The Gallant Guardian (6 page)

Lydon watched him curiously for a moment before turning back to speak to Charlotte. “He is a nice lad and quite obviously has a way with horses. My team does not stand so quietly for anyone but Griggs, here.” He nodded toward his tiger, who was observing William’s easy communication with the high-spirited team with considerable astonishment.

Tears of relief and gratitude stung Charlotte’s eyes. She blinked them quickly away. “Yes he is a dear, and horses, animals of all kind, are his passion. He spends as much of his time as he can at the stables hobnobbing with the grooms; and I venture to guess that he will soon add Griggs to his list of favored companions.”

Maximilian, who had spent the better part of his childhood in much the same way, smiled. “If the grooms and Griggs take a liking to him, then he is a rare person indeed. It is my experience that those most critical of the human race in general, and one’s own faults in particular, are those who spend most of their time with horses.”

Charlotte chuckled as she could not help thinking of how nervous Cecil made any horse that happened to be near him and of the barely concealed disdain with which he was treated by his own coachman and by those who worked in the Harcourt stables. She heard the crunch of gravel behind her and Cecil, seemingly conjured up by these thoughts, appeared with Almeria.

Beaming expansively, Cecil held out his hand. “Welcome to Harcourt, my lord. We are delighted to have you as our guest; and may I have the pleasure of introducing you to my esteemed spouse, Lady Wadleigh.”

Seething with indignation, Charlotte gritted her teeth and held her tongue while her cousin contrived to welcome the marquess at length to all the glories of Harcourt and enumerated all the amenities that were at his disposal.

Her fury was not lost on Lord Lydon. One glance at the Wadleighs was quite enough to assure him that his card-playing companion had known what he was about when he appointed him guardian to his children. There was no doubt that Sir Cecil Wadleigh was a grasping, obsequious little toad with a wife to match, and that Charlotte, despite her obvious spirit and intelligence, was no match for them. She was one person against two supremely selfish, ambitious individuals.

Barely acknowledging the Wadleighs, he replied, “Yes, Harcourt appears to be a charming place and Lady Charlotte tells me that you have been availing yourselves of all the delights that it has to offer.”

The tone of his voice was enough to freeze the blood in anyone’s veins, and the air of languid hauteur was calculated to depress the pretensions of the hardiest of toadies. Cecil flushed with anger and Almeria shut her mouth with a snap.

Charlotte could barely refrain from hugging herself with glee as her guest turned back toward her. Gesturing toward Harcourt’s impressive facade, the marquess continued, “But pray, proceed, Lady Charlotte. I believe you were about to show me around.” Bestowing a dazzling smile on Lord Lydon, Charlotte took his proffered arm and led him up the front steps.

When they were safely out of earshot, she chuckled. ‘Thank you, my lord. That was exceedingly well done of you. I do not know when I have seen Cecil and Almeria so thoroughly put down, and I must say that I found it quite delightful to see them so utterly confounded.”

Max smiled down at her. “Come now, Lady Charlotte, I cannot think that you are one to sit tamely by, supporting your cousin’s sense of self-importance.”

“No…” she admitted thoughtfully. “However, I should never dare to give him the cut direct as you did. I dare say that is what comes of being a man. A man is not so subject to the will of others and is therefore more likely to say and do precisely as he wishes without fear of giving offense.”

The marquess was silent for a moment, struck by the truth of her statement From the moment his father had cut him off and he had been forced to earn his own livelihood he had felt free to speak his mind whenever and wherever he pleased—not that he had given much thought to the opinions of others even before parental support had been entirely withdrawn. Before that, however, there had been some constraint there, some consciousness of owing something to his father when he had been more dependent upon him. That sense had vanished completely upon his dismissal from the family. He heartily sympathized with the frustration Charlotte must feel at the necessity of being civil to her poisonous cousin. Of course she was not beholden to Sir Cecil for financial support, but setting herself up in defiance of the Wadleighs would only make her situation more difficult and could ruin her reputation. A young woman on the verge of her come-out could not risk the slightest blemish in that regard if she had any hopes of contracting an eligible alliance and establishing herself in a home of her own.

