The Quiet Heart (3 page)

She flung her a look of appeal.

“Do you think you could make some coffee immediately, Mrs. Davenport?” she requested. “And bring it here to the sitting-room.”

Mrs. Davenport surveyed the new owner sourly ... not at all as if she had once acted as his nanny, or his wet-nurse, which she most certainly had not.

“Three cups?” she enquired, her lips tightening. “You look as if you ought to take a couple of aspirins with yours, Mrs. Fairlie. It’s hardly the time of year for taking a closer look at the chimney stacks,” which proved she was very knowledgeable about the manner in which they had passed the last hour or so.

Charles Leydon walked past her and into the sitting-room. He cast a mildly surprised glance around him, as if expecting to find the three girls there still, and then strode across to the fire and extended his hands to the blaze.

“Oh, by the way, Mrs. Fairlie,” he called over his shoulder, “ask your henchwoman not to take her departure yet. I don’t expect it’s possible for you to provide me with lunch, and, in any case, I’ve made arrangements to return to the Leydon Arms for it. But I shall be spending the night here, and a room will have to be got ready for me. I’ve no doubt your Mrs. Davenport will be willing to help you make up the bed, and whatever else you might find it necessary to do to render one of those state apartments upstairs habitable.”

Alison felt certain she couldn’t be hearing aright.

“Spend the night
here
?” she echoed, staring at him.

He gazed back at her complacently.

“But of course. That was my intention from the beginning. After all, why should I pay for a room at the Leydon Arms when there are so many bedrooms here that we could accommodate everyone in the village?”

There was something in that, Alison realised. But she was appalled because she had never even thought of him staying the night.

“But your meals...?” she protested. “Your breakfast!”

“Surely you can provide me with a simple meal like breakfast?” The beautifully cut masculine mouth continued to smile faintly in mild amazement. “And dinner, too? I should like to ask Mr. Minty to dine with me, so it will be necessary to cater for two. You’ll have to get a fire lighted in the dining-room, and build it up well with a lot of the wood I see lying about here. No doubt your daughters will help you.”

“Y-yes,” Alison stammered.

Mr. Minty looked even more appalled than she did. He protested that he really ought to return to Murchester, where he had arranged to see an important client that afternoon, and he couldn’t really see how he could avoid granting the interview to the important client without giving offence. But Charles Leydon merely elevated his eyebrows.

It was obvious he considered he was probably the most important client whose affairs were handled by Mr. Minty and his various partners.

“Of course,” the solicitor suggested diffidently, realising he couldn’t get out of it altogether, “I could—if you’ll excuse me lunching with you, or even waiting for coffee—return to Murchester and see my client, and then return here this evening, in time for dinner.”

But his expression indicated that he had grave doubts about it being a very comfortable dinner. Leydon shrugged almost indifferently.

“Do that,” he agreed. “But I shall be returning to Murchester myself after lunch, so naturally I can give you a lift.”

Mr. Minty reminded him:

“I have my own car.”

“Oh, yes, of course ... that veteran you arrived in. I hope it’ll get you back to Murchester.”

Alison made an excuse and left the room. In the kitchen, which she had redecorated with her own hands, and which was bright and comfortable, although small, she found the three girls huddled round the Rayburn. Marianne was heating some soup, Lorne was simply toasting her toes, and Jessamy was looking thoughtful.

“Gosh!” Lorne exclaimed. “You look as blue as a bilberry! What happened?”

Alison didn’t bother to explain what had happened, but she informed them of what was likely to happen in the next few hours. Each one reacted differently, although the combined shock was considerable.

Marianne, when asked to give as much assistance as possible, remembered that she had an appointment in Murchester that afternoon. A boy-friend was taking her to a dance that evening, and Alison had agreed that she could have her hair washed and set at the town’s leading hairdresser’s. Lorne was having a Spanish lesson—also in Murchester; and only Jessamy appeared to be free. Jessamy was not allowed to undertake heavy tasks, like shifting ponderous articles of furniture, or indulging in an orgy of furniture polishing ... but she could do the flowers, if her stepmother thought flowers would do anything at all to brighten up the forbidding sombreness of the great dining-room at Leydon. She could always get round the head gardener when she wanted something special, and he had some marvellous blooms he was bringing along for Christmas he might let her have. She would tell him Charles Leydon was staying the night.

