Fourpenny Flyer (14 page)

‘Aye, so it may have been. For
her
,' Mrs Sowerby said grimly. ‘For a young girl with absolutely
no
prospects,
absolutely no prospects
, mark me, 'tis quite another matter, let me tell 'ee. I suppose he paid you pretty compliments to turn your silly head.'

‘No indeed, Mama. He joined us so as to care for Miss Pettie.'

‘Joined you?' Mrs Sowerby asked, and her tone was horrible.

‘He escorted us home, Mama,' Harriet faltered, feeling impelled to explain.

‘Ho, did he?' her mother said, rigid with righteous indignation. ‘Well of course he did, you silly girl. We all know about rich young men like him. That's just the sort of thing he would do. You keep well out of his way, my girl. Men like Mr Easter are
dangerous
, let me tell 'ee. They
ruin
poor girls.
Ruin
them as soon as look at 'em. It is always the way. Have nothing more to do with him, do you hear?'

It was horribly unfair. ‘He was uncommon kind to – to Miss Pettie,' Harriet said, defending him, but as meekly as she could. This was too cruel. Was she really not to see him again?

Her mother raised her voice and her eyebrows immediately. ‘Do you
argue
with me, child? Do you pretend to know better than your
own
mother?'

Harriet retreated at once. ‘No, no Mama,' she said. ‘Of course not.' Cruel or not her mother had to be obeyed.

‘And so I should think,' Mrs Sowerby said, mollified by the ease and speed of her victory. ‘Then you will do as you are told, will you not?'

‘Yes, Mama.' What else could she say? Perhaps she could find a way round it?

‘Very well,' Mrs Sowerby said, using her broom again with renewed vigour. ‘Let us return to our duties and hear no more about it. You are back now so you'd best get to work. There's a fire needs lighting and then you can scour that doorstep. I've never seen it in such a filthy state. From
the look of it, half the world has been treading upon it during these last few days. I turn my back for five minutes and this is what I get, you see. I'm sure
I
never trod on anybody else's doorstep in all my born days. Oh there's no justice in the world. Well, don't just stand there. What are you waiting for?'

As Harriet went wearily off to fetch the bucket and rake out the fire, Mr Easter's letter shifted and scratched inside her bodice. And for a fleeting second, she was comforted because she had such a secret.

Mr Easter himself was as hard at work as she was. Early on Thursday morning news came through from France that the French army had deserted their new King Louis XVIII en masse and gone over to their old emperor. This time
The Times
printed twice its usual number of papers and John used twice his usual number of fourpenny flyers, and the energy expended at the Post Office that morning was enough, according to Billy, ‘to haul a thousand coaches'.

‘Mama will be home tomorrow,' he said. ‘She'll be surprised at all this. I can't imagine what she'll say.'

But John didn't care what she said. He already knew that he had made his point. He'd had two letters that very morning from his shopkeepers in Ipswich and Reading. Their sales had nearly doubled, they said, ‘thanks to the prompt arrival of the papers, some hours ahead of all other shops in the area'. Now they were suggesting that their daily orders should be doubled to keep pace, ‘whilst the bad news lasts'.

‘What d'you think she'll say when she knows what you've been doing?' Billy insisted.

But she knew already.

‘First with the news again I see,' Sir Joshua Barnesworthy called, striding across the terrace at Holly Hall and waving a copy of
The Times
at Mrs Easter.

‘Bad is it, Josh?' his cousin Peter drawled, holding out his hand to receive the paper.

‘Uncommon bad,' Sir Joshua said. ‘See here. Dratted Frenchies gone over to the enemy, so they have.'

‘Do I not recall that Mr Bonaparte was once crowned the Emperor of the French?' Lady Barnesworthy teased. ‘Or am I mistaken, my love?'

‘Damned foreigners, the lot of 'em,' her husband said cheerfully. ‘Still we beat the beggers once, so I daresay we shall do it again.'

‘How do you manage to get the papers here to us so quickly?' Lady Barnesworthy asked, turning to Nan as the three men studied the news. ‘'Tis an impressive achievement. Do you not think so, Mr Brougham?'

