The Captain's Daughter (8 page)

The next morning
Amy went out into the garden right
after breakfast and drew in the brisk air with deep breaths. She always loved
the smell after a great rain when the storm had washed the whole countryside
and left it clean and ready to be enjoyed.

Above her the sun was trying to
break through the clouds and the clouds for their part were doing their best to
prevent such an intrusion. They did not want the sun wiping the droplets off
the leaves and flowers that they had gone to such effort to spread over the
whole wide world.

And the poor marigolds had lost
their protector. Old Hubert’s rheumatism was not quite up to kneeling on the
cold damp ground. He could, of course, have knelt on a leather apron, but his
absence was most likely caused by his sorrow that his golden children, who at
this stage were little over six inches tall, had been beaten by the torrential
downpour of the night and were lying on the muddy ground. In a few weeks they
would be tall and beautiful but for now they sadly lay like little patients in
their bed of mud.

As for old Hubert, Amy found him in
the garden shed with his flower pots and trowels.

“Hubert, hitch Pansy to the trap.”
She always tried to make it sound more like a request than an order, although
they both knew he had to comply.

For some reason she always tried to
avoid hurting Hubert’s feelings, and Hubert had an overabundance of fragile
feelings.

“Ahhh, this is no day for Lady
Amaryllis to go ariding, what with’n the muddy roads an all.”

Amy decided the best thing was to
wander far enough away from old Hubert so she could no longer hear him, or to
where he would think she couldn’t hear. This worked and eventually Hubert led
Pansy out, pulling the trap.

“Ah don’t know why Lady Sibbridge
would allow her family to go out in this here weather.”

In truth, no one knew that Amy was
going for a drive. Amy hadn’t told her mother. She generally avoided telling
her mother when she went out to ride, because that would just cause problems.
She actually complimented herself for exercising enough caution to take the
trap rather than ride when mud and pools of water were everywhere.

What was uncharacteristic was that
she had not asked Emma to come with her because she did not see the need of a
chaperone when she was not going to visit a young man.

This morning, the village of
Stockley-on-Arne was what was of interest. And she did not want any chance of
her expedition reaching her mother’s ears. Not that she didn’t have absolute
confidence in Emma’s discretion, but by going alone she was less likely to be
noticed when she slipped out of the house, and her absence was less likely to
draw attention.

Mrs. Parkhurst noisily combing the
house and everywhere else for her missing pupil would only draw attention to
the absence of both Emma and Amy, and Amy did not need that. It would lead to
questions that she did not want to address.

And it wasn’t only the questions.
They would be waiting for her return and she couldn’t just sneak back in the
house, or as she considered it, reenter in a discrete manner. And the problem
with returning in the full view of her mother, and someone would tell her
mother if everyone had been searching for both her and Emma, was that she was
not quite herself that morning.

In a way, it was not Lady Amaryllis
Sibbridge that rode the trap into Stockley-on-Arne that blustery morning,
instead it was little Amy the maid. Amy the faux maid didn’t quite fit the
clothes belonging to Effie the real maid, but she tried to make it work. The
real maid, Effie, had needed quite a bit of reassurance and also a little
silver hadn’t hurt to agree to let Amy borrow her good going-to-church dress.
Effie, who was always a little skittish, seemed to feel that Lady Sibbridge
would consider it a hanging offence if she aided and abetted Amy in her
surreptitious departure.

It didn’t help that she was forced
to tell Effie she needed to borrow her dress to go to town and ask a few
questions about the old sailor that had paid them a visit the previous
afternoon. Effie, like many simple folk, seemed to feel it was wrong for Amy to
sneak out on her mother, go where her mother wouldn’t want her to go, dress in
clothing of the servant class, and deceive the townspeople into thinking she
was someone she wasn’t by assuming a simple disguise.

To poor Effie, it all amounted to
disobedience, lying, deceit, and trickery. Effie seemed to fear her helping Amy
in this little deception might be taken into consideration by a higher power
beyond this earthly realm and if it did not lead to her eternal damnation,
could at least be a black mark against her. Amy, who deeply respected Effie’s
innocence and holy writ as well, had a mystery to solve, and tried her best to
reassure her reluctant co-conspirator. Amy was rather well versed in scripture
and used her knowledge and power of reasoning to try and convince a rather
doubtful Effie that not only was what she was doing acceptable to the heavenly
powers, but that it was practically a holy obligation.

It got her the dress she needed, as
she now crossed the old stone bridge into Stockley-on-Arne.

As she crossed the river Arne,
Amy’s attention was redirected from the struggles of the journey to the complications
awaiting her in Stockley. The struggles of the journey had involved the
stinging of small but insistent raindrops which at times felt like little pins
stinging her in the face and making some effort to blind her. It was an odd
type of shower that only occasionally accosted the traveler. Usually raindrops,
even the large ones, were soft, but on occasion tiny drops urged on by blustery
breezes seemed to have the ability to turn themselves into a new form, what
seemed to Amy to be sharp water.

Sharp or soft, both managed to soak
clothing. Amy had tried to get the top to the trap up but had failed. Usually,
if no one else accompanied her she still had Emma, and Emma seemed to be able
to get the top up without difficulty. Amy considered herself every inch as
dexterous and agile as other people and that included her sister but she
reconciled herself that this wasn’t true with the roof of the trap. She did
have to admit also that there were other things that Emma seemed very capable
at handling as well as the raising of open carriage tops.

This had resulted in her making the
journey from her home to the town, which was by no means a very long journey,
in the open, which meant as she crossed the bridge over the river Arne that she
was considerably damper, no, make that wetter, than she would like.

