Fourpenny Flyer (12 page)

‘Could they be out, do you think?' he said.

‘My father will be at his work at this hour,' she said, her brow puckering at the puzzle of it. ‘Howsomever my mother should be at home.'

‘Look through the window,' he suggested.

It took her a long time to obey, he noticed, and then she only peeped. Both the downstairs rooms were empty.

‘I cannot understand it,' she said. ‘Wherever can she be?'

‘Ask next door,' he said, leading her up the hill. ‘There is no sense standing here knocking at the door of an empty house, now is there?'

Next door turned out to be a laundry, where five dishevelled laundry maids toiled amid the steam, ironing sheets and small-clothes. They were all very surprised to see Harriet.

‘Why Rosie, look 'ee here, tha's our Harriet,' the oldest said.

Rosie was a plump woman, who wore a sacking apron and a vacant expression and had a disconcerting habit of repeating the last words that had been said to her, like an affable parrot. ‘Our Harriet,' she agreed, ‘yes, Mrs Kirby, tha's our Harriet sure ‘nough.' And she patted Harriet's arm affectionately.

‘We thought you was in Bath for another three weeks,' Mrs Kirby said, tackling a sleeve, with professional speed.

‘'Nother three weeks,' the parrot emphasized.

‘Do you know where my mother is?' Harriet asked.

‘Mother is,' the parrot nodded.

‘Why my dear, they've gone away,' Mrs Kirby said. ‘Gone a-visitin' so Mrs Sowerby a-told us. Your aunt, or some such, down Ipswich way.'

Harriet's face fell visibly. ‘When will they be back, Mrs Kirby?'

‘Wednesday, my dear. First thing. Mr Cole gave your father four days off, didn't he Rosie?'

‘Four days off,' Rosie confirmed.

‘Thank 'ee,' Harriet said, but she looked stricken.

‘I will see you settled in,' John said as they emerged into the cold air again. ‘You could dine at my house this evening, if there is no food in your larder.'

‘I cannot get into the house,' she said forlornly. ‘I do not have a key. Oh Mr Easter, what shall I do?'

He was in charge of her again. What an amazing piece of luck. ‘You shall dine with me, and then I will take you to Rattlesden,' he said. ‘You shall stay with my sister.'

The Reverend James Hopkins was sitting at his desk beside the parlour window in the rectory at Rattlesden, composing his sermon for the following day. Or, to be more accurate, trying to think of a text that would comfort his parishioners and give them a sense of worth. The Corn Laws kept the price of corn artificially high, so the land owners' profits remained steady, but since the peace their labourers' pay had fallen even lower than ever. Most of his neighbours eked out an existence so bare it was often little better than that of the beasts they tended. So it was difficult to find a good text for them.

When he heard the sound of a carriage grinding round the corner into the drive, he was quite glad to put down his bitten pen and call to Annie that they had company.

Annie Hopkins was sitting in the dining room of their rambling house making the most of the last of the light to mend a tear in her son's little blue trouser suit. Baby Beau was fourteen months old now and on his feet, staggering into everything, but determined to walk everywhere. Yesterday he'd tumbled into the mud beside the pond on the village green, and that afternoon he'd torn his trousers on a blackthorn.

She finished her work as quickly as she could, calling to James as she sewed, ‘Is it Billy, do you think?' for she'd recognized the sound of her mother's pony-cart.

She and James met one another in the panelled hall, just as their guests were climbing out of the cart, and by now it was necessary to light the candles before they opened the front door. In the sudden darkness before their little light, neither of them was able to see who was walking up the path.

‘Is that you, Billy?' Annie asked, holding her candle aloft.

And John's voice answered, ‘No, Annie. It's me. I have come to beg a favour.'

‘Come in, come in,' the Reverend Hopkins said, stooping towards them to urge them into the house. ‘If it is within our competence you have only to ask.'

And, of course, when the pony had been stabled and Harriet introduced and the story told, it was within their competence.

‘What a misfortune to travel all that way and then to find no one home to welcome you!' Annie said to Harriet. ‘I will have a room prepared for you this instant. You must be worn out.'

‘I am a great nuisance, I fear,' Harriet said.

