Agatha pulled me away from her embrace, shifting her hands to my temples so that she could read me like one of her pudding receipts. I lapped up the attention, for when would anyone ever waste sentiment on the likes of me again?
“Penned creatures suffer, but the more so when they imagine a pen what ain’t there,” Agatha said softly. “Can ye tell me the difference afore ye leave your ’ome behind?”
“I’m not penned—I’m frightened.”
“Ye said that before, in front o’ the main house. Of what, lass?”
“Of myself.”
Agatha set about mending the worst of my stockings. She stole glances at my mother’s painting, however, the one like a sunset seen through tears. I easily divined her secret fear, but knew it to be rootless. Edwin Barbary was ugly in life, uglier still in death; but many lovely things died with him, and one was my desire to be exactly like my mother.
I could no longer afford to be like my mother; my heart must be carried not on my sleeve but deep in my breast, where the complete darkness might mask the fact it too was black as pitch.
? ? ?
The day before my departure, Edwin was placed beneath the grass and the buttercups before a very small assembly. Aunt Patience would have sobbed if she could, but only swayed, murmuring; she may have been addressing Edwin, or the droning minister, or the shovel in the gnarled hands of the gravedigger—who could say?
I stood in silence with my head bowed, wondering whom she would talk to at all without me left to hate.
This morose thought followed me home, where a cold meat supper awaited. Directly before sleep finally captured my twitching eyelids, I mused over whether Aunt Patience would rouse herself and march—froglike, determined, hateful, as she used to be—down to the gate and see me off.
She did not . . . only Agatha kissed my cheek as I was helped onto the rickety wooden step of the coach, with my trunk strapped above.
? ? ?
There is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere: thin eggshell dawn-soaked curtains stained with materials unknown to science; rattling fit to grind bones to powder; the ripe stench of horse and driver and bog.
Now I have fulfilled my literary duties, I need only add that other girls travelling to school may not have dwelt quite so avidly upon the angular faces of police constables as I.
We had journeyed for some seven hours, and I had flicked the curtain aside as the towns came thicker along our misty route, blinking into view as faint collections of red roofs and stone chimneys. I tugged at the rope strung above the window. The otherwise empty coach stopped abruptly, nearly throwing me from the hard seat. A few seconds later, the driver’s whiskered face appeared in the act of spitting upon the side of the roadway. He gestured at the string tied to his arm as if my signalling him were the final straw in a long list of liberties I had taken with his person.
“Are we stopping at all before we reach Lowan Bridge?” I asked.
“Stopping!” He rubbed as if to wipe the red from his nose. Even had he succeeded, the pistol flask peeping from his lapel pocket would have replaced the stain in short order. “Are ye sick?”
“No.”
“Faint?”
“No, but—”
“Hoongry?”
Glancing at the basket Agatha had lovingly filled with bread and pickles and potted rabbit, I shook my head. “I only need some air.”
“Air!” repeated the driver. He shook his head as if from this day forward, no offence would ever be met with surprise. “Ye’ll have air enough in half an hour, when we reach yer destination. Ye’ll live on the stuff.”
“Is the board a frugal one?” I asked, desperate for a hint.
“Ye might say so. Ye might say scraps tossed to pigs are a point of frugality.”
“What is your name, sir?”
Rolling his eyes so I could see every feathery red vessel, the man answered, “Nick. What of it?”
“Nick, is life very hard at Lowan Bridge? I only want some warning, as Mr. Munt seemed . . . peculiar.”
Nick tapped his finger to the side of his ruddy nostril. “Peculiar! Aye, he is that. Ye’ll learn a plentiful heap o’ facts, if all goes well.”
“And how if all goes ill?”
“Then ye’ll not need to worry yerself—” he coughed “—as it’s prodigious difficult to trouble a corpse.”
This intelligence was punctuated by the stomping of boots as the coachman returned to his high post, a friendly cry of “Damn you, Chestnut, you bloody useless sack o’ glue!” and we were off again.