However it was, Lefebure worked the oracle. Cecily received a letter from the Postmaster General informing her that from henceforth a postboy would deposit and pick up letters for and from the district at the Belle Sauvage, the White Horse’s licence as a receiving house having been withdrawn.
Stevenage’s inhabitants were displeased. They now had to travel five miles further in order to use the post than they’d done before. Totty Stokes, the White Lion’s landlord, was furious at the loss of a lucrative trade. But, since Totty Stokes’s mother had handled that part of his business, and since she was also the local laundress and the mail had acquired a dampness on wash days which made the ink of the addresses run, rendering them illegible, everyone else was delighted.
So was the postboy who carried the London mail on its stage from Potters Bar; the end of his ride came earlier and Cecily’s food and ale were better and more plentiful than Totty’s.
She heard his horse enter the yard and went out to meet him. ‘Well met by moonlight, Wallie.’
‘Bloody moonlight. Give us a hand, mum, me stamps is stiff.’ He had to make two attempts to dismount before his legs obeyed him.
‘There’s mutton stew on the fire in the kitchen,’ she told him. ‘And a blackjack on the table.’
‘Gawd bless you for a Christian.’
She took his horse to the stable for him, relieved it of its saddlebag and rubbed it down, leaving it munching from a manger.
‘I’ll lock up the mail as usual, shall I, Wallie?’
He looked up from his meal. ‘Aye. Got to guard the mail.’
She took the saddlebag upstairs to her bedroom. By law, it shouldn’t have left Wallie’s sight. By law, Wallie should have blown his post horn as he entered the Belle’s yard, where a fresh horse should have been awaiting him on which he should even now be galloping north towards the next stage instead of getting ready to bed down on a palliasse by the kitchen fire until morning.
But, as Cecily always said to herself, if the Postmaster General wanted his postboys to obey the law, he should pay them better.
Wallie, like so many postboys, was an elderly and pensionless veteran of Queen Anne’s wars. In winter he could be frozen to death – the ‘boy’ he’d replaced actually had been in the winter of ’16, his horse ambling into Stevenage with his corpse still on it. The spring rains created mud Wallie could drown in if his horse tipped him off. Trying to keep to time in summer over ruts a foot deep, he encountered flocks of geese and sheep which wouldn’t be hurried; in autumn he faced wide-wheeled slow-moving harvest wains, fallen trees that nobody bothered to clear and rotted bridges. All for 7s. 6d. a week.
Even if she hadn’t had an ulterior motive, Cecily would have given the man bed and food. Who was to notice the delay? The Post Office’s national delivery was all delay.
In London an excellent Penny Post ensured a speedy and frequent delivery that was the envy of the world, but if you lived more than ten miles outside the City, you got your letters and parcels when you got them.
The trouble was that the system hadn’t changed since the days of Charles II. The post roads went north and south only so that a letter sent by Royal Mail from Newcastle, in the east, addressed to, say, Carlisle, fifty-seven miles away in the west, had to travel to London and then out again – a round trip of 574 miles.
Again, while some receiving houses were coaching inns with horses available, like the Belle, some were mere homesteads where postboys had to wait while their horse for the next fifteen-mile stage was unharnessed from a plough.
With all this, the roads were so awful that it wasn’t unknown for a letter sent to the Americas by the Falmouth packet to arrive quicker than one posted at the same time in London to a destination beyond the Home Counties.
So nobody at the next stage after the Belle was going to raise an eyebrow if the mail was late. It was always late.
In her bedroom, Cecily undid the saddlebag’s buckles, slipped in the letters Maskelyne had given her and searched for the one it already contained to Clonkilty of Edinburgh.
If it was franked it meant it was likely to be from somebody important, a member of either the House of Lords or the Commons who was therefore exempt from having to pay postage. There it was. ‘William Clonkilty on the third stage of MacLannan’s tenement in Puckle Alley, Edinb’gh. Haste. Haste.’
Damn… The letter was bulky. It’d be hours copying the bugger. Even opening it would take time. The wax had to be softened enough for her to ease it from the paper without breaking it but not so much that the seal’s impression became distorted.
