“What’s this, what’s this?” Dick Butterfield said. “Stop it, you two. Let’s eat in peace.”
When they’d finished, Dick Butterfield sat back and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I’m going up to Smithfield’s tomorrow,” he announced. “Goin’ to see someone about some lambs comin’ in from-where was they comin’ in from, Charlie?”
“Dor-set-shire,” Charlie answered, drawing out each syllable.
Maggie’s throat closed so that she couldn’t speak.
“You want to come, Mags?” Dick Butterfield’s eyes rested on her. “It’s easier to let Dorsetshire come to you rather’n you go to Dorsetshire, wouldn’t you say?”
“Charlie, you bastard!” Maggie managed to get out, realizing now that he had never intended to give her the spoon money.
“Now, Mags,” Dick Butterfield interjected, “don’t blame him. He’s just lookin’ out for you. You don’t think he’s goin’ to let you go off on a country adventure without tellin’ me.”
“I-Please, Pa. I’m just tryin’ to help her.”
“The best help you can give is to your mam with her laundry, not runnin’ round Dorsetshire looking for that boy, under the ruse of helping his sister.”
“I’m not doing that! I just want to take her home, where she wants to be, out of this-this cesspit!”
Dick Butterfield chuckled. “You think this is a cesspit, gal, wait till you get to the countryside. Things happen out there just as bad as here-worse, sometimes, as there an’t so many people watchin’ out for you. You forget that your mam and me is from the countryside-we knows what we’re talkin’ about, don’t we, Bet?”
Maggie’s mother had remained quiet throughout this exchange, concentrating on clearing the table. She looked up briefly from the last bit of pie she was moving to the sideboard. “That’s right, duck,” she agreed, her voice flat. Maggie studied her mother’s face, and found in her frown a spark of hope, even as her father was saying, “You’ll be staying here with us, Mags. You’re a London girl, you know. You belong here.”
Maggie lay awake most of the night, thinking of ways she might still get the money she needed for the journey. This included selling one of Mr. Blake’s gifts, if they were valuable, though she hated the idea.
Then hope arrived. After a short doze, Maggie awoke to find Bet Butterfield sitting by her bed. “Shh. We don’t want to wake no one. Get yourself dressed and ready for your journey. Quiet, now.” Her mother gestured toward the other bed, where Charlie was sleeping on his stomach, his mouth open.
Maggie quickly changed and gathered the few things she would need, making sure above all that Mr. Blake’s packages were safe in her pocket.
When she joined her mother in the kitchen, Bet Butterfield handed her a sack filled with bread and the remnants of the pie, and a handkerchief knotted around a bulge of coins. “This should get you to Dorsetshire,” she whispered. “It’s bits and bobs I’ve set aside these past months-all my button money, and other things too. Since you’ve helped me with ’em, some of it’s yours. That’s how I see it.” She said this as if already rehearsing her side of the argument she would have the next day with her husband when he discovered Maggie and the money were gone.
“Thanks, Mam.” Maggie hugged her mother. “Why you doin’ this for me?”
“I owe that girl somethin’ for lettin’ her get in the state she’s in. You get her home safe, now. And come back, will you.”
Maggie hugged Bet Butterfield again, breathing in her smell of pie and laundry, then crept out while her luck still held.
6
Maggie remembered every moment of the journey to Dorsetshire, and long afterward liked to travel through it again in her mind. Bet Butterfield’s money extended only to two passages inside the coach, and it took a great deal of persuasion for the coachman to agree to let Maggie sit up beside him for the reduced third fare. He was convinced at last by the state of Maisie and Rosie, with Maggie claiming she was a midwife and if she didn’t go along the coachman might have to deliver the babies himself.
Maisie and Rosie caused a sensation everywhere they went together-at the inns where the horses were changed, at the dinner tables, in the streets where they took a turn to stretch their legs, in the coach itself, crowded with the other passengers. One pregnant girl was common enough, but with two together the double dose of fertility directed attention their way, offending some, delighting others. Maisie and Rosie were so happy to have each other’s company that they barely noticed the tuts and smiles, but snuggled together in the coach, and whispered and giggled in the street. It was just as well, then, that Maggie sat on top of the coach. Besides, from there she had a much better view of the vivid, unfamiliar landscape of southern England.
The first stage was not so surprising, as the coach passed through a string of villages that shadowed the Thames and looked back to London for their vitality-Vauxhall, Wandsworth, Putney, Barnes, Sheen. Only after Richmond and the first change of horses did Mag gie feel they had truly left London behind. The land opened out into long, rolling hills in a physical rhythm unknown to someone accustomed to the chopped-up streets of a big city. At first Maggie could only look ahead over the layered hills to the horizon, which was farther away than she’d ever witnessed. After coming to terms with that spacious novelty, she was then able to focus on the landscape closer to hand, to take in the fields segmented by hedgerows, the sheep and cows sprinkled about, and the thatched houses, whose shaggy curves made her laugh. By the time they stopped for dinner in Basingstoke, she was even asking the coachman for the names of roadside flowers she had never taken any interest in before.
It would all have been overwhelming for a London girl if she weren’t perched on the rattling box, detached from what she saw, passing by but not engaging with the countryside. Maggie felt safe where she was, squeezed between coachman and groom, and loved every minute on the road-even when it began to rain midafternoon and the coachman’s hat dripped directly onto her head.
They stayed the night at an inn in Stockbridge. Maggie got little sleep, for it was noisy, with coaches arriving till midnight and the inn serving far later. Sharing a bed with two pregnant girls meant that one or the other was always getting up to use the chamber pot. Then too, Maggie had never slept anywhere other than at home and, briefly, in the Blakes’ summerhouse. She wasn’t used to such a public place for sleeping, with three other beds in the room, and women coming and going all night long.
Lying still after a day on the move gave Maggie time at last to think about what she was doing, and to fret. For one thing, she had little money left. The inn meals had been half a crown each, with another shilling to the waiter, and extra costs kept appearing-sixpence expected by the chambermaid who showed them to their room and gave them a sheet and blankets, tuppence for the boy who told them he must clean their boots, a penny for the porter who insisted on carrying their bags upstairs when they could easily have done so themselves, for they had few things. With her meager fund of pennies and shillings rapidly eroding, Maggie would have nothing left by the time she reached the Piddle Valley.
She thought too about her family: how angry her father would be to discover she had escaped, how much grief her mother would have to suffer from him for helping Maggie. Above all, she wondered where Charlie was right now, and whether he would find her one day and punish her for the revenge she took on him. For that morning, when she and the girls had reached the White Hart in the Borough High Street where the Weymouth coach started, Maggie had spied a soldier, taken him aside, and told him there was a young man at no. 6 Bastille Row full of enough piss to take on the French. The soldier had promised to visit the house first thing-the army was always looking for likely young lads to send to war-and had given her a shilling. It was nothing like the amount of the spoon money she never got off her brother, but it was every bit as satisfying-and even more satisfying to think of Charlie shipped off to France.