Tuppenny Times

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘If they marry ’twill be a fine thing,’ Annie said stoutly. ‘Look how happy Mama is.’

  ‘D’you think he’d teach me to ride?’ Billy wondered.

  But Johnnie only scowled and said nothing. He thanked the lieutenant for his present, and he spoke when he was spoken to, but apart from that he kept his distance, sitting at the far end of the table at mealtimes, listening and watching, like a small dark conscience.

  Calverley was puzzled by him. He would have liked to befriend the child, but it was impossible to do it, because he showed no interest in anything, neither horses, nor the war, nor soldiers, nor even Lord Nelson, who was plainly and rightly a very great hero to his brother and sister. He seemed impervious to any challenge and blind to every blandishment. Questions were parried with a chilly, ‘I couldn’t say.’ Compliments were received with a polite, flat, ‘Yes.’ He looked so like Nan, too, with the same dark hair and dark brown eyes, but his mouth was held in a tight line and his nose was pinched and his face was so withdrawn as to be almost devoid of expression. He was Nan without animation, Nan without fire, a death-mask Nan. A most disconcerting child.

  ‘I can’t make head nor tail of your youngest,’ he confessed to Nan as they were drinking mulled wine in the drawing-room after an evening at the theatre.

  ‘Don’t pay him no mind,’ Nan advised. ‘’Tis a secret child. Always has been, always will be.’

  ‘Does he talk to anybody?’

  ‘I shouldn’t imagine so. Mrs Pennington thinks well of him. She says he has a good head for figures. The governess, you know. A funny sort of woman. You will meet her tomorrow for we all dine together a’ Thursdays.’

  ‘I met her on the stairs,’ he said, laughing to remember it. ‘She don’t approve of lovers, I can tell ’ee.’

  ‘No more do I,’ she teased, drinking the last of her wine and holding out her arms to him. ‘’Tis scandalous the way they go on.’

  It was such a joy to be with him again, to love whenever they would, to ride together in Rotten Row, to be seen about the town as a pair. But that night she remembered that in two days time Sophie would be coming to visit her as she always did on a Friday, and she wasn’t sure what her old friend would think of this affair, especially as Calverley had once paid court to her.

  At breakfast on Friday morning she decided to tell him of the visit, for even though she couldn’t bring herself to ask him whether he and Sophie had ever been lovers, just in case the answer was yes, she felt he ought to be warned.

  He was splendidly tactful. ‘If that is the case, my dear,’ he said, ‘I will visit my club this afternoon and return when the lady is gone. I am sure you don’t need me around. And a good soldier always knows when to retreat, eh?’

  Sophie had been travelling for the last six days and now she was bubbling with the latest gossip.

  ‘My dear,’ she said; ‘I have been aching to tell you the news. What do you think? Mr Blake has left London! Gone off to live in Sussex, with Catherine and his sister and right beside the sea, if you ever heard of such folly. He writes to Heinrich to say it is Heaven on earth, but I cannot imagine how it could be any such thing, what with the damp air in such places and the French like to land at any time.’

  Nan expressed suitable surprise and wondered what had brought about such a change.

  ‘’Tis Mr Hayley’s doing, by all accounts,’ Sophie said. ‘A commission, I believe. But why he could not have stayed in London and waited for a better offer I cannot imagine. Heinrich says ’tis all for the best, but I would not wish to live in the very path of an invasion, I can tell ’ee.’

  ‘Nor I, Sophie,’ Nan said, sipping her tea and wondering how she was going to introduce the subject she really wanted to talk about. ‘Nor I.’

  ‘Heinrich has taken on a new pupil at the Royal Academy,’ Sophie went on. ‘An uncommon good painter, the whole world says so. His name is Mr Constable and he comes from Suffolk, so he tells me, which is your part of the world, is’t not, my dear?’

  Nan had very little interest in a new painter, uncommon good or not, but there was something about the breathless enthusiasm of her friend’s voice that encouraged her. ‘A lover, I’ll warrant,’ she said.

  ‘Would it were so,’ Sophie sighed. ‘’Twould be uncommon good fortune. But ’tis a steadfast creature I fear, and puritanical.’

  ‘Then you must content yourself with a handsome lieutenant,’ Nan said, delighted by her cunning.

