Frances had found no emotion within herself stronger than that of relief when the stagecoach had finally pulled into the hopping courtyard of the London’s Great George Coaching Inn. She had hired a hackney carriage, seen to the transfer of her case, and within minutes here she was among the vegetables.
The picturesque hustle about her filled Frances with fresh energy. She smoothed a wisp of her soft brown hair under her bonnet and gave her crumpled skirts a brisk shake. A sparkle returned to her hazel eyes as she filled her lungs determinedly with the dense acrid air of the metropolis. Tilting her head back, she smiled politely at the hackney driver.
“This is my first trip to the capital,” she said. “But I can see that it’s a city of which England can be proud.”
The hackney driver was a surly man in a green felt cap and a double-breasted cloth frock coat with a turned-up collar. He looked contemptuously at Frances and muttered a reply largely indistinguishable, but which sounded suspiciously like “Sure, girlie, and me old dad was a kidney pie.” In more audible tones he said, “Fare.”
Miss Atherton opened her purse, selected the coins, and handed them up to the driver. “Here you are, one shilling and sixpence. If you please, you may set my case here on the pavement.”
The driver looked at the fare in his cracked palm as if someone had presented him with a cockroach corpse. The other hand he lifted to scratch his unshaven chin, and he looked down at Frances with an intimidating frown.
“Ain’t enough,” he growled.
“But it is,” she answered, taken aback. “I counted it out most carefully, one and sixpence.”
“One and six ain’t enough,” returned the driver, with the air of one talking to a dimwit.
“Most certainly it is,” said Miss Atherton stoutly. “’Tis the fare on which we agreed at the coaching inn not twenty minutes ago.”
“One and six was enough
then
. If yer don’t like it, yer can come and get yer own trunk,” said the driver, smirking unpleasantly.
As Miss Atherton’s case was strapped onto a baggage rack behind the hack driver and more than six feet off the ground, its retrieval would have called for her to clamber up the side of the coach on widely spaced footholds and kneel over the driver’s lap. Miss Atherton stood back and reassessed the situation.
“Sir, you are not behaving well,” she observed.
The hack driver cleared his throat with disgusting, and quite unnecessary, resonance and spat upon the pavement.
The three youths who had been whitewashing the herb shop saw the exchange and, sensing that better amusement was to be had near the coach, trotted over to gape at Frances and nudge each other suggestively.
Ignoring her chortling audience, Frances said firmly, “I shall have my trunk now, please.”
The driver squashed his cap further down on his grizzled head and fixed Frances with a cold stare.
“Ye can come and get it,” he said, with tight-mouthed satisfaction.
Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd, and before Miss Atherton had time to think of an adequate retort, the watching group had swelled to include a bevy of sooty chimney sweeps, a greengrocer in a blue apron bulging with carrots, and a red-faced woman with a gaudy gypsy scarf and a basket of crimson love apples on her head. A youth with a long, pointed nose and coarse ginger bowl-cut hair made a saucy comment that drew snickering approval from the gathering. The Golden Rule and chivalry aside, a young, unaccompanied female on the London streets was considered fair game.
A less resolute young lady might have let prudence win over principle and paid the hack driver his demanded due, but Miss Atherton was made of sterner stuff. Turn and run? Not she, the girl who, at the tender age of eleven, had taken the village smithy to task for drinking away his good wife’s market money at the county fair.
Frances shook her finger reprovingly at the hack driver. “I suppose because I am from out of town that you think I’m to be easily bamboozled,” she said, adopting a tone one would use with a refractory child. “You’re quite wrong! I won’t allow you to take advantage of me.”
To the crowd’s heartily expressed enjoyment, several voices inquired if
they
might be allowed to take advantage of the young lady. A burly giant with curly black hair and enormous shoulders in a coster’s corduroy was inspired by the uproar to drop his bundle of beets with their dirty dangling roots and step toward Frances with a foolish grin that stretched from one stumpy ear to the other.
“I’ll help you get your case, missie,” he proclaimed. “Let me put my hands on yer waist and I’ll lifts ye right up to your case and in no time, too.”