Anyway, she would ask him. She seemed quite eager to do the flowers. She was very clever with her flower arrangements, and, indeed, generally accepted as extremely artistic.

Alison regarded her thoughtfully for a moment, and then nodded her head.

“All right. Only don’t cycle over to the gardener’s lodge, you know it’s bad for your foot. Marianne must give you a lift in the Mini when she goes into Murchester.”

Somehow, Alison had managed to buy the girls a small car. They shared it between them—each having passed her driving test—while she made use of the local bus service when she wanted to go shopping, or visit someone on the outskirts of the village.

While Marianne protested that she wouldn’t have time to drive her sister back to the Hall Mrs. Davenport, having provided the gentlemen with coffee in Alison’s sitting-room, returned with a distinctly grim expression on her face, and stood with her arms akimbo at the foot of the kitchen table. She and Alison exchanged glances.

“What about my old man’s dinner?” she demanded. “He always gets home at one. And what about the children?”

“Don’t they get a meal at school?” Alison asked vaguely, seeming to recollect that all children got meals at school nowadays, unless they went to expensive private schools, like her three stepdaughters, where the arrangements were sometimes more complicated. “And surely your husband can manage for once?”

Mrs. Davenport poured her a strong cup of coffee and agreed that he would have to manage.

“After all, now that His Lordship’s turned up at last I suppose we’ll all have to reorganise ourselves a bit,” she remarked gloomily.

“We’ve had nearly a year since Sir Francis died,” Alison reminded her, thinking how fantastically lucky they had been without knowing it.

She and Mrs. Davenport spent the afternoon performing the kind of tasks Jessamy could never dream of undertaking, and by six o’clock their backs were aching but they were moderately satisfied with what they had done. At one time Alison had half decided that it might be a good idea to serve dinner to Mr. Leydon and his guest in her own small sitting-room-dining-room; but Mr. Leydon himself had negatived this suggestion when she made it. He had indicated quite clearly that he wished the meal to be served in the main dining-room, with as much state and dignity as was possible at such short notice, and taking into account the almost entire absence of servants. And he wished coffee to be served in the library where, naturally, another fire had to be lighted.

The dining-room furniture was magnificent, and as the place was well cared for throughout the year in very good order. Mrs. Davenport had a way of working miracles with a damp cloth and a special brand of furniture cream, and in no time at all the side tables were gleaming, the sideboard reflecting the modest amount of silver that was nut out for the occasion, and the dinner-table itself—almost a priceless piece that needed a system of communication if two people were to dine at either end—a thing of beauty and almost certainly a joy to a large number of antique dealers (especially local ones) who were interested in it.

Jessamy was left to do the flowers both in the dining-room and the library, and while a couple of girls hastily summoned from the village got the great Aga to work in the kitchen and prepared vegetables, Mrs. Davenport and Alison retreated upstairs and contemplated the well-nigh impossible task of deciding which bedroom would be the most cosy, and likely to let in the fewest draughts, during the one night—presumably—that Mr. Leydon would be occupying it.

In the end, Alison herself made up her mind that the dressing-room adjoining the principal bedroom was the only possible answer to their leading problem. It opened on to the gallery near the head of the stairs, had a bathroom reasonably close to it—none of the bathrooms at Leydon formed a part of some of the magnificent suites—and in size was a mere slip of a room by comparison with even the smallest guest-room.