She had to wait until her hands stopped shaking. Suppose I break the seal and Clonkilty informs Walpole that somewhere along the Great North Road someone is tampering with the Royal Mail…
The night-time sounds of her inn forced themselves on to her awareness as if, in the creak of its timbers shrinking after the heat of the day, in the tiny agitation from the cellar, in the breathing of the child, in the scutter of mice in its thatch, the Belle was reproaching her: Will you risk all this?
As always, when she faltered, she was confronted by the image that enforced her co-operation with shabby men like Spender Dick and Arthur Maskelyne. It wasn’t Guillaume Fraser’s nor that of King James but the face of a woman hanged in Hertford for burning down a hayrick.
I’m here, Dolly.
Her hands stopped trembling. She levered up the softened seal, opened the letter, dipped her quill into the inkpot and began to copy.
The letter was from Josiah Staples, a Whig MP, sending a report to his friend in Edinburgh that would warm Mr Clonkilty’s presumably Whiggish heart as it chilled Cecily’s. ‘The Great Man do strengthen his hold with every Day that passeth,’ wrote Staples of his prime minister.
The discovered Jacobite plot to assassinate George I and take over the Bank and the Royal Exchange had proved useful to Walpole, enabling him to quell even reasonable opposition as Jacobite manoeuvring. Because of it, the Commons was to vote money for the raising of four thousand extra troops. ‘The Tories are in Disarray,’ Staples wrote, ‘for Whatever they do may be Suspect as for James Stuart.’
Britain’s Catholics were still having difficulty in paying the fine of ten thousand pounds imposed on them by Walpole as punishment for their support (tacit or open or non-existent) of the Jacobites. ‘It do serve them right,’ wrote Staples, ‘for are they not all traitors in their hearts?’
Bolingbroke had been allowed back into the country – (‘A Mistake for a Viper be ever a Viper’) – but was kept under close scrutiny and not permitted to sit in the House of Lords. Landowners’ taxes were to be lowered (‘a good Thing’) and workers’ wages were being cut (‘the better for their employment’).
Walpole, it appeared, was not only stifling Tories but any threat to his leadership from his own side. ‘Our Great Man,’ wrote Staples, ‘has ousted troublesome Carteret and ’tis rumoured Macclesfield, Cadogan and Roxburgh will follow.’
Interesting if depressing stuff, and pages of it. Dawn was gilding Datchworth church’s weathervane by the time Cecily re-warmed Josiah Staples’s seal and stuck it down.
Folding her copy, she took it to Sir Spender and Maskelyne’s door and slipped it underneath before returning Wallie’s saddlebag. Dutifully, she waited while he removed the letters for the district and handed them to her. She took those addressed to the Belle and put the rest on the hall table to be collected by their addressees.
She got Eleanor up and took her down to the kitchen. Outside Ned was harnessing horses to the coach, ready for its departure. The contraband delivery had gone well and Tyler had already left with the mules for wherever it was in the forest he kept them.
Usually Cecily was in the yard to wave the coaches off but she was too tired today. She watched from her window as two hung-over Jacobites were helped aboard.
She sat on in the window, enjoying the relief that they’d gone and the view of the road with its morning traffic. The sight of Colonel Grandison on his
bay, trotting down the hill from Datchworth to pick up his mail, reminded her it was the Brewster Sessions tomorrow. She’d have the annual chore of reapplying for the Belle’s licence.
Another horse, bearing Archibald Cameron and various fishing paraphernalia, emerged out of the gate below her and stopped while its rider chatted to the colonel, then turned right in the direction of Welwyn and the river Mimram.
What woman in Kent?
Marjorie put her head round the door. ‘More trouble…’
Cecily ran into the taproom and fell on her knees by the small, crumpled figure in its big chair. ‘Can they do this?’
‘They’ve done it.’ One of the colonel’s hands dabbed a handkerchief to his averted eyes, the other held out a letter. Beneath the Lord Chancellor’s seal a curt paragraph told Colonel Fairley Peter Grandison that his commission as Justice of the Peace quorum aliquem vestrum was being withdrawn immediately.
Walpole. ‘They must give you a reason.’
‘The reason, my dear, is that I’m a Tory and Walpole will have every official in the country a Whig, down to the night-soil men. At our last meeting the Lord Lieutenant reproached me that I didn’t administer the Test Act to Jack Ferris.’