  ‘They’re an odd lot in the barracks this season,’ Sophie said. ‘Not a one on ’em I fancy, I do assure you.’

  ‘How of the gentlemen from the Duke of Clarence’s?’

  ‘La, I forgot them long ago.’

  ‘Deuce take it, Sophie, I don’t know how you can do it. I’m sure I couldn’t.’

  Sophie shot her a shrewd glance from under those long thick eye-lashes. ‘I take good care never to miss any man once he has moved elsewhere,’ she said. ‘’Tis good advice, my dear, which you would do well to remember when your present lover finds a new love.’

  Nan was so startled she blushed like a girl. ‘How did you know?’ she stammered. ‘I have told no one of it, I swear.’

  ‘Why, ’tis blazoned in every part of you,’ Sophie said, smiling with delight at her friend’s confusion. ‘You bloom with it, my dear. You positively bloom. I wish you joy in him, whomsoever he is.’

  ‘’Tis Mr Leigh,’ Nan said, quite unable to resist a full confession now that she’d gone so far. ‘I met him at Weymouth.’ Then she stopped, aware that she might have made a mistake, and looked up at her old friend, blushing and anxious but bold with love.

  ‘I wish you joy in him,’ Sophie repeated. And she seemed to mean it. ‘’Tis a handsome creature in all conscience, and good company.’

  ‘Oh Sophie,’ Nan said, so much relieved that she seized her friend’s hands and held them between her own, ‘if you could only know how much I love him. ’Tis the dearest of men.’

  ‘But a man merely,’ Sophie warned, returning her grasp, ‘and as such, fickle, my dear. They are all deceivers, every man jack of ’em. ’Tis as well not to grow too fond.’

  ‘Mr Easter was not fickle, I think.’

  ‘No, indeed. But Mr Easter was a rarity, as we’ve said many and many’s the time. A one-woman man, your Mr Easter, whereas Calverley …’

  ‘But men change, do they not?’

  ‘Aye, when they are too old for love. Oh, Nan my dear, you surely do not hope to change that gentleman?’

  Nan withdrew her hands from her friend’s grasp and dusted them against each other in her old determined gesture, palm against palm. ‘I love him,’ she said, chin in the air. ‘If he were to ask, I’d marry un.’

  ‘La, Nan, he ain’t the marrying kind. Be warned by one who knows.’

  It was kind advice and well meant, but Nan was hurt by it. Sometimes Sophie’s cynical view of mankind was very hard to take. ‘Have you been to the play?’ she asked, changing the subject.

  ‘I have indeed, and uncommon foolish I found it.’

  Later that night as she lay beside her lover in the easy intimacy of satisfaction, she realised that for all her cynicism Sophie had approved of this affair, just as Bessie and Thiss approved and Annie and Billy and Mrs Jorris.

  ‘I am a fortunate woman,’ she said, putting her head on his shoulder.

  Although their ten days passed far too quickly, it was a blissful interlude and they were both saddened when he had to leave.

  ‘I will return,’ he promised, sitting astride his handsome chestnut, while she stood beside him on the pavement.

  ‘And I will write.’

  But when three weeks had passed and he hadn’t been granted any more leave, and Mrs Dibkins was still well enough to sit in her chair for at least part of every day, she had another idea. ‘I will travel to Weymouth without telling him,’ she confided to Bessie, ‘and surprise him just as he surprised me.’

  ‘Oh mum,’ Bessie said. ‘What romance!’

/>   But as it turned out, Weymouth was a surprise of the wrong kind.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  While Nan had been away, Weymouth had suffered a disconcerting sea-change. She had left a holiday resort basking in the sun of high summer and full of light-hearted people enjoying themselves; she returned to find a town shrouded in September mist, a town beseiged. There were hundreds of troops mounting guard along the chilly promenade and thousands more encamped on the damp hills behind the town. Her landlady had closed her boarding-house and fled, none of her remaining neighbours knew where, and although there were still plenty of visitors filling the new terraces, those who dared to take the air were sombre-faced with apprehension and spent most of their time glancing out to sea or examining the horizon with spy-glasses. It was rather alarming and not what she’d been looking forward to at all.

