Belinda Goes to Bath (3 page)

Inside the coach again, Mrs Judd began to sing and was violently hushed by her husband, on whom alcohol had produced a morose effect.

‘You are a fuddy-duddy,’ said Mrs Judd with a laugh. She obviously liked the sound of the words because she kept repeating ‘fuddy-duddy’ over and over again and then tried ‘duddy-fuddy,’ all interspersed with laughs and hiccups.

Mr Judd sat huddled in his corner and glared at his wife. Hannah considered there was going to be one almighty marital row that evening when the Judds were in the seclusion of their bedchamber.

They finally rolled into Reading and found their rooms in the Bear and Bull. It was an expensive hostelry. Glad as she was of the comfort, Hannah began to wonder uneasily how long her inheritance would last. Five thousand pounds had seemed a fortune just a short time ago. But it was lovely to finally sink down on a feather bed with silk hangings and stretch out on lavender-scented sheets.

Her eyes were just beginning to close when she heard the sound of a thump from the next door, followed by a wail of pain.

Hannah sat up in bed.

The Judds were in that room next door. If a married man wanted to beat his wife, there was nothing she or
anyone could do about it. But her heart went out to little Mrs Judd. There came the sound of another blow and then a thin, high wail of fear.

‘For what I am about to do, God,’ prayed Hannah Pym, ‘please forgive me.’

She rose and dressed and went downstairs and ordered two tankards of mulled wine. She carried the steaming tankards up to her room. Throwing back the lid of her trunk, she took out a box in which she kept various medicines. Into one of the tankards, she poured a dose of laudanum.

She then carried the tray next door and knocked. Mr Judd in nightcap and dressing gown opened the door. Mrs Judd was a huddled, sobbing figure on the bed.

‘I heard Mrs Judd cry out and was afraid she was suffering from nightmares. Is that the case?’ demanded Hannah, steely eyed.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr Judd testily.

‘I have brought you both some mulled wine,’ said Hannah in governessy tones. ‘It is the best thing to ensure a tranquil sleep and I shall stay here until you have both drunk it.’

She turned the tray deftly so that the drugged drink was nearest to Mr Judd. ‘Thank you,’ he said sourly. He was anxious to get back to the pleasures of tormenting his wife. He drained the tankard in one gulp and then took the tray from Hannah. ‘I will take this to my wife,’ he said. ‘Good night.’

Hannah followed him into the room and neatly caught the tray as he began to weave and stumble.
‘What the deuce?’ he mumbled. He fell into an armchair beside the fire and began to snore.

Hannah walked over to the bed and patted Mrs Judd awkwardly on the shoulder. ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Do not cry any more. Your husband is asleep. Do not move him. He has had too much to drink.’

Mrs Judd sat up and dried her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I am very weak and silly … about nightmares, I mean.’

‘Not silly at all,’ said Hannah compassionately. ‘Do try to sleep, Mrs Judd. We have a long journey tomorrow and perhaps a dangerous one if that wretched coachman don’t sober up.’

‘If only some highwayman would rise up from a hedgerow and shoot me,’ said Mrs Judd drearily. She lay down and buried her face in the pillow. Hannah looked at her sadly and then went out and quietly closed the door.

2

When the passengers struggled back aboard The Quicksilver in a freezing black dawn, the snow was still falling steadily. But there was no wind. Wind was what caused accidents to stage-coaches, wind that hurled snow up into high drifts. Miss Wimple, rather red about the nose and eye after the libations of the day before, said the weather was all the fault of the government’s encouraging balloonists. If God had meant us to fly, she insisted, he would have given us wings. It stood to reason that all these balloons bouncing into the clouds had disturbed the atmosphere and caused the snow to fall. Hannah’s comment
that she had never heard of a ballooning expedition in winter was treated with disdain.

Mr Judd sat groggily in his corner. His wife poured a little cologne in a handkerchief and bathed his brow; he smiled at her weakly and said he would never touch strong drink again.

‘And neither will I,’ declared Miss Wimple. ‘And as for you, miss,’ she went on, rounding on Belinda, ‘you should never have had any in the first place.’

‘At the latter stages yesterday,’ said Belinda, ‘Miss Pym and I were drinking lemonade, which is why we are the only two who look at all human this morning.’

‘Do not address your elders in such a pert manner,’ said Miss Wimple and then put a hand to her head and groaned as the guard tootled ferociously on the yard of tin and the coach moved off into the snow.

‘I wonder how our coachman is faring this morning,’ said Hannah.

‘Disgraceful young churl,’ commented Mr Judd wearily. ‘He looked as if he had slept in his clothes.’

