The Purpose of Miss Shepley

Chapter Fifteen

How long does it take a Wyrm to milk a cow?

Same as Folk, plus twenty-one years to mourn the King. 

 (joke, Ethelfolk)

.:.

I made my excuses to the Browns in a letter I wrote while my maids crammed the barest necessities into two canvas sacks. I was vague about it, saying only there was an urgent family matter of the gravest importance.

Mrs. Burke stayed behind with the trunks while Miss Ward and I went ahead with the post. We travelled the Post Road back, passing below the Great Fen and the mountains before swinging up through the great wide valley of the Northerns. We stopped only to change horses, and once while crossing the mouth of the Stanbourne.

We approached the river late in the second day. I had been all eagerness and impatience when we'd started out, but after a full day and night rattling along in the post coach, I had grown weary and dull and numb. I sat in a sort of daze of listlessness, watching the sun disappear and re-appear from behind the treetops, when Stanford Bridge came into view.

It was an imposing bridge, stout and graceless, rising from the water on arches of rough-hewn blocks. The river below was broad and slow, its banks littered with rounded stones. The coach turned and rolled onto the bridge, and I mused about them idly, the bridge and the river... The hewn and the worn, the crafted and the natural... The river must prevail in the end, I decided, for in simply being a river, it would wear away the stonemasons' edges and render the blocks into stones again. And then the driver called out, "Ho," and the coach jerked to a stop.

He rapped on the roof, and then we heard his boots hit the ground hard. Miss Ward clutched her hands to her bosom, glancing at me with terrified eyes. A moment later, the driver pulled back the door flap and shoved his auburn head inside.

He was one of the Baelgast, tall and stout and broadly built. Red tattoos ringed his meaty fingers, and he wore braids in both his hair and his whiskers.

"We cross the Stanbourne," he said. He offered me his hand, and I blinked back at him owlishly a moment before I understood he expected us to get out.

We climbed down at his command, though Miss Ward trembled and went pale. The driver held his hat to his heart and looked at me expectantly. I looked back at him blankly.

"Will you start us off, Sister?"

I shook my head somewhat. "I beg your pardon...?"

"The song..." he urged, scowling. "To honor our King."

"The King..." I began to piece together some of his purpose. "Because he was drowned in the Stanbourne...? But that was at Frodulf Court. That's a dozen miles from here."

The driver seemed none too impressed with me. "Aye, and this water came a dozen miles from that spot, Sister."

I murmured, "Oh. Yes, I suppose so." I shrugged at him apologetically. "I'm afraid I don't know any song."

The driver took a hard look at me, then he shook his head and sang the song on his own. Miss Ward and I learned the chorus, by and by, and hummed along timidly on the verses

The song ended. The driver put on his hat, and we all went back to the coach.

The driver helped Miss Ward up, then he took my hand, holding it a while and regarding me with remorseful eyes.

"I was harsh with ye, Sister, and I'm sorry for it. You hardly knew our King, and you grieve him not. I understand. That's the very point of the thing."