When the fire died, the ashes of First Impressions smoldering in the hearth, Jane held the single scrap of paper she’d retrieved from the pyre. She placed the piece in her pocket and exited the house.
MISS HARWOOD WAITED ON her doorstep. She opened her door and ushered Jane inside.
“You knew how it would go with him,” Jane said.
“Yes, badly,” Miss Harwood replied. She offered Jane a chair. Jane sat down.
“What is wrong with me?”
“You are different,” Miss Harwood said. She stoked the fire, newly ablaze, the hearth now filled with coal.
“I do not want to be,” said Jane.
“Do not fret.” The woman scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to Jane. “You will travel to London.”
Jane flinched. The heaving, rat-infested capital? “London is a day’s journey away.”
“Do you have a better option?” Miss Harwood asked.
Jane shrugged, taking the paper. “At this point, I have nothing.”
AS JANE TRAVELLED to London the next day in a carriage of ill repute, she worried how to make it there without discovery. She selected the most dilapidated postal carriage she could find, which left from the back of the Black Prince Inn at ten o’clock in the evening and guaranteed passage to London via the quieter roads, in darkness. A man in a torn waistcoat and a stained admiral’s hat was Jane’s only companion in the public coach. He stank of rum and refused to meet Jane’s eye, a level of communication that suited them both. As he made no comments to Jane about the crime of a single woman travelling alone, Jane supposed he lay in worse trouble than she. Whatever fight he’d embroiled himself in or debt he’d racked up in the card houses of Bath, he seemed keen to leave the West Country in as quick and anonymous a manner as possible, which rendered him the perfect travel companion for Jane. He shut his eyes before the carriage moved.
Chapter Seven
Of all the dishonor Jane had brought on her sex over the years, this night’s actions far exceeded it. A single woman travelling alone through the countryside, negotiating her fare, paying her own way, and riding with strangers were acts reserved for harlots and witches. No good woman who was the property of a respectable family corrupted her soul in such a fashion.
Guilt had racked Jane as she slipped from the house that evening. Everyone had retired to their bedrooms for the night and she had exited out the back of the building via the kitchen, whose door no one would hear. In her pockets, Jane placed three biscuits from the larder (the hard ones no one missed) and a little over five pounds—all her money in the world. She’d told no one where she was going; she could only imagine the mayhem that would greet the house when they discovered her absence. She felt glad she would likely have arrived in London, one hundred miles away, by then.
The carriage left Bath at a little past ten and made its way east through the outskirts of town. The honeystone Palladian columns out the window gave way to stone cottages, then huts with smoking chimneys, then the endless fields of Somerset.
The rolling fields of the West Country became the oak forests of Berkshire. They stopped at Reading to water the horses. The driver stretched his legs but neither Jane nor her snoring companion left the safety of their wooden cage. She peered gingerly out of the carriage window and looked around the Reading town square, half expecting her mother to come bounding into the carriage and demand she return home.
Another post carriage travelling back toward Bath stopped on the other side of the road. The driver did the same as theirs, watering the horses and himself. Jane looked at the other carriage, in which a family laughed and chatted, their faces illuminated in the torchlight from a nearby alehouse. From their bright clothes and large suitcases, Jane imagined they were on their way to holiday in Bath. She considered jumping inside with them. There was one space spare. She could return to Bath before the alarm was raised, no harm done. She placed her hand on the carriage door, but then the driver took his seat and flicked the reins once more. The carriage rolled forward, and Jane sat back. If she’d had any desire to hold on to what shreds of her dignity and reputation were left, she obliterated it now. There was no turning back.
On the outskirts of Windsor, light from a farmer’s bonfire illuminated a spectacular holly oak at least fifty feet high by the side of the London road. Jane momentarily forgot her humiliation and turmoil and turned to admire its glorious branches, which had withstood the weather and the years. Nothing else marked the road from then onward except field after darkened field, and as the bump and roll of the wheels eased into a rhythm, Jane fell asleep.
She awoke as the carriage drove through Kensington. The sun had risen long ago; she estimated the time to be around noon. The smells hit her before the sight of the pretty buildings did: above the green of Hyde Park and the grandeur of Kensington Palace she choked on a perfume of coal smoke, sewage, and a decomposing estuary at low tide. The capital city seethed and tumbled, spewing forth a fragrance of people and buildings, alleys and grime. As the carriage rolled along the Thames, a factory on the south bank disgorged plumes of black smoke into the air and a pipe that led out from its bottom dumped rotting animal matter into the river. Jane recalled her hatred of the capital, with its screeching hawkers, the Machiavellian court, the soot and fog. She chose trees and grass
