Джорджетт Хейер - Charity Girl

“No, my lord, I don’t think no such thing! But what I do think is that you should take her back where she came from!”

“She won’t go, and I have no right to force her to do so.” A gleam of humour shot into his eyes; he added: “And even if I had the right I’d be damned if I’d do it! Lord, Stebbing, would you drive a girl who was crying her eyes out, in an open carriage?” He laughed, and said: “You know you wouldn’t! Put to the horses, and don’t spill any more time sermonizing!”

“Very good, my lord. But I shall take leave to say—asking your pardon for making so bold as to open my budget!—that I never seen you—no, not when you was in the heyday of blood, and kicking up all kinds of confiabberation!—so bedoozled as what you are now! And if you don’t end up in the basket—and me with you!—you can call me a Jack Adams, my lord!”

“I’m much obliged to you! I will!” retorted the Viscount.

The Viscount drew up his sweating team two-and-a-half hours later in Albermarle Street, having driven his horses in a spanking style that in anyone but a top-sawyer, which he was, would have been extremely dangerous. Even Stebbing, who had good reason to know that he could drive to an inch, clutched the edge of his seat three times: twice when, on a narrow stretch of the road, he sprang his horses to give the go-by to a slower vehicle, and once when he feather-edged a blind corner without checking; but it was only when they reached the outskirts of London that he allowed himself to utter a gruff warning, saying: “Easy over the pimples, my lord, I do beg of you!”

“What do you take me for?” the Viscount tossed over his shoulder. “A spoon?”

Stebbing returned no answer to this, for while he secretly considered his master to be a first-rate fiddler nothing would have induced him to say so, except when boasting of the Viscount’s excellence amongst certain of his cronies at the Horse and Groom. He rarely praised the Viscount’s skill to his face; and never when Desford stood in his black books.

Miss Steane, whose spirits had soared from the instant Desford had said that he would convey her to London, enjoyed the journey hugely. She confided to him, with what he thought engaging ingenuousness, that she had never before been driven in a curricle. A gig had hitherto been her only experience of open carriages, and although her cousin Stonor possessed a curricle it was a very shabby affair compared with the Viscount’s lightly built and graceful carriage. She thought well of his horses too, and told him so, for which commendation he thanked her with a gravity only very slightly impaired by the quiver of laughter in his voice. They were, in fact, perfectly matched grays, and he had paid so long a price for them as would have confirmed his father (if he had known it) in his belief that his heir was a scattergood.

“You can’t think what a high treat this is for me, sir!” she said gaily. “Everything is new! You see, I have never travelled at all since my Papa carried me to Bath, and I don’t remember very much about that journey. Besides, we went in a closed coach, and that is not the way to see the countryside. This is beyond anything great!”

She chatted away in this artless style, interested in all that met her wondering gaze, continually craning her neck to obtain a better view of a particularly bright garden, or a picturesque cottage, fleetingly seen down a side lane. Such of her conversation as was not concerned with the passing scene was devoted to an earnest discussion with Desford on what ought to be her approach to her grandfather. But when they reached London she became rather silent, a circumstance which made Desford say quizzingly: “Tired, little bagpipe? Not far to go now!”

She smiled, and shook her head: “No, not tired. Has my tongue been running on like a fiddlestick? I beg your pardon! Why didn’t you tell me to button my lip? I must have been a sad bore to you.”

“On the contrary! I found your conversation most refreshing. Why have you shut up shop? Are you in a worry about your grandfather?”

“A little,” she confessed. “I didn’t know that London is so big, and—and so noisy, and I cannot help wondering what to do if my grandfather refuses to see me. I wish I had some acquaintance here!”

“Don’t fret!” he said reassuringly. “It is in the highest degree unlikely that he will. And if he does I promise I won’t desert you! Depend upon it, we shall hit upon some scheme for your relief!”

He spoke lightly, for the more he considered the matter the more convinced did he become that however eccentric Lord Nettlecombe might be he could scarcely be so lost to all sense of propriety as to cast upon the world a granddaughter whose childlike innocence must be obvious to anyone but an incurable lobcock. But when he drew up his weary team outside Lord Nettlecombe’s town residence in Albemarle Street such optimistic reflections suffered a severe set-back. Every window of the house was shuttered and the knocker was off the door: his lordship’s eccentricity had not led him to remain in London during the summer months.

