Westley awoke, startled. A sickly, milky light strained through the windows, curdled like early-stage cheese. It took a moment, as he found most often the case when sleeping abroad, to reacquaint himself with the gloaming room. The small, dark bedchamber was simple, yet luxurious compared to the rooms his scholar’s stipend usually allowed; with layered bedclothes and dusky hangings.

As his brain became used to the shadows, a wave of remembering washed past his fogged eyes. Rousing his slight legs beneath a tangled nightshirt, he ran a knuckled hand across his clammy torso, straining against the weight of stranger-stained linens. A trembling toe stretched into the outside chill, as he creakily eased himself onto the pads of bare feet, and pressed against the thickly varnished boards below. 

Stumbling, he emptied his dawn-taut bladder into a yellowing chamber pot with great relief. He grasped for his scattered breeches, shirt and boots, smudged a damp cloth about his face and pushed wisps of hair back into a loose tie; austere, wig-less and naked. Reaching to open the window drapes, he sheepishly announced his presence to the square below. Bustle and light shot upwards. Dazzled, taking a step back, he finished his attire and, collecting his thoughts and his things, undertook a last look about the place. 

Struggling down the stairs, Westley entered the public bar with a disturbed clatter, for the inn was still low at this hour, the day's travellers just rousing into life. He shifted his belongings uncomfortably, and approached an empty table by the window. This new spot was a gentle introduction to the day; the weak, soured-milk sun still struggling through the mottled glass. 

A brief, solitary moment passed. Sighing, he retreated helplessly into the volume in his hand, a treatise on the history of saintly relics. At long last, a serving lady hustled out from behind the bar with a curt, "mornin' sir". She served him a breakfast of stiff bread and strong cheese, presented without airs on a rattling tin plate. A flat pint of beer closely followed, which he gulped generously, taking the hard crust down his gullet, dampening his salty tongue. 

Breakfast done, dues paid, Westley cautiously made towards the coaching yard, chasing the promise of a swift, safe transition to the coast. Out on the chilled cobbles, he was directed to one of the waiting post-chaises - an unpromising huddle of iron and cloth, bound by black drapes and hard wooden doors. A man stood in the shadows nearby, cloaked in a travelling cape and hat; a small, cloudy bottle in one hand. 

"Would you take me to Dunwich sir? By the sea?" he enquired, in a voice which he hoped conveyed a more certain authority than he held in his quite untravelled mind. 

With barely a glance over a shoulder, the man grunted "two pound n' ten”, in response, unmoved at this unusual request. A spindled hand, purple-hued in the morning air, reached out from the cape and gave a sharp rap on the chaise door. 

Easing the horses out of the yard, they set off together. Travelling in taciturn quiet for some hours, the journey was an uncomfortable, disjointed affair, shuffling ever deeper down the county’s lanes. Praying softly, Westley leant back in his seat, oblivious to the marshy flatness stretching behind him. 

Finally, around five o’clock that afternoon, the horses bounced and jolted through a scrap of red brick and grey stone houses that stood for a village. The squat, modest homes huddled around a roughly drawn square, whilst nearby, a slumped church supported the bones of its recently toppled tower. 

By the road, a toll post bore the faded sign of Westleton, jarring Westley’s thoughts at the reflection of his own, familiar name. Peering further through a gap in the chaise’s window, he saw no souls, save a tired looking woman in a doorway, wrapped in a shawl and cap against the springtime chill, her face as grey and impassive as its stonewalled surround. Averting his eyes downward, the woman trailed off behind them.  

Not more than a few miles out of the place, the bouncing post-chaise slowed, the horses trotting to a stop along the Suffolk Road. They were now flanked by wooded fields on either side, punctuated by the odd startling copse of vividly purple heather and sharp yellow gorse. A sloping dirt track cut through the shrubs, and stretched away to the right. The post-boy (he could not help calling him this, despite a demeanour as far from being boy-like as there ever could be) drew up the reigns and rapped sharply upon the roof. 

