Pugg's Portmanteau

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Pugg's Portmanteau Page 24

by DM Bryan


  He himself is more pup than hound, she appraises, and then turns away from his restlessness. She applies her fingers to her neck, every squeeze revealing the damage done by a slumping feather ticking. The place is new but indifferently cared for, and already the flaking paint of the door lies like moss on the wet stone step.

  When their coach pulls around from the back of the inn, Mr. Gotobed helps the coachman pass both bags into the interior. Their driver pays the same respectful attention he showed them the previous day, but his face is a husk, and before they set forth they hear him retching against the side of the carriage. He has taken the coachman’s customary prerogative to refresh himself alongside his horses, and this morning he pays for the privilege. When the coach joins the Bath road, resuming its jostling, jolting pace, the man overhead groans so loud they hear him. Mr. Gotobed’s face forms into an empathetic mirror, and Sarah wonders whether he knows what he does.

  Past Thatchum, Sarah grows restless, the countryside no more than a wide sky of needles. Closing the louvers, she collapses the world into the finely joined boards of the coach. Her companion’s brown glance falls on hers from time to time, and she takes this as an invitation to question him more closely about his visit to Sandleford. In the close confines of the coach, they continue as friends, although they must emerge as distant acquaintances at the end. Did he see much of her sister and brother’s house at Sandleford, she asks. Elizabeth has newly painted the stairs—did he happen to notice the colour? The plasters in the drawing room are much admired—did he see them? Sarah warms to her topic, telling him how Elizabeth desires to remake the house along more gothic lines—Mr. Walpole setting the fashion, of course—but Mr. Montagu will not suffer to have such alterations made—what says Mr. Gotobed to the matter?

  Mr. Gotobed says nothing of the gothic and only a little of the plasters—he did not see them but wishes he had. He speaks more freely of a rabbit pie he was served, which he found delicious. He thought Mrs. Montagu a most admirable woman and was very honoured to meet her, having read about her literary salons in the newspapers. To his eyes, she seemed in tolerable health, although he admits to Sarah he is not a good judge of such matters. Of Mr. Montagu, he has firmer opinions. Mr. Montagu is most exceptionally capable in managing his collieries and lands. He is a gentleman who works hard to improve his holdings and collects his rents assiduously. With his own eyes, Mr. Gotobed saw the panelled chamber where he works, where sits a vast desk, covered in papers—so many papers. Papers of tremendous importance, Mr. Montagu told him. Papers that carry his orders from one end of England to another, from north to south, from Sandleford to London, and from London back into the west. Mr. Gotobed delights in the thought he might do Mr. Montagu a kindness by carrying those orders, by transporting some modest portion of those valuable papers. This is a task of which Mr. Gotobed hopes to be found worthy.

  “I know little enough of that,” says Sarah.

  He asks her how she likes Bath, and she finds herself telling him the truth. She admits she is lonely, and that the last attack on her dear friend’s health frightened her very much. She even mentions Barbara’s spasms … fits … She does not know how to name them to him. Indeed, she should not try, she understands from the embarrassed redness that lies like paint upon Mr. Gotobed’s cheek. “The doctor comes repeatedly to examine my friend, but he accomplishes little. She has pains in her limbs, in her teeth, in all her parts,” she says, a little cruelly, while Mr. Gotobed stares at the closed louvers, as if at a view.

  They pass Arkham. They pass Belbury. They water the horses and the coachman in Puntfield, at the Drunken Weasel, where the thatch in the roof is black with rot. Mr. Gotobed snaps open the window and droplets freckle his face. Voices, drenched and sodden, shake themselves off, preparing to fight. “Like dogs,” says Mr. Gotobed, watching.

  Berkshire flows past in streaks of watery ore, jade and silver, emerald and peridot. On one side, a copse of saplings, and on the other, a grouping of cattle on a green ground, couchant. Clouds part and hint blue. Light thickens and thins. The louvers blur.

