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 woman, 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?’
‘Edward Smith,’ said the young man and then closed his eyes firmly and pretended to go to sleep.
The rest all said they hoped to make the journey in the promised time of three days. Hannah studied them all avidly.
At Hyde Park toll, the guard jumped down to have a word with the toll-keeper, holding his carbine firmly. ‘I hope he knows how to use that,’ said the lawyer uneasily. ‘I shall feel safer when we are through Knightsbridge.’ For before the pretty village of Knightsbridge lay a place of bogs and highwaymen. Here the Great Western Road crossed a stream, the bed of which was composed of thick mud.
The guard climbed back up on the roof and the coach moved away from the line of whale-oil lamps at Hyde Park Corner and into the blackness that led to Knightsbridge. But all too soon, they reached the stream. Days earlier, Hannah had gone through this stream in Sir George’s light carriage with barely a hitch. Even the Thornton Hall coach, which had deposited her in the City that morning, had stuck a little, but as it was lightly laden, had soon struggled clear.
But into this great impassable gulf of mud the Exeter Fly descended, and after desperate flounderings, stuck fast.
‘Oh, dear, oh, dear,’ said Mrs Bradley, clutching her precious basket. ‘I hope there won’t be no highwaymen. Reckon I’d die of fright, m’dears.’
Only Hannah remained calm. To her, the stage-coaches were impregnable fortresses on wheels. What villain would dare to accost the Exeter Fly?
‘Stand and deliver!’ shouted a great voice from outside. The fat woman screamed, the captain turned a muddy colour, his wife buried her face in her hands, the lawyer swore quite dreadfully, and the slim youth, Edward Smith, sat up with a start and looked around, wild-eyed. ‘Are they come for me?’ he asked Hannah.
Before Hannah could ask him what he meant, the voice shouted again. ‘Outside, all of you in there.’
They climbed out, Hannah conscious the whole time of the money in her reticule. They were all standing now with freezing muddy water half-way up their legs. The highwayman had dismounted and was brandishing a brace of pistols. ‘Bad pickings,’ he commented sourly on seeing the inside passengers. ‘Poor lot. Turn out your—’
That was as far as he got. He was struck a vicious blow from behind and collapsed into the muddy water. Looming over him appeared the aristocrat of the roof, the hard-faced saturnine man. He dragged the highwayman clear of the mud and water and laid him on the road and bound his hands behind his back. ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Hannah. ‘I am most grateful to you.’
‘Of course,’ blustered Captain Seaton, ‘I was just about to take action meself, but my lady wife had come over faint, don’t you see, and I could hardly leave her.’