The Wicked Guardian

  THE WICKED GUARDIAN

  Vanessa Gray

  A NOT SO PROPER YOUNG LADY

  “I wish I were dead!” was Clare Penryck’s impassioned reaction upon hearing that Sir Benedict Choate was to be her guardian. She had known this elegant aristocrat for but one London season—but that time had sufficed to show her how insufferably arrogant he could be.

  Benedict made it clear that he expected Clare to be a very proper young lady, to remain safe on her secluded country estate, to wait for a decent match—in short to be all and do all that Clare found intolerably boring and detestable.

  Both Benedict and the law said she must obey him. But the exasperatingly headstrong Clare had no intention of accepting any such odious arrangement. First her outrageously independent mind, and then her scandalously impetuous heart, told her it was time to rebel.

  Sir Benedict Choate was clearly unprepared for the lesson in love he was about to be given—by a maddeningly willful young girl who had so much to learn herself!

  Characters: Sir Benedict Choate and Miss Clare Penryck

  1.

  An old-fashioned traveling coach, well-kept but evoking memories of an earlier day, trundled majestically along the King’s Highway approaching London.

  An expert might puzzle his brains to recognize the armorial bearings on the coach panel. Ostrich feathers quartered improbably with a rare leopard rampant and three wyvems—the Penryck arms had not been seen in London for ten years or more.

  The arms on the door of the coach belonged to an old and onetime wealthy Dorset family of high courage and resolution coupled with an unfounded but invincible belief in the favor of the goddess of gaming. At this time, in 1811, the Penryck family was left with its ancient seat, a somewhat Gothic abbey near Blandford, surrounded by fields productive enough to assure a comfortable life for tenants and the family itself, but without means to indulge in the excessively expensive world of fashion.

  It was clear that the coach had gone a long way. Coachman all but slumped on his box, and there was even a light coating of dust on the maroon coachwork. But it would take more than these visible signs of slackening of discipline to be sure that the occupants were right rustics.

  There were two occupants of the coach, maid and mistress. The mistress, sitting bolt upright and wearing an air of tiptoe expectancy, disdained the support of the maroon squabs, pounded free of accumulated dust no more than three days ago. She was a very comely girl of perhaps fifteen years. Her curls, gold as florins, hung prettily alongside a charming face with an assortment of features that, while not of classic beauty, yet exerted a beguiling charm, which, unaware, she bestowed on any living being within range. Her traveling dress was of sober hue, and cut not quite in the crack of fashion, but of excellent material, and new. An onlooker might be puzzled to note that the young miss was dressed unexceptionably as a lady no longer in the first flush of youth, and then to regard the dimples, the frank, open countenance of a girl who ought still to be in the schoolroom.

  This puzzling young lady was the Honorable Clare Penryck, sole descendant of the Penryck family. Sadly orphaned ten years before, when her father and mother had trusted, mistakenly, in her father’s ability to hold his spirited pair around a sharp corner, Clare was brought after their deaths to live with the Dowager Countess of Penryck, in Penryck Abbey.

  The Tresillians of Devon, the wayward family to which Clare’s mother had belonged, could not be trusted, so the dowager said, to rear a Penryck, and communications between the two families lapsed.

  As a matter of fact, Lady Penryck, an austere person who had lived through the tragic death of her only son and his wife, and the less tragic loss of her bibulous husband, and had constructed a shell of some hardness around her in order to survive, dared not let her heart be hostage to any family ties in the future.

  The Penrycks, of course, presented no problem, since there were so few of them that they had to some extent been absorbed into other families, and only cousins at least twice removed remained.

  But Lady Penryck’s own surviving family consisted solely of a vastly ancient man, her half-brother, Lord Horsham of Wiltshire, and that was all. He was of feeble health, and while he was expected to become Clare’s guardian in due course, supposing Lady Penryck to die before he did, yet the last letter he had written to her caused his sister slight misgivings.

