Sweet Bargain (2 page)

"The devil take you, Auggie Shaw," yelled Darlington, and dug his spurs into his horse. The chestnut surged down the lane.

"Auntie Bel," said the little one in her arms, "is that man angry because Uncle Auggie stole his hat?"

"Oh, yes, Kit," said Bel. Then she looked at the three other boys. The blue Shaw eyes were bright with mirth, and it was quite fatal to her dignity to meet those gazes. Whoops of laughter took them all. Darlington, trapped in the narrow lane, rode repeatedly against the hedge, leaning out to snatch the hat, pulling back empty-handed to keep his seat. But as Darlington gained on the bobbing hat on the far side of the hedge, Bel collected herself.

"Oh, dear! Phil, Arthur, Joe, girls, Darlington will be in a rage when he catches up with Auggie. Hurry!" They grabbed the pail and their baskets and rods and scrambled through the break in the hedge.

From the top of a low rise they looked back to see Darlington, his hat on his head once more, cantering toward the narrow opening in the hedge, and Auggie, on their side of the hedge, striding across the open field, poking the air with his fishing rod in a triumphant imitation of the trick he had played on Darlington. The dog, Honey, leapt and barked at the boy's side, apparently sharing the triumph.

Darlington reined in at the break in the hedge and shouted out, "Bel Shaw, you'll pay for your brother's insult, I promise you. Nobody makes a mock of Alan Darlington."

The angry words hung in the still air and seemed to silence even the birds. The younger Shaws looked quietly at Bel. Below them Darlington rode off.

"How'd you like that, Bel?" asked Auggie, coming up to them, panting. "I put Darlington in his place for you, didn't I?"

"That you did," said Bel. "Thank you, Auggie." The boy was grinning with self-satisfaction, and Bel could see that this was no time to comment on the likely results of his prank. She looked at the worried faces of the others. "Let's not worry about Darlington," she said. "It's time and enough that we started fishing."

"Bel," said Arthur, "we don't really have to fish the Upper, do we? Not today?"

"Couldn't we go to the Lower one last time?" asked Phil.

"Before Fanny and Louisa come and spoil our summer?" It was Diana who made this last plea, and it was a powerful one, for their rich London cousins were the most tiresome of summer guests.

A half dozen pairs of sober blue eyes pleaded with Bel to restore the pleasure of the day. Her own girlhood summers on the Ashe were gone, had ended with Tom's leaving and her assumption of the duties of eldest child, but at least she had had them in full measure. What harm could there be in one last expedition to their favorite spot?

"Very well," she said. "To the Lower Ashe, Shaws."

"Hurrah for Bel!" shouted Auggie.

AN IMPERTINENT BEAM of sunlight, no respecter of rank or wealth, penetrated the curtained darkness where Nicholas Arthur Seymour, the Earl of Haverly, lay. The saucy beam danced a little with the gentle movement of the trees through which it fell, and played lightly over the earl's closed lids with their fringe of black lashes. At the touch he woke, sat up, threw the covers off his lean frame, and pushed aside the heavy bed hangings.

Dappled sunlight shimmered whitely on the bare wood floor, and sparkling dust motes swirled in the currents created by his sudden movement. Birdsong from the trees beyond his window seemed to have reached symphonic proportions. His head throbbed, and he lifted a strong, fine-boned hand to cover his eyes. He felt as if he had only just that moment dozed off. The night's restless dreams had wearied him more than the long journey he had undertaken the day before.

He pulled the rumpled, sweat-dampened nightshirt over his head, and tossed it behind him on the bed. The cold air in the unheated chamber raised goose pimples on his arms and chest, but the chill was welcome after the hot stickiness with which he had awakened too often in London. He had been a fool to think London, with its gay crowds, its laughter and music and light spilling into the night streets, its thousand temptations, was any place for him. He had believed that all the years in his uncle's well-regimented house had made him indifferent to the rustle of silks, the curve and sway of hips, the swell of a white breast above a bit of lace. He had been wrong. If he were not so certain that his parents were in hell, he would be tempted to wish them there himself.

But in the country he would sleep well, he was sure. A day of fishing his own stream, on his own land, would cure the restlessness that had plagued him in town. He stood and stretched, brushing with his fingertips the top of the bed frame and disturbing a small cloud of dust. He sneezed. Maybe he would consent to hire a housekeeper after all.

