S
he sat on the edge of her seat in the corner of the third-class railway carriage and watched as the train rolled slowly into King’s Cross Station. Dense vapour blew down over the grey platforms on either side of her, altogether obscuring the mighty overhang of stanchions and red brick, and for a moment she wished that she might not ever have to leave the carriage, which now seemed to her a very safe and comfortable refuge. Then, as the smoke began slowly to clear and the train juddered almost to a halt, this feeling left her, and she glanced out of the window at the moving figures now revealed behind the glass. There were but few of these—a guard in a peaked cap with a red flag stuck into his jacket pocket, a pale-faced old lady clutching a small child by the hand, sundry boys and lookers-on—but she stared at them with a curious intentness, supposing that the secrets of London, where she had never come before, must surely lie within their grasp. The carriage was empty, and Esther, realising that she had raised her knuckles to her mouth, such was the extent of her nervousness, was glad that there was no one to see her. From somewhere near at hand a whistle sounded, and all around her could be heard a tramping of feet and a slamming of doors. A silent and solitary figure amidst this cacophony of noise and movement, Esther reached up to the rack above her head for her luggage, released the catch of the door with her free hand and stepped down onto the platform.
Caught up instantly in the throng of people leaving the train, she darted anxious glances at those who moved alongside her, wondering if any of them knew her for what she was: a servant who had thrown over her place and disappeared without leave. The anonymity of her situation reassured her—she had half expected to find a policeman on the platform waiting to summon her back—and she perceived that she was merely a girl in a brown dress with a canvas satchel strapped across
her shoulders and a travelling bag dragging at her feet (she had left the unwieldy trunk at the Hall), one of countless similar girls in whom she imagined the metropolis abounded. The thought of this solidarity cheered her, and she reviewed, for perhaps the twelfth time that day, the circumstances of her flight from Easton: waking before sunrise, her things concealed in the scullery the evening before; stealing down the back staircase in grey, unearthly light; abstracting the key from the ring in Mr. Randall’s pantry to let herself out of the kitchen door into the silent dawn, her feet and the marks of the handcart leaving a trail on the dew-drenched grass. She supposed that Mr. Randall, alone among the Hall’s servants, would regret her passing, and she brooded on this for a moment, conscious, however, that the Hall and its people had already begun to pass from her imagination and that her mind had begun to occupy itself with other things. On the wall above her was a poster advertisement showing a man in a tall hat and a morning coat drinking from a glass, and she marvelled at this thing, ten feet high, that stood in a public place inviting her, and those that passed with her, to admire it. Something in the man’s gorgeous apparel—the set of his collar or his magnificent waistcoat—reminded her of William in his footman’s uniform, and she added this to her store of imaginings and anticipations. And so, with the travelling bag bumping behind her and the dust from the platform hanging about her dress and forearms, yet intrigued and for the most part delighted by what she saw, Esther came at last to the station concourse.
Here, momentarily, her courage failed her again. Never in her life, she thought, had she seen so many people gathered in one place or moving so rapidly about their business. Behind her, three or four great engines smoked and steamed at the buffers. Porters ran on all sides propelling trucks of baggage. Before her lay almost a thoroughfare of coffee stalls, newspaper kiosks, barbers’ premises, shoe shiners’ stocks and the like. Before her, arranged beneath blue-grey air, she could see the immensity of London—a vista of tall buildings and church towers moving away behind the teeming street. The effect on her consciousness was so bewildering that she hesitated to venture out into this turbulent world, electing for a moment to stand quietly by one of the coffee stalls, drink a cup of tea and ponder her next course. William
had advised her to engage a cab, but this, even with the quarter’s wages she had hoarded in her purse, was not something she could bring herself to do. She supposed that she should take an omnibus. The question was, which? Below the steps of the station was an expanse of stone pavement where half a dozen stood drawn up, their drivers and conductors recruiting themselves with tea, and this caravanserai she now timidly approached.
“Excuse me, sir. Can you tell me how I may get to the Strand?”
