Death at Dawn (2 page)

Two mornings before I’d woken up on a fine Sunday in the inn at Dover, with nothing in the world to cause me a moment’s anxiety. Nothing, that is, beyond whether my aunt might have sent one of her servants or even a tame curate to recapture me. It was a small side room, the cheapest they had, looking out over the stableyard of the larger hotel next door. I remember standing barefoot at the window with my woollen mantle round my shoulders, looking down at the sunlit yard and the grooms harnessing two glossy bays to a phaeton, feeling well satisfied with myself and the world in general. My escape from the dim, sour-faced house at Chalke Bissett had gone entirely to plan. Even before the servants were up I was on my way across the field footpath to the village, knowing the area well enough by then to guess that there’d be a farm cart
taking fruit and vegetables into Salisbury. The driver said he’d take me there for a kiss, but I bargained him down to one shilling and insisted on sitting in the back, along with withy baskets full of strawberries and bunches of watercress.

From Salisbury, I took a succession of stage and mail coaches, much as I’d planned from the road book giving coach routes and times in my aunt’s small library. Her road book was out of date, like everything else in the house, so some of the times were wrong and I had to wait for hours in the street outside various inns, trying hard to be inconspicuous in my mantle that was too heavy for a warm June day and the battered leather travelling bag that I would not allow anybody else to carry because I was unsure how much to tip. Salisbury to Winchester took four hours and two changes of horses. At Winchester I managed to secure the last outside place in another coach that took me all the way across Hampshire.

It was a glorious evening, flying along on the top of the coach behind four fast horses with the scent of hay and honeysuckle in the air, haymakers out late with their scythes and rakes and the sun sinking in the west behind us, throwing their long shadows out over the shorn fields. I felt like singing, only it would have drawn the attention of the other outside passengers, a clerical-looking man with a cough and a farmer and his wife, loaded with packages that included a live duck in a basket with its head sticking out complacently, as if it too were
enjoying the sweet air. We arrived at the changing point of Hartfordbridge in the early hours of the morning, when it was already getting light, so that spared me the worry and expense of a room in the inn. I simply sat on the edge of a horse trough, wrapped my mantle round me and ate the last slice of bread and butter I’d taken from my aunt’s kitchen.

From Hartfordbridge it was a long and expensive day’s journey into Kent and Tunbridge Wells. In this fashionable place, spending the night on the edge of a horse trough was out of the question, but luckily I’d made friends with a lady on the journey, travelling to meet her husband from a boat at Chatham. We shared a room and a large but lumpy double bed at a modest inn. Over a supper of cold beef pie and two pots of tea – we were thirsty because the roads were dusty from the dry weather – she glowed with happiness at the idea of seeing her husband again.

‘And I’ll soon be seeing my father,’ I said.

Now I’d put two good days’ travelling between myself and my aunt, it seemed safe to talk about myself.

‘Has he been away long?’

‘Only since September.’

It seemed longer. I remember that my companion asked the waiter if he had any news of the king. He shook his head gravely, implying that it was not good. King William was elderly and ill, probably dying, but that was not causing any great outbreak of grief among his subjects. I thought he was probably one of the dullest
men ever to sit on the throne of England and in any case our family’s sympathies were far from royalist. But I said nothing for fear of offending my companion, who was a kind woman.

Next morning we breakfasted together on good bread and bad coffee, then she took the coach for Chatham while I passed some time looking round the town, admiring the fashions and waiting for the coach that would take me on the last stage of my journey to Dover.

I reached the port in the evening. I knew it quite well, from the occasions when I’d crossed to the Continent with my father and Tom, but I’d never been there on my own before. I stood at the inn where the coach had put me down feeling for the first time scared at what I’d done. Then, determined that my father should not come back to find a feeble young woman, I adjusted my bonnet, slung my mantle over my arm and picked up my bag. I was wearing my second-best dress in plain lavender colour, with tight-fitting sleeves and a little lace at the neck. My bonnet had suffered from travelling outside and my hair felt plastered with dust, but I hoped I looked respectable, though travel-worn. The inns and hotels along the seafront and near the harbour were too expensive and conspicuous. If my aunt sent somebody after me, those were the first places he’d try. I walked along a dimly remembered side street, at right angles to the sea, and hit on an old inn called the Heart of Oak that looked as if it
catered for the better class of trades-person rather than the gentry. The dark panelled hall smelled of beer and saddle leather. A brass bell stood on a counter. I rang and after some time a plump bald-headed man arrived, wearing a brown apron stained with metal polish.

‘I should like to engage a room,’ I told him, as confidently as I could. ‘Not one of your most expensive ones.’

‘Just for yourself, ma’am?’

His voice was polite enough, but his boot-button eyes were weighing me up.

‘Just for myself.’ Then, losing my nerve a little, I added, ‘I’m here to meet my father. He’s coming across from Calais.’

