Victoria and the Nightingale (13 page)

Victoria shook her head.

“No. It’s just that I—I feel so horribly guilty....”

“Silly child,” he said gently, and placed his hand beneath her elbow and urged her to her feet. “We can’t have you catching pneumonia,” he remarked. “Besides, the light looks cozy in the cottage. I’d like to go inside and see what you’ve done to the place.”

“At this time of night?” She sounded almost horrified, particularly as the words ‘love-nest’ were echoing inside her head in a most unpleasant manner; and although it was quite ridiculous, of course, that Miss Islesworth should have so far forgotten her own dignity as to accuse him—a man like Sir Peter Wycherley, who must impress most people as being entirely unlike the type who went in for love-nests— of a peculiarly distasteful form of unfaithfulness was so horrible, particularly as it involved herself, that she quite shrank from letting him into the cottage.

He frowned down at her suddenly with displeasure.

“Silly child,” he said more forcefully. “If you imagine I take any notice of what a jealous woman says you must be mad. And you certainly don’t know me! If you were not here to look after Johnny I would find someone else to look after him ... it’s as simple and uncomplicated as that! Do you understand what I mean? And now will you let me into the cottage?”

She nodded. He could not have put it more clearly that, whatever his ex-fiancee thought, he himself was so little aware of Miss Victoria Wood apart from her usefulness and her value because of her obvious devotion to Johnny—as a young person who could intrigue him or make his admittance into her cottage (which was actually his) at close upon eleven o’clock at night. He didn’t view this as any sort of a menace to her reputation or her future prospects that it was almost an insult to her own young womanhood.

As he smiled down at her a little coolly out of those quiet gray eyes of his, she gathered that he was not merely indifferent to her, but he was completely indifferent.

“I—I—” she stammered. “I merely thought that it was a little late. . . .”

“But you do realize that I’ve driven quite a long way to see you? And I want to hear about Johnny! I want to find out how you’ve been managing with your housekeeping, and I want to give you a check—”

At that she protested violently.

“I don’t need money!”

“All the same, I mean to make a small sum over to you.” He opened the door of the cottage, and they walked straight into the living room, where the grandfather clock was ticking at the foot of the stairs. He glanced around him with a look of appreciation on his face as the mellow light in the living room revealed the bowl of roses on the gate-legged table, and another big bowl of flowers on the highly polished sideboard. The small, enclosed space was sweet with the scent of flowers and beeswax, and it also had a lived-in, distinctly ‘homely’ look with Victoria’s knitting lying in the middle of the couch, and the book she had been reading flung down on a small occasional table.

She had been having a cup of coffee before she went out into the garden, and her coffee cup was standing beside her book. There was also a small book in which she had been totting up her expenditure on food and so forth.

Sir Peter walked across to her novel and picked it up and looked at it, but he did not touch her accounts-book. Instead he went across to the desk and sat down at it, then drew out a check book from his pocket and a handsome gold pen.

“How much of your own money have you been spending?” he asked.

“Not much.”

“Then you and Johnny have been living on air?”

“Of course not,” she denied.

He wrote his check and handed it over to her.

“You can cash that at the local bank, or pay it into your own account as you think fit. I have added a couple of months’ salary to the amount I estimate you will require for housekeeping, and if you find you need more you can

always ask for it.”

He tilted back in his chair and smiled a little peculiarly as he handed over the check.

Victoria started to protest instantly when she saw the amount of the check. Not merely did it mean she was to receive a very, very generous salary, but it meant she and Johnny were to cost him far more than they were either of them worth—certainly to him, at the present time! Altogether, it was far too much money to receive from a man who didn’t need to act the part of their mutual benefactor, and she told him so.

“I realize that you want Johnny to have everything you consider he should have, but this is far, far too much!”

He got up leisurely from the desk and went across to her. He placed his hands on her shoulders.

“Miss Victoria Wood,” he told her solemnly, “I honestly believe you would look a gift horse in the mouth!”

She flushed.

“I haven’t any right to receive a gift horse.”

“I’ve told you somebody has to be the recipient of this particular gift horse, so why do you object? It simply means that you are now on my payroll—like Hawkins and the rest!”

She flushed more brilliantly while the light beat down upon her.

“You relieve my mind of a burden of anxiety,” she declared breathlessly.

“Do I?”

There was no expression on his face, but his eyes were cool.

“In that case you’re rather a foolish young woman!”

Then she felt his fingers biting into the soft flesh of her shoulders, and for one moment she thought he was actually angry with her.

“Did you never make a mistake yourself?” he asked, in a carefully controlled manner.

She looked up at him in bewilderment.

“A mistake—?”

“A serious mistake.” He laid one finger lightly on the gold of her hair, and then he let her go. “It’s too late for riddles, isn’t it, so I’ll let you go to bed. But you can tell Johnny I shall be seeing him quite soon, and you can buy him something he wants out of that check.” He moved regretfully toward the door. “This cottage has always appealed to me, and now I find it has a strange attraction.” He turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder.

For the first time she realized that his eyes were telling her something ... or trying to tell her something. “Goodnight, Victoria ... I’m going to stop calling you Miss Wood. If nightingales can sing for you and Johnny has adopted you I certainly am not going to behave toward you as if you had all the dignity of an ordinary young woman. You are not an ordinary young woman You are very far from being anything of the kind. And tonight I am free and I can say what I like, and I would like you to know that I—consider you fit in beautifully here at the cottage!”

He smiled at her a little crookedly.