The demureness of her expression and the downward cast of her eyes as she asked the question commended themselves to the official.
“You want this one here, miss, as goes to the Eastcheap. Mind your skirts now, as you steps aboard.”
Again, as she sat on the lower deck of the omnibus with the straw rustling beneath her boots, looking back at the towers and pediments of the station, a memory stirred within her—of the evening when she had first come to Easton Hall, of walking with her bag across the hill as the twilight rose and settled around her, and the dust motes rising up from the chalk path to strike her skirt, and of the faces turning to greet her as she came into the kitchen. Again, though, the outline quickly receded, like a dream that vanishes from the somnambulist’s mind on the very moment of waking, to be replaced by the tall figure of William smoking his pipe as he lounged against the fence and saluting her as she passed by. And so she sat, as it seemed to her, very comfortably on her seat in the omnibus, joined presently by two workmen who chaffed her about her luggage and asked her, was she running away to marry a marquis? She ate a bun that she had purchased from the coffee stall, was carried away into the heart of the city and ceased for a moment to think of Easton Hall. The books that her mother had given her banged together in the bag at her feet, but she did not register that they were there. They were merely things that she carried with her, things that she would always carry. As to what her mother might think of what she was doing, the strictures that she could imagine her pronouncing left no impression. Her mind was too full, too crammed with the sensations stirred by her journey and the thought of what would await her at its end.
Quitting the omnibus at the bottom of the Strand—she knew that
it was the Strand for she had taken the advice of the conductor—she stood by a cab rank staring at the tall buildings set back from the road, wondering who inhabited them and what went on within their walls. All kinds of people and vehicles passed her as she lingered—gentlemen in tall hats, inky boys with bundles of newspapers under their arms, clerks moving in and out of office doorways, costermen with their barrows—and she followed the ebb and flow of the crowd for a moment with her eye before once more taking out William’s letter to study. This directed her, as she knew—for she had read it a dozen times—to a public house in Wellington Street named the Green Man, where she should ask for him at the bar and he could be sent for. Wellington Street, a passerby advised her, was very near. Accordingly, she fastened the satchel once more about her shoulders and, dragging the travelling case once again at her heels, set off along the dusty pavement. Her nervousness, she realised, had been replaced by a feeling of calm satisfaction: that her route had fallen out as William had predicted, that everything was where he had said it would be. It did not occur to her to wonder if he would be there to greet her or what she should do if he were not. She could see him in her mind’s eye, just as she could see the dome of St. Paul’s a mile and a half distant rising into the azure sky.
Wellington Street was empty of people. The Green Man stood at its farther end, and Esther, crossing the pavement to its open doorway, stared for a moment into its dark interiors, where a fat man stood at the bar caulking a barrel. As she entered, two or three other men sitting by the door turned to stare at her and she became aware of her face reddening. Never mind! William should come soon, and they would stare at her no longer.
“Yes, miss?” the fat man wondered.
“I was told to ask here for Mr. Latch.”
“He’s not been in today, miss, but the boy can be sent. Hi, Joey!” There was a commotion from the passage behind the bar, and a boy of perhaps twelve years of age with a strawberry birthmark half covering his face stuck his head through the doorway. “Take yerself off to Shooter’s Buildings—yer know the place—and tell Mr. Latch there’s a party asking for him at the bar. And now, miss, what will you take?”
Esther accepted a glass of lemonade and took it to a table that looked out through green glass windows to the street. She had finished half of it when there was a rush of boots upon stone and William came marching into the bar with the boy Joey loping at his heels.
“Why, Esther! So it is you! I am very glad to see you.”
He came over and stood by the table, as if uncertain how best to greet her, finally extending his hand for her to shake.
“I am very glad to see you, William.”
Looking at him as he stood before her, Esther noted the change in his appearance since they had last met. He was clad in a suit of black cloth, which she could see was a good suit made by a competent tailor, and the white stock around his throat was freshly ironed. In addition, there was a white carnation in his buttonhole. He had put on more flesh, she believed, indeed was better complexioned since the days when she had watched him running into the drawing room at Easton Hall or bringing in Mr. Dixey’s parcels from the gig. William guessed the angle of her thoughts.
