‘Very. Wake up!’ said Sir Richard, wondering what more imprudent remarks might be hovering on her tongue.
She yawned, and straightened herself. An altercation seemed to be in progress between the guard and someone standing in the inn-yard. A farmer, who had boarded the coach at Calne, and was seated beside Pen, said that he thought the trouble was that the would-be passenger was not upon the way-bill.
‘Well, he cannot come inside, that is certain!’ said the thin woman. ‘It is shocking, the way one is crowded already!’
‘Where are we?’ enquired Pen.
‘Chippenham,’ responded the farmer. ‘That’s where the Bath road goes off, see?’
She sat forward to look out of the window. ‘Chippenham already? Oh yes, so it is! I know it well.’
Sir Richard cocked an amused eye at her. ‘Already?’ he murmured.
‘Well, I have been asleep, so it seems soon to me. Are you very weary, sir?’
‘By no means. I am becoming entirely resigned.’
The new passenger, having apparently settled matters with the guard, at this moment pulled open the door, and tried to climb up into the coach. He was a small, spare man, in a catskin waistcoat, and jean-pantaloons. He had a sharp face, with a pair of twinkling, lashless eyes set deep under sandy brows. His proposed entrance into the coach was resolutely opposed. The thin woman cried out that there was no room; the lawyer’s clerk said that the way the Company over-loaded its vehicles was a scandal; and the farmer recommended the newcomer to climb on to the roof.
‘There ain’t an inch of room up there,’ protested the stranger. ‘Lord, I don’t take up much space! Squeeze up, coves!’
‘Full up! Try the boot!’ said the farmer.
‘Cast your winkers over me, cull: I don’t take up no more room than what a bodkin would!’ pleaded the stranger. ‘Besides, there’s a set of flash young coves on the roof. I’d be mortal afraid to sit with ’em, so I would!’
Sir Richard, casting an experienced eye over the man, mentally wrote him down as one probably better known to the Bow Street Runners than to himself. He was not surprised, however, to hear Miss Creed offering to squeeze up to make room, for he had, by this time, formed a very fair estimate of his charge’s warmheartedness.
Pen, edging close to Sir Richard, coaxed the farmer to see for himself that there was room enough for one more passenger. The man in the catskin waistcoat grinned at her, and hopped into the coach. ‘Dang me if I didn’t think you was a flash culltoo!’ he said, squeezing himself into the vacant place. ‘I’m obliged to ye, young shaver. When coves do Jimmy Yarde a service he don’t forget it neither.’
The clerk, who seemed to have much the same opinion of Mr Yarde as that held by Sir Richard, sniffed, and folded his hands tightly on the box which he held on his knees.
‘Lord bless you!’ said Mr Yarde, observing this gesture with a tolerant smile, ‘Iain’t no boman prig!’
‘What’s a boman prig?’ asked Pen innocently.
‘There, now! If you ain’t a werry suckling!’ said Mr Yarde, almost disconcerted. ‘A boman prig, young gentleman, is what I trust you’ll never be. It’s a cove as ends up in Rumbo – ah, and likely on the Nubbing Cheat afore he’s much older!’
Much intrigued, Pen demanded a translation of these strange terms. Sir Richard, having pondered and discarded the notion of commanding her to exchange places with him, lay back and listened with lazy enjoyment to her initiation into the mysteries of thieves’ cant.
A party of young gentlemen, who had been spectators of a cock-fight held in the district, had been taken up at Chippenham, and had crowded on to the roof. From the sounds preceding thence, it seemed certain that they had been refreshing themselves liberally. There was a good deal of shouting, some singing, and much drumming with heels upon the roof. The motherly woman and the thin spinster began to look alarmed, and the lawyer’s clerk said that the behaviour of modern young men was disgraceful. Pen was too deeply engaged in conversation with Jimmy Yarde to pay much heed to the commotion, but when, after the coach had rumbled on for another five miles, the pace was suddenly accelerated, and the top-heavy vehicle bounced over ruts and pot-holes, and swung perilously first to one side and then to the other, she broke off her enthralling discourse, and looked enquiringly at Sir Richard.
A violent lurch flung her into his arms He restored her to her own seat, saying dryly: ‘More adventure for you. I hope you are enjoying it?’
‘But what is happening?’
‘I apprehend that one of the would-be sprigs of fashion above has taken it into his head to tool the coach,’ he replied.
‘Lord ha’ mercy!’ exclaimed the motherly woman. ‘Do you mean that one of they pesky, drunken lads is a-driving of us, sir?’
‘So I should suppose, ma’am.’
The spinster uttered a faint shriek. ‘Good God, what will become of us?’
‘We shall end, I imagine, in the ditch,’ said Sir Richard, with unruffled calm.
Babel at once broke forth, the spinster demanding to be let out at once, the motherly woman trying to attract the coachman’s notice by hammering against the roof with her sunshade, the farmer sticking his head out of the window to shout threats and abuse, Jimmy Yarde laughing, and the lawyer’s clerk angrily demanding of Sir Richard why he did notdosomething?
‘What would you wish me to do?’ asked Sir Richard, steadying Pen with a comfortingly strong arm.