‘Not at all,' Annie said, hastening to reassure her. ‘You are most welcome and no trouble at all. Johnnie was entirely correct to bring you here. Come with me, my dear, and allow me to introduce you to Pollyanna and the boys.'

‘Have you heard the news?' the Reverend Hopkins said to John when the two women had left the room. There was a copy of
The Times
open on his desk, and they both looked towards it as he spoke.

‘No,' John said. ‘We've been travelling all day.' He'd forgotten all about news and newspapers. How very remiss.

‘Bonaparte has gone back on his word and left Elba with an army of a thousand men.'

It was shattering news, the kind that sold papers in their thousands, and he'd been out of London when it arrived. ‘When did it happen?' he asked.

‘On 26th February apparently,' his brother-in-law said, ‘but only reported this morning, it seems.'

‘Is this this morning's paper?' John asked, picking it up.

‘It is. I bought it in Bury this afternoon, when I was visiting the Canon.'

‘From Easter's?'

‘No, I'm, afraid not,' James admitted. ‘It was on sale in Mr Cole's bookshop, arrived on the afternoon stage. Easter's had it too, I'm sure.'

But they should have had it first, John thought. It was the sort of news he ought to have sent out by flyer. His very first opportunity to show how his new system would work, and he'd missed it.

‘May I?' he asked, unfolding the paper.

‘Pray do. But it makes sober reading, I fear.'

It did.

‘We have hitherto delayed accounts of Bonaparte's landing on the coast of Provence,' the paper said, ‘because the telegraphic dispatches which first made it known still communicate no details.

‘Bonaparte left Porto Ferrajo on the 26th February, at nine o'clock in the evening, in extremely calm weather, which lasted until 1st March. He embarked in a brig, and was followed by four other vessels, such as pinks and feluccas, having on board from 1,000 to 1,100 men at most, of whom a few were French, and the rest Poles, Corsicans, Neapolitans, and natives of Elba.

‘The vessels anchored in the road of the Gulf of Juan, near Cannes, on the 1st March, and the troops landed.'

‘He's been in France for nearly a fortnight,' John said.

‘He has indeed.'

‘And this is the first we hear of it.'

‘It is.'

‘Then he has not been repulsed or captured, you may depend upon it. If the news was suppressed, it was suppressed for a purpose. They would have waited for him to be rejected. And if he had been, they would have known of it by now.'

‘You fear, as I do, that the French people have made him welcome and joined his cause?'

‘I must return to London,' John said. ‘More news will follow and I must be there to dispatch it.'

‘Tonight?' James demurred.

‘Tonight,' John said firmly. His adventure with Miss Sowerby was over. At least for the time being. Now he must return to work.

‘But will your mother not …'

‘My mother was not in town this morning. There was no sign of her at breakfast. Nor when we arrived last night. In fact I have no idea where my mother is.' He'd been so busy looking after Miss Pettie and Miss Sowerby he hadn't even bothered to inquire. If she was there she'd be furious at his careless behaviour, and he'd best go back at once to face her and work with her; if she wasn't, it was an opportunity not to be missed. ‘I will go back to town tonight.'

‘Must you, Johnnie?' Annie said, when she and Harriet heard what he intended.

But his mind was made up. He was full of energy and wanting to be off at once. ‘I will send the pony-cart for you, Miss Sowerby, early on Wednesday morning. You are in good hands I do assure you.'

‘You will stay for a hot punch?' James suggested. But even that was impossible.

Within twenty minutes, the pony was back in harness and none too pleased about it, and John Easter was on his way back to Bury.

‘I will write to you,' he called, as he manoeuvred the cart into the darkening lane.

And Harriet, watching him go, wondered which of them he was talking to, and felt that she had no cause to hope it would be her. And hoped just the same.

London was bristling with rumours, even in the small hours of Sunday morning; people said that the French were flocking to join Napoleon's army, that the British army was on the move, and there had been a skirmish, but no one knew where, that Wellington was on his way home to England to receive orders. If the country was not already at war with Napoleon, as everybody surmised, it certainly felt as though it was.

