by Mira Stables
Arrived in the housekeeper’s sanctum, her companion’s presence explained and duly exclaimed over, Nanty settled herself comfortably to the business of the afternoon. As her needle flashed deftly in and out of the thin places in a linen sheet she listened avidly to Aggie’s account of the arrival of his lordship. “Not so much as a valet in attendance. Just his groom. And little to say, though he smiles pleasant enough. And Mr. Pursey quite overcome because his lordship is willing to learn of him. But I sair misdoot the outcome.” In moments of emotion Agnes Graham was apt to revert to her childhood accent. And she was ever a prophet of gloom.
“Why, what ails him?” asked Mrs. Wayburn, deeply interested.
“We don’t know why he’s come down here,” began her friend, primming her lips severely, “and I’m sure I’m not one to listen to gossip. Some say he’s fallen into disgrace, others that he’s been jilted by one of those fine town madams. But I don’t like the way he behaves. Going about with Mr. Pursey takes up the mornings and then he spends quite a bit of time with Lady Mary, teaching her to ride. So happy she is it shines out of her, having him spend his time with her, poor little soul, and her terrified of horses and always has been. But it’s at night, after she’s in her bed, that he just sits, brooding. Doesn’t read, doesn’t drink, won’t go visiting nor receive callers. Just sits staring into space or paces the floor, so Mr. Johnstone says, for he’s caught him at it when he went in to see if the fire needed replenishing or if anything was required. Now that’s not natural in a young man not yet twenty-five and I don’t like it. Something’s pressing on his mind. And who’s to know what may come of it? His father was the same after he lost his wife—and look what happened to him.”
Her lugubrious expression strongly hinted that the late Viscount Stapleford had put a period to his existence. In actual fact he had gone off on a long sea voyage to the Indies, leaving his infant daughter and nine-year-old son in the care of their grandparents. He had been so unfortunate as to take a pestilent fever and die of it, but Mrs. Graham was a true romantic and much preferred her own version with its suggestion of a broken heart.
Nanty frowned over the re-threading of her needle. “Where is his lordship now?” she enquired.
“Out with his sister. He still has the pony on a leading rein but declares that soon she will be fit to go alone. I’m sure I hope she may have the strength for it, but she is still sadly frail and soon droops and sickens. I’ve never seen her so bright and gay as she has been since his lordship’s coming and only hope it does not presage some dire illness. It is often so with the delicate ones. They blossom to vivid beauty before they fade for ever.”
Dear Aggie, thought her friend affectionately. She was devoted to her little mistress and would gladly sacrifice both leisure and comfort to serve her, but she did love to dwell on the gloomy side. Lizzie was looking quite distressed. She had always had a fondness for little Lady Mary, pitying the child’s sickly habit and the restricted life that she led. They had met by chance when they were but children. Lizzie, the elder by a scant two years, had been permitted to wander in the picture gallery and had come upon the younger girl staring solemnly at the Gainsborough portrait of her Mama. Each had taken a shy liking to the other, Lizzie maternally protective to the younger child despite her lofty station, Lady Mary wistfully drawn to the vivid colour and vitality of the village girl. Their lives had rarely converged but Lizzie had always maintained her interest in the frail youngster at the Place.
“Then if all the family are out, may Lizzie stroll through the gallery and the saloons?” asked Nanty, wanting to talk freely with her friend uninhibited by eagerly receptive ears.
“Indeed she may,” granted Mrs. Graham cordially. “If his lordship should chance to return earlier than expected he would but take her for one of the maids.” She looked approvingly at the girl’s neat grey dress and spotless cap and apron. “And a very seemly appearance she presents,” she said kindly. “I daresay that dragon of a Miss Parminter will be lying in wait for Lady Mary, declaring that she has neglected her Italian or her piano-forte practice and must make it up at once. A scholarly woman she may be, but far too strict in her notions to my way of thinking.”
These revolutionary sentiments were quite unsuitable for young ears. Whatever Mrs. Graham’s view, the governess was a fixed part of the hierarchy and must be treated with proper respect by the lower orders. Already Lizzie’s grey eyes were bright with interest. Hastily Nanty dismissed the child to her wanderings, wondering for perhaps the hundredth time what mischievous freak of her heritage had endowed her with this yearning for the lofty rooms and echoing galleries and for the treasures of art and literature with which they were furnished. Perhaps her earliest years had been passed in such surroundings. Ever since Nanty had first brought her to the Place, a child too young to be left alone at home, she had seemed to take naturally to its grandeur and was good as gold when permitted to wander about freely.
