The Sergeant Major's Daughter (13 page)

“Oh, my lord, be sensible!” she urged, worry making her less than tactful. It earned her a withering look.

He held out his hand and without further argument she relinquished the ribbons.

For a while all went well; then he misjudged a turn badly and swore as he corrected his error. Felicity sat tense, gritting her teeth, vowing she would not interfere again.

A few yards more and without warning the Earl brought the grays to a halt. He slumped in his seat, his
J
hands dropping between his knees, his breath coming in quick, shallow bursts.

“I fear
...
you are right, Miss Vale
...
any farther and I shall bring us to
grief...”

Felicity had seen the symptoms many times. She conquered the shake in her voice, took the reins, and said matter-of-factly, “That would be a pity, sir. I daresay you have a little concussion, you know—from the blow you took.”

“Quite possibly,” he said, and shut his eyes.

When they reached the stable yard, Benson’s surly apprehension turned to concern. Under Felicity’s watchful
eye
he helped his lordship down and together they assisted him toward the house. Here, Cavanah, having been forewarned, waited with a strong, young footman. This was too much for the Earl. He straightened up and disposed of them all in a pithy, idiomatic sentence, before steering a lone, if somewhat erratic, course toward the library.

Felicity followed quickly on his heels, giving Cavanah a number of low-voiced instructions.

“You don’t think perhaps the doctor, Miss Vale?”

She smiled reassuringly. “I think not—for the present, at least.”

A footman came into the library, bearing a tray which he laid down silently on a table close to the Earl’s chair. He inquired if there was anything further Miss Vale would be wanting?

Felicity glanced at the tray and shook her head. The footman withdrew and she began to wring out a cloth in the hot water.

“I am going to bathe your head, my lord,” she said with deliberate cheerfulness. “Cavanah will send your valet presently to assist you to your room. I expect you will feel much more the thing when you are rested.”

“The devil I will!” he retorted. “You are too busy, ma’am. I shall do very well if you will just go away and leave me be.”

“Presently, sir, when I have finished.”

She continued to dab at the congealed blood. He winced as she probed gently at the jagged gash, lest there be any hidden splinters.

“If you will just be still,
sir...”

“Dammit, Miss Vale! I am not Jamie!”

“No, my lord.” She smothered a smile, glad that he was already sounding more himself.

Stayne squinted up, eyeing her with disfavor. “I’ll tell you what it is, my girl! You are getting above yourself— giving orders to my servants under my nose! If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s a managing female!”

Felicity pressed a piece of court plaster firmly into place over the wound and turned away to rinse out her cloth.

“I can quite see now, sir, why you have never married. You are very nice in your notions of how females should and should not behave. You do not wish them to be clinging and dissolve into tears at the first sharp word, yet neither, it seems, do you wish them to be practical and show initiative.”

“Oh-ho! We
are
sharp-tongued today!” He winced again and put up tentative fingers to his temple. “Am I then so hard to please?”

She shook her head, laughing. “What you require is a paragon, my lord, and they are very hard to come by. You might, of course, take some dutiful little thing and train her to mind your ways. In fact, I wonder you have never done so.”

She paused before adding innocently, “I believe Miss Lipscombe to be quite
conformable
—though it is a well-known fact that girls grow to be very like their mothers!”

“Pray come here, Miss Vale.”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because you would box my ears!”

Before the Earl could reply, the door opened to admit a tall, spare man with a kindly, aesthetic face.

“Ah, John,” said Felicity. “You may take his lordship away now. It is time he rested. He still looks very pale and undoubtedly has a raging headache.”

“Very good, Miss Vale.”

John had a great liking for Miss Vale; a young lady of considerable common sense—and always ready with a smile and a pleasant word. He stepped up to the Earl’s chair.

“If you would care to take my arm, my lord?”

No, John—I would not!” said Lord Stayne with dangerous calm. “I shall remain here. I already feel very much improved, thanks to Miss Vale’s ministrations! You may bring the brandy.”