The Sunday papers had repeated yesterday's news and speculated upon it, but there were no further dispatches from France and nothing more was known, according to Mr Walter of
The Times
who was one of the most reliable newspaper owners in London. And no news from Vienna either, which Mr Walter said he would certainly have expected by now. Most of the ‘Allied Sovereigns' had been
meeting in ‘Congress' in Vienna ever since the first of November. With Napoleon safe out of the way in Elba, they were supposed to be redesigning the map of Europe, but they'd made very little progress in the last five months and now of course, any work they might have done would be rendered quite useless by the dictator's return. The British army was still in Brussels, Mr Walter reported, but there was no news of them either. ‘We must bear our souls with patience,' he said, ‘and wait for what tomorrow brings.'

So John supervised the stamping, dispatched his papers in the usual way and went home to Bedford Square to find his brother. If there was no news yet, so much the better. It gave him the time to prepare for it.

Nan was out of town, so Mrs Pennyfield the housekeeper said. ‘Gone to stay in Hertfordshire, sir, and like to be there a week. We're to expect her back a' Friday.'

‘Did she leave an address?' John asked.

‘Holly Hall, St Albans, sir.'

‘Thank 'ee, Mrs Pennyfield. Is Mr William up?'

‘Rousing sir.'

‘Then I will rouse him further. Would you prepare breakfast and send me up some tea?'

‘To Mr William's room, sir?'

‘To Mr William's room.'

For a gentleman who was supposed to be rousing himself Billy was singularly supine.

‘Get up, you lazy dog!' his brother said amiably, pulling all the covers from the bed.

‘That you Johnnoh?' Billy said, sitting up slowly and giving his hair a thorough scratching. One side of his face was still marked by creases and he hadn't opened his eyes.

‘Put a breeze on!' John said, examining his own unshaven face in the dressing table mirror. ‘We've got work to do.'

Billy swung his legs out off the mattress and eased them onto the floor. ‘Wha'zza time?' he yawned.

‘Time you were up. Napoleon's landed in France.'

‘That's old news,' Billy said, unimpressed by it. ‘Yesterday's news. Where did you go haring off to with old Miss Pettie?'

‘Took her home. I'll tell 'ee about it later. Come on, Billy.
Look alive. We've got a dozen flyers to hire before the afternoon.'

‘You're never going to take on flyers again,' Billy said, opening his eyes at the very idea. ‘What'll Ma say?'

But his brother ignored that. ‘This time,' he promised, ‘Easter's are going to be the first with the news, good or bad. I've ordered tea and breakfast.' He fingered the thick stubble on his chin. ‘I must shave, then we're off.

‘I've got enough to do without hiring flyers,' Billy said. ‘I've got a warehouse to run, in case you hadn't noticed.'

‘Come off it, Billy,' John grinned. ‘You never go down to the warehouse until after breakfast. Sometimes not even then, if Miss Honeywood wants your company for a ride in the park.'

‘Which she very well might this morning, for all you know.'

‘Then you must send her a note pleading pressure of work.'

‘I can't do that. She'd never forgive me. We're getting along like a house a' fire, I'd have you know.'

‘Then if that's the case she'll understand. If we can get the next piece of news out to the provincial towns before anyone else, we shall outsell all our rivals and establish a precedent. Don't you see? It's the chance of a lifetime.'

Billy groaned. ‘It beats me where you get your energy from,' he said.

It beat John too when he thought about it. He'd been awake since six the previous morning and had slept very little the night before that, and yet he was charged with energy, fairly bristling with it.

Fatigue caught up with him later that afternoon, when his brother had sent a note to Matilda, after much sighing and protesting, and the necessary flyers had been found and hired and were pledged to be outside the Post Office at half past five the following morning, and he'd written detailed instructions ready to be attached to each and every ream of newspapers. He took a cab home to Bedford Square, aching with exhaustion, gave orders that, no matter what, he was to be woken at half past four the following morning, crept up the stairs like an old man and fell into
bed more asleep than awake.

The next morning was rather a disappointment. The flyers were there and ready, the instructions were tied in position, but there was no further news of Napoleon, and no news from Vienna or Brussels either, so although he and Billy got all the Easter papers to Mr Chaplin's coaches at dazzling speed, it was rather a wasted exercise. Billy said he might as well have stayed in bed as usual.