  Sarah wakes to the sound of Mr. Gotobed’s foot tapping repeatedly against the side of his leather portmanteau. How he must feel the cramp in his legs, poor man. She sits upright, tasting the staleness of her own mouth. Her cap sits sideways and she works to right it, tucking in loosened hair. Stays press against unguarded regions, and Sarah puts a hand to her ribs, uncertain how to fix her garments. Mr. Gotobed releases her from her uncertainty, studying the ceiling while she tugs, rotates, replaces, pats, smooths. That the result is not entirely satisfactory she sees in her companion’s smile, which flashes as quick as the shadow of a coach under unsettled skies.

  Again, they speak. “Do you have a wife, Mr. Gotobed?” she asks him, thinking the question, for all its impropriety, best aired.

  “I have a sweetheart,” he says, eyes fixed on some stain to his coat sleeve.

  “Ah,” says Sarah. Mr. Gotobed, she reminds herself, is very young. Any engagement must necessarily be long, but in time, she hopes he will find happiness. Her imagination summons up a sentimental print: a neat front parlour, a pleasant fire, the girl with her narrow waist and pink cheeks.

  “You smile,” said Mr. Gotobed.

  “Do I?” Then she says, “Is it not a spinster’s duty to rejoice in the happiness of others?”

  But then, Sarah reminds herself, she is not a spinster—not really.

  The stain on the man’s sleeve absorbs his attention. He plucks at it, taking between his two fingers a pinch of broadcloth. Sarah watches him closely. “Is there some obstacle to your union?” she asks.

  Mr. Gotobed gives her an astonished look. Then he nods, glumly.

  “Mr. Gotobed, in my limited experience, every union entails obstacles—but a willing heart is the only true necessity.”

  Mr. Gotobed begins to scrape his sleeve with a thumbnail. Twice he rasps the rough cloth before abandoning all. He presses himself back into the corner of the carriage, crossing his arms but turning his full attention upon Sarah. “Many difficulties,” he says, “might be overcome by a willing heart, yes, but not all.” He nods at her, catches her eye.

  Sarah thinks she understands—Mr. Gotobed prefers not to speak of the nature of his distress, but Sarah might guess. “Let me see,” she says. “The lady is too low for you?”

  “Not too low,” says Mr. Gotobed.

  “She is too high?”

  Mr. Gotobed shakes his head glumly. “Both and neither at all.”

  “You riddle with me, sir.”

  A hard-facetted laugh. A surprising laugh—she had not imagined him capable of much bitterness.

  “Your sweetheart’s father—”

  “Dead.”

  “Her mother—”

  “Most willing.”

  “You lack sufficient standing in the eyes of the world.”

  “I do. But my love would have me regardless.”

  “She loves another.”

  “There is only me.”

  “She marries another.”

  “Nay. My sweetheart marries no one.”

  “She will not marry then,” says Sarah, very quietly indeed.

  “On some days.”

  Sarah says nothing.

  “Do you imagine you are done guessing, madam?” He tries for a smile.

  “Not every woman wishes to marry, sir,” says Sarah, as gently as she can.

  “But will you not guess why.”

  Sarah will not guess any longer. She shakes her head.

  “I cannot marry my true love,” says Mr. Gotobed “because my darling won’t give up—”

  But now, with a heave as vast as the sigh of a disappointed lover, the coach ceases its forward momentum and slides sideways. Sarah and Mr. Gotobed are thrown equally into a confusion of limbs and intentions. For a moment, one louvered window fills entirely with
weeping sky, while the opposite door swings open, revealing a bed of rutted grit. Through the open door, Sarah, Mr. Gotobed, and both leather portmanteaus tumble directly into the mud of the Great Bath Road. Then, motion ceases, and all is wet dirt, darkness, and the press of bodies.

  For an instant, Sarah lies dazed. Then she is thrashing upright, twisting her limbs away from the weight of Mr. Gotobed’s legs and pushing at the wet pouf of her gown. Mr. Gotobed scrambles away, as eager to separate from her as she is from him. Freed, she crawls out from under the tilted coach, inching leglessly in her wet skirts. When she reaches firmer footing, her companion is there to haul her upright. She notices his mouth moving as he makes utterances she has not time to comprehend. Then she is fully standing, and he is still speaking. He tells her to seek shelter, and Sarah turns to see the coach, canted as handwriting.

