The General's Granddaughter Page 2

  “Sarah, you are barely out of a sickbed,” she protested earnestly. “You cannot expose yourself to the rigours of a long uncomfortable journey in one of those accommodation coaches, especially in the winter.”

  “The cost of traveling by mail is prohibitive. I am quite recovered now and shall take no harm on the common stage, Lottie. All kinds of people travel that way every day. It might not be a comfortable ride, but there is certainly no danger attached to going to stage.”

  Lottie was not reassured by this calm pronouncement. “‘All kinds of people’ is no more than the sad truth. You’ll be trapped inside one of those smelly vehicles, rammed elbow to elbow with heaven knows what kind of riffraff for a whole day and probably half the night too. Why not wait for a month or two until you have regained your health? Perhaps by then the shop will be on a more profitable basis so that you’ll feel able to go by mail. There is no cause for desperate haste in the matter, surely. Richard is barely eleven, and the day school he attends is adequate for the moment.”

  Lottie’s measured words were eminently reasonable, but it became evident over the next few days that on this subject Sarah had gone beyond the reach of reason. She had nerved herself up to take drastic action and this state, once achieved, consumed her mental energy to the exclusion of all other interests. Generally the most amenable of creatures, she had on one or two occasions in the past exhibited a similar mulish determination of purpose that brooked no opposition. Her arguments proving ineffective, Lottie was eventually persuaded to bestow her qualified blessing on the undertaking despite private misgivings.

  “I don’t know what Richard or I would do without you, Lottie,” declared a grateful but slightly remorseful Sarah when she had succeeded in getting her own way.

  “Neither do I,” she was told with grim humour, “but that goes two ways. I would not like to contemplate life without the two of you either. One gets used to the incessant chattering of a pair of magpies after a while.”

  At this reminder of Lottie’s childhood name for her, Sarah laughed and embraced the big-boned but sparsely padded figure who had been the one unchanging element in her life. Except that her dark hair was now streaked with grey, she had scarcely altered from the loving, no-nonsense nurse who used to dress a little girl in starched dresses to bring her to the frail young woman whose delicate constitution never completely recovered from childbearing. “I do love you, Lottie. You are our family.”

  “I wonder. Would your ladyship be so quick to hug me had you lost this tug-of-war?” came the quick rejoinder.

  Sarah chuckled again. “You know me too well. Now, let us be serious for a moment while we decide which items in my unique wardrobe will disgrace us least before my rich grandfather.” She pulled a long face.

  Lottie said promptly, “Bring the bronze-green bonnet with you.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t, Lottie. It’s much too grand for a poor relation. Besides, I’m hoping we’ll be able to sell it before I leave, to help defray the expenses of the journey.”

  Lottie looked rebellious but forbore to argue.

  The next few days were crowded with preparations for Sarah’s journey. She had flatly refused to spend additional money on a new traveling dress or pelisse, but Lottie coolly appropriated some of the costliest materials from their hat-making supplies and put her clever fingers to work in refurbishing some items dating back to their days in New England. Fortunately, the period of mourning was now up, providing more scope for her efforts. She cut out the neckline of one of Sarah’s plain black gowns and inserted finely pleated white lawn that she found time to embroider below a dainty collar. There was even enough of the bronze-green velvet left to make up a smart little spencer that she trimmed with the same sherry-coloured satin as the ribbons on the bonnet. After some cogitation, she replaced the worn collar and cuffs on the despised black serge pelisse with black velvet. No one of refined taste would mistake Sarah’s modest wardrobe for the height of fashion, but her clothes were always well-cut and beautifully fitted, though she had lost weight during her recent illness, necessitating some slight adjustments.

