Deborah Goes to Dover (3 page)

Shabby men and women had been going around the streets handing out what looked like playbills. One fluttered along the street and caught on Hannah’s skirt. She plucked it off impatiently and was about to toss it away when the cheap black lettering on it leaped up at her.

‘Mr George Randall, Pugilist Supreme, to fight Mr Benjamin Stubbs, the London Gentleman.’

Her heart in her mouth, she read on. The fight was to take place at ten o’clock that morning in a place called Gully’s Field. She glanced at the watch pinned to her bosom. Eight o’clock. If she had asked for a footman called Benjamin Stubbs, someone might have put her wise earlier, but all she had done was give a description of the missing Benjamin, not his name. She asked back at the inn for directions to Gully’s Field and learned it was six miles off to the
north of the town. Hannah knew she had no hope of hiring any sort of carriage or even farm cart, as every vehicle in the vicinity would have been taken up. Setting her lips in a grim line, and holding a serviceable umbrella like a club in one hand, she set out walking the long road to Gully’s Field.

2

Boxing had reached the zenith of its popularity. Patronized as it was by royalty, nobles and
commoners
alike, a prize match could bring thousands flocking to the scene.

Lady Deborah Western was beginning to feel a trifle uneasy, but glad she was wearing men’s clothes. Any lady attending such an affair would surely cause a scandal. She and her brother were fortunate that they had arrived early enough to secure a place for their carriage at the ringside. By the time the fight was due to begin, the carriages were ten deep around the
ring and thousands of foot spectators were spread up the sloping hillsides round about which turned the field into a natural amphitheatre.

All about Lady Deborah, voices loud in boxing cant traded their knowledge. The odds were stated in quaint terms. It was, ‘Chelsea Hospital to a sentry-box on Randall,’ or ‘Glass case of ’51 to a cucumber frame on the unknown.’ The faces of the boxing heroes were frontispieces or dial-plates; their mouths, potato traps, gin-traps, kissers, or ivory-boxes; their heads, nuts, nobs or knowledge boxes; their blood, currant juice or claret; their eyes, ogles or optics; their stomachs, bread-baskets or victualling offices; and their noses, conks, snouts or smellers.

Even the newspaper reports were written in cant. Lord William had shown his sister a report of a prize-fight which described the arrival of the boxers as, ‘The men came to the scratch, with good-humour painted on their mugs.’

Then Lady Deborah noticed a movement and fuss about the shabby carriage next to her. The man at the reins seemed to be about to move off. Wondering that anyone, having secured such a prime place, should forgo it, she watched in surprise. Just as he was ready to drive off, a smart racing curricle with two men in it drove right across the ring. The stewards held up the ropes. The carriage next to her drove off and its place was taken by the curricle.

‘Clever way to secure a good place, Carruthers,’ said one of the newcomers.

‘Oh, Parsons is a good fellow,’ replied the man
called Carruthers. ‘I paid him well to be here early so that we should get the best view.’

Lady Deborah eyed Carruthers’s companion and she jogged her brother with her elbow. ‘Ain’t that old Puritan Ashton in beside us?’

Lord William looked across her and hissed in dismay. ‘Sure it is,’ he whispered. ‘Looks like the devil, don’t he? I remember those green eyes of his. Pull your hat down over your eyes, Deb. If he recognizes you, he’ll give you a jaw-me-dead and spoil our fun.’

Mr Peter Carruthers took out his quizzing-glass and looked about. He studied the twins in the next carriage. ‘Beautiful pair of lads,’ he commented, ‘although the one near you is a trifle girlish. Could do with toughening up.’

The Earl of Ashton looked at the pair just
described.
His face hardened. ‘That, my dear friend,’ he said loudly, ‘is none other than Lord William Western and his sister, Lady Deborah. The young whelp has dressed his sister in his clothes and brought her to a prize-fight.’

His voice carried to the other spectators hard by and Deborah suddenly found herself the focus of much attention, followed by loud taunts. A pair of fine legs in skin-tight breeches occasion no comment when supposed to belong to a man, but when it is revealed the delectable limbs are those of a lady, coarse remarks are apt to rise all round. To Deborah’s burning ears came lubricious suggestions about where the gentlemen would like to find those legs – tight
around their necks being the general and loud opinion.

