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Chapter Two: The Mail
It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the first of the persons with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay, as to her, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter’s Hill. She walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coach person and guard, however, in combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to their duty.
With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and brought them to a stand, with a wary “Wo-ho! so-ho-then!” the near leader violently shook his head and everything upon it--like an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.
There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all.
Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he or she saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of the two companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter, when every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in “the Captain’s” pay, ranging from the landlady to the lowest stable nondescript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard of the Dover mail thought to herself, that Friday night in November, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter’s Hill, as she stood on her own particular perch behind the mail, beating her feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before her, where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of cutlass.
The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the coach person was sure of nothing but the horses; as to which cattle she could with a clear conscience have taken her oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the journey.
“Wo-ho!” said the coach person. “So, then! One more pull and you’re at the top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you to it! --Jo!”
“Halloa!” the guard replied.
“What o’clock do you make it, Jo?”
“Ten minutes, good, past eleven.”
“My blood!” ejaculated the vexed coach person, “and not atop of Shooter’s yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!”
The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative, made a decided scramble for it, and the three other horses followed suit. Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its passengers squashing along by its side. They had stopped when the coach stopped, and they kept close company with it. If any one of the three had had the hardihood to propose to another to walk on a little ahead into the mist and darkness, she would have put herself in a fair way of getting shot instantly as a road agent.
The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the wheel for the descent, and open the coach-door to let the passengers in.
“Tst! Jo!” cried the coach person in a warning voice, looking down from her box.
“What do you say, Tammy?”
They both listened.
“I say a horse at a canter coming up, Jo.”
“I say a horse at a gallop, Tammy,” returned the guard, leaving her hold of the door, and mounting nimbly to her place. “Gentlemen! Ladies! In the king’s and queen’s name, all of you!”
With this hurried adjuration, she cocked her blunderbuss, and stood on the offensive.
The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step, getting in; the two other passengers were close behind her, and about to follow. She remained on the step, half in the coach and half out of; they remained in the road below him her. They all looked from the coach person to the guard, and from the guard to the coach person, and listened. The coach person looked back and the guard looked back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up his ears and looked back, without contradicting.
The stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and labouring of the coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it very quiet indeed. The panting of the horses communicated a tremulous motion to the coach, as if it were in a state of agitation. The hearts of the passengers beat loud enough perhaps to be heard; but at any rate, the quiet pause was audibly expressive of people out of breath, and holding the breath, and having the pulses quickened by expectation.
The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.
“So-ho!” the guard sang out, as loud as she could roar. “Yo there! Stand! I shall fire!”
The pace was suddenly checked, and, with much splashing and floundering, a woman’s voice called from the mist, “Is that the Dover mail?”
“Never you mind what it is!” the guard retorted. “What are you?”
“Is that the Dover mail?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I want a passenger, if it is.”
“What passenger?”
“Ms. Jeannine Lorry.”
Our booked passenger showed in a moment that it was her name. The guard, the coach person, and the two other passengers eyed her distrustfully.
“Keep where you are,” the guard called to the voice in the mist, “because, if I should make a mistake, it could never be set right in your lifetime. Passenger of the name of Lorry answer straight.”
“What is the matter?” asked the passenger, then, with mildly quavering speech. “Who wants me? Is it Jenny?”
(“I don’t like Jenny’s voice, if it is Jenny,” growled the guard to herself. “She’s hoarser than suits me, is Jenny.”)
“Yes, Ms. Lorry.”
“What is the matter?”
“A despatch sent after you from over yonder. T. and Co.”
“I know this messenger, guard,” said Ms. Lorry, getting down into the road--assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by the other two passengers, who immediately scrambled into the coach, shut the door, and pulled up the window. “She may come close; there’s nothing wrong.”
“I hope there ain’t, but I can’t make so ‘Nation sure of that,” said the guard, in gruff soliloquy. “Hallo you!”
“Well! And hallo you!” said Jenny, more hoarsely than before.
“Come on at a footpace! d’ye mind me? And if you’ve got holsters to that saddle o’ yourn, don’t let me see your hand go nigh ‘em. For I’m a devil at a quick mistake, and when I make one it takes the form of Lead. So now let’s look at you.”
The figures of a horse and rider came slowly through the eddying mist, and came to the side of the mail, where the passenger stood. The rider stooped, and, casting up her eyes at the guard, handed the passenger a small folded paper. The rider’s horse was blown, and both horse and rider were covered with mud, from the hoofs of the horse to the hat of the rider.
“Guard!” said the passenger, in a tone of quiet business confidence.
The watchful guard, with her right hand at the stock of her raised blunderbuss, her left at the barrel, and her eye on the rider, answered curtly, “Yes.”
“There is nothing to apprehend. I belong to Tellson’s Bank. You must know Tellson’s Bank in London. I am going to Paris on business. A crown to drink. I may read this?”
“If so be as you’re quick, ma’am.”
She opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and read--first to herself and then aloud: “‘Wait at Dover for Monsieur.’ It’s not long, you see, guard. Jenny, say that my answer was, RECALLED TO LIFE.”
Jenny started in her saddle. “That’s a Blazing strange answer, too,” said she, at her hoarsest.
“Take that message back, and they will know that I received this, as well as if I wrote. Make the best of your way. Good night.”
With those words the passenger opened the coach-door and got in; not at all assisted by her fellow-passengers, who had expeditiously secreted their watches and purses in their boots, and were now making a general pretence of being asleep. With no more definite purpose than to escape the hazard of originating any other kind of action.
The coach lumbered on again, with heavier wreaths of mist closing round it as it began the descent. The guard soon replaced her blunderbuss in her arm-chest, and, having looked to the rest of its contents, and having looked to the supplementary pistols that she wore in her belt, looked to a smaller chest beneath her seat, in which there were a few smith’s tools, a couple of torches, and a tinder-box. For she was furnished with that completeness that if the coach-lamps had been blown and stormed out, which did occasionally happen, she had only to shut herself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks well off the straw, and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if she were lucky) in five minutes.
“Tammy!” softly over the coach roof.
“Hallo, Jo.”
“Did you hear the message?”
“I did, Jo.”
“What did you make of it, Tammy?”
“Nothing at all, Jo.”
“That’s a coincidence, too,” the guard mused, “for I made the same of it myself.”
Jenny, left alone in the mist and darkness, dismounted meanwhile, not only to ease her spent horse, but to wipe the mud from her face, and shake the wet out of her hat-brim, which might be capable of holding about half a gallon. After standing with the bridle over her heavily-splashed arm, until the wheels of the mail were no longer within hearing and the night was quite still again, she turned to walk down the hill.
“After that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won’t trust your fore-legs till I get you on the level,” said this hoarse messenger, glancing at her mare. “‘Recalled to life.’ That’s a Blazing strange message. Much of that wouldn’t do for you, Jenny! I say, Jenny! You’d be in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jenny!”
Did anything strike you about this chapter? I found that reading through it with male characters, I didn't bat an eye. But once I realized all the characters were female, it seemed significant. I feel like we take for granted in literature that stories so male-dominated, even in the minor characters. Dickens couldn't make at least one of the passengers a woman?
Watch for more chapters next Wednesday!
Please consider supporting my work by clicking on the "Buy me a coffee" button. Fifty percent of the proceeds made through a Tale of Two Cities post will go toward Project Gutenberg. The rest will go toward the coffee and wine that I drink while blogging. Thank you!Chapter Two: The Mail
It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the first of the persons with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay, as to her, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter’s Hill. She walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coach person and guard, however, in combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to their duty.
With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and brought them to a stand, with a wary “Wo-ho! so-ho-then!” the near leader violently shook his head and everything upon it--like an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.
There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all.
Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he or she saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of the two companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter, when every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in “the Captain’s” pay, ranging from the landlady to the lowest stable nondescript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard of the Dover mail thought to herself, that Friday night in November, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter’s Hill, as she stood on her own particular perch behind the mail, beating her feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before her, where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of cutlass.
The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the coach person was sure of nothing but the horses; as to which cattle she could with a clear conscience have taken her oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the journey.
“Wo-ho!” said the coach person. “So, then! One more pull and you’re at the top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you to it! --Jo!”
“Halloa!” the guard replied.
“What o’clock do you make it, Jo?”
“Ten minutes, good, past eleven.”
“My blood!” ejaculated the vexed coach person, “and not atop of Shooter’s yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!”
The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative, made a decided scramble for it, and the three other horses followed suit. Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its passengers squashing along by its side. They had stopped when the coach stopped, and they kept close company with it. If any one of the three had had the hardihood to propose to another to walk on a little ahead into the mist and darkness, she would have put herself in a fair way of getting shot instantly as a road agent.
The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the wheel for the descent, and open the coach-door to let the passengers in.
“Tst! Jo!” cried the coach person in a warning voice, looking down from her box.
“What do you say, Tammy?”
They both listened.
“I say a horse at a canter coming up, Jo.”
“I say a horse at a gallop, Tammy,” returned the guard, leaving her hold of the door, and mounting nimbly to her place. “Gentlemen! Ladies! In the king’s and queen’s name, all of you!”
With this hurried adjuration, she cocked her blunderbuss, and stood on the offensive.
The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step, getting in; the two other passengers were close behind her, and about to follow. She remained on the step, half in the coach and half out of; they remained in the road below him her. They all looked from the coach person to the guard, and from the guard to the coach person, and listened. The coach person looked back and the guard looked back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up his ears and looked back, without contradicting.
The stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and labouring of the coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it very quiet indeed. The panting of the horses communicated a tremulous motion to the coach, as if it were in a state of agitation. The hearts of the passengers beat loud enough perhaps to be heard; but at any rate, the quiet pause was audibly expressive of people out of breath, and holding the breath, and having the pulses quickened by expectation.
The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.
