It never snowed for Christmas. It always snowed--if it
snowed at all--before Christmas, when people were trying
to travel to family gatherings or house parties, or long
after Christmas, when it was a mere nuisance to people
trying to go about the business of their everyday lives.
It never snowed actually on Christmas, when it would have
added a picturesque quality and some magic to the
celebrations.
Such was the sad reality of living in England.
This year had been no exception. The skies had remained
stubbornly gray and heavy with the promise of something
dire all over the holiday, and the weather had been chilly
and blustery and really not very pleasant at all. But the
ground had remained obstinately bare and as drab as the
sky.
It had been a rather dreary Christmas, if the truth were
told.
Frances Allard, who had made the long day's journey from
Bath, where she taught at Miss Martin's School for Girls
on Sutton and Daniel streets, in order to spend the
holiday with her two great-aunts near the village of
Mickledean in Somersetshire, had looked forward to being
in rural surroundings. She had dreamed of taking long
walks in the crisp winter countryside, blue skies
overhead, or else of wading to church and the Assembly
Rooms through a soft white fall of snow.
But the wind and the cold devoid of sunshine had forced
her to curtail the few walks she had undertaken, and the
Assembly Rooms had remained firmly closed, everyone having
been content, it seemed, to spend Christmas with family
and friends this year rather than with all their neighbors
at a communal party or ball.
Frances would have been lying to herself if she had not
admittedto feeling just a little disappointment.
Miss Gertrude Driscoll and her widowed sister, Mrs. Martha
Melford, Frances's great-aunts, who lived at the dower
house in the park of Wimford Grange, had been invited to
join Baron Clifton's family at the big house on Christmas
Day, the baron being their great-nephew and therefore a
cousin of some remove to Frances. Frances had been invited
too, of course. They had also all been invited to a few
other private parties in the neighborhood. But the great-
aunts had sent back polite refusals to them all, declaring
themselves too cozy in their own house to venture outdoors
in such inclement weather and too contented with the
coveted company of their great-niece to bother with any
invitations.
They could, after all, visit their great-nephew and his
family and their neighbors any day of the year. Besides,
Great-Aunt Gertrude had fancied that she was coming down
with something, though she had displayed no clearly
discernible symptoms, and dared not stray too far from the
fireside of her own home.
Frances's wishes had not been consulted.
Only when the holiday was over and they were hugging her
and shedding a few tears over her and kissing her good-bye
before she stepped up into their rather rickety private
carriage, which they had insisted upon sending with her
though it did not usually venture beyond a five-mile
radius around the village, did it occur to her great-aunts
that maybe they had been selfish in remaining at home all
over the holiday and ought to have remembered that dear
Frances was only three-and-twenty and would perhaps have
enjoyed a party or two and the company of other young
people to enliven the tedium of a Christmas spent entirely
with two old ladies.
She had hugged them in return and shed a few tears of her
own and assured them--almost truthfully--that they were
all she had needed to make Christmas a wondrously happy
occasion after a long term at school, though actually it
had been more than one term. She had remained at the
school all through last summer, since Miss Martin took in
charity girls and it was always necessary to provide for
their care and entertainment through the various holidays--
and Frances had had nowhere particular to go at the time.
Christmas had, then, been a disappointingly dull holiday.
But she really had enjoyed the quiet after the constantly
busy bustle of school life. And she was extremely fond of
her great-aunts, who had opened their arms and their
hearts to her from the moment of her arrival in England as
a motherless baby with a French emigre father who had been
fleeing the Reign of Terror. She had no memory of that
time, of course, but she knew that the aunts would have
brought her into the country to live with them if Papa had
chosen to let her go. But he had not. He had kept her with
him in London, surrounding her with nurses and governesses
and singing masters, and lavishing upon her all that money
could buy for her comfort and pleasure--and oceans of love
besides. She had had a happy, privileged, secure childhood
and girlhood--until her father's sudden death when she was
only eighteen.