She felt tears of mortification rising to her eyes. If only the fight would start so that her tormentors would leave her alone. She cursed Lord Ashton. She felt sure he had revealed her identity quite
deliberately.
Lord William was almost as miserable. He could not call them all out for insulting his sister. He was made even more miserable by the knowledge that he and his friends would no doubt bait any lady just as much had she attended a prize-fight dressed like a man. There was no way they could retreat until the fight was over.

And then, to Lady Deborah’s relief, a hush fell on the crowd as the two fighters walked into the ring. Then there was an outcry. For the champion, Randall, was all that a champion should be, squat and powerful with a Neanderthal jaw, but the unknown, Benjamin Stubbs, was tall and slim. The odds rose high in favour of the champion.

‘My money’s on Randall, and so is everyone else’s,’ said Mr Carruthers gloomily.

‘I think I shall back our unknown,’ said the earl. ‘But let’s see how he strips.’

Benjamin removed his coat and handed it to his second and that was followed by his ruffled shirt. His chest was white and hairless and his arms were sinewy, but he cut a poor figure beside Randall, who had a mat of hair on his chest like a carriage rug and whose arms were as thick as tree trunks.

‘Not much sport today,’ said Lord William, leaning
forward, and Lady Deborah heaved a sigh of relief and prayed it would all be over quickly.

It was a beautiful morning, clear and still, with a delicate fuzz of new green leaves covering the trees on the hills above the ring. Great fluffy clouds sailed across a clear blue sky and the air was warm and sweet.

The contestants squared up to each other, the handkerchief was dropped and they set to. The couple sparred for a few minutes. There was deathly silence. Then Randall, moving with amazing speed for so heavily built a man, put two dextrous hits through Benjamin’s guard, hitting him in the mouth and the throat at the same minute. Benjamin fell like a log, covered with blood, as cheer after cheer for Randall rent the air.

Lady Deborah closed her eyes and prayed she was not going to be sick.

Benjamin had been sponged down and was
squaring
up gamely for round two when a woman could be heard shouting from somewhere behind in the crowd. Painfully glad there was at least one other female present, Lady Deborah opened her eyes, only to see Randall punch Benjamin on the side of the head and send him reeling.

And then a middle-aged woman carrying a large umbrella erupted into the ring like a fury. She marched straight up to Randall and brought her umbrella down on his head with a resounding
thwack.
Hannah Pym had arrived.

Her umbrella dated from the last century. It had an
oilskin covering, heavy iron spokes, and a silver head in the shape of a grinning dog.

The Earl of Ashton ran lightly into the ring and approached the group of gesticulating stewards who had gathered around Hannah and the fighters.

‘Leave my footman alone, you great bully,’ howled Hannah.

‘It’s all right, modom,’ said Benjamin. ‘I said I was going to fight. No one pressed me into it.’

‘You had better come with me,’ said Lord Ashton. ‘You cannot stop a prize-fight or there will be a riot and many people might be killed.’

‘Yes, please go,’ said Benjamin. ‘Ain’t nothing you can do now.’

Hannah looked around wildly. Lord Ashton took her gently by the arm. ‘There is a lady in the carriage next to mine,’ he said. ‘I suggest you join her.’

Lady Deborah watched them approach. Lord Ashton came right up to her and said, ‘Since you have had the temerity, the folly, to appear here, the least you can do is offer some protection to this lady.’

Too mortified to do other than make room between herself and William for Hannah, Lady Deborah then sat very still, staring straight ahead.

‘He will be killed,’ said Miss Hannah Pym. ‘I know it.’

‘Your son, ma’am?’ asked Lady Deborah, finding her voice.

‘No,’ said Hannah crossly, ‘my footman, and as Benjamin is in his thirties and I in my forties, I am tired of people asking me whether he is my son. He is
a silly footman who lost a great deal of money gambling and this is his stupid, stupid, dangerous way of trying to recoup his losses. Why are you dressed like a man?’

‘Mind your own business, madam, and watch the fight,’ said Deborah tartly.

‘I do not want to watch the fight,’ replied Hannah. ‘I do not enjoy public hangings, nor do I like to see public murder done, which is all that a prize-fight is.’

‘How long do these … these …
things
usually go on for?’ Deborah asked William.

‘Twenty-eight rounds,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Stubbs has a great deal of bottom and is shaping up well.’