Which was the perfect truth, even though the look in those eyes made it feel like a lie.

‘How many nights, ma’am?’

‘He may be arriving as early as tomorrow …’

‘Tomorrow’s Sunday.’

‘… or I might have to wait a day or two. I am not entirely sure of his plans.’

That was true as well, although one thing I was entirely sure of was that my father’s plans did not include having his daughter there to meet him at Dover. His latest letter – in my bag and marking my place in the volume of Shelley, which was the only book I’d brought with me – made it quite clear that I was to wait at Chalke Bissett until called for. The innkeeper grudgingly admitted there was a room on the second floor he could let me have.

‘I’ll take supper in my room,’ I told him. ‘Mutton chop, some bread and cheese, and a jug of barley water.’

He nodded gloomily and called the bootboy to carry my bag upstairs to a small but reasonably clean room, furnished with bed, chair and wash-stand. I tipped the boy sixpence and, as the door closed behind him, spread out my arms and opened my mouth in a silent but most unladylike yell of triumph. When supper arrived I ate it to the last crumb then slept in the deep featherbed as comfortably as any dormouse.

I idled Sunday away pleasurably enough, tipping the little maid a shilling to bring cans of warm water upstairs so that I could wash my hair. When it was dry I strolled along the front in the sunshine, watching families driving in their carriages or walking back from church, and sailors arm in arm with women friends, bonnet and bodice ribbons fluttering in the breeze from the sea. The white cliffs gleamed and the old grey castle on top of them seemed from a distance to have broken out in patches of pink-, green-and lilac-coloured mushrooms, from the parasols of the ladies sight-seeing. In such a busy place, nobody was in the least disturbed by a young woman walking unescorted. I revelled in being alone and the mistress of my own time for once.

But on Monday morning I woke at first light with a little demon of anxiety in my mind. Now that I might be meeting my father within hours, it occurred to me that he would perhaps be annoyed because I had
disobeyed instructions. I took his letter out of my bag and read it by the window as the horses stamped and the ostlers swore down in the yard. It had been written from a hotel in Paris, posted express, and arrived at Chalke Bissett just the evening before I left, too late to change my plan of escape.

Then, after his signature, a scrawled postscript.

As I re-read it, I was seized with a panic that he might at that very moment be stepping off a boat and posting to Chalke Bissett, not knowing I was waiting for him less than a mile away. I ran downstairs, secured paper,
pen and ink from the landlord and – lacking a writing desk – stood at the cracked marble wash-stand in my room to scrawl a hasty note.

I didn’t tell him in the note, and never intended to tell him, that the real reason I’d fled the house of my mother’s elder sister was that I couldn’t tolerate her criticisms of him. She’d never forgiven his elopement with my mother and used every opportunity to spray poisonous slime, like a camel spitting.

‘Your father the fortune hunter …’

‘He is not. He had not a penny from my mother.’

‘Your father the Republican …’

‘He’s always said it was wrong to cut off the head of Marie Antoinette.’

‘Your father the gambler …’

‘Do not all gentlemen play games of hazard occasionally?’

She called me argumentative and said I should never get a husband with my sharp tongue.

*

I sealed my scrawled note and was waiting on the steps of the poste restante office as it opened. When I handed it over the counter I asked if there were any more letters waiting for Mr Thomas Lane. Three, the clerk told me, so I knew I hadn’t missed him. I strolled by the harbour for a while, watching the steam packet coming in and passengers disembarking. The novelty of my escape was wearing off now and I was beginning to feel a little lonely. But that was no great matter because soon my father would be with me and a whole new part of my life would be starting. My father had talked about it back in September, nine months before, as he was packing.

‘I’m quite resolved that if I have to leave you again it will be in the care of a husband.’

I was folding his shirts at the time.

‘Indeed. And have you any one in mind?’

‘As yet, no. Have you, Libby?’

‘Indeed I have not.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘Then we can look at the question like two rational beings. You agree it is time you were married?’

‘So people tell me.’

‘You mean the match-making matrons? Don’t pay any heed to them, Libby. They’d have any poor girl married by the time she’s off toddlers’ leading strings. People should be old enough to know their own minds before they marry. Thirty for a man, say, and around twenty-two for a woman.’

I was twenty-one and six months at the time.

‘So I have six months to find a husband?’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Hardly that. In fact, I am proposing that we should leave the whole question on the shelf …’

‘And me on the shelf too?’

‘Exactly that, until I return next summer and we can set about the business in a sensible fashion.’

He must have seen the hurt in my face.

‘Libby, I’m not talking about the marriage market. I’m not proposing you trade your youth and beauty for some fat heir to a discredited peerage.’

‘I don’t think they’d rate higher than the second son of a baronet,’ I said, still defensive.

He came and took my hand.

‘You know me better than that. I’m not a young man any more.’ (He was forty-six years old.) ‘I must think of providing for you in the future. I shan’t die a rich man and Tom has his own way to make.’