The Wicked Guardian

by Vanessa Gray

  ‘Tell me!” commanded Primula. “Fear not for my condition, for it is much harder not to know the truth, you know.”

  Thus adjured, Mr. Otten said, “He’ll do, he’ll do. But it was a near thing. Doctor was competent, far as I know. I think, with your permission, your ladyship, I should stay on here a bit, just to make sure.”

  “I’ll have them make your room available,” she said at once, “right next to Benedict’s. Can I see him?”

  Mr. Otten went up with her to Benedict’s room. They stayed there for what seemed to be a long time, to Clare, and when Lady Lindsay came down, she was alone.

  “He will do,” said Primula, greatly relieved. “But he is so weak.” She came to sit beside Clare. “I can rest easily on his account now,” she announced. “But it seems to me you are equally in dire straits. Can you tell me about it?”

  It was the first kindly word that Clare had heard recently, the first truly sympathetic interest that touched her, and her eyes filled. “I ... I’d like to,” she said gratefully, and began.

  She omitted nothing, from the time that her grandmother had told her she was to go to Lady Thane in London, until this morning when Lady Lindsay’s coach swept into the yard in such overpowering grandeur. “You can’t guess how relieved I was to see you!” Clare finished. She had forgotten nothing in her narrative, but she had seen no reason to burden Primula with the revelation that had come to her when she saw Benedict helpless and dying. That feeling was a secret she would always keep to herself—it was the least penance she could perform to atone for her headstrong rebellion that had brought her guardian to such low ebb.

  Primula looked searchingly at her brother’s ward. Did the poor child think that her regard for Benedict could pass unnoticed? She had long held a guarded antipathy toward Marianna Morton, and looked with favor now on the golden-curled girl who would make, so his sister thought, a much better wife than the domineering Marianna. Something would have to be done, she decided, but there wasn’t the faintest hope of rearranging Benedict’s life unless he wished it. And even so, she knew Benedict well enough to know that he would not back off from an arrangement made in good faith.

  “I suppose,” she said delicately, “that your regard for Sir Alexander has waned?”

  “Sir Alexander?” echoed Clare blankly. “Oh, yes, yes, of course, I only thought...” Her voice died away. She had only wanted to make Benedict jealous, she realized now. And she would not admit that to anyone.

  “I wonder whether it might not be well to send Sir Alexander’s coach back to him?” suggested Primula.

  “Thank you, I had quite forgotten it. I’ll do so at once.”

  “But you will stay?” pursued Primula.

  “Of course,” said Clare, adding, unconsciously revealing her newfound docility, “I don’t know yet what Benedict would wish me to do.”

  Primula, with a frown, continued to study the question of her brother’s marriage after Clare had gone to give orders about the coach. Primula had a shrewd notion of how things stood with Clare. But it was too soon to quiz Benedict about his feelings.

  Two days later, Lady Lindsay and Clare were still at the inn. Lady Lindsay’s servants provided the party with the utmost comforts the small inn could provide. The patient upon whose well-being the entire inn revolved was making progress after the first day of Primula’s visit. Mr. Otten’s care was assiduous and effective, but in spite of the medicine, the mulled claret, the changing of dressings, the bathing of the fevered face, he remained restless.

  Clare thought he was still overly feverish, but Primula noted with bright-eyed interest that he seemed more quiet when Clare sat with him. At such times, he would search the coverlet until his hand touched hers, and then he seemed content to let his hand rest, covering the small fingers until he fell asleep.

  In the late afternoon of the second day, while Lady Lindsay wrote a long and reassuring letter to her anxious husband, Benedict was pronounced well enough to venture, with help, down the stairs to sit in a chair in the small private parlor.

  Supported by the two footmen and encouraged by Clare, Primula, Mrs. Pruitt, and Mr. Otten, Benedict collapsed in a chair. He was weak as a kitten, but no longer feverish, he said. But Mr. Otten decided he was well enough so that he himself could return to his duties at Shenton, and he departed in the Lindsay coach, which would shortly return for Lady Lindsay. It was planned that Benedict would return to complete his convalescence at his sister’s home.

