Sixpenny Stalls

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘Follow the hedge below the high ground for as far as it goes,’ he told the guard when he returned. ‘It ain’t much. Better’n nothing. Make for any light. There’s bound to be beacons lit. Good luck!’ The sacks were loaded onto the lead horse, and the guard wound his muffler tightly about his neck and across his nose, took a lantern, mounted and plodded off. They waved him goodbye, for he carried their hopes as well as the mail, and Caroline felt quite bleak as she watched the little swaying light move further and further away from them into the storm.

  The coachman and the two gentlemen had taken up the spades again and returned to their digging and Caroline found herself with nothing to do. She was very very cold and very very tired and her back was aching as though it had been snapped in two, and even the fact that Mrs Grinder seemed to have stopped crying at last was very little comfort. I hope he’s quick, she thought, shivering. But how could anyone be quick in such a storm?

  After that, time and action were blurred by fatigue and snowfall. She watched the three men as they laboured to dig out the rest of the horses, and she got out of the way when the second pair were shivered out of the drift, and occasionally she stamped her feet to restore some feeling to them, and put her frozen hands into her muff or under her armpits, copying the coachman, and now and then, when one of the gentlemen relinquished his spade, she was able to dig while he recovered his breath, which warmed her a little and took her mind off the storm for a few active minutes. But it was an endless, frozen time, and she felt cold to the innermost part of her body.

  Presently the wind dropped and the snowfall eased a little and the lanterns gave more light, and now she could see the high field sloping above her. It was still thickly covered with snow despite the vast quantities that had fallen from it so treacherously, and she thought how beautiful it looked, so blue-white and smooth and mysterious, even though she knew it could have killed them all. But it hadn’t killed them all, had it? They’d fought back. They’d outwitted it, and now there was only one more horse left in the drift, and sooner or later …

  ‘Lights!’ Mr Johnson shouted. ‘Look there! Lights or I’m a Dutchman!’

  And he was right. There were lights, a long wavering line of them, bouncing and swaying in the darkness, in an odd disjointed rhythm as though they were connected on a wire, at least twenty lights, a long way away, but clearly headed in their direction.

  Mr Grinder went trudging off to tell his wife the good news. ‘Mrs Grinder, my love, wake up. We are rescued.’

  ‘Thought as much,’ the coachman said with great satisfaction. ‘A good lad is young Tranter. I knew he’d get through if anyone could. Meantime there’s still this horse, Mr Johnson.’

  Caroline climbed up onto the great upturned wheel of the fallen coach and watched the lights until they reached an invisible bend in their invisible road, where they bunched together and grew larger and larger until a great chattering company trudged into view, bright-eyed with lantern-light and exertion.

  ‘What a mercy the snow’s give over,’ their leader said to the coachman. ‘We’ve hung lanterns every quarter mile or so. You’ll be safe as houses now, never fear. Name of Potterton, sir, landlord of the Bull Inn. We’ve brought a sledge for the ladies, and four strong boys to pull un.’

  And strong they certainly were, for they managed to lift Mrs Grinder out of the coach, even though she was half asleep and complaining all the time.

  Then there was so much bustle and movement that the shovelled snow was trodden quite flat for several yards all round the coach and the horses could be walked about to get them going again. Mr Johnson and Mr Grinder and the coachman packed up their spades and beat as much snow and ice from their clothes as they could, and Caroline was bundled into the sledge under several very smelly horse-blankets, crammed against the relative warmth of a grumbling Mrs Grinder with two carpet bags propped under her feet, and the procession began its homeward journey.

  By now the wind was blowing from the east, or so the landlord said. ‘There’s another mercy, don’t ‘ee think, to have un blowin’ with us.’ His optimism was splendidly reassuring. ‘We got a fine ol’ fire waitin’ for ‘ee, don’t ‘ee fret.’

  Caroline snuggled down under the blankets, eased her frozen gloves from her fingers and tucked her hands inside her muff, wincing a little because they were so cold and sore. There was no feeling in her feet at all and her wet skirts were chilling her legs, but the worst was over. She was on her way to that fine ol’ fire, on her way to her dear dear Nan, on her way in a rocking soothing rhythm, on her way, on her way. She was fast asleep within minutes, and she didn’t wake until the landlord peeled back the blankets ready to help her out of the sledge.

