“Well, I have been thinking, Sarah, and, although I know you won’t agree with me, I believe I should be very well advised to seek a situation in—in a domestic capacity.”

“In a—Never while I’m alive!” said Mrs Nidd. “The Lord knows it went against the pluck with me when you hired yourself out as a governess, but at least it was genteel! But if you’re thinking of going out as a cook-maid, or—”

“I shouldn’t think anyone who wasn’t all about in her head would hire me!” interrupted Kate, laughing. “You know I can’t bake an egg without burning it! No, I believe I might do very well—or, at any rate, tolerably well!—as an abigail! In fact, I daresay I could rise to be a dresser! Then, you know, I should be a person of huge consequence, besides making my fortune. Mrs Astley’s housekeeper has a cousin who is dresser to a lady of fashion, and you wouldn’t believe how plump in the pocket she is!”

“No, I wouldn’t!” retorted Mrs Nidd. “And even if I did—”

“But it is perfectly true!” insisted Kate. For one thing, a first-rate dresser commands a far bigger wage than a mere governess—besides being a person of very much more consequence! Unless, of course, the governess should be excessively well educated, and able to instruct her charges in all the genteel accomplishments. And even then, you know, nobody slides sovereigns or bills into her hand to win her favour!”

“Well, upon my word!—” uttered Mrs Nidd explosively.

Kate’s eyes danced. “Yes, isn’t it shocking? But beggars can’t be choosers, and I’ve made up my mind to it that to make my fortune—or, at any rate, to win an independence!—is of more importance than to preserve my gentility. No, no, listen, Sarah! You must know that I have no accomplishments. I can’t speak Italian, or play the piano—far less the harp!—and even if people wished their children to be instructed in Spanish, which they don’t, I don’t think they would wish them to learn soldiers’ Spanish, which is all I know! On the other hand, I can sew, and make, and dress a head to admiration! I did so once for Mrs Astley, when she was going to a ball, and her woman had made a perfect botch of her hair. So—”

“No!” said Mrs Nidd, in a tone which brooked no argument. “Now, you drink your tea, and eat your nice bread-and-butter, and no more nonsense! If ever I listened to such a pack of skimble-skamble stuff!—And I don’t want to hear any more about imposing on me and Nidd, for there’s no question of that, and I take it unkindly of you to say such a thing, Miss Kate!”

Kate caught her hand, and nursed it to her cheek. “No, no, Sarah! You know better! How infamous it would be if I were to foist myself on to you! When I think of all you have to do, with old Mr Nidd living here, and all those grandsons of his to feed, and house, I feel it’s quite shameless of me to come to you even for a short visit! I couldn’t stay here for ever, dear, dearest Sarah! You must own I could not!”

“No, you couldn’t,” acknowledged Mrs Nidd. “It wouldn’t be fitting. Not but what there’s only three grandsons, and one of them lives with his ma—that’s Joe’s sister Maggie, and the most gormless creature you ever did see! Still, there’s no harm in her, and I’m bound to say she’s always ready to come and lend me a bit of help—if help you can call it! But a carrier’s yard is no place for you, dearie, and well do I know it! We’ll think of something, never you fear!”

’I have thought of something!” murmured Kate wickedly.

“No, you haven’t, Miss Kate. You’re puckered, with that nasty stage-coach, and all the uproar that was kicked up by that Mrs Brimstone, or whatever she calls herself, and you’ll feel different when I’ve got you tucked into bed, which I’m going to do the minute you’ve drunk up your tea. You’ll have your sleep out, and when you wake up you shall have your dinner in the parlour upstairs, and we’ll see what’s to be done.”

Kate sighed. “I am very tired,” she confessed, “but I shall be happy to eat my dinner downstairs, with the rest of you. I don’t wish—”

“An ox-cheek, with dumplings!” interrupted Mrs Nidd. “I daresay! But it ain’t what I wish, Miss Kate, and nor it isn’t what Nidd or the boys would wish neither, for to be sitting down to their dinner in company with a young lady like yourself would put them into such a stew, minding their manners and that, as would turn them clean against their vittles! So you’ll just do as Sarah tells you, dearie, and—”

“Believe that Sarah knows best!” supplied Kate, submitting.

“Which you can be bound I do!” said Mrs Nidd.

