Baine assisted Mrs. Mering up the steps and into our compartment and then ran back to supervise the porter in loading our belongings. Jane settled Mrs. Mering in her seat, gave her her lorgnette, her embroidery, found her handkerchief and her shawl, and then bobbed a curtsey and climbed down the steps.
“Where’s she going?” I said to Verity, watching Jane hurry down the platform to the rear of the train.
“To second-class,” she said. “Servants don’t travel with their employers.”
“How do they do without them?”
“They don’t,” she said, catching up her skirts and starting up the steps.
They certainly didn’t. Baine came back as soon as everything was aboard to bring Mrs. Mering a lap robe and ask if there was anything else she needed.
“A cushion,” she said. “These railway seats are so uncomfortable.”
“Yes, madam,” he said, and took off at a gallop. He returned in under a minute, disheveled and out of breath, with a brocade-covered cushion.
“The train from Reading is a corridor train, madam,” he panted, “but this one has only compartments. I will, however, attend you at each stop.”
“Were there no direct trains to Coventry?” she said.
“Yes, madam,” Baine said. “At 10:17. The train is about to leave, madam. Is there anything else?”
“Yes, the Baedeker. And a rug to put my feet on. The condition of these railway compartment floors is disgraceful.”
Mrs. Mering had obviously never been on the tube. It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation. Twentieth-Century contemps complained about cancelled flights and gasoline prices, Eighteenth-Century contemps complained about muddy roads and highwaymen. No doubt Professor Peddick’s Greeks complained about recalcitrant horses and chariot wheels falling off.
I had ridden on trains before, in the 1940s, most recently to Hampton Lucy to see if the bishop’s bird stump was there with the east windows, but those trains had been packed with soldiers, the windows had been covered with blackout curtains, and all the fittings had been removed to make ammunition. And, even if it hadn’t been wartime, they had been nothing to this.
The high-backed seats were upholstered in green velveteen, and the walls above were panelled in polished mahogany inlaid with a pattern of flowers. There were rich green plush curtains hung at the windows, and gas lamps in brackets on both sides, covered with etched-glass lampshades, and the luggage rack overhead, the hand rails, the arm rests, the curtain rings, were all of polished brass.
Definitely not the tube. And, as the train lurched slowly forward (with Baine making a last flying run to deliver the Baedeker and the rug and another back to second-class) and then picked up speed through the beautiful, misty countryside, definitely nothing to complain about.
That did not stop Mrs. Mering from complaining about the soot blowing in the window (Terence closed the window), about the stuffiness of the compartment (Terence opened the window again and drew the curtains), about the dimness of the day, the roughness of the ride, the hardness of the cushion Baine had brought her.
She gave a little screamlet each time the train stopped, started, or went round a curve, and a large one when the railway guard came in to take our tickets. He was even older than the porter, but Verity leaned forward to look at his name badge and subsided pensively in her seat after he’d gone.
“What was the guard’s name?” I asked her when I helped her down at Reading Station, where we were to change trains.
“Edwards,” she said, looking around the platform. “Do you see anyone who looks like he’d be willing to marry Tossie?”
“What about Crippen over there?” I said, nodding my head toward a pale, timid-looking young man who kept looking down the track and sticking his finger nervously in his collar.
“None of Crippen’s wives managed to stay married to him for fifty years,” she said, watching a large and irritable man with sidewhiskers who kept bellowing, “Porter! Porter!” to no avail. The efficient Baine had commandeered all of them before the train even stopped and was directing the disposition of the Mering effects.
“What about him?” I said, pointing at a five-year-old boy in a sailor suit.
A young man in a boater and a mustache came bolting onto the platform and looked wildly around. Verity gripped my arm. He saw Tossie, standing with Mrs. Mering and Jane, and started toward her, smiling.
“Horace!” A girl waved from another group of three ladies, and Horace raced over to her and began apologizing profusely for being late to meet them.
I looked guiltily over at Terence, thinking about the fateful meeting I’d made him miss.
The young man left with the three ladies, the sidewhiskered man grabbed up his own bags and stormed off, which left Crippen, now warily eyeing a station guard.
But even if he or the young man with the boater had been suddenly smitten, Tossie wouldn’t have noticed them. She was too busy planning her wedding.
“I shall carry orange blossoms for my bouquet,” she said, “or white roses. Which do you think, Terence?”
“ ‘Two roses on one stem on one slender spray,’ ” Terence quoted, looking longingly at a woman carrying a terrier, “ ‘in sweet communion grew.’ ”
“O, but orange blossoms have such a sweet smell.”
“There are far too many trains,” Mrs. Mering said. “They cannot possibly need all these trains.
Baine finally got everything and everyone on the train and arranged in an even more opulent compartment, and we started for Coventry. After a few minutes, a guard, this one much younger and actually quite good-looking, came along the corridor and punched our tickets. Tossie, deep in planning her trousseau, didn’t so much as glance up, and what made us think that when we got to Coventry she would even notice Mr. C, engrossed as she was in her wedding plans with Terence? What made us think she would even notice the bishop’s bird stump?
She would. She had to. The trip to Coventry had changed her life and inspired her great-great-great-great-granddaughter to make ours miserable.
After a few miles, Baine arrived, spread white linen napkins on our laps, and served us a sumptuous luncheon, which cheered everyone considerably (except possibly Baine, who had made approximately two hundred trips between first and second class, bringing us cold roast beef and cucumber sandwiches and Mrs. Mering a fresh handkerchief, her other gloves, her sewing scissors, and, for no discernible reason, Bradshaw’s Railway Guide).
Terence looked out the window and announced it was clearing off, and then that he could see Coventry, and before Jane and Baine had time to gather up everything and fold up Mrs. Mering’s lap robe, we were standing on the platform in Coventry, waiting for Baine to unload our luggage and find us a carriage. It had not cleared off, nor did it look like it was going to. There was a fine mist in the air, and the city’s outline was blurred and gray.
Terence had thought of a poem suitable to the occasion and was declaiming it. “ ‘I waited for a train at Coventry,’ ” he quoted. “ ‘City of three spires…’ ” He stopped, looking puzzled. “I say, where are the three spires? I only see two.”
I looked where he was pointing. One, two, and a tall box-like structure stood out against the gray sky.
“St. Michael’s spire is being repaired,” Baine said, struggling under a load of rugs and shawls. “The porter informed me that the church is undergoing extensive restorations at the moment.”
“That explains why Lady Godiva spoke to us now,” Mrs. Mering said. “The spirits’ resting place must have been disturbed.”
The mist deteriorated into a drizzle, and Tossie gave a screamlet. “My travelling dress!” she cried.
Baine appeared, unfurling umbrellas. “I have obtained a closed carriage, madam,” he told Mrs. Mering, handing them to Terence and me to hold over the ladies.