Chapter 5 #2
The road narrowed where the wind had laid drifts along the ditches.
Twice the coach laboured so perilously that the post-boy sprang down with a shovel, and once Mr. Gardiner himself climbed out to see whether the farther verge held firm.
He returned with snow at the hem of his coat and the look of a man calculating sums he would rather not reckon in public.
“Another mile brings a posting inn,” he said when he had settled again. “We will take fresh horses and advice together.”
It was no small comfort to see the swinging sign appear at last, half-edged in white.
The yard seethed with that particular industry born of bad roads—men talking too loudly, boys running the wrong way with purposeful expressions, somebody always insisting the last coach had managed it easily and thereby proving nothing at all.
Elizabeth guided her aunt within to the crowded common room, where damp coats steamed and a stew of indefinite origin endeavoured to smell hearty.
They found a narrow bench by the hearth.
Elizabeth warmed her aunt’s hands between her own and kept a running catalogue of cheerful nothings—the colour returning to a sailor’s cheeks at the next table; the way the serving maid hummed under her breath as she threaded her way through elbows; a gentleman of melancholy air attempting to cut his bread with a spoon and discovering his error too late to preserve his dignity.
Mrs. Gardiner laughed at that, softly, which pleased Elizabeth beyond measure.
Mr. Gardiner came back from conferring with the landlord and stood behind them a moment, considering how to spend the news.
“The road to Towcester is said to be passable in parts,” he said at last, “and in other parts no road at all. Southward to London is much the same. Coaches have turned back from both directions before noon.”
“Then a coin toss would do us as much good as a map,” Elizabeth said lightly.
“Maps are cheaper than coins,” her uncle replied, unmoved from his cheer, “and we will have the landlord’s advice for nothing. He recommends patience; I recommend we oblige him for an hour, take dinner, and try again while there is light enough to show us where not to go.”
“An excellent compromise,” Elizabeth said, though she did not miss the lines of fatigue around her aunt’s mouth.
They ate what the kitchen could be prevailed upon to provide, which was more honest than elegant, and returned to the road with the coach as warm as a travelling oven for the first half-mile.
After that the fire’s comfort became a memory and the world a moving whiteness again.
Elizabeth told herself that if they had managed the previous miles, they could manage these too; and if she did not wholly believe it, she had no intention of confessing as much.
The miles did not agree to be managed. The drifts rose higher, shouldering across the turnpike like barricades.
The horses, brave creatures, put their weight to it until their flanks darkened with sweat that the wind turned to chill in a breath.
Twice more the post-boy took his shovel to the worst of it.
Once the near wheel slipped toward the ditch with such decision that Elizabeth felt the blood leave her face.
The coach checked, righted with a groan, and went on as if it had meant to accept the ditch only to change its mind.
“Enough,” Mr. Gardiner said at last, striking the roof to call a halt. “We gain little and risk too much. If we cannot reach a decent house by daylight, we had best retreat and be sensible.”
Mrs. Gardiner said nothing. Her hand, still resting in Elizabeth’s, had grown colder. Elizabeth wrapped both their hands together in the fold of her cloak and nodded. “Sensible is sometimes the most heroic course,” she said, and tried to make it sound like wit.
They turned back to Stony Stratford. The road that had argued so violently on the way out seemed almost complacent now they had admitted defeat.
Elizabeth might have laughed at the perversity of it if she had not been so tired.
The sky had lowered by the time they regained the posting inn; flakes fell thick enough to soften the edges of carts and boots and faces alike.
Inside, the common room had grown noisier.
Children cried because they were not permitted to go outside and freeze; someone near the door held forth upon the proper way to drive a coach that had never met ice before; a farmer slept upright with his mouth open and one hand upon his hat, as if he feared it would make an escape of it at the first opportunity.
Elizabeth found herself intensely fond of them all.
Their discomfort was an odd sort of company.
A soldier with one sleeve pinned neatly at the shoulder—an old wound, if the set of him told true—had drawn a semicircle of little listeners near the hearth.
He was explaining, with admirable gravity, how to march in snow without sinking—”one foot, then the other, never both at once”—which seemed to satisfy his audience until they tried it and discovered that one foot, then the other, put them exactly where they had started.
The ensuing outrage required so much brow-furrowing and soothing that Elizabeth could not help smiling at the industry of consolation.
When at last, they were shown to a chamber above the noise, Elizabeth drew aside the curtain.
The glass was already filming with frost. Beyond it the snow fell with unhurried purpose, as if it had business that would not be hurried by any plea.
The lane which had carried them a few miles out and fewer back was a pale ribbon lying still.
London, Northampton—both felt equally far, as if distance were an opinion rather than a measure and the weather had taken the opposite side.
Her aunt sank into the chair by the hearth and closed her eyes. “I am quite content to stop,” she said, and the admission cost her something.
Elizabeth knelt to unfasten her boots. “Then we shall call it a triumph. We have discovered our limits without running through them.”
“You always make a virtue of necessity,” Mrs. Gardiner murmured, opening her eyes long enough to smile.
“It is an economical virtue,” Elizabeth said, settling her boots by the fender. “It costs nothing and improves the temper.”
Mr. Gardiner came up a few minutes later to report that the ostlers would stable the team and that there would be hot soup and something described as pie at seven.
“If the road will be mastered,” he added, looking from one to the other, “it will not be mastered by argument. We will rest and look again in the morning.”
Elizabeth agreed, because there was nothing else to be done.
When he had gone, she stood once more at the window and laid her fingers against the pane.
The cold came through at once, a clean, steady chill that refused to be anything but itself.
She traced the outline of a frost flower and then let her hand fall.
It would be easy to grow vexed with delays, to imagine that happiness had chosen some other road and was making good time upon it.
But vexation had never improved a mile’s measure yet.
She turned back to the hearth with a smile for her aunt that she did not have to counterfeit.
“Shall I read to you?” she asked. “Or shall we invent a game that requires no board, no counters, and very little imagination?”
“Read,” Mrs. Gardiner said, closing her eyes again. “My imagination is tired.”
Elizabeth took up the first small volume her hand encountered—Cowper, it proved—and opened where the ribbon lay.
The room warmed by degrees; the noise from the common room below became a distant rumour; the snow went about its steady work.
Between one line and the next she thought, without bitterness, that whichever way they turned, the road denied them for now.
Well then, let it. They would be equal to patience to-day, and courage tomorrow, and whatever else the miles demanded the day after that.