Death at Dawn - Caro Peacock [46]
The driver nodded and tapped out his pipe on his seat.
‘Seeing as they’re open, might as well go up the straight way.’
‘Better not. What if her ladyship sees you?’
‘See two of me, if she does.’
The driver made a tilting motion with his elbow and they both laughed. He jerked the reins and the cob, tiring now, went trotting slowly up the steep drive towards the castle. We hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards when a shout came from the gate lodge behind us. I turned round and there was the gatekeeper, waving his arms and pointing back the way we’d come. The driver turned too and his face went slack.
‘That’s done it.’
A great cloud of white dust was coming along the road from Windsor, a much larger one than we’d made. At the centre of it was a travelling carriage drawn by four horses, coming at a fast canter. At that point they must have been a half mile away, but we could already hear the harness jingling, the thudding of their hooves and a whip cracking. My driver seemed frozen, irresolute. Then he swore and jerked at the cob’s head, as if intending to go back down to the gate lodge. But it was too late. The carriage was thundering between the gates, at a trot now but still fast. The gatekeeper had to jump aside. There were two men on the box, one in a plain caped coat, the other in a burgundy-coloured jacket, with whip and reins in hand. My driver tried to pull our phaeton off the drive and on to the grass. The wheel must have stuck in a rut because it lurched and wouldn’t go. He struck at the cob with his whip, swearing. By now the carriage was so close the air was full of the sweat of the four labouring horses. The face of the man driving it was red and sweating, his black eyebrows set in a bar.
‘Oh God.’
It was the gentleman who’d disputed his bill in the hotel at Calais. He must have seen that the phaeton was stuck in his path, but he was still whipping up the horses. I don’t know why I didn’t jump out. Perhaps I believed that the driver of the carriage must swerve at the last minute. But he didn’t. The phaeton lurched and juddered as the cob, writhing under the driver’s lash, tried to drag us clear. Then the world came apart in a confusion of whinnying, swearing and splintering wood, and I was in the air with a great downpour of wax candles falling alongside, making splintering sounds round me as I landed with my face on the gravel of the drive and my knee on the fish kettle.
When I managed to get to my feet I found that the cob had saved us at the last second by managing to drag the phaeton out of its rut and far enough on to the grass for the carriage to give us no more than a glancing blow. But the blow had been enough to tear the nearside wheel from its axle and throw the phaeton sideways. The cob, trapped in the shafts, had gone with it and was threshing on his side. The driver was slashing at the harness with a knife, trying to release him, letting out a torrent of obscenities. I limped over to them.
‘Sit on his head, for gawd’s sake,’ he yelled at me.
As instructed, I sat on the cob’s head. That kept him still enough for the driver to release him. When he told me I could get up, the cob scrambled to his feet. His face and neck were grazed, his eyes terrified.
‘He’ll live,’ said the driver, after running his hands down his legs.
‘He could have killed him. He could have killed all of us.’
I was boiling with the anger that follows terror. The driver felt in his pocket for his pipe, found it broken, threw it down on the grass.
‘Shouldn’t have been coming up that way, should we. Only it’s another mile round by the back way.’
At least our danger had made him more conversational, though depressed.
‘But he must have seen us,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, he saw us all right.’
‘Is he a guest here? Surely Sir Herbert will be angry that …’
He was staring at me as if I’d said something stupid.
‘What are you talking about, girl? That was Sir Herbert.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My hot anger turned to something colder and harder. Until then, I’d had misgivings about entering any man