Venetia Read online

  Fulfilling Aubrey’s behests was an even more difficult task, for he wanted not only such simple matters as a supply of paper and several pencils, but a number of books as well. He had told her that she would find his Phaedo on the desk in the library, and so she did; but Guy Mannering was only found after an exhausting search, a zealous housemaid, to whom the sight of a book lying open on a chair was an offence, having wedged it, upside-down, into a shelf devoted to text-books and lexicons. Virgil presented no problem: Aubrey had certainly asked for the Aeneid; but Horace blandly offered a choice of several volumes, and Venetia was quite unable to remember whether Aubrey wanted Odes, or Satires, or even Epistles. In the end, she added all three to her collection, and Ribble bore off the pile to the waiting tilbury, where Fingle, the middle-aged groom, received them from him with the cheerful prognostication that the next thing anyone would know was that Master Aubrey had studied himself into a brain-fever.

  Feeling that she had acquitted herself in a manner worthy of a scholar’s sister, Venetia then drove off to the Priory, where any hopes she might have cherished of earning encomium were speedily dashed. ‘Oh, you need not have brought them after all!’ said Aubrey. ‘Damerel has a capital library – a first-rate affair, large enough for a catalogue! He found it for me last night, and brought me up the books I particularly wanted. I warned him, when I saw what a splendid collection it is, that he would find it hard to be rid of me, but he says I may always borrow any volumes I choose. Oh, is that you, Fingle? Good-morning: have you taken a look at Rufus? Lord Damerel’s groom has him in charge, but I daresay you’ll wish to see that foreleg for yourself. No, don’t set those books down: I find I don’t want ’em!’

  ‘Odious, odious boy!’ Venetia said, bending over him to drop a kiss on his brow. ‘When it took me half-an-hour to find Guy Mannering, and I brought all your Horace, because I couldn’t remember which volume you wanted!’

  ‘Stoopid!’ he said, smiling up at her. ‘I’ll keep Guy Mannering, though, in case I want something to read in the night.’

  She withdrew it from the pile Fingle was still holding, nodded dismissal to him, a twinkle in her eyes which caused him to cast up his own expressively, and ventured to ask Aubrey how he had slept.

  ‘Oh – tolerably well!’ he replied.

  ‘There is no truth in you, love. I collect that you spurned the syrup of poppies Nurse was so careful to bring with her?’

  ‘After the laudanum Damerel gave me! I should rather think I did! He agreed I should be better without it, too, so Nurse went off to bed in a miff, which I was heartily glad of. Damerel brought up a chess-board, and we had a game or two. He’s an excellent player: I won only once. Then we fell to talking – oh, till past midnight! Did you know he had read classics? He went to Oxford – says he has forgotten all he ever knew, but that’s humbug! I should think he had been a pretty good scholar. He has visited Greece, too, and was able to describe things to me – things worth describing! Not like that fellow who stayed with the Appersetts last year, and had nothing more to say of Greece than that he couldn’t drink the wine because of the resin in it, and had been eaten alive by bed-bugs!’

  ‘So you enjoyed your evening?’

  ‘Yes – but for my curst leg! However, if I hadn’t taken a toss I daresay I might never have met Damerel, so I don’t regret it.’

  ‘It must be very agreeable to be able to talk with someone who enters into the things you care for most,’ she agreed.

  ‘It is,’ he said frankly. ‘What’s more, he knows better than to ask me, a dozen times in an hour, how I feel, or if I wouldn’t like another pillow! I don’t mean that you do so, but Nurse is enough to throw a saint into a pelter! I wish you had not brought her: Marston can do all I need – and without putting me in a bad skin!’ he added, with his rueful, twisted smile.

  ‘My dear, I couldn’t have kept her away from you! Tell me once how you find yourself this morning, and then I promise – word of a Lanyon! – I won’t ask you again!’

  ‘Oh, I’m well enough!’ he replied shortly. She said nothing, and after a moment he relented, and grinned at her. ‘If you must know, I feel devilish – as though I had dislocated every joint in my body! But Bentworth assures me it’s no such thing, so my aches are of no consequence, and will soon go off, I daresay. Let us play piquet – that is, if you mean to stay for a while? You’ll find some cards somewhere – on that table, I think.’

  She was fairly well satisfied, although upon first entering the room she had thought he looked pale and drawn. It was not to be expected, however, that a boy of such frail physique should not have been badly shaken by his fall; that he was not in one of his testy, unapproachable moods encouraged her to hope that he had not suffered any very serious set-back. When Nurse presently came in, to put a fresh compress round his swollen ankle, Venetia saw, at a glance, that she too was taking an optimistic view of his situation, and was still more cheered. Nurse might show a lamentable want of tact in her management of Aubrey, but she knew his constitution better than anyone, and if she, with years of experience at her back, saw more cause for scolding than for solicitude an anxious sister could banish foreboding.

  Upon Marston’s coming into the room with a glass of milk for the invalid Venetia drew Nurse into the adjoining dressing-room, saying, as she shut the door: ‘You know what he is! If he thought we cared whether he drank it or no he would refuse to touch it, just to teach us not to treat him as though he were a baby!’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ said Nurse bitterly. ‘Anything Marston or his lordship tells him he’ll do, just as if it was them that had looked after him from the day he was born! For all the use I am I might as well be back at home – not that I mean to leave this house until he does, nor ever did, so his lordship could have spared his breath!’

  ‘Why, did he try to send you away?’ Venetia asked, surprised.

  ‘No, and I should hope he knew better than to think he could! It was me saying to Master Aubrey that if he preferred to have Marston to wait on him I’d as lief pack up and go – well, miss, he was so twitty and troublesome last night that anyone might be excused for being put out! But as for meaning it, his lordship should have known better, and no need at all for him to remind me that it wouldn’t do for you to visit here without I’m in the house! I know that well enough, and better you shouldn’t come at all, Miss Venetia! It’s my belief Master Aubrey wouldn’t care if neither of us came next or nigh him, not while he can clutter up his bed with a lot of unchristian books, and lie there talking to his lordship about his nasty heathen gods!’

  ‘He would very soon wish for you if he were to be really ill,’ Venetia said soothingly. ‘I think too that he is just at the age when he’s not a child, but not quite a man either, and excessively jealous of his dignity. Do you remember how uncivil Conway was to you at very much the same age? But when he came home from Spain he didn’t care how much you cosseted and scolded him!’

  Since Conway held the chief place in her heart Nurse would by no means admit that he had ever conducted himself in any way that fell short of perfection, but she disclosed that his lordship had said much the same thing as had Venetia about Master Aubrey. She added that no one understood better than she Master Aubrey’s hatred of his disability, and his passionate desire to show himself as hearty and as independent as his more fortunate contemporaries: an unprecedented announcement which furnished Venetia with a pretty accurate notion of his lordship’s skill in handling hostile and elderly females.

  There could be no doubt that he had succeeded in considerably mollifying Nurse. She might resent Aubrey’s preference for his society, but she could not wholly condemn anyone who, besides showing so proper a regard for Aubrey’s well-being, managed to keep him in cheerful spirits under conditions calculated to cast him into a state of irritable gloom.

  ‘I’m not one to condone sin, Miss Venetia,’ she said austerely, ‘but nor I’m not one to deny anyone thei