Fourpenny Flyer (6 page)

The ‘Phenomena' was the last to leave, which pleased John because it gave him the chance to treat his coachman to one last brandy. And this time he bought one for himself, too, because he felt he'd earned it.

As the coach trundled off towards the Norwich road, he remembered his brother Billy, and wondered how well his new courtship was progressing. It was just like Billy to be off courting while
he
was doing all the work, and for a few seconds he felt quite jealous of his idle brother. But then he comforted himself with the thought that he, John Easter, no less, was the one who was furthering the fortunes of the firm. He would rent the necessary shops, hire men to run them and establish deliveries. That was something he had done before and he knew he could do it well. Then he would go to London and meet Mr Chaplin. By the time he saw his mother again the deal would be concluded, and she could hardly fail to be impressed. As the coach picked up speed and the wheels began to purr, he was smiling to himself with satisfaction.

Billy Easter wasn't doing quite as well on his envied picnic as his younger brother imagined. It had begun cheerfully enough, with their two fine vehicles bowling along between the May leaves under a warm blue sky. Billy rode in the Easter chaise with his sister Annie and dear old James, her husband, and their two little boys, baby Beau peacefully asleep across his mother's knees and three-year-old Jimmy sitting quietly beside his nursemaid. And the delectable Matilda rode in the Honeywood chaise with her younger brother Claude sitting beside her looking superior and her two cousins, Sophie and Maria, with their backs to the box seat, giggling.

They had travelled north to the little village of Fornham St Mary where the vicarage slept behind a thickset hedge
of hawthorn and yew trees, and a row of untidily thatched cottages faced the green. As they trotted by, a gaggle of dishevelled children ran from the cottages to cluster about the village well and watch them as they passed. They waved and smiled, feeling grand and young and idle, and the children grinned back, their faces brown as earth between pale straw bonnets and unbleached pinafores.

But then the party reached the foot of the hill that would lead them up through the woods to the little hamlet of St Genevieve and the grounds of the manor house where they were to have their picnic. By now the day had grown quite warm and their horses were beginning to blow so, except for baby Beau and his nursemaid, they all came tumbling out of their carriages ready to climb the hill, Annie and James swinging little Jimmy between them, Claude escorting his cousins and Billy gallantly offering his arm to Matilda.

Unfortunately their arrival attracted a swarm of flies which until then had been occupied on a fresh muck heap piled beside a gateway. With the unwavering instinct of their kind, they homed in on the mouths and eyes of a new and moving host. They were death to romantic conversation, as Billy discovered almost at once.

‘My dear Miss Honeywood!' he began. ‘Pray do permit me to say how perfectly charming you look this afternoon. A Parisian bonnet is … Ugh! Ugh!' A fly had flown straight into his mouth.

‘Why Mr Easter! Are you unwell?' Matilda said, peering at him through the buzzing.

‘Fly!' he gasped, red in the face and pulling air into his lungs with a noise like a cock crowing. ‘Swallowed a fly, dammit!' Oh what a stupid thing to have done! And just when he wanted to be suave and gentlemanly.

‘Oh dear!' she said and began to giggle. She knew she shouldn't but she really couldn't help it because he looked so funny with his round face red and that sandy hair standing on end and the buttons on his shirt popping open with the exertion of all that leaping and spluttering.

‘What is it?' Annie called back over her shoulder. She was swatting the files away from little Jimmy with the palm of
her hand. ‘Oh shoo! Shoo! You beastly creatures.'

‘Your brother has swallowed a fly.'

‘All right now,' Billy gulped. ‘No need to fuss, Sis. Only a fly.'

But his sister was already beside him and striking him firmly between the shoulder blades. ‘Cough it up, Billy.'

‘Imagine where the little blighter's been,' Claude said, enjoying the sight of someone else's discomfiture. ‘Climbing over all that muck, damnit, and then straight down Billy's throat.'

And at that Billy discovered that he wasn't all right after all and he had to go stumbling off to the hedgerow to be sick. And by the time he'd parted company with the fly and most of his breakfast, his new beloved was several hundred yards up the hill and flanked on either side by her two giggling cousins. He trailed after them disconsolately, cursing his luck. And his tormentors followed him every buzzing inch of the way, pinging against his cheeks and dancing before his eyes.

