Elisabeth Kidd (7 page)

It was after he had executed this errand and was on his way home again that he spotted Cedric and Sydney emerging from Miss Moore’s. They did not immediately perceive him, so that Lyle could have beat a prudent retreat; but he waited just a moment too long, his eye caught inexplicably by Miss Moore’s discreet shingle, which covered a more ostentatious previous signboard boasting what appeared to be “Couture par Madame Moreau.” Apparently, Lyle thought with a faint smile, Miss Moore’s neighbours had let her know precisely what they thought of such pretentiousness.

Cedric spotted the Marquess and hesitated momentarily, but encouraged by the smile, he stopped forward to greet his friend.

“Morning, Lyle!” he called out. “Running errands, are you? Are you sure that nag is up to your—that is, both your weights?”

“As you observe, Cedric,” Lyle remarked mildly, “I was in the neighbourhood and am making myself useful by executing a commission for Hallam. You will also observe that this is not my graceful Miranda, but one of the work horses, who is perfectly capable of carrying a little extra weight.’’

Sydney likewise hesitated to put herself forth, even indeed falling back a step as if to take refuge behind Cedric. She had for the past hour been pursuing her education over the top of a painted screen while being fitted for her new clothes, and knew her hair to be mussed from the fitting, and her shoes—beneath the hem of her new blue walking dress which she wore with a short velvet cloak lent her by Mrs. Collins, who had declared it “far too elegant for the likes of me’’—to be decidedly muddy. To be sure, Lyle was also dressed casually, but his buckskin breeches, corduroy jacket, and Barcelona handkerchief became him so modishly that Sydney could take no comfort in his country attire.

Lyle, however, only looked her over with a slight lifting of one shapely eyebrow and remarked, “Very fine feathers, Miss Archer. We shall see what a proper London dressmaker can do for you.”

“I like this dress very well, thank you, my lord,” Sydney said, with a mulish expression that prompted Cedric to dig her surreptitiously in the ribs.

“I daresay you do,” Lyle said, and could perhaps be pardoned for adding, “but then, you have had little experience of anything else as yet, have you?”

“I beg your pardon, Lyle,’’ Cedric interrupted, “but—’’

“No, no, Cedric. Never apologize. Brazen it out, as Miss Archer does, or don’t get into the coil in the first place.’’

Lyle turned his horse then and, lifting his hat to Sydney, bade them a good morning, and rode placidly away. Sydney scowled darkly after him.

“Is there no pleasing him?” she demanded rhetorically of Cedric. “What does he expect of me? And after a rain, too!’’

Cedric suggested rather lamely that Lyle might be playing devil’s advocate in order to accustom Sydney to strangers who
might not be kindly disposed towards her. “You can’t go losing your temper every time you meet someone you dislike,” he argued reasonably.

“I
didn’t
lose my temper!” Sydney insisted, stamping her foot in a puddle. “It is only that he is so—oh, the devil fly away with him! And with you, sir, for toadying to him! What do you mean by apologizing for me?”

“I never!”

‘‘You begged his pardon.’’

“I was only going to mention that the Count said this morning that you are coming along very well with your French!”

“Oh.” Sydney looked dejected, and Cedric could not help feeling sorry for her, and forbore to scold her—this time—for misinterpreting him.

“Shall we go home now, Miss Archer?” he asked solicitously, taking her arm. “I expect your feet may have got damp, and we can’t have you catching cold, can we?”

Sydney smiled a little weakly. “Well, perhaps that might help my French accent a little,
n‘est-ce pas?’’

It was in fact several busy days before Cedric remembered to inform Lyle that not only was Sydney making great strides in French, but that she and the Count had become fast friends and she now spent a part of each day with him. That Cedric sounded faintly disappointed as he delivered this intelligence confirmed Lyle in his growing suspicion that Cedric was succumbing to the very charms he had been commissioned to educate out of Sydney.

