Amanda Scott (11 page)

The door opened at once, and Borland stood there, his sharp gaze flying from Manningford to Nell, whereupon his eyes widened and he looked back in dismay at Manningford. “Master Brandon,” he protested in his raspy voice, “you cannot—”

“I can, Borland, so it is of no use to tell me that I cannot. I have honored my father’s wishes for eight-and-twenty years, but that was before he demanded more than I can give. I quite understand that the wretched novel must be written—oh, don’t look so no-account,” he added when the manservant gasped and stared wretchedly at Nell. “She knows the whole of it, and you may tell him for me that if he does not agree at once to see the pair of us, I shall shout the truth from the rooftops of Bath. It is naught to me if people know his secret. Certainly no one will think for a minute that I had a hand in it, so if they laugh, they will laugh only at him.”

There was a heavy silence that lasted a full minute before Borland turned and looked back into the bedchamber, his expression as he did so showing clearly that he would not have been surprised to discover that his master had suffered another seizure and died on the spot. What he saw apparently startled him nearly as much, however, for he turned back with a look of amazement on his face and said, “Bring her in, Master Brandon.”

“What, at once?”

The response came from within the room, in a gruff but surprisingly firm voice. “Aye, you damned, self-centered knave, at once! I can scarcely be expected to change my attire for the occasion, but damme, I’m still your father, and if you try such threats with me again, I’ll see you suffer for it.”

Exchanging a speaking look with Borland, Manningford turned and gestured to Nell.

She arose, stepped forward, and without a thought put her hand in his, not knowing whether she sought to give or take comfort, certain only that she was glad to find his hand, warm and strong, gripping hers.

He drew her forward, and Borland stepped aside uncertainly to allow the pair of them to enter. “Shall I come in, Master Brandon, or …”

“Wait here,” Manningford said quietly, and shut the door, turning toward the man in the bed, who had leaned forward, away from the many pillows against which he had been propped, his expression showing both impatience and alarm. Manningford said hastily, “Father, this is Miss Bradbourne. She—”

“Good God, you’re Flavia Bradbourne’s niece, ain’t you?” Sir Mortimer demanded harshly, falling against his pillows again but not taking his gaze from her.

“I am her grand-niece, sir,” Nell replied, making her curtsy. Noting his pallor and thinking he must be in pain, she added gently, “I apologize for disturbing you, but Mr. Manningford believed the matter was of some urgency to you.”

“It is, it is! But never mind about that. Tell me about Flavia. Damme, but she must be an old woman by now!”

“She’d not thank you for calling her so,” Nell said with a grin. “More likely, she’d threaten to dust you with her cane.”

“Hasn’t changed then,” he said with satisfaction. “She can give me a few years, of course, though you mightn’t think it to look at me now. Little scrap of a thing, she was, like yourself, though her hair was gold as a guinea. A beauty, a real beauty.”

Manningford said, “Miss Bradbourne has certain claims to beauty, too, sir, if I might be so bold as to say so.”

“Oh, certainly, certainly. No need to take offense!”

Nell’s eyes twinkled. “I thank you for the compliment, both of you, but I can never claim to be such a beauty as Great-aunt Flavia was in her day. Why, she was a nonpareil.”

Sir Mortimer said, “I’ll not contradict you, Miss Bradbourne.” He fell silent for a moment, then added, “Do I take it that my idiot son thinks you can write a novel?”

Nell was dismayed but replied calmly, “Oh, no, sir, Mr. Manningford had it in mind only that I should act as your scribe, because no one can read his hand. You see, I need the—” Remembering that he knew her great-aunt gave her pause, but she gathered herself and finished firmly, “I need the money.”

“So Flavia has run herself to a standstill, has she? Can’t say it surprises me to hear it. Extravagant little puss.”

“She did not,” Nell said quickly. “That is, it was not extravagance so much as the fact that her jointure remained the same when prices increased. It is really too bad.”

Sir Mortimer shrugged, and for the first time she was able to see that his ability to move had been impaired, for only his left shoulder went up. She noticed, too, that his face appeared to sag a little on the right side, and that his right eye seemed somehow different from his left.

“Will you allow me to assist you, sir?”