  The Burdon barracks were bristling with activity, with a great deal of important coming and going, and an overpowering sense of closing ranks that made her feel foreign and unwelcome even at the gate. There were no encouraging smiles, only rows of tense withdrawn faces, troop sergeants barking orders, and no sign at all of Calverley. Finally she saw Mr Fortescue riding in through the gate and he told her, but brusquely and with one eye on the troop sergeants, that Mr Leigh was on guard duty in the look-out post at Upwey, and that if she’d take his advice she’d go straight back to London. ‘Invasion could be any minute, ma’am,’ he said, ‘anywhere along this coast.’

  If he thought to frighten her he was very much mistaken. ‘Can’t be done,’ she said, cheerful now that she knew where her lover was. ‘There en’t another coach till morning, and that’s the slow one through Dorchester, which I can’t say I fancy.’

  ‘Where do you stay?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘The White Hart, or the Golden Lion or the Crown and Sceptre I daresay.’ For they were the three best coaching inns in the old town and there would surely be room in one of them.

  The landlord of the Golden Lion had a room ‘right enough’ but he wasn’t at all sure he ought to let her have it. ‘Boney’s back,’ he explained lugubriously. ‘Sittin’ on the French coast a-watchin’ us so the fisherfolk say, an’ they’m the ones to know bein’ they’m sailed across an’ seen the beggar. Conquered Italy so he has, an’ now he’m after us. He only need calm sea an’ thick fog an’ then the Lord have mercy, that’s what I says. If I was you ma’am, I’d be off back ’ome on the very next coach, out of ’arm’s way, so I would.’

  ‘I got business in the town, Boney or no Boney,’ Nan said. ‘I can’t stop living just because that dratted crittur’s on the other side of the Channel.’

  ‘Tha’s the spirit, ma’am,’ a fisherman called to her from the bar. ‘Tha’s what I says, Barnabas. Let ol’ Boney go hang, I says. Drat the man, I says.’

  ‘’Twould be another song you’d be singin’ if ‘tweren’t for all the ale you’m supped, John Mackleson,’ the landlord said.

  ‘I will take your room for six nights,’ Nan told him before the two of them could begin an argument and delay her any further. ‘If you will arrange for someone to show me up.’

  ‘’Twill be a guinea.’

  ‘Aye, doubtless.’

  So the potboy was called for and given her carpet bag to carry and the two of them negotiated the stairs which were as unsteady as John Mackleson and almost as noisy. Down below in the bar, where a deal of Dutch courage was being consumed, somebody was singing raucously.

  ‘When lawyers strive to heal a breach,

  And parsons practise what they preach,

  Then Boney he’ll come pouncing down

  And march his men on London town!

  Rollicum rorum, tol-lol-lorum

  Rollicum rorum toll-lollay.’

  The bravado of the words was vaguely encouraging. She gave the boy a ha’penny for his pains, bounced on the bed to test the mattress, and went to open the window.

  There was hardly anybody in the street below her, except for two elderly women head to anxious head. The air was extremely chill and glancing up the street she saw that a white sea mist was swirling into the town from the direction of the harbour. Calm sea and thick fog, she thought. What if I’ve got here just in time for the invasion? It had been expected intermittently every spring and summer for the last three years, ever since Boney was given command of his Army of England, but until now she’d always been in London, which was concerned but distanced, never on the coast, and so she had never really understood how raw the fear of it was, here in the front line. Would it happen now, tonight? There was enough tension in the air in all conscience.

  I shall have my dinner, she decided, and then I shall put on my pelisse and walk to Upwey and find him. There was nothing to be gained by sitting around waiting for him to come off duty, and she was full of nervous energy now that she was so close to seeing him again.

  So that was what she did.

  She and Calverley had walked the road to the ridge on two or three occasions during her last visit, because it was the natural extension of a stroll along the promenade, only more private. Now it was a ghostly place and full of ghostly people, odd dark shapes with limbs as thin as kindling-sticks and bodies deformed by bundles, silently trudging out of the town, shrouded to the knees by the dank white mist that was still swirling up from the sea, their hands bent and their faces obscured by the darkening clouds of a rapidly descending dusk. Some rode in donkey-carts, some pushed wheelbarrows piled with bundles, one group creaked along in an ancient hay-wain, but most were on foot and burdened with as many belongings as they and their beasts could carry. Their children stumbled behind them or were carried in shawls or rode piggy-back half asleep. It was an exodus and despite her high spirits, Nan found it disturbing.

