“Well, of course not,” said Mrs. Warrender. “You know as well as I do that your father was a fool at cards.”
“Yes,” agreed Kate. “Chris and I used to beat him when we played for counters. He stopped playing soon enough. Said the luck was always against him.”
“It always, was. But, Kate, what’s all this about Lord Hawth?”
“I was telling you. I met his three children on the path by the park wall. You won’t believe it, mamma. They had actually found the secret tunnel, the one Chris and I used to look for. I helped them get back in.” She laughed. “Lord, it was funny. Mind you, I didn’t think so at the time. To tell truth, I was taken all aback. There we were, bouncing out into his study, and there he was waiting for us, like … like—” she groped for a description—“like a cross between the devil and Lord Byron.”
“Good gracious! So’ what did you do?”
“Acted the man for all I was worth. Well, I was in good form. The children had taken me at face value, bless their little hearts. Introduced me as Kit Warrender. No problem. He’s horrid to them, mamma!”
“Kit Warrender, you said?”
“It all happened so fast. I didn’t have time to think.”
“Did he know?”
“About poor Chris? Yes. I’m afraid I said—” She smiled ruefully down at her mother. “I suggested I was in the same boat as his children.”
“Kate Warrender!” Her mother drew herself up to her full five feet, reminding her daughter of nothing more than an angry kitten. “You never suggested you were one of poor papa’s—” She stopped, blushing crimson.
“Byblows. That’s just what I did do. Or, no, come to think of it, not one of papa’s. I said you were my cousin. One of grandfather’s lot, I suppose. Well: two of a kind, weren’t they, and it’s the greatest comfort that you admit it. And I will say,” thoughtfully, “it does help to make my visits to the Bell possible. There seem to be so many of them. Tall young men with the Warrender nose. There must be a few girls somewhere, you’d think, but one doesn’t seem to see them.”
“Oh, Kate, I was such a failure as a wife.”
“Nothing of the kind. Let’s face it just this once, you and I. Papa was a disaster as a husband. And not much better as a father. It’s a pity he left us with only my hundred a year between us and the poorhouse, but aside from that I simply cannot bring myself to mourn for him, and I don’t see why you should any more than you think plain decent. You know as well as I do how much happier this house is now he’s gone.”
His widow nodded mutely, drying her eyes with the handkerchief her daughter had considerately left in her hand. “If only we could stay here,” she said.
“And that we can’t,” said Kate. “Not a minute after you’ve handed the keys to George Warren and sworn whatever form of words he and his precious man of business have thought up. And that is why you are going to receive Lord Hawth tomorrow, mamma dear.”
“You keep coming back to Lord Hawth.”
“And his children. Don’t forget the three byblows, mamma, and how unkind he is to them. He’s out of all patience because their mother has run off with the tutor and left them on his hands. I doubt he’d have minded so much if she’d taken them with her. She sounds a dead bore of a woman to me. And an idiot. Fancy giving up Lord Hawth for the tutor. She has to be about in the head. But they’re a nice lot of children. I liked them. Full of pluck. You’ll dote on them, I’m sure.”
“I?”
“Yes, ma’am. He’s coming tomorrow to ask if you and I will come to Hawth Hall as housekeeper and governess.”
“What?” It brought Mrs. Warrender to her feet, blue eyes sparkling. “He’s doing what, Kate Warrender?”
“You heard me.” From her place of vantage by the fire, Kate smiled lovingly down at her mother. “Hawth didn’t think you’d be best pleased.”
“Pleased! Housekeeper at Hawth Hall. Never!” And then, in explanation,. “The Warrenders …”
“ ‘Came over with the Conqueror.’ That’s what Hawth said. While the Chyngfords are nothing but eighteenth-century muck. But, think a moment. What good has being a Warrender ever done you? Besides, you’re not, only by marriage. If I don’t object to going as governess, why should you mind being housekeeper? At least,” fiercely, “it gets us away from here. From Cousin George.”
“Yes?” She thought for a moment. “Kate, dear, you can’t have considered. Governess! I’d always hoped—in the end—a suitable marriage. You know, governesses don’t.”
