Elisabeth Kidd (6 page)

When Milford, with a satisfied smile, had taken his leave, Mr Gary—
who had listened to this exchange with growing amusement —smiled
and revealed a quiet charm that his pale, rather solemn face lacked in
repose.

“He has you well trained, I see.”

Kedrington grinned ruefully. “Well, that’s what I hired him for—
although when Wellington recommended him to me, I didn’t realise I
was to be saddled with one of his insoluble disciplinary problems.”

“He knows his business.”

“Who, Duoro? Oh, Milford—yes, he does. I know some of my habits
drive him to professional distraction—I must permit him to shave me
tonight to make up for my boorishness just now—but we are learning to
compromise. I now sleep with the windows only half open”

Mr Gary laughed, and Kedrington joined in. It was not often that
Octavian indulged in such easy laughter, and the viscount liked to encourage him when he did. The youngest sibling of the large and
impecunious family of a clergyman of the Methodist persuasion, the
young man had been raised in circumstances which might have been
expected to foster a gloomy outlook on life. However, while Octavian’s
demeanour was that of an only child who had adopted the sobriety of his elders—the next brothers in line having left home when he was scarcely
out of leading strings—there was mixed with this a gentle sense of humour.

This quality was no surprise to Kedrington, who was friendly with
Octavian’s scapegrace brother Neil and who, on the strength of Neil’s
awed description of his youngest brother’s mental prowess, had offered
Octavian a post as his secretary. Octavian had accepted without hesitation,
all too aware of the drain on the family finances that his continuing
presence at home represented. To be sure, Neil stood to inherit a modest
competence—if he behaved himself—from his childless Uncle Junius,
but there was no counting on his spending it on anyone but himself. So
Octavian jumped at his unexpected good fortune, and moved into the viscount’s Brook Street house determined to prove to his exacting father
that he, too, could make his way in the world.

Fortunately, since he had given no consideration to whether he would
find employment in Kedrington’s household congenial, this proved to be
a matter of no consideration. After only a year, Octavian was not yet
entirely at ease with the viscount’s alarmingly egalitarian treatment of his staff, but he had come not only to respect him but to like him as well.
He had even learned to parry deftly the sharp conversational thrusts Kedrington made in his direction.

“He’s right, you know,” Octavian said in response to Milford’s
fulminations. “The place is so cold that by the time I’ve reached my
room —and I have more than once lost my way in this rabbit warren—I’m
half-frozen. Surely you don’t really mean to buy Windeshiem?”

Kedrington, who only a few days before had made up his mind not to
do so, now unaccountably leapt to the estate’s defence.

“I can have the doors and windows tightened,” he said consideringly,
“and the chimneys swept. I’d almost certainly take out several walls. In fact, I’d enjoy renovating the place. Windeshiem’s far sounder and not
nearly so prone to damp—whatever you may think tonight—as that mausoleum of mine in Surrey. I don’t wonder my father rarely went near
it, and even Mother spent most of her time in town. She wouldn’t even
die there, but went to my Aunt Julia’s to do it.”

He paused and stared reminiscently into his brandy, watching the
firelight reflected in its ruby depths. Octavian waited patiently.

“No,” Kedrington said, taking a sip of brandy and stretching his long
legs toward the fire—which, since Philip Kenyon was a careless but
never an ungenerous host, was a warm one—”there’s nothing wrong
with Windeshiem that can’t be attributed to simple neglect, and that’s easily remedied. The situation is right, and the best rooms face to the
south. When the windows are cleaned and the shrubbery cut back, there
will be light enough. And Kenyon is asking very little for the place, considering.”

“Need you consider that?”

“No, not really. My mother was an excellent manager, and I could live
on the income of what she rescued from my father for the rest of my life. That is, if Milford and my man of business—not to mention my aunts! —
don’t put me in Queer Street first.”

He gave a short burst of laughter and confessed, “Do you know, I’m actually beginning to enjoy spending money on fripperies? I remember
that Neil once told me I had the makings of a dandy, but as I was dressed
at the time in a sheepskin coat, a pair of leather breeches I’d tanned
myself, and boots I’d pulled off a dead Frenchman, I took him to be
roasting me!”

Octavian chuckled. He had not seen his brother Neil since his last brief leave from the army, and he pressed Kedrington for anecdotes which lost nothing in the retelling, and which occupied the two men for nearly an hour. Only when Philip Kenyon came in to remind them that
they must leave for Wyckham shortly did Kedrington recall something he had meant to tell Octavian earlier.

“Are you perfectly certain,” Octavian asked for the third time, “that it
is all right for me to accompany you? The ladies are not acquainted with
me, after all.”

“I assure you, you would have received a personal invitation had I been
beforehand enough to mention your presence here to Miss Fairfax yesterday.
However, I confess to having been in something of a muddle at the time.
Which reminds me of what I wanted to say to you. Miss Fairfax has a
brother in the army. I knew him briefly in Spain, but I don’t want her to
know that. The fact is, I once rescued him and two of his disreputable
friends from a scrape in one of the lower taverns in Salamanca—where
none of us was supposed to be at the time—and I wouldn’t care to have to
explain any of our actions in detail.”

“Nor to be thought a hero,” said Octavian, who was aware of some of
the details of Kedrington’s activities behind the scene of Wellington’s campaigns in the Peninsula.

“It wasn’t very heroic. Neither I nor the several other persons involved acted very nobly, even if it all turned out well enough in the end. Also,
there would be the devil of a kick-up in the press!”

