Emily Goes to Exeter (2 page)

‘What will you do with your fortune?’ asked Sir George. ‘Buy a little cottage? Retire?’

She clasped her hands tightly and looked at him as a simply wonderful idea entered her mind.

‘No, sir,’ said Hannah. ‘I shall travel. On the stage-coach.’

‘Where?’

Hannah threw out her hands, her sallow face flushed with excitement, those odd eyes blazing. ‘Anywhere.’

‘For the sake of travel. How strange.’

‘You see, sir,’ said Hannah earnestly, ‘I crave adventure.’

‘A journey on a stage-coach, particularly in winter,’ he said dryly, ‘is full of adventure – broken traces, snow-drifts, mud, highwaymen, footpads, and damp beds in the wayside inns.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The housekeeper’s odd eyes appeared to have lost all colour and become as bleak as the winter landscape outside.

‘But if that is your wish …’ he said quickly. ‘It means much to you?’

‘Oh, yes, sir.’ The eyes flashed green. ‘The Flying Machines, the excitement, the motion, the towns and cities. I shall travel to the ends of the earth.’

‘Stage-coaches do not go to the ends of the earth,’ he pointed out.

‘I know. But all over England. Bath, York, Exeter. Life, adventure … and hope, sir.’

‘How gloomy it must have been here for you,’ he said sympathetically. ‘Why not try one stage-coach journey and see how you fare?’

‘I do not want to seem mercenary,’ said Hannah. ‘But … but, how soon can I have some money?’

‘You can get an advance from Mr Entwhistle as soon as you like. I would advise you to bank your fortune.’ Hannah’s face fell.

‘Come now,’ he said gently, ‘you cannot travel the length and breadth of England with sacks of sovereigns.’

‘It’s just,’ said Hannah, twisting her hands in her lap, ‘that I do not know anything about banks.’ She bit
her lip, remembering the perfidy and cheating of that under-butler who had run off with her savings. ‘What if, sir, the banker should prove a cheat and run off with my money?’

‘Banks are not like that. Look, we shall go to the lawyer’s together tomorrow – I have to see him about a few things – and we will get you an advance. Then I shall take you to my bank and they will explain to you about cheques and bank drafts and all such complications.’

‘Sir, you are very good.’

‘Think nothing of it, Miss Pym. Now, as to dinner, tell cook to supply a simple meal. Have the servants who have been here longer than four years been told of their two hundred pounds?’

‘Yes, sir. Or rather, I told the footman and I assume he told everyone else.’

‘As I shall be closing this place up, I think Mr Entwhistle should advance them the money now or it might be very difficult to find them after the estate is sold and everyone has dispersed to different parts of London.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Harriet dutifully, although she was sure that any servant with the expectation of two hundred pounds would not stay away from the lawyers for very long.

‘That will be all.’

Hannah rose and curtsied and left. Her head was full of excitement and dreams. Where would she go first? Exeter, she thought. Instead of standing by the window watching the Flying Maching hurtle past, she would be on it herself!

At ten o’clock the following morning, Sir George sent for her and told her to make herself ready to go to the lawyers. He said he would meet her in the hall in half an hour.

Hannah ran to her room and wrenched off her black gown and cap. She was going out in the company of a gentleman and must look like a lady. She had one silk gown, a golden-brown colour. It was of old-fashioned cut with the waist being where a waist should be instead of up under the armpits as present fashion decreed. The day was bitterly cold. She hesitated and then ran up the stairs and through the long corridors to Mrs Clarence’s old rooms, which had been kept locked up. Mrs Clarence had fled only in the clothes she stood up in. Her clothes, never touched since the day she had gone away, hung in two large wardrobes.

With a feeling of great daring, Hannah selected a dark-blue velvet cloak and then lifted down a beaver hat. She was sure Sir George would give them to charity. She would find the right moment to tell him she had borrowed them and ask if she might pay for them.

She carried them back down to her room and put hat and cloak on. She hoped she looked like a lady. She felt she did. But when she met Sir George, a grand figure in a many-caped coat and shining top-boots, she felt just like a servant in borrowed clothes.

He helped her into his carriage exactly as if she had been a lady and Hannah began to feel a little more assured.

The well-sprung carriage bowled down the drive. Hannah looked out eagerly, rubbing at the misted glass with her glove and pressing her crooked nose against the window.

