The Gallant Guardian (24 page)

“He has so little that he can excel at that I feel I must encourage those things where he can. However, I have no idea of the expense of it.”

“Let me think about it for you and see what I can do.”

“Why thank you.” How easily he offered his assistance and how easily she had accepted it, Charlotte marveled to herself. Things had changed a good deal since their first prickly encounter, or, for that matter, since his initially stormy reaction to their appearance at Lydon Court. Perhaps her father had been right after all in choosing the marquess as guardian.

Chapter Twenty-five

In fact, having Lord Lydon as a guardian could even be rather pleasant, Charlotte thought as she and the marquess sat down to a game of chess in the library that evening. She had never really had anyone to turn to for advice before. Speen, Mrs. Hodges, Mr. Tidworth, and Mr. Sotherton had always been there to answer questions about the practical aspects of running the estate and Dr. Moreland was a fund of knowledge where Greek, Latin, history, mathematics, or even botany were concerned, but none of these people, devoted as they were, could offer much in the way of worldly wisdom, and that was the area where Charlotte most needed help. Her father should have been the one to make up that deficiency, she thought as her hand hovered over her queen, but he could not even be bothered to acknowledge her existence, much less answer the letters she had faithfully sent to him over the years.

“A scowl that ferocious bodes ill for my hapless rook,” Max remarked as he studied her face in the firelight. Concentration was not an expression he was accustomed to observing on female faces. He found the intensity with which Charlotte devoted herself to anything intriguing and her total lack of self-consciousness delightful.

“What?” Charlotte looked blank for a moment. “Oh…no, I was thinking of something else.”

“Something else? You could think of something else at this critical moment?” Max raised his eyebrows in mock dismay.

“I, well…yes,” Charlotte admitted a trifle sheepishly.

“What a lowering thought. I am quite undone.” The marquess shook his head sadly.

“I suppose it is rather appalling to you that I was not attending, accustomed as you are to females’ undivided attention.”

“Vixen.” Max grinned appreciatively. “But I deserve it. I admit it; I have grown shockingly puffed up. However, I assure you that
any female attention I may command is not due so much to my person as it is to my position. If I were a haberdasher, for example, I should attract no notice whatsoever, but were I twice as old as I am now with a club foot and a squint, I should probably attract no less interest.”

Charlotte could not help chuckling. The idea of the dashing Lord Lydon as a haberdasher was incongruous in the extreme, but there was no hiding the bitter edge in his voice and it gave her pause. It had never occurred to her that he would do anything but revel in his reputation of being irresistible to women.

Tilting her head to one side, she examined him more closely. The sardonic grin, dark brows, mocking expression, and high cheekbones certainly gave him the look of a rake, but the eyes betrayed him. Instead of the cynical gleam she had half expected to see there, she saw bleakness, and a loneliness as deep as her own.

It was only the impression of a moment, and then he laughed, raising one dark brow. “I assure you I still enjoy myself. Whatever the motivation behind it, the results are the same.”

He was his usual ironic self again, but Charlotte had seen the vulnerability underneath. That moment of understanding, brief though it had been, gave her the courage to ask something she had been unable to ask before. “What was my father like?”

Her voice was so low that at first Max was not even sure that she had spoken at all, but looking at her he could read the question in her eyes, in the tension of her body, and the whiteness of the knuckles that now clutched her knight, and he sensed how difficult a thing it was for her to ask. He was silent for quite some time, searching for just the right words, words that would reassure her without lying to her. “He was a very private man, a brilliant politician and card player, a stimulating conversationalist when he felt comfortable enough with someone to take the trouble to talk to him. But essentially he was a solitary person, someone who worked very hard for the things he believed in, but who did not waste much time on purely social affairs.”

“But did you like him?” Now that she had asked the question, she was pathetically eager for information, and Max’s heart went out to her.

“Yes I liked him. I trusted him, and that is saying a great deal, for the worlds I have lived in are such that one can easily be destroyed if one places trust in the wrong person. He was not an easy
man to know, but he saw and appreciated many things about me that the rest of the world did not.”

“He
respected you.”

“Yes, I think…yes he did.” Looking across at the serious little face, Max could see that she understood all that he was trying so awkwardly to convey about what it was like to discover someone who saw the real man beneath the rank and the reputation, someone else who was deeply interested in trade and finance instead of being bored or appalled by it, someone who knew exactly what it took to do what Lydon had done, to succeed as he had succeeded.

“I wish…I wish he had respected me.”

“I do too.” Max longed to reach out to her, to pull her into his arms and hold her close, to smooth away some of the hurt he heard in her voice and saw in her eyes. Any father would have been proud to have a son who had accomplished what Charlotte had—running Harcourt, looking after the land and people who trusted in the care of the earls of Harcourt. Hell, his own father would have given anything to have a son like that. That a young woman had done it all was all the more extraordinary. “But he did choose someone to look after you who does.”

There was a smile in his eyes and a warmth in his voice that spoke to her more than words. Ordinarily, Charlotte would have bridled at the thought of someone looking after her and in the beginning she had, but something had changed. It was different now. The marquess was not speaking of looking after her physical well-being as much as he was about looking after her soul and making sure that he protected, not so much what she was, but who she was, from Cecil and Almeria, and anyone else who wanted to turn her and William into something they were not. Perhaps, in some small way, her father
had
cared about them. After all, he had appointed the marquess as their guardian when he very easily could have ignored them completely and left them to the tender mercies of the Wadleighs.

‘Thank you.” Unaccustomed to such a feeling of closeness with anyone except William, Charlotte felt suddenly shy and at a loss as to how to reply, but she did not need to. Her expressive face told him everything and Max felt oddly happy sitting there watching the glow of the fire on her skin and the shadows cast by her lashes on the curve of her cheek.

