voice countered none too soberly. “Got a bloke waitin’. You can’t—”
“You shut it. I could pluck a lad off the street who’d be of more use to me than you.” There was a long pause and then, “Oi! You there! Spider-shanks.”
“He’s talkin’ to you, lad,” the barkeep said to Benna, jerking his chin toward the taproom door.
Benna turned to find the innkeeper, whom she’d spoken to an hour earlier, hovering in the doorway.
Good God. What had she done now?
“Me?” she said in a squeaky voice that made the other three patrons at the bar laugh.
“Aye, you. You said you were lookin’ for work. I ain’t got no stable lad job, but if you can sit a horse without falling off then you’re hired.”
The same drunken voice, no longer amused, shouted, “Now see here, Courtney, you’re not really gonna—”
“Well, boy?” the innkeeper demanded impatiently, ignoring the other man. “Do you want a job, or don’t you?”
***
Riding post, it turned out, was far easier than delivering express mail.
It helped that the inn owner, Courtney—or Mr. Courtland—paired Benna with the Stag’s most experienced post boy, Jimmy Hutchinson. To call Jimmy a boy was misleading since he was a few years over fifty.
Not only had Jimmy trained more new post boys than most people had forgotten, but he was also a celebrity of sorts, having once ridden five back-to-back stages between Easingwold and York, clocking an impressive one hundred and thirty miles in a day.
Jimmy rode the wheel—the left-handed horse closest to the chaise—and Benna rode the front horse, which meant all she had to do was follow Jimmy’s shouted directions and stay on the horse.
The worst part of the trip was wearing a spare postilion boot that Mr. Courtland had flung at her, along with the white leather breeches and red coat that were the Stag’s Head’s livery.
The breeches were so loose she had to tie them up with some bailing twine, the sleeves of the coat were too short and pinched at her armpits, but it was the right boot that tormented her—the one reinforced with wood to keep her leg from getting crushed between the coach horses. It was so small that her toes were numb by the time they arrived at their destination.
“You’ve made an enemy in Gary Collins,” Jimmy said to Benna as the two of them lounged in the corner of the warm kitchen.
“Who’s Gary?” Benna asked, massaging her little toe, which seemed to be permanently blue.
The older man took a few deep puffs, not speaking until the bowl of his pipe had caught. “The lad whose job you took.”
“I didn’t take—”
An inn wench popped into the kitchen bearing two tankards. “Here ye go, Jimmy.”
“Ta, Molly.”
Molly winked at Benna and set down her ale with a thump. “And this is for you, pretty lad.”
Benna blushed, which made the girl laugh. “Thank you, miss.”
“Ooooh, this one’s got the manners of a lord.” Molly ruffled Benna’s hair and disappeared back into the tap room.
“I didn’t take Gary’s job,” Benna repeated, stretching her toes and wincing. “Mr. Courtland discharged him and offered the position to me.”
“Ooh la-la,” Jimmy mocked, his eyes wide. “Listen to them break-teeth words. You born a nobleman, lad?”
Benna mentally castigated herself for forgetting to disguise her accent. It was rather lowering that, in the time that she’d been on her own, it had been her voice, rather than her person, that had garnered the most suspicion.
Nobody seemed to doubt for a moment that she was a young man, but almost everyone she met raised an eyebrow whenever she opened her mouth.
Fortunately for Benna, Jimmy liked the sound of his own voice too much to require her to talk. He was also great friends with all the inn employees and they didn’t spend so much as a penny for their eating and drinking.
Once their horses had been baited and rested, they took another chaise back to the Stag’s Head, arriving just after eleven-thirty that night.
Benna was so tired that she could hardly keep her eyes open. And her lower body seemed to have gone the way of the toes on her right foot and become numb.
When she slid off her horse, her legs crumpled beneath her and she fell onto her bottom in the middle of the inn courtyard, much to the amusement of Jimmy and an ostler.
Benna didn’t bother trying to get up.
Perhaps they would let me curl up in a corner somewhere and sleep?
But Jimmy held out a hand, still chuckling. He was at least six