He would not interfere, Lyle told himself yet again, and locked himself in the library with an unsatisfying sense of virtue. Unfortunately, the library had a window, from which the Marquess one morning glanced down to see Sydney, in a very becoming new green-and-white sprigged muslin morning dress, pacing back and forth in the spring sunshine, her eyes intent on a book she was reading—some parts of it aloud, judging from her gestures as she walked. Lyle presumed she was preparing for her French lesson, but he thought also that Sydney’s book looked remarkably like a volume out of the set of Shakespeare kept in the guest bedroom she occupied. When Cedric came into the garden to escort Sydney to the Count’s and she hastily stuffed the book into her reticule, Lyle was convinced that she had indeed not been studying her French verbs. But what was she up to?

All at once, Lyle felt a pressing need for a little fresh air. As slowly and deliberately as he could—to avoid crossing paths with Cedric and his charge, of course—he changed his clothing, had his curricle put to, and tooled off in the direction of the residence of the Comte de Grand-Ile. He would merely enquire for himself about his ward’s progress. No—he would not even do that. He would discuss with the Count the Sydney-less progress of the Count’s memoirs, of which the elderly exile had been reading each newly completed chapter to his only appreciative neighbour.

However, the Marquess’s self-control was never put to a fair test. Sydney was not any longer present in the Count’s house, but she was still very much in his mind.

“Ah, my dear boy, how good to see you!” the Count exclaimed, having noticed Lyle’s approach from his window and opened the front door himself. The Count was a small, cleanly shaven and neatly attired gentleman of some seventy years, with a frail constitution but a healthy twinkle in his pale blue eyes.

“I greatly fear,
mon cher,
that I have nothing new to read to you today, as my time has lately been occupied—most pleasantly, I assure you—by your ward, Mademoiselle Archer.’’

“Is she advancing with her lessons, then?” Lyle enquired, giving up.

“Indeed, yes! She is a most able pupil—so quick, although with a slight
intonation espagnol
which I cannot account for. I think she has been well instructed, has she not? Very different from most English young ladies.’’

“Very,” Lyle said dryly, seating himself at the Count’s insistence in his most comfortable chair, and accepting an aperitif.

The Count noted the dryness, but made no remark on it. “Yes, yes,” he went on, “a most accomplished
demoiselle.
She plays on my harpsichord, you know, and recites from the works of de Chenier quite as if she knew what she was saying, and acts out
petites histoires
in the French language—very lively, a most estimable talent for theatricals.

“Apart from which,” the Count added with a sly look at his guest, “she is very pretty,
n‘est-ce pas?’’

Lyle appeared not to have heard this last innuendo, being deep in consideration of the preceding part of the Count’s confidences. A sense of uneasiness began to come over him, as if there were something he ought to know, but which was eluding his comprehension.

“Where is Miss Archer now?” he enquired of his host, who had sat back in his chair as if in anticipation of a pleasant tête-à-tête.

“Why, I believe she is minding the children of my neighbour—the genial but large and indolent Mrs. Griswold. Your young friend Monsieur Maitland has been
très gentil
to
go to the village for my medicine. Mademoiselle Archer said she would teach them—the little ones—a French song in the meanwhile. She likes to do two things at one time, you know. She is very—what is that fine English word?—yes, keen. She is very keen to learn things, and so does everything at double intensity.’’

Lyle finished his wine as quickly as he was politely able to do, and excused himself, saying he would collect his ward and drive her home himself.

“But of course!” the Count said, smiling as he saw Lyle to the door and pointed the way to Mrs. Griswold’s back garden—from which Lyle could already hear childish giggles. “What man would not rather drive out with a pretty lady than talk with an old man?
Au revoir, mon cher.
”

With some trepidation, Lyle made his way to the source of the voices, above which he could now distinguish one—undoubtedly his ward’s—which was singing rather shakily:

“
Sur le pont d’Avignon,

l’ony danse, l’on y danse...”

Rounding the corner of the Count’s little cottage, Lyle could then see, not very far off, three or four children dancing across a small bridge that spanned a shallow pond, full of lilies. One child went along slowly, holding his hand up to Sydney as she walked precariously atop the wooden railing of the bridge, singing and holding her arms out for balance. Lyle could not help thinking how like a wood nymph she looked there in the chill, fading sun, her fringed shawl slipping unnoticed from her shoulders and the sparkle of the water reflected on her pale face. A water lily was pinned in her hair.