“I am glad I was able to afford you some satisfaction. From now on I shall consider it my duty as guardian to administer at least one set-down a day while I am here. How is that?”

“Excellent. But I fear that my cousin is so thick-skinned and so determined to manage our lives that it will take a good deal more than a few insults to dislodge him.”

Lord Lydon’s glance swept the magnificent rose marble entrance hall with its imposing staircase and exquisitely painted ceiling. “I believe you are in the right of it. Harcourt is too rich a prize to pass up so easily. The park and surrounding lands are most impressive. With an estate such as this to enjoy I am astonished that your father did not spend more time at Harcourt.”

“We were here.”

The terse reply took Max by surprise and he stole a quick look at his companion. Her lips were pressed into a thin white line, her face rigid with some barely contained emotion that he could not quite fathom. “Surely you are mistaken.”

Green eyes, dark with pain, glanced briefly up at him and then were hastily lowered as though their owner were afraid of revealing too much. “No, I am not. When it was discovered that Wil—that my brother would not grow into an heir worthy of following in my father’s footsteps, he stopped coming to visit us altogether. We had always been something of a burden to him, involved as he was in politics, and he had already found it difficult to get away from town to come see us, but when he learned about William he could not bear to face the situation, so he simply avoided it.”

“Leaving you in the care of…”

“My governess and William’s nursemaid and the other servants. I was almost nine at the time and I was so accustomed to being on my own that at first I was not aware of any difference in his interest in us. Then not much longer after that, when it became clear that his tutor was no help, I began looking after William myself and trying to teach him to talk and, much later, his letters and numbers. I was so busy with William that I no longer noticed my father’s absence.”

The tale was told simply enough, but a great deal had been left unsaid of the loneliness of a child left without any parental attention. Even the infrequent and always critical attention that Max had received had been more than she had had. The hall they were standing in seemed vast and magnificent to him now, how much more vast and empty it must have seemed to a child of nine, how empty her life must have been if the devotion of her childish existence to a simple brother had formed the sole basis of it. Max looked down at her. What a tiny thing she was, and still so young—too young to have assumed all that responsibility.

His reverie was interrupted by the swish of skirts and the jingle of keys. Mrs. Hodges, notified of the guest’s arrival, came bustling up to show the marquess to his chambers and Charlotte, after cautioning him that her brother was likely to be lying in wait to question him further about his horses the minute he reappeared, left him in the housekeeper’s capable hands and went off to speak to Cook about preparing something special in honor of his lordship’s arrival.

In fact, Charlotte need not have bothered to descend to the kitchen at all, for word of the marquess’s arrival had already spread. “He is an out-and-outer, to be sure,” panted the stableboy who, fortified with such momentous news, had had the temerity to burst into Cook’s sacred domain without bothering to scrub himself thoroughly from head to toe.

“And he is ever so handsome,” the youngest scullery maid piped up from her place at the sink.

“And how would you know that, Polly? That sink, which is where you are supposed to be with those potatoes, is nowhere near a window.” The kitchen maid reproached her in a lofty tone, safe in her superior position opposite Cook at the kitchen table.

“That must be his lordship, the Marquess of Lydon, guardian to the young earl. Lady Charlotte told me that he was expected.” Cook’s grand pronouncement effectively silenced all of them. “We must see to it that his lordship is provided a meal worthy of Harcourt. Polly, run fetch me a breast of veal from the larder and two of the pheasants as well. And you” —she turned to the kitchen maid— “had better go and ask Mr. Tidworth for some sherry to put in a syllabub. By now he will have heard of his lordship’s arrival and will be ready to bring out the best port.” Cook trusted that the butler had managed to maintain the quality of Harcourt’s cellars, even though the former earl had not availed himself of its treasures for more than a decade. Still, Mr. Tidworth, ever hopeful of a visit from the master, would have done his best to have something presentable on hand should he happen to appear.

