Penelope Goes to Portsmouth Page 4

  Benjamin mounted the scaffold. His face was white and tense, his eyes bleak. He looked down and saw Hannah and Penelope and made them a stiff bow.

  ‘Look the other way, Penelope,’ urged Hannah. ‘God grant me the strength, for when he hangs, I am going to jump on that scaffold and pull his legs so his neck will break and it at least will be quick.’

  The prison chaplain read a doleful sermon. The rope was put around Benjamin’s neck.

  ‘Hold hard!’ shouted a voice.

  Everyone swung around.

  Lord Augustus, the magistrate, the prison governor, and the constable came hurrying up to the scaffold. ‘Release the prisoner!’ shouted the governor. ‘He is innocent.’

  Benjamin looked dazed. But then, Hannah thought, how could a deaf man know he had been miraculously reprieved?

  ‘Write it down,’ shrieked Penelope. In a shaky hand, Hannah scribbled, ‘You are a Free Man.’ She climbed the scaffold as the executioner removed the rope from around Benjamin’s neck. Four flaring pine torches were burning at each corner of the scaffold. Benjamin held the paper up and read what was written on it.

  Then he slowly sank down on one knee and raised the hem of Hannah’s dress to his lips.

  ‘Enough of that!’ cried Hannah. ‘I am not your saviour. It is Lord Augustus you should thank. Oh, of course, you cannot hear a word I am saying.’ She wrote it down. Benjamin rose and read it. He shook his head in bewilderment.

  Hannah Pym took his hand in hers and then, as if leading a child, she took him down from the scaffold.

  3

  Though in silence, with blighted affection, I pine, Yet the lips that touch liquor must never touch mine!

  G.W. Young

  The departure of the stage-coach was delayed while the formalities of securing Benjamin’s release were gone through.

  Miss Trenton was incensed, so much so that the glory of Lord Augustus’s title faded in her eyes. For once her sympathies almost seemed to be with Penelope. His lordship sat at his ease in front of the inn fire with the magistrate and laconically went over his statement. Penelope was listening, round-eyed. Yes, said Lord Augustus, he had bedded Lady Carsey and deuced exhausting it had been, too, but all in the interests of justice, don’t you know. The magistrate, an elderly man, said severely that although saving an innocent man from the gallows was commendable, his methods were deplorable. Unrepentant, Lord Augustus pointed out that there did not seem to be any other way of obtaining proof.

  ‘Indeed!’ said the magistrate severely. ‘Would it not have been better to have put your suspicions before me, my lord, and then we could have obtained a warrant and made a search?’

  ‘Tish,’ said Lord Augustus, half closing his eyes. ‘I can see it all now. You arrive at the Manor with the warrant but full of obsequious apologies. My lady would have been all help and compliance. She would have ordered her maid to fetch her jewel box and the maid, already knowing her mistress had lied, would have hidden the brooch where it could never be found. I have made my statement and am weary of this town and wish to be on my way.’

  ‘As you will,’ said the magistrate, removing his glasses and stowing them away with fussy care in a shagreen case. ‘But Lady Carsey is a well-respected member of this town, my lord. I am convinced she made an innocent mistake.’

  He rose to his feet, gathered his papers, and walked out.

  ‘Heigh-ho!’ said Lord Augustus. ‘Thank goodness that’s over. What becomes of our Benjamin?’

  Hannah fumbled in her reticule and took out two guineas and handed them to Benjamin. He pushed them away and stared at her in mute appeal.

  ‘He wants to write something,’ said Penelope. ‘Give him a piece of paper.’

  Hannah took out her notebook and gave it to Benjamin. He wrote busily and then handed it back to her. She read, ‘I wish to be Yr. Servant. No wages. Food will be enough.’

  ‘What does he want?’ asked Mr Cato.

  ‘He wants to be my servant.’

  Miss Trenton tittered and then said in a shrill voice, ‘The impertinence of the fellow. Of course you must refuse. In my opinion, Lady Carsey knew something about him which led her to believe he took that brooch.’

  ‘He would be better to register at one of the agencies and go out to America as a bonded servant,’ said Mr Cato. ‘I’ll arrange it for the fellow.’

  Benjamin kept his eyes fixed on Hannah.