‘Most impressive,' Mr Brougham said, smiling at the two women as they stood before him in the pale sunshine of that March afternoon. ‘And intriguing, too. You must tell us how 'tis done, Mrs Easter.' A handsome woman, he was thinking, admiring her, for the long straight cut of her fasionable blue coat set off her figure to advantage, and the white fur with which it was trimmed at her throat and her wrists certainly enhanced her colouring. Ruddy cheeks and brown eyes had always appealed to Mr Brougham. It was what had attracted him to his first wife, poor creature.

‘Well as to that,' Nan said, grinning at him, ‘that's my son's doing, so 'tis. I can only guess at the workings of it, especially from this distance.' She had no intention of
revealing such a valuable trade secret at a country house party. Not even at a country house party as aristocratic as this, and to a gentleman as polite and proper as Mr Brougham.

Mr Brougham smiled at her again, offering his arm as they continued their promenade around the garden. ‘You give him full credit for it, I see,' he observed.

‘Of course,' she said. ‘Fair's fair, Mr Brougham. Johnnie did the work, so Johnnie gets the glory.'

‘There are many would disagree with such sentiments,' he said.

‘Then they would be foolish,' she said firmly. ‘There's a deal more to a business than knowing what and when to sell.'

‘I have a friend in the coaching trade who maintains much the same thing,' he told her. ‘According to him, knowing how and when to reward, and how and when to rebuke, is the great art of running a business. Name of Chaplin. They call him the coach king.'

‘I know him well,' she said. ‘A man of sense.' But she was thinking, if you know Mr Chaplin then 'tis likely you will know of my affair with Calverley Leigh. And the thought annoyed her, because she would rather her new aristocratic friends knew as little as possible about her liaison with that gentleman. For Calverley Leigh, despite his charming personality and the undeniable pleasure of his company, had been a gambler and a wastrel too, and now that they had finally parted she was rather annoyed with herself for having spent so much of her time on him.

Since she'd taken up residence in her prestigious house in Bedford Square, Nan Easter had been moving up in society. It was no surprise to her, nor to her friends, nor to those of her new neighbours who had enjoyed her lively hospitality. Some people frowned upon her, of course, because they knew her history and spoke of it in scathing terms whenever her success was mentioned.

‘She was nothing more than a servant girl, my dear. Heaven knows what Mr Easter ever saw in her! His family cut him off, you know, for marrying her. What else could they do? And they do say Sir Osmond Easter refuses to
receive her to this day. And then, of course, she took up with a lieutenant in the cavalry who was no better than he should have been. It was quite a scandal. And now she drives about town in a closed carriage, if you please, for all the world as if she were one of the gentry. Really, the presumption of the nouveau riche!'

And so she did and a very fine closed carriage it was, with the company sign painted boldly on its sides and a fine pair of greys to draw it. And although she knew that people gossiped about her she was too busy and too sensible to comment on it. She was extending her trade and growing steadily more and more wealthy and secure, and that was what mattered to her. But this invitation to Holly Hall had been a great surprise. And a surprise made doubly sweet because she knew how much it would infuriate her enemies.

For Holly Hall was the country seat of Sir Joshua Barnesworthy. And Sir Joshua Barnesworthy was a friend of the Earl of Harrowby, no less, who was a British envoy to the Congress of Vienna, a man who negotiated with Wellington and Talleyrand. And if the Earl of Harrowby were to take her up, as the gentry noted at once, the rest of them would have to respect her. It was scandalous. Fancy inviting a woman like her to a house like that!

Actually the invitation had been sent because Mr Brougham suggested it, for Lady Barnesworthy was a secret and most successful matchmaker. From time to time she included among her dinner guests two people who wished to be introduced to each other, or one, as was rather more often the case, who wished to make himself known to a person as yet admired from afar. It was done with great discretion and absolutely no comment at all, and had resulted in several extremely useful marriages. And it was being done again on this particular occasion.

