Elisabeth Kidd (6 page)

“Well,” he began, “you certainly won’t be introduced to La Catalani or to Macready, even if they were to be at some party, because they’d only be there to entertain. Byron’s another kettle of fish, being a peer, but he’s out of the country, thank God, so the matter won’t come up. Mrs. Siddons keeps retiring and may really do it this year, and Sir Thomas—well, you might have your portrait done, but it certainly won’t be at any social gathering!’’

“Oh—I see.” Sydney appeared to give this a great deal of thought, staring out into the terrace as she furrowed her pretty brow. Cedric sighed again, heavily.

“Are you not feeling quite the thing, Mr. Maitland?” Sydney enquired, suddenly all solicitude. “Shall I bring you a cup of tea, perhaps?”

“Good God, no!” Cedric exclaimed, appalled, and sitting up straight in his chair again. “Tea is for invalids and females in a delicate condition. And even if I was one of those,” he added, “you wouldn’t fetch it for me yourself. What do you suppose servants are for? Servants! Oh, Lord.”

“Tell you what,” he said, making a quick addition to his list, and then getting up to pull at the service bell. “There’s no point in my drilling a lot of things into you today you’re only going to forget tomorrow. We’ll just have to plunge right in and do them. You hungry?”

“Oh, yes!” Sydney said plaintively. She had been up at an early hour that day, and although the comforting effects of a large breakfast had long since faded, she had been too reluctant to cause inconvenience to anyone to ask for anything else—although had she known it, any of the servants would have brought her any trifle she might require, only to have a look at what was going on in order to report it to the others.

“We’ll have a nuncheon in here, Chambers,” Cedric told the footman who answered his ring, adding to Sydney—as Chambers hesitated, glanced at Miss Archer and back to Mr. Maitland, and reluctantly retreated—”We’ll just pretend we have guests. Daisy can pretend to be one, and you shall be the hostess. Good practice, you see, since you’ll be going out to dinner all the time in London.’’

Sydney admitted that she had always had a talent for amateur theatrics. “But I shan’t be the hostess every time, shall I? In London, I mean?”

Cedric disregarded this quibble. The nuncheon—which consisted of a goose pie removed with Cedric’s examples of dinner party conversation and side dishes of the proper forms of address for any peers Sydney might encounter around the table—proved to be useful but inadequate, and the experiment was repeated at dinner and at breakfast the next morning. These meals were consumed privately between them, however—Sydney not being yet quite civilized enough, in Cedric’s opinion, to invite Lyle to listen to them. She was, however, ready by the fifth day to go on to the next item on the agenda.

“Do you by any chance play at the pianoforte or the harpsichord?” Cedric asked her then, unwittingly hitting on precisely the subject most likely to upset his fragile confidence in a happy result of his labours.

“Oh, yes!” Sydney replied eagerly. “Shall I play for you, Mr. Maitland?”

Cedric, who considered himself something of a connoisseur of musical talent—and who was also somewhat comforted to have discovered a useful accomplishment in his charge—agreed to give her an audition, and they repaired to Lyle’s ballroom.

This was a vast but unused chamber, where the chandeliers were swathed in folds of muslin and the draperies had been removed from the windows, revealing a dazzlingly waxed floor—polished daily but untrod-upon—and a piano sheathed in canvas but still perfectly tuned, as Sydney discovered happily when the cover had been removed and she sat down to play. She launched immediately and uninvited into a crashing sonata.

“Good God!” interrupted a stunned Cedric when she came to the end of the allegro but had not yet begun the scherzo. “ What’s that?”

“Beethoven,” Sydney informed him, with a look of mild astonishment that he should not be aware of this. Cedric mopped his brow.

“Forget Beethoven,” he said. “Don’t even consider Beethoven. Mozart, if you must, or Haydn. Better still, do you know ‘Early One Morning’ ?”

Sydney wrinkled her nose.

“Never mind what
you
think,” Cedric advised her. “You want to play what is fashionable, or at least what people think they want to hear.’’

Sydney agreed that this might be best to start with. “Do you think I am talented enough to play for—for an audience, Mr. Maitland?”

