The Viscount and the Hoyden Read online

  THE VISCOUNT AND THE HOYDEN

  Laura Matthews

  Chapter One

  “Bet you half a crown!” Ralph exclaimed, his nose pressed against the schoolroom window. “Look! He’s definitely riding this way. It’s the viscount, I tell you.”

  “Oh, it isn’t either,” his sister Brigid scoffed. “He would be riding in a carriage with his crest on the door. Viscounts don’t just ride about in the snow when they’re on their way to visit someone of Papa’s importance.”

  “A viscount can do whatever he wishes,” Ralph informed her, shifting his gaze from the gathering gloom on the landscape outside to his younger sister’s face. “Maybe he’s not so toplofty as an earl or a marquess would be, and certainly not so much as a duke, but enough. More than a baronet!”

  “Well, Papa is grand enough for me,” Brigid sniffed. She sighed and rubbed clear the spot her warm breath had misted. “He rides well. Hally will like that. If it’s the viscount,” she remembered to add. “And I did not accept your bet, Ralph, for I haven’t a half crown to my name.”

  Ralph narrowed his eyes against the dusk, squinting to keep the moving form in his view. “I don’t really understand why he’s coming to spend the Christmas holidays here when his seat is in Somerset. We don’t know him, and he’ll just be in the way,” he grumbled. “You just can’t be as comfortable with strangers in the house.”

  “Well, Papa invited him because his mama and our mama were friends,” Brigid explained. “That’s why he’s come.”

  “That’s no reason!” Ralph glared out into the gloom. “I’ll bet he wants to marry Hally.”

  “Marry Hally? He doesn’t even know her!” Brigid’s eight-year-old face had gotten red at the very thought. “Don’t be absurd! Besides, Hally doesn’t wish ever to marry.”

  “Girls marry,” Ralph pronounced with all the wisdom of his own eleven years.

  “Not Hally,” Brigid insisted. She jumped down from the chair she’d drawn over to the bank of windows. “She wants to stay here with us as she always has.”

  “Lot of good that will do her,” Ralph said knowingly. It was too dark now for him to see the rider, and he was satisfied as to the viscount’s identity in any case. “Hally’s getting old.”

  “Old! She’s only twenty. And she could have married Tom Parsons last year if she’d wished.”

  Ralph snorted. “Tom Parsons. As if he were anybody. A nodcock of the first order. No one would want to marry Tom Parsons.”

  “He’s very handsome,” Brigid protested.

  “And without a lick of sense. Hally sent him on his way with a flea in his ear.”

  Brigid’s brow creased. “Why wouldn’t the viscount marry someone he knows?”

  Ralph, who hadn’t considered this possibility, dismissed her reasoning with a wave of his fingers. “Oh, you don’t know anything, Brigid.”

  There was a quick knock on the door of the schoolroom, and the children turned to see their older sister, Hally, thrust her head into the room with the air of an innocent intruder. “I’m not interrupting, am I?” she asked. “Not disturbing your lessons, or preventing you from studying?”

  Her short, curly hair, only allowed by her Papa after numerous arguments in which she’d pointed out that Lady Caro Lamb was all the rage for having it, seemed well suited to the vivacious cast of her face. With deep blue eyes, gleaming black hair, and a mischievous dimple in her right cheek when she grinned, she looked more like an Irish milkmaid than the daughter of a Hampshire family that traced its lineage to William the Conqueror.

  “Miss Viggan has gone off for her tea,” Brigid said. “Oh, Hally, he’s here!”

  “Who’s here?” her sister queried, coming into the room with her usual energy, her cheeks still pink from outdoors and her hair disheveled.

  “Viscount Marchwood, silly,” Ralph said. “We saw him riding toward the house.”

  Hally cocked her head at him. “Riding? I should think he’ll arrive in a carriage, or perhaps in a stylish curricle.” Her voice held a trace of sarcasm, which she made little attempt to hide. “John would have it that the viscount is a noted whip.”

