The Reavers. George Fraser MacDonald

       Chapter 2

      It’s quite a commentary on our so-called scientific progress that while we can send men to the moon (well, possibly you can, even if this correspondent can’t), getting stuck on the high fell road between Scotch Corner and Carlisle is just as liable to happen now as it was in the sixteenth century. In some ways it’s worse nowadays, when your carburettor’s flooded, not a call-box in sight, and nothing for it but a ten-mile walk; in the 1590s you could always huddle up in a corner of your satin-lined luxury coach, swathed in silks and furs, beguiling your impatience with peach brandy and sweetmeats o’ Peru, while outside in the raging blizzard your lackeys heaved and whimpered to get the show on the road, and Coachman Samkin clumphed around giving futile instructions to the grooms, like “Keep them nags in low gear, the chestnut’s over-revving!” – assuming, of course, that you weren’t just any old wayfarer, but the pampered and wealthy Lady Godiva Dacre, proud flower of the nobility, owner of half East Anglia, and accustomed to having every whim, let alone crisis, attended to instanter by droves of head-knuckling servitors. There were a round dozen of these floundering knee-deep in slush as they strove to force the great gilded carriage ahead, and Coachman Samkin waved his lantern and vanished in a snowdrift.

      Inside, her ladyship tapped dainty foot and drummed slender fingers in Krupa-like crescendo, signs which her companion, mischievous little Mistress Kylie, watched with covert amusement as she waited for Krakatoa to blow, and tried to think of some remark which would get the eruption going.

      “Perchance,” she ventured brightly, “the weather will clear ere long, or mayhap some travellers will fare this way, bringing timely succour. Or a road scout, wi’ spanners and gadgets –”

      “– and a team of oxen, and wainropes, and a fork-lift truck!” stormed Lady Godiva, finally giving vent. “God’s light!” she seethed, “was ever poor debutante so sorrily served? Twelve reeking fat knaves that have gorged and swilled enough for a regiment since we left London, and cannot shift me a featherweight coach through a pinch of snow! Yeomen of England, yet! How we beat the Spaniards I’ll never know! Can nothing stir them, jelly-muscled churls?”

      “Have ’em lashed with horse-whips,” suggested sweet Kylie. “Mind you, they’re probably too numb to feel it by now, but it’s worth a try.”

      “And have ’em run whining to an industrial tribunal!” The fine eyes of scornful Lady Godiva flashed like violet detonators. “With my fair name bandied in the gutter press as merciless employer! Thank you, Mistress Thinktank! Who are you working for, me or the Sunday Sport?”

      “Marry, ’tis a thought,” admitted Kylie. “Certes, the tabloids would eat it. ‘My Flogging Frolic i’ the snow with Gorgeous Goddy’, by Postillion Tim … And ’twould be just like them to use that kinky picture of you in Ben Jonson’s last masque – remember, Diana chastising the fauns? All right, all right,” she added hastily as her mistress began to gnash pearly teeth, “just speculating. I always said amateur court theatricals were a lousy idea, but you would fancy yourself in tights … Here, have another snifter.”

      And while tactful Kylie sets the decanter merrily a-glug, and Lady Godiva extends smouldering goblet, let us cast an eye over these two ladies fair – or rather, in Godiva’s case, let us gaze in stricken admiration, for they’re not making them like that any more. Superbly tall, with the flawless ivory beauty of some Nordic ice queen, and a shape whose curvature could not be concealed even by the voluminous finery of the day, our heroine (yes, it is she) was a breathtaking mixture of Marlene above the neck and Jane Russell below. Her white brow was lofty, her eyes of deepest midnight blue, her nose classically sculpted, her lips an imperious rosebud, and her ears shell-like gems peeping from beneath magnificent fiery tresses which cascaded like glossy red curtains to shoulders of alabaster smoothness. Her chin and teeth were all right, too. Add to this assemblage a mien before whose frigid disdain accountants trembled and barristers fairly grovelled, clothe her in cloth of silver (by Balmain), and let Van Cleef (or Arpels) loose wi’ gewgaws of price wherewith to deck her slim hands and snowy bazoom, and you have a picture of feminine perfection that would take the paper off the wall. Rumour had it that she had been Master Spenser’s original model for the Faerie Queene before wiser counsels led him to ascribe his inspiration to Her Majesty’s person, and that Shakespeare himself had her in mind when he penned that immortal line in Much Ado which begins “Here’s a dishe …”

      In short, Lady Godiva Dacre was the ultimate Elizabethan knockout, and if among the sonnets, songs, wolf-whistles and cries of “Gaw!” with which courtiers paid tribute to her peerless oomph, there were occasional murmurs of “Haughty piece”, “Stuck-up icicle”, and “Payne i’ the butte”, this was no matter for wonder.

      For, as our description and the foregoing snatch of small talk suggest, our leading lady’s temper was wilful, headstrong, passionate, and proud to busting. Spoiled from infancy by a doting grandsire and squads of devoted nurses, grooms, and hangers-on, our orphaned heiress had realised at the age of about three that beauty, money, and blue blood had placed in her tiny hand the throttle of a steamroller on Life’s highway, and she had been winding it on ever since. Sent to court as a child, she had modelled herself on the Queen’s Grace, to whom she had been maid-in-waiting for several years; hence those outbursts of tantrum when any inconvenience (like having to sit in a coach moving at one mile an hour through a snowstorm) came to disturb the rose-strewn progress of her existence. We see her now aged twenty-two, journeying north to visit the distant estate of her late grandfather, old Lord Waldo Dacre, recently succumbed to a surfeit of reivers. She wouldn’t have come – too far, too rude, and oh, sweet coz, the people! – had she not been commanded away by the Queen who, it was rumoured, had been itching for an excuse to get shot of an attendant who gave herself impossible airs and whose naturally flame-coloured coiffure was a maddening reproach to Her Majesty’s weekly gallon of henna.

      So there’s Lady Godiva … sorry? Lovers, you ask? Well, none of your business, really. Yes, granted, a lady with her equipment and ardent spirit, when aroused by Cupid, might well make the Maneaters of the Kumaon look like stuffed mice … and, indeed, there has been talk, but that’s the court for you. Suffice to say that while she has had legions of open admirers with whom she has dallied coolly before giving them the old-sock treatment, we are not prepared to speculate about anything steamier. Don’t worry, her passionate nature will take off before we’re finished … but mum.

      Now, if you can tear your eyes away from our heroine, we turn to little Kylie, her attendant, a perfect complement to Lady G. Kylie is petite, blonde, pert, and chocolate-box pretty, with those generous contours common among saucy milkmaids and well described by the modern expression “stacked”. Inseparable since they won the two-woman bob-sleigh title at their Swiss finishing school, they spar almost continuously, for Kylie couldn’t care less about her imperious employer’s outbursts, and needles her freely, a familiarity which Lady Godiva secretly enjoys because she feels such tolerance becomes her aristocracy. Just let anyone but Kylie try it.

      Having brimmed her companion’s goblet with the electric soup, Kylie remarked that it would keep out the cold, and got her head in her hands for her pains.

      “Cold, quotha!” withered haughty Godiva. “What shouldst thou know of cold, overweight and padded wi’ blubber as thou art! Nay, had I thy surplus tissue I might sit me starkers on an ice floe and be warm as toast, I’ll warrant!”

      “Pleasingly plump and eight stone in