Oak King Holly King by Sebastian Nothwell

Author:Sebastian Nothwell [Nothwell, Sebastian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-02-13T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

The housemaid who answered the door-bell looked as if Wren were the first gentleman she’d seen in all her days. She didn’t appear any less astonished when Wren told her he’d come to see Miss Flora Fairfield. She left him standing on the doorstep whilst she went to see if Miss Flora was “in.” Some quarter of an hour later she returned and led him in to a very rosy little front parlour and instructed him to wait before she left him alone again. Wren spent another quarter of an hour casting a dubious eye over the flocked golden damask wallpaper, the delicate white lace antimacassars laid out over the backs of armchairs that had evidently never known the grease of a gentleman’s hair, and the myriad framed examples of young ladies’ samplers, watercolours, and pencil-sketch portraits rendered in varying levels of skill. He had just determined one particular watercolour depicted a horse—and not, as he had at first surmised, a very unfortunate and lumpy hound—when the parlour door opened again.

The voluminous lace-flounced tartan cake of a gown that swept over the threshold did not carry Miss Flora along with it. Instead Wren found himself under the stern gaze of a woman whose greying hair tucked beneath her starched white cap bespoke her middling years and widowed status.

“Mrs Bailiwick, I presume?” said Wren.

She looked him up and down with an audible sniff.

“Mr Lofthouse, at your service,” Wren added with a bow. “Clerk to Mr Grigsby.”

Her formidable scowl relaxed by fractions. “So you are here to see our Miss Fairfield on behalf of her guardian.”

“Yes,” Wren lied. “Do forgive the short notice. Mr Grigsby is accompanying Mr Tolhurst and Mr Knoll to Rochester today, and they sent me on in advance of the invalid to bring Miss Fairfield the glad tidings.”

Mrs Bailiwick brightened considerably. “Glad tidings indeed, if our dear Mr Tolhurst is returned at last! We’ve so missed our marvellous music master. And I daresay Miss Fairfield shall be as happy to hear of his return as that of her fiancé—for, indeed, Mr Tolhurst has doted on her ever since she entered our academy.”

“Has he,” said Wren, more out of politeness than any real interest. As Mr Grigsby’s clerk, he’d assisted him in choosing his ward’s education, and therefore knew very well that Tolhurst had been the music and dancing master of Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy for many years. Long before Miss Flora had arrived at the tender age of eleven. Small wonder that the man should take an interest in his nephew’s betrothed. “Most attentive of him.”

“I’m certain you found him thus in London whilst he tended to his nephew,” said Mrs Bailiwick with a satisfied smile. “They may as well be family already—Miss Fairfield and Mr Tolhurst, I mean,” she added with another bizarre trill.

Wren forced a smile. “I should like to inform Miss Fairfield without delay—and, with your permission, in privacy. I’m afraid I must bring her some dreadful dull matters of business as well as joy.”

A

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