“When I see you again I shall probably not be free, so if you insist on formality I will then address you as Miss Wood. And we shall remain Miss Wood and Sir Peter Wycherley for the remainder of our lives! But tonight you are Victoria!”

She moved nearer to him as he opened to door. “Good-night, Sir Peter,” she said quietly.

One of his eyebrows ascended.

“What, if I condescend to address you as Victoria won’t you return the compliment by addressing me as Peter? Just for one night! Tomorrow, I assure you, I shall be an engaged man again, and I don’t think my fiancee would like it if you called me Peter. So ... just for tonight! Because we listened to that nightingale together?”

He took her hand, and she let it lie in his warm brown clasp, and she lifted her eyes to his and obediently said what he wanted her to say: “Good-night, Peter. And—and thank you!”

“For what?”

He smiled still more crookedly, gave her back her hand, glanced rapidly round the living room, and then strode out into the waning moonlight.

She listened to his firm footsteps walking down the garden path to the gate, and it was not until she heard his car starting up—or thought she heard it starting up—that she closed the door.

But he came hurrying back.

“Lock it, Victoria,” he ordered. “Lock it and bolt it, do you understand? And make sure all your windows are fastened, and—”

“But I can’t sleep with a closed window,” she told him breathlessly.

“Then stay awake with a securely snibbed one! This cottage is far too lonely!” He frowned at her before he himself shut the door, and he waited for her to drive home the bolts. Then he called from outside:

“Good-night!”

She called back with a wild feeling of excitement rendering her voice a trifle husky.

“Good-night!”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The next morning he was back with his arms full of parcels and the Bentley left standing in the road in close proximity to the garden gate.

It was barely eight o’clock, and the kitchen of the cottage was full of the smell of burning toast—which Victoria, most unfortunately, had temporarily forgotten—coffee and scrambled eggs. Johnny was sitting at the table and disposing of a bowl of cereal laced with cream, and Victoria was tying an apron about her slender middle and wondering whether she dared add another rasher to the ones that were sizzling in the pan for her own consumption as well as Johnny’s, or whether it would be wiser to stick to her normal diet of toast and marmalade.

Both Victoria and Johnny heard the car stop outside the gate, and Johnny let forth a jubilant whoop because he thought it was Hawkins returned to place himself at their disposal for the day. But Victoria recognized the footsteps as soon as she heard them echoing on the flagged path which continued round an angle of the house until it ended up at the kitchen door; and as the kitchen door was standing open to admit the sunshine she was the first to have her suspicions confirmed and to welcome the owner of the cottage when he stood smiling at them somewhat broadly from the sweetness of the morning outside.

“I hope I’m not interrupting your breakfast,” he said. “But I’ll admit I hoped you would offer me some coffee as I haven’t had any breakfast myself yet.”

He deposited his parcels on a side table, then stood sniffing the atmosphere appreciatively.

“Burnt toast! Do you know, I have a weakness for it! Do you think you could spare me a piece?” And he actually robbed the toast rack of one of its most highly carbonized exhibits and proceeded to munch it with appetite. He sat down on the arm of a chair and winked at Johnny.

“Have a look at my parcels,” he said. “There are one or two things among them that might interest you.”

While Johnny rushed at the parcels Victoria hastily set another place at the table for their unexpected visitor, and then attempted to deprive him of the remains of his burnt toast.

“You can’t possibly eat that,” she declared. “It’s practically black! For goodness’ sake, if you’re hungry, sit down and have a proper breakfast.”

He grinned at her. His teeth were amazingly white in the strong sunshine, and although it was so early in the morning and it had been fairly late when he left the cottage the night before he was beautifully shaved and impeccably groomed as always.

“Thank you, that’s what I mean to do,” he told her. He pulled out his own chair at the table and sat down while she was still frantically calculating whether she had enough sausages and bacon in the refrigerator to provide him with a really substantial breakfast. His voice dropped to a lower key, and was suddenly very soft. “Don’t tell me I’m not welcome?”

“Of course.” She hardly knew what she was saying, and for some reason she felt quite ridiculously confused. She was also having the strange experience of someone who was making new discoveries ... how indolent his gray eyes were, and yet how attractively bright. His eyelashes were far too long and thick to be the possession of a mere man, and when he smiled his eyes crinkled up at the corners and he appeared to be studying her through the fringes of his eyelashes. His mouth was exceptionally shapely, and his chin reassuringly square. There was a brightness about his hair, and yet in patches it was very dark—dark as a blackbird’s plumage.

“Well?” As she stood there looking down at him as if something about him had had a stupefying effect on her senses he smiled in a somewhat peculiar manner. “Am I welcome? Or would you rather I went?”

“No, no, no!” In her eagerness to convince him she actually laid a hand on his shoulder. “Of course I don’t want you to go. I mean—”

“Splendid.” The softness—it could even have been a caressing note—was back in his voice again, and a completely relaxed look overspread his features. “Then I’ll stay.”

As Johnny danced about the kitchen delightedly with a new transistor radio swinging from one hand and a beautifully bound book on butterflies held aloft in the other, Victoria dived into the larder, and when she reappeared Sir Peter was helping himself to cornflakes. Johnny poured cream over them for him.

“We always have breakfast in the kitchen,” Victoria apologized, still not quite certain what she was saying, or why she was saying it.

“And why not?” Certainly the check cloth was very bright, and the flowers in the small Wedgwood jar in the middle of it a gay and attractive centerpiece. “It reminds me of my nursery days.”

She glanced at him.

“I didn’t expect to see you this morning. I—I imagined you would have other things to do.”

“Such as?”

He was buttering a roll while she slid some more slices of bread under the grill.