“I shan’t marry. You must know I’ve seen too much of it. Besides, who should I marry? Who do I know? Father kept us cooped up … like … like a henhouse. And now Cousin George’ offers to introduce me to his friends—to a parcel of hawking, spitting Yankees like himself.” She laughed angrily. “I collect he said that, just in case I had any idea of becoming Mrs. Warren. Lord—” the amusement was back in her voice. “Do you think he is married? Will turn up with a little dab of an American wife and expect us to introduce her into society?”
“I’m sure he’s not. He would have mentioned it. And, Kate, dear, I had wondered …”
“If I might choose to change Warrender to Warren? What an incorrigible romantic you are! But, I thank you, no. I would rather earn my bread and scrape at Hawth Hall.”
“Kate?”
“Yes?”
“You haven’t … you can’t have…. you don’t imagine …”
“Darling mamma,” patiently. “What in the world?”
Her mother made a great effort. “Dearest, you haven’t by any chance formed a tendre for Lord Hawth?”
“What?” Kate surprised and relieved her mother by bursting into an unladylike fit of laughter. Then, sobering up with an effort: “Don’t fret. I told Lord Hawth I wouldn’t marry him if he was the last man in the world.”
“Kate!”
“He thinks I’ve formed a secret attachment. A pity, really. He offered to bet I’d set my cap at him. Stupid of me. I should have taken him: in sovereigns. Lots of them.” She brightened. “Perhaps I’ll pay him another visit, like this, and take his bet.”
“Kate!” Her mother wailed again.
“Quite right, mamma. Not the action of a gentleman, certainly not a Warrender, even one from the wrong side of the blanket. Besides, if he’s going to employ me as Kate, I think he’d better see no more of young Kit.” She crossed the room to study herself in a gilt-framed looking glass. “What shall we do to make me look different tomorrow? These short crops are the devil.”
“Kate!”
“Kit, if you please: I am having my last fling, mamma, before I dwindle into a governess. And here, in good time, comes Chilver with the burgundy. What happened to you, Chilver? Don’t tell me you lost yourself in the cellar.”
“No, Miss Kate.” The butler was looking as ruffled as his training would permit. “I was delayed. There was a person came to the back door asking questions. About you, Miss Kate.”
“Questions?”
“If you’d had a guest here. A Mr. Kit Warrender. He wanted to speak to him. I said, yes, a gentleman had called, for a moment, but was gone. I said I did not know where he lived. I let it be seen that it was a matter I did not wish to discuss.” Chilver was at his most stately, as he remembered the well-administered set-down. Then, human again: “I hope I did right, miss?”
“Quite right, Chilver. Thank you. But—what kind of a person? A servant, do you think? From the hall, maybe?”
“Oh, no, miss.” Surprised. “Quite a rough fellow it was. A stranger. From London, I’d think, by his talk, or maybe even from farther north. Miss—” he had moved a mahogany wine table to her elbow and now poured wine into her glass—“You didn’t come through the long meadow tonight?
“No.” She sipped, smiled her approval, and looked up at him thoughtfully. “I was—advised not to.”
“By whom, if I may ask?”
“I think, best not.” They were old friends, and the refusal held a note of apol
ogy. “Smugglers, I thought. I said we needed some tea. You might let me know if it comes, Chilver.”
“It has,” said Chilver. “He brought it. The stranger.”
“Ah.” It was a sigh of relief. “Then that’s all right.”
“Well, is it?” He had been debating whether to tell her this. “It’s not the tea we generally have. That had come earlier in the evening. And before we expected it, too.”
“Oh?” She thought about it for a moment, then went off at an apparent tangent. “The lights were on as usual at the Tidemills. You’ve not heard of more trouble there?”
“Not to say trouble, miss. Not more than usual, but they’re not happy. I’d be lying if I said they were. Well, you know how it is, as well as anyone, Better than most. Times are hard, thanks to Boney. And those non-importing Americans. Prices high, wages bad. It was one thing, when they had something to hope for down at the Tidemills. You’d be surprised what expectations was built on Mr. Chris, and then on you after he died. But Lord Hawth, he’s another story. It was a bad day for the district when poor Mr. Warrender lost the mill to him. And he with no more sense than to go bullying down with talk of mass dismissals if trade don’t look up.”