Today she ran light-footed down the short staircase that connected the housekeeper’s room with the musicians’ gallery, wondering eagerly if the holland covers that had always shrouded the furniture in the main apartments would have been removed. She had sometimes peeped beneath the covers and lovingly fingered the thick satins and damasks with which chairs and sofas were covered. It would be delightful to see them revealed in all their glowing beauty. But a peep into the drawing-room proved disappointing. It was very apparent that his lordship had no intention of entertaining in the grand manner. Both furnishings and chandeliers still wore their ghost-like wrappings. She left the place to its dreams of ancient splendour and walked along the gallery which circled the first floor and then swept down to the hall in a magnificent staircase. But with one foot already pointed to the descent she hesitated. How shocking it would be if the door should suddenly open to admit Lord Stapleford. He might, as Mrs. Graham had suggested, take her for one of the maids—but such insignificant creatures did not use the main staircase. Then the solemn little face under the prim cap lit to a mischievous twinkle. She turned and ran back along the gallery to her own special bit of Stapleford Place, to the discovery that had enthralled her childhood.
In one of the small saloons, quite a humble one, such as might have been used by the daughters of the house before they were fully “out” the fireplace was flanked by a large alcove which had once been a secret room. There was no secret about it now since the panelling which had concealed it in long ago dangerous days had been removed and the alcove itself shelved out to hold such books and knick-knacks as its occupants cherished. The discovery which had so enchanted the child Lizzie, was the fact that the place contained a peephole, which none of the grown-ups who ruled her world seemed to know about, perhaps because they were all too tall to realise that one could set an eye to the heart of a certain carved flower and see right through the wall to the outside world. No doubt this view had kept the hidden occupant of the secret room informed of any happenings in that outside world that might threaten his safety. In Lizzie’s childhood—for now, at sixteen, she considered herself quite grown-up—the peephole had been disappointingly lacking in incident. No one ever seemed to use the library on Thursday afternoons and such visitors as came to the Place did not use the front drive. She had had to make do with creatures of her own lively invention, picturing fugitive cavaliers or Jacobites galloping furiously for the safety of the secret room. Today, for the first time it would serve a real purpose in enabling her to scan the terrain for the presence of the enemy. She chuckled at her own foolish imagining. It was quite a shock to discover that she now had to kneel in order to set her eyes to the peephole. No wonder the adults had never noticed it!
For a moment she did not see the tall figure outlined against the window. Then she drew in a sharp breath of apprehension. Instinct had not played her false. This could only be Viscount Stapleford. No one else could look so completely at home and though she had never seen him in her life before she was quite sure of his identity. So absorbed was sh
e in studying his appearance—his height, his olive skin, and hair almost black, so different from his sister’s indeterminate fairness, that she quite forgot how wrong it was to be spying on someone who was unaware of being watched. Indeed, as he left the window and began to pace up and down the floor in just the fashion that Mrs. Graham had so graphically described, he did not seem to the watcher to be a real person at all, but a character out of a play or a book who was acting out his part according to the description given.
Jervase, wrestling with the problem of a delicate little sister whose spirit was gallant and gay beyond her strength, guiltily conscious of long years of neglect when he had scarcely given the child a thought, paced on steadily and wondered how he could make amends. He had returned early because the pony had loosened a shoe and there was no other beast in the stable sufficiently docile and gentle for his purpose. He knew very well, by the tight set of Mary’s lips, by the tension of the thin little hands on the reins, how much it cost her to make this effort to please him, and only persevered with the lessons because he felt that the gentle exercise and freedom from the supervision of her strict governess must be beneficial.
He sighed sharply and abandoned the problem of how to contrive a little innocent gaiety for the child, seating himself at the big writing-table and beginning to hunt for some papers that Pursey had asked him to look through. The Stapleford estate was not large, by Wrelf standards, and had never necessitated a proper estate office such as there was at Wrelf. The drawers in the big table were quite adequate to the housing of leases, estimates, receipts and correspondence connected with the running of the place. He pulled open one drawer after another but could not find the papers that Pursey had mentioned. The old steward was growing very forgetful, he thought regretfully. The last drawer of all was locked but its key was in a tray on top of the desk. The drawer had evidently been used only for the money needed for the payment of wages and expenses. It still held several rolls of coins of different denominations and at the back was a very antiquated pistol. Evidently some bygone Stapleford had taken measures to protect his cash!
Mildly amused, Jervase pulled out the fearsome piece and examined it with interest. It was not loaded. He wondered how long it had lain there and who had last fired it, balancing it in his hand and smiling at its clumsy mechanism, long outdated. He could not know that to the hidden watcher, already imbued with Mrs. Graham’s gloomy prognostications, his deliberate actions spelled only one intent, and that when he laid aside the pistol and drew towards him a sheet of writing paper, every fear was confirmed. So that when the library door crashed open and a slim flying figure shot into the room and caught at his arm with urgent hands, he was considerably startled.
“My lord, my lord! Please, oh! please, don’t do it!” the odd creature ejaculated.