“So-ho!” the guard sang out, as loud as she could roar. “Yo there! Stand! I shall fire!”
The pace was suddenly checked, and, with much splashing and floundering, a woman’s voice called from the mist, “Is that the Dover mail?”
“Never you mind what it is!” the guard retorted. “What are you?”
“Is that the Dover mail?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I want a passenger, if it is.”
“What passenger?”
“Ms. Jeannine Lorry.”
Our booked passenger showed in a moment that it was her name. The guard, the coach person, and the two other passengers eyed her distrustfully.
“Keep where you are,” the guard called to the voice in the mist, “because, if I should make a mistake, it could never be set right in your lifetime. Passenger of the name of Lorry answer straight.”
“What is the matter?” asked the passenger, then, with mildly quavering speech. “Who wants me? Is it Jenny?”
(“I don’t like Jenny’s voice, if it is Jenny,” growled the guard to herself. “She’s hoarser than suits me, is Jenny.”)
“Yes, Ms. Lorry.”
“What is the matter?”
“A despatch sent after you from over yonder. T. and Co.”
“I know this messenger, guard,” said Ms. Lorry, getting down into the road--assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by the other two passengers, who immediately scrambled into the coach, shut the door, and pulled up the window. “She may come close; there’s nothing wrong.”
“I hope there ain’t, but I can’t make so ‘Nation sure of that,” said the guard, in gruff soliloquy. “Hallo you!”
“Well! And hallo you!” said Jenny, more hoarsely than before.
“Come on at a footpace! d’ye mind me? And if you’ve got holsters to that saddle o’ yourn, don’t let me see your hand go nigh ‘em. For I’m a devil at a quick mistake, and when I make one it takes the form of Lead. So now let’s look at you.”
The figures of a horse and rider came slowly through the eddying mist, and came to the side of the mail, where the passenger stood. The rider stooped, and, casting up her eyes at the guard, handed the passenger a small folded paper. The rider’s horse was blown, and both horse and rider were covered with mud, from the hoofs of the horse to the hat of the rider.
“Guard!” said the passenger, in a tone of quiet business confidence.
The watchful guard, with her right hand at the stock of her raised blunderbuss, her left at the barrel, and her eye on the rider, answered curtly, “Yes.”
“There is nothing to apprehend. I belong to Tellson’s Bank. You must know Tellson’s Bank in London. I am going to Paris on business. A crown to drink. I may read this?”
“If so be as you’re quick, ma’am.”
She opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and read--first to herself and then aloud: “‘Wait at Dover for Monsieur.’ It’s not long, you see, guard. Jenny, say that my answer was, RECALLED TO LIFE.”
Jenny started in her saddle. “That’s a Blazing strange answer, too,” said she, at her hoarsest.
“Take that message back, and they will know that I received this, as well as if I wrote. Make the best of your way. Good night.”
With those words the passenger opened the coach-door and got in; not at all assisted by her fellow-passengers, who had expeditiously secreted their watches and purses in their boots, and were now making a general pretence of being asleep. With no more definite purpose than to escape the hazard of originating any other kind of action.
The coach lumbered on again, with heavier wreaths of mist closing round it as it began the descent. The guard soon replaced her blunderbuss in her arm-chest, and, having looked to the rest of its contents, and having looked to the supplementary pistols that she wore in her belt, looked to a smaller chest beneath her seat, in which there were a few smith’s tools, a couple of torches, and a tinder-box. For she was furnished with that completeness that if the coach-lamps had been blown and stormed out, which did occasionally happen, she had only to shut herself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks well off the straw, and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if she were lucky) in five minutes.
“Tammy!” softly over the coach roof.
“Hallo, Jo.”
“Did you hear the message?”
“I did, Jo.”
“What did you make of it, Tammy?”
“Nothing at all, Jo.”
“That’s a coincidence, too,” the guard mused, “for I made the same of it myself.”
Jenny, left alone in the mist and darkness, dismounted meanwhile, not only to ease her spent horse, but to wipe the mud from her face, and shake the wet out of her hat-brim, which might be capable of holding about half a gallon. After standing with the bridle over her heavily-splashed arm, until the wheels of the mail were no longer within hearing and the night was quite still again, she turned to walk down the hill.
“After that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won’t trust your fore-legs till I get you on the level,” said this hoarse messenger, glancing at her mare. “‘Recalled to life.’ That’s a Blazing strange message. Much of that wouldn’t do for you, Jenny! I say, Jenny! You’d be in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jenny!”
Did anything strike you about this chapter? I found that reading through it with male characters, I didn't bat an eye. But once I realized all the characters were female, it seemed significant. I feel like we take for granted in literature that stories so male-dominated, even in the minor characters. Dickens couldn't make at least one of the passengers a woman?
Watch for more chapters next Wednesday!
Buy me a coffee
1 comment:
I was wondering about this line: "Not one of the three could have said, from anything he or she saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of the two companions." Was 'he or she' in the original? Because I took that to mean that some of the people in the coach were female and some were male.
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