‘For God’s sake.’ Sir Jack Ferris was a dear old man; well known and well liked, nobody had questioned his position as a local Overseer of the Poor even though it was generally known that he was a Catholic. Insistence that he take the Oath of Supremacy and Allegiance, as all holders of public office were supposed to do to prove they were practising members of the Church of England, would have meant his refusal and therefore the loss of a dutiful and compassionate Overseer, so Grandison had refrained from doing it.
‘This isn’t London, Cecily, it’s the country. We meld here, we tolerate. I told the Lord Lieutenant so. Do you know what he said? He said…’ Grandison turned to look at her. Tears spurted out of his screwed-up eyes, like a baby’s. ‘He said I must therefore be suspect of Jacobite sympathies. Me.’ He clambered out of his chair and drew his sword. It looked too big for him as he danced on his small feet, slashing at invisible enemies. ‘I opposed James II in the Glorious Revolution. I fought against young James when he was in Louis’ army at Oudenarde. And they call me a Jacobite?’
Confused, Cecily said: ‘But I’ve seen you drink to the toast of the king over the water.’
He was indignant. ‘That doesn’t mean I’m a Jacobite.’
Such a contradictory little man. Magistrate and receiver of stolen goods. Yet no more corrupt than the Lord Chancellor who’d just dismissed him. The signature on the bottom of the letter had read ‘Macclesfield’, the earl at this moment under investigation for misuse of Chancery funds. And, thought Cecily, for a minister of Walpole’s to attract inquiry into his peculation, said peculation must be enormous and undeniable. She sent Cole for some best contraband brandy and poured the colonel a bumper.
Hypocrites, she accused the government as she watched him cry. Grandy cares more for his little bit of England than you do for the whole nation. As magistrate, he’d been the chief organ of local government in the area, dispensing justice, seeing to the upkeep of gaols, fixing wages, licensing trades, reporting on the state of religion and any unrest in his division, setting levies for parish needs and suppressing nuisances. He was entitled, without trial, to send people to the stocks for swearing or being drunk and order a vagrant whipped.
Like all JPs he’d had the power of a despot. Yet nobody had ever appealed against his decisions. His people grumbled against ‘that interfering little goblin’ when he’d scolded and punished errant members of his flock, yet because he was interested, because he drank with them, helped them, tumbled some of their willing women, knew their children’s names and shed his ever-ready tears when they died, they had accepted him as a generally beneficent part of their lives, like the weather.
May God send as good a man in his place.
But, as she found out next morning at Stevenage’s Brewster Sessions, God and the Lord Chancellor had instead sent a Whig, Sir Samuel Pink. Hearing his name for the first time outside the court, she’d expected something small and fluffy, like the colonel, but he was large and red, wore a full-bottomed wig as if he were a judge, and appeared possessed of permanent fury.
He refused her licence.
Standing in the dark well of the court with other inn proprietors, she wondered if she’d heard him correctly. ‘I beg your pardon, your worship?’ The colonel had always passed her application on the nod.
‘Renewal refused,’ repeated Pink.
Walpole, she thought. He’s found me and instructed this gargoyle to take the Belle away from me as he’s taken everything else.
She stared upwards at the high bench and heard Pink mutter to his clerk: ‘A hotbed of Jacobites.’
‘If you’re referring to the Belle Sauvage,’ she said clearly, ‘it is a hotbed of Toryism. I was not aware that to be Tory is yet against the law, though I suspect it soon will be.’
At the back of the court, Cole Packer began to move forward.
‘Do you address me, madam?’ asked Pink.
‘I do, sir. May I ask for what reason you are refusing me?’ As Cole jogged her arm, she added: ‘Your worship?’
‘You are refused, madam, because you are a single woman…’
‘I am a widow.’
‘…a sole woman, also the sister of a convicted felon…’
‘Sister-in-law. Am I accused of a crime?’
‘You are refused a licence, madam, because no respectable woman may or should run an inn on her own.’
‘I have done so these five years.’
Pink leaned forward over his bench, smiling, as pleased with her fury as with his own. ‘Then your respectability comes into question, madam. Now, leave this court before I sentence you for contempt of it.’