  Gotobed stumbles toward the upright horses, as Sarah thanks God that she is to be spared the screaming of dying animals. The two bays stamp and shiver, their leather traces hanging in slack loops, trailing off into mud. Sarah sees Gotobed reach the first horse, laying one hand on a matted rump, but his actions are tentative. He fumbles for harness straps, urging the horses forward, but they stamp and snort, and they will not pull in one direction. The bays step and shift under his hands, but without confidence or understanding. He has not underestimated his lack of horsemanship, Sarah thinks.

  Their plight continues to reveal itself. One coach wheel, huge and metal rimmed, sticks fast in a well-watered rut of remarkable depth.

  Sarah looks for and finds the coachman sprawled only a few feet away, calling weakly for assistance. She scrapes rather than scoops up her hems and goes to him, but she cannot discern injury from intoxication. Unable to do more than pull him into a seated position, she watches as he settles his head on his arms and curses.

  “Jesus Christ,” says the coachman, speaking into the hollow of himself. “Jesus Christ—I flew.”

  “Get up,” shouts Gotobed at the cursing coachman. “Help me, God-damn you.”

  “God-damn yourself,” says the coachman, lifting his head. “I’m broken all over—I tell you. I came off my seat. I flew, you bastard, I flew.”

  Gotobed again attempts to make the horses pull but only succeeds in making one animal step sideways into the other. Hoof claps on hoof. The second horse half-rears, bugling in alarm. The coach rocks violently but never budges, and Gotobed disappears between the plunging bays. Sarah knows he is there only by his voice—raised and blaspheming. The horses come to a standstill, snorting, expelling clots of snot, and Gotobed backs out from between them, wiping his hands on his breeches. He looks at Sarah, but doesn’t speak. The coach is hopelessly mired.

  The sharp drizzle changes angle, and the wind picks up. Sarah’s skirts cling coldly, wrapping her legs in layers of wet cotton, wool, and silk. She watches as Mr. Gotobed retrieves their portmanteaus from where they have fallen in the mud. He takes up one and tucks it beneath his arm, but when he lifts the second, it yawns open, unfastened. White pages flick from its mouth. The wind grabs each sheet, lifting them over Gotobed’s head and out across the fields. Stunned, the poor man stands stock still, while page after page pours forth. Sarah too is transfixed by this vision of butterflies, wings white-green under cloud. The next moment, she returns to herself, snatching up her muddy hems and running at the wheeling sheets. She catches some. Gotobed stops others at their source, scooping them to the breast of his coat, grabbing for more with his free hand. But still they blow, catching in the short grass before careening wetly toward the next clump. Cattle watch, blazes shaped like hourglasses.

  How many moments pass before Sarah thinks to check the sheets of paper themselves, seeking to distinguish between familiar and strange, hers or his? Whose papers cling wetly on her hand? Whose is the loss? The first few pages she looks at have nothing writ on them. She turns them over and finds nothing on the verso. These, she thinks, belong to her, for she carried in her portmanteau not only her drawings but also blank sheets, tucked in between to protect her fragile ink lines. She discards several blank pages before holding one up to the light. Nothing but fibres, grey with water. She lets fall the page, and for an instant, wonders if the rain has washed away her harlot’s house, her rake’s workshop. The gardens, cross-hatched? An ink-gravelled pathway between beds of herbs? Black petals running like rain? Is all her work gone—laundered clean?

  Mr. Gotobed takes her elbow, but she fights him, striking him hard upon the forearm. She shoves him, taking him unawares so that he slips down into the mud. When he rises, a piece of paper clings to his thigh. A blank page, showing only a filthy, pristine surface. Gotobed removes it, while Sarah stares at him, unable to believe her misfortune.

  “These are my papers—the letters I carried for Edward Montagu—these are your brother’s papers,” he says, holding out the page. The paper droops, wraps around his hand. Under the tawny mud is pale nothing.

  “Mine,” says Sarah. “A projection. A proposition, if you will. A proposal for a man who knows the business. All washed away.”

  Gotobed shakes his head. “It was my portmanteau that came open,” he says. “Yours was hardly wetted. I have returned it to the coach to keep dry.”

  “You found my portmanteau?”

  Mr. Gotobed nods.

  “But these cannot be Edward Montagu’s papers,” says Sarah, looking at their damp faces in confusion. “There is nothing writ upon them.”

