Midwinter by John Buchan

The whole staff of the Sleeping Deer were around the door when my lady Norreys, making dainty grimaces at the weather, tripped over the yards of snow-powdered cobbles between the step of her coach and the comfortable warmth of the inn. The landlord, ill-favoured and old, was there with his bow, and the landlady, handsome and not yet forty, with her curtsey, and in the gallery which ran round the stone-flagged hall the chambermaid tribe of Dollys and Peggys clustered to regard the newcomer, for pretty young ladies of quality did not lie every night at a moorland hostelry. But the lady would not tarry to warm her toes by the great fire or to taste the landlady's cordials. A fire had been bespoke in her bedchamber and there she retired to drink tea, which her woman, Mrs. Peckover, made with the secret airs of a plotter in the sanctum beside the bar. The two servants from Weston attended the coach in the innyard. Mr. Edom Lowrie comforted himself with a pot of warm ale, while Mr. Samuel Johnson, finding a good fire in the parlour, removed his shoes, and toasted at the ribs his great worsted stocking soles.

Twenty minutes later, when the bustle had subsided, two unassuming travellers appeared below the signboard on which might be seen the fresh-painted gaudy lineaments of a couching fallow deer. The snow was now falling thick, and the wind had risen so that the air was one wild scurry and smother. Midwinter marched straight for the sanctum, and finding it empty but for Mrs. Peckover, continued down a narrow passage, smelling of onions, to a little room which he entered unbidden. There sat the landlord with horn spectacles on his nose, making a splice of a trout rod. At the sight of Midwinter he stood to attention, letting all his paraphernalia of twine and wax and tweezers slip to the floor.