Lucky Logan Finds Love (8 page)

“I am not going to test you any further,” Lady Logan replied. “I know you are exactly the sort of reader I am looking for and it will be delightful to have someone young with me.”

She gave Belinda a little smile before she went on,

“I was so afraid I would have to have somebody old and crotchety who would read the books my son gives me as if it was a duty rather than a delight.”

“If all your books are like this one,” Belinda remarked, “I can assure you it will be an inexpressible delight for me to read them.”

“Then it is settled,” Lady Logan said with satisfaction. “How soon can you come to me?”

“I can come at once,” Belinda answered. “The carriage that brought me here has my trunks strapped to it. And if you did not want me, I had really nowhere to go in London.”

“Then of course you must stay here.”

Lady Logan rang a little bell that stood on a table beside her.

Belinda noticed it was not only made of gold but also encrusted with precious stones.

She thought this was another present that her son had brought back from somewhere in the East.

The door opened and an elderly servant appeared.

“Please have Miss Brown’s trunks brought in, Dawson,” Lady Logan ordered. “She is going to stay with us.”

“That’s very good news, my Lady,” Dawson replied, “and I’ll see to it they’re taken upstairs at once.”

He went from the room and Lady Logan commented,

“My servants are all so good to me. They have been wonderful since my eyesight has deteriorated. They were hoping, as I was, that I will find somebody as charming as yourself to be my reader.”

Because she was being so kind, Belinda suddenly felt guilty.

She was here under false pretences. She was deceiving this charming old lady by purporting to come as her reader.

Then she told herself severely that a guilty conscience would not help her situation.

She had come here as a reader and she would play her part as conscientiously as she could.

The problem would arise when Marcus Logan himself appeared, but, because it frightened her, she did not want to think about it.

She looked towards Lady Logan.

“Please let me have some more of your other books that you have been unable to read,” she suggested. “Then we can choose the one that we enjoy most before we go through them one by one.”

Lady Logan laughed.

“You are making it a game, Miss Brown, which I shall enjoy. I used to be a great reader, but now I find it impossible to see the words, even when the print is quite large.”

“That is how I am going to help you, my Lady, and you must not let it worry you. I expect you have been to the best oculists, but my mother always said that a herb called ‘eyebright’ could sometimes help people’s eyes in a quite miraculous manner.”

“I have never heard of it,” Lady Logan said, “but you know what doctors are like. When I complain, they just give me something that makes me feel sleepy and rather stupid.”

“Mama was very good with herbs and we grew them in the garden. She thought that doctors’ medicine often did more harm than good.”

“I am sure that is true, so you must order me some of this eyebright and I will try it. Even if I cannot see to read, I might be able to see you more clearly.”

“I feel very sure that eyebright will help you,” Belinda said, “and we must work very hard with your eyes.”

Lady Logan gave a little chuckle.

“I see I am not only going to have a reader, but also a physician!” she said. “How can you know so much at your age? I know you are very young, but how old in fact are you?”

Belinda hesitated and then she told the truth.

“I am nearly nineteen, but my father, who was a very clever man, taught me languages almost as soon as I could talk. We lived in the country and my mother had an herb garden of her own.”

As Belinda spoke, she felt a pang of distress.

Now she had left home, there would be no one to tend the herb garden and the weeds would grow in abundance and swamp the more delicate of the herbs.

Then she told herself that that was a very small item to worry about.

Unless she was successful in what her stepfather was asking her to do, she would never see her home again.

Afraid of her thoughts, she picked up the book that Lady Logan had given her.

“I am sure I shall find some more poems in this book and I would like to read you another one.”

“It is something I will look forward to,” Lady Logan said, “and I can tell you right away, Miss Brown, that I think your voice is charming.”

She gave a little sigh before she added,

“So many young people today have such hard voices, which makes me fear that their characters are very much the same.”

“Then I hope my character matches my voice,” Belinda replied. “But that, my Lady, is something you will find out when you get to know me better.”

“Which is what I want to do. And I feel quite certain, my dear, that your character will be just as beautiful as your voice.”

Belinda opened the book.

She was thanking God in her heart that everything so far had gone so well.

‘I am here,’ she thought, ‘and I know Mama would have liked Lady Logan and is pleased that I am in this beautiful house.’

She turned over the pages of the book.

She was trying hard not to think of her stepfather going back to
Madame
Yvonne and her exotic pink bedroom.

The house was entrancing everywhere she looked.

Belinda kept wishing that her father could see it and tell her about the pictures, the furniture and the carpets.

In fact everything.

She was shown into a bedroom that was very attractive.

It was not large, but to her delight it overlooked the garden.

It made her feel somehow that she had not left everything behind her in the country and the flowers, the birds and the bees were all there with her.

They had luncheon in the beautiful dining room that had been designed by Nash and Lady Logan talked of the development of Regent’s Park, and, of course, her house.

“I like living in the country best,” she said, “and my son has bought a large estate in Oxfordshire. The house is lovely, as I know you will think when you see it.”

It flashed through Belinda’s mind that that was something she would never do if she found out quickly all that her stepfather wanted to know.

“I really had no wish to come to London,” Lady Logan went on, “but it was necessary for me to have special treatment on one of my legs. Also it means I am here when my son arrives home from his travels.”

“But this is not unlike being in the country, my Lady” Belinda remarked.

“That was what my son thought. He said, ‘Mama, if I cannot give you the broad acres, at least you shall have the flowers’.”

Lady Logan gave a sigh.

“He is such a wonderful son. I am so very very lucky to have him.”

“I hear he is very clever,” Belinda hazarded.

