The next morning was rather a disappointment. The flyers were there and ready, the instructions were tied in position, but there was no further news of Napoleon, and no news from Vienna or Brussels either, so although he and Billy got all the Easter papers to Mr Chaplin’s coaches at dazzling speed, it was rather a wasted exercise. Billy said he might as well have stayed in bed as usual.
But on Tuesday there was a new dispatch, and The Times was held up for nearly an hour while it was printed. It came from France and was printed in full by The Times.
‘The unpleasant apprehensions which were pretty universally excited on Friday by the intelligence of Bonaparte’s landing in France, had begun to subside in the course of Saturday and Sunday, but the news of yesterday has revived the first impressions of alarm. It has been asserted on high authority that he entered Lyons on Saturday evening, and was there welcomed by the general populace, many of whom have joined his army, which is now said to number several thousands.’
‘He’ll have been welcomed elsewhere too by this time,’ John said sourly, watching the printers at work.
‘You may depend upon it,’ Mr Walter said, ‘or we should have heard otherwise.’
It was very bad news indeed, John thought, but it would certainly sell, if he could get it to the coaches in time. ‘I will take the first batch with me, now,’ he said, ‘and send for the rest later.’ If only he didn’t have to waste time with all that damned stamping.
It was a frantic morning. John worked harder than he’d ever done in his life, and usually on the run, collecting papers from the printers with the ink still wet and smudging and smearing under his fingers, supervising the stamping, which was abominably slow, loading the flyers in a half-light that showed only too clearly that dawn was under way and that the first of Mr Chaplin’s coaches would be leaving within minutes, and on one panicking occasion running the length of the Strand in search of another flyer because all the ones he’d hired were out on the roads and two more batches of papers were ready to dispatch. But by breakfast time the papers were gone, the coaches caught, the first dispatch completed.
‘We have made a start,’ he said, as he and Billy and the rest of their team sat down at last in Galloway’s Coffee House to eat a well-earned breakfast.
‘Never mind about a start,’ Billy said, laughing. ‘It’s damn nearly finished me. To say nothing of what it’s done to my courtship.’
‘It will be easier tomorrow,’ John said. And in the meantime he would keep his promise and write to Annie and tell her all about it.
He took time off that afternoon to write at length to Annie and to James, and when their letters were completed, he took up his pen again to write another even longer. And this one was to Miss Harriet Sowerby.
Back in Rattlesden Harriet had settled into the Hopkins’ household as easily as if she’d been designed for it. Little Jimmy had insisted on sitting beside her at the breakfast table that Sunday morning and talking to her all through the meal, and, what was more, he’d been allowed to do it, which was a great surprise to her because meals at home were always taken in complete silence.
Here at Rattlesden the breakfast table was a-babble with conversation.
‘Did you sleep warmly?’ Annie wanted to know. ‘This old place is a proper rabbit warren. The wind blows in through the walls quite terribly sometimes.’ But her tone was mild. She didn’t seem to be complaining about it.
Harriet assured them that she’d slept very well indeed and added that she thought the rectory was a beautiful house. ‘So old!’
‘It has stood here for three hundred years,’ the Reverend Hopkins told her, ‘but never so happily occupied as it is now, I think. Is that not so, my love?’
But at that point Mrs Chiddum, their cook, came bustling in with a dish of bread and milk for baby Beau, who was bouncing in his high chair with excitement at the smell of it. And that brought another amazing revelation.
‘If he don’t have his bread and milk first,’ Annie Hopkins confided, spooning the soggy mixture into her baby’s eager mouth, ‘he won’t eat a thing, will you my chicken? Not his nice coddled egg, nor his nice flaked fish, not a thing.’
And they see no sin in it, Harriet thought, looking from Annie’s smiling face to her husband’s approving one. They don’t force the child. They let him eat what he likes. And the baby crowed and held the spoon and called for more.
‘Will he eat his fish now?’ she asked, intrigued, when the little bowl was scraped clean.
