Sylvester

by Georgette Heyer

  ‘I’ve changed my mind, John,’ Sylvester said. ‘I’ll go myself.’

  ‘Go yourself, your grace?’ repeated Keighley. ‘And may I make so bold as to ask why? If your grace don’t care to have me driving the grays, I hope your grace will pardon me if I was to say that it won’t be quite the first time I’ve done so! P’raps your grace would as lief drive them without me in the curricle at all?’

  This withering sarcasm had the effect of clearing the frown from Sylvester’s brow. ‘Exactly so!’ he said, his eyes quizzing his offended henchman. ‘I am going alone! Oh, no I’m not! I shall have the half-wit with me, shall I not? I hope he may not murder me, or anything of that nature! No, don’t argue with me! Miss Marlow believes you to be sinking into a confirmed consumption, and I will not have your death upon my conscience! Besides, what should I do without you? Where is my greatcoat?’

  Keighley turned an amazed and slightly reproachful gaze upon Phoebe. ‘Me? Lor’, ma’am, there’s nothing amiss with me barring a bit of a cold in my head! Now, if your grace will give me your card, I’ll be off! And no more funning, if you please, because if I don’t get started quick there’s no saying but what I’ll end in the ditch, and a nice set-out that would be!’

  ‘No, I am quite determined you shan’t go,’ Sylvester said. ‘Did you put my coat in my bedchamber? Where is my bedchamber? Direct me to it instantly, and be off to put the horses to! Good God! Ought I, perhaps, to do that too? Miss Marlow, do you think – ?’

  Keighley intervened before Phoebe was obliged to answer a question she suspected to be deliberately provocative. Reiterating his request to Sylvester to stop funning, he added a strongly worded protest against the impropriety of his chasing all over the country after a mere sawbones. Such unbecoming conduct, he said severely, would not do.

  ‘I’m the best judge of that,’ returned Sylvester. ‘Put the horses to, at once, if you please!’

  He strode to the door, but was arrested by Phoebe, who said suddenly: ‘Oh, pray – ! I don’t wish to charge you with an office you might think troublesome, but – but if you are going to Hungerford, would you be so very obliging as to try if you can procure for me a few ounces of muriate of ammonia, a pint of spirit of wine, and some spermaceti ointment?’

  Sylvester’s lip twitched, and he burst out laughing. ‘Oh, certainly, Miss Marlow! Are you sure there is nothing else you would wish me to purchase for you?’

  ‘No,’ she replied seriously. ‘Mrs Scaling has plenty of vinegar. And if you can’t come by the ointment, she will let me have some lard instead – only I can’t be sure it is perfectly free from salt. It is to put on Trusty’s foreleg,’ she explained, seeing that he was still much inclined to laugh. ‘It is badly grazed: I fancy poor True may have kicked him, when he was struggling to get out of the ditch.’

  ‘I’ll come and take a look at that, miss,’ said Keighley, his professional interest aroused. ‘Showing red, is it? It’ll have to be fomented before the ointment’s put on it.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I have been doing so, every hour, and True’s hock as well! I should be very much obliged to you, if you will look at it, Keighley, and tell me if you think I should apply a bran poultice tonight.’

  ‘Render Miss Marlow all the assistance you can, John, but first put the grays to!’ interrupted Sylvester. ‘See to it that fires are lit in our rooms, bespeak dinner, and a private parlour – no, I expect there isn’t one in so small a house: you had better tell the landlady I’ll hire this room – don’t disturb Mr Orde, and have everything ready for a bowl of punch as soon as I return. And don’t let Miss Marlow keep you out in the draughty stable too long!’

  On this Parthian shot he departed, closely followed by Keighley, who did not cease to expostulate with him until he was actually preparing to mount into the curricle.

  ‘Be damned to you, John, no!’ he said. ‘You will stay here, and nurse your cold. Why didn’t you tell me you were out of sorts, you stupid fellow? I could have taken Swale with me, and left you to follow in the chaise.’

