Maulever Hall by Jane Aiken Hodge Read Free Book Online Page B

her face sobered as she looked at it—“Mark’s ward, poor little Lord Heverdon, has been burned in his bed—and all because of a neglected flue, my dear, which is why we must have ours swept without delay. And poor Mark is Lord Heverdon and cross as two sticks as a result.”
    “But, dear madam, why?”
    Oh dear, with a complacent sigh. “What a scatterbrain I am, to be sure, telling my story so back-to-foremost. Though I should have thought that you, so clever as you are, would have found it out for yourself. Mark has longed, all his life, to sit in the House of Commons, but he is so high-minded—quite impossibly so, if you ask me, but of course no one ever has—that he will not accept any seat that has the slightest whiff of patronage about it. Well, of course, you can imagine what the result has been; he has never found a seat, and has had to content himself with working for his friend Lord Grey in what I have always thought an almost menial capacity. But all his hopes have been set on the new Parliament that will come in after his precious Reform Bill has been passed. And now look what has happened. He must sit, poor Mark, in the Lords. It is no wonder that he is so angry. And he’s executor, too, for that hussy, Lady Heverdon, and must go North at once, he says, to Heverdon, to arrange for the funeral. From all I’ve heard of her, balls are more in her line than funerals though it’s true she buried Lord Heverdon fast enough.” She sighed theatrically. “So much for my hopes. I really quite thought Mark would want to see my romantic protégée and might, for once, pay me a visit in the Easter Recess. Oh, well”—here a sigh of resignation—“he would probably be in a terrible passion anyway, and, thank goodness, I have you, my dear. Now, ring the bell and let us make arrangements about those chimneys.” She cast an anxious glance at the huge fire that roared in the hearth. “I am sure I have no wish to be burned in my bed.”

 
    III
    The spring evenings drew out; snowdrops gave way to daffodils in the park and village children came begging at the back door with draggled little bunches of primroses, but no further word came from Mrs. Mauleverer’s son. “I must remember to call him Lord Heverdon, my dear. He may not like it, but there’s not much he can do about it.”
    Marianne had learned by now that when her hostess had one of her bad nights and came down to breakfast with clouded eye and shaking hand, the best way of drawing her out of herself was to turn the conversation to her absent, neglectful son. She might grumble about him most of the time, but, quite obviously, she adored him. Marianne, listening, day in day out to the bitter-sweet stream of praise and blame, had developed a hearty dislike for this young man whose tedious perfections must be more than counterbalanced by his selfishness. No wonder if he neglected his mother so shamefully now, since from his earliest years she had evidently lain down and let him trample on her. He had been a delicate child, it seemed, and she had wanted to keep him at home with a private tutor, but he had insisted—“Yes, absolutely insisted, my dear, you never saw anything like it”—on going to Eton as his father had done before him. And after that, when his mother had entertained some lingering hope that he would stay at home, keep her company and learn to manage the estate, he had taken himself ruthlessly to the University, only to leave it again, despite her tears and prayers, vividly described, on the escape of the monster, Bonaparte, from Elba. “He was only a child, my dear, but he would go, and though I do not like to say it of my brother-in-law, his uncle connived at it, I am sure, from the most interested of motives. He and my husband had divided the estate between them, you see. If Mark had been killed, it would all have reverted to Lord Heverdon, and what would have happened to me, I tremble to think. There is not even a dower house