The Adventure Calendar of Mr Timothy Hope is a seasonal story of unlikely accidents and hair-raising escapes told in 24 letters sent home by Timothy Hope as he journeys in the Arctic Circle. Featuring characters such as the unhinged big-game hunter Baronet Oxshott, the scatter-brained genius Professor Cumulus and the always inventive Timothy Hope, the story is a frequently silly, always exciting sleigh ride across crevasses, through wolf packs, into the heart of Christmas itself.
3rd December
My Dear Lady Misericordia
I hope this letter finds you well.
I’m not entirely sure that it will, however. I rather suspect that it finds you somewhat unwell, given the hour the party went on to last night. But while you were busy capering around the ballroom and working up a headache and a bad mood for this morning, I, my Lady, have been busy thinking. Busy thinking and busy doing.
Which is why I am able to greet you with some news that I think will cheer you up. Your wish of many long years has come true: you will find yourself, this morning, without a private tutor.
Ring for me, my Lady, and I will not answer, go to the schoolroom and you will find it empty, for I have gone.
Ah, but where?
I noticed, my Lady, that you were not awake this morning to see your father and his expedition off on their grand departure. You missed an impressive sight, with Professor Cumulus fussing over his endless boxes of equipment as they were piled precariously on top of the coach, Baronet Oxshott wandering about, getting in everyone’s way, shouting at animals and criticizing the grooms while your father, Lord Daunt, stood on the driver’s seat and tried in vain to impose some kind of order on the confusion.
And everywhere footmen and grooms and porters and stableboys like an overturned ant heap, with equipment and stores, with the wrong boxes and the right pieces of tack, with everyone trying to do everyone else’s job and standing on each other’s feet.
Such a confusion in fact, that no one noticed a strange footman with an ill-fitting coat that he had stolen from the laundry and oddly stiff white side-whiskers and beard that he’d actually had to cut from an old periwig of the butler’s. A strange footman who inveigled himself into the troop ferrying equipment back and forth, who made sure that one small carpet bag was included in the luggage and who, as the coach finally got under way, scrambled up behind with the others to join the journey.
For that footman, my Lady, had decided, in the few, quiet hours of the night, that he was the kind of man who is no longer just happy reading about life, the kind of man who is ready and willing for challenge and excitement and adventure, the kind of man who would disguise himself as a servant to stow away on an dangerous and incredible expedition to the North Pole.
For that footman, my Lady, was me!
Yes, I, Timothy Hope, private tutor and scholar, have decided to become an adventurer. I intend to travel in the guise of a footman with your Father to the port where they are embarking for Norway. There I will try and stow away on the ship and remain hidden for the rest of the journey. I trust that when I reveal myself once we have landed, your father will be impressed enough with my endeavor that he will allow me to join his expedition.
I am writing this now from a hayloft in a coaching inn a day’s journey from Daunt Magna. All of us footmen, supposed and genuine, are huddled together up here as a dreadful storm blows around us, rattling the broken slates and rustling through the hay.
It is not the most hospitable place, but it’s a glorious haven compared to what we have been through today. All I can say is that I am glad I am only pretending to be a servant, if this is the sort of thing they have to go through regularly.
All of us staff have had to travel on the outside of the coach in the most inclement and abysmal weather as we lumbered through dripping and dismal woods, across desolate and howling moors, up into bleak and foggy mountains. Never a view but it was shrouded in dim mist or obscured by drizzle or empty and bare but for a dead tree and a half-starved crow.
Not that one has much of a mind for scenery when one is being rained on, hailed at, blown about and soaked with mud from the road. I cannot imagine a more depressing and trying journey – I truly suspect that this is the more arduous expedition, the progress through wintry, unwelcoming Britain, not the sea-crossing or the great Polar adventure that awaits us.
But this was not all. This might have been an unhappy experience, but it took the peculiar genius of Professor Hedley Cumulus to turn it into an extraordinary nightmare.
The Professor had insisted that all the baggage be secured to the roof of the coach using elastic ropes of his own devising. This instruction applied, in fact, not only to the luggage but also to us footmen, who also had to be tied to the coach, although only loosely, so we could move about as required.
Unfortunately, the elastic properties of this new rope and the loose binding had the most bizarre effect. I was the first to discover it as the coach turned out of the drive of Ghastington Manor and hit a pothole full of muddy rain water. It gave a great jolt and I lost my grip on the roof, falling headfirst into the puddle. Then, before I knew it, the elastic rope, with a loud twang, sprang back, snapping me back up to my place again, my face dripping with mud.
At that the other footman began laughing, somewhat unkindly, I thought, one of them laughing so much that he lost his grip and disappeared from view, only to reappear, a twanging moment later, with a bird’s nest caught up in his wig.
And so our journey continued. Every so often the coach would give an unexpected bounce or lurch and one or other of the footmen would drop away, only to spring back the next instant with a surprised look on their face and with horse manure in their hair. Or hedge in their coat. Covered with cuts and bruises and bits of England and, in one memorable instant, a startled owl flapping about their ears.
As evening drew in and mist began to close in about us, the men would disappear from view entirely into the fog, becoming just distant and vague shapes in the gloom before hurtling back at us with a boing. It was certainly a strange sensation, one moment bumping along on the creaking and rattling coach, the next flying off into the indistinct and silent twilight, taking by surprise an unsuspecting sheep on a ledge high above before being snatched back once more to the noise and confusion.
I am beginning to wonder, my Lady, if my decision for adventure was quite such a wise one. As are my companions, I think, as I have to go now to help them draft a petition against the elastic rope.
Yours
Happily unsecured
Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
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