‘Why bless us, of course he will,’ Annie said. ‘Won’t you, my lambkin?’
‘I eatin’ my fish,’ Jimmy said proudly, holding up his plate to show her the progress he was making.
‘And a fine good boy you’ll grow in consequence,’ his father told him. ‘I must walk across to church now, Annie my love, or I shall not be ready for the service.’
They are the gentlest, kindest people Harriet had ever met. She watched as the clergyman stooped to kiss his wife and little Jimmy and to submit, oh so patiently and lovingly, to having his face patted by Beau’s sticky hands.
And she was touched to feel that she was allowed to be one of them, as she and Annie and the two children stood beside the draughty window to watch him as he went stooping along the garden path towards the holm oak and the wicket gate that led to the churchyard. He was so gentle and so diffident, and such a contrast to the unforgiving asperity of her own father.
‘Oh! Oh!’ Annie said suddenly, putting her hand to her mouth. ‘He’s forgotten his muffler again, the dear man, and his chest is in no fit state to do without it. Look after the little ones, my dear. I shan’t be a minute.’
She was off out of the room in a second, her feet skimming across the uneven flagstones as though they were winged. There was no doubt of her affection or her concern. Harriet watched with a lump rising in her throat while her hostess ran down the garden path in the sunshine to catch her absent-minded husband in her arms and wind the muffler he’d forgotten about his neck and send him on his way to church with another kiss. To love so and be so loved, she thought. What a blissful thing it must be.
And, as she discovered later that morning, his church was just like he was, gentle and welcoming and unassuming. She sat between Annie and the nursemaid, Pollyanna, in the third box pew, at a respectful distance from the grand party from the Manor House, with Jimmy cuddled on her knee, and listened to the first Sunday service she’d ever heard outside her own fierce chapel, and was amazed at it.
For a start the Reverend Hopkins didn’t boom a text at his congregation, he read them a story, the tale of the Good Samaritan, and he read it simply and quietly, pausing from time to time to smile at his poor parishioners or to give them a chance to cough or to settle more comfortably in their wooden pews. And then he set his great Bible aside and began a most extraordinary sermon.
Harriet was used to sermons and she didn’t enjoy them, although of course she would never have admitted it, and especially not to her mother or the preacher who were the two people who lectured her most frequently. But she paid as little attention to them as she could, for they were always the same, telling her that she was a grievous sinner and would be punished for her sins with torture and hellfire as sure as night followed day. And even if she didn’t believe them it was upsetting to hear such things.
But the Reverend Hopkins was a preacher of quite another persuasion. He talked to his congregation, and the God he spoke about was a gentle deity, a God who forgave sins and answered honest prayers, just as He’d answered hers in the King’s Bath, a God who actually seemed to want his creation to be kind to one another.
Jimmy was sucking his thumb, lulled by his father’s voice and baby Beau was asleep in his mother’s arms. It is all so simple and easy and loving here, Harriet thought, looking at the communion table with its plain green cloth and the wooden crucifix set so simply upon it, flanked by its two glowing candles. You sleep when you are tired and you wake with the daylight, you feed your babies with t
he food they like to eat, you welcome strangers into your home when they have nowhere else to go, and you do not preach. For this man wasn’t telling anybody what to do, he was simply talking about the need for ‘mutual help and comfort’ and the unsought rewards of kindness.
She looked up at the three bright rows of assembled saints, glowing red and blue and purple and gold in the great east window beyond the communion table, and saw that in the space above them a figure of Christ was depicted in solitary glory, His hands upraised in blessing. And the face of the Christ made her heart leap in her chest. It was such a tender face, such a sad, tolerant, compassionate, understanding face. And she wondered whether she and her parents had been worshipping a different God all these years, and felt that it was very likely, and knew, beyond any doubt, that if she were given a choice it would be this living Christ she would prefer to follow.
