Elisabeth Kidd

Andrew Innes, Marquess of Lyle, lived a very comfortable life in his Sussex home, and he saw no reason, despite what Lady Romney and her brother said to the contrary, that this peaceful existence need be disturbed by his honouring a years-old promise to a friend.

“I fail to understand why you should feel obliged to take on the responsibility,” Vanessa said for the third time, as genuinely uncomprehending as she had been when the idea was first presented to her. “I wonder this person—who is no connection of yours, after all—should ask it of you.”

The Marquess gazed with a kind of detached admiration at Lady Romney, as if she were a particularly fine piece of porcelain. Aware of his scrutiny, Vanessa had maintained for some time the same position on a chaise longue in front of the Marquess’s library fire, her exquisite profile turned to her host, displaying a firm yet feminine jawline that swept gracefully into the neatly coiffed blond hair. Unexpectedly, Lyle was reminded of the sole occasion on which he had seen it loose and provocatively disheveled; he wondered at the tendency of his normally obedient mind to recall such irrelevancies.

Vanessa’s brother, Cedric Maitland, was playing solitaire—no one else having expressed any interest in cards—on a small inlaid table opposite his host’s chair. His round, amiable countenance was fixed in concentration on the cards, but long habit kept his back straight and his head—only slightly less fair than his sister’s—erect, in order not to crease any part of his impeccably correct costume, which consisted of a blue coat of excellent if somewhat strained fit, a white silk waistcoat, and striped stockings.

“Don’t seem very wonderful to me,” he remarked, placing a red seven squarely over a black six. “Perfectly natural, in fact, considering the man had Archer’s letter telling him to do it. I tell you what, Nessie, you don’t want to go around assuming people are going to take advantage of you—or of Drew in this case—if you don’t know it for a fact. Puts people’s backs up, being distrusted like that.’’

Vanessa moved her profile slightly to the right to favour Cedric with a withering glance, not so much because she found his remarks offensive, but because Cedric inevitably accompanied the most unarguable of them by the use of the childhood nickname she detested. “I have never entertained any such discourteous notion,” she said dampingly.

“Well, don’t go all huffy on me,” Cedric replied, unperturbed. “I only meant, this is by way of being a special case. Ain’t I right, Drew?”

“Approximately.’’

Lyle set down his brandy and, crossing one long, fashionably clad leg over the other, shifted his gaze to the portrait over the mantelpiece of his uncle, the previous Marquess of Lyle. There was little resemblance between the florid features painted somewhat apologetically by Hoppner, and the classically handsome face that looked up at them.

The present Marquess was undeniably good-looking. He was of average height and slim proportions; his best features were his shapely hands, his sleek dark hair, and a firm but attractive mouth that occasionally softened into a charming smile. Unfortunately, the smile was rare and unlikely to be accompanied by a similar warmth in the cool grey eyes. Even now, although his pleasantly low-pitched voice yielded to remembrance, his expression revealed little of his feelings.

“I must confess,” he said, “to a certain curiosity as to what Owen’s daughter may be like. I never saw her, you know, nor Marisa either, except in the miniature Owen always kept by him during the campaign.’’

The grey eyes became even more distant as Lyle’s imagination took him briefly back twelve years to when he was only the Honourable Andrew Innes, twenty-one years old, two cousins away from the marquessate, and mad for a pair of colours, which his indulgent father, even then in failing health, gladly purchased for him. Andrew Innes was an only child, and the army was his first exposure to close companionship with men of his own age. Some of his natural reticence gave way to it, although after his first experience of losing a friend in battle, he fought to hold as many of such defenses as he could.

Colonel Innes developed into an exceptionally able soldier, however, and he shortly found himself in command of Captain Owen Archer’s regiment of infantry in Portugal. Captain Archer had just sent home to his sister in England his Spanish wife Marisa—the daughter of a Castilian hidalgo, who had caused a well-bred scandal by running off with the foreign soldier and actually being happy with him, and who was then expecting their second child. When both mother and son died in a premature confinement on board the transport ship, Owen in a somber mood asked his colonel to look after his first child, a daughter, should Owen also die before seeing England again.

As it happened, Captain Archer did not see his home or his daughter again, although it was not until five years later that he was killed at Vitoria. By then, the honourable Colonel Innes had been home for a year, having unexpectedly become Marquess of Lyle at the sudden death of his uncle and both cousins in a conflagration which burned the gothic pile they lived in to the ground. The Hoppner, having been out for cleaning at the time, was one of the few of his uncle’s personal possessions that survived their owner.

Aware that she had lost Lyle’s attention, Lady Romney rose gracefully from her seat and pulled the service bell before he or Cedric could rise from their own chairs. She motioned them back. “I happened to notice that the decanter is empty. That is all.”

Lyle sat down again. “Thank you, my dear. You are ever thoughtful. But we should not sit here swilling brandy in front of you.”

“Please do not be absurd. If you send me away, I shall not go—for what use have I for only my own company?—and if you do not drink, why—I shall!’’

No one had ever seen so much as a taste of ratafia pass Lady Romney’s lovely lips. This probably accounted in part for her cool allure. In that, in the simple black and grey gowns she wore which befitted both her thirty years and her widow’s status, and in her exquisite manners, Vanessa Romney was everything that was admirable. He ought to have married her years ago, Lyle thought, and remembering the episode of the disheveled hair, he wondered why he had not. Everyone expected it. He supposed it was mere sloth—or his disinclination to change his present comfortable life to even the small degree that marriage to Vanessa would represent—that was preventing him from taking this seemingly simple step. Ah, well—one day he would do it.

