“Oh! yes; they torks, and that’s about all they does do. Lot o’ good torking does my ’orses. Vot I vants to know is, v’y does we pay the turnpikes?”
We change at the “Red Lion,” Royston, and then come on to the galloping ground that brings us smartly, along a level road, to Arrington Bridge, the spelling of whose name is a matter of divergent opinions among the compilers of road-books. But whether called Arrington or Harrington, it is a pretty, retired spot, with a handsome inn and an equally handsome row of houses opposite.
“Will you please to alight?” asks the stately landlady of the “Hardwicke Arms” inn and posting-house, with perhaps a little too much air of condescension towards us, as coach-passengers. We of the stage-coaches—nay, even those of the mails—occupy only a second place in the consideration of mine host and hostess of this, one of the finest inns on the road. Their posting business brings them some very free-handed customers, and their position, hard by my lord of Hardwicke’s grand seat of Wimpole, spoils them for mere ordinary everyday folks.
However, it is now more than half-past seven o’clock, and we have had no bite nor sup since two. Therefore we alight at the landlady’s bidding and hasten into the inn, to make as good a supper as possible in the twenty minutes allowed.
Half a crown each, in all conscience, for two cups of tea, and some bread and butter, cold ham and eggs! We climb up to our places, dissatisfied. Soon the quiet spot falls away behind, as our horses get into their stride; and as we leave, so does a yellow po’shay dash up, and convert the apparently sleepy knot of smocked post-boys and shirt-sleeved ostlers, who have been lounging about the stable entrance, into a very alert and wide-awake throng.
Caxton, a busy thoroughfare village, where the great “George” inn does a very large business, is passed, and soon, along this flattest of flat roads, that grim relic, Caxton Gibbet, rises dark and forbidding against the translucent evening sky. Does the troubled ghost of young Gatward, gibbeted here eighty years ago for robbing the mail on this lonely spot, ever revisit the scene, we wonder?
The wise, inscrutable stars hang trembling in the sky, and the sickle moon is shining softly, as, having passed Papworth St. Everard, we drop gently down through Godmanchester and draw up in front of the “George” at Huntingdon, 58½ miles from London, at ten o’clock.
We take the opportunity afforded by the change of filling our pocket-flasks with some rich brown brandy of the right sort, and invest in some of those very special veal-and-ham sandwiches for which good Mrs. Ekin has been famous these years past. Our coachman “leaves us here,” and we tip him eighteenpence apiece when he comes round to inform us of the fact.
The new coachman, after some little conversation with the outgoing incumbent of the bench, in which we catch the remark made to the newcomer that some articles or some persons are “a pretty fair lot, taking ’em all round”—a criticism that evidently sizes us up for the benefit of his confrère—climbs into his seat, and giving us all a comprehensive and impartial glance, settles himself down comfortably. “All right, Tom?” he asks the guard over his shoulder. “Yes,” answers that functionary. “Then give ’em their heads, Bill,” he says to the ostler; and away we go into the moonlit night at a steady pace.
The box-seat passenger, who very successfully kept the original coachman in conversation nearly all the way from London to Huntingdon, does not seem to quite hit it off with our new whip, who is inclined to be huffish, or, at the least of it, given to silence and keeping his own counsel. “Have a weed, coachman?” he asks, after some ineffectual attempts to get more than a grunt out of him. “Don’t mind if I do,” is the ungracious reply, and he takes the proffered cigar and—puts it into some pocket somewhere beneath the voluminous capes of his greatcoat. After this, silence reigns supreme. For ourselves, we have chatted throughout the day, and now begin to feel—not sleepy, but meditative.