She was a little surprised when her dear Frederick first asked her to invite Mrs Easter to her next house party, for she wouldn't have thought that the two of them would have had anything in common. After all he was related to the great Brougham family of Westmoreland, and had stern aristocratic features, being roman-nosed and
grey-eyed and really quite tall although with an impressive embonpoint, as you would expect, while she was a commoner, and looked it. In addition to that, of course, he'd been quietly and successfully married to her own well-born cousin until the poor lady died of the smallpox, while Mrs Easter had been gallivanting about the town with her very common lover.

Nevertheless she did as he asked and was surprised to see how much the two of them seemed to be enjoying each other's company, comforting herself that it would be unlikely to go any further, given the lady's circumstances.

She would have been a little piqued if she could have overheard their conversation after dinner that night.

The rest of the company had adjourned to the drawing room, where two great fires were blazing and the tables had been set ready for cards. But Nan had walked quietly off in the opposite direction towards the library and, after a discreet pause, obstensibly to smoke a cigar with his old friend Sir Joshua, Frederick Brougham had followed her.

She was sitting at the writing desk beside the fireplace, with candles lit to right and left of her, busily composing a letter. He could see the energetic quivering of the ostrich plumes in her headdress and hear the purposeful scratching of her pen from where he stood in the doorway.

She had removed her long gloves, tossing them carelessly across the back of her chair, and her bare arms were as white as pearl in the candlelight. The sight of them gave him an unexpected frisson of surprise and pleasure. They looked so deliciously naked and there was something primitive about them, too, an honest, untramelled urgency that roused his admiration and stirred desire in him for the first time since his wife's death nearly sixteen months ago.

He walked towards her, casting about in his mind for some light, quizzy remark that he could use to open a conversation and ease his emotions.

‘You keep in touch with your company, I see,' he said. ‘Even from this distance.'

She didn't look up. ‘Aye,' she said, ‘I do. War makes work for news-sellers, Mr Brougham. And, besides, my
son has done well this week, and 'tis only proper that I write and tell him so.'

Her hands were small and rough and short-fingered, a worker's hand's, and the complete opposite of the narrow long-fingered languid pallor that women of his class aspired to. He admired her more than ever.

‘It is a sadness to me that I return to London tomorrow,' he said. ‘I have enjoyed my stay here immeasurably, Mrs Easter.'

‘And so have I,' she said, looking up at him at last, brown eyes laughing.

‘I have disturbed your work,' he said, inclining his body apologetically towards the desk and the letter. ‘That was most remiss of me. Pray do not allow me to disturb you further.'

‘'Tis done,' she said, folding the paper. ‘Now it only needs to be taken to the mail coach. There is a servant comes to the library every evening for that very purpose.' And she dusted the palms of her hands against each other, swish, swish, dismissing her work and his apology.

‘If that is the case,' he said, ‘we might converse.'

She was putting on her gloves again. ‘We might indeed.'

So they sat in two armchairs before the fire with her timely newspaper on a little low table between them and they talked; about the house party, about their fellow guests, about the house and its grounds; and, finally, about themselves.

‘I must confess,' he said gallantly, ‘that one of the reasons I prevailed upon my cousin to invite me to this party was the hope that I would be introduced to you.'

Her answer was very surprising. ‘Aye,' she said. ‘I thought as much. We've been thrown into each other's company a deal too often for mere coincidence.'

‘You must blame our hostess for that,' he said rather uneasily, ‘I merely requested her invitation, not that any further action be taken by it. I trust you have not been too greatly incommoded.'

‘I been amused,' she said, ‘seeing I en't never been victim to a matchmaker before.'

‘Oh come now, Mrs Easter,' he said, ‘that is rather
strong, is it not? A victim? Surely not. Whatever their faults matchmakers are well-meaning.' His own marriage had come about as the result of the efforts of two matchmaking aunts and he had never had cause to regret it.

‘A victim,' she said firmly. ‘I never use a word unless I mean it. To choose a partner is the most delicate decision. That you'll allow, I dare swear.' And, as he signalled his agreement with a smile, ‘Well then, that being so, 'tis plain folly, to my way of thinking, to allow an outsider to make the choice for you.'