  One aspect of her appearance required no apology in any company. Sarah’s hats had always been the envy of her friends in America, thanks to her creative artistry and Lottie’s exquisite sewing. It gave her old nurse some small satisfaction to reflect that if her chick must demean herself to the extent of riding on the public stage, at least she would sport the most attractive headgear of any passenger thereon. Sarah would not hear of taking one of the hats from the shop with her, insisting that the black velvet bonnet they had made after her father’s death was still the most suitable, and slyly laying stress on the happy coincidence of the pelisse’s new velvet trim providing a stylish pairing. Defeated in her main object but determined at all costs to negate any aura of pathetic widowhood clinging to the all-black costume, Lottie removed the veiling material from the bonnet and added a white satin band around the crown, to which she attached a single large white ostrich feather, placing it to curl enticingly over the brim above one eyebrow.

  Though she had supplied generous practical assistance, even packing Sarah’s portmanteau, Lottie was not by any means reconciled to the desperate scheme of trying to force an audience upon General Ridgemont in his home. Nor was she taken in by Sarah’s well-done but spurious air of detachment whenever the subject was brought up — as though to imply that such expeditions were commonplace in her young life. When she thought herself unobserved, her anxious eyes and a strained look about her mouth testified to a trepidation she would have denied on the rack. Even Richard, told merely that his sister had some business in Gloucestershire, was unable to express his feelings with total unfettered freedom. To a boy of eleven, any deviation from their quiet life represented adventure and was thus ardently to be desired. He did indeed offer himself as escort and companion to Sarah, but when told gently that finances would not permit this happy arrangement, he manfully concealed his disappointment and threw himself into the preparations for the trip. It was Richard who actually purchased the ticket and reserved a place for Sarah on the Bristol stage, and it was Richard’s persistent nagging that was responsible for their arrival at the White Horse Inn in Fetter Lane in good time for the nine A M. departure of the coaches for the West Country. He had insisted on taking care of Sarah’s portmanteau on the short hackney carriage ride and attended to its final disposal among the diverse baggage being loaded on the huge green-and-gold accommodation coach in which his sister would spend at least the next twelve hours, for the stage didn’t reckon to achieve more than eight miles per hour. He even submitted good-naturedly to Sarah’s loving embrace despite the embarrassing proximity of spectators.

  Sarah was safely established in a corner of the coach with the basket of food provided by Lottie on her lap. At Richard’s insistence, her attendants remained to watch the heavily laden vehicle rumble out of the inn yard with a full complement of interior passengers plus seven or eight hardy souls perched up on the roof in defiance of threatening skies and a biting wind.

  Richard chattered away on the trip home, pleasantly conscious that he had surmounted his natural disappointment and willingly assisted in getting his sister off on her adventure. That his companion was a far cry from sharing his positive thoughts about the adventure in store for Sarah never entered his mind, for Lottie took care to respond to his prattle with a convincing show of attention, reserving to herself both the nagging worry that the physical discomfort of the journey might undermine Sarah’s precarious state of health and the pessimistic conviction, based on the accumulated evidence of General Ridgemont’s stony nature, that the effort was destined to be in vain. Her last glimpse of Sarah’s pinched features in the window of the coach when she waved a final goodbye had confirmed her supposition that the girl’s determined confidence this past sennight had been in the nature of whistling in the dark.

  CHAPTER 2

  Lottie’s uneasy assumptions about the genuineness of Sarah’s confidence in
the success of her mission were well-founded, but not even to herself — especially not to herself — could the young woman have acknowledged any misgivings. Unhappily, the driving force of the desperation to act that had carried her through the preparation period and into a corner of a clumsy stagecoach began to lose impetus before the vehicle had lumbered out of the yard of the White Horse. In the instant before Lottie’s and Richard’s faces vanished from her sight, panic rose up and nearly choked Sarah. A little gasp escaped her lips as her hand blindly sought the door handle. At that moment, the coach turned sharply into the city street, throwing the unprepared girl back into her corner with a bump she felt from her shoulder to her tingling fingertips.

  “Too late, missy. You’d best learn to do without whatever it was yer forgot.”

  A tinge of colour crept into Sarah’s pale cheeks as she made belated sense of the words addressed to her by the grinning, portly man sitting in the opposite corner. “Yes,” she murmured, dropping her eyes hastily as she read the interest in his. She tried to mask her instinctive shrinking into her own corner by producing a polite little smile.