After Reading, the Bath road ran through flat pastoral country with barely a rise, past Sipson Green, where they changed horses again at the Magpie, and into Buckinghamshire, where it became broad, flat, and comfortable until Newbury. The day remained grey and threatening. There was no cheerful dawn, only the remorseless snow, which had begun to thicken. The horses had slowed to a walking pace. The bricks that had been placed on the floor of the coach that morning lost their heat and the miserable passengers began to shiver. Mr Judd lit the travelling
lamp, not because he needed the light, but in the hope that it might disperse some of the biting cold.

‘We should have more passengers inside to keep us warm,’ said Hannah, trying to lighten the gloomy atmosphere when they alighted at the next stage. Everyone seemed to have forgotten the vow to give up strong drink, for every one of them was downing Nantes brandy like a trooper.

‘Can be miserable, that can,’ said the guard, a small, tough, wizened Cockney who had been passing their table and heard Hannah’s remark. ‘I mind when Jack Stacey was driving the Bath mail out o’ London. Well, as you know, the mails can only take four inside and a tight squeeze it is. One night, when the mail was about to leave and was full, a gentleman who was a regular customer come up to Jack and insisted on getting in, for he had to get to Marlborough. Stacey held a council with the bookkeeper, observing that it wouldn’t do to offend a regular. At last, the problem was solved by the gentleman jumping in just as the mail was leaving. What a squeeze that was. At the Bear at Maidenhead, where they changed the horses, Jack, he opens the coach door and says, “There’s time for you to get a cup of coffee here, gentlemen, if you’d like to get out.” No one moved, for, don’t you see, they was fearful they wouldn’t fit back in again. And they wouldn’t budge at any of the other stages. Jack says they were all as silent as the grave and that’s how they went on for seventy-four miles.’

‘And how is our coachman today?’ asked Hannah sharply.

‘Tolrol’,’ said the guard with a grin. ‘Flash Jack can handle the ribbons as good as any man in England, drunk
or
sober.’

‘I would rather have him sober,
if
you don’t mind,’ said Hannah crossly. ‘And is it not folly to travel on in this storm? If there are any ruts or obstacles in the road, he will not be able to see them.’

‘Oh, all’s right and tight, lady. No wind. Can’t move when there’s wind.’

Hannah sniffed and pulled her nose. Outside the leaded panes of the window lay a winter’s scene. Snow sparkled on roads and roofs, lending beauty to the inn and to a jumble of Tudor houses. It would be pleasant, thought Hannah, to stay where they were and enjoy the view and wait until the snow stopped falling.

Dinner was served, a heavy inn dinner of roast beef, game pies, trifles and fruit. Hannah and Belinda drank lemonade, but Hannah noticed that Miss Wimple was drinking fortified wine, occasionally giving her lips genteel dabs with a lace handkerchief.

Reluctantly they all filed out again. Mr Judd was once more bullying his wife and she was doing everything she could to placate his temper, which, of course, only made it worse.

She should stand up to him, thought Hannah. It is that cringing, fluttering manner of hers. Such a manner brings out the beast in men. She remembered a chambermaid, Lucy, a shy, fair, pretty, fluffy girl. But she had had the same air as Mrs Judd and the butler was always shouting at her and the footmen seemed to delight in making her cry; even the
lamp-boy put a dead rat in her bed. She was one of life’s natural-born victims. Hannah, tired of fighting Lucy’s battles, had found her work in the home of an elderly lady renowned for the sweetness of her temper.

But when she had called on Lucy on one of her rare days off, it was to find the girl red-eyed and broken in spirit. She said the other servants tormented her and her mistress shouted at her.

Hannah shook her head over the memory. It was amazing how fear encouraged bullying, as if the human race could smell it, like dogs.

‘Do you read romances?’ Belinda asked Hannah.

‘No, I do not,’ said Hannah roundly. ‘A great deal of pernicious rubbish.’

Miss Wimple gave her an approving smile.

‘Because,’ went on Hannah and lost Miss Wimple’s favour, ‘what goes on in real life is more weird and wonderful than any romance.’

‘How so?’ asked Belinda, sensing a story.

Hannah settled her head comfortably against the squabs. ‘Two miles out of Reading and on the right of the road’, she said, ‘is Calcott House. It was the home of Miss Kendrick, a rich and whimsical lady. There is a poem about this adventure, but I can only remember scraps of it. In any case, this Miss Kendrick had received many offers, all of which she refused, and it was reported she hated all men, when one day,

‘The young gentleman was Benjamin Child, Esquire. To him Miss Kendrick sent a challenge to a duel in Calcott Park. She did not assign any cause why Child – if such should prove to be his lot – should be skewered like a chicken. The barrister took the challenge seriously and turned up on the duelling ground, sword in hand. He found Miss Kendrick masked and waiting for him, also with a sword in her hand.