  But Horsham had been hale when Clare first came to live at Penryck Abbey, when she was five. Lady Penryck, although an invalid, had fulfilled her obligations, provided Clare with an unexceptionable governess from Bath, whose name, Peek, seemed appropriate for such a mild, almost furtive person. She had guided Clare’s first steps through the maze of Penryck Abbey and the loneliness of a suddenly orphaned child, and even had done a creditable job of educating the child, with the help of Miss Mangnall’s Historical and Miscellaneous Questions for the Use of Young People, which had fortunately been published just long enough to be current in Dorset.

  Miss Peek had found her charge quick to learn, with an intelligence above average, and she was hard put to keep the girl busy. But as Lady Penryck declined in health, Clare was forced more and more to take over the management of the household, Miss Peek declining in a flustered flurry of half-sentences.

  So it was that when Miss Peek left Penryck Abbey to remove to Bath, to share lodgings with her sister in Milsom Street above a milliner’s shop, Clare was an odd mixture of lonely child and precocious adult. Miss Peek left with mixed feelings, which she often shared with her sister, Sara, over a cup of tea, looking down into the street from their cozy living room over the shop.

  “Mark my words,” she said, not for the first time, “that young miss is going to make her mark in the world. I wonder how she will do, for you must know that her grandmother is failing.”

  Miss Peek shook her head mournfully. “Yes, failing every day.”

  “She sounds like a spoiled child to me,” said Sara with reproof. She was, if truth were told, a bit jealous of her sister’s absorbing interest in the Honorable Clare Penryck. She was completely bored with the iteration of the young lady’s virtues, and even the glossed-over faults, of which there were astonishingly few.

  “She sounds like a rash young lady,” commented Sara. “Does she never think first before she does something?”

  “Oh, yes. She is a thoughtful child, much too thoughtful for her years,” said Miss Peek approvingly. “I’ve known her to spend hours in the long gallery, looking at the portraits of the family, you know. I often wonder what she thought about them.”

  “Why didn’t you ask her?” asked Sara dryly.

  “I did. And she said something nonsensical about ‘imagine having to live up to the appearance of those fierce eyebrows’! Such a child!”

  Sara fell into a reminiscent mood. “When I used to see Lord Penryck—the grandfather, that is—here to take the waters for his gout, he had just such eyebrows. And a wicked disposition to match, I recall! That was the only thing I recall—and I was glad to see the end of him. Such a man! You remember him, don’t you?”

  Miss Peek shut her eyes in shuddering recollection. “Yes,” she said flatly. “And I thank my stars that young Clare never had a chance to fall afoul of her grandfather. For she must have suffered, don’t you know!”

  Dismissing the Penryck eyebrows and the Penryck disposition into limbo, Sara moved on to the far more important subject of what they would have for their tea, and Clare was forgotten.

  Clare herself was not thinking about Miss Peek, to tell the truth, nor even about her grandmother, of whom she had been dutifully fond, but no more. It would have been strange had she been more than affectionate to a woman who appeared to need no one to love, and seemed only to have the desire to be left alon
e.

  Clare had no way of knowing that the pain that walked constantly with Lady Penryck—both the discomfort of her illness and the gnawing pain of her son’s loss—made the dowager keep even her grandchild at a distance. Clare was thrown back on her own resources, which she found, over the years, more than adequate.

  Clare and her maid had spent the previous night at the Anchor in Ripley, on the Exeter Road, a rather large establishment that had at first made a quelling impression on her, until her quality had been established by the impressive, if old-fashioned traveling coach, with coachman, footman, and two armed outriders.

  Now, as she leaned from the window, she could discern the smoke of the capital in the far distance, a mere smudge on the horizon. “Budge, just think! In a few hours I shall be in London! That is, we shall, for I cannot conceive of going anywhere without you, dear Budge.”

  “Like enough we’ll be slaughtered together in the streets, miss,” said Budge, a mahogany-faced Dorset girl, daughter of a Penryck tenant, pressed into service as a personal maid when young Clare Penryck first came to the abbey.

  “Oh, Budge, you gloomy thing! My godmother, Lady Thane, will keep us safe. As though we’d be in any danger!”

