Amanda Scott (42 page)

“Lord, yes, of course I can manage them,” the boy said in much his customary tone. “Uncle Michael taught me himself, for he said he didn’t want me employing my father’s slapdash methods with any of
his
cattle.”

“I didn’t realize he had taught you to drive,” Anne said. “If that is the case, I know I can entrust myself to you.”

“He most likely won’t agree that I’m ready to drive this team,” Andrew confessed. “You will recall that he flew into the boughs the last time I did so, but that was because I scraped the side of his racing curricle, trying to drive at speed through a gate. Moreover,” he added with a sigh, “in view of how angry he’s bound to be about all the rest, I suppose what he thinks about my driving is only a bagatelle.”

“Don’t anticipate trouble now,” Anne advised. “In my experience, what one imagines will happen is frequently much worse than the actuality. We don’t know yet that your uncle will even have to know about all this. Of course, since you entrusted your letter to Sylvia—”

“Is that how you found out? I told her not to give it to anyone before tomorrow, and then to give it to Uncle Michael.”

“Well, I hope you do not mean to scold her for failing you, for she holds you in very high esteem, you know, and would be quite dashed down by your censure. I encountered Mr. Pratt in the gardens this morning, and was astonished to learn that he believed you had accompanied your uncle to Castleton. And when poor Sylvia looked at me with such obvious guilt in her eyes, I drew my own conclusions and confronted her. She is not to blame, Andrew. You ought never to have involved her in your plan.”

The boy did not respond. His attention was fully engaged in guiding the team out of the field onto the uneven road, and he was clearly nervous of the responsibility he had accepted. Since the muttering thunder from the approaching storm was not likely to have a calming effect on him, or on the team, Anne made no further attempt to converse with him just then, hoping he would relax a little once they reached the main highroad.

It was more than ten minutes after they had done so before he looked at her and said soberly, “I have been thinking.”

“Have you, dear?”

“I’ll have to tell him about all this, won’t I?”

She said matter-of-factly, “Well, you know, I do think it would be best if you made a clean breast of it. You will have all the advantage of making an honest confession, you know, which will be far better than if he were to learn of it from someone else. And that, I fear, we cannot be certain will not happen, for far too many persons have become involved in this tangle.”

“He will still murder me.”

“I wish you will stop saying that,” Anne begged. “You cannot know how very much I dislike hearing it, particularly when I am certain that he will do nothing of the kind. Recollect, if you will, that he does at least try to exercise patience in dealing with your misbehavior, and that he did teach you to drive a team—and in fine style, too, I might add—when he must have been exceptionally busy with his new duties.”

“He only taught me after I tried tooling random-tandem,” Andrew said, shooting her a reluctant smile. “I’d heard from one of the chaps home at Christmas how it was all the rage in London and Oxford, and was determined to attempt it myself. And,” he added on a harder note, “though Uncle Michael chose to dispute the point, the horses I had hitched to the phaeton were my own.”

“And the phaeton?”

His lips twitched. “My great-uncle’s. I’d have used my father’s, but it sat a good deal higher off the ground, and I thought if I should come to grief it would be better in the lower one. It was not I who came to grief, however, but the phaeton.”

“I see. A wheel?”

“An axle. Broke clear through. I took a turn too quickly, not realizing it was the most dangerous thing I could do with a pair strung out one behind the other. When a wheel hit the ditch and caught in the hedgerow, the axle ended up in two bits across a boulder that ought never to have been there. Uncle Michael threatened to lay his whip about my shoulders, but instead he taught me to drive both a pair and a team properly. He said driving tandem was only for worthless whippets and Jack Straws.”

This artless conversation gave Anne food for thought. She said, “So he has not always treated you as harshly as he has seemed to do since I came to live at the Priory.”

“He was pretty forbearing before, actually, though he bellowed a lot. I expect he just got fed up.”

She said with a twinkle, “You haven’t precisely given him cause to love you, have you?”