  ‘Where are we?’ she said, blinking up at him.

  ‘Long Melford, miss,’ the landlord said, ‘and that ol’ fire all a-waitin’ for ‘ee.’

  It was marvellously warm in the Bull Inn, with the fire roaring and crackling in the hearth and hot soup steaming in a cauldron over the flames and pot-boys running to and fro with brandy and hot water. Mrs Grinder cheered up at once, and having despatched a boy to see to the disposal of her luggage, she kicked off her shoes, propped her stockinged feet on the fender where they were soon steaming most pungently, and embarked upon a long and highly imaginative account of their adventures, for the benefit of her busy and admiring audience.

  ‘When that coach fell, I declare I quite gave myself up for gone,’ she said between gulps of brandy and hot water. ‘Quite gave myself up for gone. The torments I’ve suffered today simply beggar description. Beggar description. I’m bruised all over. Is there any more of this excellent brandy, Mr Landlord?’

  ‘Lucky none of you was killed, mum,’ the landlord said, replenishing her tankard. ‘Never mind, you’re safe and sound now, each an’ every one. You can stay here the night and let the weather go hang. Beds is all aired.’

  ‘It was the bull-dog spirit that pulled us through,’ Mrs Grinder confided, as the soup was served. ‘We may have been in mortal danger, Mr Landlord, but we never faltered. Never for a moment. We set to with our spades and dug out the horses with our own hands.’

  The landlord murmured his admiration of her courage, but Caroline was fuming. ‘The gentlemen dug out the horses, ma’am,’ she said. ‘I dug out the horses. You sat in the coach and screamed.’

  Mrs Grinder waved her remarks away with one fat imperious hand, as though they were of no more consequence than the buzzing of a fly. The combination of extremely cold air followed by extremely hot brandy was mottling her fat cheeks with a sudden pattern of harsh purple. ‘The bull-dog spirit,’ she said, sighing with satisfaction at her remembered bravery. ‘Were we not courageous, Mr Grinder? Did we not acquit ourselves with honour?’

  He’s going to agree with her, Caroline thought, watching the obsequious expression that was gathering on Mr Grinder’s face. Oh, what a toady!

  ‘Oh yes, my love,’ Mr Toady agreed. ‘The bull-dog spirit. Quite.’

  ‘I’m off to bed,’ Caroline said to the landlord. ‘I can’t stay here and listen to this. I shall eat my soup in my room. Is there a maid to lead the way and take my wet clothes? I got very wet digging out the horses.’

  And she stomped up the stairs in high dudgeon.

  It was warm in her little low-ceilinged room, for there was a fine fire burning in the grate and the maid got busy with a bed-warmer while Caroline ate her soup. But when her wet clothes had been stripped off and carried away to be dried overnight, the dirty dish had been removed, the lamps turned down to the merest bead, and she was finally tucked up warm beneath the covers, she couldn’t sleep.

  For the first time since she’d run out of Fitzroy Square she was thinking about the people she’d left behind. Poor Pa, she thought, he’ll be wondering where I am in this storm. He’ll be worried, not knowing. And although she’d left him that note to tell him where she was going, she wished there were some way she could send him a message now to tell him she was safe and warm and thinki
ng of him. I wonder how long the storm will go on, she thought, listening to the wind howling outside the window. How will he get up to Bury if the coaches don’t run? And as the fire crackled and spat, and the timbers of the old inn creaked and squeaked below her, she wished she hadn’t run away. Poor old Pa, he’ll be worried out of his wits. I’ll write him a letter first thing tomorrow morning. Perhaps the mails will get through somehow. They always do.

  But although she didn’t know it, hers had been the last mail-coach out of London that day.

