snowdrift chapter 1

 I am hoping to finish this and get published for Christmas, but I need the shop to do something to the computer. I'm a week ahead for posting as I couldn't write as fast longhand and then had to transcribe....

 

 

Chapter 1

 

“Is it very far to the next stop?” whispered Lydia to Adelaide Prentice.  “Only I need the convenience, and I am so cold, I’m scared I won’t be able to hold it.”

“I’ll hold my shawl, so you can use the chamber pot  from under the seat,” said Adelaide.

Lydia scrambled down with alacrity, to fish out the utensil, and Adelaide did her best with her shawl. 

“I’m tired of travelling,” whined Tommy. “I want to go home to Mama.”

Adelaide sighed. How to explain to the child that he could never go home?

“Mama is dead,” said seven-year-old Lydia, firmly, with the understanding her four-year-old brother failed to manage. “She’s in heaven and she can see you being bad.”

“Am not,” said Tommy.               

“Are, too,” said Lydia.

“Hush, both of you,” said Adelaide. “It’s this deep snow which makes it so slow, it’s a wonder the driver can get through at all.”

They settled down, mostly, looking like a pair of small angels with golden curls and big blue eyes. Adelaide knew that with her dark hair and aquiline profile she would never be taken as anything but a governess; and indeed, she intended looking for a post as such when she had escorted Lydia and Tommy to an orphan asylum for indigent gentlewomen. Surely they would have the compassion to keep Tommy as he was so young; what else might be done for him, Adelaide did not know. Closer to them in looks was the young girl, no more than sixteen or seventeen, travelling with her maid. The girl’s name was Susan, and her maid was Joan, and Susan had shyly volunteered to entertain the children with stories. And the other traveller inside the crowded coach, an apple-cheeked farmer’s wife, who had introduced herself appropriately as Mrs. Appleton, had a fund of songs and rhymes to take Lydia’s and Tommy’s minds off the exigencies of travel.

 

Susan Wedderburn felt sorry for the two children. Not that she pitied them for being orphaned, she had lost her own father at a similar age to Lydia, and her stepfather was a stern man, a pillar of the chapel, and her mother meekly gave way to him on every point. And Susan had no intention of marrying a man fifteen years her senior, and going with him to India as a missionary’s wife.

She had confided in Joan, that she planned to run away, and Joan had told her that she needed a maid with her. Susan hoped that she might get a job as a governess, perhaps in a school, so Joan was welcome too.

Joan Kent thought her mistress had rats in her barmbox if she thought a pretty young girl was going to be employed as a governess. Joan had rather more down-to-earth thoughts, being a good seamstress herself, and knowing that Susan was a fine embroideress.  She planned to suggest to Miss Susan that they would do better to find enough rent for an apartment somewhere unfashionable but not downmarket, like Henrietta Street, for Joan had a cousin in London, who wrote about such things, and to make millinery or embroidered panels to add to dresses. They would have to be careful as Henrietta St. was not far from Covent Garden, in case they were taken as whores, but careful dressing should help them avoid that opprobrium.  And Joan was determined that she would look after Miss Susan, who had no more idea, in Joan’s belief, than a day old kitten!

 

Martha Appleton thought it a shame that young things like Miss Prentice and Miss Wedderburn should be all alone in the world, and Miss Prentice, who could scarcely have reached her majority, should have to have sole charge of a pair of lively orphans. She was wrong here; Adelaide was actually twenty-two, but she had a youthful face, given to laughter.

Martha was heading for Slough, where resided her daughter, Sukey, married to a baker, and about to present him with their first child. Sukey’s Matt had no family of his own save some snuffy old uncle, and Martha did not trust any midwife to manage to deliver her first grandchild properly.  She had left lists of things to do for Appleton, in her round, careful semi-literate handwriting, and adjured him to call for aid from the neighbours if he couldn’t manage without her.

