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protected him against his mother's animosity and continual fault-finding.
The Nursery at the Castle had been a place filled with love, and, although he had not
realised it or expressed it in the same words as Ophelia had, that was what he had felt
when he visited Nanny in her small thatched cottage.
They drove on in silence for a short while. Then when the first houses of London
loomed ahead of them, the Earl turned in at two stone-flanked gates and drove up a
short drive.
In front of them was an attractive red-brick Queen Anne house with long windows
and exquisite stone carving over the front door.
"Is this where your Great-Aunt lives?" Ophelia asked in a nervous little voice.
"I want her to look after you and be quite sure that nothing will upset you while I
have certain things to do," the Earl replied.
As Jason ran to the horses' heads, he stepped from the Phaeton, then lifted Ophelia
down.
"Your Great-Aunt will think I look very strange without a bonnet," she said a little
nervously.
"You look lovely!" the Earl answered, and he could see the surprise in her eyes.
She did in fact look very attractive in one of the gowns he had sent her from London,
this one of pale periwinkle trimmed with broderie anglaise threaded through with
narrow velvet ribbons.
Because he knew that she was nervous, the Earl held her hand in his, and as the door
of the house was opened by an elderly Butler with white hair, they stepped into a cool
Hall which smelt of pot-pourri and bees'-wax.
"How are you, Dawes?" the Earl asked.
"Well, thank you, M'Lord. You'll find Her Ladyship in the Garden-Room."
The Earl hesitated for a moment, then said:
"I think, Dawes, that Miss Langstone, whom I have brought with me, would like to
tidy herself. Will you take her upstairs and ask your wife to look after her while I find
Her Ladyship?"
"I'll do that, M'Lord," Dawes said, and added in a fatherly manner to Ophelia:
"Will you follow me, Miss? I'll show you the way."
He went ahead of her up the stairs and Ophelia followed him, but she looked back at
the Earl with an expression in her eyes which made him want to go after her and hold
her close against him.
"She has been through a very harrowing experience," he told himself, "but she has
been extraordinarily brave about it."
He knew that if such a thing had happened to Lady Harriet or to any of his other
women-friends, they would have been fainting or screaming hysterically, and
exclaiming over and over again at what they had been through!
The Earl, knowing his way, walked across the Hall towards the Salon which looked
out over the back of the house onto a formal rose-garden.
He could see in the sunshine his Great-Aunt, wearing, as he expected, a wig the same
colour as her hair had been as a girl, and jewels worthy of an Eastern Potentate, without
which she never would move.
As soon as the Earl opened the door, three King ('harles spaniels raised their heads,
then sprang towards him with a noisy greeting of yelps and barks.
"Good-day, Aunt Adelaide," he said, advancing ncross the room.
"Rake!" his Great-Aunt exclaimed. "Is it really you
or am I seeing a ghost? I have not seen you for such a long time that I thought you
must have died!"
The Earl smiled.
"No, I am alive," he answered, "and I have come to ask a favour of you."
"I might have known you would not call without wanting something," the Countess
said tartly.
The Earl raised her heavily bejewelled hand to his lips, then kissed her cheek.
"No need to ask how you are, Aunt Adelaide," he said. "I have never seen you
looking better."
"Flattery will get you nowhere, young man," the Countess replied. "I am annoyed
with you, as I have every reason to be."
"I have been extremely busy," the Earl said, "and so you must forgive my neglect."
"I cannot think why I should do that."
"Only because you are the one person I can trust at this particular moment, which is
why I come to you as a supplicant."
"What is it this time?" the Countess asked in a resigned voice. "If it is more emigres, I
will not have them. The last you brought me were quite intolerable. They complained
about everything, and their children broke two of my best Crown Derby plates!"
It was an old story which the Earl had heard several times. He had in fact replaced
the plates, which was something his Great-Aunt conveniently forgot to remember.
"The French Revolution has been over for some time," he replied.
"But France now has that monster Napoleon!" his Great-Aunt snapped. "He might be
up to anything!"
"It is not the monster Napoleon I am concerned with at the moment," the Earl replied,
"but Circe Langstone."
"Circe Langstone?"
The Countess's voice rose several notes and her eyes were bright with curiosity.
She would have found growing old intolerable could she not keep abreast of all the
scandal and gossip of the Social World, and this, in some extraordinary way, she
contrived to do.
The Earl told her briefly what had happened, and as he did so he knew that the
Countess was enjoying every word of the story.
"I have heard about that woman," she said. "I hear, too, that you call her the 'Serpent
of Satan.' It is obviously an extremely apt description."
"That is what I thought," the Earl answered. "And now I am asking you if you will
look after Ophelia for a short time, while I make sure that this sort of thing does not [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]