The thought of Cecil, however, brought Charlotte quickly back
to reality. In the security of Lydon Court and the freedom from her daily responsibilities, she had almost forgotten the threat hanging over William. “Have you heard anything back yet from the servant you sent to Harcourt?” Charlotte broke the silence, glad of the excuse to divert the conversation away from herself. She felt just the tiniest bit uneasy with the intimacy she suddenly felt between them.

“What?” With an effort, Max broke out of his reverie. “Oh. No. But I did not expect to hear immediately. I asked him to be discreet, but to make a thorough investigation—not just into the question of poachers, but into anything that seemed out of the ordinary. I do not expect him back until the end of the week.”

“You do not think I am imagining things, do you? Cecil may seem to be just a prosy old windbag, but I think he truly believes that he deserves to inherit Harcourt and that William stands in his way.”

“Whether or not you are correct in your suspicions is less important than protecting William, so it is best to act as though Cecil were capable of anything. If you are wrong, there is no harm done, and if you are right, you have protected your brother. However, while you are here at Lydon, my task is to see to it that you enjoy yourself to such a degree that the thought of Cousin Cecil does not cross your mind from one day to the next.”

“That is too kind in you, my lord, to act the host to two uninvited guests who caused the end of a party which must have been far more amusing to you than anything William and I have to offer.”

“Yes, I am a paragon of gracious hospitality, in fact. But you need not remark on it with such surprise. Just because I do not haunt the gathering places of the
ton
does not mean that I am totally devoid of social graces, you know.”

“Well if you are going to protect yourself against being caught in the parson’s mousetrap by letting the world think of you as a sad rake, then you must be prepared to suffer the consequences of being thought of as antisocial,” Charlotte responded unsympathetically. But both of them were thinking back to the evening Charlotte and William had arrived. She was wondering how much he regretted the departure of his friends, and he was marveling at how quickly he had forgotten that they had even been there. It seemed so long ago and part of another life.

Actually, everything but the present with Charlotte and her
brother seemed part of another life. Max kept telling himself that since they would be leaving soon and since they had so little opportunity for enjoyment he ought to devote himself to making their time at Lydon Court a pleasant one. But in truth, he was more than happy to lay aside the rest of his affairs to spend time with them, and more than happy to ignore the fact that he was working to make it a memorable visit for himself as well as for them.

And as the days passed, Lord Lydon was to be seen less and less in his study and more and more in the company of his wards. Their enjoyment of their first driving lesson had been such that he continued to teach them, gratified by their natural ability and the quickness with which they both picked it up.

He also set up an archery range on the lawn in front of the library. William did not take to archery as easily as he had to driving, and occasionally became frustrated. “I shall never get it,” he complained one warm afternoon as his arrow missed the target entirely.

“Of course you will. It is just that you are not so accustomed to this as you are to other things. Just do not try so hard. You would not force a horse at a fence, now would you? It is the same with archery or anything else; you must concentrate until it feels right and you can picture it all without looking at it. Now try again, slowly…wait until you can feel it… There, you see? You hit the target.”

“I did, didn’t I?” William looked pleased. He turned to his sister, who had been quietly watching the lesson. “Now you try, Charlie.”

Both William and his sister let out a crow of delight as her arrow flew straight to the target and buried itself in the bull’s-eye.

“A well-brought-up young lady would never run the risk of upsetting a gentleman by besting him at anything, especially an athletic pursuit.” The marquess shook his head in mock dismay. He picked up his bow, sighted along the shaft, and let fly. Much to his disgust, it landed a considerable distance from the bull’s-eye. “Blast!”

“You won, Charlie, you won!” William was even more excited than his sister who, though not as vocal as her brother, was visibly pleased with herself.

“And only a perfect hoyden would take pleasure in beating a gentleman, not to mention letting him see it.” Max shook his head sadly, his eyes dancing.

“Perhaps, but if I were a proper young lady you would not be able to enjoy the archery because you would be wondering if I were hoping to charm you into making me an offer.”

“Touché. There is a great deal to be said for honesty. Brutal honesty, however, is another matter.”

Not certain of whether or not he was truly offended, Charlotte colored and opened her mouth to apologize, but Max took pity on her. “Relax, I am only teasing you. Actually, I have never had a woman compete with me before and I find it extremely refreshing. Though I cannot say how I would take defeat on a regular basis, I find it only adds to your charm that you are extremely skillful at something.”

“My charm?” Charlotte looked so dumbfounded that Max could only laugh and ruffle the dark hair that, freed from the confines of the cottage bonnet she had tossed carelessly on the ground, curled around her face.

“Yes, your charm.” He strolled over to the target and pulled out the arrows. “And for tomorrow afternoon, may I suggest an activity in which I am certain to excel because it requires nothing more than brute strength, which I feel quite sure I possess in greater abundance than you do? I suggest that we row on the lake.”

There was a challenging gleam in his eye, but Charlotte was still too taken aback at being told she had charm to respond to it.

Chapter Twenty-six

The following day was even warmer than the previous one and the idea of spending the afternoon on the water was infinitely appealing. Charlotte was glad to shed the heavy bombazine carriage dress she had worn for the driving lesson that morning in favor of a white India muslin walking dress trimmed with straw-colored satin. The bodice was cut rather lower than most of her dresses, which made it even cooler, but she did take the precaution of bringing a muslin shawl for protection against the sun and in case the breeze over the water turned out to be fresher than she anticipated.

After their driving lesson, William had hurried off to his bedchamber with a great deal of purpose. Charlotte wondered at this, for ordinarily he liked to seek out Griggs and regale him with every last detail of his lesson. But his mysterious behavior was soon explained when he appeared after luncheon holding a folded paper boat. “Speen taught me how to make boats back at Harcourt, so I made one to try here when we go out on the lake.”