The Original Miss Honeyford Read Online Free PDF Page B

week, she met with a setback. On her arrival at The Green Dragon in Rawson in Bedfordshire, she was told there was no room for her. In vain did she plead that her father had sent her bookings for each posting house ahead with the mail coach. The landlord professed ignorance. The Green Dragon was full to bursting point, and it transpired there had been a prize fight near the town that very day. At last the landlord volunteered the information that the only hope she had of a bed that night was some six miles west on a minor road at The Boar’s Head. Honey’s coachman listened carefully to the directions and once more they were on the road with the light fast fading from the sky.
    The last slanting rays of the sun eventually lit up the frontage of The Boar’s Head as Honey’s coach lurched around a muddy, rutted bend in the dreadful road.
    It was so old and ill-kept that it looked as if it were about to fall down and become part of the surrounding countryside. In the last century, it had been a popular place, but due to subsidence, the road had proved unsafe for the great, lumbering stage coaches, and so the London road had moved six miles to the east, leaving it largely abandoned.
    A fantastic jumble of chimneys loomed above the roof, and two oriel windows on the front made it look as if it were glaring down the road, wishing ill luck on the fickle travelers who had deserted it so long ago.
    But on that night it had, perhaps, a more cheerful view. Three men, travelers like Honey who had been unable to find an inn in the town, could be seen moving between the inn and the stables.
    The rooms, in the old tradition, had names instead of numbers—Rose Parlor, Cliff Parlor, Crown Chamber, Key Chamber, and Moon Chamber. The landlord looked like a small tenant farmer with his large groggy face and bovine stare. His wife looked like his twin, and her broad hips in their voluminous skirts brushed either side of the stairway as she conducted Honey up to the Moon Chamber.
    The room was fireless and damp, and the towels used by the last inhabitant had been merely dried, rather than washed, and put back again complete with brandy smell and snuff stains.
    Honey became weary of all her independence. She stuck her head out of the window which overlooked the stable yard, and, seeing the groom, Abraham Jellibee, crossing the yard, she hailed him and told him to get fresh towels and hot water.
    Then she sank down into an upholstered chair, which sent up a cloud of dust, and contemplated the legend carved on the mantel:
    As trusting of late has been my sorrow
Pay me today and I’ll trust you tomorrow.
    At length Abraham arrived with towels and hot water, grumbling that it was unbecoming to his livery to act as an inn servant.
    “Then find a servant,” snapped Honey, exasperated.
    “Don’t seem to have one ’cept a poor lass that’s mazed in the head and a liddle boy. Seems you must dine in the coffee room, miss, the roof of the dining room having fallen in this age.”
    “There are private parlors!”
    “Them’s into rooms for us grooms and such. Better I stand behind your chair tonight. There’s a mort o’ loud johnnies in the tap.”
    “And have you grumbling about being a waiter? Besides, you will be dining there yourself.”
    “Begging your parding, but Jem and Peter’s for taking the carriage into town.”
    “What is the matter with it?”
    “Don’t rightly understand, but Jem said as how it was a liddle thing, and besides we could fare better in the town for victuals.”
    “Leaving me here to take pot luck?”
    “Now, hasn’t I just said as how I’d stay?” said Abraham with all the familiarity of an old country servant.
    Honey bit her lip. She had coped very well on her own during the last week, but this was not a posting inn, and such company as there was would be gentlemen from the prize fight.
    But a vision of Lord Alistair’s sleepy blue eyes flashed before her. He had made her feel young and silly, and he had