But her aunts had had some role to play in her growing
years. They had brought her into the country for holidays
and had occasionally gone to London to take her about and
buy her gifts and feed her ices and other treats. And ever
since she had learned to read and write she had exchanged
monthly letters with them. She was inordinately fond of
them. It really had been lovely to spend Christmas in
their company.
There had been no snow to enliven her Christmas, then.
There was snow, however--and plenty of it--soon after.
It began when the carriage was no more than eight or ten
miles from Mickledean, and Frances did consider knocking
on the roof panel and suggesting to the elderly coachman
that they turn around and go back. But it was not a heavy
snow, and she did not really want to delay her journey. It
looked more like a white rain for all of the hour after it
began. But inevitably--when it really was too late to turn
back--the flakes became larger and thicker, and in an
alarmingly short time the countryside, which had been
looking as if it were rimed with heavy frost rather than
with snow itself, began to disappear under a thickening
blanket of white.
The carriage moved steadily onward, and Frances assured
herself that it was foolish to be nervous, that the road
was probably perfectly safe for travel, especially at the
plodding speed to which Thomas was keeping the horses.
Soon the snow would stop falling and begin to melt, as was
always the way with snow in England.
She concentrated her thoughts on the term ahead, planning
which pieces of music she would choose for the senior
madrigal choir to sing. Something bright and brilliant and
Elizabethan, she thought. She wondered if she dared choose
something in five parts. The girls had mastered three-part
singing and were doing rather well at four-part pieces,
though they did sometimes break off in the middle of a
phrase to collapse in laughter as they got hopelessly
entangled in complex harmonies.
Frances smiled at the thought. She usually laughed with
them. It was better--and ultimately more productive--than
weeping.
Maybe they would try five parts.
Within another half hour, it was no longer possible to see
anything but unrelieved white in any direction--and no
longer possible to concentrate upon thoughts of school or
anything else. And the snow was still falling so thickly
that it dazzled the eyes and made it hard to see any great
distance from the windows even if there had been anything
to see. When she pressed the side of her face against the
glass in order to look ahead, she could not even
distinguish the road from the ditches or the fields
beyond. And there did not even seem to be any hedgerows on
this particular stretch that might have provided some sort
of dark border to signify where the road was.
Panic clawed at her stomach.
Could Thomas see the road from his higher perch on the
box? But the snow must be blowing into his eyes and half
blinding him. And he must be twice as cold as she was. She
pressed her hands deeper into the fur muff that Great-Aunt
Martha had given her for Christmas. She would pay a
fortune for a hot cup of tea, she thought.
So much for wishing for snow. What sage was it who had
once said that one should beware of what one wished for
lest the wish be granted?
She sat back in her seat, determined to trust Thomas to
find the way. After all, he had been her great-aunts'
coachman forever and ever, or at least for as far back as
she could remember, and she had never heard of his being
involved in any sort of accident. But she thought
wistfully of the cozy dower house she had left behind and
of the bustling school that was her destination. Claudia
Martin would be expecting her today. Anne Jewell and
Susanna Osbourne, the other resident teachers, would be
watching for her arrival. They would all spend the evening
together in Claudia's private sitting room, seated cozily
about the fire, drinking tea and exchanging reminiscences
of Christmas.
She would be able to give them a graphic account of the
snowstorm through which she had traveled. She would
embellish it and exaggerate the danger and her fears and
have them all laughing.
But she was not laughing yet.
And suddenly laughter was as far from her thoughts as
flying to the moon would be. The carriage slowed and
rocked and slithered, and Frances jerked one hand free of
her muff and grabbed for the worn leather strap above her
head, convinced that they were about to tip right over at
any moment. She waited to see her life flash before her
eyes, and mumbled the opening words of the Lord's Prayer
rather than scream and startle Thomas into losing the last
vestiges of his control. The sound of the horses' hooves
seemed deafening even though they were moving over snow
and should have been silent. Thomas was shouting enough
for ten men.
And then, looking out through the window nearest her
rather than clench her eyes tightly shut and not even see
the end approaching, she actually saw the horses, and
instead of being up ahead pulling the carriage, they were
drawing alongside her window and then forging ahead.
