Sixpenny Stalls Read online

  Fortunately Caroline was used to dealing with irate gentlemen. She’d heard enough of them bellowing in her father’s house at dinner time not to be afraid of their noise. She pushed herself through their greatcoats until she was standing in front of the counter. ‘I want a seat on the next coach to Bury, if you please,’ she said.

  The clerk stopped barking and smiled at her. ‘Well now, Miss Easter,’ he said, ‘that’s something I can manage, Bury being a different matter altogether by reason of there being no proper hills thereabouts, you see, what some people don’t seem capable of understanding. On your father’s account was it, miss?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘Leaves in eight minutes,’ the clerk said as he wrote out her ticket. ‘Just nice time.’

  And sure enough the Bury coach was ready for the off, with ostlers at the horses’ heads and most of the passengers already aboard. There were three people inside and two bundled in rugs aloft. But, as the coachman was explaining loudly to two gentlemen in green top-hats, there was no possibility of making a start while the Oxford coach was still blocking his way. ‘He don’t think a’ the rest of us, not he, not that one. Stay here all day, we can, for all he cares.’

  The Oxford coachman stood beside his bulky vehicle as though he were guarding a gate. ‘I ain’t a-taking no coach through the Chilterns today,’ he said stoutly. ‘I done it once, an’ once is enough. You ain’t seen the state a’ them hills. It’s a wonder we wasn’t killed comin’ through them hills.’ He’d been complaining about it ever since he’d eased his snow-laden coach into the yard at a little after six o’clock that morning. ‘Them roads is treacherous.’

  Although there was less snow falling here in the shelter of the courtyard, it was foul underfoot, for the cobbles were awash with brown slush, horse dung and dirty straw. Caroline clambered up into the Bury coach at once, holding her mantle close to her knees to keep it as clean as she could. There was dry straw on the floor of the coach and one narrow seat still available squashed beside a very fat lady in a very damp cloak, and opposite two lugubrious gentlemen, one dressed entirely in brown and the other entirely in green, and both steaming like kettles.

  ‘Just in time,’ the brown gentleman said kindly, as the postboys folded up the steps and shut the door.

  ‘If they ever pluck up enough courage to make a start,’ the fat lady said, ‘which don’t seem at all likely to me, I must say, Mr Grinder.’

  ‘They are doing their best, my love,’ Mr Grinder said. ‘You must allow that, Mrs Grinder. They are doing their best.’

  ‘Such a fuss about a little bit of snow,’ the fat lady said. ‘Such babies.’

  ‘In all fairness, my love,’ her husband murmured, ‘it ought to be admitted that it is quite difficult to control a coach and four in bad weather, and this bids fair to be very bad weather.’

  ‘Babies,’ the fat lady said contemptuously. ‘Blethering babies the lot of ‘em. Give me the reins, that’s what I say, and you wouldn’t hear so much about snow,’ She gave a splendidly derisive sniff and turned her attention to Caroline. ‘Where do you hope to travel, my dear?’ she said. ‘Always allowing that they actually manage to get this coach out of the yard.’

  ‘To Bury, ma’am, to my grandmother.’

  ‘Who lives in Bury, I daresay?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. On Angel Hill. She is Mrs Easter, the newsagent.’

  Mrs Grinder was impressed, as people always were when Nan’s name was mentioned. ‘I know the lady,’ she said. ‘By sight, of course. Mr Grinder and I live in Bury too, you know. A very great lady I believe.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Caroline agreed happily, ‘she is.’

  ‘Do you travel alone, my dear?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘All alone?’ Mrs Grinder said, swivelling her face towards the child and opening her eyes wide, like a plump barn owl.

  ‘Yes, ma’am, all alone.’ How thrilling to be able to say such a thing.

  ‘There you are you see, Mr Grinder,’ the fat lady said with great satisfaction. ‘You see how the world changes. It is 1836 now, my love, and not the Middle Ages. If Mrs Easter the newsagent, who is a very great lady, will allow her own grandchild to travel alone all the way from Ludgate Hill to Bury St Edmunds, why then anything is possible.’

