“Josiah, I think that says,” Joel said. “Josiah Brumford. He is sending a private chaise to fetch you, and you are to pack a bag for at least a few days.”
“To London?” Bertha’s voice was breathless with awe.
“Whatever am I to do?” Anna’s mind seemed to have stopped working. Or, rather, it was working, but it was whirring out of control, like the innards of a broken clock.
“What you are to do, Anna,” Joel said, pushing a chair up behind her knees and setting his hands on her shoulders to press her gently down onto it, “is pack a bag for a few days and then go to London to discuss your future.”
“But what future?” she asked.
“That is what is to be discussed,” he pointed out.
The buzzing in her ears grew louder.
Two
Anna could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had ridden inside a carriage. Perhaps that explained one of the few memories she had of her infancy. The conveyance that drew up outside the doors of the orphanage early in the morning two days after the letter came and set every child dashing to the windows of the long dining room in which they were eating breakfast was perhaps not the grandest of equipages, but some of the girls declared that it was just like Cinderella’s coach. Even to Anna, who dreaded climbing into it, it looked far too impressive to be intended for her.
She was not to travel alone, it seemed. When she was summoned to Miss Ford’s sitting room, she was introduced to Miss Knox, a solid, gray-haired, large-bosomed woman of severe mien, who had Anna thinking of Amazons. Miss Knox had been engaged by Mr. Brumford to accompany Anna to London, since apparently it was not proper for a young lady to travel any great distance alone.
It was the first Anna had heard of being a lady. She was very thankful for the company, however.
A few minutes later, out in the hall, Miss Ford shook hands firmly with Anna while Roger, the elderly porter, lifted her bag into the carriage. It was neither a large nor a heavy bag, but what was there to pack, after all, but her spare day dress and her Sunday dress, her best shoes, and a few sundries? A number of the girls, released temporarily from the regular routine of their day, rushed about her to hug her and shed tears over her and generally behave as though she were going to the ends of the earth in order to face her own execution. Anna shed a few tears of her own, for she shared their feelings. A few of the boys stood at a safe distance, where they were in no danger of being accidentally hugged, and beamed at her. She suspected that they smiled, the rascals, because they hoped her going would mean no school today.
“I will be gone for a mere few days,” she assured them all, “and will return with so many stories of my adventures that I will keep you up one whole night. Be good in the meanwhile.”
“I will pray for you, Miss Snow,” Winifred Hamlin promised piously through her tears.
As the carriage pulled away from the curb a couple of minutes later, children crowded the windows of the dining room again, smiling and waving and weeping. Anna waved back. This all felt alarmingly final, as though she would never return. And perhaps she would not. What was it about her future that needed to be discussed?
“Why has Mr. Brumford summoned me?” she asked Miss Knox.
But the woman’s face remained blank of all expression. “I have no idea, miss,” she said. “I was hired from the agency to come here and fetch you and see you safely delivered, and that is what I am doing.”
“Oh,” Anna said.
It was a long journey, with only a few brief stops along the way for refreshments and a change of horses and one night spent at an uncomfortable, noisy inn. Throughout it all Anna might as well have been alone, for Miss Knox did not utter more than a dozen words, and most of those were directed to other people. She had been hired to accompany Anna, it seemed, not to provide any sort of companionship.
Anna might have been intolerably bored if her heart had not been palpitating with a nervousness bordering on terror and if her mind had not still been spinning quite beyond her control. Everyone at the orphanage had learned of the letter, of course, and everyone had heard it read aloud. There had been no point in trying to keep its contents private even if Anna had felt so inclined. If she had done so, Bertha would have recounted what she recalled with heaven knew what embellishments, and the most hair-raising rumors would have been shooting about the home in no time at all.
Everyone had had an opinion. Everyone had had a theory.
The one most likely to be true was that Anna’s benefactor, whoever he or she was, was ready to turn her loose upon the world and withdraw the monetary support she had relied upon for the past twenty-one years. He—or she—did not have to summon her all the way to London in order to inform her of that, though. But perhaps he had found her employment there. What could it be? Would she agree to take it and begin a new phase of her life, cut off from everyone she had ever known and the only home she could remember? Or would she refuse and return to Bath and try to subsist on her teacher’s wages? She would have a choice, she assumed. The letter had, after all, stated that her future needed to be discussed. A discussion was a two-way communication.
She wondered if there were enough coins in her purse for a ticket home by stagecoach. She had no idea what the fare was, but she had a little money of her own—a very little—and Miss Ford had pressed a whole sovereign into her palm last night despite her protests. What if it was still not enough? What if she found herself stranded in London for the rest of her life? The very thought was enough to make her feel bilious, and the state of the road over which they were traveling did nothing to settle her stomach.