Page 11 of The Lady's Companion
She lay awake long after her trunk was packed, corded, and downstairs waiting for the carter who would take it and her to the Hound and Hare to catch the mail coach. Don’t they understand what they have done to me? she asked herself over and over, until the words lost any sense or meaning. And when she had ground that subject down to hash, she thought about David Wiggins. Unknown man, I hope you are of a mind to be helpful, she thought. I am weary of difficult men.
Before sunrise, she let herself out of a quiet house, permitted the carter to hand her up onto the high seat, and congratulated herself on saving the cost of a hackney. The morning was bitter cold, the air still and heartless. This is a discouraging time of day, she thought. She debated whether to turn around for a last look at the town house, but she did not. If someone is looking out a window, she told herself grimly, they will not have the pleasure of thinking that I cared enough to glance around.
Muffled by snow, the streets were oddly silent. The further they drove toward the city, the more carts she saw, until there was the Hound and Hare, with a queue of passengers already waiting to scramble for the best seats.
To both her relief and her surprise, Joel Steinman stood in theinn door, stamping his feet to keep the cold at bay. He nodded to her and indicated a bench in front of the inn where two mugs of tea waited for them. She took one gratefully, holding the cup to her cheek.
“I won’t have you laboring under the fiction that the Steinman Employment Agency sees off all its clients,” he said as he took her ticket from her and handed it to the coachman. “It’s just that I suspect this is your first ride on the mail coach.”
She nodded. “You know it is. Do you have any good advice?”
“What do you think?” he asked, a smile on his face. “Although I fear you are out of luck for this first stage of the journey, when you get back on after the first rest stop, try to get a seat facing the coachman.”
“That’s it?” she asked after a moment watching the ostler stow her trunk on top and knot it down.
“That’s it. Let’s get you in line, Miss Hampton.”
She set down her tea and took the arm he offered, clutching it rather tighter than she meant to. He looked down at the pressure on his arm.
“Steinman has another service I forgot to mention,” he said as they shuffled closer to the coach. “We let our clients know of other openings more suited to them, if something should come our way. And we also don’t mind getting letters from clients, if they get lonely.”
She didn’t have any more time than to give him a grateful smile, before the coachman helped her inside the conveyance. Steinman leaned in after her. “One thing more: get on David Wiggins’s good side and he will be your ally. He has a most excellent side.”
“Mr. Steinman, do you know him? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Joel Steinman only grinned and waved his empty coat sleeve at her as the coachman blew his horn to warn bystanders. Susan sat back, her elbows close into her sides, warned from furtherexhibition by the harumph of the vicar on one side of her, and the warning stare of an over-fleshed woman mashed next to her. They left London as the sky lightened.
Nightfall found Susan only just beyond Oxford, and with a huge headache. I have learned so much today, she thought as she leaned her forehead against the cool glass, smudged from a day of travel through snow three parts mud. I can jostle for a window seat with the best of them, eat standing up, and entertain three-year-olds with the oddest bits of things from my reticule. I have listened to Waterloo stories and Trafalgar stories, and grievances of master and worker, and traded recipes. I know remedies for morning sickness and how to keep fleas off cats. Travel by post chaise was never this enlightening.
She longed for her bed, ached for the comfort of a familiar mattress, and a maid to bring her a tisane. I suppose I will be fetching those tisanes for someone else, she reflected as she rubbed her temple. Oh goodness, I wonder what a lady’s companiondoes?
A nursemaid dozed beside her. Her head tipped farther and farther forward, then snapped up when the coach hit icy patches and slid sideways. I could ask her, Susan thought, then reconsidered. She would only wonder what planet I had dropped down from, that I was so ill-equipped.
The headache was a stubborn one and she knew it would not go away without a good night’s sleep and something to eat. Food was out, no matter how many more times the weather forced them to stop tonight. She had spent her last few pennies on tea and a hard roll at the inn before Oxford, and even that was hard to come by, with the crush of travelers. Her stomach growled, and she could only chafe at her own pride that refused to ask a penny beyond coach fare from Lady Bushnell, or a modest loan from Joel Steinman. Her reflection in the coach window hardened. She would starve the length and breadth of Englandbefore asking Aunt Louisa or Papa for a groat.
No, what we must do is arrive at Quilling, and I must figure out how to charm David Wiggins. Lady Bushnell had said he was one of her late husband’s regimental sergeants, and before that, her father-in-law’s sergeant, too. Susan tried to picture him in her tired brain, but all she came up with was someone old and forbidding, and used to strict obedience. Perhaps his wife is more easily worked upon, she considered. I can ask her advice on domestic matters, and work my flattery on her husband that way. And if he is convinced of my worth and value, perhaps he will convey it to Lady Bushnell.
About her future employer, she had no clue. “I only know that I simply must succeed,” she said out loud.
“Wot, miss? Begging your pardon.”
Susan glanced at the nursemaid, who was sitting up wide awake now, trying to pull down the bow of her bonnet from under her nose, where it had ridden up and curled like a mustache. Susan hesitated. Aunt Louisa would no more speak to this inferior than pack snuff in her lip. Susan looked at her seatmate—the coach was nearly empty now—and was struck with the fact that talking to her was going to be like taking that first step down to the servants’ entrance.
“I am to be lady’s companion to Lady Bushnell at Quilling Manor,” she confided, her unease overcoming her scruples after all these miles. “I must tell you, it frightens me.”
The nursemaid had wrestled herself out of her bonnet. She turned big eyes on Susan. “Coo, love, it would worrit me some, too. I hear she’s a high stickler.” She leaned closer, her voice low and confidential, even though the sailor sitting across from them snored. “I hear she sleepwalks and prowls about the place at all hours and ends up outside the family mausoleum, joost sittin’ there. Keep your door locked, miss.”
“Oh, I shall!” Susan declared. “This is grim indeed.”
The nursemaid retied the bow under her chin and glanced out the window as the coach began to slow. “’Tis what my uncle heard from the gardener’s cousin, who had it from the laundry maid.”
“Apocryphal, then,” Susan murmured.
“No, miss. The apothecary ain’t had nothing to do with it!”
“My mistake,” Susan replied, careful not to smile. “But tell me something of David Wiggins. Do you know him?”
“Nobody knows him, miss, for all that he’s lived here five years or so. He came back from Waterloo with Lord Bushnell’s body, and he never left. I call that strange.”