  There was a commotion in the yard.

  ‘Now what?’ the brown gentleman said.

  Caroline took her hand out of her muff and cleaned a little porthole in the steamy window beside her. ‘They’re moving the Oxford coach,’ she said.

  ‘Are we off then?’ the fat lady said.

  And off they were, their great wheels lurching through the slush, echoing under the arch, crunching over fresh-fallen snow in the street outside, past Mr Sparrow’s, the tea dealer, and Mr Parry’s the shawl manufacturer and the Italian warehouse, off on the road at last.

  Now, Caroline thought triumphantly, as the pole-chains clinked and the coach rocked from side to side, my adventure is beginning.

  Chapter 2

  It went on snowing all through the morning, with a steady, muffling, three-dimensional persistence. By one o’clock, when John Easter’s housekeeper, old Mrs Toxteth, took a little light lunch up to Caroline’s bedroom according to his instructions, the downfall was so heavy it was as dark as evening. She had to send a housemaid to light the lamps on the stairs and landings ahead of her so that she could see where she was going.

  She was surprised to find that the room was dark and empty. ‘Drat the child!’ she said to herself. ‘Where’s she gone?’

  The answer was on a card propped against the mantelpiece. ‘I have gone to Bury to be with Nan, signed Caroline Easter.’

  Mrs Toxteth went downstairs at once to consult Mr Wickham the butler.

  ‘There’s no point in telling Mr Easter,’ that gentleman said. ‘Not yet awhile. Not when she might turn up here again. I can’t see many coaches getting out in all this. We’ll send Joe out to see what’s what.’

  So Joe the boot-boy was sent on a tour of the coaching inns to make discreet inquiries. It took him nearly two hours and when he finally returned, his mouth was blue and his nose red and the front of his jacket was a solid mass of frozen snow. But he was bright with bad news.

  Miss Caroline had caught the mailcoach to Bury, he said, as the scullery maid skinned him out of his frozen coat and bundled him into a chair before the kitchen fire. ‘Left at a quarter to ten, so they say, though how they done it I can’t think. All the roads out a’ London are blocked off, bar one, so they say. Mails ain’t in from Dover, nor nowhere else fer that matter. Them as went out from St Martin-le-grand this morning ain’t been heard of since. One got stuck in a drift ten foot high, so they say. St Paul’s is snow all over, an’ there’s hosses fallen everywhere yer look. They was a-shootin’ one in the Strand. His legs was broke that bad you could see the bones all a-sticking out the flesh. An’ they’ve ‘ad a navalanche in the south some place. I can’t remember the name, Lemming or Lewes or some such. ‘T’anyrate it knocked down more’n a score of houses so they say. Ever so many dead.’

  ‘If you can’t say nothing more cheerful,’ Cook reprimanded, ‘you’d better hold your tongue.’

  ‘I was only tellin’ yer,’ Joe said, spreading out his hands to the blaze of the fire.

  ‘Well, don’t.’

  ‘What will Mr John say?’ the housekeeper grieved. ‘He’ll be worried out of his wits. It’s enough to send the poor man into a fit. Whatever possessed her to go wandering off in this weather? Where can she be, the foolish child?’

  The foolish child supposed she was on the road out of Sudbury, for that was the town they had left about an hour ago, but she might as well have been at the north pole. The cold was so extreme that there were sharp little icicles growing all around the windows inside the coach. It was dark and there was a blizzard blowing, and what with fresh snow falling thickly out of the unseen sky in one direction and fallen snow being swirled thickly into the air in another, the
re was such a tumult all around them it was impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction. The wind screamed above their heads and beat the sides of the coach with thunderous blows and made progress almost impossible. The horses could only manage to haul them forward intermittently and then at a very slow pace. It was worse than any journey she could ever have imagined. She was sick with cold and stiff with travel and beginning to feel anxious.

  Not that she allowed any of her fellow travellers to know how she felt. No, no, no, of course not. No Easter would ever admit to being anxious in front of strangers. That would have been infra dig. And Easters were never infra dig.