It wasn't the way he'd planned this picnic at all.

Outside the manor house door they were met by young Mr Jeremiah Ottenshaw who, being the only son of the house, was a gentleman of considerable style and importance, and dressed in the height of fashion from the fine white stock neatly folded beneath his fine blue chin to the immaculate doeskin trousers on his long, aristocratic legs. For all his rather imposing appearance, he was an amiable young man and enjoyed being hospitable, especially when he could number the Honeywood cousins among his guests.

‘Come in, Mr Honeywood, pray do,' he said as they rounded the last bend and toiled towards him trailing their unwanted companions. ‘Miss Honeywood, how pleasant to see you. And the Reverend Mr Hopkins and Mrs Hopkins, I do declare … Miss Maria, Miss Sophie, pray walk this way. You must be fatigued after your climb. We have iced champagne and syllabub and water ices a-plenty all waiting for you. Ah now, you're never going to tell me that our young Jimmy walked all this way, all by himself up the hill because I'll never believe it. What a
deuced fine thing!' And he bustled them on to where footmen were waiting to carry the picnic hampers to his chosen spot, and grooms to lead the horses to the stables, and maids to fetch and carry. And somehow or other in the general confusion of welcome and greeting and catching breath and cheerful gesticulating talk, the flies lost heart and drifted away to torment someone else.

So it was a good picnic after all and Billy perked up and began to enjoy himself. Even though Sophie and Maria spent the first ten minutes of the meal mimicking his behaviour when he'd swallowed the fly, with every splutter and retch most vividly recreated.

‘Fell into the hedge, so he did,' Maria giggled. ‘Positively fell in. The poor thing was spattered all over. Claude told us. Ugh!
I
couldn't bear to look.'

‘Oh I say,' Billy protested weakly as the laughter continued. ‘Steady on! It wasn't
that
bad.'

‘Done a deal o' tumbling just lately, so I hear,' Jeremiah said. ‘Fell out of a tower after the ball last night. Ain't that so, Billy?'

‘Oh Mr Easter!' Matilda reproached him. ‘How did you come to do such a thing?'

‘Calling a certain young lady's name, so I'm told,' Jeremiah teased. ‘Ain't that the size of it, eh? Plunged from the tower with her name on his lips, so he did. All good romantic stuff.'

‘And which young lady was that, pray?' Matilda asked, magnificently innocent, her grey eyes opened wide between those swaying curls.

‘Deuce take it,' Billy complained to his friend. ‘Ain't a man to have any secrets?'

‘Not when he screams 'em from the top of the tallest tower, old thing.'

‘Oh do tell,' Matilda begged. ‘Who is she? I long to know.'

‘When we have finished our picnic, we will take a turn through the rose garden,' Billy suggested, ‘on our own, and then I will tell you. I promise.'

‘I could not walk with you alone, Mr Easter,' Matilda said, thrilled by the idea. ‘'T would not be proper.'

‘Perfectly proper, Miss Honeywood,' Jeremiah said, winking at Billy with the eye Matilda couldn't see. ‘I assure you. There are plenty here to see you and chaperone you. You may walk where you will. I mean to take Miss Maria and Miss Sophie to see the fish ponds, if they will do me the honour.'

‘I very much hope you will, sir,' their cousin Claude said, ‘else I cannot ride your roan, as you promised.'

‘We must sit here with our children, I suppose,' the reverend Hopkins teased his Annie. ‘Like the old married couple we are.'

‘And what could be better, my love?' she said. So it was arranged.

It was very quiet in the rose garden, down in the dell between the house and the hazel copse, and if Billy and his new beloved
were
being chaperoned they were quite unaware of it. They walked side by side, Billy holding out his right arm gallantly and rather stiffly so that she could rest the tips of three of her gloved fingers very delicately upon it.

‘Now do pray tell me, Mr Easter,' she said, flirting her grey eyes at him. ‘What was the name you called upon as you fell from the tower? Was it truly the name of a young lady?'

‘It was indeed,' he said earnestly. Should he tell her? Or was it too soon?