Instead of the responsive twinkle she expected, the boy frowned heavily and said, “I never give anyone cause for that.”

Anne was shocked. “But, my dear, though I know you must miss your mama and papa sadly, surely they loved you very much.”

He shrugged. “My mama doted on Sylvia, ma’am, as well she should have, but to me she showed only respect and duty. She never called me Andrew, as you do when you are not trying to make me feel my dignity”—he shot her a speaking look—“but always Tissington, which is how I was styled before my father died. As for him, although I daresay he was rather puffed up about having produced a son, he had no time for me. Indeed, his servants got more attention from him than I did, for he spent much more time conferring with Bagshaw than he ever did talking with me.”

Anne was stirred by pity, but she knew it would be a mistake to let him see it, so she said in her usual calm way, “That must have been difficult for you. I am singularly fortunate, I know, to have parents who choose to spend most of their time at their principal residence. My mother is not a warm person, but at least she was nearly always nearby, and we girls had governesses, while the boys went to good schools. And my father, though not terribly interested in his children, still keeps watch over our activities. I hope that when you marry and have children of your own, you will remember these feelings of yours now, and be more conscious of your duty toward your children, as a result. I have frequently observed how very protective you are of Sylvia, and I suspect you will be so with your own offspring as well.”

“Do you really think so?”

The mixture of anxiety and hope in his eyes was nearly too much for her, but she said warmly, “Oh, yes, I have often noted that persons who were ignored by their parents—or guarded too closely by them, for that matter—try to treat their own children more sensibly, and that people who were overindulged as children tend to be more strict with their own. I was recently speaking of this phenomenon with Lady Hermione, albeit from an aspect that pertains rather more to your uncle than to you.”

Seeing that she had his full attention now, she went on, “As I see it, since children who are overindulged by their parents or ignored by them altogether are, in effect, given complete freedom to do as they please, they frequently manage to get into all manner of scrapes and mischief. Then, later, as parents themselves, just knowing what can happen makes them more severe with their children than their parents were with them.”

“But by your own logic, then, I shall be a strict parent,” Andrew said, “for what makes Uncle Michael so determined to control my actions now,
he
says, is that I was thoroughly spoilt before by always having had complete freedom to do as I please.”

“If you will forgive me for contradicting you, my dear, in my opinion, you have been given very little freedom at all, for you have been kept at the Priory almost like a prisoner. The cage is a golden one, to be sure, but your freedom, as you call it, has hitherto extended only to allowing you to behave in a manner that would not be tolerated anywhere else in a boy your age. I don’t call that freedom. I call that plain foolishness.”

He frowned, and for a moment she expected him to take offense, but then he shot her another of his slanting looks and said, “So, was Uncle Michael overindulged or overguarded?”

“Indulged, I think, but only in the sense that he was allowed to do as he pleased and given enough money to think he need not count the cost. In that sense, however, from what I’ve heard—though I ought not to repeat it to you—he must have been shockingly indulged, for he seems to have got into a number of scrapes and to have run up all manner of debts without counting the cost until he was forced to do so. But that very experience, I believe, produced the deep sense of duty he has now to protect you from all the evils he knows may be lying in wait for you.”

“But I can take care of myself,” Andrew protested.

“I hesitate to contradict you, dear sir, but where would you be at this moment had Lady Hermione not taken it into her head to interfere with your plan?”

He had the grace to look chagrined, but a moment later, she detected a lurking twinkle in his eyes when he glanced away from the team again to say, “And what about you, ma’am? Shall you be able to take care of yourself when Uncle Michael learns that you drove out with Great-Uncle Ashby to follow us?”

She speedily diverted his thoughts from this unpromising topic by warning him to keep his eyes on an approaching carriage that seemed inclined to remain in the exact center of the road, and by the time they had passed that vehicle, she had the happy notion of telling him about the arrival of Sylvia’s new governess and then of asking him to tell her about the countryside through which they were passing. He was content to do so, and some time passed in this fashion, until a chance remark of his drew to her notice the fact that the road they traveled was the exact same one that Lord Michael would take from Castleton.