  They seemed to have been travelling for ever. It had taken them nearly four hours to get to the Saracen’s Head at Chelmsford and that was the shortest leg of the journey. By then the two outside passengers were so cold they decided enough was enough and booked in at the inn ‘until the weather improves’ which the landlord declared ‘uncommon sensible’.

  But as soon as they’d eaten their dinner, Mrs Grinder decided to press on. ‘We are not the sort of people to be daunted by a little snow,’ she said firmly, when her husband quailed that they might consider staying in Chelmsford themselves. ‘What is snow, when all’s said and done? Frozen water, that’s all snow is. And where’s the harm in that, I should like to know?’

  They were to discover the harm in it during the next six terrible hours as the weather worsened and the day darkened and they grew steadily more and more chilled and uncomfortable in their icicled carriage. At Braintree they took on two extra horses because the coachman said four weren’t sufficient, and several extra lanterns because by then the gale was blowing strongly and it was very dark indeed. But their team of six found the going as hard as four had done and fell into a walk whenever the coachman wasn’t whipping them. And the gale became a howling blizzard. And now they seemed to be stopping again.

  ‘Blethering fools,’ Mrs Grinder was saying into the darkness, when there was a rushing, crunching sound so near and so loud that they could hear it above the wind. The horses screamed and the coachman swore and the coach gave a lurch to the left and fell over sideways, tossing them all down together against the icicled window.

  Caroline found she was lying with her face pressed against the rough cloth of somebody’s greatcoat and with somebody’s hand clutching her about the neck. The darkness was total and terrifying and full of squirming flesh and frantic voices. ‘Dear God!’ ‘Oh, stop! Stop!’ ‘What is it?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Deuce take it all!’ She realized that Mrs Grinder was squealing, on a high-pitched incessant note like a stuck pig, and she could just make out the shape of an open mouth and the gleam of broken teeth a matter of inches below her. She struggled free, bracing her spine, grabbing at the now-sloping edge of the seat, treading on the bodies underneath her, and stood up as well as she could, bent-backed and leaning forward to keep her balance.

  The window below her was smashed, and snow was tumbling into the coach like white light to heap across the tilted seat and speckle the wriggling half-seen bodies of the two gentlemen and Mrs Grinder, who were writhing and heaving in the darkness like some terrible black-limbed octopus.

  Caroline was filled with revulsion at the sight of them. I must get out, she thought, panic rising in her throat. I can’t stay squashed in here with all these awful bodies or I shall suffocate. But how could she escape? One door was jammed tight against the ground and the other was tilted into the air. And Mrs Grinder was still squealing, which was making it very difficult to think.

  Caroline pushed and scrambled to the upper end of the seat, where she clung to the strap with one hand while she struggled to open the door with the other. It was terribly heavy and when she finally managed to push it into the air it swung back on her almost at once, jarring her arms. But she held on grimly, pushing it open again, and with one last effort swung both legs out of the coach.

  The snow drove against her face so strongly that for a few seconds she was blinded by it, seeing nothing but the sharp, black spikes of the flakes that were stuck to her eye-lashes. She brushed them away, on the back of her gloves so as to avoid getting her fingers wet, and peered into the murk again, aware that the lantern was still alight beside the door. But even so, her vision was obscured, for the light it gave was flickering and limited and the snow was swirling so violently around and below her that she seemed to be gazing down into a thick grey-white mist.

  ‘Coachman!’ she called into the howling air. ‘Help! Help!’

  There was a dark movement in the mist and a shape moved into the yellow light of the lantern, a stout, dependable shape, wearing the coachman’s flat dependable hat and his nice broad-shouldered cape. ‘Jump!’ he yelled at her. ‘I’ll catch you, never fear.’

  She jumped, at once and without thought, dropping into the mad air with her arms stretched towards him as though they were wings, as the wind screamed and the door crashed shut above her. And despite the force of her fall and the unsteadiness of the snow beneath his feet, the coachman caught her, just as he’d promised, and held her against his nice warm bulk for a few comfortable seconds until she’d found her feet and her balance.

  ‘What happened?’ she shouted, as he glanced up at the coach again.