‘What prevailed upon you to do such a thing? I declare, you gave me to believe that you were a gentleman of the most serious intentions.'

‘Did I?' he said, amazed to hear it. ‘Oh I say, I don't know how I did
that
, upon me word.'

‘Dear me,' she teased. ‘Are your intentions less than serious, Mr Easter?'

‘No – I mean – well yes – I ain't the most serious feller alive, Miss Honeywood, and that's the truth of it.' How betwitching her eyes were, gleaming at him in the pale sunlight. I could be serious with you, my beautiful Matilda.

‘Dear me,' she said again, and this time she smiled at him, looking straight into his eyes. ‘Do you trifle then, sir?'

‘Oh no, indeed,' he vowed, quite overcome by such
directness. ‘I could never trifle with you, Miss Honeywood. Not when you are so – when you have – when I –'

‘We have reached the end of the arbour, Mr Easter,' she said, still gazing into his eyes, ‘and if we continue to walk in this direction, I fear you may fall into another hedge.'

‘I have fallen in love,' he said truthfully.

‘Have you indeed?' she teased. ‘And who with, pray?'

‘Why with you, Miss Honeywood.'

‘Have you indeed?' she said again. And she began to laugh, chortling with delight at his declaration, beaming at him as if she were applauding.

It was such an infectious sound it set him laughing too. He seized both her hands and began to skip about, dancing with her between the roses.

The noise they were making echoed all over the grounds, from the open heath where her brother Claude was happily riding the roan, to the shade of the picnic oak where his sister Annie was half asleep with her head in her husband's lap.

‘Oh James,' she said. ‘I do believe our Billy has made a match.'

‘If you could prevail upon him to refrain from swallowing flies,' her husband said, smiling at her, ‘I do believe you could be right.'

Nan Easter, the formidable head of the formidable firm of A. Easter and Sons was negotiating the purchase of a new London home. Never one to waste time in unnecessary searches or pointless preliminaries, she had discovered the property she wanted within three days of commencing her search for it, a first grade house in fashionable Bedford Square, double-fronted and built in the Palladian style, with a huge pediment and engaged columns. Just the right sort of house for a woman in her position in society. Now she was bullying the vendor's solicitor to get the deal completed as quickly as possible.

He had come to her office in the Strand, cheerfully enough and according to her instructions, ready to undertake the sale in his usual leisurely way, but now, after a mere half-hour in the lady's demanding presence, he was already finding the transaction more difficult that he could ever have imagined.

She was so impatient and so domineering, quite unlike any other woman he'd ever had to deal with. The force of her character had been a considerable surprise to him, for she was such a little woman, barely five feet tall and slender as a reed in her straight green coat and her little button boots, but the face above the green velveteen should have given him pause despite her lack of inches. It was such an open, confident, expressive face, framed by thick dark hair that sprang from her temples in forceful curls, wide of brow, with shrewd brown eyes and a wide mouth and the most determined chin he'd ever seen on a woman. An honest face, he thought, but with far too many marks of passion upon it; laughter lines fanning beside
those eyes and two deep lines of temper between eyebrows as thick and dark as any man's. It was, as he now realized rather belatedly, the face of a person used to getting her own way.

He had opened the proceedings with his usual caution, stressing that it might well take some little time before a suitable price could be agreed upon but assuring her of his best endeavours in the matter. And she'd fairly brushed him aside.

‘Tosh, Mr Randall,' she said, ‘I'm a woman of business. I en't got all day to haggle, so I'll tell 'ee straight what we'll do. I will offer a fair price, you will inform the vendor, and if 'tis agreeable I'll buy and if it en't I'll look elsewhere. There are squares a-plenty in this city and one is much the same as any other.'

He was much put out, although he did his best not to let her see it. ‘How if the vendor would prefer to bargain, ma'am?' he suggested. ‘The asking price is often, if I may make so bold as to point out, merely offered by way of preliminary. Lengthy negotiations are customary.'

‘Maybe they are,' she said, grinning at him, ‘but I en't. Come now, the vendor wants to return to the Bardados and is to stay there, which I know for a fact. He'll be glad of a sale at the price I'm offering, depend upon it.'