“I shall maintain a discreet silence,” Mr Gary solemnly promised.

“You may allow yourself to indulge in polite conversation. It should
not be difficult. I neglected to mention that the younger Miss Fairfax
is—by Kenyon’s account, at least—even lovelier than her aunt.

“Although frankly,” the viscount added, ascending the broad oak
staircase to their rooms, “I doubt that anyone could be.”

Kedrington sank into reflexion during the brief drive to Wyckham, a circumstance scarcely noted by their host, who kept up a rambling commentary on the beauties of the countryside. Mr Gary kept his own counsel.

Even the viscount’s secretary was not privy to all of his employer’s
plans for the future. The truth was that Kedrington had only recently
come to the sobering conclusion that he was too old for further adventures.
God knew, he had had enough of them to satisfy ten other men, but it
was not until an unexpected squall had driven him back to England that
he knew he could not go on indefinitely living at the edge of death; he
had to draw back and seek firmer ground.

He had almost forgotten what
security and comfort were when he set tentative foot ashore at Weymouth
two years before, but Fate pushed him inland. He walked to Dorchester,
where he learned from a family friend of his mother’s illness. Then he
borrowed a horse and set out for Berkshire—and never turned back.

Cecily died a few months later, but long before that her son had made
up his mind to stay at home. Half-joking, he asked his Aunts Julia and
Hester for their help in reestablishing himself in society, and the ladies
instantly took up this carte blanche, outlining a plan of campaign designed
to put him, by the coming season, as much at his ease in the haut ton of
London as any man could wish to be.

Within a few months, Kedrington’s
path was prepared by his becoming a member of Brooks’s and Watier’s
Clubs and resuming his acquaintance with the Regent and a contingent
of lesser royalty. He had been approved by Mr Brummell, who presented
him to three of the patronesses of Almack’s. He had established his
credit at Tattersall’s and Newmarket, redecorated his house in Brook
Street, purchased a box at the opera, and sat for his portrait by Mr
Lawrence.

“Good Lord,
why
?” Neil Gary had demanded by letter, when apprised
of these accomplishments. His friend was hard put to explain it to him.

He could not, in good conscience, put forward the attractions of
fashionable life as a reason, for these were false goals even to him, and he
knew only too well how Neil would laugh when he saw that his friend
was not yet broken of such habits as rising at first light in all weathers to
go for a long ride before breakfast, and eating all his meals, in Julia’s
acerbic opinion, “like a farmer—all appetite and no taste.” He was not, at first glance, a very promising candidate for entrance into Society, but he
had made up his mind to settle down into a quiet life in his native land,
and since he had no desire to do so in the guise of an eccentric recluse, he
determined to make himself agreeable to the people he would be obliged to live with.

In this, he thought cynically, he had succeeded more through the size
of his fortune than his personal attributes. In self-defence, he had
developed a manner of merely raising his quizzing glass to quell a
threatening mushroom, and a fund of equivocal remarks and unblushing bouncers to answer upstarts who would not be quelled by a look.

It was partly to escape the quizzers that he had fled to Leicestershire. It
was true enough, however, that he wanted to buy another house and dispose of the one in Surrey, so that when he met Philip Kenyon in
London, he accepted his invitation to spend a week in the country with
him. Even Hester had approved of the scheme, concluding by her
peculiar process of reasoning that, in spite of the pronounced lack of interest shown by her uncooperative nephew in the many young ladies
she had put him in the way of meeting, he must still be considering matrimony. Why else would he want a home of his own?

Why, indeed? Kedrington wondered. Devil take it, he had intended to
marry! He had expected that to be the simplest of matters. There were
any number of females of an acceptable age and social position to choose
from, and he had had leisure to study them all.

But in spite of their differing shapes and sizes, they all looked alike to
him. None of them resembled the women he had become familiar
with during his sojourn abroad—few of those being either eligible or
acceptable—and he did not know what these gently reared specimens expected of him, nor what he might expect of them. He had been long enough in the world not to look for the sudden, at-a-glance knowledge of
the rightness of a connexion that the novels called “falling in love,” and
he was well aware that his private vision of himself, in armour on a white
horse, would arouse no more than a smile in the eyes of any damsel of his
present acquaintance—none of whom stood in much need of rescue
from her cushioned, adventureless life. Accordingly, he had put aside the
few romantic notions that still remained to him, and trusted solely to his good judgement to tell him when and to whom to make an offer. But
until now, something other than judgement had persisted in preventing
him from doing it.

Judgement told him that Antonia Fairfax was a more than eligible
parti
, despite her temporarily straitened circumstances, but that other something that he ought to have outgrown now perversely wished that
she were not, so that he might prove himself to her by renouncing rank
and fortune to marry her in the face of universal opposition. All of which
was, judgement declared, arrant nonsense.

“Duncan? Are you there?”

“Hmmm?”

The viscount sat up and, glancing out of the window of the chaise,
saw that they had passed through the park surrounding Wyckham and
were approaching the house itself. From behind them, the setting sun
cast a rosy glow over the neat brick building and was reflected in the windows and the fanlight over the wide, white-painted door.

“Wool-gathering, sir!” said Mr Kenyon, wagging his finger sagaciously.

Kedrington smiled and apologised. A moment later, they had descended
from the chaise, and the butler, presenting his most dignified front,
opened the door and assisted in relieving the gentlemen of their outer
wear. The viscount thanked him and turned away. Then he caught sight of Antonia Fairfax descending the staircase into the hall, and his breath
stopped in his throat.