Cole’s hand clamped over Cecily’s opening mouth and he dragged her outside and bodily lifted her into the carriage. ‘Lord’s sake, missus, you courting gaol?’
‘You stinking, Whiggish, fat-bellied bastard,’ Cecily was shouting as Cole whipped up the horse. ‘You Walpole-lover, you dare do this to me…’ Her fury lasted as far as the Great North Road to be replaced by despair. She couldn’t see the road, nor the sun. She was on a raft in a featureless sea. ‘I can’t lose the Belle, Cole.’
‘You just lost it, missus. That’s a matter of how to get un back.’
Without the Belle she would be unmade, thrown back to the foot of the chasm she had been climbing out of ever since the Bubble burst.
Smell of ale and tobacco giving way to freshness from opened windows, beeswax on furniture, horsetail on pewter; sounds of the broom as Betty Bygrave swept out, tunelessly humming, Ned hupping horses in the yard, Marjorie’s sharp speech coming from the kitchen and the slow boom that was Quick’s reply, chopped herbs, whiffs of ironed, breeze-blown linen as Pru, the laundry-maid, made up beds. Looking at her timepiece in the evening and taking up position to wait for the distant two notes on the horn that told her the London coach had breasted Mardley Hill, reverberation through the soles of her shoes, the scrape of brake against wheel before it took the bend, the change of galloping hoofs to a trot as it swept into the yard, stink of sweating horse and leather, satisfaction in pleasing tired, hungry people, being too busy to think, the knowledge that the Packers were around if a drunk became violent, that Eleanor was safe asleep… Eleanor, oh, God, Eleanor. ‘What am I going to do, Cole?’ she said, into the void.
‘We’re going to find Master Archie.’
Of course. Cameron would make it all right again. He always did.
The sunlight of a warm spring day reasserted itself through the crown of her wide straw hat and she stopped shivering.
Cole drove the carriage off the main road and they bumped over a grassy track running alongside the river Mimram which crossed the Great North Road outside Welwyn and meandered through fields and the Bramfield forest towards Hertford. On this side there was ragged meadow, yellow w
ith marsh marigolds; on the other, alders leaned over water that ran olive-green under their shade.
‘He’s gen’ly along here somewheres,’ Cole said.
It was as soothing to see the neat figure standing alone on the bank as it was to smell the weedy dankness of the river and hear the kurruk of moorhen. Cecily couldn’t wait for the carriage to negotiate the track that ran in a loop towards him but clambered from it and ran through the meadow, scattering cows and yellow wagtails, falling, scrambling up again. ‘Master Cameron, Master Cameron.’
He glanced up and doffed his hat, carefully lodging his fishing rod in the cleft of a stick. As she gabbled he spread his coat against the bank for her to sit and lean back on, produced an immaculate handkerchief, wiped her tears and made her blow her nose.
‘It’s Walpole,’ she told him. ‘He’s hounded me since Edinburgh. Talk to him, make him give me back my licence.’
He squatted opposite her, surprised. ‘It’s no’ him,’ he said. ‘To my knowledge Sir Robert has forgotten your existence. Was it Pink? A doughty fighter for the Lord, he’d say. He regards all women as transgressors since his wife ran off.’
‘Talk to him,’ she begged.
Cameron raised his ginger eyebrows. ‘I doubt he’d listen. I acted for a neighbour of his in a land dispute and won the case. He’s no’ too fond of me is Samuel Pink.’
‘Appeal, then. We can appeal.’
He shook his head. ‘The magistrate’s decision is final.’
‘What can I do, then? Cameron, what can I do?’
He said to Cole: ‘Draw off a way, Master Packer, if you will.’
Cecily saw Cole grin, heard the meadow suck against his boots as he tramped back to the carriage. She couldn’t see the meaning of it; the lawyer’s mind had always been a mystery to her. What course of action was he to propose that could be too illegal or too personal for Cole Packer to hear it? Then she knew. A second before he said it, she knew.
‘You can wed me,’ he said.
She waited for her reactions, as someone who’s stubbed their toe has a second’s grace before the pain starts. When they came they were so many and so various that, astonishingly, they formed a laugh. It began at her feet, surged up her thighs into her belly, swirled around her ribcage, stopped at her throat and came out as a squeak: ‘Eh?’
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