The Christmas Carriage (2 page)

***

“Did you try writing to him?” Anna asked as the coach inched along. “Young ladies ought not to be corresponding with single gentlemen, I know, but you and Mr. MacIntyre nearly had an understanding, and sometimes desperate measures are necessary where true love is concerned.”

Desperate measures, indeed. “I did try writing to him, but I received no reply. My father said Frederick took himself off because no fellow who respects a lady will pester her with attentions that can’t amount to anything. Papa has never worked a day in his life, and yet he thinks…”

Anna patted her hand. “Old-fashioned. My father-in-law is the same way, but good-hearted. My husband and I had to overcome considerable difficulties on the way to the altar. We were all at sixes and sevens, cross purposes, and widdershins.”

“Widdershins is a word my Frederick would use. You and your husband came right, though, didn’t you?”

Anna’s smile would have inspired angelic choruses, so beatific was it. “My husband and I have come right. You and Frederick will too, but you must not give up hope.”

“I’ve tried attending services at our former church, but Frederick hasn’t been seen there in months. I’ve sent a footman to inquire on the street where Frederick kept rooms but nobody will admit knowledge of him. His family was in Aberdeen…”

So very far away, and this time of year, cold and dark, too.

Anna’s smile faded, her expression becoming earnest. “Write to him again, then. A holiday greeting, something to let him know you’re thinking of him. Gentlemen often need encouragement but don’t know how to ask for it.”

The notion was daring, not proper at all, and Anna seemed like such a proper lady, too.

“I can do that,” Lizzie said. “I can write to him again, but if he’s moved, they’ll just be returned to me, won’t they?”

“Write anyway,” Anna said. “You don’t know that he’s changed lodgings, and if he loves you, he will not have gone haring back to the north with matters between you unresolved.”

Lizzie did not argue, though Frederick was proud, and a proud man might not have wanted to endure begging and pleading when he told a woman who loved him good-bye.

“I’ll write,” she said. “I’ll send one more note, full of holiday greetings. Nothing more.”

***

Mr. Westhaven apparently was the sort of fellow who could nose around at a postal installation and immediately find himself taking tea with the superintendent in his private, well heated office.

“You getting airs above your station again?” Tims asked.

Frederick took up a stool at the sorting table. “Of course. It turned out so well last time.”

Tims’s smile turned sympathetic. “You still miss her?”

“With every beat of my heart.”

They fell silent as Harlan Bickerman came trotting over, his green visor set low across his brow. “You’re late, MacIntyre. Do you think because you’ve been racketing about with a duke’s son you’re no longer subject to the same work hours as the rest of us?”

“I don’t know any duke’s son, sir,” Frederick said, noting that the toes of Bickerman’s fine boots were still wet, suggesting Westhaven had been right: Everyone had run late that morning.

“He who comes in late must stay late,” Bickerman pronounced. “It’s not like you’ve a wife and kiddies to go home to, is it? But then, I forget. You hail from the north, and no proper London girl is likely to have you.”

Across the table, Tims’s jug-ears were turning red.

“You’re exactly right, Mr. Bickerman. I’ve nobody to go home to.”

“So you won’t mind doing some extra sorting,” Bickerman said, He hefted a large canvas sack onto the sorting table. “There’s a bag of Christmas cheer, no doubt, none of it directed at you. Don’t leave until you’ve got it all sorted, or I will have your position.”

As Bickerman’s heels beat a receding tattoo against the floorboards, Frederick stared at a bag twice the size of the usual sorting load.

“The man’s an embarrassment,” Tims said, though quietly. “I saw him dump a load of dead letters into a sorting bag. I’m guessing it’s that lot there.”

Dead letters were a sorting clerk’s worst nightmare. They required checking endless lists of forwarding addresses, trying to guess at awful handwriting, using the quizzing glass on smudged ink…

“He’s right,” Frederick said. “I have nobody to go home to, and the only London girl I fancy apparently does not fancy me.” To be fair, it was Lizzie’s father who had not fancied him, but Lizzie was always going to have the same father.

Frederick reached for the bag.

Twenty minutes later he’d confirmed Tims’s dire prediction involving dead letters as a cheery, “Happy Christmas, Mr. MacIntyre!” rang out across the sorting room floor. Westhaven stood side by side with the superintendent, who was apparently walking his impromptu guest to the door.

“Happy Christmas, Westhaven!”