  Being unburdened, it didn’t take her long to catch up with the nearest family, a man with a long saturnine face, and, walking a few meek paces behind him, his toothless wife and three dishevelled children.

  ‘Where do you go?’ she asked the woman.

  ‘To Upwey,’ the woman answered. ‘I’ve a cousin there, a joiner same as my husband. He will give us room, praise be. ’Twill be safer there.’

  ‘Is it far?’ Nan asked, looking at the dragging heels of the smallest child, who couldn’t have been more than four and was finding the going hard already.

  ‘Three miles or thereabouts,’ the woman said, and she whispered her explanation, ‘Better a long walk and blisters than a bay-net in the belly.’

  ‘You think the French are like to come tonight?’

  ‘Like enough,’ the joiner said. ‘He en’t come yet, ’tis true, but better safe than sorry to my way a’ thinking. He got twenty thousand men on t’other side of the Channel, all amassed an’ ready for the off. ’Twould be plain folly to be stood in the way of such an army.’

  They trudged on through the damp air while Nan digested all this.

  ‘You travel light,’ the woman said, looking shrewdly at Nan’s empty hands.

  ‘To the look-out post, no farther,’ Nan explained. ‘I have rooms in town for tonight and I mean to stay in ’em.’

  ‘Then good luck to ’ee, ma’am,’ the joiner said, ‘for ’tis more than I’d do, in all conscience.’

  By this time Nan was beginning to question the wisdom of it herself. But she walked on with them resolutely enough, until they reached the path that led off to Upwey and the look-out.

  By now it was very dark indeed for the moon and the stars were hidden by cloud and the mist was beginning to thicken. She could only just make out the grey shape of the look-out station a few hundred yards to the left. It was a simple wooden building with a brick chimney and a brick-built galley set to one side, and an old ship’s topmast standing rather forlornly before it, with a yard arm attached to it, and a flagstaff with truckle and sheaves ready to send the signal everyone dreaded.

  She was cheered as she walked towards it, for the nearer she got to it the more sturdy and dependable it looked, w
ith warm smoke rising from the chimney and lamplight in the window, and a midshipman on sentry go beside the flag staff. There was a single blue pennant drooping at the top of the mast, but no other signal, and that was heartening too, for it showed that the French hadn’t landed yet.

  She could hear voices coming from the far side of the hut and although the midshipman looked at her sharply, he didn’t challenge her, so she walked boldly past him and knocked at the door.

  It was opened by a dragoon in the familiar blue uniform of the Clarence’s. He was surprised but respectful. ‘Yes, marm?’ he said.

  ‘I have come to enquire what is known of the invasion,’ she said firmly, and as she spoke, her eyes were taking in all the details of the little lamplit room, and scanning the faces of the men sitting around the table eating their supper. The third face she looked at was Calverley’s.

  He was surprised, just as she’d intended him to be, but to her disappointment she saw that his surprise was rapidly replaced by another expression that looked far too much like annoyance or even anger.

  ‘No news yet, ma’am,’ the naval lieutenant said politely. ‘I would advise you to get within doors as soon as ever you can and to stay there till morning. ’Tis no night to be out walking.’

  ‘The lady is a friend,’ Calverley said, ‘come to do business in the town. If she could stay with us until my duty is over, I will escort her back to Weymouth.’

  The naval lieutenant was intrigued. ‘You have a business in town, ma’am?’ he asked.

  ‘Indeed yes, and must be here for the next day or two to attend to it. I own the reading-room in Charlotte Row.’

  He was impressed. ‘Then you should certainly have an escort,’ he said, looking from her to Calverley and back again, and guessing their relationship. ‘Your relief is due in ten minutes, Mr Leigh. ’Tis quiet enough. You could cut off now should you wish it.’

  Calverley had his jacket on before the lieutenant had finished speaking, but the hand he thrust beneath Nan’s elbow was rough and angry, and he walked her back along the hill path in silence until they were safely out of earshot of the midshipman. Then he shouted at her.