Word of the marquess’s arrival had spread like wildfire, from the gardeners trimming the bushes along the drive to the stable-boys. Throughout the servants’ quarters it had been passed along that he was top-of-the-trees, a true Corinthian, and furthermore, it was widely known that he had given the odious Sir Cecil and his shrewish wife a stunning set-down. Everyone, from the butler to the scullery maid, rejoiced that at last someone had come to put the Wadleighs in their place and restore smiles to the faces of Lady Charlotte and Master William.

Chapter Seven

In fact, the guardian himself was thinking along much the same lines as Harcourt’s devoted retainers. As he washed off the dust of his journey, Lydon marveled at the change in Charlotte’s appearance when she smiled. In an instant she was transformed from an intense, almost dowdy little creature into an intriguing and attractive young woman. The change had taken him quite by surprise. It had been so brief, so transitory, that he was not even sure he had seen a woman underneath. However, the marquess was nothing if not the man for a challenge, and he resolved to try to bring that brilliant smile back to her face as often as he could.

Obviously, the best way to accomplish this was through William. It took no great powers of observation to see that Charlotte doted on the lad, lived for his happiness, and trembled lest he be made to suffer the unkindness of an unsympathetic world. The marquess had seen the way her eyes lighted up when he had called him
a nice lad.
He had felt her eagerness for him to understand and accept her brother when she had spoken of William’s affinity for animals. The boy was everything to her, and no wonder, neglected as she had been by her father, left alone with no family to offer her support or sympathy of any kind. Her love for William and his for her must have been the only love that Lady Charlotte Winterbourne had ever known. How well he understood what that was like.

Being ignored by the two selfish, unapproachable people who had been his parents. Lord Lydon had suffered a childhood not so different from Charlotte’s. Maximilian only hoped that she had been fortunate enough to have some adult—a nurse or a governess, perhaps—who had given to her all that Felbridge had given to him. Her fierce devotion to her brother was certainly a natural outcome of such an upbringing, and it was through this devotion that Max planned to win her trust and friendship.

The marquess paused in the middle of drying his face. Win her trust? What had come over him? He had left London that morning resenting the unexpected responsibilities that had been thrust upon him, intent on completing a burdensome task as quickly as possible and with as little cost to himself as he could manage. Now, in the space of little over an hour he was thinking about making Charlotte happy. How had this come about?

In part, this transformation was owing to William. There was something in the boy’s open countenance and confiding expression that appealed to the marquess in a way that he had never before experienced. And this was further enhanced by his own reaction to Sir Cecil Wadleigh, a creature whose type Lord Lydon had encountered far too many times in his life: self-important, self-serving, and certainly not to be trusted. Seeing the two together, Charlotte and Cecil, innocence, and deviousness, the marquess had experienced a flicker of anger that made him sympathize heartily with Charlotte’s passionate indignation at their situation and made him wish to remedy it as quickly and as effectively as possible.

The marquess finished his ablutions and, refreshed and ready to tackle both the Wadleighs, strolled to the door of his bedchamber. He paused to glance in the looking glass and give a final twitch to his cravat before stepping into the hallway. As he opened the door he caught sight of the shaft of sunlight pouring through one of the tall windows, illuminating the bright blond hair of the boy who jumped up eagerly from an enormous Jacobean chair the moment the marquess appeared.

Charlotte had surmised correctly. Her brother had been lying in wait for Lord Lydon. Unable to contain himself, William burst out, “Oh, sir, that is the most bang-up pair I have ever seen. Such beautiful action, such deep chests. They must do sixteen miles an hour when you spring ‘em. Did you get them at Tatt’s?”

Flattered by the genuine admiration glowing in the boy’s eyes, the marquess laughed and laid a kindly hand on his shoulder. “Whoa there, lad, one question at a time. Yes they are good for at least sixteen—seventeen if the road is good and they have not been given a good run for a while. And yes, I did get them at Tattersall’s. I had been looking for a team for some time and then this one showed up. They belonged to the Earl of Dalton, who lost disastrously at Newmarket and was forced to sell off his cattle or mortgage his estate. He was accounted a fair judge of horseflesh, so I bought them and have been most pleased with them. But perhaps you would like to join me tomorrow and see for yourself what sweet goers they are.”