  “What was it?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Huge amber-brown eyes returned to the jowly face across from her.

  “Whatever it was that was so important yer tried to climb out of a moving coach to get.”

  “Oh! Ah … tooth powder,” Sarah said, inventing madly.

  “Not to fret, dearie, salt will do just as well,” commented an amply padded matron with a benevolent smile beneath a brown hat whose brim sagged under the weight of artificial fruit piled upon it. “You’ve got very pretty teeth, dearie, just like my second girl before hers went all loose from childbearing. She’s lost most of them now, more’s the pity.”

  “I … I’m sorry,” Sarah offered feebly, feeling some response was demanded of her. She had not given previous thought to the enforced intimacy obtaining among a half-dozen strangers confined together in a closed carriage for an extended period. She did so now and experienced another tide of anxiety. How was she to bear a whole day of being subjected to the rude stares and prying questions of strangers — strangers whom she would never choose to associate with in the ordinary course of events?

  Fortunately, an eager interjection by the woman sitting beside Sarah led to a prolonged exchange of horror stories dealing with dental problems, which gave Sarah a respite in which to subdue the diffuse anxieties attacking her and re-establish her customary commonsensical outlook. How ridiculous of her even for a moment to doubt her ability to survive a day in a stagecoach when she had survived six weeks of a stormy Atlantic crossing two years before. It might not prove the most agreeable day of her life, but neither would it be the worst. One could stand any inconvenience for a few hours.

  Imperceptibly, Sarah’s defensive posture relaxed and she began to take an interest in her fellow passengers. Her glance slid quickly past her lumpish admirer across the way. The look in his eyes as they had appraised her earlier was one with which she had grown all too familiar since their entrance into the world of trade following her father’s death. Familiarity had not overcome her distress or discomfort at being assessed like livestock for sale on market day, though she had quickly learned to disguise her reaction, knowing full well that a significant portion of the shop’s business was directly attributable to her modelling of hats for their masculine customers. Initially, she had been surprised to receive any male patronage, but her naivete had not survived the first bold offer of a carte blanche. In recounting her shocked outrage to Lottie after the would-be protector had been shown the door with icy dismissal, she had received a second shock when her old nurse took her to task for losing a sale.

  Eventually, she had learned to swallow her disgust and project an air of impersonal pleasantness that not the most blatantly flirtatious approach could dislodge. The measure of her success was to be seen in the steady growth of sales to gentlemen despite her cool refusal of even the most minimal personal involvement with her clients. Indeed, she suspected her persistent unreceptiveness to masculine blandishments had brought the shop a degree of notoriety among a certain class of clientele. She resented this situation while at the same time taking advantage of it to increase their sales, something that should have troubled her conscience more had their need not been so great. The practical side of her nature decreed that she was in no position to afford those particular niceties of a lady’s sensibility.

  Sarah’s eyes passed over the friendly countrywoman who was still holding forth on her family’s medical history in the intervals when she could wrest the initiative from the garrulous woman next to Sarah. The man beside her was evidently her husband, though he possessed none of his rib’s bonhomie. A thin, sour-faced individual, he had replied to his spouse’s repeated requests for confirmation of her various statements with monosyllabic grunts that might just as well have been taken for disagreement, while his eyes never left off their rapt contemplation of the scenery rushing past the window.

  Even by angling her head into the side of the carriage, Sarah could not really see the third occupant on her own side of the coach who, judging by her wavery but persistent voice, was an elderly lady of frail physique but indomitable spirit. Her nearest neighbour blocked her view, which was not surprising since her girth was considerable and made even more so by an accumulation of shawls and wraps about her person.

  For the first few stages, the novelty of the experience and the extraordinary conversations of her companions helped the time pass fairly quickly. Sarah replied politely when directly addressed but was aware that among a plethora of embarrassingly intimate anecdotes and personal histories aired, her own few impersonal contributions lacked any savour whatever as entertainment value.

