Page 3 of Trouble

‘If you could just sing something to him,’ she said desperately. Behind her, the scrawny girl and the snub-nosed boy were caked in dark grey mud and screaming with impressive resonance, considering their respective sizes. ‘I’d have Malcolm take him, but he’s afraid of sheep.’

Whether this phobia belonged to her small child or her adult husband was not made clear.

By the time help arrived, Emily and the silent toddler were staring each other down in a fraught stalemate, sitting with their arms crossed on opposite sides of the carriage.

‘Miss Laurence?’ said the coachman, peering in and looking discomfited by the general atmosphere of malevolence. ‘Er .?.?. Reinforcements have arrived.’

Emily picked up the small child as one would heft a dirty pot or a box full of spiders, and returned him to his rightful owner the moment she exited the carriage. It was growing dark around them, the wind picking up, the colourless landscape losing all of its light to a flock of gathering clouds.

There were three additional people standing around the carriage. One was a short, well-curved Indian woman of middle age, with an umbrella in one hand and the other on her hip, like she was about to start issuing instructions. She glanced up at Emily and frowned very slightly, as if she’d seen something she hadn’t expected. This, of course, made no sense – Amy had never met any member of the household staff, so it was impossible that they’d know just by looking at her that Emily was an imposter. Perhaps this woman simply sensed the hostile energy that was coming off her in waves, and did not think it befitting of a governess.

The second new addition was a thickset, ruddy-faced frown of a man who must have been at least fifty, with what looked suspiciously like bloodstains on his shirt, his expression pinched as he assessed the wheels. He was far more credible as a man of action than Mr Sandler had been; in fact, Emily would have believed him capable of lifting the carriage with one hand if the mood had taken him.

The last of the newcomers was a man in perhaps his mid- to late thirties, with gently weathered skin that had tanned halfway to tawny, and silver hair at his temples. He had a sharp, striking face, full of stern angles and overenthusiastic cheekbones. He was wearing leather riding breeches that might have once been white but had been abused all the way to a murky beige, and a shirt that hadn’t fared much better – hand-me-downs, perhaps, past their best before he had ever donned them.

He didn’t bother with a preamble – he simply gestured to the coachman and the frowner, and then braced himself against the back of the coach to push. They joined him, and the woman went to help direct the horses, and within a couple of minutes of co-ordinated shoving the coach was free.

‘Can’t thank you enough,’ said the coachman, enthusiastically shaking both men’s hands.

‘You must be Miss Laurence,’ said the Indian woman, coming over to do the same to Emily. ‘I’m Miss Meera Bhandari. We’ve been corresponding. I should have thought to send word about the mud – it’s always tricky in this spot when it rains – but anyway, the good news is that we’re only a quarter of a mile away from the house. You’d be able to see it, if it weren’t for the slope of the land.’

Emily tried to channel her best Amy impression. She smiled. She ducked her head. She said ‘Oh, how pleasant!’ for the first time in her life.

Miss Bhandari gave her another odd look, but didn’t question the pleasantness of the situation.

‘You’re shivering,’ she said instead.

‘Not on purpose,’ said Emily.

‘We must get you back to the house. Where are your things? Joseph will take them. Don’t mind his face, it always looks like that. Joe, could you please see to Miss Laurence’s .?.?. Oh, he’s already doing it.’ Joe was apparently the brawny, red-faced older gentleman. ‘Is that your trunk, Miss Laurence? Excellent. I suppose we’ll just—’

‘I shall take her,’ said the man who wasn’t Joe. He had rolled his shirtsleeves up to his elbows, and was standing with impeccable posture. ‘I need to return to the horses, anyway.’ He was the groom, then – and if Amy had been corresponding with her, Miss Bhandari must have been the housekeeper.

One of Mrs Sandler’s small children suddenly fell face-first to the ground, and everybody else rallied around to make noises of consternation and offer advice.

‘Right,’ said Miss Bhandari, lingering for a moment before going to join the fray. ‘Very good.’

At this point Emily realised that she had managed to overlook the presence of an additional horse. Said horse had been standing out of sight behind the carriage; now the sharp-faced groom who was apparently to ‘take’ her went to fetch it. He didn’t do anything so polite asaskif she minded clambering on to a horse with him. He just bent and cupped his hands so that she might use him as a human ladder.

‘I’m very muddy,’ she warned him. He just glanced down at himself, wet through and similarly dirtied, and then raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Well. I did warn you.’

Emily hadn’t ridden a horse since childhood, and she wasn’t entirely sure how to arrange herself: both legs astride seemed sensible, although difficult to achieve with a dress. She wriggled into position and then discovered that doing so had hitched her skirts up so high that quite a large portion of stockinged calf was visible.

The groom glanced at her legs and then looked pointedly away and cleared his throat.

‘Sidesaddle is traditional,’ he said, his voice slightly strained; Emily thought he might be holding back laughter, and immediately resolved to hate him.

‘I was .?.?. injured, in the crash,’ she lied, her head held high. ‘Sidesaddle would not be comfortable.’

The groom caught her eye, and she saw a flash of something softly puzzled in his expression before he nodded curtly.

‘As you wish.’

Luckily, he did not press further on the issue of an invented injury that necessitated one’s legs being open; he simply got up behind her and took the reins.

It really was a very short ride to the house, but Emily spent every second of it preoccupied with the disconcerting feeling of a strange man at her back. She couldn’t remember the last time someone who wasn’t her sister had been this close to her. Her mother had probably hugged her at some point in the past year, and Emily might have suffered it momentarily before leaping from her grip like a sliver of soap, but that was all.

There had been the men at the textile mill, but even they hadn’t dared to put more than a single hand on her, usually in the realm from elbow to shoulder blade – a decision they had quickly regretted.