His lordship could only surmise that one of the maids had run suddenly mad and eyed the wench in some anxiety. But she showed no sign of becoming violent, the only evidence of her distraught state being the white agonised face and a pair of huge eyes that looked almost black, so widely were their pupils distended. Presently it was borne in upon him that she was a stranger. He had a pretty good memory for faces and the staff was not so large that he would not have recalled this particular countenance if he had ever seen it before. It was a distinctive face, with its fine straight nose, wide-lipped mouth and white skin, faintly powdered with freckles.
“And who the deuce are you, and what is it that I’m not to do?” he enquired, with a calm remarkable in one presumably interrupted in the act of self-destruction.
The girl did not even notice his unusual self-possession. Her mind was wholly obsessed by her fears. “Please, my lord, don’t shoot yourself,” she pleaded earnestly. And added with comic solemnity, “Think how dreadfully it would distress your sister!”
Viscount Stapleford stared at her in blank amazement. Then his eye chanced to fall on the pistol that he had just laid aside and for the first time in a month he rocked with laughter. “Shoot myself? With that thing? Why, it isn’t even loaded. And if it were, it would probably misfire or throw so wide that I would be the safest person in the room. Believe me, my good girl, I am much nicer in my requirements than to attempt destruction, my own or anyone else’s with that baby blunderbuss. But you have not answered my question. Who are you? And why should you imagine me bent on suicide?”
This was dreadful. She had made a complete fool of herself and perhaps brought trouble on her friends. The vibrant urgency that had impelled her to such improper behaviour was gone and she drooped visibly, her eyes filling with shamed tears.
“Come, now,” said the deep, amused voice kindly, “there is no cause to look so distressed. I promise you that I will not be angry, nor even tell anyone of your very natural mistake. But you must tell me who you are and how you came to see my actions. For I am very sure that the door was closed,” and now his interest was fairly aroused.
Still she looked at him in shy distress. The question sounded so simple, so natural. But how did you tell anyone your name when you hadn’t got one? “I live in the village, with Mrs. Wayburn,” she faltered at last when the waiting had become unbearable. And then, in miserable humility, “I don’t know my real name.”
In his own bitter disillusion, Jervase was sensitive to the hurt of others. He accepted the statement without comment and pressed the point which did, indeed, seem to him of greater interest. “And how did you see what I was doing?”
Now she looked up at him naturally, animation bringing out the charm of the quaint little face, even though she coloured guiltily as she explained about the peephole and her discovery of it.
“So you have been coming about the Place since you were a child,” he said thoughtfully. “And now I recall that you mentioned my sister. Are you a friend of hers?”
She must be dreaming, surely? Gentlemen—noblemen—did not ask such foolish questions. But the intent dark gaze clearly expected an answer. Humbly she explained how she had first come to meet the Lady Mary.
He was silent so long that she began to wonder if she ought to withdraw quietly without attracting any further attention from him. Then he said abruptly, “What do you do?”
She looked at him blankly. Impatiently he repeated, “You look like a maid servant or abigail of some kind. Is that your occupation?”
“I was sewing maid for Mrs. Williams at Bank Sykes,” she said meekly, “but I was dismissed yesterday.”
“Why?” he shot at her.
Her courage was coming back. He could not eat her after all, and he seemed a kindly young man who would not take a mean revenge on Nanty for her folly and presumption. She told him, with growing freedom and enjoyment, exactly how she had come to lose her place, convulsing him once more with laughter by her description of Bertha’s brown-streaked countenance. Whereupon she assured him soberly that it was no laughing matter since it would probably take the poor girl a year at least to restore her hair to its former blonde beauty.
The oddly assorted couple seemed to have reached a very comfortable degree of understanding. But the girl was shocked out of all Nanty’s carefully inculcated notions of proper behaviour when Viscount Stapleford said coolly, “Would you consider a post here, as maid to my sister?”
“You can’t, my lord,” she said bluntly. “You can’t be serious. I’m not respectable. Didn’t you understand? I’m—I’m a love child. That’s the polite name for it. I’m not a fit person for a lady even to talk to, let alone take into her service.”
It had to be made plain, even though her heart was sick at having to reject such a prospect of paradise. Maid to the Lady Mary! It would mean living here, at the Place, in the atmosphere of beauty and dignity of which she was intuitively aware. But it was too good to be true. She was not suited to such a post, however much her heart longed for it.
“I understood you perfectly well,” he said. “But I cannot see how the circumstances of your birth, over which you had no control, make you unfit to come into contact
with my sister. On the contrary, I perceive in you a pleasing honesty and an engaging youthfulness that predispose me strongly in your favour. My sister is too much with her elders. It is my object to provide for her some younger, gayer society. And I would point out to you that many of our noblest families are proud to boast of ancestors no more legitimate than you claim to be.”
That was his natural kindliness speaking. He had not missed the note of hurt in the young voice when she proclaimed her nameless state. Nor did he think a simple country girl, who probably could barely read, would understand the reference. She would just accept the offered comfort without question. This child came back at him immediately. “Yes. I know. But in those cases the father was the king or at least a royal duke. And they are different.”