He was conscious both of his admiration of the picture before him, and irritation—with his feelings, with Sydney for causing them, and then, when some of the seemingly irrelevant things Cedric had told him about Sydney suddenly came back to him and fell into place to complete the puzzle whose solution had been just out of his grasp, with the full realization of what dealing with his remarkable ward was going to mean to his—their—future.

Just at that moment Sydney looked around, in his direction. Her eyes caught his and widened, and then, amidst the cries of the children, who instantly sensed her loss of balance, she began to teeter dangerously and—emitting a less frightened than exasperated
“Oh”
—she fell into the pond.

Now Lyle thought, he would interfere.

He resisted, however, his initial impulse to call Cedric into the library and demand that he give an account of himself. Cedric was not after all an errant schoolboy, and it was scarcely his fault that Sydney went about falling off bridges while her protector was away for ten minutes to the local apothecary on an entirely unobjectionable errand for the Count. Nevertheless, it was becoming too clear that Cedric had no control over his charge, and were it not that Sydney had been immediately put to bed by a concerned Mrs. Collins, Lyle would have taken great pleasure in giving them both a tongue-lashing.

As it was, he loosed his vexation on Murray and was thus able to adopt a somewhat more subtle way of regaining control of Sydney’s education. That Lyle had earlier vowed to have nothing to do with it, he now scarcely remembered.

“Well, is she drowned or are we to be inflicted with her yet further?” he snapped at Murray, who ventured into the library the next day with Lyle’s morning newspaper.

“Miss Archer is quite well, thank you, my lord,” Murray reported, unperturbed by his employer’s tone. “Indeed, she has been most desirous of getting up from her bed this morning, but Mrs. Collins persuaded her to wait a day to be certain she has not caught a chill.’’

Lyle could picture quite vividly Mrs. Collins’s efforts to keep her doubtless bloomingly healthy patient quietly in bed, but aware that his housekeeper’s efforts were more than likely directed as much to keeping Sydney out of her guardian’s reach as to ensuring her well-being, Lyle calmed down and asked Murray more temperately to bring him a brandy, a request that even at that early hour of the day Murray took in his stride.

“Murray!” Lyle called him back as he opened the door to leave.

“My lord?”

“I trust Miss Archer is not
too
much of a trial to anyone?”

“Oh no, my lord.” Murray even smiled dimly. “On the contrary, everyone quite enjoys having her around, so to speak. Quite a taking little thing she is, my lord.’’

“Yes, I daresay. Thank you, Murray.”

“Yes, my lord.”

After Lyle had brought Sydney home the evening before—dried from the Count’s fire, but still shivering slightly—he had retreated wordlessly, but with a scowl that sent his staff scurrying to avoid him, into his library, where he sat down to pen another scrupulously formal but imperative summons to Prudence Whitlatch. He would make one last attempt, Lyle promised himself, to rid Long Hill of the impossible Miss Archer—sending her to the devil if there were nowhere else for her!

He had a sudden vision of the havoc Sydney was capable of creating in Prue Whitlatch’s unstable but hardly merry household, and chuckled in spite of himself. Prue would doubtless have hysterics every other hour; young Susan, who was susceptible to any strong personality, would probably find Sydney totally admirable; and her brother Dolph would either fall in love with her, or run like retreating cavalry in the other direction.

Nevertheless, Lyle had no qualms about thrusting Sydney in the path of the Whitlatches—who, now he thought on it, would very likely
all
respond by haring off in every direction at once to avoid stumbling over the obstacle—for both he and they were well aware of the debt owed Lyle by the family. Even so, the idea kept pushing itself forward in Lyle’s mind that the Whitlatches would be the beneficiaries of this arrangement; he could not help but compare what he knew of Sydney’s life to date with the way Prue’s family—not excluding Lyle himself—conducted theirs. There was something
so positive
about Sydney, even when she was in a temper!

Lyle finished his letter, sealed and franked it, and sighed, wondering why he had not gone into the diplomatic service rather than the army. He knew why, of course; he might still be in it, growing more bored every day, instead of at his leisure to mull over memories that were, in the main, pleasant ones. Such remembrances had in fact occupied him considerably since Sydney Archer came into his life, tearing up his carefully laid routine and muddying his serenity.