She gripped the strap even more tightly and leaned
forward. Those were not her horses. Gracious heaven,
someone was overtaking them--in these weather conditions.
The box of the overtaking carriage came into view with its
coachman looking rather like a hunchbacked snowman bent
over the ribbons and spewing hot abuse from his mouth--
presumably at poor Thomas.
And then the carriage passed in a flash of blue, and
Frances had the merest glimpse of a gentleman with many
capes to his greatcoat and a tall beaver hat on his head.
He looked back at her with one eyebrow cocked and an
expression of supercilious contempt on his face.
He dared to be contemptuous of her?
Within moments the blue carriage was past, her own rocked
and slithered some more, and then it appeared to right
itself before continuing on its slow, plodding way.
Frances's fears were replaced by a hot fury. She seethed
with it. Of all the reckless, inconsiderate, suicidal,
homicidal, dangerous, stupid things to do! Goodness
gracious, even if she pressed her nose to the window she
could not see more than five yards distant, and the
falling snow hampered vision even within that five yards.
Yet that hunchbacked, foul-mouthed coachman and that
contemptuous gentleman with his arrogant eyebrow were in
such a hurry that they would endanger life and limb--her
own and Thomas's as well as their own--in order to
overtake?
But now that the excitement was over, she was suddenly
aware again of being all alone in an ocean of whiteness.
She felt panic contract her stomach muscles once more and
sat back, deliberately letting go of the strap and folding
her hands neatly inside her muff again. Panic would get
her nowhere. It was altogether more probable that Thomas
would get her somewhere.
Poor Thomas. He would be ready for something hot to drink--
or more probably something strong and hot--when they
arrived at that somewhere. He was by no means a young man.
With the fingers of her right hand she picked out the
melody of a William Byrd madrigal on the back of her left
hand, as if it were the keyboard of a pianoforte. She
hummed the tune aloud.
And then she could feel the carriage rocking and
slithering again and grasped for the strap once more. She
looked out and ahead, not really expecting to see
anything, but actually she could see a dark shape, which
appeared to be blocking the way ahead. In one glimpse of
near-clarity between snowflakes she saw that it was a
carriage and horses. She even thought it might be a blue
carriage.
But though the horses pulling her own had drawn to a halt,
the carriage itself did not immediately follow suit. It
swayed slightly to the left, righted itself, and then
slithered more than slightly to the right--and this time
it kept going until it reached what must have been the
edge of the road, where one wheel caught on something. The
conveyance performed a neat half-pirouette and slid gently
backward and downward until its back wheels were nestled
deep in a snowbank.
Frances, tipped backward and staring at the opposite seat,
which was suddenly half above her, could see nothing but
solid snow out of the windows on both sides.
And if this was not the outside of enough, she thought
with ominous calm, then she did not know what was.
She was aware of a great clamor from somewhere--horses
snorting and whinnying, men shouting.
Before she could collect herself sufficiently to extricate
herself from her snowy cocoon, the door opened from the
outside--not without some considerable assistance from
male muscles and shocking male profanities--and an arm and
hand clad in a thick and expensive greatcoat and a fine
leather glove reached inside to assist her. It was obvious
to her that the arm did not belong to Thomas. Neither did
the face at the end of it--hazel-eyed, square-jawed,
irritated, and frowning.
It was a face Frances had seen briefly less than ten
minutes ago.
It was a face--and a person--against whom she had
conceived a considerable hostility.
She slapped her hand onto his without a word, intending to
use it to assist herself to alight with as much dignity as
she could muster. But he hoisted her out from her awkward
position as if she were a sack of meal and deposited her
on the road, where her half-boots immediately sank out of
sight beneath several inches of snow. She could feel all
the ferocity of the cold wind and the full onslaught of
the snow falling from the sky.
One was supposed to see red when one was furious. But she
saw only white.
"You, sir," she said above the noise of the horses and of
Thomas and the hunchbacked snowman exchanging vigorous and
colorful abuse of each other, "deserve to be hanged,
drawn, and quartered. You deserve to be flayed alive. You
deserve to be boiled in oil."
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