“Good gracious, will he?” Anne exclaimed. “I suppose, now that I look about me, some of this country does seem familiar, but I’m quite certain we did not pass through that last village—Hathersage, wasn’t it—earlier today.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. If you went to Sheffield, you most likely turned off at Calver or Froggatt.”

“Calver,” she said with certainty, “and I remember now that Lord Ashby was concerned lest we encounter Michael there. I am all confusion, I admit. It was bad enough when Lady Hermione told me we were only ten miles from the house, after we had been chasing the balloon for what must have been hours, but to be back on the road where we began, and without passing through Sheffield again—We have traveled in a circle, I suppose.”

“Very nearly.”

He went on to describe what he thought must have been their route, but Anne paid little heed to his discourse. The storm was still behind them, but thunder muttered frequently, with an occasional rumble louder than the others that would sound enough like approaching carriage wheels to make her look anxiously over her shoulder. The thought that they might encounter Michael before they reached the Priory was more than a little disconcerting because she had not yet decided what she meant to say to him, and she feared if he caught them on the road—and driving his bays, at that—that she would be given little chance to explain anything for some considerable time.

That he would undoubtedly be harsh with Andrew if he were to discover in such an abrupt fashion all the facts of this latest escapade was another matter of concern, for he would be that much less likely to heed her if she suggested more patient methods. She had no doubt now that he had begun well with the boy, but suspected that Andrew’s failure to respond quickly to tolerance and understanding with the behavior that Michael desired of him, coupled with Michael’s increasing worry about other matters, had led to growing distance between them and greater inclination on Michael’s part to be severe.

If she could discuss her feelings with him in an atmosphere of composure and tranquility, she believed she could make him see that he would do better to exert a greater degree of forbearance with his charge. But, if he were awaiting them now at Upminster, or if he should catch them on the road—Another mutter of thunder interrupted her thoughts, causing her to look back again, but the road behind them was reassuringly empty of traffic.

“Will he be angry with you, too?” Andrew asked abruptly.

Realizing that he had stopped talking about the countryside and must have deduced at least some of her thoughts from her distraction, she said, “I hope not. He can make life rather uncomfortable when he is displeased, can he not?”

Andrew agreed with enough fervor to make her smile, but the smile faded quickly. Though she made more effort after that to keep up her end of the conversation, she found her thoughts continually returning to Michael. Despite all she had learned about the mysterious Lord M, and despite the fact that to her knowledge Michael was the only Lord M in the district, she still could not seriously believe that he was the villain Mrs. Flowers had described. The most condemning evidence was the description of Lord M’s voice, and surely many men had low, caressing voices that might, at least occasionally, inspire women to compare them to large purring cats.

He had a temper, to be sure, but he had never raised a hand to her, or even given her cause to think he might, though she had surely, at one time or another, given him what some men would consider to be sufficient provocation. And though he had without doubt been violent on more than one occasion in his treatment of Andrew, he had never done more to the boy than Lord Rendlesham had done to his sons, or to his daughters for that matter.

Mrs. Flowers had said that Lord M frequently used the women on the
Folly
for his own sexual gratification; yet, Michael had given his word that he had never indulged in sexual congress with prostitutes, and she had believed him. That she still believed him made her wonder if she was being naïve? Was it merely that she had grown to care for him, indeed to care passionately that he succeed in all his endeavors, whatever they might be? Was she just refusing to concede that she might have married a murderer. Was she mistaking hope for confidence?

Though she could not answer these questions, or other, similar ones her mind produced, she found she was quite capable of making a decision in spite of them. She would, she decided, confront Michael just as soon as they got home. If she achieved nothing else, his discovery that he was believed by many in the district to own the
Folly
ought to take his mind off Andrew’s activities long enough for her to think of a way to approach that topic with enough tact to influence the outcome.