“I seem to have no choice,” he said grimly, glancing at his son, but his expression, in Nell’s opinion, showed respect rather than vexation, though his voice was still gruff as he added, “Don’t you think to go haring off now, young man. This is your doing, and you’ll stay to see it through, damme if you won’t!”

“I will,” Manningford said, but he said it to Nell.

F
OR A FORTNIGHT THEIR PLAN
succeeded well enough, the only occurrence to upset Nell’s composure during that time being the arrival of a letter from her father’s cousin, who chose to treat her flight with dignity. Suggesting that, as a Bradbourne, she ought to have traveled post rather than by the common stage, Jarvis wrote that he had no objection to her journey and added that she ought to have applied to him for money rather than be obligated to Lady Flavia. But since he enclosed a draft on a Bath bank (for which, as an enclosure, she was obliged to pay sixpence), though she might wish he had not guessed so quickly where she was, the most she could complain of in his letter was that good manners compelled her to write and thank him for it.

In Royal Crescent, Manningford had taken the reins more firmly in hand than anyone had expected him to do, and Nell believed he was rather enjoying the experience. Not only had he found he could deal very well with his father’s man of affairs (who was delighted to be able to do business face-to-face rather than by post, as had been his habit for many years), but he had succeeded all by himself in convincing the Hammersmyths, his father’s late butler and housekeeper, to return.

Quarter-day had passed, but he had seemed to take no notice of it, other than to send Max down to Westerleigh to his brother, with a recommendation to see what sort of a gun dog he might make. His mood remained light, and if he seemed to be busy in his father’s study whenever Nell sat with Sir Mortimer, and ready to escort her to her chair when they had finished, she certainly had no objection to make to that. She liked him and had rapidly come to accept him as a friend, though she still found it disconcerting that he frequently understood her thoughts before she spoke them aloud.

For the first few days, until Mr. Lasenby departed in response to a curt summons from his grandfather, a maidservant sat on the padded bench outside the bedchamber door, but with Lasenby gone, Nell had deemed her presence there unnecessary and suggested she find other duties. By the time Lasenby returned, complaining of his grandfather’s despotism (but ruefully admitting that he had forgotten to visit Miss Wembly in London prior to her family’s departure for the south coast), no one thought about asking the maid to resume her place on the landing.

Nell found it hard to believe that Sir Mortimer had been a determined recluse for so many years, for he seemed, now that he had accepted her visits, to look forward to them. Sadly, by the end of the second week, she had begun to notice that rather than gaining strength, he was weakening, and that he was simply too ill to work at the pace that would see his book finished when the publisher expected it to be. Not only was he not accustomed to telling his tales aloud but he frequently had difficulty thinking of the words he wanted to use, and even more difficulty keeping track of his story. She thought the result worse than any tale she had ever read and was certain that even she, with her lack of experience, could have done a better job of writing it.

She had been going early each morning to the Royal Crescent and returning late in the afternoon to Laura Place, and as far as either she or Lady Flavia could tell, no one suspected that she was doing anything out of the way. Thus, she would have been content to continue as they were, hoping that with Sir Mortimer’s experience, he would somehow manage to create gold out of dross, but suddenly one afternoon, he lost what little patience he had.

“Damme, but I don’t know what’s come over me,” he muttered as he fumbled for a word. “That’s the fourth time in less than a quarter-hour that I have lost the thread! This will not do, Miss Bradbourne. It won’t do at all.”

“I wish you would call me Nell, sir,” she told him for what she thought must be the hundredth time.

“’T’ain’t proper,” he muttered, clearly still searching his mind for the word he wanted. “Pretty young woman like you oughtn’t to be spending all her time with an old man, wearing her fingers to the bone with nonsensical scribbling. Ought to be going about to parties and the like.”

“Well, I cannot do that, in any event,” she reminded him. “I am in mourning, as you know full well.”

“Must be nearly over and done b’ now,” he retorted. “Royal family’s nigh well given up mourning the Queen, after all, and Bradbourne did himself in about the same time, did he not?”

“Just afterward,” she said coolly, wondering how this old man, cooped up as he was on the top floor of a house in Bath, could know so much of what went on elsewhere in the world.