  ‘I could employ him for a little,’ said Hannah slowly, ‘that is, until I find a position somewhere for him.’ She thought of Sir George. Surely he would have enough connections to find work for one footman.

  ‘May I point out,’ said Lord Augustus meekly, ‘that our coachman is waiting and I am anxious to be shot of this place.’

  Hannah made up her mind. She would purchase a seat for Benjamin on the stage. She thought ruefully of her dwindling finances. It would need to be an inside seat, for it had begun to rain and Benjamin was dressed only in a thin, torn shirt and breeches.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Hannah, ‘someone might be so good as to go to the Manor to collect Benjamin’s clothes?’ She looked at Lord Augustus.

  ‘Not I, ma’am,’ he said, raising his hands in mock horror. ‘I never want to see that place again.’

  ‘Are you all coming aboard or ain’t you?’ growled the coachman.

  Hannah wrote in the notebook, ‘I shall purchase you a seat inside on the stage. You may stay with me for only a little. I shall find you employ when we return to London.’

  She stood up. Benjamin leaped to his feet and deftly picked up Hannah’s shawl and reticule and stood to attention behind her.

  She went off to the booking-office in the inn and bought the ticket. Miss Trenton let out a squawk of sheer fury when she realized that Benjamin was to sit with the insiders. ‘How dare you, Miss Pym,’ she raged. ‘A carriage lady such as myself is not going to travel in the company of that.’

  ‘Stow it, you old crow,’ said Mr Cato in a sudden passion. ‘I have to reach my ship before she sails. If I hear one more word of that carriage of yours, I’ll scream. You ain’t got no carriage and we all know it.’

  ‘Well.’ Miss Trenton bridled. But she climbed on board the coach, although her face, or what could be seen of it inside her bonnet, was quite pink with outrage.

  Hannah sat in her corner seat with Benjamin beside her. Penelope sat opposite with Lord Augustus next to her, and Miss Trenton and Mr Cato faced each other over on the other side of the coach. Miss Trenton’s disapproval filled the carriage.

  But after less than a mile, Benjamin, Hannah, Penelope, and Lord Augustus fell asleep. They did not even awake three miles and four furlongs down the road when the coach made a brief stop at Cobham. Only Mr Cato and Miss Trenton were awake to accept the offered glasses of rum and hot milk.

  Three miles, seven furlongs farther on, and they were at Ripley, famous for its cricketers, and its old inn, the Talbot, full of gables and long corridors. The coachman jerked open the door, but by now all the passengers were asleep, so he fortified himself with brandy and drove on. Seven miles on, and the coach rolled to a stop in the sleepy town of Guildford. The passengers struggled awake and silently and sleepily filed into the Crown.

  Although Benjamin was standing at attention behind Hannah’s chair, the landlord took one look at his dirty and unshaven face and tried to turn him out. Lord Augustus took the landlord aside and said something, and after that there was no complaint. But Lord Augustus murmured to Hannah, ‘We stop here for but a short while. Perhaps there might be somewhere in the town where you can purchase a livery for your new servant.’

  Hannah got to her feet, signalling to Benjamin to stay where he was. ‘Make sure the coach does not leave without me,’ she said, and hurried out.

  ‘Now that is a resourceful lady,’ said Lord Augustus. ‘More ham, Miss Wilkins?’

  Penelope murmured, ‘No,’ and would not meet his eyes.