  John Easter came home to Fitzroy Square late in the afternoon, squinting with worry. A. Easter and Sons had had a disastrous day. So few papers had been dispatched out of London that their losses would be severe, and as the weather showed no sign of improving, the newspaper proprietors had decided to cut down production, which would mean continuing loss of trade and profits in the days ahead. He had visited every coaching inn and railway station in the city, trying to find alternative routes out, but entirely without success. By mid afternoon even the new railways weren’t running because the tracks were icy, and the coaches had packed up completely. He was so worried he barely noticed how cold he was, nor how slowly his carriage was travelling, nor what a hard time his bays were having struggling through the snow. And when Mr Fazackerly creaked up alongside him as he turned into Fitzroy Street, he did no more than nod him a vague acknowledgement.

  ‘You didn’t travel then, Mr Easter,’ Mr Fazackerly shouted above the din of wheels and wind.

  ‘Travel, Mr Fazackerly?’

  ‘Aye. With the little girl. Your Caroline. I gave her a lift to the Belle Sauvage.’

  ‘Caroline?’ What was he saying? Caroline couldn’t have gone to the Belle Sauvage.

  ‘Yes indeed, sir. Your Caroline. I gave her a lift.’ And then seeing how perplexed his neighbour looked, ‘I trust that was in order?’

  John Easter gathered his control and spoke courteously. ‘Most grateful to you, sir. Uncommon kind.’ But when the carriage reached his door he jumped down at once and took the area steps in one stride to find out what had happened.

  He was so upset by what his housekeeper told him that he actually shouted at her. ‘What were you thinking of to let her go? You should have stopped her. She was your responsibility.’

  ‘I’m ever so sorry, Mr Easter,’ Mrs Toxteth said, her face wrinkled with distress. ‘We didn’t know she’d gone, d’you see. She was that quiet.’

  ‘In this snow!’ he mourned. ‘With every road out of London blocked. Every single one. She’ll be stuck out in the country somewhere with no food and no money and no one to help her. Did she take any luggage?’

  ‘Not that we could see, sir.’

  ‘No luggage, no money, no food, all by herself,’ John said. ‘Whatever shall we do? Joe shall be sent out.’ But he knew the boy would never be able to get out of London no matter where he was sent.

  ‘Should we send out to cancel your dinner party?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your dinner party, Mr Easter sir. Tonight.’

  In his anxiety he’d forgotten all about it. ‘No,’ he said, controlling himself with a visible effort. ‘There is no need to inconvenience my guests. That would be impolite.’ The dinner party would have to be endured. ‘We cannot follow her tonight, not in this weather and with the roads blocked and icy. We are locked into the city. All of us. I’ve been trying to find a way out all afternoon and there isn’t one. We are locked in and she is locked out. There is nothing we can do except wait.’ And he sighed most miserably.

  ‘Be better by morning pr’haps,’ Mrs Toxteth hoped.

  But daybreak brought no comfort at all. The heavy snowfall that had caused drifting on so many East Anglian roads the previous afternoon reached London at four o’clock in the morning and John woke to a blinding headache and a blinding snowstorm. The snow in the middle of the square was shoulder high, the steps and pavements thick with it, and the early traders slithering from door to door were awkward black shapes in the downpour, their street cries pitiful wails against the wind. There would be no possibility of travel that day.

  That was the general opinion in Long Melford too.

  ‘Best stay here till the weather clears,’ the landlord said. ‘We’ re well provisioned.’

  Mr Grinder was finding the provisions uncomfortably expensive, but he knew they had no option but to stay, for as there’d been no snow falling when he got up he’d walked out to reconnoitre the village and had soon discovered that they were virtually cut off by snowdrifts.

  ‘I must move on,’ Caroline told her companions at breakfast. ‘My grandmother will be wondering where I am. And my father will be travelling to Bury today. I can’t stay here.’

  ‘Nobody will be travelling anywhere today,’ Mr Grinder said, buttering his toast. ‘I can tell you that with absolute certainty, my dear. The roads are full of drifts, and there are no carts out and no horses either and very few people, if it comes to that. It will cost us a small fortune to stay here but I fear that is what we must do.’

  ‘And more snow to fall if I’m any judge,’ Mr Johnson said gloomily.