“Would your lordship wish me to ring the bell?” enquired Stebbing, in Cassandra-like accents.

“Yes: do so!” the Viscount said curtly.

By this time Miss Steane had had time to assimilate the significance of the closed shutters, and panic seized her. She gripped her hands tightly together in her lap, in a brave attempt to remain calm; and after a few minutes, during which Stebbing vigorously pulled the bell, said, in a voice of would-be carelessness: “It seems that the house has been shut up, d-doesn’t it, sir?”

“It does indeed! But I daresay there may be someone left in charge from whom we can discover your grandfather’s direction. Try the basement, Stebbing!”

“Begging your lordship’s pardon, I don’t hardly know how I can do so, being as the area-gate is chained and padlocked.” He observed, not without a certain satisfaction, that the Viscount, momentarily at least, was at a non-plus, and relented sufficiently to say that he would enquire at the neighbouring houses. But as one of these had been hired for the summer months by a family whom Stebbing disdainfully described as Proper Mushrooms, and who had no knowledge of Lord Nettlecombe; and the other by an elderly couple whose porter said, with a sniff, that he had seen the old hunks drive off about a week ago, but had no notion where he was going. “My master and mistress don’t have nothing to do with him, nor don’t any of us in this house have nothing to do with his servants,” he stated loftily.

When Stebbing returned to the curricle to report these discouraging tidings, Miss Steane uttered in an anguished whisper: “Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do?”

“Shall I ask at any of the other houses, my lord?”

But the Viscount had had time to think, and he replied: “No. We have wasted enough time, and wherever his lordship may be we can scarcely hope to reach him today. Up with you!” He then turned his attention to his agitated passenger, and said with a cheerfulness he was far from feeling: “Now, why are you shaking like a blancmanger, little pea-goose? To be sure, this mischance has cast a slight rub in our way, but the case isn’t desperate, you know!” He set his horses in motion as he spoke, turning them round, and added, with a rueful laugh: “Of course, if we discover that he is drinking the waters in Bath we shall be made to look blank, shan’t we?”

She paid no heed to this, but repeated: “What shall I do? What can I do? Sir, I—I haven’t very much money!”

This disclosure was blurted out, and ended in a sob. He replied matter-of-factly: “What you can do, Cherry, is to stop fretting and fuming, and to leave it to me to find a way out of this bumble-bath. I promise you I will, so pluck up!”

“I can’t pluck up!” she uttered. “You don’t understand! It doesn’t curl your liver to find yourself alone in this dreadful city, with only a few shillings in your purse, and not knowing where to go, or—oh, how can you be so unfeeling as to laugh?”

“My dear, I can’t help but laugh! Where did you pick up that expression?”

“Oh, I don’t know, and what does it signify?” she exclaimed. “Where are you taking me? Do you know where there is a Registry Office? I must set about finding a situation immediately! But I shall be obliged to put up for the night—oh, dear, perhaps for several nights, because even if I found a situation at once it can’t be supposed that I should be wanted instantly! Unless someone was wanted in a bang, because of some accident, or illness, perhaps, and then—”

“You are forgetting that you would be obliged to provide yourself with, a recommendation,” he interpolated dampingly.

“Well, I am persuaded Miss Fletching would give me one!”

“No doubt she would, but may I remind you that it will take time to procure one from her?”

She was daunted, but made a quick recover. “Very true! But you could recommend me, couldn’t you, sir?”

“No,” he replied unequivocally.

Her bosom swelled. “I never thought you would be so disobliging!”

He smiled. “I’m not being disobliging. Believe me, nothing could more certainly prejudice your chances of obtaining an eligible situation than a recommendation from me—or any other single man of my age!”

“Oh!” she said, digesting this. A blast on a coach-horn made her flinch, and she said fervently: “How can you bear to live in this odious place, where everything is noise, and bustle, and the streets so full of coaches and carriages and carts that—Oh, pray take care, sir! I know we shall collide with something—Oh, look at that carriage, coming out of that street over there!”