“Eh? Yes, certainly. Too good, even. Every hostess likes to have a pretty girl who can play something to favour her guests. You don’t want to draw too much attention to yourself, though—people like to chat and finish their brandies and so on while the entertainment’s going on.”

“How very rude!”

“Not at all. It’s not as if you was being paid to do it, after all, like Catalani.”

“No, I suppose not, but don’t—are there not concerts got up now and then precisely for those who like to hear music properly played?”

“Hostesses putting on airs will arrange such a thing, I suppose. But nobody much will attend them, if all there is to do there is listen. Do you sing, too?”

Sydney regretted that her singing was not quite up to her playing. Cedric looked relieved, and as he listened to a more acceptable Clementi piece which Sydney then played for him—sitting up as straight and ladylike as he could wish—he reflected that there were at least
some
things he would not have to teach her. The difficulty was, he never knew what unexpected talents and deficiencies Sydney would display next.

Sydney, for her part, soon came to realize that while Cedric’s mind was perhaps not so quick as hers, he was both as kind-hearted as he had first appeared to be, and more perceptive than his self-indulgent habits might suggest. He was, for example, most tactful about suggesting that the brown cambric gown with the demurely high neckline and modest single flounce, which Sydney had worn about the vicarage and had now become accustomed to wear to her morning lessons, was perhaps not her best colour (besides being dreadfully
démodé,
but Cedric refrained delicately from raising this point).

Consequently, however, he drove her—on their sixth day together—to be measured for several new gowns at Miss Moore’s, the finest (indeed, the only) dressmaking establishment in Arundel. Cedric even agreed, when in spite of herself Sydney fell in love with an already completed walking dress of dark blue muslin embroidered all over with white flowers and ornamented around the hem with two rows of white ribbon, that the colour suited her eyes and complexion to perfection.

Miss Moore was delighted to part with the dress which, she explained, had been ordered but later refused, the unappreciative (and unfashionable) client having declared that it was not near so elegant as she had been led to believe.  Cedric, certain that Lyle would approve of it—his lordship having a keen if generally unsuspected eye for the niceties of feminine apparel—purchased it on the spot.

To be sure, in a moment of exasperation with Sydney the very next day, Cedric also declared with much less tact that her hair looked as if birds had been nesting in it, but Sydney took no offense at this. Clothes and hair styles were matters that could be corrected by qualified persons when the time came for it, and when she assumed her career, such things would no longer matter; she viewed them as mere means to an end.

Thus, she noted carefully in her journal every night every precept that Cedric taught her, as well as recording at some length her impressions of the society he described to her. Better, she was aware, to confide these observations to her private journal, than to voice them in Cedric’s scandalized hearing. It behooved her, after all, to get herself as firmly into his good graces as she could before revealing to him that she had anything in her mind other than learning to be a demure, well-behaved, and accomplished young lady.

She smiled at the thought that it was fortunate that, even after a week, Cedric did not know her very well yet, for any of her cousins would have seen instantly through her modest pose and nipped whatever extravagance she might have been planning in the bud.

Sydney had a strong suspicion that Lyle too would have seen through her, so it was fortunate that she had so little contact with him. At the same time, she could not help wondering why he seemed to be avoiding her. It was all very well for Cedric to say Lyle had given him a carte blanche to educate Sydney as he saw fit, but she was certain Lyle’s unseen but firm hand guided the naturally indolent Cedric—particularly in his more emphatic dictums on what Sydney most
not
do or say.

Sydney was of several minds about her enigmatic guardian. She was happy to be spared his disquieting presence, but was also a little resentful of his apparent indifference. She was alternately possessed of an urgent desire to prove Lyle’s worst suspicions to be well founded by creating as large a disturbance of his placid life as she could, and of an equal determination to show him she could behave as well as any duchess and conquer London on her own merits—not just using the arts he taught her.

She lay awake for some time contemplating these various forms of vengeance on her unfeeling guardian, but at last she pulled herself together, heaved a great sigh, jotted a note to herself at the end of her day’s journal entry to Remember Her Goal, and fell into a sound sleep by repeating this phrase over and over to herself.

It was as well that she did not in the morning recall dreaming happily of becoming the toast of London—and exacting her revenge by spurning her repentant guardian’s passionate declaration of love for her in order to pursue a brilliant career!