  He sounded a little contrite, which would have surprised Keighley had he not been so much revolted by the thought of relinquishing his post to Swale that he never noticed Sylvester’s unusual solicitude. By the time he could trust himself to repudiate the disgraceful suggestion in anything but terms quite unsuited to his position, Sylvester had swung himself up into the curricle, and set his pair in motion. Beside him, Will Scaling, a shambling and overgrown youth of somewhat vacuous amiability, grinned hugely, and sat back with all the air of one prepared to enjoy a high treat.

  Nine

  It was nearly eight o’clock before Sylvester returned to the Blue Boar, and for a full hour Phoebe had been picturing just such an accident as had befallen Tom, and wishing that she had not sent him forth on his errand. When he did at last arrive he took her by surprise, for the snow muffled the sound of the horses’ hooves, and he drove his curricle straight into the yard, and came into the house through the back-door. She heard a quick stride in the passage, and looked up to see him standing in the doorway of the coffee-room. He had not stayed to put off his long driving-coat, which was very wet, and had snow still clinging to its many shoulder-capes. She started up, exclaiming: ‘Oh, you are safely back! I have been in such a fidget, fearing you had met with an accident! Have you brought the doctor, sir?’

  ‘Oh, yes, he is here – or will be in, a few minutes. I came ahead. Is there a fire in your bedchamber, Miss Marlow?’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘Then may I suggest that you retire there until the surgeon has departed? I haven’t mentioned your presence here to him, for although your brother and sister story may do well enough for the landlady, it is quite possible, you know, that a doctor living at Hungerford might recognise one or other of you. You will agree that the fewer people to get wind of this escapade of yours the better.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think he would know either of us,’ she replied, with what he considered to be quite unbecoming sangfroid. ‘However, I daresay you are right, sir. Only, if I am not to see the doctor, will you take him up to Tom, if you please, and hear what he thinks we should do for him?’

  ‘I’ve told Keighley to do so. He knows much more about such matters than I do. Moreover, I want to put off these wet clothes. Have you dined?’

  ‘Well, no,’ she owned. ‘Though I ate a slice of bread-and-butter just after you went away.’

  ‘Good God! Why didn’t you order dinner when you wished for it?’ he said, rather impatiently.

  ‘Because you bespoke it for when you should return. Mrs Scaling has only one daughter to help her, you know, and she couldn’t dress two dinners. In fact, she has been in a grand fuss ever since she discovered who you are, because, of course, she is not at all in the habit of entertaining dukes.’

  ‘I hope that doesn’t mean that we shall get a bad dinner.’

  ‘Oh, no on the contrary! She means to feed you in the most lavish way!’ Phoebe assured him.

  He smiled. ‘I’m happy to know it: I could eat an ox whole! Stay in this room until you hear Keighley take the surgeon upstairs, and then slip away to your own. I suppose I must, in common charity, give the man a glass of punch before he sets out for Hungerford again, but I’ll get rid of him as soon as I can.’ He nodded to her, and went away, leaving her with her mind divided between resentment at his cool assumption of authority and relief that some at least of her burden of responsibility had been lifted from her shoulders.

  When the surgeon presently left Tom, she ventured to go and tap on the door of the best bedroom. Tom bade her come in, and she entered to find him sitting up in bed, much restored by his long sleep, but fretting a good deal over her predicament, his own helplessness, and the condition of his father’s horses. She was able to give him a comfortable account of the horses; as for herself, she said that since they could scarcely have hoped to reach Reading she was quite as well off
at the Blue Boar as she would have been at an inn in Newbury.

  ‘Yes, but the Duke!’ Tom objected. ‘I must say, there was never anything more awkward! Not but what I’m devilish obliged to him. Still – !’

  ‘Oh, well!’ said Phoebe. ‘We must just make the best of him! And his groom, you know, is a most excellent person. He put the poultice on Trusty’s fore, and he says if we keep the wound pliant with spermaceti ointment until it is perfectly healed, and then dress it with James’s blister, he thinks there will be no blemish at all.’

  ‘Lord, I hope he may be right!’ Tom said devoutly.

  ‘Oh, yes, I am persuaded he is!’ She then bethought her that the horses had not been the only sufferers in the spill, and conscientiously enquired after Tom’s broken fibula.