  Penelope had a lot to think about. She was a dutiful daughter and admired
her father very much and dreaded his disappointment when he learned she had been expelled from the seminary. When she had first seen Lord Augustus, although she had not fallen in love with him, she had thought of marriage. How pleased her father would be if she married a lord! Lord Augustus seemed a dilettante, but an easygoing and comfortable one. Then, when it seemed that he might be prepared to help Benjamin, her imagination had quickly raised him up to new heights and credited him with all sorts of noble attributes. When it looked as if he had no intention of saving the servant, she had damned him as totally useless. But now he had saved Benjamin, but in such a way! When it came to love-making, Penelope’s imagination through lack of practical knowledge did not go much further than kissing and hugging. She had first assumed Lord Augustus had been exhausted by his night with Lady Carsey because he had talked all night long in an effort to try to get her to believe Benjamin’s innocence. But when Lord Augustus had been telling the magistrate of his adventures, not only the magistrate but everyone else had looked shocked. Therefore it followed that Lord Augustus must have made love to Lady Carsey, and nowhere in the romances Penelope read did a hero make carnal love to a woman he obviously disliked. So Lord Augustus, she decided, belonged to a wicked and decadent world to which she did not want to belong. The other girls in the seminary had whispered of scandals, of how one must marry well, but how, if one was discreet, one could take a lover after marriage. All this had not sat easily in Penelope’s puritan mind. To date, she had mostly lived through books. Her father, although a self-made man and a Radical, had kept her away from her peers in the merchant class of Portsmouth. Penelope’s mother, a small, quiet lady whose faded looks only occasionally showed that she had once boasted the same beauty as her daughter, obeyed her husband in every respect. Penelope had followed her mother’s lead, but now she felt the first stirrings of rebellion. What was wrong with the merchant class? She herself admired men who worked. Lord Augustus was travelling on the stage only because he had obviously gambled all his money away and was now hoping to coerce his aged uncle into either giving him some or to leaving him money in his will. She also thought that he drank too much. It was a hard drinking age, and yet Penelope had grown to despise drunken men and had no intention of marrying one.

  Unaware that Lord Augustus was watching her, Penelope’s face hardened. She raised her eyes at last, found Lord Augustus watching her, and quickly veiled them, but not before he had seen the slight contempt in her eyes.

  Lord Augustus was normally an easygoing man. But that look of contempt he had just surprised in Penelope’s eyes irritated him greatly. Had he not, for her sake, bedded a repulsive woman? He ignored a niggling voice in his head that told him that he would probably have done it anyway, for Benjamin’s plight had touched him as much as it had touched Hannah and Penelope. He thought haughtily that Penelope was, after all, a trifle common with her little snub nose and total lack of the arts to please. And yet her very innocence and virginity struck him like a reproach.

  Hannah returned, slightly out of breath, with a package that she handed to Benjamin. She took out her notebook and wrote, ‘Put these on and join me in the coach.’

  Benjamin bowed and took the package. ‘I was lucky in finding a good second-hand clothes-shop,’ said Hannah to Penelope.

  The small group of passengers filed out and boarded the coach and then patiently waited for Hannah’s footman. ‘Are we never to move? Are we to sit here all day waiting for this criminal to favour us with his presence?’ demanded Miss Trenton acidly.

  The carriage door opened at that moment and Benjamin climbed inside, although it took all a few moments to realize it was Benjamin. He was wearing a suit of black-and-gold livery. His hair was powdered. He had washed and shaved and seemed very proud of his appearance.

  Lord Augustus studied Benjamin covertly as the carriage moved on. The man was too bright and intelligent to be a servant. Lord Augustus doubted that Benjamin had ever been a servant before his brief stay with Lady Carsey. Footmen were often effeminate and lazy. There was an air of cheekiness and independence about Benjamin. How old was he? Lord Augustus thought he was probably in his late twenties and had lived on his wits for quite some time. He wondered, too, whether Benjamin was really deaf and dumb or had heard of Lady Carsey’s predeliction for ‘freaks’ and was only affecting to be so.

  ‘Benjamin!’ he said suddenly.

  The footman turned his head sharply in his direction. ‘So you can hear,’ said Lord Augustus.

  Benjamin shook his head and then tugged at Hannah’s sleeve. She handed him the notebook. He wrote something down and gave it to Lord Augustus.

  ‘So you say you can read lips,’ said Lord Augustus. ‘A useful talent. Would you not say so, Miss Wilkins?’

  ‘No, I do not think so,’ replied Penelope after some moments’ thought. ‘One would know what people on the other side of a room were saying about one. It would be like listening at doors.’

  Hannah stifled a sigh. There would be no matchmaking for her on this journey. Mr Wilkins would need to train his daughter in the social arts if he wished to realize his ambitions. Obviously no one had ever taught Penelope that a young lady never corrects a gentleman.