  Budge, whose natural gloom had been accentuated over the years by her mistress’s bright and often misplaced optimism, forbore to prophesy further. The journey had been a trial to one of her ample proportions, and she had thought the beds at one inn had not been sufficiently aired.

  And she positively knew she was not going to like London!

  “I have been trying to imagine just how Lady Thane will look,” Clare continued. “It will seem strange to have an almost-relative to talk to, after all this time. Grandmama’s relatives are all gone, except for her brother, who will someday be my guardian. So Grandmama always said. She said there wasn’t anybody on the Penryck side who could serve. Just a boy, a third cousin. I’ve never seen him.”

  “A boy?” echoed Budge. “I don’t mind any boy. Never saw one.”

  Rightly paying no heed to her maid, Clare prattled on. She would not have admitted that the nearer London came, the more sinking she felt. How would she go on? She was, after all, much too young to come out into society. But Grandmama counseled a determined avoidance of birthdays, and had told her as forcefully as she could: “You must marry if you can. Now, child, I don’t mean that you should take the first offer that comes your way. Lady Thane will see to that. But don’t shy off for some missish reason.”

  “But what, dear Grandmama, if no one offers?”

  Old Lady Penryck surveyed her granddaughter with a pride she had never allowed to show. The girl fortunately had escaped the fierce Penryck eyebrows—taking more after the Tresillians—and her tip-tilted nose and her engaging ways would be winsome indeed, if ... Always that if. Lady Penryck wished fiercely she could give her granddaughter another two years of tutelage. But certain unmistakable signs had told her that those two years would not be allotted to her.

  She was careful to make no complaint of her ailment to Clare. Instead, she simply said, “I should like to see you settled in life, my dear. And every young lady is entitled, they say, to one London season.”

  “But won’t it be difficult for you to travel so far, Grandmama? You say that Bath is too far, but I should think the waters would help you greatly. Even the doctor says so.”

  Lady Penryck dismissed the doctor’s opinion with a wave of her hand. She had no trust in doctors, based on her experience with them. They had not even helped her late, unlamented husband’s gout. “I am not going. I am sending you to your godmother, Lady Thane. She has a house in London, and I have written to her to ask her to take you in.”

  Clare’s heart quailed. She had mixed feelings, suddenly, longing to cling to the known security of Penryck Abbey, where, to all intents, she reigned over the household. But London was a magnet of great potency, and the sudden glimpse of a wider horizon could not fail to stimulate her vivid imagination.

  “She was a great friend of my mother’s, wasn’t she?” ventured Clare. She had not had any word from her godmother except for a succession of dolls at Christmastime, and even that series had ceased in the last few years. To Clare’s own recollection, she had never seen her. She told her grandmother so, but, adding fairly, “Of course I would not remember if I had been a child then, would I?”

  Lady Penryck said abruptly, to cover her feelings, “You are hardly more than that now. And I should not send you so young. But—”

  “Then please let me stay until you think it is time,” begged Clare, the part of her that was reluctant to leave uppermost.

  Lady Penryck steeled herself. “I think it is time now. I have decided, and I shall not wish to hear any more about it. I have put aside sufficient money for this excursion. Lady Melvin is to see that you are properly dressed, and although I regret the necessity for depending upon a lady whose taste I do not quite like, yet I must believe that she is more aware of the fashions than I.”

  Lady Penryck leaned back on her pillows and closed her eyes for a moment. The interview was taking too long, and her strength was ebbing. “Now, run along. Lady Melvin expects you this afternoon, and she will know how to go on.”

  Clare tiptoed to the door, and turned. “Thank you, ma’am,” she said softly. Lady Penryck was already asleep.

  That had been a month ago. And Clare had been caught up in the swirl of dressmaking, and the constant advice and warnings of Lady Melvin, until by the time she had left Penryck Abbey two days ago she was in such a state of excitement that she could have flown to London by herself.

