Emily Goes to Exeter Read Free

money?’
    ‘Banks are not like that. Look, we shall go to the lawyer’s together tomorrow – I have to see him about a few things – and we will get you an advance. Then I shall take you to my bank and they will explain to you about cheques and bank drafts and all such complications.’
    ‘Sir, you are very good.’
    ‘Think nothing of it, Miss Pym. Now, as to dinner, tell cook to supply a simple meal. Have the servants who have been here longer than four years been told of their two hundred pounds?’
    ‘Yes, sir. Or rather, I told the footman and I assume he told everyone else.’
    ‘As I shall be closing this place up, I think Mr Entwhistle should advance them the money now or it might be very difficult to find them after the estate is sold and everyone has dispersed to different parts of London.’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ said Harriet dutifully, although she was sure that any servant with the expectation of two hundred pounds would not stay away from the lawyers for very long.
    ‘That will be all.’
    Hannah rose and curtsied and left. Her head was full of excitement and dreams. Where would she go first? Exeter, she thought. Instead of standing by the window watching the Flying Maching hurtle past, she would be on it herself!
    * * *
    At ten o’clock the following morning, Sir George sent for her and told her to make herself ready to go to the lawyers. He said he would meet her in the hall in half an hour.
    Hannah ran to her room and wrenched off her black gown and cap. She was going out in the company of a gentleman and must look like a lady. She had one silk gown, a golden-brown colour. It was of old-fashioned cut with the waist being where a waist should be instead of up under the armpits as present fashion decreed. The day was bitterly cold. She hesitated and then ran up the stairs and through the long corridors to Mrs Clarence’s old rooms, which had been kept locked up. Mrs Clarence had fled only in the clothes she stood up in. Her clothes, never touched since the day she had gone away, hung in two large wardrobes.
    With a feeling of great daring, Hannah selected a dark-blue velvet cloak and then lifted down a beaver hat. She was sure Sir George would give them to charity. She would find the right moment to tell him she had borrowed them and ask if she might pay for them.
    She carried them back down to her room and put hat and cloak on. She hoped she looked like a lady. She felt she did. But when she met Sir George, a grand figure in a many-caped coat and shining top-boots, she felt just like a servant in borrowed clothes.
    He helped her into his carriage exactly as if she had been a lady and Hannah began to feel a little more assured.
    The well-sprung carriage bowled down the drive. Hannah looked out eagerly, rubbing at the misted glass with her glove and pressing her crooked nose against the window.
    ‘Miss Pym,’ he said, ‘it is like escorting a prisoner out of jail. Did you never leave the grounds?’
    ‘Hardly ever, sir. There was so much to do, you see. When I was younger, I would sometimes go to the play – that was when Mrs Clarence was here, but not for a very long time now.’
    ‘Have you no relatives? No friends?’
    ‘Such friends as I had, sir, were among the staff,’ said Hannah, ‘but they gradually all found posts in other households. My family were all killed in the smallpox epidemic of ninety-two.’
    ‘You were with the Clarences a long time?’
    ‘I started as scullery maid at the age of twelve. They were newly married then, Mr and Mrs Clarence. I rose up the ranks and became housekeeper eighteen years later. But it was shortly after that that Mrs Clarence ran away. She would have been about thirty-five years then, sir, and the footman only twenty-five.’ Hannah squinted down her nose in sudden embarrassment. He might consider it vulgar of her to regale him with such gossip.
    Hannah turned her attention back to the moving scene outside. She was a gossip and knew it. Time after