  Since their brother John’s one aberrant passion was horseflesh, this was something of a compliment. John, a sturdy, unimaginative fellow of nineteen, saw no need for light diversions from his self-imposed estate work schedule of dawn to dusk, but his siblings knew that he could often be distracted by some variation on the theme of riding, driving, or hunting. Which, as Hally was wont to say, “is a very good thing, for otherwise he would certainly be no more than the paltriest clodhopper.”

  Brigid was squirming on the chair she’d taken. “But, Hally, aren’t you going to change? He will be here any minute.”

  “Pshaw! What does it matter? Williams will show him to a room. And if he’s ridden, he’ll need to remove his dust. John or Papa will see him then. No one asked me to be there.”

  “But, Hally, you’re the mistress here!” Brigid nearly wrung her small white hands. “We wouldn’t want him to think that he wasn’t welcome. I should hate it if I arrived at a country house and there was no one to welcome me.”

  Hally tapped her kindly under the chin. “Don’t fret, sweetheart. Papa has been sitting in the winter parlor for the last three hours with a toasty fire going and a blanket over his legs waiting to greet his lordship. I was only teasing.”

  “But you should be there! What will he think?”

  “That I have other important things to do—like visit my brother and sister in the schoolroom.”

  “I think he’s come to marry you,” Ralph interjected.

  Hally stared at him. “My dear boy, he doesn’t even know me! His mother particularly wanted him to spend Christmas with us so he could tell her how we go on after all these years. She has to spend the holidays with her ailing sister and didn’t want him to be without family.”

  Ralph looked unconvinced, but linked his arm with hers—he was almost as tall as Hally—and led her to the abandoned tea tray. “Have a biscuit with us, Hally, before you go down, and tell us about the ice skating. Miss Viggan wouldn’t let us out today. She said tomorrow the ice would be safer. Papa really should not make me mind her. I’m far too old to be shut up in the schoolroom.”

  “Oh, indeed,” his sister agreed as she took the chair he gallantly offered. Her eyes sparkled with excitement. “I raced Francis Carson on the ice today, and I won!”

  Before she had finished describing this latest adventure, Miss Viggan entered the room and announced with truly remarkable gravity, “Your Papa wishes you to join him in the winter parlor, Hally.”

  Hally sighed. “Thank you, Miss Viggan. I shall present myself immediately.”

  Miss Viggan, who had been at Porchester Hall since Hally was a child, added diffidently, “I believe Lord Marchwood is with the baronet.”

  Hally winked at her sister. “As I suspected. Behave yourselves, urchins,” she instructed with her usual lack of sincerity. “I’m off to do my duty.”

  Chapter Two

  The Hall was not yet decorated for the holiday season. Hally had hoped to take the younger children out to gather holly and evergreen boughs that afternoon, but Miss Viggan had been adamant that the two of them had not deserved the special treat. It was her one method of maintaining order in her small ranks, disallowing treats with Hally, but it was an effective one. Even Hally had to admit that Ralph and Brigid were more likely to listen to the governess if they knew a promised treat lay in the balance.

  Hally wore an everyday dress of lavender wool, chosen by her Aunt Louisa in absentia, which was no more suited to Hally’s tearing spirits than it would have been for a small terrier. Still, Hally wore it religiously as a sort of
lesson to her father and John, who seemed to believe that were she to somehow manage a bit of decorum their lives would be immeasurably better.

  Not that she doubted for a moment their devotion to her! Hally knew they both loved her—and appreciated her role as well. With the baronet never remarrying and John still too young to marry and bring a wife there, Hally had served as mistress of Porchester Hall since she was old enough to order a proper tea.

  Mama had died when Brigid was born, more than eight years previously. Hally had practically raised Brigid, with some help from Miss Viggan, and felt proud of the results. And Ralph. Of course Papa and John had had a lot to do with raising Ralph, but there too she’d had her influence, keeping them from making him stodgy and bland as they seemed intent upon doing. Poor Ralph. He should go away to school, certainly, but until recently he’d been adamant about staying in Hampshire. Hally had encouraged him, pointing out the good things—as John was all too capable of inadvertently alluding to the worst—in going off to school. They were trying to convince him to try the spring term at Greenwald, a smallish school no more than fifty miles distant. Hally would miss him if he went, but she thought he’d benefit from the experience.