‘Miss Pym,’ he said, ‘it is like escorting a prisoner out of jail. Did you never leave the grounds?’

‘Hardly ever, sir. There was so much to do, you see. When I was younger, I would sometimes go to the play – that was when Mrs Clarence was here, but not for a very long time now.’

‘Have you no relatives? No friends?’

‘Such friends as I had, sir, were among the staff,’ said Hannah, ‘but they gradually all found posts in other households. My family were all killed in the smallpox epidemic of ninety-two.’

‘You were with the Clarences a long time?’

‘I started as scullery maid at the age of twelve. They were newly married then, Mr and Mrs Clarence. I rose up the ranks and became housekeeper eighteen years later. But it was shortly after that that Mrs Clarence ran away. She would have been about thirty-five years then, sir, and the footman only twenty-five.’ Hannah squinted down her nose in sudden embarrassment. He might consider it vulgar of her to regale him with such gossip.

Hannah turned her attention back to the moving scene outside. She was a gossip and knew it. Time after time, she had tried to stop her clacking tongue, and time after time it had got her into trouble. But not for ages. There had been no one really to talk to.

Hannah was very disappointed in the lawyer’s
office. It was dark and musty. Could do with a good scrub, thought Hannah with a sniff. She had somehow imagined that everywhere she went with Sir George would be grand and elegant. Mr Entwhistle gave her a bank draft for one hundred pounds. ‘It is the same bank as mine,’ said Sir George. ‘We are going there now, Mr Entwhistle, to arrange an account for Miss Pym. Now, there are various other things I would like to discuss with you …’

Hannah drifted over to the window which looked out on to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A fine snow was beginning to fall from the leaden sky. Then, as she watched, the flakes grew thicker, but still buoyant on a mischievous wind, scurrying in circles, swirling up to the window and spiralling down again. Five thousand pounds! The full impact of the legacy hit Hannah in all its glory. The spectre of the workhouse receded. She was a lady of independent means. She brushed the fine velvet of the cloak she wore with a complacent hand.

Sir George quickly completed his business and took Hannah to Child’s Bank. The bank was every bit as grand as Hannah could wish, but instead of feeling happy and confident she began to feel diminished. A friend of Sir George’s approached him while they were waiting for the bank manager. To Hannah’s confusion, Sir George introduced her to his friend, a Mr Cadman. She was so used to being invisible to the Quality that she stammered and blushed. ‘How goes the world?’ Sir George asked Mr Cadman. ‘Still gambling on everything and anything?’

‘Had the most miserable run of luck at White’s,’ said Mr Cadman. ‘Lost fifteen thousand guineas last night. But I shall come about.’

Hannah felt herself shrivelling. Here was a world in which gentlemen could lose such vast sums in one night. And she had thought five thousand pounds had raised her to the ranks of the gentry!

An usher came up and said the manager was ready to see them. Hannah’s mercurial spirits went soaring up again like a balloon. For the manager treated her with deference and seemed to find nothing odd in the fact that she knew absolutely nothing about banking. She apologized for her ignorance, but he smiled and said, ‘The ladies. The ladies. Never bother their pretty heads about such mundane things as money,’ and then proceeded to give her a simple lecture on how to draw money as and when she needed it.

He then rang the bell and ordered tea and biscuits. Hannah asked a few questions and drank tea. Her voice began to sound strange and ugly in her ears. She had trained herself not to drop her aitches and to watch her grammar but now she felt it had a coarse sound compared to the cool and incisive voice of Sir George and the polite, cultured tones of the manager.

She was disappointed when the hundred pounds was handed to her in notes and silver. Hannah distrusted bank-notes, weak, flimsy pieces of paper. She preferred the hard, comfortable feel of gold.

When they left the bank and climbed in the coach, Sir George hesitated before giving instructions to his
coachman to drive them back to Kensington. There was something very rewarding about taking this odd housekeeper about. There was a wonderment in her eyes as she looked about the busy streets of London, something childlike. On a sudden impulse he raised the trap and said, ‘Gunter’s.’

Hannah flashed a look at him and then sat very still, the rigidity of her body hiding the bubbling excitement within. Gunter’s was the famous pastry cook’s and confectioner’s in Berkeley Square. She wished that wretched and perfidious under-butler could see her now, Hannah Pym, entering the famous Gunter’s on the arm of a gentleman, sitting down and eating cakes, like the veriest aristocrat.