“So everybody says. He is like his father. I try to understand what he tells me about the places he has been and that is where you will have to help me.”

“I suppose, as you have a book from Persia,” Belinda enquired, “that he has been there.”

“Yes, that was his last trip and he brought me back some beautiful Persian carpets which are really too good to put on the floor!”

She paused before she added with a smile,

“He bought me a book that describes why the Persian carpets became so famous and that is something else I want you to read to me.”

“I shall enjoy that, my Lady,” Belinda answered.

“I find it very strange,” Lady Logan said, “that though so young, you should be good at so many languages. You say your father taught you, but even so, I was afraid that I was going to have an old Professor who had retired from University or, even worse, somebody whose real job was in the British Museum.”

Belinda laughed.

“I am glad I am neither of those persons, but it will be exciting for me to translate the books your son has brought you from so many different places in the world.”

There was silence as they went on eating.

Then Lady Logan said,

“Marcus, as you say, is very clever. Everybody talks about him as being ‘Lucky Logan’, but I cannot help wishing he would marry and settle down and have a family.”

“I suppose that is what we all want,” Belinda remarked.

“That is true,” Lady Logan agreed. “I want to have grandchildren, but so far Marcus never seems to lose his heart.”

Belinda had read about men who worked in the City who were despised by the aristocracy as being ‘in trade’.

It was obvious that Marcus Logan was a gentleman and yet she wondered if her father would have approved of him.

Lady Logan was still talking about her son and his travels.

“I suppose no one else has seen so many strange places,” she said, “but even as a small boy he was adventurous. Once he ran away from home for two days and I was frantic!”

‘I am sure he is selfish,’ Belinda thought, ‘as well as everything else.’

Instead of admiring Lord Logan, she began to think he would be conceited, autocratic and money grabbing.

When Lady Logan paused in her endless praise of him, she asked,

“Why is your son so eager to be rich when he was brought up in luxury?”

Lady Logan looked at her in surprise.

“That is not true. Did no one tell you that because my father-in-law was so extravagant, when my husband and I were first married we had very little money?”

Belinda was surprised.

“I had always thought from what I had read that you were rich and prosperous.”

Lady Logan laughed.

“My husband was a soldier and although he became a Governor in India, we were always having to economise because he had so little money of his own.”

Lady Logan was silent, as if she were gazing back into the past.

Then she said,

“I remember how we saved and saved in order to send Marcus to Eton and Oxford. I used to alter my gowns so that I need not buy new ones. It always amused me when people complimented me on my ‘fashionable gown!’”

Belinda laughed.

“Seeing you in this wonderful house, I can hardly imagine you having to do that, my Lady.”

“Everything you see here is due to Marcus,” his mother answered. “When my husband retired, we had only a very small house in the country, little more than a cottage.”

“But everything changed when your son discovered a diamond!”

Lady Logan laughed again.

“It was not as quick as all that. We were very excited by his discovery, but I thought perhaps it would be unlucky to sell it. So we waited until Marcus started his other discoveries when he was at Oxford.”

There was a soft look in her eyes as she added,

“I will show you the brooch which contains the first amethyst he found in Scotland.”

“I would love to see it,” Belinda replied.

“The gems that he found in Austria and were his second discovery were sold to pay for his next trip which took him to Crete.”

Belinda was just about to ask another question when Lady Logan suggested,

“I will leave Marcus to tell you the stories of his other discoveries when he comes home. As I expect you know, we have to be very careful about what we say to the world outside, which, for some reason I don’t really understand, is trying to make money out of him.”

Belinda felt guilty.

She was deliberately trying to uncover information about Marcus Logan from his very gentle and sweet mother.

‘I hate doing it,’ she reflected.

When Lady Logan went up to rest after luncheon, Belinda walked down the corridor to the library.

“It is where Marcus likes to sit when he is at home,” Lady Logan had explained, “and I am sure, my dear, you will enjoy seeing the books that are there, many of which he has collected on his travels.”

Belinda opened the door of the library, which was at the far end of the house.

As she walked in, she knew it was exactly as she had expected it to be and she would have been disappointed if it had been any different.

The room was beautiful in itself.

Long and narrow, it had a finely decorated ceiling from which hung a crystal chandelier.

There was a marble mantelpiece that she was sure had been designed by the Adam brothers. Over it hung a picture she recognised as being by Holbein.

The other walls were all lined with books.

The sun coming in through the long windows made their leather covers a kaleidoscope of colour. There were rugs on the polished floor that she thought Marcus Logan must have brought back from Persia.

Arranged around the room were several comfortable armchairs and a sofa.

The books provided the rest of the furnishings, the exception being a beautiful Regency flat-topped desk with gold feet and elaborate drawer handles.

She looked round, thinking that if nothing else, this room would be a compensation for having to leave her home.

She went from shelf to shelf, finding, as Lady Logan had said, a great number of books from Oriental countries.

Some of them looked as if they were so old they had come from Monasteries or perhaps ‘Lucky Logan’ had been presented with them.

That would be from people who wished to show their gratitude for the prosperity his discoveries had brought them.

There was also a number of English history books and then, to her surprise, a few novels by Sir Walter Scott.

She thought it unlikely that Marcus Logan ever wasted his time reading romances, as he would concentrate, she thought, entirely on the paths he travelled which led him to the Temples of Wealth.

Looking among the shelves, she found some books from Persia that resembled the one from which she had read to Lady Logan. Because they were so beautifully illustrated with hand-painted designs, she felt they must have been done by Priests.

Picking one out of the shelf, she went and sat down in an armchair.

She was finding what she was reading extremely fascinating, when the door opened.

She heard somebody come in.

She did not look up, supposing it was a servant.