Among Cedric Mainland’s qualities there was also a reluctance—stemming from his conviction that worry aged a man before his time—to anticipate troubles before they made their appearance. He therefore dismissed as many of Sydney’s eccentricities as he could with a firm injunction to her never to indulge in them publicly and, lulled by her engaging smile into a happy complacence, reported to Lyle that things were going much more smoothly than they had expected.

The Marquess, however, was less optimistic in the face of the visits of Mr. Maitland—oblivious of his host’s pointed hints that he did not wish to be disturbed—to Lyle’s well-insulated library to tender his reports. Lyle was not entirely unaware of what was going forward, having heard also from Mrs. Collins and from Murray about it, nor was he so indifferent as Sydney supposed to her progress, having—purely by chance, of course—overheard some small part of Cedric’s instructions as he passed the door to the breakfast parlour one morning.

He had stopped to observe the door for a moment—this being not closed but left a punctilious two inches ajar—and was startled to hear laughter coming from behind it. He wondered if he ought to put a stop to it. It was certainly not a sign that either Miss Archer or her tutor was taking her lessons very seriously. On the other hand, Lyle considered—taking no notice of the curious look leveled by a footman who happened to see him contemplating the paneling—that if he were to interrupt he would doubtless put a firm damper on whatever they were doing. Reluctantly, he turned away.

Cedric’s reports were not calculated to confirm Lyle in his policy of noninterference, however, they being at first unencouraging and even despairing—but then not much later so enthusiastic and full of praise for Sydney’s most unorthodox charms, that Lyle began to be apprehensive that Cedric was losing his objectivity towards his pupil.

Sydney had, Cedric reported gloomily after the first days’ lessons, a superfluous if not downright damaging knowledge of history, ancient and modern languages, philosophy and practical science, and literature and the arts. It was impossible, he complained, to convince her of the value of small talk, and she persisted in peppering her conversation with her opinions on these weighty subjects.

“Even on politics and religion, for God’s sake,” Cedric grumbled.

“More than likely,’’ Lyle remarked cryptically.

“Eh? Oh, you mean on account of her uncle being a parson. I have to give her credit that she don’t have much to say in the theological line, which is something in her favour, I suppose. Bad enough that she reads Shakespeare and Milton instead of Scott and Byron—and she speaks German, of all things, but no French. Can you imagine? However, she is quick to pick things up, so I should be able to teach her what French I know.’’

Lyle did not mention that Cedric’s French accent was commonly known to be deplorable; nor did he volunteer—although for an instant he was tempted—to offer himself as tutor. He did, however, remind Cedric that an elderly French count lived in the neighbourhood and might be persuaded—since he was also a penurious French count, having been too ill after Waterloo even to think of returning to his native land—to instruct Miss Archer twice a week in the French language.

Cedric trotted off to his waiting pupil to inform her of this new treat in store for her, and Lyle closed the library door firmly, although with no great hope that it would remain shut for long, behind him. He then sat down at his desk to attend to his correspondence, but soon found his mind wandering from the rather ill-humoured criticism of his troublesome ward which he had begun to pen to Lady Romney.

Well, was Sydney really all that bad? he asked himself, attempting to be fair. She hadn’t actually
done
anything dreadful; she only
looked
as though disaster always threatened. No, that was not true, either. She simply did not look the way Lyle had expected her to. The truth, he admitted to himself finally, was that what he had expected—or hoped for—was a mindless little mouse who would melt into the background and give him no trouble at all. He should have known that no daughter of Owen Archer would be so insipid. He should have known—

“Damn!” Lyle muttered to himself. He got up to change his clothes and send to the stables for a horse to be saddled for him. He would remove himself from temptation with a good run over the fields.

This relief was denied him, however, by the muddy ground resulting from a spring-portending rise in the temperature, so Lyle changed his mount for a sturdier one and turned to the village to fetch some lime that was needed for the new lawn around the herb garden. His gardener, he knew, would be scandalized to think of his master trotting about the countryside with a hundred-weight of lime over his saddle, but Hallam’s sensibilities would recover eventually.