Fourpenny Flyer (33 page)

There is a mill stream hard by, Harriet thought, as the boy held up his lantern to light her down from the carriage. She could hear the creak of great wheels and the water murmuring and splashing in unmistakable rhythm. I wonder where we are.

‘Welcome to Minster Lovell, Mr Easter sir, Mrs Easter ma'am,' the landlord said, rolling darkly out of the
candlelight to greet them. ‘Thomas will take tha' luggage sir. I hopes 'ee made a pleasant journey.' And they were ushered into the inn.

They were in a wide, warm room with oak beams above their heads and rushes under their feet. There was a settle drawn up beside the huge log fire all ready for them to sit upon, with cushions for their backs and stools for their heels, and two pewter mugs steaming on the hob.

‘Hot punch,' their landlord explained, ‘for to send 'ee warm to tha' slumber, sir and madam, after such a long journey. Now whatsomever else you may require, sir and madam, say the word, that's all tha's to do and 'twill be in tha' hand soon as mentioned.' He was a very short man and extremely stout with a round red face, sparse sandy hair and very pale eyes, but what he lacked in stature he more than made up for in hospitality.

Although they would have preferred to go straight to their room, they drank their punch and toasted their toes and spent as long in the landlord's company as John deemed polite, while Thomas clumped their luggage upstairs and two maids ran after him with brass bed-warmers. But at long long last etiquette was satisfied and they were allowed to open the oak door and climb the spiral staircase behind it to their bedroom, preceded by their landlord with a broad smile and a triple candlestick.

It was an old-fashioned panelled room, which reminded them both of the hall in the rectory at Rattlesden, hung with tapestries and warmed by a log fire in the old stone hearth. There were two small shuttered windows set in the eaves, a carved oak linen-chest in one corner, a sheepskin on the boards before the hearth, and the bed was a huge four-poster, heavily curtained as they were both glad to see. The servants' door was set directly in the corner of the room, but there was a key protruding from the lock and as soon as the maids had departed John closed the door after them and locked it firmly. They were on their own at last.

‘Now we are married, my own dear love,' he said, ‘I shall undo the top three buttons of your gown and kiss your neck. Like this. And this. And this.'

He was rather surprised that instead of standing still to
receive his caress, as he'd hoped and expected, she ducked away from his hands and sped across the room to open their carpetbag, which had been left on a wooden stand beside the bed. He watched with growing amazement as she took a large towel out of the bag, turned back the covers of the bed, very neatly and deftly he noticed, and spread the towel across the undersheet.

‘What are you doing?' he asked, walking towards her. She had made him feel rather aggrieved running away like that, and just at the very moment when he was feeling most loving.

‘Annie told me to,' she said, pulling the towel smooth.

‘Do you always do as you are told?' he asked, his sense of grievance melting as he began to tease.

She answered him seriously. ‘Oh yes. Always.'

‘Then come here and let me kiss you.'

Oh that was easy to obey! And so were all the other commands that followed. ‘Come back to the fire, my love, where it is warm' … ‘Unpin your lovely hair and let it fall' … ‘Put your arms about my neck, my dearest' … ‘Hold me close, close, closer still!' … ‘If I undo this lace, so, your chemise will fall, so, and you can step out of it, can you not?' Oh she could, she could, shivering naked, her feet white against the yellow fleece, her mind shivering too, in case this was sinful, but reassured almost at once because his face was blazing love, his eyes lustrous as water and quite quite black in the leaping firelight.

‘Oh Harriet, my own dear darling,' he said. ‘You are so beautiful.' Standing before him, pearl-white and blue-eyed, like a goddess, with that straight pale hair framing her face and shimmering over her shoulders, and her limbs so slender and her belly so tenderly rounded and those pretty breasts casting pale blue shadows on her white skin. And he knelt at her feet, nuzzling her belly, kissing her breasts, and whispering, ‘I adore you. Adore you. Adore you,' over and over again between kisses.

She had not expected to be worshipped. Kissed and caressed and held close certainly, but not worshipped. Whatever we do when we are married, he had said, is right and proper and cannot be a sin. But to be worshipped?
The confusion of it made her feel dizzy, so that she swayed and put out her hand to steady herself against his shoulder.