His valet was not happy; he looked to Felicity, who seemed not the least surprised. She stepped across to feel the Earl’s pulse and found it already much steadier.

“If his lordship prefers to stay here and
d
rink
brandy,” she said, “I can see no great harm in it.”

Thank you, Miss Vale!” said the Earl with heavy irony.

“Think nothing of it, sir; The brandy will undoubtedly make your head much worse, but it is
not
within my power to order your life.”

“No—I thank God!” he ejaculated. “It moves me profoundly to hear you admit it!”

His jibe flicked her on the raw; she would have snatched her hand away, but his free one caught and held it.

“Such a capable member,” he murmured, and his eyes lifted to her face. “I
am
grateful, in spite of a great many things I may have said to the contrary.”

“Oh well ...
as to that, most of them were justified,” she acknowledged with an uncertain grin. “I, too, said a great many
things ...
I fear I lost my temper.”

His expression was inscrutable. “We both lost our tempers,” he said abruptly. “It is best forgotten.”

“You are very generous, sir.” She felt absurdly close to tears. She tried to withdraw her hand and after a moment he released it.

At the door, he called her name. “Tell me—was it really concern for my skin which moved you to abscond with my grays?”

“Of course, my lord.” Felicity hesitated, then added, with a rueful twinkle, “but I am bound to confess I had been longing to drive them for an age!”

She wasn’t sure if she imagined the laugh which followed on the closing of the door.

After two weeks of frantic activity the school reopened, and Amaryllis finally left for London.

She departed in Stayne’s carriage with a mountain of baggage, in an unseasonable flurry of snow, to a clamor of goodbyes.

She was to travel as far as Chippenham, where her friends the Barsetts would meet her and take her on to London. When the carriage had disappeared from view, Felicity suddenly realized how much she was going to miss her.

10

“Do you know how some of our more enterprising pupils have been passing their time these past weeks?”

Something in Ester’s voice made Felicity glance up from the progress chart she had been compiling. How different Ester was these days; the hollows in her cheeks had filled out and the pale hair, no longer lank, had been coaxed into soft, shining waves. She had grown into a handsome woman and as though aware of the fact, she moved with a new briskness and confidence.

Her glance moved on to where Willie stood stolidly before a bright Bible painting on the wall. Poor isolated Willie! What really went on behind that blank facade? There were times when she despaired of ever penetrating it fully. Jennie, by contrast, was now a sturdy, lively toddler.

“They have been conducting their own classes,” Ester’s voice drew her attention back with a jerk. “In that old drover’s hut upon the common.”

“No! Really?” Felicity sat back with a grin of pure pride. “That’s quite a compliment, don’t you think?”

“It depends how you look at it,” said Ester dryly. She gave Felicity an enigmatic look. “Ask yourself who would most wish to profit from such clandestine tuition?”

“Oh glory! The Manor Court children?”

“Precisely. I only heard about it myself this morning. Our brats have been selling their services at a halfpenny a session, with Lanny Price as their ringleader. He organized the scheme the moment he was off his sickbed.”

Felicity smiled ruefully. “I wish he would devote as much energy to his own studies.”

“Well, the money’s been rolling in from all accounts—with or without parental connivance.” Ester stood for a moment in frowning silence, a pile of books in her arms. “The Captain won’t like it.”

“Need he know?”

“He’ll know.”

“He’s been very quiet lately. Perhaps Lord Stayne’s words went home and he has decided to accept the situation.”

Felicity’s words lacked conviction; they both knew that silence from that quarter was as ominous as the quiet before a storm.

Furthermore, whether Captain Hardman heard about it or not, it was inevitable that the Earl must. He always did. She had a feeling that it was something she was going to find difficult to explain away, which was a pity just when they had begun to establish a certain rapport.

Without Amaryllis to chatter inanities, the dinner table had become a place for intelligent conversation, which sometimes spilled over into arguments lasting well into the evening.