Miss Malvern was neither so young nor so guileless as her flower-like countenance frequently led strangers to suppose. She was four-and-twenty years old, and her life had not been passed in a sheltered schoolroom. The sole offspring of a clandestine marriage between the charming but sadly unsatisfactory scion of a distinguished family and a romantic girl of great beauty but somewhat inferior lineage, she was born in a garrison town, and reared in a succession of lodgings and billets. The runaway bride whom Captain Malvern had captivated disappointed her scandalized relations by suffering no regret whatsoever at being repudiated by them; and falsified their expectations by remaining so ridiculously besotted that neither the discomforts of following the drum, nor the aberrations of her volatile spouse abated her love, or daunted her spirits. She brought Kate up in the belief that Papa was the personification of every virtue (the embarrassing situations in which from time to time he found himself arising not from any obliquity but from an excess of amiability), and that it was the duty of his wife and daughter to cherish him. She died, in Portugal, when Kate was twelve years old, almost with her last breath adjuring Kate to take good care of Papa, and, to the best of her ability, Kate had done so, aided and abetted by her redoubtable nurse. Sarah cherished no illusions, but, like nearly all who were acquainted with him, she was a victim of his compelling charm. “Poor dear gentleman!” Sarah had said, after his funeral. “He had his faults, like the best of us—not that I’m saying he was the best, because telling farra-diddles is what I don’t hold with, and there’s few knows better than me that you couldn’t depend on him, not for a moment, while as for the way he wasted his money it used to put me into such a tweak that there were times when I didn’t know how to keep my tongue between my teeth! He never took thought to the morrow, and nor did my poor dear mistress neither. You never knew where you was, for there wouldn’t be enough money to buy one scraggy chicken in the market one day, and the next he’d come in singing out that the dibs was in tune, and not a thought in his head or my mistress’ but how to spend it quickest. Well, he told me once that it was no use ringing a peal over him for going to low gaminghouses, because he was born with a spring in his elbow, and there was no sport in playing cards and such in the regiment, for nearly all the officers was living on their pay, same as he was himself. But this I will say for him! there was never a sweeter-tempered nor a kinder-hearted man alive!”

“Ay,” had agreed Mr Nidd, rather doubtfully. “Though it don’t seem to me as he behaved very kind to Miss Kate, leaving her like he done with a lot of debts to pay, and nobbut his prize-money to do it with—what was left of it, which, by what you told me, wasn’t so very much neither.”

“He always thought he’d win a fortune! And how was he to know he was going to meet his end like he has? Oh, Joe, I wish he’d been killed at Waterloo, for this is worse than anything! When I think of him that was always so gay, and up to the knocker, no matter whether he was plump in the pocket or regularly in the basket, being knocked down by a common tax-cart, well, it makes me thankful my poor mistress ain’t alive to see it, which is a thing I never thought to be! And my lamb left alone, without a sixpence to scratch with, and she so devoted to her pa! I never ought to have married you, Joe, and it weighs on me that I let you wheedle me into it, for if ever Miss Kate needed me she needs me now!”

“I need you too, Sarey,” had said Mr Nidd, with difficulty.

Observing the look of anxiety on his face, Sarah had mopped her eyes, and implanted a smacking kiss on his cheek, saying: “And a good, kind husband you are, Joe, and if there was more as faithful as what you proved yourself to be the world would be a better place!”

Colouring darkly, Mr Nidd had uttered an inarticulate protest, but this rare tribute from his sharp-tongued spouse had been well earned. Falling deeply in love with a much younger Sarah, who had been on the eve of accompanying her mistress and her nursling to Portugal, and had rejected his offer, he had indeed remained faithful. Seven years later (“Just like Jacob!” had said Kate, urging her nurse to the altar), when Sarah had come back to England with her widowed master and his daughter, he had renewed his suit, and his constancy had been rewarded: Miss Sarah Publow had changed her name to Nidd, and had lost no time at all in assuming the control of her husband’s family, and vastly improving their fortunes. Within a year, she had bullied and cajoled her aged father-in-law into spending his jealously hoarded savings on the acquisition of the inn which now provided the firm with spacious headquarters, and had transformed it from a single carrier into an establishment which, if it did not yet rival Pickford’s, was in a fair way to providing Pickford’s with some healthy competition. Her husband adored her; his father, while losing no opportunity to get the better of her, had been known to inform his cronies at the Cock, when mellowed by a sufficient quantity of what he inelegantly termed belly-juice, that she was a sure card; his sisters wavered between ineffective resentment of her managing disposition, and a comfortable dependence on her willingness to assist them in any difficulty; and his nephews, all as inarticulate as he was himself, said simply that you wouldn’t get a more bang-up dinner anywhere than what Aunt Sarey would give you.