The Gallant Guardian by Evelyn Richardson Page A

lips were pressed into a thin white line, her face rigid with some barely contained emotion that he could not quite fathom. “Surely you are mistaken.”
    Green eyes, dark with pain, glanced briefly up at him and then were hastily lowered as though their owner were afraid of revealing too much. “No, I am not. When it was discovered that Wil—that my brother would not grow into an heir worthy of following in my father’s footsteps, he stopped coming to visit us altogether. We had always been something of a burden to him, involved as he was in politics, and he had already found it difficult to get away from town to come see us, but when he learned about William he could not bear to face the situation, so he simply avoided it.”
    “Leaving you in the care of…”
    “My governess and William’s nursemaid and the other servants. I was almost nine at the time and I was so accustomed to being on my own that at first I was not aware of any difference in his interest in us. Then not much longer after that, when it became clear that his tutor was no help, I began looking after William myself and trying to teach him to talk and, much later, his letters and numbers. I was so busy with William that I no longer noticed my father’s absence.”
    The tale was told simply enough, but a great deal had been left unsaid of the loneliness of a child left without any parental attention. Even the infrequent and always critical attention that Max had received had been more than she had had. The hall they were standing in seemed vast and magnificent to him now, how much more vast and empty it must have seemed to a child of nine, how empty her life must have been if the devotion of her childish existence to a simple brother had formed the sole basis of it. Max looked down at her. What a tiny thing she was, and still so young—too young to have assumed all that responsibility.
    His reverie was interrupted by the swish of skirts and the jingle of keys. Mrs. Hodges, notified of the guest’s arrival, came bustling up to show the marquess to his chambers and Charlotte, after cautioning him that her brother was likely to be lying in wait to question him further about his horses the minute he reappeared, left him in the housekeeper’s capable hands and went off to speak to Cook about preparing something special in honor of his lordship’s arrival.
    In fact, Charlotte need not have bothered to descend to the kitchen at all, for word of the marquess’s arrival had already spread. “He is an out-and-outer, to be sure,” panted the stableboy who, fortified with such momentous news, had had the temerity to burst into Cook’s sacred domain without bothering to scrub himself thoroughly from head to toe.
    “And he is ever so handsome,” the youngest scullery maid piped up from her place at the sink.
    “And how would you know that, Polly? That sink, which is where you are supposed to be with those potatoes, is nowhere near a window.” The kitchen maid reproached her in a lofty tone, safe in her superior position opposite Cook at the kitchen table.
    “That must be his lordship, the Marquess of Lydon, guardian to the young earl. Lady Charlotte told me that he was expected.” Cook’s grand pronouncement effectively silenced all of them. “We must see to it that his lordship is provided a meal worthy of Harcourt. Polly, run fetch me a breast of veal from the larder and two of the pheasants as well. And you” —she turned to the kitchen maid— “had better go and ask Mr. Tidworth for some sherry to put in a syllabub. By now he will have heard of his lordship’s arrival and will be ready to bring out the best port.” Cook trusted that the butler had managed to maintain the quality of Harcourt’s cellars, even though the former earl had not availed himself of its treasures for more than a decade. Still, Mr. Tidworth, ever hopeful of a visit from the master, would have done his best to have something presentable on hand should he happen to