The Nonesuch Read online

  ‘No,’ agreed Mrs Underhill doubtfully. ‘That’s true enough, but – he might want to marry her, and a pretty piece of business that would be!’

  ‘If he shows any such disposition,’ said Miss Trent, laughter warming her eyes, ‘we must take care to remind her that he is not a member of the peerage!’

  Mrs Underhill smiled, but she sighed too, saying that she wished to goodness Sir Waldo wasn’t coming to Broom Hall.

  The wish was echoed, a few days later, by the Squire, who told Miss Trent that he heartily wished the Nonesuch at Jericho.

  He had overtaken her on her way back to Staples from the village, and had very civilly dismounted from his hack to walk with her down the lane. He was thought by many to be rather an alarming man, for besides being a trifle testy he had an abrupt manner, and a disconcerting way of staring very hard at people from under his bristling eyebrows. Mrs Underhill always became flustered in his presence, but Miss Trent was not of a nervous disposition. She met his fierce gaze calmly, and answered the questions he shot at her without starting or stammering, thus winning his rare approval. He said she was a sensible woman: no nambypamby nonsense about her! He wished he could say the same of some others he might mention.

  In this instance Miss Trent responded only with a slight smile, which caused him to say, in a threatening tone: ‘Don’t tell me you are in raptures over this Pink of the Ton!’

  That drew a laugh from her. ‘No, how should I be? I am past the age of falling into raptures, sir!’

  ‘Gammon! Chit of a girl!’ he growled.

  ‘Six-and-twenty!’

  ‘Ay, so you may be: exactly what I thought! Wouldn’t signify if you was six-and-fifty, either. Look at my wife! Killed with delight because this chuckfarthing fellow is coming amongst us! Means to give a party in his honour, if you please! None of your pot-luck, mind! Oh, no! Shouldn’t wonder if she sends out her cards for a turtle-dinner, and has a waltzing-ball to round the thing off in style! Ay, you may laugh, miss! Don’t blame you! I shall laugh when the fellow sends his regrets – which he will do, if I know anything about these Town Tulips! I shall call on him, of course: can’t but do the civil, though I’d as lief give him the go-by.’

  ‘Never mind, sir!’ said Miss Trent encouragingly. ‘I daresay he will be gone again within a sennight, and he can’t break any hearts in such a short time, surely?’

  ‘Break any hearts? Oh, you’re thinking of the girls! They don’t bother me! It’s our boys. Damme if I wouldn’t be better pleased if he was a Bond Street fribble, for that wouldn’t send ’em mad after him! The mischief is that he’s a Top-of-the-Trees Corinthian – and I’ve seen what harm they can do to silly young greenheads!’

  The amusement left her face; she replied, after a moment: ‘Yes, sir: so too have I. In my own family – But that was in London! I can’t think that here, in such a quiet neighbourhood, the silliest greenhead could find the means to run into a ruinous course.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t fear they’ll do that!’ he said impatiently. ‘Merely break their necks, trying to outdo their precious Nonesuch! Would you believe it? – even my Arthur, slow-top though he is, has smashed my phaeton, trying to drive through my west farm-gate with never a check – nor any precision of eye neither! As for Banningham’s cub, riding that goose-rumped gray of his up the stairs at Brent Lodge, and your Courtenay hunting the squirrel on the Harrogate road – but mum for that! No harm done, and a rare trimming he got from old Adstock – for it was the wheels of his carriage the young chucklehead was trying to graze! Driving to an inch! ‘You can’t drive to an ell!’ Adcock told him. But you won’t repeat that!’