  “And you, Clare? Will you be able to find enough to do at Shenton?” queried Primula.

  “I don’t think Benedict wants me to go there. I confess I don’t know quite how to go on, but I am persuaded that he would wish me to return to Penryck Abbey. Mrs. Duff is to come to me there, I think.”

  “Do not fret about it yet, Clare. When Benedict is well enough, we will see what he wants. But I wish to tell you that you are always, today or any day, welcome at Shenton. With or without Benedict, you know.”

  “Thank you!” Clare was reluctant to see these few days come to an end. She had become exceedingly fond of Primula, and of course it was sheer delight to tend Benedict, to watch the black eyebrows lift in amusement, to prepare his meals for him. Mrs. Pruitt meant well, but Clare fancied that Benedict ate better if she sat with him. She knew that ahead lay a great void, which would last her entire life.

  “But you know Benedict will soon be married,” Clare added wistfully, and the melancholy look in her eyes stirred Primula to thoughtful speculation.

  31.

  That night, Clare, unaware of Lady Lindsay’s train of thought, wrestled with her own. To give up her love for Benedict, just when she had found it, tore at her more than she could bear.

  But the Penryck resolution, so often deployed in a losing cause, now came staunchly to her rescue. If I must confess to him, she thought, best I do it while I can, before Marianna comes to stir everything into a worse muddle!

  The next morning, before her courage could turn tail, she descended to the parlor where Benedict sat, bundled warmly, to his disgust, in coverlets, his feet up on a stool, looking every bit the invalid he was. His mood, never tranquil, was exacerbated by the necessity of allowing others to do the simplest offices for him. He could not even beguile the devil’s own black mood by the ordinary actions of the day.

  His descent into the parlor the day before had done him no apparent harm, and he demanded as his right the assistance to get him dressed in a brocade dressing gown, the sleeve folded neatly over his broken arm, and helped downstairs to sit in the parlor.

  Clare had not come to help him this day, as she had previously, It would be hard enough to screw her courage to the point, she knew, so she waited until she saw Lady Lindsay leave the private parlor. She stood a moment outside the door while she swallowed the unaccountable lump in her throat, and then slipped inside the door and closed it softly behind her. The man in the armchair sat with his back to the light, so she could not see the expression on his dark countenance. But she could see that the heavy black eyebrows were drawn together, boding ill for the success of her mission.

  “Sir?” she quavered.

  His head came up immediately, and for the space of a breath there was a queer hungry look in his thin face. Then, as though erased, it was gone.

  “What is it?” he demanded. His voice was harsh, as though he had decided to keep Clare at an unhappy distance. She did not flinch, though she quailed inwardly.

  “I ... trust I see you better?”

  “You do,” he said. “I believe that my sister plans to carry us to Shenton tomorrow.”

  “Truly?” cried Clare, her eyes shining. “I am so glad. You cannot believe how dreadfully you looked when I first saw you.”

  “If it were parallel to the way I felt, I could believe it,” he said, less severely. “I know I have you to thank—”

  “Well, you see,” said Clare carefully, “that is why I came ... that is, why I waited until Lady Lindsay had left ... I know there’
s nothing I can say that will make amends.”

  Choate had thought he could never be harsh to this child again, knowing how tightly she had wound herself into his heart, but his weakness, coupled with long habit, betrayed him. “Try,” he recommended sternly.

  Her chin quivered. Must he make it so hard? Trying to think of his coldness as a penance, she moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “I’m more sorry than you will ever know,” she said in a low voice. “I never truly thought you wicked. I just wanted you to notice me!”

  She was looking with apparent concentration upon her folded hands held tightly before her. She did not see the wry twist to Choate’s sensitive mouth.