  ‘And weak tea into the bargain,’ Mrs Grinder complained, examining her cup. ‘I do so hate weak tea.’

  It began to snow again as they were finishing their meal, and it snowed steadily all day long, so Caroline didn’t write to her father after all because there was no point in writing a letter if she couldn’t send it. It was still snowing when they finally left the fireside at ten o’clock to yawn their way to bed.

  But when day broke next morning the sky was clear. It was bitterly cold and the snow was mounded against every door and window, but the wind had dropped and the sky was clear.

  Just before eight o’clock Tranter the guard came into the coffee room where they were all eating breakfast to tell the coachman that he’d hired the sledge and a nice good-tempered cob to pull it and that he was off to Bury St Edmunds. ‘I’ll get this ol’ mail through, never you fear,’ he promised. ‘They’ve cleared a path out north and south, an’ if no more falls I shall do well enough.’

  Caroline made up her mind at once. ‘I will come with you,’ she said to him brightly.

  That wasn’t at all what he expected. ‘Oh well now, Miss,’ he said. ‘I don’t know about that.’ Young ladies in embroidered mantles didn’t go traipsing about the countryside with the mail.

  ‘I’m strong,’ she insisted. ‘I helped you with the digging, didn’t I? Very well then. I can help you drive the cob. Besides, I know the countryside. I was born and bred here.’

  ‘My dear child,’ Mr Grinder said, ‘I admire your spirit, upon my life I do, but don’t you think you are being a trifle foolhardy?’

  ‘It’s ridiculous!’ Mrs Grinder said at once. ‘You shan’t go, child. It’s unheard of.’ She’d been impressed by Caroline’s adventurous spirit when they set out from the Belle Sauvage, but since her outspokenness over the matter of bravery and digging out horses, she had quite taken against the child. Adventurousness was one thing. Insubordination was another. ‘He won’t take you.’

  ‘Yes I will,’ Tranter said, surprising everybody, including himself. He wasn’t at all sure about the wisdom of allowing this child to travel with him, because she was only a young thing. But then he’d been walking long distances without harm ever since he was a child himself, so he knew how strong children could be. And besides he certainly wasn’t going to take orders from the objectionable Mrs Grinder. ‘Yes I will.’

  ‘I’ll be ready in two shakes,’ Caroline said. And was.

  Their departure was quite an event. Everybody in the inn turned out to wave them God speed, except for Mrs Grinder, and all along the high street people stared out of their windows and waved and nodded at them. And the little cob pulled his burden if not at a trot at least at a commendably brisk walk despite the snow, and Caroline was surprisingly warm under all those smelly horse blankets, with the mail bags tucked one on each side of her and the guard perched at her f
eet. Off on her adventures again!

  They travelled due north for most of the morning, following a pale sun and the easy undulations of the white landscape. They had no way of knowing whether they were using a road or not, but they were heading in the right direction and occasionally they crossed the tracks of earlier travellers, which reassured them both. But they didn’t see another living soul until they reached a little smoky hamlet some time after midday. It lay on the east side of a frozen stream in a narrow valley between two gently sloping hills, its few dark cottages streaming smoke into the white sky and the higgledy-piggledy street at its centre completely empty., There were two mills signposting the western hill and a manor house sheltered in a white fold of the eastern hill like a lamb in a blanket, and close to the church, a small dishevelled inn, where they stopped to thaw themselves by the fire and eat a plateful of new bread and rather sweaty cheese washed down with ale.

  Then feeling slightly warmer and rather less hungry they set off again, both on foot this time because the cob was too weary to pull them, following the valley between two more low hills and trying to remember the landlord’s instructions. Five miles to Bury he’d said. Five miles, due north, keeping the woods to their left. That shouldn’t take too long, not if the weather held. But as they reached the end of the valley their luck ran out and it began to snow again.

  Nevertheless they continued doggedly onwards in what they judged to be the right direction, trudging slow and speechless through the thickening fall. But after several frozen hours there was no sign of Bury St Edmunds, and the afternoon was growing steadily darker and colder. They could see brown smoke rising into the snow-filled air from some hidden farmhouse a long way away, but that was all.