  When she reached the hallway outside the winter parlor, Williams sprang to open the door for her, giving her a slightly questioning look as he did so. Hally supposed he wondered if she knew that she was about to encounter an important visitor, and if she did why she hadn’t dressed more stylishly. Her dimple appeared briefly, but she said nothing as she composed her face into a semblance of innocent properness and walked swiftly into the room.

  A cozy tableau greeted her: Papa wrapped up in his blanket before a roaring fire; her brother John in buckskins and top boots, pouring tea; and a stranger in town clothes seated as far as possible from the source of the heat. The two able men rose to their feet, John with startled alacrity and the viscount with a more languorous grace.

  Though John stood almost six feet, the stranger outdistanced him by an inch or two and Hally was forced to look up quite a ways when her father exclaimed, “Good, my dear! We should have waited tea for you, but no one seemed to know where you’d gotten to. Come in, come in. Let me introduce you to Viscount Marchwood. Marchwood, my daughter Alice Halliston Porchester.”

  “Miss Porchester,” the viscount murmured, his brows slightly elevated over his dark, quizzical eyes. “Your servant.”

  “Lord Marchwood.” Hally dropped an energetic curtsy before moving to her father’s chair to bend down and drop a kiss on his raised cheek. “Papa. John. There was no need to wait for me. I’ve been in the schoolroom with Brigid and Ralph. Miss Viggan said you were looking for me.”

  She seated herself in the chair her brother John had been occupying and proceeded to finish pouring tea. Her own particular manner of pouring tea bore little resemblance to her mother’s. Lady Jane had been a delicate, feminine woman who did everything with exquisite taste and simple elegance. Hally’s style was a good deal more spirited. Tea invariably splashed over the rim and onto the plate when she poured it. Lumps of sugar splashed determinedly into the brew, and biscuits were offered with an enthusiasm few could resist.

  Lord Marchwood accepted a biscuit, a slice of seed cake, and buttered bread sprinkled with nuts, a concoction of Hally’s invention. He eyed the last with uncertainty, but Hally was insistent. “We invented them quite by chance, Ralph and Brigid and I,” she explained. “It was on a picnic in the walnut grove where Ralph had climbed a tree and sat above us cracking nuts. Then he used the buttered bread for target practice. It’s delicious, isn’t it? You’ll be fascinated by some of the dishes they prepare in the Porchester kitchens.”

  “Oh, no, Hally!” John protested. “You haven’t ordered curried fowl for tonight’s menu, have you? You’ll kill the poor man!”

  Hally’s chin went up. In a haughty voice she informed her brother that he did not need to eat the curried fowl if he did not wish to, but that the rest of the family were looking forward to it. “Aren’t you, Papa?”

  Sir Thomas valiantly agreed that he was, but with a commiserating look at John that did not escape Hally’s attention. “Not everyone has the taste for spicy cookery,” she informed Lord Marchwood.

  “Or the courage,” her brother said in his own pungent fashion.

  “Exotic cookery is one of my few domestic interests,” Hally admitted to the viscount, her dimple appearing. “I don’t play the pianoforte, I don’t sing at all well, I don’t sketch or draw and my needlework is abominable.”

  “She’s a very fine horsewoman,” John hastened to interject, as though to offset this list of negatives. Then fearing that this sounded like a boast, his face grew flushed. “Not that it matters,” he mumbled. “I’ll have another of the Christmas biscuits, Hally. Today’s the first time this year Mrs. Goodin has served them. They’re one of the signs we look for that the festive season is here,” he explained to the viscount with a forced heartiness. “Perhaps you have something of that nature at Millway Park to welcome in the season.”

  The viscount nodded. “From the week before Christmas until a week after, each night a candle is placed in the window of every room. It’s a charming sight from outside, especially coming home from church on Christmas Eve. I believe my mother brought the tradition from her home in Yorkshire when she married my father.”

