Victoria and the Nightingale (11 page)

“We moved in yesterday,” Victoria informed her while she slipped a book of stamps inside her handbag.

The postmistress’s eyebrows rose.

“I didn’t know Sir Peter was going to let it. I didn’t know he’d made up his mind what to do with it.”

“He hasn’t let it,” Victoria further informed her. “Johnny—” she prevented him upsetting a bowl of eggs on the counter— “is Sir Peter’s ward, and I’m looking after him.” She couldn’t think of any reason why she had to keep

Johnny’s new security secret from the rest of the world. “We shall probably be at the cottage for a few weeks.”

“Indeed!” But the way the postmistress said it this was tremendous news. “I didn’t know Sir Peter had a ward, and I don’t think many people have heard about it, either. But then everyone’s talking about the wedding that’s coming off soon. . . . Such an event for us all!”

She appeared to brighten for a brief while. “Sir Peter has promised to send cars for us all. Such a very kind gentlemen!”

“Er—yes,” Victoria answered.

“One doesn’t meet many like him nowadays.” Quite obviously she was against progress. “And him so very rich, too.”

“Er—yes,” Victoria murmured again.

The postmistress—who also maintained a kind of general shop—peered at her shortsightedly once more across her loaded counter.

“You look a little young to me,” she remarked, “to be taking care of the child. But perhaps there’s someone with you at the cottage?”

“No, no one,” from Victoria.

The grizzled eyebrows swept upward again.

“But it’s rather a lonely cottage, and the people who were there last thought it was very lonely. But then perhaps they’d been used to rather a gay life abroad ... And in any case, they had a car. I expect you’ve got a car?”

“No.” Victoria shook her head as well.

“No car? Then you really are cut off! Unless Sir Peter—”

“Sir Peter’s chauffeur will take us for occasional drives.”

“I see.”

But Victoria was not convinced that she did see, and as she and Johnny walked back to Alder Cottage—and now that she knew the name of it she decided that it was very suitable, since the garden sloped to a river—she couldn’t help wondering how the rest of the district would react to the news that Sir Peter Wycherley, on the very eve of marriage with a highly suitable young woman, had burdened himself with a ward who could quite easily have been his own son.

And that set Victoria thinking along quite different lines. She was beginning to feel more and more amazed because Sir Peter had taken such a firm line about Johnny. She simply could not understand why he had had to do anything quite so drastic as the undertaking to look after Johnny for the rest of his adolescent life was likely to turn out to be. If he had children of his own there would almost certainly be awkwardness, and she was absolutely certain that Sir Peter’s fiancee did not approve.

Hardly any young woman on the verge of marriage would.

But for the first time she wondered what the district would think, and how Sir Peter would explain away Johnny ... and herself. Surely he was being a little rash in burdening himself with both of them? A young woman whom the postmistress thought looked very young, but was rather too young to be Johnny’s mother.

Or was she?

She began to work it out for herself. Since Johnny was eight and she was twenty-two that really put her out of court as a mother for Johnny. But she wasn’t quite sure that she wanted to be put out of court as a mother for Johnny. For some perverse reason she wasn’t in the least sure, since Sir Peter was old enough—and more than old enough!—to be his father!

Lunch was a tremendous success because the up-to-the-minute stove in the kitchen worked beautifully. One would have had to be a very bad cook indeed to fail to produce something eatable after wading through the list of recipes in the cookbook that had been purchased with it, and hung beside it on the wall. Victoria was debating whether or not to send Johnny upstairs for a short nap when a woman who looked rather like the woman at the post office, but was actually much nicer, arrived at the side door and announced that she had been instructed by Sir Peter to present herself at the cottage for a few hours daily to do essential chores.

“Like scrubbing the kitchen floor, and things like that.” She beamed at Victoria. “You don’t look to me as if you’re accustomed to scrubbing floors, my dear, and after all it isn’t your job, is it? To look after the little lad is your job.”

Victoria felt somewhat taken aback.

“But it’s such a tiny cottage—” she began.

Her new daily woman waved a hand and laughed.

‘‘Don’t you talk about tiny cottages, my dear.” In the whole course of their association Victoria was to be addressed as “my dear” by Mrs. Wavertree. “They get dirty whether they’re big or small, and in my experience the smaller they are the dirtier they get. Especially when there

are youngsters running around.”

But she seemed to take a great fancy to Johnny, and as she knew a lot about birds and he was beginning to take a serious interest in wildlife it seemed likely that they would get along very well. Also, there was no doubt about it. Mrs. Wavertree was prepared to revere him because he was Sir Peter’s ward.

Or about to become Sir Peter’s acknowledged responsibility.

Mrs. Wavertree gave the scrupulously clean kitchen what she called a going over, and would have performed the same function for the sitting room-living room, only Victoria had already cleaned it thoroughly that morning, and Mrs. Wavertree took her departure, promising to return the following day.

For the next few days the pattern of that first day at the cottage repeated itself, and Victoria and Johnny—with the assistance of Mrs. Wavertree—settled into a routine. In the mornings they rose early, had their breakfast, walked to the village and did a certain amount of shopping, and sometimes extended their walk farther afield, returned to the cottage for the preparation and consumption of their midday meal. After that, the rest of the day was usually spent in the garden, with Johnny chasing butterflies or digging in a small part of the garden that he had decided to call his own, while Victoria got down to the serious business of ridding the garden of weeds.

It was a forbidding task, and a backaching one, but she enjoyed it. And more than anything else she enjoyed reclaiming the borders and the various-beds that had once been devoted to flowers. She trimmed the pocket handkerchief lawns and weeded the paths, and within a week Alder Cottage was standing in the midst of a very pleasant plot instead of being overrun by suckers and thistles and the other enemies of order in an enclosed piece of land. Even the orchard received some attention from her, and the hedges. She could be seen going round with hedge-clippers and standing on step ladders and peering into the lane while she shaped box hedges and beech hedges, and cut back the buddleia so that the small white-painted garden gate could be opened with ease and without a shower of caterpillars descending on her head every time she passed through it from the lane.