He would manage perfectly well, she was sure, having too much pride to ask for aid, but would enjoy himself spending more time in the local inn than he dared do when she was at home, complaining of being abandoned, all for a farrowing, and would be so pleased to see her back that his little holiday in the inn would be soon forgotten. It was, after all, only fair that he should have some pleasure out of her time away, even as she would enjoy shopping in shops holding more than might be found locally. If only it wasn’t so bitterly cold! She spared a thought of pity for the passengers on the roof, who had ceded the inside of the coach to the women.

 

On the roof, Jeremy Atherton was glad he was young and athletic. He was on his way to London, intending to do a bit of shopping, before travelling on to Oxford. He  had stopped vibrating with excitement about the time he started shivering with cold, and was not displeased to have undertaken a quixotic act of kindness to the thinly clad little boy, also on the roof. Jeremy had fished out his spare pair of woollen stockings – in case of getting his damp, courtesy of his mother – for the barefoot child, and had called on him to creep inside Jeremy’s capacious cloak. The little body had warmed up and helped Jeremy keep warm too.

“You’re a good man,” said one of his fellow travellers. “Reckon the nipper’d have died of cold by now without you.”

“Poor little sod, what else could I do?” said Jeremy. “I ain’t averse to all of us huddling up close, you know; and taking turns on the outside.”

“I ain’t so proud as to refuse that offer,” said the man. “Name’s Kirk, August Kirk; I’m in haberdashery.”

“We’d be warmer if we were all in haberdashery,” quipped Jeremy, eliciting a laugh from Kirk.

The other two also edged closer, once one man had taken the initiative.

“Jack Dempsey, Bow Street Orficer, and I’d be glad to shake your fambles if it weren’t too perishing to get them out o’ my pockets,” said the burly man.

“Strewth, a trap? That’s all we needs,” said the slightest of the four men. “Name’s Will Kenton, and if that don’t mean nuthin’ I’ll be well pleased.”

“I don’t care if you’re ruddy Dick Turpin, as long as you’re warm,” said Dempsey.

“He has the thinnest clothes and is slender; put him on the inside, next to the brat,” suggested Jeremy. This was arranged, and the men made sounds of satisfaction, their repositioning having made an almost immediate difference to their comfort.

 

Jems, inside the gent’s cloak, reckoned he had fallen on his feet.  He could easily have prigged the gent’s ticker, aye, and the whole turnip if he’d a mind, but it wouldn’t be gratitude to a man who probably had saved his life.  Jems had managed to acquire enough to travel one stop on the stage, on the roof, which was half price, to escape his cruel master. He had washed off as much of the soot as he could, and had found some clothes to fit him left out draped on a line, and stiff as a board with frost, to discard the filthy clouts he wore for climbing chimneys.

He stuck his head out.

“A fine gent like you needs a servant,” he said, brightly to Jeremy.

“I’m not really well enough off for a... oh, I see,” said Jeremy. “I can’t give you much more than your keep, you know, the pater’s sunk everything in getting me into university. I need to do well so I can become a lawyer.”

“I c’n run errands,” said Jems. “You gimme a meal a day an’ I’m your man.”

“I should jolly well hope I could give you more than one meal a day,” said Jeremy, indignantly.

“Well, then, I’d think you was a ruddy angel,” said Jems, curling up and going to sleep. It is a measure of how poor his lifestyle had been before that he had never been so comfortable.

 

 

Will Kenton was a sneak thief by trade, and was travelling anywhere which was away from York. He had a shrewd suspicion of Jems’s former occupation and that he was a runaway, having himself fled indenture from the parish poorhouse when he was placed in one of the mills.  His education was rudimentary, but he could at least read the numbers on paper money when he found it, and could probably made a better living with blackmail, had it not been against his moral code. He was a little dismayed to find himself sharing a coach roof with a trap, his idiom for a Bow Street runner, but if the runner was outside of London, he had been paid for to come. The motto was ‘if the gentleman calls, the gentleman pays,’ and anyone who needed a runner paid their wages of a guinea a day. A small fortune! Only those with good reputations got sent out of the metropolis.

“You might need an assistant,” said Will, to Dempsey.

“Ho, yes, and you think I cut my eye teeth yesterday,” said Dempsey.