  She assured him that she would not; and as they had by this time reached the main gates of Staples he took his leave of her, saying sardonically, as he hoisted himself into the saddle, that they might think themselves fortunate Joseph Calver hadn’t gone to roost in the middle of the hunting season, when every cawker for miles round, after first pledging his father’s credit for white-topped boots, would have crammed his horse at a stake-and-bound, and would have been brought home on a hurdle. ‘Mark my words!’ he admonished Miss Trent. ‘You’ll see Underhill rigged out in a coat with a dozen shoulder-capes, and buttons the size of saucers before you’re much older! I told Arthur not to think I’d help him to make a cake of himself, aping the out-and-outers, but I don’t doubt Courtnay will get what he wants out of his mother! All the same, you females!’

  Three

  It was perhaps inevitable that the Nonesuch’s arrival at Broom Hall should fall a long way short of expectation. Young Mr Mickleby, the Squire’s son, was able to report to his cronies that Sir Waldo had sent his horses on ahead, for he had himself seen two grooms turn in at the gates of Broom Hall. But the horses they led were only coverhacks: good-looking prads, but nothing marvellous, and no more than two of them. They were followed by a travelling-carriage, which was later discovered to contain only a couple of soberly-clad servants, and a disappointingly small amount of baggage. It soon became known that Sir Waldo was driving himself from London, by easy stages; and although this accorded, in the main, with the younger gentlemen’s ideas of how a noted whip should travel, easy stages fell tamely on their ears, spoiling visions of some sporting vehicle, slap up to the echo, swirling through the village in a cloud of dust.

  No one of more note than the ostler at the Crown witnessed Sir Waldo’s arrival in Oversett, and his account of this momentous event was discouraging. Instead of a curricle-and-four, which even provincials knew to be the highest kick of fashion, Sir Waldo was driving a phaeton; and so far from swirling through the village he had entered it at a sedate trot, and had pulled up his team outside the Crown, to ask the way to Broom Hall. No, said Tom Ostler, it wasn’t a high-perch phaeton: just an ordinary perch-phaeton, drawn by four proper good ’uns – a bang-up set-out of blood and bone! There was another gentleman with Sir Waldo, and a groom riding behind. Very pleasant-spoken, Sir Waldo, but not at all the regular dash Tom Ostler had been led to expect: he wasn’t rigged out half as fine as Mr Ash, for instance, or even Mr Underhill.

  This was dispiriting, and worse was to follow. The Squire, paying his promised call, was agreeably surprised by Sir Waldo: a circumstance which might please the Squire’s contemporaries but which conjured up in the minds of Mr Underhill, Mr Banningham, and, indeed, Mr Arthur Mickleby as well, a sadly dull picture. No buck of the first head, it was gloomily felt, would have met with the Squire’s approval. Arthur ventured to ask if he was a great swell. ‘How the devil should I know?’ said his father irascibly. ‘He ain’t all daintification, if that’s what you mean.’ He eyed Arthur’s exquisitely starched shirt-points, and the wonderful arrangement of his neckcloth, and added, with awful sarcasm: ‘You’ll cast him quite into the shade! Lord, he’ll be like a farthing-candle held to the sun!’

  To his wife he was rather more forthcoming. Mrs Mickleby was as eager as her son to learn what Sir Waldo was like, and far less easy to snub. Goaded, the Squire said: ‘Fashionable? Nothing of the sort! Turns out in excellent style, and looks the gentleman – which is more than Arthur does, since he took to aping the smarts!’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so provoking!’ exclaimed Mrs Mickleby. ‘My cousin told me he was of the first style of elegance – bang-up to the nines, he said! You know his droll way!’

  ‘Well, he ain’t bang-up to the nines. Not the kind of man to be cutting a dash amongst a set of quiet folk like us, my dear!’

  Mrs Mickleby opened her mouth to utter a retort, saw the malicious gleam in the Squire’s eye, and shut it again.

  Pleased with this success, the Squire relented. ‘It’s of no use to ask me what sort of coat he was wearing, or how he ties his neckcloth, because I didn’t take any note of such frippery nonsense – which I should have done if he’d been sporting a waistcoat like that Jack-a-dandy one Ash was wearing the last time I saw him! Seemed to me he looked just as