  ‘Drift,’ he told her briefly. ‘Come straight down from that there field above us. Watch yer step. There’s more to fall.’ And he looked rather apprehensively over his shoulder at the space in front of the coach where the horses should have been standing. There was no sign of them in the swirling snowfall, although Caroline could hear frantic whinnying and the guard’s voice soothing, ‘Whoa there my beauties. Whoa there.’

  The coach door creaked open again and they both looked up and there was the dishevelled head of the gentleman in green sticking out into the void. His face shone silver behind the lantern as the snow veiled between them. ‘Oh I say!’ he said plaintively.

  ‘Soon have you down Mr Johnson, sir,’ the coachman called. ‘Could you bring yourself to jump like the little girl, do you think?’

  Mr Johnson mouthed words they couldn’t hear and disappeared back inside the coach.

  ‘Blamed fool,’ the coachman said, narrowing his eyes against the snow and his annoyance. ‘He’ll have to jump come the finish. There’s no way I can get up there.’

  Caroline left him to it and began to edge her way round the coach to find out what had happened to the horses. The wind was blowing with such force that she had to lean forward to make any progress at all and the snow was so deep and untrodden that with every step she took she sank into it up to her knees. But at least she could see where she was going, for somebody had hung two lanterns on the topmost branches of a blackthorn bush that was still spiking up out of the snow, and in the pools of light they cast she could see the dark figure of the guard bent over the mounded snow, hard at work with a spade. She trudged towards him, brushing the snow from her eyes again and aware that her skirts were heavy with wetness and that her feet were so cold she’d lost all feeling in her toes, but what she saw next made her forget her own discomfort completely.

  There had indeed been a snow-drift, and all six of their horses had been smothered by it. The guard was working feverishly to dig out the lead horse, who was buried up to his haunches and snorting with terror. He’d kicked his forelegs free and now he was putting up a desperate struggle to drag the rest of his body clear too, but the snow pressed and held and the more he fought it, the more he brought tumbling down upon him. His partner was in a worse state than he was, being buried up to his chest, and behind their heaving bodies, all that could be seen of the other four were straining necks, terror-strained eyes and flailing hooves. The weight of the fallen coach was plainly dragging them down and the pole had cracked in two. Caroline could see one broken end sticking up at a hideous angle among all those struggling limbs, just where it would be most likely to tear them. ‘Quick!’ she shouted to the guard. ‘Have you got another spade?’

  ‘By the lanterns,
’ he shouted back, without looking up or stopping his work.

  Of course, she thought, pulling the heavy implement out of the snow. ‘Where shall I dig?’

  ‘Shift it back as I dig it out,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to make another fall. Best keep clear of his feet. He’s mortal feared.’

  Even in the little light from the lanterns and with snow sticking to her lashes, she saw at once what was needed. For a few minutes the two of them worked together, he clearing snow in her direction, she flinging it as far behind her as she could. Despite the cold she was full of energy, charged with pity for the horses, fear of another snowdrift, and anger against that foolish Mrs Grinder, who was still in the coach, sobbing and wailing and making everybody feel afraid.

  Presently Mr Johnson appeared beside her, dangling the third spade and red-nosed with cold, and the guard shouted instructions at him to clear a space alongside the wheeler. ‘She’s got her forelegs clear, d’ye see. Might jump if you could give her enough ground to take hold.’ And the digging continued, endlessly, with occasional warnings yelled above the wind, and falling snow filling the spaces up again even as they were shovelling them out. Caroline was beginning to think that they would never do any good no matter how hard they worked, when suddenly the lead horse was clear, struggling up out of his imprisonment, his sides heaving and scattering snow, as Mr Johnson held his head and the guard cut the traces.

  Then all sorts of things happened. Mr Grinder and the coachman came puffing up to join them just as the second horse followed his companion out of the snow-pile. The poor creature was in a state of such terror that it took the combined strength of all four men to hold him, and the struggle went on for several very fraught moments, while he quivered and snorted and did his best to make a bolt for it. But at last he was still and the coachman went off to retrieve the two mail-sacks and to see if he could ‘get that plaguey woman to stow her noise’.