Charity Girl

Chapter 5

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!”

“Shut your eyes!” he advised her, amused by her evident want of faith in his ability to avoid accident.

“No!” she said resolutely. “I must learn to accustom myself! Is it always so crowded in London, sir?”

“I am afraid it is often very much more crowded,” he said apologetically. “In fact, it is at the moment very empty!”

“And people choose to live here!” she shuddered.

He had turned back into Piccadilly some few minutes earlier, and now checked his horses for the turn into Arlington Street. “Yes. I am one of those very odd people, and I am taking you now to my house, so that you can rest and refresh before we continue our journey.”

She said uneasily: “I think I ought not to go to your house, sir. I may be a pea-goose but I do know that it is not the thing for females to visit gentlemen’s houses, and—and—”

“No, it is a trifle irregular,” he agreed, “but before we go any further there are certain arrangements I must make, and you would scarcely wish to wait in the street, would you? So the best thing I can do is to hand you over to my housekeeper for half-an-hour. I shall tell her that my Aunt Emborough placed you in my charge, and that I am taking you to your home, in Hertfordshire.”

She asked nervously: “Where—where are you taking me, if you please, sir?”

“Into Hertfordshire. I am going to ask an old and dear friend of mine to take care of you until I’ve found your grandfather. Her name is Miss Henrietta Silverdale, and she lives with her mother at a place called Inglehurst. Don’t look so scared! I am pretty sure you will like her, and entirely sure that she will be very kind to you.”

The curricle had come to a standstill outside one of the smaller houses on the east side of the street, and Stebbing had climbed down, and had gone to the horses’ heads. Miss Steane whispered: “It was wrong of me to run away, wasn’t it? I know it now, because everything has gone amiss, and—and I have only you to turn to for help in this scrape. But indeed, indeed, sir, I would never have asked you to carry me to London if I had known how it would be!”

He laid his hand over her tightly clenched ones, and said gently: “You are tired, my child, and the world looks black, doesn’t it? I can only say to you: Trust me! Haven’t I told you that I won’t abandon you?”

Her hands twisted under his, and clasped it convulsively. She said: “I never meant to be such a charge on you! Oh, pray believe me!”

“Oh, I know you didn’t! What you don’t know is that I don’t regard this adventure as a charge: I regard it as a challenge, and am determined to run your grandfather to earth if I have to go to all the watering-places in the land in search of him!” He saw that his butler had opened the door, and was coming towards the curricle, and disengaged his hand, saying: “Ah, here’s Aldham! Good-day to you, Aldham! Has Tain arrived yet?”

“Just an hour since, my lord,” replied Aldham, beaming fondly upon him, but casting a doubtful glance at his companion. He had known the Viscount since Desford’s cradle-days, having been employed at that time as page-boy at Wolversham, from which lowly position he had graduated by slow degrees to that of First Footman, and thence, in one longed-for leap, to the honourable post of butler to his young lordship; and he knew quite as much about him as did Stebbing, and rather more than did Tain, his lordship’s excellent valet, who was the only member of the little household in Arlington Street not born and bred at Wolversham. He could have named (had he not been the soul of discretion) every fair Cyprian with whom his volatile master had enjoyed amatory adventures, from the straw damsel who had caught his first, callow fancy, to the high flyer who had almost ruined him; and he had frequently officiated at far from respectable parties in Arlington Street. But he had never known the Viscount to drive up to the door, in broad daylight, with an unattended Young Female sitting beside him. His first impression, that the Viscount had brought home with him a country lightskirt, was dispelled by a second, covert look at Miss Steane: for one thing, she was no lightskirt; and for another the Viscount never seemed to take to very young females. To Aldham’s experienced eye she was more like a girl just broken out of the schoolroom—though what the Viscount was doing with any such was a problem beyond his power to solve.

But when he had been favoured with a glib explanation of her presence in the curricle he accepted it without even mental reservation. It was just like my Lady Emborough, he thought, to saddle my lord with a chit of a girl, with instructions to conduct her to her home in Hertfordshire, just as though it had been on the way from Hazelfield to London. And very much embarrassed the young lady was, by the looks of her! So he received her with a fatherly smile, and ushered her into the narrow hall of the house, saying that he would fetch up Mrs Aldham directly to wait upon her.

The Viscount lingered on the flagway to exchange words with the second of his chief mentors and well-wishers, the expression on whose face, compound of sorrow and censure, caused him to say: “Yes, you’ve no need to look at me like that—as though I didn’t know as well as you do that this is a rare case of pickles!”

“My lord,” said Stebbing very earnestly, “when I heard you tell Miss you was going to take her into Hertfordshire I was that comfumbuscated I pretty near fell off my seat, because it looked to me like you was going to take her to Wolversham!”

“No, I did think of doing so, but it wouldn’t answer,” replied the Viscount.

“No, my lord—as I would have taken the liberty of telling your lordship! As I beg leave to do now, for I wouldn’t be able to sleep easy in my bed if I didn’t, and it don’t signify if you choose to turn me off, because—”

“Of course it doesn’t signify! You wouldn’t go!” retorted the Viscount.

The corners of Stebbing’s grim mouth twitched involuntarily, but he refused to be beguiled. He said: “My lord, I’ve known you do some hey-go-mad things in your time, but you’ve never till this day done anything so cockle-brained as to make me think you must be short of a sheet! Which I do! My lord, you’re never going to take Miss to Inglehurst!”

“But I am,” asserted the Viscount. “Unless you can suggest where else I can take her?” He paused, regarding his henchman with mockery in his eyes. “You can’t, can you?”

“You hadn’t ought to have brought her to London at all!” muttered Stebbing.

“Very likely not, but it’s a waste of time to lay that in my dish now! I did bring her to London, and must now abide the consequence. Even you must own that to abandon her here would be the action of a damned ugly customer—which I am not, however hey-go-mad you may think me!” He saw that Stebbing was deeply troubled, and smiled, dropping a hand on his shoulder, and slightly shaking him. “Stubble it, you old rumstick! To whom else should I turn for help in this hobble than to Miss Hetta? Bless her, she’s never yet failed me! Good God, you should know how often we’ve rescued one another from scrapes!”

“When you was children!” Stebbing said. “That was different, my lord!”

“Not a bit of it! Stable the grays now, and tell the postilions I shall be needing them to carry me to Inglehurst within the hour. I’ll take my own chaise, but I shall have to hire horses: Ockley can be depended on to choose the right type, but warn him that I mean to return tonight. That’s all!”

He gave Stebbing no opportunity to utter any further protests, but turned on his heel, and went quickly into his house. Stebbing was left to address his embittered remarks to the weary gray at whose head he was standing before climbing into the curricle and driving it away.