Westhaven offered Frederick a parting wave. “Give your Lizzie a kiss for me beneath the mistletoe!”

“Will do, sir! And the same to your lady.”

Tims watched this exchange in puzzlement. “So who is he? He’s dressed a damn sight better than any postal clerk will ever be.”

“Mr. Westhaven’s lady appropriated his carriage, so he was forced to take a cab. We shared the ride over from Knightsbridge.”

Tims was quiet for a moment, but like any good clerk, he could sort and gossip at the same time. “You still looking for your lady, Fred?”

Frederick had taken rooms in Knightsbridge because he was still looking for his lady. “She liked to shop there. Said the quality was as good as Mayfair, but the prices weren’t as outrageous, though for all I know, her family has moved to Bath.”

They spoke of the weather, of Tims’s sweetheart, Christobel, who was meeting him for a rum bun at supper. The pile of letters on Tims’s side of the table eventually became a few score, then a few dozen.

As the oldest clerks shuffled out in the darkening evening, Bickerman came strutting by. “Haven’t made much progress with your sorting, have you, MacIntyre?”

“Some,” Frederick said. “What a letter to Berwyck was doing in a bundle from Bristol is anybody’s guess.”

Bickerman glanced pointedly at the eight day clock that stood like a warden in the prison yard in one corner. “Don’t waste coal tonight. I’ll expect that bag to be sorted when I arrive in the morning.”

The sorting room was chilly at best. Frederick wiggled his toes in his boots. “I thought I’d attend services tonight.”

Across the table, Tims took eternities to fasten six buttons.

“That is between you and the Almighty, but don’t think piety will excuse a lack of punctuality if those letters aren’t on their way come morning.”

He stomped off, but not fast enough.

“Happy Christmas, Mr. Bickerman!” Tims bellowed. He winked at Frederick, who couldn’t help but smile.

“Yes, Mr. Bickerman, Happy Christmas, and to Mrs. Bickerman too.”

Because, as every clerk in the installation knew, Bickerman lived with his mother, there being no other lady in London who would have him for her very own.

***

“You’re up late, my dear.”

Lizzie’s mother stood framed in the library door. By firelight, she was a pretty woman still, though strong sunlight would reveal fine lines around her eyes and mouth.

“I spent too much time in the shops today,” Lizzie said, appending a signature to her letter—her holiday note. “I’m behind in my correspondence as a result.”

“The holidays are frightfully busy,” her mother said, advancing into the room. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about the invitations to next week’s dinner.”

Lizzie opened the top drawer in search of sand for her epistle but found none. “We’re having another dinner?”

Mama took the seat across from the desk, the same seat Lizzie had taken on the occasion of various lectures, scolds, or announcements from her father. Now she wanted to lecture her mother regarding all these invitations sent out to single, young men—even single, not-so-young men, provided the family had a title.

“Lizzie, is there no young fellow whom you could see yourself taking an interest in? Many a titled lordling will overlook a girl’s common antecedents if her settlements are generous enough, and you are pretty.”

Mama offered the last observation with a brisk inspection of Lizzie’s features, as if making sure she were still pretty.

“Where does Papa keep the sand?”

“Third drawer,” Mama said. “But why aren’t you using your own sitting room?”

Lizzie opened the third drawer. “Because Papa will not allow my maid to top up the coals on my hearth after tea time, so the fire goes out each night and we waste more coal laying a new fire come morning—morning in a very chilly room, I might add.”

“Your father cannot be blamed for trying to conserve resources, Lizzie. I thought the Porringer boy was a pleasant fellow.”

Lizzie closed the third drawer with a stout thump. “He’s pleasant because he arrives to any occasion half seas over, Mama. There’s no sand—Ah.” She found the ornate little turquoise and gold cloisonné box in the second drawer, all the way back, but when she lifted it out, she spied beneath it a missive addressed in her very own hand.

“Lizzie, you are not snooping in your father’s desk, are you? Nothing good ever comes of eavesdropping or snooping, I always say.”

Lizzie barely heard her mother. “What are my letters doing in Papa’s desk?” For she’d found two, both addressed to Mr. Frederick MacIntyre.

“What letters? If they’re in your father’s desk, I doubt very much they’re your letters.”

“My letters to Frederick,” Lizzie said, closing this drawer with a bang. “Why does Papa have letters I wrote months ago, letters I very much wanted sent?”

