main road. And whatever you might think of the motorcar, it’ll turn out to be a blessing to small places like these.
“The days of the great coaching inns have gone and the posting houses, too. If they’re lucky enough to be near the railroad, then they change the name to the Great Western Arms or something and do very well. For these little places the motorist will be a blessing. He has no horses to be stabled and he doesn’t need to stay the night as much as a man with a carriage, who needs to rest his cattle. How are the sandwiches?”
“Appalling,” said Ginny gloomily. “But I don’t care.”
The wind suddenly gave a great howl and rattled ferociously at the door and the shutters.
Snow, thought Lord Gerald. It might snow. He should walk on himself and find help. In fact, if he had not been so frozen and tired, he would have done just that in the first place. That was the problem, he reflected, as he watched the play of the firelight on Ginny’s face. One grew up with servants to jump at one’s bidding and never got into the way of performing quite simple actions oneself—like shaving or lighting a fire or finding one’s own clothes or drawing one’s own bath; cooking meals or getting out in the middle of the night and walking along a country lane to fetch some much-needed help.
“You’re right about the sandwiches,” he said, chewing on a piece of dry bread and suspiciously smelly ham, “but the punch is excellent. When I’ve got myself thoroughly warm I shall go out and search for help. We can’t both go with only one coat between us.”
