T Kinsey - Death Around the Bend (A Lady Hardcastle Mystery Book 3)

Dressing, breaking our fast, and finishing our packing were all accomplished at remarkable speed the next morning following far too little sleep and while still feeling the after-effects of our splendid evening with the Farley-Strouds.

I regretted Lady Hardcastle’s decision to give Edna and Miss Jones the whole week off. Couldn’t they start their holiday on Tuesday? I wondered as I cleared away the breakfast things and had one last tidy round.

Bert arrived with the Rover as the hall clock chimed nine and declared it a ‘fine little vehicle’, before politely declining my offer to drive him home in it and setting off on foot. He said that the walk would do him good, but I also suspected that an opportunity to wander into the village and then take his time getting back to The Grange was also quite appealing.

Not long afterwards, Newton arrived in Dr Fitzsimmons’s trap, ready to take us to the station in nearby Chipping Bevington, the railway never having quite made it as far as Littleton Cotterell. He was a stolid, henpecked man, whose abrasive wife was Dr Fitzsimmons’s housekeeper. I had met her during our first week in the village and hadn’t been favourably impressed. A convenient consequence of her domineering nature, however, was that Newton didn’t bat an eyelid when I told him that I would help him load our baggage on to the trap. He didn’t even comment on my strength, something which I found more refreshing and relaxing than any amount of ‘Here, let me do that for you, miss’ could ever be.

Within no time, everything was loaded and we were off on our sedate and steady way to Chipping railway station. Newton made no effort to engage either of us in conversation, but we were still sufficiently groggy that we were happy to spend the long ride in companionable silence. The sun was out, the air was warm, and I drank in the sights and smells of England at its late-summery best. From the trap’s high vantage point, we could see over hedgerows that occluded our view when we were in the little motor car, and I was able to get an early start on my study of the countryside with a good long look at some of the West Country’s finest dairy herds – from a reassuringly safe distance. Cows, as anyone with any sense knows, are terrifying beasts and should not be approached, but it was safe to view them from the other side of a sturdy English hedgerow. As the journey progressed and we drew nearer to our destination, I also managed a glimpse or two of some rather entertaining-looking pigs (Gloucestershire Old Spots, I sincerely hoped, though in truth I had no idea) rooting about near their little wooden huts in a field beside the road.

As we drew up at the station, the porter, who seemed to recognize us from our previous trips, hurried towards the trap with his trolley. He began cheerfully unloading the luggage almost before we had stopped moving. By the time Lady Hardcastle and I had clambered down and she had pressed a few coins into Newton’s hand for his trouble, the sturdy little porter had piled everything on to his sturdy little trolley and was already on his way towards the sturdy little ticket office.

He was waiting for us as we walked in.

‘Mornin’, m’lady,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you again. Just you have a word with Young Roberts there for your tickets and I’ll see you to your train.’

‘Thank you, Mr . . . ?’ said Lady Hardcastle.

‘Roberts, m’lady,’ he said, knuckling the peak of his railwayman’s cap. ‘“Old Roberts”, they calls me. Young Roberts over there behind the counter is me eldest, see. Railways is in our blood. There’s been Robertses here at Chipping Bevington station near sixty years now, startin’ with me grandfather, Mr Roberts.’

‘I say,’ said Lady Hardcastle with a smile as she approached the ticket counter. ‘How wonderful to be so well looked after. It’s like visiting an old family business.’

Roberts beamed proudly. His son looked faintly embarrassed, but gave a conspiratorial grin when Lady Hardcastle winked at him. ‘Two returns to Riddlethorpe, please,’ she said.

The young man reached under the counter and heaved up an enormous, well-thumbed volume. He spent some minutes flicking back and forth between the pages and making notes on a scrap of paper. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever sold a ticket to Riddlethorpe before, m’lady,’ he said when he had finished his calculations. ‘I shall have to note it in my book. I likes to keep track of all the places I sends people. It’s interestin’, I finds, seein’ where people gets to.’

She smiled warmly at him.

‘Your quickest route,’ he carried on, consulting his notes, ‘would be to get to Bristol Temple Meads, then get the express to Birmingham New Street. You can get a connection from there to Leicester, and then change on to the branch line to Riddlethorpe. Looks like you’ve arrived at exactly the right time, too. If you gets on the next train here, all your connections lines up nicely.’

The truth was that we knew this already, having spent almost an hour the previous weekend poring over Bradshaw’s Guide trying to work out the best way to get to Codrington Hall. But the young ticket clerk’s pleasure in having worked it all out for us was so evident that it would have been churlish to tell him.

Lady Hardcastle paid for our two First Class tickets, and ‘Old’ Roberts led the way to the ‘down side’ platform, where we sat in the waiting room and awaited the local train to Bristol.

‘You know, Flo,’ said Lady Hardcastle, looking out of the window at Roberts as he carefully wrote our details on to tags and tied them to our baggage, ‘this journey would have been so much more straightforward if we’d sent our traps on ahead. I know they’re really rather organized, but I do worry that something will go missing with so many changes of train for them to deal with. If we’d sent them in advance, they’d have more time to find them and re-route them if they went astray, don’t you think?’

I said nothing. I had made this very same point several days earlier, but my concerns had been pooh-poohed. With everything else I had to contend with, I had decided not to pursue it. Being proven right and finally getting Lady Hardcastle’s agreement was a hollow victory, though, so I decided not to pursue that either.

Instead, I said, ‘Oh, we’ll be fine, my lady. Everything will be unloaded and waiting for us by the time we’ve put our books back in our pockets and stepped on to the platform. They deal with much more complicated consignments than this every day. And even if something does go astray, it’s all properly labelled. We’ll just get Lord Riddlethorpe to send a man to the station to pick it up when it finally arrives.’

‘You’re right, of course. Still, I should have listened to you when you suggested it.’

My mouth was still hanging open in surprise as the train pulled up and we stepped out to board it.

Chapter Two

The journey was a long one. A hundred years earlier it would have been longer still, of course, but we weren’t travelling a hundred years ago. Viewed with the impatience and lack of perspective of the modern traveller, it took an absolute age. Our changes at Bristol Temple Meads (Brunel’s Tudor-style railway castle), Birmingham New Street (with its immense roof), and Leicester London Road (still feeling almost new) went without even the slightest hitch. We transferred from train to train with a clockwork efficiency that must be the envy of the world. Our baggage, too, managed to follow us with nary a problem.

The problem, for there was bound to be one, was that, as I’ve already mentioned, the whole proceeding took an absolute age. There are only so many conversations two travellers can profitably have about whether cattle are frightened by the passing trains (and serve them right if they are – dreadful creatures), or about whether trains might one day be powered by electricity in the same way that trams are. Lady Hardcastle, who followed developments in the world of science and technology with great enthusiasm, insisted that they would. The gentleman who was sharing our compartment at the time snorted his derision, but was wise enough to say nothing.