The next two days passed in the same quiet mood of contentment. She helped to feed the boys, and took them for walks about the village and was allowed to tuck them into bed at night, and in the afternoons she helped Annie with her sewing until dinner, and when the meal was done and the candles were lit, she and Annie and her ‘dear James’ played cards beside the fire. It was a blessed existence, and when Mrs Easter’s pony-cart arrived to fetch her on Wednesday morning she couldn’t hide her disappointment that her visit was over.
‘You must come again, my dear,’ Annie said, kissing her goodbye most lovingly. ‘Drive her carefully, young Tom.’
Young Tom was recognizably Mr Thistlethwaite’s son. He had the same untidy hair and the same brown eyes and the same wide mouth. But he wasn’t as quick-witted as his father. ‘Lawks-a-mercy,’ he said. ‘I got letters for to give to ’ee an’ I clean forgot all about ’em.’ He was fishing three letters out of his trouser pocket, bending them considerably in the process. ‘Come by the night mail, Mrs ’Opkins, mum,’ he said, handing them across. ‘Pa said to deliver ’em.’
‘One for each of us, my dear,’ Annie said, putting Harriet’s into her lap. ‘Dear John. He kept his word, you see. Now promise me that you will come again.’
‘I will. I will. Indeed I will,’ Harriet said, breathless with surprise and pleasure. To think that he had written to her too!
But she waited until the pony-cart was out in the lane and had ambled downhill through the village before she opened her letter. She needed to be as private as possible before she read what he had to say to her.
It was a polite letter and very formal, hoping that she had taken no harm from her long journey and that her stay at Rattlesden would prove happy and comfortable. He was sorry, he said, that he had not been able to stay at Rattlesden himself, howsomever it was just as well that he returned to London when he did, for the news from France was very grave.
Then he spent two paragraphs telling her all about it, but assuring her that Wellington would soon defeat the upstart and that she was not to worry that the French would be lurking in dark corners again to afright her. ‘I do not forget what you told me at the Victory Ball, you see.’
Then, at the very foot of the page, he wrote something that brought a blush to her cheeks even in the cold air blowing past her on that early morning ride.
‘I trust I may take an opportunity to call upon you, when I return to Bury, and that I may consider myself your respectful friend, John Henry Easter.’
She read it through three times before she could convince herself that she wasn’t imagining it. Then she folded the letter carefully and, after a moment’s hesitation, tucked it inside the bodice of her gown. If she put it in her carpetbag, her mother would see it and insist on reading it, and for the first time in her life she had a secret she wanted to hide. A secret she had every right to hide, for Mr Easter had written to her, not to her mother. The paper scratched her skin, as prickly as a conscience. But it was her letter and hers it would remain.
Back in Churchgate Street her mother had been home for nearly half an hour and was already furiously at work with broom and duster.
‘Mercy on us!’ she said crossly when Harriet knocked at the door. ‘What brings you back so soon?’
‘Miss Pettie took a faint in the baths, Mama,’ Harriet said, ‘and wanted to come home.’
Mrs Sowerby was instantly and happily scathing. ‘So you made a poor job of it, after all,’ she sneered. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised. I never imagined you would be the slightest use to the poor lady. What must she be thinking of us now!’
‘She said she was uncommon glad of my company,’ Harriet said, defending herself. ‘She called me a kindly nurse.’ The remembered compliment was warming even in the chill of her mother’s parlour.
Mrs Sowerby put aside her broom and turned to direct the full force of her disapproval upon her daughter. ‘Hoity-toity!’ she said. ‘More to the point, what were you doing, pray, to allow her to be taken ill in the first place? Tell me that!’
‘Nothing, Mama. Truly,’ Harriet stammered, thrown into confusion by the vehemence of the attack.
‘Come now,’ her mother said implacably. ‘Do not lie to me, miss, for I know when you lie. You were careless were you not? You have a careless disposition. I have often had cause to chastise you for it. Admit!’ And she glanced at the chastening rod hanging beside the unlit fire.