  He grinned his appreciation of this palpable afterthought, but replied that the surgeon had not meddled with Keighley’s handiwork, beyond applying a lotion to the inflamed surface, and bandaging the leg to a fresh and less makeshift splint. ‘But the devil of it is that he says I must be abed for at least a week. And even then I shall be in no case to drive you to London. Lord, I hadn’t thought I was such a clunch as to overturn like that! I am as sorry as could be, but that’s no use! What are we to do?’

  ‘Well, we can’t do anything at present,’ she answered. ‘It is still snowing, you know, and I shouldn’t wonder at it if we were to find ourselves beleaguered by the morning.’

  ‘But what about the Duke?’

  She considered the Duke. ‘Oh, well, at least I’m not afraid of him! And I must own that although I cannot approve of his conduct – he seems to think he can have anything he wants, you know! – he has made us excessively comfortable. Only fancy, Tom! I have a fire in my bedchamber! A thing Mama never allowed at home, except when I have been ill! Then he said he must have a private parlour, and would hire the coffee-room, I daresay not so much as considering whether it might not be inconvenient for Mrs Scaling to give it to him – and of course she didn’t dare say a word, because she is so much dazzled by his being a duke that she would give up the whole house to him if he should take it into his head to wish for it.’

  ‘I expect he will pay her handsomely – and who would be coming here on such a night?’ said Tom. ‘Are you going to sit down to dinner with him? Shall you find it awkward?’

  ‘Well, I daresay it may be a trifle awkward,’ she acknowledged. ‘Particularly if he should ask me why I am on my way to London. However, he may not do so, because he will very likely still be in a miff with me.’

  ‘In a miff with you? Why?’ demanded Tom. ‘He didn’t seem to me as though he cared a groat for your having run away!’

  ‘Oh, no! Only we quarrelled, you see. Would you believe it? He had the intention of sending poor Keighley to fetch the surgeon! It put me in such a passion that there was no bearing it, and – well, we came to cuffs! But he did go himself, in the end, so I don’t regret it. In fact,’ she added reflectively, ‘I am glad of it, because I was feeling miserably shy before I quarrelled with him, and there is nothing like quarrelling with a person to set one at one’s ease!’

  Unable to take this philosophic view of the matter, Tom said, in a shocked voice: ‘Do you mean to tell me you sent him out just to fetch the surgeon for me?’

  ‘Yes, why not?’ said Phoebe.

  ‘Well, my God, if that’s not the outside of enough! As though he had been anybody! You are the most outrageous girl, Phoebe! I shouldn’t think he would ever wish to offer for you after such treatment as that!’

  ‘Well, what a good thing that would be! Not that I think he ever did wish to offer for me. It is the strangest business! I wonder why he came to Austerby?’

  Speculation on this point was interrupted by the entrance of Keighley, bearing a heavily laden tray. Neither his injury nor his subsequent potations having impaired Tom’s appetite, he temporarily lost interest in any other problem than what might be concealed beneath the several covers on the tray. Keighley, setting the whole down on the table by the bed, asked him in a fatherly way if he was feeling peckish; and upon being assured by Tom that he was, smiled benevolently at him, and said: ‘That’s the barber! Now, you keep still, sir, and leave me to fix you up so as you can manage! As for you, miss, the covers are set downstairs, and his grace is waiting for you.’

  Dismissed in this kind but firm manner Phoebe withdrew, promising in response to a somewhat peremptory command from Tom to return to him as soon as she should have dined. Tom had suddenly been attacked by qualms. Phoebe was at once too innocent and too intimate with him to see anything equivocal in her position; he was fully alive to its impropriety, and he felt that he ought to keep her under his eye. Sylvester had certainly seemed to him to be a very good sort of a man, but he did not know him, after all: he might be a hardened rake, and if that were so a very uncomfortable time Phoebe would have of it, alone with him in the coffee-room, while her supposed protector lay tied by the leg in the best bedroom.

  Had he but known it, Sylvester was not feeling at all amorous. He was tired, hungry, and in a fair way to regretting the impulse which had made him stop at the Blue Boar. To assist in an elopement was conduct quite unbecoming his position; moreover, it would lay him open to censure, which would not be easier to bear because it was justified. He was frowning down into the fire when Phoebe came into the room, and although he looked up at her entrance the frown did not immediately leave his brow.