It also seemed that the zeal that
drove her to come to town had dissolved in the wetness of the rain and turned
into a runny mush. She even briefly thought of turning back, and only was able
to force herself to go on by bringing up the courage of her ancestors, although
hovering somewhere in the recesses of her consciousness was the realization
that she didn’t really know if the ancestors she invoked were real or
imaginary.

They did not flinch at
Agincourt,

To face the might of France,

But challenged the iron knights,

To join them in a dance.

And to their foe in burnished
steel

Our yeomen would not yield,

And when night had hushed the
fray

Their hearts had won the field.

She could not remember who said
that, but current challenges now intervened. She was in the middle of the town
square and townsfolk were beginning to cast glances in her direction.

There are inherent problems in a
young lady borrowing a household maid’s clothes to go to town and ask questions
about an old sailor. Amy wished she had given this more thought before
commencing her expedition. Maybe it would have been a good idea to discuss it
with Emma. Emma might have had some useful suggestions that would have enhanced
the success of her mission.

Her problems suddenly seemed
manifold. For one thing, the townspeople might find it strange that a maid
would ride in a gentlefolk’s trap rather than walking to town as household
servants were wont to do, unless they had been authorized to take the farming
wagon.

There was this too, the fact that
Amy went to church with her family every Sunday and at Advent and sundry other
important days. It was true there were three churches in town, the Established
Church, the Catholic Church, and the church attended by the followers of Mr.
Wesley.

She wasn’t sure how they divided
the population of the town as far as the number of people attending each
church, but she supposed that about a third of the people might attend each
church. This would seem to mean that about a the third of the town might be
able to recognize her even with her scullery maid’s bonnet pulled halfway down
over her face, but there was one thing that gave her hope that she might escape
recognition.

Most of the poorer people in town
attended the church of the followers of Mr. Wesley because it devoted itself to
the poor and the minister gave very colorful and animated sermons as the
followers of Mr. Wesley were inclined to do. The congregation of the Catholic
Church was made up of a mix of Irish workers and a minority of the landed
gentry. The Established Church which Amy and her family attended was primarily
the church of the nobility, the gentry, their servants, and the merchants and
other more affluent members of the community.

Amy drew comfort in this for it meant,
or so she reassured herself, that the only people that might possibly recognize
her were the gentry who would all be out at their respective country
residences, their servants who by this time would have completed their errands
in town and already be back at the mansions of their masters or at least
hurrying in that direction. The merchants would be hard at work at their
business, and the lawyers, doctors, clerks, and such would be hard at work at
their respective trades. She assured herself that at this time of the morning
there would be no one out on the streets of the town who would recognize her.

“Mornin’ Lady Amaryllis.”

Who was that
? She didn’t
recognize him.

“Be seein’ you Sunday, milady.”

That was the one disadvantage of
being one of the foremost local families. You occupied the front pews in
church. The less affluent members of the congregation saw you from their pews
in the rear of the church, but you didn’t see them, especially when your
family, mostly your mother, had ingratiating conversations with the vicar while
the poorer members of the congregation shuffled out of the church to make their
way back to their humble abodes.

Amy had not been sure what she
would accomplish by going into the village and inquiring about the old sailor.
She had hoped that old sailors being scarce around Stockley-on-Arne that many
would have noticed him and that she might gain some useful information,
although she had no idea what that could be since he came to town on the
stagecoach and left again the selfsame day.

Except that’s not quite what
occurred. She had worked up enough courage and reignited a little of the old
zeal that drove her into the village. While the flame of her zeal was much
diminished yet it was enough to encourage to inquire of a number of townsfolk.

She was gratified that no one else
recognized her, or if they did they didn’t make it known. Amy was frequently
embarrassed that she had to ask her questions in damp clothes and a bedraggled
bonnet, but no one seemed to notice or if they noticed they didn’t make it
known either. Maybe the people of Stockley-on-Arne were just a discrete bunch
of villagers. And her investigation bore some fruit. As she hoped, quite a few
had observed the old sailor, and what she found out was helpful—in a way.

The bringer of the bundled pouch
did not come to town on the stagecoach, and he did not leave that way either.
He walked. He had come by foot from wherever he had commenced his journey, and
he had left Stockley-on-Arne the same way. And what was more significant to her
was that he did not leave yesterday. Because of the lateness of the hour, with
darkness impending, and perhaps because of the rain, he had bought himself a
tankard of ale at the least of the village’s taverns and nursed it through the
night.

Leaving at daylight the old sailor
had headed south on the London Road. By now Amy estimated he would be eight or
ten miles into his journey. It should be easy to catch up with him and then Amy
would be able to get the answer to the questions that had nagged at her since
yesterday.

As Amy was about to climb back into
the trap, the coach from London arrived at the Tabard Inn. The inn had been
named after its more famous and much more ancient counterpart. Amy had been
told it was built just before she was born, and its proprietor an admirer of
poets in general and Chaucer in particular had named it after the famed inn
where the pilgrims to the shrine of Thomas à Becket had storied away their
visit in the
Canterbury Tales
.

Amy looked down woefully at her
bedraggled dress, and up at the travelers who were beginning to leave the
coach.
I have to ask them
she sternly told herself
even if I look as
if I recently fell into a river.

To her disappointment none of the
passengers had seen an old sailor on the road. The last passenger to leave the
coach was a man of about forty. He leaned forward when she asked her question
as if he was straining to hear. His clothing was not of the best.

“Non, mademoiselle,” he answered as
he glanced at her clothes.

“Oh, you’re French.”

“Oui. An old man, you say? I am
sorry I am unable to help mademoiselle find her father.”