Victoria and the Nightingale (10 page)

“I could always say that he was my brother.”

“But when my adoption papers are made absolute he will be my adopted son!”

“And you really—really mean to adopt him?”

“I have said so,” in frozen tones.

“And you want me to stay on here and look after him,

until he goes away to school?”

“I think it would be a good idea,” he agreed, “particularly as you have nowhere to live. This cottage can be made over to you for the time being, and as it’s very small it should be quite easy to run. If you want any help with cooking, and that sort of thing, I’m sure there’s some woman in the village who can provide it. And naturally you will receive a salary for looking after Johnny, and all your expenses will be met by myself. I have had the contents of the cottage checked, and there’s everything here for your needs ... plenty of linen, etc. I don’t expect you to become a drudge, but I think you should enjoy running the place as if it was your own home—which, in fact, it can be until you elect to move on! —and taking care of Johnny. As it’s the summer holidays he won’t need to attend school for the time being, and he can have a grand time here running wild in the garden. You can take life easily yourself, look upon it as a kind of holiday job—”

“Thank you,” she returned, a trifle stiffly—in fact, very stiffly. “I shall certainly look upon it as a job.”

He regarded her somewhat strangely.

“It occurred to me that you might enjoy being here ... you as well as Johnny!”

She realized that he was providing both Johnny and herself with a kind of hideout—somewhere where they would be out of sight, though possibly not entirely out of mind of his fiancee. And the knowledge that, despite his protestations, they had to be kept hidden instead of enjoying the amenities of Wycherley Park quite openly

incensed her unreasonably.

Later she was to feel less resentful, and more appreciative; but while he stood there leaning against the mantelpiece—a beamed affair decorated with shining horse brasses—and peering at her in that vaguely perplexed, vaguely concerned, vaguely irritated manner which overlooked the fact that she had the right to make her own decisions and lead her own life—and take care of Johnny, if she chose, until some official decision was made about him, a sense of rebellion stirred in her. She wished Johnny was not quite so enthusiastic when he came rushing in from the garden with the excited piece of information that he had found a pony in the paddock.

Sir Peter smiled at him.

“I thought you might like to learn to ride, Johnny,” he said. “And you can take charge of the pony and groom it. There are stable quarters round at the back of the cottage, with feeding stuffs and so on. It will be your job to be responsible for the pony ... whose name, by the way, is Thomas.”

Johnny was even more wildly excited.

“Why Thomas?”

“Why not?” Sir Peter tweaked his ear. “Anyway, he’s yours, and there are lots of other things in this cottage that you can look upon as yours. Books and things ... I had brought over from the Park.”

It occurred to Victoria to walk out into the kitchen and examine the kitchen cupboards. She found that they were well stocked with foodstuffs, and, in fact, there was everything they could possibly need in the cottage. Sir

Peter had been quite thorough in his preparations for their occupancy.

The only things that were missing were the personal things—the clothes, toys, etc.—that had been bought for Johnny and which had been left behind at Wycherley Park. But even these were to be brought over from the big house, and Sir Peter’s own chauffeur had received instructions to call at the cottage once or twice a week to make absolutely certain they had everything they needed.

“And if you feel you want to go for a drive Hawkins will take you wherever you wish to go while he is here,” Sir Peter told them, before he turned toward the door.

Victoria suddenly realized that he intended to leave them there, and that his intention was that they should settle into the cottage without leaving it again—and without time for reflection on her part.

He had taken it for granted that she would fall in with his wishes, and because of Johnny she realized that she had no alternative but to fall in with them. She didn’t quite understand herself at that phase of her existence, for the cottage was something she had often dreamed about in the past, and apparently nothing was to be lacking that could make for her and Johnny’s comfort. Sir Peter had informed them that they were less than a mile from the village, and as there was a telephone laid in the cottage they were not really in the least cut off ... and in emergency there was always Sir Peter Wycherley himself, at Wycherley Park.

In the event of anything going wrong, or if she was worried about anything, she was to contact him at once.

Johnny could hardly believe that they were actually to

take up residence in the cottage, and that for several weeks at least it was to be his home.

Far, far nicer this than a dreary London bedsitting room. He raced delightedly out to the car when Sir Peter intimated that he was leaving. Hawkins was to bring the rest of their things over that evening, and they were already as good as installed.

Sir Peter chucked Johnny under the chin before he slipped behind the wheel of his car, and he once more pinched his ear.

“Look after Miss Wood, Johnny,” he ordered him, “and I have no doubts at all that Miss Wood will look after you very well indeed!”

Then he slid in his clutch, smiled fleetingly and rather peculiarly at Victoria—and, not for the first time, she thought what unusually attractive and rather charming gray eyes he had—waved a careless hand that included them both in a dismissing wave, and drove off.

They were alone in a leafy paradise that was heavy with the scent of roses and murmurous with the droning of bees. And, apart from that insistent droning of bees, the silence—once Sir Peter’s car had disappeared down the lane—was a silence that could be felt.

CHAPTER NINE

They withdrew inside the cottage after standing together at the gate for a few minutes, and Victoria began a more detailed inspection of the cottage.

While Sir Peter was there, and under the somewhat quizzical—when he wasn’t looking strangely impatient— gaze of his gray eyes, she had felt disinclined to betray any real interest, but now that they were alone it was a different matter. All women are curious about houses, and the contents of houses, and Victoria was no exception. Never in the whole of her life (leaving out the short period of it that had been passed at Wycherley Park) had she seen anything as compact and as beautifully equipped as the cottage. The furnishings were simple, but the materials used for curtains and chair covers and bed covers were expensive and tasteful. One found them in places like Liberty’s and Harrod’s furnishing departments.