‘No, no indeed, Mama,’ Harriet said, fear fluttering in her chest. ‘I did my very best endeavour, truly. I do not believe I was careless. It was not my intention.’
‘Then how did Miss Pettie come to take a faint? Answer me that.’
‘’Twas the heat of the bath, Mama. Mr Easter said so.’
‘Mr Easter?’ her mother said, quite stopped in her tracks by the mention of the name. ‘Mr Easter the newsagent?’ But he was the wealthiest young man in town. ‘So you’re on speaking terms with the Easters now, is that it?’ She was confused by this information, torn between pride in the acquaintance, and aggravation that her daughter should have been given importance by it.
‘We met at the Victory Ball, Mama,’ Harriet explained, keeping her face very still and as expressionless as she could. ‘He chanced to be in Bath. Miss Pettie said his presence was the greatest good fortune.’
‘Aye, so it may have been. For her,’ Mrs Sowerby said grimly. ‘For a young girl with absolutely no prospects, absolutely no prospects, mark me, ’tis quite another matter, let me tell ’ee. I suppose he paid you pretty compliments to turn your silly head.’
‘No indeed, Mama. He joined us so as to care for Miss Pettie.’
‘Joined you?’ Mrs Sowerby asked, and her tone was horrible.
‘He escorted us home, Mama,’ Harriet faltered, feeling impelled to explain.
‘Ho, did he?’ her mother said, rigid with righteous indignation. ‘Well of course he did, you silly girl. We all know about rich young men like him. That’s just the sort of thing he would do. You keep well out of his way, my girl. Men like Mr Easter are dangerous, let me tell ’ee. They ruin poor girls. Ruin them as soon as look at ’em. It is always the way. Have nothing more to do with him, do you hear?’
It was horribly unfair. ‘He was uncommon kind to – to Miss Pettie,’ Harriet said, defending him, but as meekly as she could. This was too cruel. Was she really not to see him again?
Her mother raised her voice and her eyebrows immediately. ‘Do you argue with me, child? Do you pretend to know better than your own mother?’
Harriet retreated at once. ‘No, no Mama,’ she said. ‘Of course not.’ Cruel or not her mother had to be obeyed.
‘And so I should think,’ Mrs Sowerby said, mollified by the ease and speed of her victory. ‘Then you will do as you are told, will you not?’
‘Yes, Mama.’ What else could she say? Perhaps she could find a way round it?
‘Very well,’ Mrs Sowerby said, using her broom again with renewed vigour. ‘Let us return to our duties and hear no more about it. You are back now so you’d best get to work. There’s a fire needs lighting and then you can scour that doorstep. I’ve never se
en it in such a filthy state. From the look of it, half the world has been treading upon it during these last few days. I turn my back for five minutes and this is what I get, you see. I’m sure I never trod on anybody else’s doorstep in all my born days. Oh there’s no justice in the world. Well, don’t just stand there. What are you waiting for?’
As Harriet went wearily off to fetch the bucket and rake out the fire, Mr Easter’s letter shifted and scratched inside her bodice. And for a fleeting second, she was comforted because she had such a secret.
Mr Easter himself was as hard at work as she was. Early on Thursday morning news came through from France that the French army had deserted their new King Louis XVIII en masse and gone over to their old emperor. This time The Times printed twice its usual number of papers and John used twice his usual number of fourpenny flyers, and the energy expended at the Post Office that morning was enough, according to Billy, ‘to haul a thousand coaches’.
‘Mama will be home tomorrow,’ he said. ‘She’ll be surprised at all this. I can’t imagine what she’ll say.’
But John didn’t care what she said. He already knew that he had made his point. He’d had two letters that very morning from his shopkeepers in Ipswich and Reading. Their sales had nearly doubled, they said, ‘thanks to the prompt arrival of the papers, some hours ahead of all other shops in the area’. Now they were suggesting that their daily orders should be doubled to keep pace, ‘whilst the bad news lasts’.
‘What d’you think she’ll say when she knows what you’ve been doing?’ Billy insisted.
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