The touch broke what little control he had left. In one movement he was on his feet and had lifted her in his arms. Two strides took them to the bed. Or was it even two? Neither of them could tell. Then time and movement blurred as kisses led them pleasurably on, swimming through emotion and sensation, warm and moist and vibrant, on and on until the moment of entry. ‘Yes, yes, yes,' he said, thrusting in triumph, ‘you are mine, mine, mine.'

And he hurt her. A sharp stinging pain as though he were pressing her with thorns. Neither the sensation nor the knowledge of it was any surprise to her. She had always suspected that she had been born for pain, so why should this supreme moment be any different? Even so, it was hard to bear in silence, and after a while she caught her breath, despite herself, and gave a little involuntary groan.

He stopped moving at once. ‘What is it, Harriet my darling? Have I hurt you?'

‘It is nothing,' she said, trying to reassure him.

He was still panting and aching with desire, but he couldn't go on. Not now. ‘I have hurt you,' he said miserably. ‘Oh my beautiful, lovely Harriet, I am so sorry.' Tears were already blocking his throat and stinging his eyes. How could he have done such a thing? ‘I am so sorry!'

‘It is nothing,' she repeated softly. ‘It always happens. Annie said so. You have taken my maidenhead.' And it was odd how proud it made her feel to say it. She had been sacrificed on the altar of love, like all wives since the beginning of time. ‘It always happens.'

Then she realized that his eyes were full of tears and she was torn with pity for him. ‘Oh my dear, John, you mustn't mind, for I'm sure I don't.'

‘I love you and I have hurt you,' he said, lifting his body away from her and sitting up. ‘You are all the world to me and I hurt you. I shall never forgive myself for it.'
‘There is nothing to forgive,' she said, putting her arms round his neck and kissing him. ‘It is God's will, my dear, and quite natural. Consider that.'

‘Then I do not understand His purpose.'

‘Perhaps he means to teach us that there is always pain in love.'

‘I love you more than I have ever loved anyone in the whole of my life,' he said. ‘Without you my life would be unbearable. You are everything to me. I would never, ever hurt you, not willingly. You must believe me.'

Why, what a child he is to be so upset! she thought. And she felt wonderfully responsible for him. ‘You will not hurt me next time, I promise you,' she said, ‘it is only the first. Annie said so.'

‘Devil take her,' he said with sudden fury. ‘She had no cause to speak of it at all.'
He
hadn't discussed these things with Billy, even though he'd wanted to, so why had she been talking to Annie about them?

‘Hush, hush, my love,' she said, smoothing his hair from those angry eyes. ‘Do not speak so.'

He got out of the bed and found his nightshirt and put it on, controlling himself, wrapping calm and reason about him with the folds of linen. They must talk of other matters, to take their attention from this terrible failure. Other matters, he thought. And he remembered his notebooks.

He unpacked her nightgown and handed it to her, trying to smile, and while she was putting it on, sitting with her feet hidden among the tumbled sheets like a mermaid in white weed, he found the books, closed the bed-curtains and climbed back into the bed beside her.

‘Now that we are married,' he said, and how matter-of-fact the old phrase sounded now, ‘I have great plans for the business. With you to help me, I shall expand our trade clear across the country.'

The realization that he could turn from love to business so abruptly made her want to laugh, but she controlled the urge and sat up in the bed beside him ready to hear what he had to say.

‘Look 'ee here,' he said, opening the largest book.

It was a map of the British Isles, yellow in the candlelight, and threading through it, like veins through the body politic, were the red lines of Mr Chaplin's coach routes. ‘I enter each new one as it is opened,' he said with pride, ‘and here, do you see, are the shops that Easter's own already, marked in black ink, and here are the ones I intend to open, marked in pencil. It is all planned.'

‘Is this your work, John?' she asked, feeling she ought to show an interest. The candles were beginning to gutter and the shadows they cast flickered across the page.