Indeed, they were so comfortable together that she found herself indulging in daydreams of a most dangerous nature. Even so, it was something of a relief when the Earl strode into the breakfast room one morning and laid
a letter before her.

Her appetite gone, she pushed away her plate and read swiftly, very much aware of his set face. Captain Hardman certainly hadn’t minced matters; phrases such as “gross interference,” “incitement to sedition,” and “flagrant disregard” leapt at her from the page.

“Oh, really! How absurd!”

“Then there is no truth in his accusation?” queried the Earl grimly.

Felicity hedged, recruiting her defenses with a sip of tea. “A few children getting together to share knowledge—is that
so
wrong?”

“Don’t equivocate. Money changed hands, did it not?”

“Halfpennies, my lord,” she pleaded. “It was a childish prank and it won’t occur again, I promise you. I have spoken to them most severely.”

“So I should hope. I have given Captain Hardman my personal assurances to that effect.”

“Oh, thank you.” She smiled sunnily at him. “I daresay you have already breakfasted, but will you take a cup of tea, .my lord?”

She deduced from his expression that he would not. He said, with a strong degree of exasperation, “You take it very calmly, too calmly. If Hardman were not so bedeviled by trouble among his foundry workers as to have his mind fully occupied, you and your brood might have fared much worse.”

“
I don
’
t see what he could have done, other than complain,
”
she reasoned. “And I’m not a bit surprised that his foundry workers are in revolt. The man is a petty little tyrant; he will be well served if he comes to a tyrant’s end. Fancy picking on children!”

Stayne had been mending the fire with one of the apple logs that stood in the hearth. As the sparks flew up he turned, his exasperation tinged with reluctant laughter.

“
You are like a broody hen with those abominable brats! It’s woe betide anyone who threatens them!”

“
If I am,
it’s
because I am proud of them. They are such good children on the whole, and you must admit they have come on! My only failure seems to be Lanny Price. He still plays truant more often than he attends.”

“My dear girl, you are wasting your time there. Lanny Price is a scamp—almost as wily a poacher as his father!”

“
Yes, but he does have ability, if one could only channel it,” she enthused, selecting a peach from the fruit dish and beginning to peel it. “It was he, you know, who organized those classes upon the common.”

“That in no way commends him to me!”

She grinned. “Perhaps not. But you must admit it shows initiative. Of course,” she ventured, “they do say that ex-poachers make the best gamekeepers, do they not?”

His look demolished her. “You may take me for a flat, Miss Felicity Vale, but you’ve windmills in your head if you think I’ll swallow bait of that kind
!”

“It was just a thought.”

The Earl came and stood by her chair, bringing her firmly to her feet “And a thought is all it will ever be.” With a kind of urgency, he added: “Don’t let that crusading zeal of yours blind you to reality, my dear. Lanny Price will
never change—but he
will
break your heart, if you let him!”

The interview left the Earl in a mood of restless dissatisfaction—a mood he was experiencing more often of late and seemed unable to define. It led him now to seek out his head keeper and castigate him for allowing the vermin too much license.

“We are losing far too many of the young chicks to predators. And the rabbit population is becoming a menace!”

Perkins, well used to his lordship’s odd quirks of temper, turned a shade ruddier in complexion, shuffled his feet, and agreed stolidly that it was so. He would set more traps and organize a party of guns to deal with the rabbits.

“I’ll come out with you now,” said the Earl abruptly. “In a couple of hours we should be able to dispose of a satisfactory number.”

Perkins mentally consigned his peremptory employer to the devil and reluctantly set aside the thousand and one more urgent jobs he had intended to tackle.

Rather less than two hours they were turning for home, having accounted for more than a score of rabbits and with exacerbated feelings on both sides slightly mollified.

A rustling in the bushes to their left brought them to a halt. His lordship, quicker in his reactions, fired first; t
h
ere was a squeal more human than animal. The Earl thrust his gun at Perkins and covered the space in a few urgent strides. The spaniels were there before him, sniffing curiously.