“They’re a good set of duds, ain’t they, Esther? I fancied you should like them. But what’s that you’re drinking? Lemonade? Come, you should have something better on a day such as this. What shall it be?”
Esther consented to take a glass of porter.
“Something stronger, miss?” said the fat man, when the order was conveyed to him. “Mr. Latch drinks Irish.”
“Porter will do very well,” Esther replied.
“This is my friend Miss Spalding,” William said. He drank the whisky in a series of gulps. “Excellent stuff! But it don’t do to have too much of it in the afternoon, eh? Now, Esther, you must tell me about yourself and the doings at the Hall. How are Mr. Randall and Mrs. Finnie? I wonder. And Sarah?”
As Esther explained about Sarah’s disappearance, William composed his features into a look of suitable gravity.
“Run away, hey? That’s bad, that is. Run away and you get no reference. But then, you have done the selfsame thing. You’re looking uncommon well, Esther.”
“I have nothing to complain of,” Esther said, to whom the enormity of her departure from Easton Hall had now become apparent.
“That’s the ticket. We understand each other, Esther, you and I. As for myself, I’m doing pretty well. Mr. Pardew—I have told you about Mr. Pardew?—is pleased with me and says I shall do well if I stick to it. And Bob Grace—that’s Mr. Pardew’s man-of-all-work—and me are regular pals. It’s hard for a chap when he comes to a strange place full of things that he’s not used to, but I fancy I shall make my mark in the end.”
Listening to these remarks, Esther was aware that the confidence William had shown in his abilities when they had talked together at Easton Hall had increased in the six months that they had been apart. Rather than alarming her, as being evidence of vainglory that could only lead to a fall, she was conscious that she approved of his delight in his success and wished, insofar as she could do so, to share it.
“You do seem very prosperous,” she told him, with her hand on the glass of porter.
“Ah, but you only ever saw me before in my footman’s togs. Ugh, how I hate to think of them. But look, what say we go to my place? It’s not much, to be sure, but I shall be getting an apartment before too long.”
Esther nodded. There was a meaningfulness about his voice that she could not fail to apprehend, but she gladly allowed him to pick up her baggage and escort her out into Wellington Street. Turning into a lane of small shops and dreary office buildings, he led her eventually to a house whose lower window advertised rooms to let. William, who had said nothing during the course of their journey, now let fall the baggage and turned to her.
“I suppose you know,” he remarked, “why we are come here?”
Again, Esther nodded her head.
Later they lay in a room beneath the eaves of the house, where pigeons clacked at the window and from beyond could be heard the implacable drone of the city.
“What a noise those birds make,” Esther said suddenly.
“Regular little nuisances they are. Like rats with wings. And never
quiet. Not like the owls at Easton.” William was silent for a moment. “What would old Randall say if he could see us now? Probably give us each a tract, eh?”
Despite her respect for Mr. Randall, the image that this conjured up in her mind was too much to be borne, and Esther laughed.
“Probably stand over us and fire off a regular prayer,” said William, rather less amiably.
“I’m sure,” Esther said, more demurely than she intended, “that he would see nothing he had not seen before.”
“Nothing he hadn’t seen! What do you know about it, Miss Pert?”
“I am not Miss Pert! And you should not mock Mr. Randall.”
“And what about you?” William persisted, making a grab for the coverlet of the bed. “What have you seen that you never saw before?”
“Nothing to startle me. Men always think that a girl has no notion of the world.”
“Well…perhaps they do. Hold on, though, it is gone six, and I have a fellow to see at eight. We had better go and eat, Esther.”
But Esther had her own ideas about this. William’s fireplace, she noticed, contained several utensils, while the cupboards gave notice of one or two things that could be drunk or eaten.
“I could cook something for us,” she said, getting to her feet and standing uncertainly in the centre of the room, “if you cared to eat it.”