Page 51 of The Book of Lost Stories
Nell was looking pensive. ‘Did Lord Rayven say if Mr Stavely is still staying with him? I have not seen him for some days … although, of course, as you know, we agreed that we must part, and meet in future only as friends.’
‘I am sure were you simply to lift your little finger he would come running, Nell, but you have chosen the sensible course, and must stick to it.’
Nell sighed. ‘I do know. I – I told him to find some eligible lady and propose to her and I hoped I would dance at his wedding.’
Alys pressed her hand but said nothing, for there was no advice she could give in such a situation, only support when it was needed. She hardly knew how to keep her tongue between her teeth on the increasingly rare occasions when George Rivers dined at home, now she knew how he mistreated poor Nell.
‘I see Sammy is up on the box,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘Does he like to drive out into the country?’
‘Yes, I always bring him, for it is pleasant for him to spend some time with his old friends at the Red House. There is one in particular, Sarah, whom he has known since childhood. She is a very quick, sensible kind of girl of nearly fourteen, who hopes to become a lady’s maid. At present she has been helping the dame with the little ones, but I have it in mind to put her under Jane for a while to learn from her, before finding her a situation with one of my acquaintances. Perhaps she may look after you, under Jane’s tutelage, while you are staying with me?’
‘Why not? It would be a novelty to me to have my own Abigail, and I dare say we could both learn together.’
The wall enclosing Lord Chase’s gardens ran beside the road for some distance, and Alys thought wistfully of the Roman mosaic and the ancient passageway to the river leading from his cellars. Nell had told her, too, of a shell chamber he had had reconstructed from a grotto created at Twickenham by the poet Alexander Pope, which she would very much like to see.
It was a great pity that Lord Chase sounded so very disagreeable!
The Red House lay well set back on the opposite side of the road. Comfortably, if plainly, furnished, it was in the charge of two middle-aged spinster sisters, plump, cheerful women in starched white caps and aprons. Order and cleanliness reigned supreme and the children all looked healthy and cheerful. Nell was obviously a great favourite with them and was quite mobbed as she distributed the little treats she had brought with her.
Alys liked Sarah, a shy, pretty girl, very much, and over the tea tray Nell mooted the idea of appointing her as Alys’s maid, under the tutelage of her own Jane.
It was fixed that she should come to them at the end of the following week, and Sarah, much excited, came to the gate to see them off just as a curricle drawn by a rather familiar pair of high-stepping grey horses was passing.
It was hastily reined in, and Nat called gaily, ‘Good day, Mrs Rivers … Cousin!’ The smile that would once have set Alys’s heart a-flutter and which now, strangely, had no effect on that organ, was bestowed upon them. ‘I know Lord Chase needs no introduction to you,’ he said to Nell with a bow, ‘but I believe you have not met my cousin, Miss Weston, Francis?’
‘How do you do?’ Alys said, looking up curiously at his lordship as he extended a gloved hand that shook slightly. He was a pallid man of nearer forty than thirty, with thin lank hair and unsettlingly restless eyes, and there was something febrile about him – a sort of suppressed and unwholesome air of excitement – that she found repellent.
‘I have heard of the work you good ladies are doing here,’ Chase said languidly, eyeing Sarah in an appraising way. Then he smiled at her and she blushed hotly before dropping a flustered curtsy and running back into the house.
‘One of your protégées, Mrs Rivers?’ Nat asked.
‘Yes,’ Nell said shortly, as the groom who had been walking their horses approached and Sammy emerged from the house. ‘Pray, excuse us. Here is our carriage, and I do not wish to keep the horses standing.’
‘I see what you mean about Lord Chase,’ Alys said, once they were in the carriage and bowling back to London. ‘How comes Nat to have such an odious friend? I took an immediate dislike to him myself and I am sure I would have done so even if I had known nothing unsavoury about him.’
‘I own I did not like the way he was looking at Sarah in the least. They cannot keep young maidservants at Templeshore House, you know. No respectable young woman would go there.’
‘Well, Sarah at least is safe from that fate, for once your Jane has trained her up, I am sure she will soon find a good post with a respectable family.’
*
Lord Rayven duly presented himself every morning, and if Alys discovered that it was much more enjoyable to be driven about by such an escort than to go alone, he, too, found himself amused by her interest in everything new to her.
He did not fulfil his professed aim of discovering the source of her income, but he did learn more of her character. She put on no airs to be interesting, but was entirely natural: headstrong, opinionated and sometimes alarmingly independent in her ideas, but wholly herself.
During the rest of each day he was never quite sure where he would see her next, for the season had begun and she often accompanied Mrs Rivers to routs, salons, breakfasts, concerts and a myriad other entertainments.
For now that Mrs Lavinia Hartwood and her daughter had called on them several times, and Alys’s position as Mr Titus Hartwood’s granddaughter was established by the frequency of her visits to him, she had become more of an object of interest to society than when she had been plain unknown Miss Weston from Yorkshire.
Rayven knew that Nat Hartwood was also often in her company and he began to wonder if her grandfather had indeeddecided to promote a match between them. In the eyes of the world it would be a sensible union, and he supposed Alys to be no more proof against a handsome face than the next woman, but he could not say that he either liked or trusted Nat Hartwood. He might be almost universally popular, but anyone who was a part of the Chase set could not possibly be all they appeared.
Jarvis, who was still keeping an eye on Miss Weston’s movements – although there had been no revelations of any interest so far, and he was mightily bored with the task – was instructed to keep his ears open and see what he could also find out about the Brethren.
‘I did warn you that the Peerless Pool was long past its heyday and no longer the resort of theton,’ Rayven said, as he drove Alys home from their next excursion.
‘Yes, but the melancholy decay was very picturesque and interesting,’ she assured him. ‘I liked it much better than the gardens of Vauxhall, where Nell and I went with a party of friends yesterday, even though the gardens are very extensive.’
‘I can hardly wait to discover what treat you have found for us to explore tomorrow, Miss Weston.’