  Mr. Gotobed scrapes the soaking page from his hand and drops it into the mud. Buried in the ooze is the root structure of the grass. Soon, these pale fuses will explode into tufts of green sparks, but now they smolder imperceptibly in the rain. Mr. Gotobed puts out his foot and grinds all, plant and page alike, into a thready, pulpy mass.

  “It is an old trick,” he tells Sarah. “I’ve been made into bait—a snare for the dishonest. Montagu gave me to understand I transported bills of hand. He gave instructions to all his servants that I was to be accommodated in every particular on account of the significance of what I carried. At the time, I wondered at the trust he showed his household, and his lack of caution with a stranger, but he acted by design, no doubt. There are highwaymen on this road, at Maidenhead Thicket, and closer in, just before Hounslow. If any of those should receive regular intelligence from his household.” He shrugs.

  Sarah tries to speak but cannot. She has begun to be very cold in the wet and the wind.

  Mr. Gotobed continues. “They quarrelled, he and your sister, when she decided that you would join me. He refused to send the coach to Bath, but your sister went behind his back.”

  Sarah hears Elizabeth reasonably insisting. Montagu overruling her, unwilling to expose his grubby plan and lose his decoy. Then Elizabeth countermanding her husband, giving new instructions in Edward’s name that Sarah would be accommodated after all.

  “I do not like commercial dealings, Mr. Gotobed,” says Sarah Scott, shivering. Together, they beginning to walk back to the crooked carriage. Sarah says, “Commerce makes men dishonest. You have a good heart, Mr. Gotobed—can you not do without business?”

  Gotobed turns his head to stare at her, tripping over an errant piece of landscape.

  At the scene of the accident, a group has gathered. Wagons, coaches, buggies are pulled up in both directions. Two women crouch beside the coachman, lifting his limbs and chaffing his hands. In the road, several burly men rock the carriage back and forth, while a countrywoman, a girl really, sits on one of the two horses, skirts hiked over her knees. She kicks her toes alternately into the horses’ ribs to make them pull together. Sarah remembers another barebacked rider and dismisses the thought that the sight was a premonition. Superstition and nonsense, but still she offers up a hope that other girl reached her destination in safety.

  Mr. Gotobed removes his greatcoat and offers it to Sarah. The garment drips and reeks, so she refuses.

  The coachman sways t
o his feet, to good-natured cries from those around him. When he sees Sarah, he returns the bottle to a reaching hand.

  “That wheel,” he says, coming toward Sarah, “that wheel was always buggered.”

  But now the coach, which the burley men and the girl with the horses have been causing to move forward and back, makes a great sucking sound and rolls free of the muddy hole in which it was stuck. The wheel stands again on firm ground, as round and right as a cheese.

  Sarah turns to Mr. Gotobed and says, “I will not travel another inch with this driver. It is his inattention that caused us to overturn.”

  “Begging your pardon, missus,” says the driver, employing a fine irony, “but I don’t see how you on the insides of the coach might know what happened on its outsides.”

  “I know your eyes,” says Sarah, “were fixed on the bottom of a bottle.”

  Mr. Gotobed hastens to step between the two. “But how will you get to London? What will you do?” he asks Sarah. “I know not where we are.”

  “What will you do, Mr. Gotobed? Do you intend to continue playing hare for Mr. Montagu? He knows the role of the fox better than you ever will.”

  Mr. Gotobed makes no answer.

  Sarah goes over to the horse girl, who has clambered down and is fixing her skirts. From a deep pocket, Sarah removes a coin and tucks it into her hand. The girl thanks her. Another coin, put into the hand of a wagon driver, secures her place on that conveyance. He is leaving this minute and will soon pass an excellent coaching inn, both warm and dry. On the morrow, she might take the post-chaise safe into London.

  Finding Mr. Gotobed already returned to the body of the Montagu carriage, Sarah conveys what she has learned, but he only hands her down her portmanteau. The leather has darkened with rain, but the wet disorders only the surface of the case. Inside, Gotobed assures her, all is dry and secure. Sarah reaches up and proffers her hand to the man. He does not press it to his lips but shakes it.

 

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