While assisting Mrs. Davenport to make up the bed—with her own well-aired sheets—
Alison
hoped the autocratic Charles Leydon (who obviously had no mean ideas about his own importance) would not consider it necessary to raise an objection about the very size of the room, which would ensure the maximum amount of comfort for himself. If he had some idea of spending his first night at Leydon—the home of his ancestors for so many generations—in a room as vast as a throne-room, and with a bed actually raised high on a dais and approached by a flight of steps, while a fire blazed throughout the night on the far-away hearth, he was in for a disappointment.

A disappointment that hardly troubled her as she laboured until she actually felt sick with exhaustion, and Mrs. Davenport insisted on breaking off operations to make them both a cup of tea.

The tea revived them magically, and they went on until it was pitch dark, and a large number of lights were blazing throughout the house.

Marianne returned from her visit to the hairdresser looking ten times more alluring than when she set out, and within a few minutes of her return the bath taps were running in her stepmother’s apartment. Marianne’s social occasions always involved a lot of borrowing from her sisters—and frequently from Alison—and to-night was no exception. Although Jessamy was occupied with her flower arrangements, and Alison and Mrs. Davenport were still toiling in the main house, Marianne, in a bath robe, raced backwards and forwards along stone corridors and up mysterious short flights of stairs to achieve her objective.

From Alison she won permission to use an as yet unopened bottle of perfume, as well as borrow her best pair of sheer stockings; and from Jessamy she won a grudging assent to borrow a pair of pearl ear-clips. As Lorne was still in Murchester she had no need to ask permission there, and rifled her room until she found an unopened box of lace-edged handkerchiefs, one of which she filched. She was about to close the drawer when she noticed a small gold-mesh handbag, which was Lorne’s fifteenth birthday present from her father, just before he died, and without the smallest shred of conscience she decided she could make use of that, too.

Then she raced back to her room, finished her dressing and emerged looking like a twentieth-century Cinderella whose slacks and sweater were thrust in the back of her wardrobe, and happily forgotten for that one night, at least.

It was the main staircase of Leydon Hall that she descended when she was finally ready, and not one of the fine ladies in the portraits lining the gallery above her and the walls of the vast hall below her had ever looked more captivatingly sure of herself or more confident that this was her rightful setting. While Alison organised the activities of her helpers in the kitchen and rushed from newly lit stove to huge electric cooker to make certain her specially thought out menu was not likely to be ruined, and had no other thought in her head but the success of the nerve-shattering evening ahead of her, Marianne, in a wild silk dress of creamy pink worn beneath a velvet coat with a touch of mink on the collar—Alison had once possessed a short mink jacket which had been cut up to adorn various portions of her stepdaughters’ anatomies—smelling delightfully of Alison’s perfume, paused for a half second on each tread of the stairs as she made her way down to the hall.

Golden and gleaming and beautiful, and entirely satisfied with herself, she paused for rather longer near the foot of the stairs to cast an appreciative glance around the hall and listen for the arrival of her escort, whose car could usually be heard roaring up the drive long before he was anywhere near the front of the house. He was a young veterinary surgeon by the name of Robert Marquis, and he was merely the latest incumbent, as it were, in a long line of aspiring hopefuls for the hand of the beguiling Marianne. Whether Marianne regarded him with more pleasure than she had any of her earlier admirers no one member of her family could tell, but she certainly looked very contemplative as she stood with her graceful head backflung waiting for the sounds of his approach.

As she stood there she took note of the amount of attention the hall itself had received from her stepmother and Mrs. Davenport during the course of the afternoon, and Jessamy had put flowers on the gigantic hall table. A not very successful fire was smouldering on the baronial hearth, and away up amongst the roof beams a cold current of air stirred a couple of faded banners that had been carried by Leydons in various historic skirmishes.

Marianne stiffened slightly as she thought she caught the sound of car wheels ... But they were far too silent to be the wheels of Robert Marquis’s convertible that he had had fitted with a racing engine. She could have moved or disappeared behind one of the numerous doors that opened off the vast expanse of hall when it became clear to her that this was the owner returning, but she did nothing of the kind. She simply stood there, waiting and smiling very slightly, as if she was the mistress of the house expecting to be taken out for the evening by the master.