Mama sat forward, looking not at all pleased. “You wrote to Mr. MacIntyre?”

“Of course I wrote to Mr. MacIntyre! I love Mr. MacIntyre, and Papa up and moved us to this house without even giving me a chance to say good-bye to Mr. MacIntyre, and now I miss him, and you keep foisting spotty baronets at me, and viscount’s fourth sons, and, and…”

“Elizabeth, calm yourself. Your father had an offer on our other house that required a hasty remove, this location is perfect, and a proper address means so much to one’s prospects in this world. If your father did not have your letters sent on you must trust that he did so in your best interests.”

The edges of Lizzie’s vision turned the exact shade of red that Anna had been tempted to purchase earlier that day. “I am of age, Mama. Papa had no right to interfere with my correspondence. If he didn’t want me writing to Mr. MacIntyre, then he should have told me so. This is…” Lizzie clutched the letters, “this is stealing, and I will not have it.”

Mama rose, looking very tall, but also for the first time in Lizzie’s experience, uncertain. “You do not tell your father what to do, Elizabeth. I’ll have those letters.”

She thrust her hand under Lizzie’s nose, and Lizzie realized the letters were still sealed. Her father’s perfidy at least had limits, while her mother’s would have none. Lizzie pushed back her father’s heavy, well-cushioned chair and tossed the letters in the fire.

“If Papa can keep the public rooms of the house cozy, he can afford to heat my sitting room as well. Perhaps then I won’t be tempted to root through that desk to see what other letters of mine he’s also deemed unworthy of the king’s post.”

Lizzie swept out of the room before she said anything she’d regret—anything
more
she’d regret—and when she got to her sitting room, she did not build up the fire.

She instead went to bed, and for the first time in months, had a reason to be grateful. Yes, Papa had appropriated two pieces of Lizzie’s private correspondence, lifted them right out of the tray in the front hallway where all the family’s letters sat in anticipation of the footman’s trip to the nearest posting inn.

Two heartfelt, sincere, pleading letters had never reached Frederick.

But Lizzie had written three. And seeing those letters had reminded her of something else: She knew where Frederick was employed.

The sorting room went from chilly, quiet and dim, to frigid, dark, and silent, the only sound the soft rustle of the occasional epistle finding its way to a proper pile of similar letters.

Frederick was down to the dead letters, and only a few dozen of those, though the hour was late. He sat on his stool, two sorting sacks wadded up into a makeshift pillow beneath his chilly, aching bum.

“I should just go home.” He flipped the letter over, and read the last lines scrawled on the exterior. The marmalade mouser curled among the sorted letters twitched an ear.

“Some people don’t put enough effort into their penmanship,” Frederick observed. This lady, for example, did not cross her t’s, and that meant… He reexamined the address, mentally revising the street name from Bellers Road to Betters Road, which happened to be located in Soho.

“I’m falling asleep on my already asleep arse, and Bickerman will just find some other pile of straw for me to spin into gold, and eventually, he’ll have a pretext for sacking me.”

The cat yawned, stretched, and resumed its slumbers.

“I should go home, not to my freezing little room, but to Aberdeen. My family misses me.” And he missed them. “Bickerman will drive me to Bedlam, and for every fellow who gets a promotion, there are twenty who don’t.”

He picked up the next letter and rubbed his eyes to make sure he was reading the address correctly.

“I have a dead letter, Cat.”

Another ear twitch.

A queer feeling came over him as he studied the address, because he knew that penmanship. He turned up the lamp at his elbow, and with shaking hands, broke the seal.

“My dearest Frederick…”

Lizzie had written to him—written to her dearest Frederick—months ago. She’d defied all convention to tell him she missed him, she hoped to hear from him shortly, and hoped her previous letters hadn’t gone astray.

Previous letters. To her dearest Frederick.

Frederick read the letter again, and again, until he had it memorized, and still he sat on his stool and stared at it. The cat rose, and used its furry head to nudge at his hand.

“Back to work, eh?” He folded Lizzie’s letter and tucked it into an inside pocket of his waist coat. “Only a few dozen more letters, right, Cat? I should be able to get through them by morning.”

Tomorrow was Friday, but on Saturday, Bickerman did not come in, and the superintendent often let the clerks leave a bit early. “I can nip around Mayfair, ask for the Winkleblecks. There can’t be that many Winkleblecks in Mayfair.”