Miss Atherton barely had time to say “thank you, no,” when the rough giant slipped his hammy hands under her cape, taking her in a bruising grip. With real alarm, she jerked away from him and took a step back, and the rough fellow came after her, arms outstretched as if to get a better hold on the situation. She stumbled, her heel striking an upturned flagstone, and fell backwards.
A pair of light, strong hands steadied her from behind, releasing her when it was plain that she had regained her footing.
She turned instinctively, looking backward over her shoulder, and found herself gazing into a young, vividly male face so attractive as to be almost startling. Miss Atherton was not one who allowed her knees to turn to pudding every time she met a handsome gentleman (which, it must be admitted, was not often), but however immune one might be to the Hollowness of mortal Beauty, Frances was aware of a rather intense, if brief, sensation somewhere in her middle that Modesty forbade her to name, even to herself. The gentleman was tall, fashionably dressed, and sensuously slender, with hair the color of melted gold touching his collar. His eyes had been painted by the same brush that decorates the first sweet greens of spring; they held an expression that was at once mocking and friendly. Frances was far too inexperienced to see the serenely calculating admiration in them. She didn’t know that she was face to face with one of her country’s foremost and most fascinating rakes. She might not know it, but the watching crowd did. They gave a cheerful shout of recognition, which further disoriented Frances, and she failed to understand its cause.
The black-haired knave who had been so willing to offer Frances unwanted assistance gave the blond stranger an affable salute, and gestured toward the driver of the hackney carriage, saying, “This son of a whip has been tryin’ to take advantage of the dimber mort” (this with a lewd wink toward Frances), “so her says.”
“Does she?” said the golden-haired stranger, his wonderful green eyes alive with interest. He gave Frances a smile that was famous throughout London for its irresistibly engaging tenderness. It quite completed the job on her. “What happened?”
The black-haired man seemed to consider himself the party who had been applied to for information. He hitched his hairy thumbs through his belt, looking as pleased as the schoolboy winner of a running contest. “’Er driver says’e won’t give up’er case until she gives’im’is fare,” the fellow chuckled proudly, “and I says I’m gonna’elp’er by liftin’’er belly up to board.”
Miss Atherton had not yet recovered from the shock that she, noted in her family from the cradle for her sensible attitudes, could react to a member of the opposite sex like a giddy miss. It did nothing to assist her composure to hear herself publicly proclaimed to possess so vulgar a member as a “belly.” With an effort that can only be described as heroic, she gathered her not inconsiderable mental resources, blocked the blond stranger from her mind, ignored the crowd’s gay jibes, delivered a quick, reproving frown to the black-haired lout, and stepped toward the hackney carriage.
“I shall summon a magistrate,” she announced valiantly, not having the faintest notion where in this vast city one was to be found.
The hackney driver had been deriving a fair measure of sour enjoyment watching Miss Atherton’s discomfiture, but at the mention of the law, his pleasure evaporated. “Oh, you will, will you?” he snarled. “Damned if I’ll take sauce from a snooty little curtezan like yourself. If you don’t pay your fare, see if I don’t take it out in trade before you’re much older.”
The black-haired lout captured the spotlight. He made a rude gesture toward the hack driver shouting, “That ya couldn’t, old Domine Do-little!” The crowd roared its approval. “This kitten needs to take her aqua vitae from a Johnny Ready like meself!” The fellow made a lunge for Frances, attempting to envelop her in his bearlike embrace.
Again Frances felt light, experienced hands encircle her waist as the golden-haired man laughingly plucked her from her attacker’s path, setting her down behind him. Her rescuer held a restraining hand toward the black-haired giant.
“Oh, no, my friend,” said the gentleman, giving the giant a dose of that curiously affectionate smile. “You may be ready for her, but I very much doubt that she’s ready for you.”
As if by magic, the lout stopped fast in his tracks, scratching awkwardly at the shaggy hair above his ear. He grinned shyly back at Miss Atherton’s champion.
“I was jest funnin’ loike. Didn’t mean’er any’arm,” said the lout in sheepish apology.