He glanced around the unfamiliar room. In the daylight he could see that Peter Farre had not misrepresented Courtland Manor's state of decay, and that pleased him. Other than the bed with its faded grandeur, the room was bare. Unfurnished, it was more fully his, and there would be time enough to furnish it after the fishing season ended. He strode in the direction of an open door through which he could see the valise he'd brought with him from town.

The dressing room was brighter than the bedchamber, and he blinked. Apparently he had slept away the early rise, the day's best fishing. Farre would answer for that. No doubt the old curmudgeon had already been to the river,
Nick's
river. He pulled the few items he needed from the valise—smalls, stockings, and dark breeches. Drawing these on, he looked round for his shaving things. There they were, laid out for him, another sign of the contrary Farre.

When Nick, at seventeen, had first come to his uncle's Haverly estate, he had concluded that all the servants there were mad or so shaped by his uncle's caprices that their eccentricities approached madness.

All but Farre. He was not mad, just maddening, determined to be the servant only when it suited him. After his Uncle Miles' death Nick had left the lot of them behind, provided for and charged with the task of maintaining his uncle's great house as the museum it had become years before the man died. But he had taken Farre with him. It had been Farre's description of the Ashe that had induced Nick to buy Courtland Manor. Here, Nick would make a place for them. Farre would have his stable, and Nick his library, and they would fish the summer away, untroubled by the past.

Nick dipped his brush in a basin of icy water and began to work up a lather in the soap cup. The river beckoned, and in his haste to get to it, he nicked himself under the chin. He toweled off, pulled on an old shirt and jacket, jammed his feet into his cold boots, and returned to the bedroom. He rummaged in the bedclothes until he found his Walter Scott and stuffed the worn volume in his coat pocket. As he descended the stairs, he thought to run his hands through his black hair once.

He found Farre in the stable, pulling a mound of moldy straw into the wide center aisle between the stalls. The floor was cambered, forming two gullies for drainage, and it was plain that the sagging roof had let in rain all spring. Little had been done to protect tools or wood from the elements. Harness, carts, rakes, and an old box for cutting chaff lay in rusty disarray in one corner. Farre, who had kept Nick's uncle's vast stable clean and well-ordered, with a corps of boys to help him, had made some sacrifice on Nick's account to have accepted this ruin.

Nick studied his friend. Farre had stripped to his shirtsleeves, and a film of sweat glazed his balding brow as he worked. Farre had altered in the eleven years of their acquaintance. The once-red hair was white and thin, revealing a wide brow and large ears.

The skin, too, seemed thin, the bones of the cheeks and the sharp bridge of the nose apparent. Farre seemed pared down to a wiry energetic frame of a man. Nick looked for another tool, found a pitchfork, and began to scoop straw from an adjoining stall onto the pile.

"Decided to get up, did you," said his companion. He cast Nick a look that plainly reproved every hasty detail of Nick's dress and person.

"No thanks to you," Nick replied. "We missed the early rise."

"Would have in any case. Stalls needed cleaning. Couldn't leave the horses to stand in this muck all day."

"I would have helped," said Nick.

"A fine thing for your lordship to be doing."

Nick straightened and leaned on his pitchfork. "I thought we agreed you wouldn't plague me with ceremony."

"We agreed you'd give town life a try, too," said his companion.

Nick shrugged his shoulders and hefted his pitchfork again. "I did. I'm not cut out for it."

"Stuff! Three weeks in a hotel. Didn't even go into the Lords."

"I saw every damned sight in London, rode in the park twice a day, and was overcharged by the tailor, the boot-maker, the haberdasher, and everyone else."

"Did you talk to one member of the quality?"

"I've got no talent for self-introduction."

"Excuses, lad. Did you write those letters when your uncle died?"

"To two ancient dowagers, who probably don't go about at all? How could they have introduced me to anyone?"

"Trust me, my boy, if you had shown your face to that pair, you would have seen the inside of every drawing room in the West End."

Nick snorted. "What makes you so sure of that?"

"Turns out, Nick, my boy, that I've talked to more ladies than you have. Those ladies look out for their own, they do. A dowager, she's got a daughter, or a granddaughter, or a niece who needs a husband, and you are a prime catch."

"Nick Seymour a prime catch? Farre, you're as daft as the rest of the lot at Haverly."