  Lord Augustus was thinking the same thing. The more he thought about Penelope as the journey progressed, the more she irritated him. After he had served six long years in the army, he had become weary of war and bloodshed and had decided that a life devoted to pleasure was the only answer. And to date it had worked very well. He had gambled, and raced and flirted and danced and drunk deep with like-minded cronies. He was a younger son, on a younger son’s allowance. He would not inherit any estates or responsibilities. He did not want to go to war again, and the Church of England bored him. The navy he considered even more barbaric than the army, and he was prone to seasickness. But he was not going to consider his life a dreary desert and a total waste of time because one little bourgeoise disapproved of him. And was she so innocent? After all, she must surely have known her music teacher was smitten by her. She could easily have depressed his courting before it got too far.

  The coach stopped briefly at Godalming. Penelope, Lord Augustus noticed sourly, refused rum and milk and asked for a glass of water instead.

  The coach then started out on the long five-mile climb to the top of Hindhead. The timbers of the coach creaked alarmingly, like a very old ship on a high sea.

  ‘I do not trust the repairs,’ said Mr Cato suddenly. ‘Cobbled together, no doubt. We should have waited at Esher until the company sent another coach.’

  But the coach breasted the top of the hill without incident. It was all downhill to Liphook, and the coach began to gather speed to make up for lost time. It swayed and jolted alarmingly. Miss Trenton squealed with fright. Two miles down the hill, there came an enormous crack, followed by the splintering of wood.

  Then they were all thrown forward. Hannah fell on top of Penelope, Benjamin on top of Lord Augustus. Mr Cato and Miss Trenton lay as close as lovers in a heap on the floor. The poles of the coach had snapped.

  Miss Trenton began to cry. It was an odd sound, like a courting cat, ‘Yow! Yewow! Yow!’

  ‘Stow it,’ shouted Mr Cato. The coach was tilted forward at a crazy angle. Lord Augustus wrenched open the door and climbed out. The coachman lay sprawled at the side of the road, dangerously near the kicking and thrashing of the frightened horses’ hooves. Lord Augustus ran to him. He was unconscious. The guard struggled around the side of the coach, cursing the villain who had sawn it up in Esher and cursing the repairman who had done such a disastrously bad job.

  Lord Augustus knelt down by the coachman and loosened his neckcloth. Hannah climbed out of the wrecked coach, helped by Benjamin, and then both assisted Penelope to alight. Then appeared Mr Cato, who leaned back in and tugged out Miss Trenton. Her yowls reduced to sobs, Miss Trenton sat down on the ground and buried her face in her hands.

  Her horrible bonnet had come off during the accident, revealing her small, pinc
hed, discontented face topped with masses of luxuriant red hair. It was not sandy like Hannah’s, but a flaming glorious red, an improbable colour for such a withered spinster to flaunt.

  Lord Augustus decided sourly that Miss Trenton was behaving just as a lady ought, given the circumstances. His next thought was that he was being stupid. Surely it was better to have the competent and brisk Miss Pym and the calm and beautiful Penelope than to have the whole lot of them screaming and wailing. That was followed by a brief flicker of an idea that it would have been pleasant to soothe a distressed Penelope.

  He went to the horses’ heads and calmed them, glad they were miraculously unhurt. He wondered at his own reckless folly in damaging the coach in the first place and thought ruefully of various silly pranks he had played in London with his drunken friends. He unhitched one of the leaders and then cut the rest free from the traces and tethered them to a couple of gateposts beside the road. He mounted the leader and rode off down the hill for help.

  ‘He is really very competent,’ said Penelope thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes, very,’ said Hannah Pym, giving a tug to her crooked nose and throwing Penelope a sideways look. ‘I think his idle life has not given him a chance to exercise his talents. Perhaps what he needs is a good woman.’

  ‘I do not think so,’ said Penelope.

  ‘Why, pray?’ demanded Hannah in an irritated voice, for she was still hoping to make a match between the unlikely pair.

  Penelope gurgled with laughter. ‘I think he needs the love of a bad woman. Anyone else would bore him and drive him from home.’

  ‘I think,’ said Mr Cato acidly, ‘that instead of discussing our absent friend, you ladies might lend a little help in soothing Miss Trenton.’

  ‘We have all had a fright,’ said Hannah repressively. ‘Thank goodness we are not still carrying outsiders, or one of them might have been seriously hurt.’