‘In fact, he suggested point-blank that she should unmask, not, perhaps, caring to take a pig in a poke. The lady, however, remained firm and incognito, when the intrepid Child, perhaps fortified with a view of the imposing Calcott House rising above the trees, told the lady he preferred to wed her rather than try her skill. Upon which, in the twinkling of an eye, he found himself

– in fact, master of Calcott. And that all happened in 1712, less than an hundred years ago.’

‘I would think you were making it all up,’ said Belinda, ‘except that the poetry is so bad. There is something so honest and worthy-sounding about bad poetry.’

‘What is wrong?’ asked Hannah sharply. Mrs Judd had begun to sob.

‘Cease your caterwauling this instant,’ snapped her husband.

‘I h-have a p-premonition of disaster,’ sobbed Mrs Judd.

‘Fiddlesticks!’ said Hannah, finding to her horror that she, too, was capable of being nasty to the inoffensive Mrs Judd.

‘Well, I feel it. Here!’

She touched the region of her heart.

At that moment, the pace of the coach began to quicken. Hannah drew aside the red leather curtains, which she had drawn to shut out the vista of bleak snow. The snow was still falling thickly, but the horses were moving at a great rate.

She let down the window and, leaning out as far as she could, screwed up her eyes and tried to make out what was happening on the box. The coachman was hunched up, and with a sudden jolt of alarm Hannah noticed the reins had slipped from his hands.

‘The coachman has fallen asleep,’ she said. ‘Someone has got to rouse him, or the guard.’

Mrs Judd screamed with alarm. Mr Judd opened his window and began to shout to the guard. The guard shouted something back and Mr Judd roared that the coachman had fallen asleep. They heard a
thump on the roof as the guard moved from his seat at the back to join the coachman on the box.

Hannah hung out of the window again. The snow thinned slightly and she saw a curve of the road ahead.

Right across it, blocking the road, stood a hay wagon. She put up the window. ‘We are for it!’ she shouted. ‘Down in the straw!’ And Hannah crouched down on the floor of the carriage just as the coach swung off the road. They were thrown right and left. There were cries and sobs and swears and then the coach seemed to take flight. There was a short moment of silence and then, with an almighty crash, the whole coach landed in a river.

The Marquess of Frenton was riding along the marches of his estate. Despite the weather and the time of year, he considered it his duty to see that his property was not being neglected and that the high stone walls that bound the park had not been breached by either animals or humans.

He would not admit to himself that the real reason for the expedition was because of his house guests. With a view to choosing a bride, he had invited Miss Penelope Jordan and her parents, Sir Henry and Lady Jordan, to stay. He had danced with pretty Penelope several times during the Little Season in London. She was a stately brunette with cool, calm, chiselled features and moved with great elegance. She was very, very rich, or rather, her parents were, which meant she would come with a good dowry. Some
element of caution had prompted him to invite other house guests so as to make his motives not seem too obvious until he had fully made up his mind. But the other guests had not arrived, being stopped from travelling by the hard weather. It was not that he really had found Penelope any less suitable. The marquess was a fastidious man. He found her as elegant and well bred as ever. It was her parents’ assumption that the knot was as good as tied that grated on him.

The marquess’s late father had been a noisy, spend-thrift gambler and drunk. His mother’s last words as she had followed her husband to the grave some four weeks later had been, ‘Do not blame your father, my son. Men were ever thus.’

So the marquess at the age of twenty had found himself saddled with monstrous debts and a near ruin of a castle. He had worked hard and long, experimenting with new farming methods, taking what little capital he had and using it carefully on the stock exchange. The hostilities with the French had brought about a rise in the price of wheat, and slowly his fortunes began to turn. Now, at the age of thirty-four, he was a very wealthy man. His estates and farms were the envy of all less hard-working landowners. He had restored his ancestral home, Baddell Castle, to its long-forgotten glory. He loved fine statuary and fine paintings and the most delicate of china. His idea of a wife was someone who would grace his home like a work of art.

Hard physical labour in his younger years,
combined with a fastidious mind, had kept the more rampant lusts at bay. He had begun briefly to take pleasure when it was offered by, say, some fashionable widow at the London Season who knew very well what she was doing and did not have a heart to break. Succumbing to broken hearts, the marquess’s observations had led him to believe, was something females were prone to do.

He was a tall man with a trim waist, square shoulders, and a lithe, athletic figure. He wore his hair powdered and confined at the nape of his neck with a ribbon. His face was high-nosed and rather stern and he had silvery-grey eyes that usually did not reflect what he was thinking.

He came to a wooded close overlooking the river Thrane that bordered his land. To his amazement, he saw a stage-coach coming down the opposite bank. A little guard was on the back of one of the horses and was hacking the traces free. The team of horses swerved right, clear of the careening coach. The coach wheels struck an outjutting ledge of rock. For one horrifying moment it sailed clear off the ledge and seemed to hang in the snowy air. And then it plunged straight down into the icy stretch of the river.