“naow further here sir; them roads is too bad for these blasted ankles n’ ooves, them old thin wheels”. 

He grunted with such stout conviction, that it was clear no entreaty of Westley’s could fully impress upon the man his acute dismay at this turn of events. It was evident that the chaise was entirely too precious to make the perilous, dirty way down to the sea. He felt he should argue the point further, yet his untested manners prevented such a thing, and he merely sat, gobble-mouthed and stuttering, like a landed mackerel gulping for air.

“What is the meaning of this? How am I to walk my goods do you propose now? I have important measuring equipment in there.. my books... How far is it to The Ship?” 

“N’aarl send yer trunks down by ‘oss and cart, Thompson’ll do it aye, Thompson. Be sent tomorrow. Unless sir wishes to carry. It’s no’ the most distance ye’ll ever see.”

With this last line, his time with the garrulous, drunk elder was most abruptly ended. Severely aggrieved at the discovery that his great extravagance of shillings had yet not furnished him with the conveniency of arriving at the place, Westley shuffled down from the chaise, and snatched up his cloth bag, with an air of most profound distress. 

Standing by the road, he saw that there was nothing for it but to make his way down the track, following its yellow line through clumped trees and shadowed hollows. He huffed his bag onto his shoulder and, after reaffirming the post-boy's promise that his trunks would follow by horse the next day, set off, his bandied, gentleman's legs full of seated stiffness.

After slowly covering a mile or so, he found that his demeanour began to shift, his shoulders growing looser, in spite of his misfortune. The travel bag was none too heavy, and he felt quite able to stop a while, to enjoy the hedgerows and cowslip, to gaze upwards at the stretched-out sky. His coach-fevered limbs began to flex and soften in his breeches, under the breeze and weak sprite of spring sun. 

This new feeling of, if not emancipation, at least some loosening of the straps, lasted some ten minutes, before Westley’s brow began to be crossed with uncertainty, and more than a little fear. He was after all, a stranger in this land, not shabbily dressed, and not lacking in esteem, at least in the eyes of some flagitious highwayman or known rogue. 

In response to this change in mood, the sky’s wideness began to feel oppressive and heavy, rather than free and endless. The hedgerows took on a sinister encroachment, full of hidden beginnings, or worse, ends. He worried most of all that he should be approaching some civilisation by now; the post-boy’s promise of a short stroll left by the side of the road some miles back. 

Furthermore, no person had shared the road with him, no horse or sign of greeting along the coastal - for the air had become distinctly salted - dirt track. Not even a cow grazed in the fields beside him, to allay his frenzied London senses with some noise, jostle or manurial stench. 

This sense of consternation was deepened by his clothes, which had become hot and heavy. His woollen frock coat smelt repugnantly like someone else had been wearing it, still steeped in the air of the inn and the crammed, noise-filled coach. Not to mention that dammed last leathery chaise, which had all but bankrupted the small travel budget bestowed by his patron. Furthermore, the flesh on his feet had by now produced an array of pinched white bubbles, concentrated on the softer, virgin places within his boots. Westley began to feel unmanned, unwieldy; an impostor of ever-growing, unsteady proportions. Combined with the odd salt air and the dark, damp musk of the forest behind him, it added up to a most alien and unsettled approach.

His discomfort growing exponentially, and just as he felt the closing grip of panic threaten the tendons in his neck, Westley saw salvation ahead. Alongside the track, the remnants of a monastery stood, impassive and beautiful. He had read about it often in books, and seen engravings, but nothing prepared him for its grey, statuesque splendour, crammed in between the byway and crumbling coast.  

Distracted, he knew that the old monks’ house signified that he had arrived. After two days, he had come, most surely, to that which the late gentleman Mr Defoe blithely termed on his travels, a most ’pitiful parcel of sorry cottages’.  The village awaited. His sprits lifted decidedly, to the point at which his tired, excitable mind allowed him to frivolously wonder that he might catch a note of those drowned, blessed bells drifting across from the sea beyond.