‘My brother must have been a sore trial to you in his latter years, Miss Pym,’ said Sir George.

‘Mr Clarence was never unkind or unreasonable, sir,’ said Hannah. ‘I felt for him. He had a broken heart. I do not know how Mrs Clarence, who was the soul of kindness, could have treated him so.’

‘I do not think hearts break,’ sighed Sir George. ‘My brother was always moody and depressed even as a young man. Letitia Renfrew, as she was before she married him, was a great reader of Gothic novels. What she saw in my brother was brooding passion, very romantic. She was sadly mistaken. He must have been a sore trial to her.’

‘Sir!’ Hannah looked at him in amazement, her eyes suddenly as blue as her cloak. ‘You surely do not condone such behaviour.’

He shrugged. ‘I can understand it. My brother was
set to become a recluse whether she stayed or went, in my opinion.’

‘Do you know where Mrs Clarence is?’ asked Hannah.

He shook his head.

‘So pretty and kind,’ mused Hannah. ‘She is probably dead by now.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘She was not brought up to work or even to scrimp and save. A footman’s wages, even if he got another post, could not keep her, and besides, footmen are not allowed to marry or even to pretend to be married.’

‘Letitia was a wealthy woman in her own right.’

‘But surely that money would become her husband’s when she married him?’

‘No, she was protected by the marriage settlements. She would have enough to keep herself and her footman in comfort for life. Does that shock you?’ he asked, looking at the housekeeper’s startled face.

‘I have been brought up to believe that the wicked are always punished,’ said Hannah primly.

‘Quite often not in this world. She was not wicked, only young and heedless, and tied to a man who must have made life seem like a desert.’

‘But she has to live with her guilty conscience,’ said Hannah.

‘Perhaps. Have another cake. So where do you plan to travel first?’

‘Exeter, sir.’

‘Exeter! In midwinter with the snow falling? Why Exeter? Why not Brighton? That’s a short run.’

‘But it is the Exeter Fly that I watch going past,’ said Hannah. ‘I want to be on it. I want to see the house from the road.’

He took out his card case and extracted a card. ‘I fear for you, Miss Pym,’ he said. ‘Take my card and come and see me on your return and let me know your adventures.’

‘Oh, sir, I should be most honoured. How soon may I leave?’

‘Let me see, Mr Entwhistle is coming in two days’ time to Thornton Hall to pay off the few servants who qualify for the two hundred pounds. All the servants may as well be paid off at the same time. I will put a caretaker and his wife into Thornton Hall to keep it aired and cleaned until I decide to sell it. This can all be arranged quite quickly and there is really not much more for you to do. Say, in a week’s time. Now what is troubling you?’ he asked, seeing those odd eyes of hers lose colour.

Hannah gave a genteel cough. ‘I have to confess, sir, that this cloak and hat are not my own. They belong to Mrs Clarence. She left all her clothes behind and … and … I could not … did not want to appear in servant’s clothes on this momentous day. I wondered, sir, if I might pay you for them.’

‘There is no need for that. Take what you wish, although no doubt everything is sadly outmoded. All your worries are over, Miss Pym. Relax and enjoy your cakes and look forward to your first journey on a Flying Machine.’

Hannah was by now Sir George’s devoted slave. No one in all her life had treated her with such
courtesy. He was a god. But some innate sensitivity made her mask her adoration. She feared that he might misread any admiration on her part and think this family servant was getting ideas above her station. She covertly looked around her at the well-bred faces, at the fearfully expensive clothes, at the snow whirling outside the leaded windows, at the piles of sweetmeats and pineapples and chocolate and fruit, and then at the high, arrogant face of Sir George Clarence and wondered if it were possible to die from sheer happiness. When they rose to leave, she shot quick little glances about her so that she might stamp the memory of this glorious afternoon on her mind for life.

To her disappointment, Sir George said he would not be staying at Thornton Hall. He would return in two days’ time with the lawyer.

Hannah went up the stairs to Mrs Clarence’s rooms that night when the other servants were asleep and took out coats and pelisses and mantles and hats and fine underwear like gossamer. Mrs Clarence had been slim as a young woman and of the same height as Hannah. Hannah did not want the other servants to know about Mrs Clarence’s clothes. They were already bitterly jealous of her because of her large inheritance and the present of such fine clothes would only add to their jealousy.