“If I had a job, I wouldn’t have to steal,” said Will. “And it’s miserable climbing in this weather, and at risk of being impaled by ruddy icicles if they get shook off of the eaves.” He shuddered, having been recently missed by a monster icicle almost three feet long and two inches across.

Dempsey considered.

“Same arrangement as the gent made with the boy until I’m sure of you,” he said. “I feed and clothe you. Show your worth, and I’ll split the dibs.”

“I can live with that,” said Will.

 

Dempsey knew fine well that one of his companions was a thief, but he’d been paid for the job he had been sent to do, and he hadn’t been paid to take this man.  And when Will Kenton made his suggestion, Dempsey was ready to consider it. Every runner had his network of informants, but to have  thief working for him, and maybe able to get at enough evidence by breaking and entering covertly to make it worth looking further by permitted legal means, might be useful. Bow Street officers were never reckoned to be the most scrupulous observers of the niceties of the law when it came to doing their jobs; and Dempsey was one of Bow Street’s finest in that he never took a bribe unless he thought the cove had very little chance of being convicted anyway, and he never used entrapment.

 

 

Johnnie Took, the driver, was an older, more experienced man than Abram Mayell, the guard, and he knew about bad winters. And this the worst he had experienced personally.  Johnnie insisted that Abram sat beside him, not at the rear of the coach, to share body heat. He bespoke as a matter of course a hot brick at each stage, which he tucked, along with his feet, into a fur muff a female passenger had once left behind her. He carried extra blankets as well, folded on the seat when not in use, but wrapped around his legs and Abram’s on the box. He let Abram have his feet outside the muff, and reminded him to stamp them periodically. Johnnie shook his head. He had never seen such weather as this, and he had known a few bitter winters! The drifts were deep, and the nags plunged into and through them, and only by keeping them going could he make sure they did not stand, and freeze. His muffler was over his face so he did not take the icy air straight into his lungs, and he wondered if his Mary would be worried about him. Well, it stood to reason she would worry.  But he would not make the stupid mistake of taking alcohol, a man who took alcohol in the cold died of sweat freezing, his da had told him that, and he had stopped Abram from having a nip.

 

Abram Mayell had resented his coachman stopping him drinking, but every other bit of advice of the older man had been good, so he shrugged sullenly, and accepted the prohibition. He was wishing he had not agreed to swap duties with Davy Blunkett, the other man on this run.

He had made a few bob hiring out the extra blankets he had had the foresight to bring, and when they got into London, he planned to warm up by spending it on Kent Road Kitty.

 

Mr. Anthony Buckley stamped his feet to keep them warm.

“Demme, Neze, I’m thinking of pulling off the road and seeing whether the Satterthwaites will put us up for a few days,” he said to his man. Ebenezer Buck was by way of being valet, chief ostler, and man of all work for his master, who was also in some degree his cousin, a relationship delicately acknowledged in a certain permitted familiarity in private, and the unbending of the gentleman to share his coach blanket with his man in such inclement weather.

“Miss Penelope will be all over you like smallpox,” opined Ebenezer.

“Unfortunately, yes, but I can put up with that for the sake of the nags,” said Anthony. He threw a sideways smirk at Ebenezer. “And my man, as well, of course.”

“The nags are worth more,” said Ebenezer, dryly. He regarded the four matched bays. “They’re flagging, you know; if the stage hadn’t broken trail, they’d be done to a cow’s thumb.”

“I know it!” said Anthony. “Built for speed not stamina; I’ll be selling them when we’re next in town if Uncle Everett is going to keep me dancing attendance upon him, now I’m his heir after cousin Walter stuck his spoon in the wall. Damned silly idea to only have one son when you’re an earl! Seven daughters in six years, stands to reason he never got another son, never gave Aunt Daphne time to rest!”

“Well, at least he has you,” said Ebenezer.

“Small comfort if I’m to be tied to an earldom,” growled Anthony. “Hello, there’s the stage – it’s not going to make the corner,” he added, touching the rein to signal to his horses to slow.