“He’s never done that?”
“Today.”
“Stupid, of him.” And then, thoughtfully. “And the odd thing is, he’s many things … a bully, oh, yes, but—stupid? I’d not have said so.” She smiled at the butler. “Thank you for telling me, Chilver. We are expecting a call from Lord Hawth tomorrow. On my mother and Miss Warrender, of course. If he should happen to ask after the young kinsman who called here tonight, you will tell him he has left.”
“Yes, miss.” If Chilver was bursting with curiosity, he hid it well behind his impassive, butler’s face.
“Lord, this is going to be a nuisance!” Kate was sitting at her mother’s dressing table next morning while Mrs. Warrender enjoyed the luxury of breakfast in bed.
“What are you doing?”
“Plaiting my nut-brown hair. Wasn’t it a good thing I saved it! There, mamma!” She turned round triumphantly. “Don’t I look the most respectable Miss Trimmer that ever dragoned it in a ducal household?”
“Good God!” Mrs. Warrender looked at her daughter with undisguised horror. “Kate, you can’t!”
“Oh, can’t I!” She shook her head without disturbing the plaits she had pinned to hide every curl of her fashionable Brutus cut. “Admit it’s a transformation!” Her mother groaned. “And only fancy my having kept such a dowd of a dress! I think I must have been ashamed even to give it away. This dun colour was all the rage Walcheren year, as I remember, and, mamma, just look at the quiz of a train. I do hope Lord Hawth is knowledgeable enough to know what a figure of fun I am.”
“He’ll know all right,” wailed her mother.
“That’s what I think. Now, I must go and warn the servants, or one of them is bound to betray me with a fit of the whoops.”
“But, dearest, must you?”
“Indeed, I must. It’s the children I’m afraid of. My lord was bosky enough to be no danger, but they are a sharp little set. Lucky for me they only saw me for a moment-in the full light, and then they were well and truly minding their formidable papa. Besides, think a little. Now you agree we want to go to the hall—and I am so glad you do!” She crossed the room to give her mother an encouraging kiss across the breakfast tray. “We must apply our minds to getting the places. No use thinking we can make a dragon of you, love, so we must just do the best we can with me.”
“Best!” moaned her mother.
“Let’s hope that Lord Hawth has not already decided to cry off,” said Kate, removing the breakfast tray and handing her mother the latest issue of La Belle Assembiée. “But whatever else he is, I take him for a man of his word.”
Lord Hawth had indeed suffered from a good many regrets as he let his valet help him into impeccable morning dress instead of his usual country dress of riding coat and buckskins. “Trousers?” he considered his man’s offering thoughtfully. “Do you think the old tartar will take me for a blood-red revolutionary? Well, maybe so much the better. The line is the Brummel look, I think. Quiet elegance, and the very best linen.”
“Yes, my lord. But, if I may say so, your figure quite outshines poor Mr. Brummel’s.”
“Go to hell,” said his lordship.
The carriage was stuffy. Morning calls were the devil. But his breakfast steak had been burned again, and Parsons had said something anxious about the children not eating their bread and water. He resigned himself to the interminable jouncing of the carriage ride. No use spoiling everything by swaggering in to call on the old dragon like a young blood, hot and sweating from driving his own curricle.
At Warren House he was obviously expected. The park, as he drove through it, had shown clear signs of neglect and of financial stringency: a wall collapsing here, a dead tree lying there and the shaws full of shaggy undergrowth. At the house itself it was a different story. Here, too, his quick, landlord’s eye saw shabby paint and neglected pointing round the Tudor windows, but there was nothing shabby about the servants who received him. Could Parsons have held his own with the stately butler who was now conducting him to Mrs. Warrender’s apartments? He wished his young friend of last night might be there, so they could have a bet on it.