Lyle’s butler, his former batman Sergeant Murray, brought in fresh glasses and another decanter of wine, and laid the tray solemnly on a side table while he transferred the empty utensils to it and then placed the fresh decanter quietly in front of his master. Lyle watched with satisfaction. Murray had spent the four years since Waterloo, when he had at last been invalided out of the army with one leg gone, in learning a new profession. He had reached such a point of mastery in it that Lyle could no longer catch him out in the army tricks and disregard of established procedure in which Murray had been proficient in his soldiering days. Murray did not even limp now on his oaken leg.

“Thank you, Murray. That will be all for tonight.’’

“Thank
you,
my lord.”

Murray left, closing the door behind him, but Lyle knew he would not go to bed until his master did.

“How’s she been brought up, then?” Cedric asked, his usually volatile attention still fixed on the original subject of conversation. “You say Archer’s brother is a clergyman? Good living?”

“Brother-in-law. It was Owen’s sister who wrote to me initially, politely declining my first offer of assistance. I gather it’s quite a prosperous parish—somewhere near Deal—as the Reverend Mr. Wendt now tells me he thinks only of the impropriety of a young woman’s keeping house for a single man who is not a blood relation. He does not ask for money.’’

“How is it the impropriety never struck him when the girl was living there with all those male cousins?’’

“Ah, but the aunt was alive then, you see, which made everything perfectly respectable. And Wendt wants her—the girl—to meet people. Other people, that is to say.’’

“Better people,’’ Cedric interpreted.

“What a social snob you are, Cedric,” Lyle remarked mildly. “There is nothing particularly objectionable about the girl’s background, you know.’’

“But he’s right, Drew,” Vanessa added. “I daresay that what the Reverend wants is precisely to marry his charge off well, and you are the obvious entrée to the society in which the most desirable partners are to be found.’’

Lyle refrained from reminding Lady Romney that he no longer had very much to do with that society, and although it had not forgotten him—the Marquess being still a most eligible connection—he much preferred to pass his time at Long Hill, the estate he had built for himself on the ashes of his uncle’s. He had no intention of allowing Miss Archer’s visit there to be prolonged.

“But what’s she like?” Cedric persisted. “If she’s plain as the side of a church, even your influence won’t get her a husband, Drew. Does she squint, or have spots? What if she has no conversation, or is simple-minded?’’

“We shall discover all that only too soon, I fear,” Vanessa said with a sigh.

“If she’s really impossible,” Lyle said, “we’ll marry her off to Cedric.”

“Drew! Dear fellow! Is that kind? Is that just?”

“Both, I should say. Who but you, an acknowledged pink of the Ton, would be more fitted to turn this sparrow into a swan? And it would be a kindness in us to find you a malleable wife, for it would save you the fatigue of doing it for yourself. My aunt tells me, by the way, that the latest on-dit has you developing a tendre for the Adderley chit.’’

“Good God!” Cedric exclaimed, momentarily startled off the scent. “Janet Adderley’s got wider shoulders than Molineaux ever stripped to—yes, and from the shape of her nose, she must have had a run-in with him once too! No, Drew, you’re making it up—you must be!”

Lyle’s mouth quivered slightly with the amusement he invariably found in baiting the inoffensive Cedric. “Then you must blame Prudence for the fabrication,” he said, “for it was she who wrote me of it, and while Prue has her lapses, she has in general a good ear for such things. Apparently, since none of the acknowledged beauties seems to attract you, you are thought to be on the look-out for something more—ah, original.’’

“Well, a gel with a name like Sydney is original enough,” Cedric said, bouncing back with a resilience that drew Lyle’s polite applause. Vanessa raised her eyes heavenward.

“Oh, Drew, it really is such a quiz of a name! Whatever possessed your friend to do that to her?”

“I believe it was the aunt’s choice. Perhaps after four sons of her own, she had no female names in stock. As a matter of fact, I rather like it.”

“It is, as Cedric says, original,’’ Vanessa conceded.

“But one cannot conjure up a face to match it,” Cedric complained. “One may easily imagine an Emily or a Caroline or even—heaven protect us—a Janet, but—a
Sydney?”

“Owen was well-enough looking,” Lyle said, remembering again. “And if that miniature was anything to go by, the girl’s mother was a beauty. I don’t wonder at Owen’s stealing her away from that convent.’’

“Let us hope the daughter is not
quite
a beauty,” Vanessa said, “or you will forever be fending off prospective suitors. Has she any fortune?”

‘‘A competence, merely.’’

“Unfortunate. I suppose it would be best, then, if she were only mildly pretty and partly accomplished. We should then have little difficulty in finding her a younger son or even a widower with modest pretensions.’’

Lyle raised one eyebrow delicately. ‘‘We?’’

“I should naturally do what I can to help if you decide to launch this child into society. I am certain Cedric will look upon it as a challenge, will you not, dearest?”

“Will you make it worth my while, Drew?”

“If you mean, will I let you leech off me while you are doing it—certainly. I seem to be providing most of your food and drink as it is. I may as well get some return from it.”

Cedric took no offense at this, nor at the obvious manner by which he had been cozened into taking on the so-called challenge, for it was perfectly true that he was never very reluctant to nose into his friends’ business. When specifically invited to do so, he was not reluctant at all. Besides, as long as Lyle willingly extended his hospitality, Cedric would tolerate much greater rudeness from him. He never meant it seriously; in fact, Cedric had a shrewd suspicion that he said such things solely for Vanessa’s benefit, because she thought Lyle too indulgent of Cedric.

“I make no promise, mind. I shall have to first see the common clay I am to mould into genteel contours.’’

“Cedric, dear, don’t speak of the girl as if she were a lump of Kentish sod. She has, after all, been raised under a kind of divine influence, and although she is undoubtedly provincial, she cannot be a complete bumpkin.’’

“She was raised with four boys. She probably climbs trees and vaults over stiles with abandon.’’