Ignoring his uninvited visitor as he arranged those damned spindly legs on Lyndon’s window seat, Lyndon shot six infantrymen dead and mortally wounded Major General William Ponsonby.
He wagered the youth would last five minutes before interrupting his military advances.He managed seven.
“Missed,” Duchamps-Avery declared with undeniable satisfaction in his tone as an arrow pinged off the side of the fourth shelf and clattered to the floor.“Too far to the left.”
“Are you suggesting I swing farther to the right?”Lyndon waved the bow in his general direction.To his credit, the boy didn’t flinch.
“I’m suggesting that you attack opponents who have the capability to fight back.Or perhaps, while away your hours on this earth doing something less…idle?Less…lazy?Laziness is the indolent parent of boredom, Papa always says.”
Papahad rather a lot to say about everything.“I’m not lazy.On the contrary.I’m simply incredibly motivated to do nothing.And anyhow, you’ll be pleased to hear that, at two o’clock, we have visitors joining us for tea.Indolence and boredom will seem like El Dorado, in comparison.Trust me.”
The news had the young fool positively wriggling with excitement.“Visitors?Who?Who?”
“A dull, local squire named Simpson.Damp-handed sort of fellow, though rich as Croesus.Thinks his pots of blunt give him carte blanche to call us friends.New money, of course.No family to speak of, and a dreadful northern accent.The man has worked for his fortune.Coal mining or some such grubby ghastliness.”
“Papa owns several northern cotton mills.He says one should never condemn another on the basis of their lowly birth, and that there’s nothing wrong with—”
“Save me from bleeding hearts, pup.”Trust bloody Rossingley to be all for the advancement of the great unwashed.“Even worse than Simpson’s inability to correctly pronounce simple words in everyday parlance, he’s bringing along his unmarried, bovine daughters.So we can forget a boozy lunch followed by a few hands of baccarat.We’ll be nibbling on cucumber sandwiches, drowning in a vat of tea, and discussing the latest hat styles coming out of Paris this season.”
He suspected his guest could make an informed contribution to conversations regarding the latter.
“Ooh!Unmarried!”exclaimed Duchamps-Avery.“How thrilling.Is their father hoping you develop atendrefor one?”
Lyndon smiled pityingly.Hell would freeze over first, especially as overnight, he seemed to have come down with a full-blowntendrefor Duchamps-Avery’s lean, taut thighs.
“He’s hoping, yes.I also suspect he’s heard I have an aristocratic young guest and is hoping you develop similar feelings for the other.”Lyndon flicked his gaze over the elegant brocade hemming the youth’s immaculate coat.Goule Hall had never hosted such a dainty, effeminate creature, and he included women amongst his reckoning.“The man’s an eternal optimist.”
Duchamps-Avery clapped his hands with joy.“This spectacle, I can’t wait to see.The mysterious, brooding Lord Lyndon being wooed.And wooing in return.Tell me, do you growl at the ladies like an irate bearbeforeyou impress them with your archery skills, or do you save that treat until after?”
Lyndon deigned not to respond.And anyhow, one wasn’t required.The boy was too busy examining his attire.
“Perhaps a different cravat,” Duchamps-Avery declared, plucking at a floral necktie that wouldn’t have been out of place on stage at the Paris Opera.“Something brighter.And my emerald topcoat.With the little gold swirls of piping, here and here.”He nodded, satisfied, then fixed those irritatingly clear eyes on Lyndon.“What say you, my lord?”
Lyndon harrumphed in the manner of his father and grandfather before him.“I say I never trust a man who dresses like a concubine at breakfast and then changes into a highwayman’s outfit at tea.”
The pup laughed at that, flashing his showy, perfect teeth, which had not been Lyndon’s intention at all.And then, with the grace of a damned gazelle, the pup raised himself from the settee.
“You and your little jokes, Lord Lyndon.You hide your humour under a bushel, you know.”
Those gazelle legs propelled him to the door.
Alas, the words flew from Lyndon’s mouth before he had chance to put a halt to them.“Why do you insist on walking like that?”
“Like what?”The boy turned back, more a fluid pirouette than a turn.
Lyndon huffed again.“Like…like…”
He made an ineffectual gesture with his hand, not sure what he was encompassing but wishing to buggery he’d kept his trap shut and that a wash of crimson wasn’t climbing his cheeks.“Like a damned pantomime horse,” he growled.
Then he snatched up his bow and decimated the commander of the 39th Foot Regiment.
*
OVERLY TALL ANDspikily thin, Reginald Simpson had the lugubrious air of a haunted pencil.Naturally, young Rollo had to position himself on the settee close to him, contrasting like a dazzling ray of bleeding sunshine.Albeit sunshine mixed with a sharp gust of hurricane, a gust most often directed in Lyndon’s direction whenever he said something the pup deemed insufficiently gracious.
Even more infuriatingly, the boy appeared to find Simpson’s company charming.Especially when the girls’ father insisted on relating all the local goings-on in Goule village as if Lyndon had expressed avid interest.Which he most certainly never had.
“The vicar has had terrible lumbago,” Simpson commented, “for over a sennight.”