‘Indeed it is,' he said. ‘Billy may be a manager too, but he does nothing more than keep the warehouse in order and supervise the sorting. I am the one who builds up sales. And the key to building up sales lies here in Birmingham – He put his finger on a black circle in the middle of the map. ‘As soon as we are back in London, Harriet, I mean to travel to Birmingham and open as many shops as I can, and a sorting house, for once our papers are established there, they can be sent out to every point of the globe. It is a huge centre, and a growing one.'

The first candle went out, with a gust of strong-smelling black smoke. Almost absent-mindedly he picked up the snuffers and put out the rest, talking all the time. ‘Mama is a magnificent business woman, but she has no method. She buys shops in fits and starts, you see my dear, and there is no profit in that. Howsomever, one day she will retire, or stand down, and then I tell you, Harriet, I mean to take over the business. This must be our secret, my love, for there ain't another single living soul knows what I intend. But I shall do it, you may depend upon it. I understand the business so entirely, you see. Growth has to be deliberate and planned, moving from one town to the next, so that supplies are always moved easily, I might almost say inevitably….'

Half lying, half sitting against the warmth of his body, Harriet began to feel drowsy. She slid down into the bed again as he went on talking into the darkness. ‘There is so little strong news these days, that is one problem. What we require is something important to happen, something influential or unexpected or dramatic that everyone will
want to read about. Then you will see our sales increase I can promise you….'

They were the last words she heard as she fell asleep.

When she woke it was early morning, the bed-curtains had been drawn and sunshine was knifing in through the opened shutters. John was already up and dressed. He was standing beside the washstand, in his shirt and trousers, stooping forward for a better view in the little shaving mirror, the lower half of his face bearded with white soap, wielding a formidable cut-throat razor. She watched his long hands working steadily and was lost in admiration for him. Then he caught sight of her face in the mirror and they smiled at one another through the glass, he rather sheepishly, she with open affection.

‘Good morning,' he said, very polite and formal. ‘Shall I ring for tea?'

‘Is it late?' she said, suddenly anxious at the thought that she might have overslept and annoyed him.

‘No,' he reassured her, holding up his nose with his left forefinger and scraping underneath it very delicately, ‘but it would not matter if it were. We are here to rest and be waited upon.'

So tea was ordered, and ‘hot water for the lady', and when the maid had disappeared through the servants' door to fetch them, John walked across to the opposite corner of the room and opened another low door, with the air of a conjuror producing a rabbit from a hat, for neither of them had noticed it on the previous evening. It gave out to a little low dressing room with its own washstand and towels and soap all neatly ready.

‘Uncommon convenient, eh?' he said, well pleased with it and with himself for finding it.

‘Oh yes, dear John, it is,' she agreed, very much relieved to see it. To be naked before him by firelight was one thing, when passion was running strong in both of them and they were contained in their own half-lit, private world, but to be washing and dressing before him in broad daylight would have been altogether too bold, and especially now with that painful lovemaking between them.

So she waited quietly while he finished his shave, and when the tea had been delivered and enjoyed, she slipped from the bed, gathered her clothes and scurried into the dressing room, shutting the door behind her. When she emerged again, she was clean and clothed and perfectly contained, her long hair pinned into its modest topknot, her face calm, her daytime self resumed.

‘We could take a walk in the village before breakfast,' he suggested.

And very agreeable and proper and idle it was, to stroll along the single street between the low stone cottages they'd glimpsed the night before, their thatches steaming in the early morning sun, and their inhabitants already hard at work, scrubbing and sweeping or feeding pigs or hoeing cabbage patches. They passed a small child in a blue holland pinafore waddling a gaggle of geese down to the millpond, and a red-chapped milkmaid swaying towards the inn under the weight of her two full churns. And the pale sun shone on them all.

At the top of the village the path grew steeper as it approached the church of St Kenelm, which was built of the same yellow-grey stone as the rest of the village. Its square tower was turreted and the grey tiles upon its roofs were old and gnarled and discoloured like discarded oyster shells, but what was even better about it was that it stood at the gateway to a mystery. To the left of the porch they could see the round roof of a very old dove cote, and towering behind the church were the broken walls of a huge ruined castle.