“No,” said the man with the golden hair, subjecting Frances to a swift, intimate appraisal. “And I don’t think you did her any, either, because she doesn’t appear to have understood half of what you’ve been saying to her.” He flipped a coin of generous denomination to the hack driver, and said good-naturedly, “The lady’s case, please.”
The size of the coin rendered the hack driver’s lugubrious aspect into something approaching happiness.
“As ya say, guv.” Twisting behind him, he unstrapped the heavy traveling case, handing it to the black-haired giant, who set it before Miss Atherton, saying, “There you are, missie, all’s right now.”
Miss Atherton, however, did not share his opinion. She nerved herself to look the blond man directly in the eye.
“That was wrong,” she said severely. “Very wrong.”
“Oh, I’m sorry; did you want Johnny Ready to hug you?”
She regarded him with a searing eye. The gentleman, it seemed, meant trouble. She hadn’t liked the effect his more than pleasant aspect had on her heart rhythm; she hadn’t liked the obligation that his unsolicited gallantry placed on her; she hadn’t liked the casual manner in which he discussed the level of her understanding with her black-haired pest; and she hadn’t liked the way he’d taken the situation with the hack driver into his own hands. “I am referring, sir, to the monies you have dispensed on my behalf and without consultation with me. I had already paid the driver the agreed-upon fare, and to concede to his extortionate demands encourages him to expect more than the justly agreed-upon rate.”
“A well-done speech,” smiled her rescuer, “considering that you couldn’t possibly have rehearsed it. There is the merest hint of a staccato, though, which it probably wouldn’t hurt to watch. Still, overall as an impromptu recitation, I would rate it decidedly above the average.”
Only the strong conviction that she had already bandied too many words about on a street corner kept Miss Atherton from advising the blond gentleman to mind his own staccatos. She would give him no further opportunity to make game of her and turned her attention to the wayward hackney driver, who was gathering his reins preparing to depart.
“Sir,” Frances addressed the driver, “you know you
ought
to return that coin to this gentleman.” From the expression on the hack driver’s face, not the most dyed-in-the-wool optimist could have held the hope that this was his intention. Miss Atherton decided not to pursue this almost certainly fruitless line of conversation, instead continuing: “You must let your conscience guide you. I hope that when you’ve thought more on the matter you will change your attitude and remit that money to charity.”
“Ain’t likely,” said the driver with a raspy chuckle. He gave the blond gentleman a knowing grin, nodded, and drove away.
Frances shook her head in resignation, and being careful not to look in the direction of the golden-haired man, she bent to pick up her case, giving a firm refusal to the giant’s offer to carry it for her. The giant shrugged, winked at the gentleman and, grabbing his bundle of beets, was off down the street. Seeing that the show was finally over, the gathered crowd melted into the bustle as easily as it had appeared.
Frances began to thread her way down Charles Street, perusing the numbers over each door for Number 59. It took both hands wrapped around the handle of her heavy dressing case to drag it beside her. The handle bit through her wool traveling gloves to sting her palms, and the case banged mercilessly against her knees. How in the world had the case become so heavy? She had originally intended to bring a few necessities in a small jute bag, but that was before the members of a large and dear family had each added their own article to her packing. Eight younger brothers and sisters had contributed such indispensable objects as a ponderous stone paperweight lovingly hand-painted with flowers, a large notebook of press-dried wild herbs, a driftwood carving of a fishing bark.
Mother had touchingly presented Frances with the old Bible Papa had used at Seminary (it was what Papa would wish, after all), and the jute bag had grown to a round valise. Frances was congratulating herself on being able to fit everything in when Grandma Atherton had arrived with a warming pan
and
a bed brick. Nothing could convince Grandma that her London daughter-in-law would be sure to keep a fire burning in Frances’ bedchamber. The valise had been returned to the attic and the unwieldy dressing case chosen. When Frances’ brother Joe had handed it to the stagecoach driver that morning he had said:
“God forbid you should have to carry this thing, Fran. It weighs like a cheese wheel.”
Frances looked at the doorway above her. Number 62. She set down her bag on the pavement, clapping her palms to rekindle the circulation. Suddenly, she realized that she was not alone, and turned to look into the eyes of her blond rescuer. With some indignation, she said:
“You’ve been following me.”