  She read in it condemnation of her attire, for she was still wearing her stuff travelling dress. He, on the other hand, had changed his buckskins and frockcoat for pantaloons and a longtailed coat of fine blue cloth, and had arranged a fresh necktie in intricate folds about his throat. It was morning dress, but it made her feel dowdy. To her vexation she found herself explaining that she had not changed her own dress because she would be obliged to go out again to the stable.

  He had not noticed what she was wearing, and he replied in the light, indifferent tone which always set up her back: ‘My dear Miss Marlow, there is no occasion to change your dress that I know of – and none for you to visit the stable again tonight, let me add!’

  ‘I must be satisfied that Trusty has not contrived to rid himself of his poultice,’ she said firmly. ‘I have very little faith in Will Scaling.’

  ‘You may have complete faith in Keighley.’

  She made no reply to this, for while she felt that Keighley, who was developing a cough, ought not to leave the house, she was reluctant to reopen a quarrel just as she was about to sit down to dinner with Sylvester. She glanced uncertainly at him, and saw that the frown had yielded to a look of slight amusement. Having no idea that her countenance was a tolerably exact mirror for her thoughts, or that he had correctly interpreted the changes of expression that flitted across it, she was surprised, and looked enquiringly at him, her head a little tilted to one side.

  She put him in mind of some small, brown bird. He laughed, and said: ‘You look like – a sparrow! Yes, I know just what you are wondering whether or not to say. As you wish, Miss Marlow: I will cast an eye over the horses before I go to bed, and if I find that that singularly inappropriately named horse has eaten his poultice I will engage to supply him with a fresh one!’

  ‘Do you know how to mix a bran poultice?’ she asked sceptically.

  ‘Better than you, I daresay. No, I don’t, in general, apply them myself, but I hold it to be an excellent maxim that every man should know more than his grooms, and be as well able to deal with whatever need may arise in his stables. When I was a boy the farrier was one of my closest friends!’

  ‘Do you have your own farrier?’ she asked, diverted. ‘My father does not, and it is something I have always wished for! But you will not mix a poultice in those clothes!’

  ‘Rather than incur your displeasure I will even do that!’ he assured her. ‘It will expose me to Keighley’s displeasure, of course, but I shan’t regard
that. Which puts me in mind of something I have to tell you. I find that the grooms’ quarters here are not at all what Keighley is accustomed to: there is, in fact, only the room in which the ostler sleeps and that, being above that very ill-built stable, is extremely cold. I know you will agree that that will not do, and I hope you won’t dislike the arrangement I have made, which is that the daughter of the house is to give up her chamber to Keighley, and herself sleep on a trestlebed in your room.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t she sleep in her mother’s room?’ objected Phoebe, by no means pleased with this further example of Sylvester’s high-handed ways.

  ‘There is not space enough,’ said Sylvester.

  ‘Or Keighley might share Will Scaling’s room?’

  ‘He would be afraid to.’

  ‘Nonsense! The poor boy is perfectly harmless!’

  ‘Keighley has the greatest dislike of half-wits.’

  ‘Then why don’t you let him set up a trestle-bed in your room?’ she demanded.

  ‘Because I should be very likely to catch his cold,’ explained Sylvester.

  She sniffed, but appeared to find this answer reasonable, for she said no more. A welcome interruption was provided by the arrival upon the scene of Miss Alice Scaling, panting under the load of a tray piled high with covered dishes. She was a strapping girl, with apple-red cheeks, and a wide grin, and when she had dumped the tray down on the sideboard she paused a moment to fetch her breath before bobbing a curtsey to Sylvester, and reciting: ‘Mother’s compliments, and there’s chickens, and rabbit-stew, and a casserole of rice with the giblets, and curd pudding, and apple fritters, and please to say if your honour would fancy the end of the mutton-pie Mother and me and Will had to our dinner.’ A hissing admonition from the passage caused her to amend this speech. ‘Please to say if your grace would fancy it! There’s a tidy bit of it left, and it’s good,’ she added confidentially.

  ‘Thank you, I am sure it is,’ he replied. ‘I hardly think we shall need it, however.’