Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online Page B

round dark head. His hair was black, and cut very short, and his skin was sallow, almost waxen. His eyes were black, and very large, his wrists and knees bony and somehow pathetic. He was dressed in navy shorts and a striped jersey, and was lying on his stomach, reading a large book. He looked small and a little drab on the big luxurious rug.
    He looked round in inquiry and then got slowly to his feet.
    I said, in English: "I'm Mademoiselle Martin. You must be Philippe."
    He nodded, looking shy. Then his breeding asserted itself, and he took a short step forward, holding out his hand. "You are very welcome, Mademoiselle Martin." His voice was small and thin like himself, and without much expression. "I hope you will be happy at Valmy."
    It came to me again, sharply, as I shook the hand, that this was the owner of Valmy. The thought made him, oddly enough, seem even smaller, less significant.
    "I was told that you might be busy," I said, "but I thought I'd better come straight along and see you."
    He considered this for a moment, taking me in with the frankly interested stare of a child. "Are you really going to teach me English?"
    "Yes."
    He said: "You do not look like a governess."
    "Then I must try and look more like one, I suppose."
    "No, I like it as you are. Do not change."
    The de Valmys, it seemed, started young. I laughed.
"Merci du compliment, Monsieur le Comte.”
    He gave me a swift look upwards. There was glimmer in the black eyes. But all he said was: "Do we have a lesson tomorrow?"
    "I expect so. I don't know
.
I shall probably see your aunt tonight, and no doubt she'll tell me just what the programme is."
    "Have you seen-my uncle?" Was there, or was there not,
the
faintest of changes in that monotonous little voice?
    "Yes."
    He was standing quite still, small hands dangling from their bony wrists in front of him. It came to me that he was in his own way as un-get-at-able as Héloïse de Valmy. My task here might not be a very easy one. His manners were beautiful; he was not, it was patent, going to be a "difficult" child in the sense of the word as usually used by governesses; but would I ever get to know him, ever get past that touch-me-not electric fence of reserve? That, and his unchildlike habit of stillness, I had already met in Madame de Valmy, but there the resemblance ended. Her stillness and remoteness was beautiful and poised; this child's was ungraceful and somehow disturbing.
    I said: "I must go and unpack now, or I'll be late for dinner. Would you like to help?”
    He looked up quickly
.
"Me?"
    "Well, not help, exactly, but come and keep me company, and see what I've brought you from London."
    "You mean a present?"
    "Of course."
    He flushed a slow and unbecoming scarlet. Without speaking, he walked sedately past me through my sitting-room towards my bedroom door, opened it for me, then followed me into the room. He stood at the foot of the bed, still in silence, staring at my case.
    I stooped over it, lifted a few more things out onto the bed, then rummaged to find what I had brought.
    "They're nothing very much," I said, "because I haven't much spare cash. But-well, here they are.”
    I had brought him, from Woolworth's, a cardboard model of Windsor Castle-the kind that you cut out and assemble, together with a box, as big as I could afford, containing a collection of men in the uniform of the Grenadier Guards.
    I looked a little uncertainly at the silent owner of the Chateau Valmy, and handed him the boxes.
    He regarded the optimistic pictures on the lids.
    "An English castle?" he said. "And English soldiers?"
    "Yes: The kind they have at Buckingham Palace."
    "With the fur hats, to guard the Queen. I know." He was still looking raptly at a picture of a full regiment of Guards, drilling in an improbable fashion.
    "They're-they're not much," I said, "You see-"
    But I saw he was not listening. He had opened the lids and was fingering the cheap toys inside. "A present from London," he said, touching