  “I noticed you,” he said. “But you know—”

  She scarcely heeded him. “I must not intrude myself upon your affairs any longer. But I just simply could not let you wed me to someone I didn’t even know!” Her voice rose with the force of her emotion. While she had decided that she must ever be submissive to Benedict’s wishes, it was proving more difficult than she had imagined.

  “Wed you to some...?” queried Benedict. “What is this? More of your wild imaginings? What could I have possibly said that could have suggested any kind of marriage to your fevered brain?”

  “Don’t be angry,” begged Clare in a forlorn voice that smote Benedict with force. With more experience than Clare, he knew precisely what had happened to his own emotions, and also, he knew that his strongest urges, his most ardent wishes were impossible to fulfill. There was Marianna...

  To his surprise, his ward, having come to stand directly before him, echoed his thoughts. “Marianna—that is, Miss Morton—told me about your plans for me. If she shouldn’t have betrayed your confidence, I am sorry to tell you she did. But you see it was her cousin and ... and, all of it, and I just couldn’t ... And even Sir Alexander was better, for you see, I know him...”

  Her little broken phrases, while not explicit, still had enough of the facts in them so that he could shrewdly guess the rest. Marianna had meddled once again, and the details could wait. He himself felt vastly weary, no longer in control of his thoughts or his speech. He closed his eyes.

  Clare said. “Oh, I’ve tired you! I’m sorry. I’m just as you said I was—a child, not old enough to know anything!”

  “Did I say that?” said Benedict, a one-sided smile on his face, his voice unexpectedly gentle.

  Clare was overcome. Dropping to her knees beside him, she rested her hands on the coverlet and gazed earnestly into his face. “I’ll do anything you say, Benedict, even go back to the abbey with Mrs. Duff. Just say you forgive me for all the trouble I’ve made!”

  That lopsided smile still transforming his face, he reached out to touch her hair. “Forgiven,” he said softly.

  Overcome, Clare buried her face in the coverlet and wept. He stroked her golden curls tenderly, while a dark expression settled on his bold features. When Lady Lindsay opened the door and saw them thus, Clare kneeling and Choate’s caressing fingers entangled in her ringlets, she withdrew without a sound. Neither had noticed her, she knew.

  But what a coil! Primula Lindsay was conscious of a sudden relief that Lindsay was not at hand to keep her from doing what she thought best. He was a good man, but he would never countenance her meddling in her brother’s affairs.

  However, Primula, knowing her brother well, and loving him far more than he knew, was determined not to stand by and see two people who meant much to her insist upon a headlong descent into a life of misery.

  What could she do? Lindsay would say: Mind your own affairs, my love! But that was one thing above all that she could not do.

  The picture of Clare and Benedict troubled his sister through lunch. Although Clare had bathed her face, and showed little sign of her recent storm of weeping, yet she was unnaturally quiet. Primula glanced at her brother, eating what he called “pap for infants,” and thought the haggard look of strain on his features was not all owing to his injuries.

  Primula was exercised to such a point that, immediately after the table was cleared, she sent Clare upstairs.

  “For you bore the brunt of the nursing before I came, and I am quite sure you have had little sleep even now. But I shall keep the invalid company while you rest.”

  Clare stood doubtfully, torn between a longing to stretch out and sleep, and a wish to stay with Benedict. But in truth she was exhausted, and the lure of the soft bed upstairs, furnished with Lady Lindsay’s sheets and down comforter, was irresistible.

  After Clare had left, Primula began to wish she had thought out her approach to her irritable brother. But she saw his eyes linger on the door through which Clare had disappeared, and taking a deep breath, she plunged.

  “What are you going to do about her, Benedict?”

  “Do, Prim? I suppose she will come to Shenton with us?”

  “She says not.”

  A frown creased Benedict’s brow. “She will do so if I...” He stopped short. He did not meet his sister’s anxious eyes. “That’s what led to all this, you know,” he resumed with a little laugh. “I was too inexperienced to avoid the blunders I’ve made all along the line.”