But there were only two ladies in the comfortable, sunlit room into which the butler ushered him, and, looking at them, he wondered if he could have made some kind of amazing mistake. But, no, there could be no doubt about it. The tiny one in the heavy mournings who was smiling at him, and blushing, and holding out a timid hand must be Mrs. Warrender. He remembered, now, with a silent curse, something sardonically gleaming in his companion’s eye last night when he had described Mrs. Warrender as an old battleaxe. Well, no wonder. She did not look capable of scaring a kitten.
The daughter was something else again. Tall and handsomely built, she might, he thought, have been quite good-looking if she had made the slightest push at it, but her tightly braided hair and dun-coloured, outmoded dress made her almost a figure of fun. No wonder young Kit had looked so quizzical last night. It must be Miss Warrender, not her mother, who set up for a bluestocking. Well, so much the better. She did look as if she might be capable of knocking some sense into his three ramshackle children.
But could the shy little widow who could not get beyond a stammered, “Good morning, my lord,” set his house in order? He very much doubted it. She looked incapable of saying boo to a goose, still less dealing with a good-for-nothing parcel of spoiled servants. His dark brows drew together in an unconscious frown as he bowed over the outstretched hand. A wasted errand. The devil could fly away with the children, but he must have some comfort at Hawth Hall now he was committed to living there.
Watching him, Kate saw and understood the frown. Presented to Lord Hawth by her mother, she held out an ungracious hand. “How do you do, my lord,” she said. “You are thinking you have come on a fool’s errand.”
“I beg your pardon?” He gave her the look that had invariably reduced his mistress to tears.
Smiling, Miss Warrender was almost handsome. “And I yours. Should we have talked sweet nothings for ten minutes before we came down to business? It seems a waste of time to me. You are come for your own purposes and we are receiving you for ours. Why beat about the bush? Mrs. Godwin says facts should be faced, and I, for one, agree with her. Our fact is that we need employment, yours that you need a housekeeper and a governess. You are thinking that I am an odd sort of plain young lady who might not be able to teach your daughters the social graces, and that my mamma looks too gentle to keep order at the hall.”
It was so exactly what he had been thinking that he actually found himself at a loss what to say, and favoured her with another quelling glance instead.
“Quite so,” she said, as if he had spoken. “So how shall we set about convincing you that you are wrong?” She moved with a kind of angry grace across to
an open piano. “Shall I favour you with my rendering of Herr Von Beethoven’s newest sonata? No? You are perhaps not musical, my lord? How old are your children?” She asked it, surprising him, in Parisian French.
“The oldest, a girl, sixteen; the boy, twelve; little Harriet, ten.” He retaliated in kind.
“Quite a little family.” She switched to German. “The boy will need a tutor, I should think. My Latin is not bad, but I’m afraid I have no Greek.”
“I shall advertise for a tutor.” He said it in English, since, though he could understand German, he did not feel able to equal her pronunciation. Hoyden of a girl. And yet … “My daughters have plenty of airs and graces,” he said. “It’s backbone they lack. Discipline. Strength of character.”
She surprised him again with a graceful curtsy. “And you think I might be able to inculcate those? I thank you for the compliment, my lord. I would do my poor best, though I should perhaps warn you that I have views about the position of women in society.”
“I dare swear you have.” He did not want to hear them, and turned pointedly to her mother. “But, Mrs. Warrender, forgive me.” Despite himself his tone softened somewhat at the sight of the slender figure in its heavy mourning. “You have suffered a series of terrible misfortunes. Your bereavement is so recent. I was so sorry—” He had had a phrase of condolence ready-polished but the tartar of a daughter had got in first, and it came out awkwardly enough now, irritating him still further.
But the widow was smiling gratefully up at him as if he had done it just right. “You are very kind,” she said. “It’s been … a bad time.” She produced a lacy scrap of handkerchief. Devil take her, was she going to cry?
She looked at the handkerchief thoughtfully and put it away again. “Are things very bad up at the hall?” she asked with a kind of shy sympathy.
“All to pieces.” And then, angrily: “You’ve heard talk!”
“Forgive me! But my—” she stopped, exchanged a glance with her daughter and went on again—‘my young kinsman’ said something. Just what you told him yourself. And then, I’m afraid, servants will talk.”
Red Sky at Night, Lovers' Delight Page 3