Deborah thought gloomily that Stubbs was going to end up, if he lived, looking like a sort of
black-and-blue
jelly for the rest of his life.

Benjamin’s pluck against such a formidable
adversary
had caught the crowd’s imagination. They began to roar his name, not Stubbs, not the surname which would have been usual, but a huge chant of, ‘
Benjamin,
Benjamin, BENJAMIN!’ The noise seemed to galvanize Benjamin, who began to place his punches more accurately. The rounds were mercifully short but by the time the fight reached its fifteenth, Deborah, forgetting Miss Pym was a stranger, was clutching her for support and Hannah had a
comforting
arm around the girl’s shoulders.

At the sixteenth round, Hannah’s nerve broke. Freeing herself from Lady Deborah, she jumped to her feet and shouted, ‘I cannot stand it any more, Benjamin.’

Benjamin’s eyes flickered in her direction. He dived under Randall’s guard and landed a massive blow under Randall’s ear, that magic spot, as it was described by the boxing expert of the time, Captain Godfrey.

Randall fell like a stone and lay still.

Crying with relief, Hannah cheered and jumped up and down. Deborah leaped to her feet and she and William clung on to Hannah and shouted themselves hoarse.

Benjamin was borne off in triumph from the field. The Earl of Ashton jumped down from his curricle and came up to Deborah. ‘I shall call on you later,’ he said.

Deborah sank down on the carriage seat. ‘Your guardian?’ asked Hannah.

Deborah shook her head. ‘Only a neighbour.’

‘May as well sit here for a bit,’ said William. ‘There’ll be such a press of carriages on the road to Rochester, it would take us ages inching along to get there if we left now.’

A man passed their carriage and leered up at Deborah. ‘Holloa, slut-face, show us yer twat,’ he jeered. Hannah’s ever-ready umbrella came crashing down on his head and he reeled away.

Overcome at last, Deborah began to cry. Although she had hunted and fished in men’s clothes and ridden about the countryside in them, she had never appeared in the town with them on, never had worn them anywhere where she might be held up to ridicule. She had been confident all the same that
everyone at the fight would assume her to be a man and was sure they might have done so had not the Earl of Ashton betrayed her.

‘I h-hate him,’ she sobbed.

‘Who?’ asked Hannah. ‘That devilish-looking man?’

‘He’s the Earl of Ashton and a stuffed shirt if ever there was one,’ said William gloomily. ‘Don’t cry, sis. You’d better dry your eyes and introduce yourself. I am Lord William Western and this is my sister, Deborah.’

‘And I am Miss Hannah Pym,’ said Hannah, holding out her hand.

He shook it and then said, ‘You’d best come home with us for a bit, Miss Pym. Are you living in Rochester?’

‘I am residing at the Crown,’ said Hannah. ‘I am travelling by stage-coach to Dover, but there was an accident to the coach.’

‘If we go to our home, Downs Abbey,’ pursued William, ‘then we will be able to cut across country and avoid the main roads. Then, when all is quiet, I will escort you to Rochester.’

‘What of my footman?’ asked Hannah.

‘He’ll have a right royal time being fêted and paraded all about the town.’ William looked at her curiously. ‘With a purse of a thousand guineas, he may not wish to remain a servant.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Hannah. She put a comforting arm around Deborah’s still shaking shoulders. ‘Drive on.’

Hannah looked at Downs Abbey with pleasure when they eventually came to a stop in front of it. It
was a jumble of various periods of architecture blended by ivy and age into a harmonious whole. A groom came running from the stables to take horses and carriage away and an elderly butler opened the door to the twins and Hannah.

‘Tea in the drawing-room, Silvers,’ ordered William.

‘I must change,’ said Deborah. She was much recovered but still looking rather pale. ‘I shall join you in a trice.’

In the drawing-room, William shovelled a pile of newspapers and magazines off an armchair and assisted Hannah into it. Hannah gazed about the room. It looked more like the study of two bachelors than a drawing-room, she reflected. There was a mangy wolfhound taking up most of the sofa and two spaniels lay stretched out before the fire.

The butler and two footmen carried in the
tea-things.
Deborah appeared shortly afterwards wearing a severe gown of dull gold velvet. Hannah noticed to her surprise that Lady Deborah, out of her masculine attire, was a very beautiful young woman.