  “You? Inexperienced?” Primula laughed. “With three sisters, a fiancée, and who knows how many—”

  “Never mind how many! You make me sound like the Grand Turk! Which I am not, you know.”

  “Too much trouble,” agreed Primula. “Monogamy is much easier.” She was returning to her usual playful manner, seeing that Benedict did not flare up at once. ‘The only questions is, dear brother—monogamous with which one?”

  He was silent so long that she thought he might have slid into unconsciousness. His dreadful condition of only a few days before was still too new in her mind for her to accept silence from him. But he was fully awake.

  “With my duty,” he said at last, his voice harsher than she had ever heard it. “I cannot do else.”

  Primula regarded him with affection. “It goes hard for me to see my dearest brother riding breakneck into a most wretched existence. For you know, I cannot like your betrothed. Nor, I think, do you, else why would you have postponed your wedding so many times?”

  “I cannot break off, with honor.”

  Primula talked on, but made no headway. At last, taking pity upon his drawn face, she rose and kissed him on the forehead. “Very well, Benedict. You may be miserable, with honor. I do not myself think honor is that important, but I do know what store you set on it. But I warn you, Benedict, I shall keep Clare with me as long as I can, and my home will be hers.”

  “And I must stay away?” Benedict quirked one black eyebrow in a quizzical manner. He was indeed recovering, thought his fond sister.

  “Your honor will no doubt guide you,” said Primula dryly, “and I trust it will be of some comfort.”

  Suddenly Benedict turned ashen, and so desolate that Primula longed to take back all she had said. But the fact remained that Clare was in love with Benedict, and if she was not mistaken, Benedict had, for the first time she could recall, fallen in love himself.

  Benedict spoke then, more to himself than to her, and she leaned forward to hear better. “I was warned. Oh, yes, all took it into their heads to warn me—too much heat in me for the degree of irritation that brat caused. But I had no idea of what they meant. How wrong I was, not to see where I was heading!”

  Primula held her breath, not knowing what would come next, but believing that her brother was in such sad straits that talking might provide at least some ease.

  “It was jealousy that brought me here,” Benedict said at last, a lost look in his eyes that she had never seen before. “Not that she disobeyed me, Prim. I simply could not see her go off with Ferguson.”

  “I agree.”

  “Or,” added Benedict, as though she had not spoken, “with any other man. Prim, what am I going to do?”

  Cry off was the cure that sprang to Primula’s lips. But she dared not suggest it again. She considered a long time. Fin
ally she said slowly, “Perhaps Clare will get over it. She’s young, and surely, next year, I shall be free to divert her into other channels. You are a very personable man, Benedict, and it is only natural that she should develop a tendre for you.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  She did not deign to answer, for the truth would take away the force of her arguments. She did not know how to extricate Benedict from his unhappy betrothal. But she had to try. She needed time now to think of some scheme. Temporize, her common sense instructed her. “I should feel it best that you send her to Penryck Abbey with Mrs. Duff. And I’ll take you to Shenton to regain your health. Clare could well be on the way to forgetting you if you are out of sight.”

  “She might forget,” said Benedict in such a low voice that she was not sure she heard aright. “But what about me?”

  32.

  The answer to Benedict’s question came sooner than anyone expected. It was only a couple of hours later when there arose a scurrying in the innyard that heralded the arrival of a person of some importance.

  “I can’t see out of the window,” complained Benedict, snatching at straws to beguile his mood. “Come, Prim, tell me what’s going on.”

  “In the innyard, I suppose you mean,” said Primula testily. She was still irritated over what she considered her brother’s illogical stubbornness, and only his wan face and the tragic look in his dark eyes reconciled her to pity him. “Some merchant, I suppose. There’s hardly been any travel to London, you know. There’s nothing going on in town.”

  Obediently she crossed to stare out of the window. Her eyes widened as she beheld the occupants of the chaise descending. The young lady who emerged first was known, without pleasure, to Primula.

  “What does she want?” queried Primula, nettled. Benedict made a movement as though to rise from his chair, but she waved him back.