The best bedroom was full of eggshell blue highly glazed chintz. The tiny room next door—Johnny’s room—was also blue, but a rather more decided color, likely to appeal to a boy of eight years old. The sitting room—which was also the dining room of the cottage—was a symphony of faded pinks, lavender and leaf green. There was an elegant little bureau in one corner, a gate-legged table in the center of the carpet, a highly polished sideboard stood against the farther wall, and a grandfather clock ticked at the foot of the stairs.

On the upstairs landing there was another grandfather clock. The whole minute space echoed to the solemn ticking of the two clocks.

There was no television or radio, but there was a very large number of books. And as Sir Peter had promised to send them over a small transistor radio this solved all Johnny’s problems.

Victoria was intrigued by the kitchen equipment, and felt an urge to try out the stove. She was, on the whole, a very good cook, and as Johnny soon declared himself in need of supper she got down to the task of preparing something for him.

In the kitchen cupboards there was a large number of tins. The refrigerator contained eggs, butter and milk, and the preparation of an omelette seemed the obvious solution to supper. Johnny had eaten so well all day that he was not really hungry, and halfway through his supper his eyelids dropped and he was plainly more ready for bed than anything else.

Victoria had been assured that the beds were well aired, and she put Johnny to bed before washing up the supper things. Then, while the child slumbered peacefully with his sandy head on yet another strange pillow, and the grandfather clocks went on ticking away against a background whirr that indicated they were prepared to chime the quarters as well as the half hours and hours, she tidied up the living room and, as it was a really beautiful night, went out into the garden.

All around her were apple trees, pear trees, and thickets of soft fruit. As well as weeds that grew waist high there were a large number of flowers, and the warm night air was saturated with the penetrating scent of clove-pinks and honeysuckle. The honeysuckle clambered riotously over the high garden wall, and from the spinney on the other side of the road opposite the garden gate came the exciting song of a nightingale.

Victoria listened, realizing that it was the first time she had heard a nightingale for a long time. Even at Wycherley Park, where the gardens were so well tended that there were few thickets to provide hideouts for song birds, she had listened in vain for just such a sound during more than one of her nightly walks in the grounds. But here, where the silence was intense and no one had bothered about the garden for weeks, the melodious and unmistakable soft trill of the sweetest of all musically minded feathered creatures poured out in an eager rush, and continued almost without cessation while Victoria stood leaning on the garden gate and listening to it.

The silence of the white road that curved beyond the gate fascinated her. She supposed that if she had been town-bred like Johnny she would have been a little frightened by it ... or at any rate, faintly perturbed. She might even have mistrusted it, and despite the glimmering golden moon that was climbing into the sky above the rambling orchard and the fields that lay behind it, have panicked and rushed back into the house and bolted and barred the door against any possible menaces that the night might hold for herself and Johnny, who was upstairs and fast asleep.

But being country-bred she had no fears whatsoever, and she leaned on the gate quite happily, and thought how deliciously soft the night air was, and how vaguely exciting the dusk that crowded close to her beneath the trees. A bat describing circles in the clear blue above the bending boughs of a buddleia made a sudden swoop and all but skimmed her cheek, but it didn’t upset her at all. She was not afraid of bats, not afraid that one might get caught up in her hair ... anymore than she was afraid of the loneliness and the dark.

She looked up through the boughs of the buddleia and saw the golden globe of the moon swimming in a sea of soft blue light, and she thought of Byron’s “She walks in beauty like the night,” and Tennyson’s “How bright the moon on Cumnor Hall,” and thought that if she was a poet she would compose endless verses about the moon and the effects of moonlight on human beings—particularly at the full of the moon—and other creatures that were not generally supposed to have the same reactions as human beings. And, more than anything else, she would dwell upon the sheer, sensuous delight of moonlight.

But, not being a poet, she decided to go indoors and early to bed, and in the morning she would have to draw up some sort of plan for her own and Johnny’s daily life as long as they were at the cottage.

Just before she went indoors and wisely secured all the bolts—not because of sudden nervousness but because of common sense—she thought she really did hear a rather curious noise which reached her from the main road, and after a few seconds she could quite easily have deceived herself into believing that she was listening to footsteps ringing rather hollowly on the smooth surface of the road.

Then, with a light shrug of her shoulders, she dismissed the sound, and drove home the bolts.

After all, what if it was some country wayfarer making his way home after an evening at the inn in the village? Or after spending an evening with friends! It was really nothing to do with her! Nothing at all.

She looked in on Johnny before entering her own room, and was pleased because he was sleeping so profoundly that he made absolutely no movement, and his arms were flung wide, embracing the whole of his enchanting small room, as it were.

The next day was a more strenuous day than Victoria had known for a long time. She got up early and cooked Johnny a really substantial breakfast, while contenting herself with fruit juice and cereal, and after breakfast started making a list of all the things that they had to purchase at the village shop. Sir Peter had given her clearly to understand that it was about a mile from the cottage, and they set off to walk the distance with two pairs of equally enthusiastic and curious feet.

Actually, it was much more like two miles, but neither Victoria nor Johnny minded in the least, and even the thought of the return journey didn’t deter them.

But before commencing the return journey they made the acquaintance of the butcher and the grocer in the village, as well as the postmistress, who seemed a little curious when she learned where it was that they were staying.

“Alder Cottage? But I thought it was still empty.” She peered curiously at Victoria. “You must have moved in rather suddenly!”