The older man stopped raking. "Well, that's as may be, your lordship, but a titled gentleman with twenty thousand a year is a catch in my book."

"As I said, it's not Nick Seymour that's the catch."

"You sell yourself short, lad, you do. What is it that women want if they don't want you?"

"They want a hero."

"What? You mean some fellow out of one of your books?"

"All the heroes aren't in books. But yes, a hero, a man of action, a fellow who can handle a sword or a pistol or at least his fists." Nick made a thrust with his pitchfork.

"Stuff," said Farre. "You don't know the first thing about what women want."

"Precisely, and that proves my point. I am ignorant of women and therefore not likely to please the least discriminating of the sex." It was not entirely a lie, for he did not suppose all women to be like the women who had come to his parents' house, but he could hardly tell the truth about himself to his friend.

"Time to learn then," Farre was saying, "and I don't mean by reading all the blasted books in your library." He tapped the book in Nick's pocket with the tip of the rake handle.

"You think I should go to school then, at eight and twenty? Or hire a tutor, an instructress?"

"Now that's an idea, lad," said Farre, beginning to rake again. "Thought you might have gotten around to it in town. So set up some pretty young doxy who knows a trick or two."

"Even a mistress requires an introduction, presumably, before one can make an offer," Nick said dryly, but Farre's suggestion had surprised him.

"Then do it, lad. You can't be tangling yourself up in the sheets every night and snarling your way through the days."

"And my groom can't be telling me what to do, Farre." Nick regretted the hasty words immediately. The scratch of the rake stopped, then started again, unnaturally loud to his ears.

"Of course not ... your lordship. As if I would." The rake continued.

Some very low words came to Nick's mind, words that he had learned in his parents' house. He wielded his pitchfork in silence until Farre's movements revealed that the old man's anger was somewhat mollified. In the early days at Haverly Nick had escaped his uncle's demands by hiding in the stables to read. There Farre found him and coaxed him out into the woods and fields—Farre, who knew horses and fishing and who could teach without embarrassing his student. Nick had soon found he could talk to Farre, but every quarrel made him fear to lose this first friend. Yet he had watched and waited, learning to recognize the moment when his friend might be approached again.

Now as Farre put up the rake, Nick ventured to speak to him. "Are you still willing to fish with me?"

Farre turned and, to Nick's relief, smiled. "Aye, stubborn lad that you are."

OVERGROWN AS THE property was, the path to the river led clear and straight to the brow of the hill, then wound down the hillside through the wood by a series of switchbacks. Farre was content to follow Nick at a distance, for their talk had set him thinking once again about a problem that appeared to have no solution. How was he to get the boy out among his own kind?

The boy was free of Haverly after ten years a virtual prisoner there, but there were lingering effects. A man couldn't abuse a young horse for years and expect him to be sweet-tempered for a new master. The old earl had worked hard to deaden the boy's sense of humor and to teach him to hold himself above everyone else. So here was the lad, starved for real companionship but knowing nothing about how to get it. And as Farre had guessed, that healthy young body was sending Nick nightly messages of its desires.

So what was Farre to do? The earl's pride would not allow him to mix easily with the sort of wenches who would be glad enough to instruct him, and he wasn't going to hire a mistress. Hired love spoke too much of the ways of the boy's dead parents. Rakehell and wanton, the pair had apparently been well-matched. Farre had heard enough of them from the other servants at Haverly to know how careless and indifferent they had been toward their only child.

Farre himself was fifty years old. Ten years before, he had buried the sweetest, sauciest woman to fill an apron or warm a bed, and he ached for her yet. In her lifetime she had not given him a son, but in dying she had set him drifting until he stopped at Haverly, and there a tall, thin gawk of a youth had taken to hiding in the stable loft when he could escape the big house. The boy had been a good tree-climber, an intense listener, and so perfect in sitting still that sometimes he had seemed made of stone. But Farre had coaxed him to the banks of the earl's stream and taught him to fish and then to ride and then to do with sureness dozens of things a man should be able to do. Lean and supple strength now characterized the man, and Farre believed his lordship was handy enough with his fives to hold his own against burlier opponents. But Nick still rated himself as if he were that lanky boy. And the books he read told him that kings and knights won the fair maid, not quiet gentlemen who fished and read.