  Sir Thomas, who had been toasting a piece of bread at the fire, remarked that he liked that tradition very well. “What do you say, Hally? Shall we make his lordship feel right at home by having the servants put candles in all the windows this evening?”

  Hally was always inclined to please her father. “If you should like it, Papa. Though I’m not at all sure we have such a generous supply of wax candles. It would not offend you, Lord Marchwood, if we used something a little more economical, would it?”

  “You must do as you see fit,” the viscount assured her at the same time her brother protested, “Well, of course we’ll use wax candles, Hally. I’m sure we must have enough and I will go into the village myself tomorrow to get more if we need them.”

  The two fell to bickering about who was responsible for such a chore and the baronet raised his eyebrows in exasperation to his visitor. “We’re not accustomed to company,” he explained. “They haven’t the habit of it.”

  John, embarrassed, immediately broke off what he was saying and sat back, ruffled, in his chair. Hally, unconcerned, smiled cheerfully at the viscount. “Well, really the only company we’re accustomed to is family, and we’re to have Mary Rose Nichols with us. Her father is my father’s cousin, and she’s the most charming girl. She’s very down to earth but joins in all our flights of fancy, too. We couldn’t ask for a more perfect companion at this time of year.”

  “She sounds delightful,” the viscount said.

  “And she’s beautiful,” Hally added. “Truly the most attractive girl in the county, isn’t she, John?”

  John’s hand stopped on its way to his mouth with a biscuit. “Well, yes, I suppose so. In a quiet way. There’s nothing dashing about Mary Rose. She doesn’t call attention to herself.”

  “Certainly not. A very proper, well-behaved girl,” Hally agreed. “She arrives tomorrow for a fortnight. We haven’t seen her since last summer and she is long overdue for a visit.”

  Lord Marchwood regarded her with interest. “My mother remembers visiting here when there were just the three of you children but several of your cousins as well. She said the house absolutely rang with laughter and adventures.”

  Hally considered. “That would have been a long time ago, when I was ten or eleven perhaps. I think I remember your mama but I’m not sure. Does she smell of violets?”

  The oddness of the question did not seem to perturb his lordship. “It’s a scent I remember very clearly from my childhood, though she has taken more recently to wearing attar of roses or some such thing.”

  Sir Thomas was nodding reminiscently as he listened to the young people. “I remember the scent of
violets, too. Your mother told us all about you when she visited then, and she regretted not bringing you. But you’d gone to stay with your grandparents for the spring holidays, as they were nearer your school. It seems a long time ago.”

  “Almost ten years.” Hally patted her father’s hand. “But now we have Lord Marchwood in his mother’s stead. I fear he’ll find us very dull after London. Perhaps we should have an evening party.”

  “There is no need to go to any extra lengths for my entertainment,” Lord Marchwood hastened to assure her, a decidedly amused light in his eyes. “I wish no more than to be a part of your family for my stay.”

  Hally wondered why he continued to regard her with such intensity. The whole problem with sophisticated people, she mused, was that they regarded such situations with a tolerant amusement, which did nothing to elevate one’s spirits. Well, Hally was not going to let the viscount’s attention, whether it was teasing or not, discompose her. He was, after all, just a man like all the men she’d met previously in her life, and she had had no trouble conversing with them.

  Not that she found the Viscount in any way objectionable in his person. He was tall, and broad-shouldered, having rather the type of build a farmer might have, though of course Lord Marchwood had never in his life done such a thing as drive a plow horse or pitch a bale of hay onto a wagon. If he had indeed ridden to the Hall, he had changed quickly, and not to buckskins as her brother wore, but pantaloons over his shining black Hessians. His brass-buttoned blue coat was worn with a buff waistcoat and fit him like a glove. Hally suspected that he was a dandy, though in truth she had not a complete knowledge of what that term meant.

  But Lord Marchwood had a head of curly brown hair that seemed barely tamed by his barber’s scissors. In fact, Hally suspected that Lord Marchwood had not been to his barber in a period of time a little longer than her father would have approved of. Both the baronet and his son wore their hair quite short, and certainly not curling down over their ears or onto their necks. Hally rather liked it.