“Fool thing to do, to kill himself.” He stirred in obvious discomfort, and Borland, who had been sitting out of the way in a chair by the window, got up at once and moved to straighten his pillows. Sir Mortimer ignored him. “Why did he do it?”

Nell swallowed the emotions stirred by his question, determined to maintain her composure. She had quickly learned that it did her no good to reveal her sensibilities to this man, that it was better to give as good as she got. She said flatly, “I should prefer not to discuss that subject, if you please.”

“Well, I don’t please. I want to know what would drive a seemingly robust man to blow his brains out.”

Her expression wooden, she said, “He found that he had been ruined through his own foolishness, sir, and he was disappointed in his son. And now, if you please—”

“Disappointed, was he? Can’t blame him for that when his son’s a damned young scoundrel who didn’t even bother to attend his funeral. On the Continent, by what I hear, and likely to remain.” He shifted painfully, adding, “In my day, that would have meant pistols at dawn as the cause, but these mealy-mouthed times, it can’t have been any such thing. Only such affair I’ve heard about in years was some loose fish shot right here in Bath, and that was no affair of honor. Take that damned stuff away, Borland!” This last was in reference to the glass the manservant was just then attempting to press to his master’s lips.

Borland said gently, “The doctor insists you take your tonic regularly, sir, so it won’t do to be forgetting it.” He tilted the glass, and since he had prudently placed his large hand behind Sir Mortimer’s head to steady it, the old man could not move away and was compelled to drink the stuff. He did so, screwing up his face at the taste of it.

Grateful for the timely respite, Nell struggled to compose herself and wondered how he could know so much. Deducing that his admittedly large correspondence must provide the bulk of his information, and hoping he would say no more to her if he thought she was reading, she began to skim through the material she had taken down that day, noting only that the work was unimpressive, both in quantity and in quality. When Borland moved back to his seat by the window, she looked up again to find the old man’s eyes quizzing her, and was able now to perceive in them pain of a quite different nature.

“Pretty awful stuff, ain’t it?” he said miserably.

She was silent for a moment, then said, “You know, sir, I think perhaps Elizabeth ought not to run away from school. One reads that sort of thing so frequently that one begins to wonder if there are any young ladies still residing in their boarding schools. And to hire herself out as an abigail to a lady meaning to depart at once for a distant, exotic country seems a trifle implausible, too. Perhaps if she were older from the outset and simply left school because her time had come to do so—”

“Now, damme, Miss Bradbourne, don’t you get to thinking you know more about writing this stuff than I do,” he growled. “Been at it thirty years and more, don’t you know.”

“Whatever made you begin, sir?” Nell asked, adding quickly lest he take offense, “I mean, ’tis not an occupation one expects to attract a gentleman.” She managed to avoid adding, “like yourself,” but she saw from his expression that he knew what she was thinking. She had seen that same expression on Manningford’s face more than once, and found it just as disconcerting now.

Sir Mortimer had no objection to answering her question. “Shortly before Brandon was born, two friends and I were riding through a village in the ’Shires one day—too hot for hunting, it was—and we chanced to encounter some villagers in a market square, squabbling over a broken-down gig. We rode on, of course—no concern of ours—but soon found ourselves proposing possible grounds for the dispute. We ended by deciding that each of us should write a tale, just for a lark, including such events as we might imagine to have led up to it. The exercise amused me more than I expected, and my little fantasy developed into a work called
Cymbeline Sheridan
. I expect you have heard of it.”

“Goodness,” Nell said, “of course I have heard of it! Why, everyone has, for I daresay it is as much a classic in its own way as
The Monk
, and I know for a fact that it was my mother’s favorite book. Did you really write it, sir?”

“Well, of course I did,” he retorted testily, “or I should not say so. Never thought anything would come of it, but I sent it to John Murray, a London publisher, when my friends dared me to do so, and then, after my poor wife died and I found I didn’t care at all for the company of others, I turned back to the writing instead. Never wanted my name bandied about, of course, and since the common taste runs to the likes of Ann Radcliffe and Madame d’Arblay—Fanny Burney, she was then—I chose to be an anonymous Gentlewoman of Quality.”