  The elderly lady got out at Reading with the man who had ogled Sarah and tried unavailingly to impress her with his status as a successful printer on Fleet Street. His place was taken by a taciturn individual whose welcome silence failed to compensate for the rancid odour emanating from his slovenly person. Sarah, who rather enjoyed modest experiments in meal preparation under Lottie’s tutelage, eventually identified the main component as garlic. By the time the unpleasantly aromatic man left the stage at Woolhampton, she had resolved never to get within smelling distance of that pungent bulb again.

  Time had slowed to a jolting crawl, and the individual rotations of the coach wheels had begun sending rhythmic hammer blows of discomfort through her temples. The stops to change horses afforded some slight respite, but none was longer than five minutes or so, barely enough time in which to take a few breaths of cold clean air into one’s lungs, certainly too short to stretch one’s legs or shake out muscles cramped from sitting.

  Lottie’s carefully prepared food was just so much wasted effort. Ever since the advent of the garlic-eating passenger, Sarah had been struggling, first to ignore, then to subdue a rising nausea that was only briefly alleviated by descending from the coach and gulping air at the various stages. As the daylight waned, all her physical and mental resources were concentrated on not being sick. She was quite literally afraid to eat, and only by staring out the window and fiercely concentrating on the darkening landscape could she ignore the odours of the various foodstuffs being consumed by her fellow travellers. Her fingers gripped her own basket with an unrelenting pressure that cramped them periodically, thus adding to her discomfort.

  Having consulted Carey’s Traveller’s Companion before embarking on her journey, Sarah knew that Beech Hill was located in the vicinity of Marshfield, a thriving town a dozen or so miles east of Bristol. As night settled on the circumscribed little purgatory that was the swaying stagecoach, all thoughts of deliverance were focused on Marshfield. According to the waybill, there were only two more stops before hers. All she had to do was contain the nausea, allow her body to roll with the movement of the coach, and ignore the pain in her head. She had been clenching her teeth against any movement of her head for so long that her jaw ached also. Several of the passeng
ers had actually dozed off from time to time. How she envied them as she noted the outlines of their relaxed bodies, their lolling heads. She attempted without conspicuous success to relax her muscles and tried to train her attention past the pain to the steady rumble of the wheels, tried to listen for a lessening of their speed as they approached a town so she might prepare herself for the guard’s blast on the yard of tin to alert the coaching inn to have the new team of horses ready to harness.

  When the accommodation coach finally pulled into Marshfield, Sarah was near collapse. She would have fallen to the ground had not the guard’s arms been quick as he assisted her down. She stood trembling in the cold damp night air while her portmanteau was retrieved from the baggage. When she tipped the driver and the guard, she asked the latter to recommend a smaller inn where her unattended status would not draw unfavourable notice, but she was reassured that, unlike posting houses that catered to a wealthy clientele, coaching inns were accustomed to serving ordinary persons. She summoned up a grateful smile as the guard pointed out a door to her, unaware of the passing sympathy in his eyes as he climbed somewhat reluctantly back up to his perch.

  Indeed, Sarah was almost totally unaware of her surroundings at this juncture. All her remaining resources were focused on achieving privacy before she disgraced herself by collapsing in a heap. The innkeeper, noting his guest’s extreme pallor, eased her through the preliminaries ahead of a man waiting impatiently, and she was shown in short order to a quiet room at the back of the inn. By now each stair represented a separate and distinct agony, adding to the painful cacophony jangling in her head. There were no thoughts in her mind beyond removing the once comfortable bonnet, which had assumed all the more unpleasant properties of a vice, and laying her head on a pillow. By the time the servant had lighted the candles and thrown some coals on a very small fire, Sarah had placed the hat on a modest chest of drawers and was struggling with the buttons on her pelisse. It would have been nice to warm her stiff fingers at the fire, but the urgent necessity to ease her head dictated all her actions. She laid her gown carelessly over a chair and sank down immediately onto the bed’s surface, taking care not to make any jerking motions as she awkwardly removed her half-boots and brought her legs under the bedcovers before easing her head onto the pillows.