The lane, for some strange reason, fascinated her, and she decided it was because it was so secret and lonely, but on top of a step ladder anyone traveling along it could be viewed from the moment they rounded the bend which shut out the straight track to the village. Also, on top of a step ladder, she felt, like Johnny, as if she was in a position of great advantage, and no one could possibly take her unawares.

Not even Sir Peter Wycherley when he paid them his next—or rather, first—visit.

But Sir Peter did not come anywhere near Alder Cottage for a full fortnight after Victoria moved into it with her charge. He had arranged for Mrs. Wavertree to keep a motherly eye on them and to take on the major share of the housework, and from the local farm dairy produce was delivered daily. The cottage contained everything they could possibly need to insure their physical comfort, and on their third day at the cottage Hawkins, Sir Peter’s chauffeur, arrived with a sleek gray Bentley outside the gate of the cottage, and indicated to Victoria that he was prepared to take her anywhere she wished to go within reason.

By that he meant that if she wished to visit the nearest town now was her opportunity, or if she simply wished to go for a drive—accompanied, of course, by Johnny—now was also her opportunity.

But Victoria, feeling strangely perverse, for some reason she herself did not understand, resisted the pull of Johnny’s hand, and his eager importuning, and told Hawkins she had no desire whatsoever to go shopping on that particular day, and she was not anxious, either to be taken for a drive. To the surprise of Hawkins she dismissed him with a sweet smile and an air of being perfectly content where she was, and to Johnny’s mortification and acute disappointment the Bentley rolled away, and the two of them stood watching it until the curve in the lane had taken it out of sight.

After Hawkins had driven away Victoria was so sorry for Johnny that she offered to take him for a long walk, if that would suffice, or on a visit to the post office where he could buy one of several items that appealed to him every time they entered it for other purposes. But Johnny, dazzled by the shine of the Bentley, and already developing tastes that were no doubt quite all right in his case, since he was to become Sir Peter’s official ward, refused to be compensated for missing the ride in the Bentley, and actually took himself off and sulked.

Victoria was surprised, but not unsympathetic. After all, almost any child would have preferred a ride in the Bentley to the promise of a box of colored pencils or a plastic farm tractor. But Johnny had not always enjoyed these amenities, and she was considerably amazed that he had assimilated luxury quite so quickly.

For his sake she hoped that everything went well in the future, and there were no hitches in connection with his adoption papers. So far nothing was really official, and she had been brought up to accept that there is many a slip between the cup and the lip.

But Johnny was not the type who sulked for long, and within a matter of half an hour he had regained his usual sunny humor. Victoria baked him a chocolate cake for his tea, and by the time tea was over the Bentley was forgotten, and the farm tractor preoccupied him completely.

The next day passed without incident and in a completely unruffled manner, and the day after that was just as placidly pleasant. Victoria wondered whether Peter Wycherley had forgotten them, and then she decided he was far too preoccupied to have time for their existence. After all, an engaged man must have many things to make demands on his time, and an engaged man who was planning to marry quite soon must have quite a number of things to do.

She began to get a little short of ready cash, and she decided that she would have to draw something out of her post office account. She hesitated to touch the tiny balance that she had in an ordinary bank. She had been spending her own money for food and other essentials, and housekeeping was making serious inroads on her resources.

Not that that worried her, for she had been prepared to maintain Johnny entirely without outside assistance. But she did think it a little curious that Sir Peter, who had been so emphatic about his intentions toward Johnny, should have forgotten that in order to exist at all one had to have the means to defray expenses, and a roof over their heads and extremely comfortable surroundings were not really sufficient to insure a high standard of living.

Neither was the daily contribution Mrs. Wavertree made to their comfort.

However, for herself she was content, and more than content. She was living a kind of twilight existence that was hardly real; and certainly, the evenings after supper that she spent walking up and down on the flagged path before the cottage in the moonlight, watching the bats flitting to and fro in the dusk and listening for sounds on the white road beyond the garden gate, inhaling the perfume of the honeysuckle, were scarcely real at all.

She couldn’t get away from a strange, unaccountable feeling of excitement.

CHAPTER TEN

She was walking up and down in the moonlight when she heard the car coming along the road from the opposite direction to that in which lay the village.

It wasn’t merely a moonlight night; it was a night of surpassing and quite extraordinary beauty. There was a faint haze rising from the fields surrounding the cottage, and the rays of the moon appeared to be imprisoned by the haze ... caught up in it, as it were, and softened by it, so that the moonlight had a strange iridescent quality, and fell as gently as a caress.

The tobacco plant was smelling strongly, and so was the night-scented stock. As for the honeysuckle, it was like a background to Victoria’s thoughts, a challenge to her blood. She felt her blood quicken and leap along her veins when she inhaled the perfume of the cascades of honeysuckle that clothed the garden wall.

She had known little or nothing in the way of romance, and yet romance seemed in the very air she breathed. And it was more than romance. It was magic.

She felt a strange yearning to share it with someone.

The sound of the car was just a fat kiss of tires on the surface of the road when she first heard it. And then there was silence as it slid to a standstill outside the gate, and then the gate clicked open and footsteps approached along the garden path.

The footsteps sounded hollow in the silence of the night, and for a second or so Victoria was alarmed ... alarmed because she could see no one, and the growth was thick at each side of the garden path. And then a figure emerged and stood in the moonlight confronting her, and she recognized her visitor immediately, despite the fact that he was wearing full evening dress.