  But then, she thought with mischievous amusement, how could she have managed to convey her dear Budge, weighing probably eleven stone, along with the trunks that were strapped to the back of the coach?

  Now the outskirts of London came into view. Clare fell silent as she stared from the window of the coach. Heedless of anything except the great size of the prospect, the narrow roads where carts jostled coaches, riders pressed against pedestrians who, more often than not, retorted with flying cabbages and hurled insults.

  And while, like Dick Whittington, she should have seen opportunity spread out before her, she must take her lower lip between her teeth to keep from giving vent to the strong desire to be back at home at Penryck Abbey that very instant. The feeling did not leave her until the coach, following directions obtained along the way, turned with a rumbling clatter into Grosvenor Square.

  2.

  At the time that Clare was about to learn from her grandmother’s lips of her great good fortune, a certain house looking out on Grosvenor Square was beginning to face a new day, a day that was destined to rock the household to its foundations.

  Lady Thane’s house in Grosvenor Square caught the midmorning light. The house was astir with its usual activities, more particularly in the kitchens, where Mrs. Darrin waited serenely for the bell to ring and the indicator for Lady Thane’s bedroom to drop, signifying that Lady Thane had roused from sleep and was, if not ready, at least willing to face the day.

  “Not like the old days, is it?” grumbled Darrin, the butler, to his wife. “Not like when there was entertaining, twenty to dinner more often than not, and such a stir of carriages in the square outside as would make a cat smile.”

  “And sorry enough you were at the time, Darrin,” retorted his wife smartly. ‘Too much to do, you always said. Although you had footmen enough, and maids, too, to do it all.”

  The discussion was not a new one, and uncovered no new ground, and at length died of its own inertia. Hobbs, an angular, tart-faced woman who had tended Lady Thane since her marriage more than twenty years before, and therefore held a position of unquestioned superiority over the Darrins, hurried in, her handful of letters attesting that the post had just come.

  “And not much in it, either,” said Hobbs. “A letter from Miss Harriet, I should say Lady Cromford, and we can guess that something has gone awry down at the Hall. But...” She stopped short to frown
down at a letter that puzzled her. “I can’t make this out,” she muttered, and then, the bell ringing sharply, the letter was dropped on the morning tray, Mrs. Darrin made tea from the kettle already on the boil, and with practiced efficiency the breakfast tray for Lady Thane was borne up the service stairs to the floor above. Lady Thane was an indulgent mistress, relying more on the affection her servants had for her than to her management, and she was well-served. In fact, as Lady Thane’s daughter, Harriet, sometimes told her, “They have little else to do than to wait on you hand and foot.”

  Lady Thane replied, “I do think we get along comfortably together. I am sure I want for nothing.”

  Just now, on this April morning, she was propped up in her bed upon freshly fluffed pillows, the breakfast tray upon her lap, and Hobbs moving quietly around the room. The draperies were opened, and the sunshine poured in.

  The stack of envelopes on the breakfast tray did not receive Lady Thane’s attention until after her second cup of tea. Truly, she thought, it takes longer and longer to wake up in the morning. The tea is too weak—she must speak to Mrs. Darrin about it.

  Languidly turning over the envelopes, she indulged herself in her usual habit, trying to divine the contents from the outer appearance.

  “This is surely a card to the duchess’s ball at Syon House. But Syon House is so removed, Hobbs, it quite oversets me to think of traveling that far. Especially at night.” She sighed. “I fear I must turn it down. And yet, if one continually turns down these invitations, one soon finds oneself out of the swim altogether. I don’t know what to do.”

  Hobbs gave her no encouragement, correctly surmising that her mistress was communing entirely with herself. Hobbs placed the screen before the fire that struggled in the grate. Green wood—Hobbs scowled—and she would have a thing or two to say belowstairs about that!

  An exclamation behind her made her turn inquiringly to Lady Thane. She was peering in a decidedly puzzled manner at the same heavy square envelope that had aroused Hobbs’s curiosity. The butterfly patch she wore to discourage lines between her eyebrows bent with her effort to decipher the writing on the envelope.