Sunday, October 19, 2025

poetry and perfection 16

 

Chapter 16

 

Charles Worthington found his son studying under the eye of the vicar of South Mimms, who was a young man of about thirty.

“Oh, hello, Papa, Johnnie here has been helping me with some things I didn’t really understand; I won’t worry about going back to Oxford, now,” said Stephen.

“That’s very kind of the reverend…?” said Worthington.

“John Kent,” said that worthy. “I asked Stephen to call me Johnnie; I’ve a young brother his age.”

“I shall be looking out for Charley at Oxford,” said Stephen. “Johnnie has been an absolute Trojan in taking care of me, and I told him all about it.”

“You must have been very worried about your daughter being foolish enough to go off with such a man to protect her friend, as well as proud of her loyalty,” said Reverend Kent. “I trust she made it home safely?”

“Alas, not yet,” said Worthington.  “Stephen, Hugo found her, and is with her; she was hurt by some drunken oaf, and he is remaining with her whilst she heals. So, she is safe enough.”

“Hugo’s a good chap,” said Stephen. “I knew he’d find her. Meant that I was more prepared to put up with being nursed.”

“You are fortunate to have such sons, sir,” said Kent.

“Indeed,” said Worthington, relieved that Stephen had at least had the forethought to permit this country vicar to assume that Hugo was Stephen’s brother. No association with the well-known, and often mentioned in the news, Beau Bottringham, fashion leader.

“I thought you might ride in my carriage, my boy, with your team tethered behind; and you can ride one of them out to collect your curricle when you are stout enough to ply the reins,” said Worthington.  “Reverend, may I reinburse you for the amount my son and his team eat….”

“Oh, please, do not think of it! I’ve greatly enjoyed having a guest, and the added pleasure of knocking down a would-be abductor when he wanted to search my house and was convinced that Stephen was a girl in disguise, but for his lewd and violent behaviour, the comic nature of the interlude would almost have surpassed a good farce at the opera,” said Kent.

Stephen sniggered.

“When he tore open your banyan and felt up the paps I don’t have, and I socked him with my good arm, I thought he would die of shock. You display very nicely, Johnnie, and threw him out with style. Only fancy him assuming m’sister would be so overcome by firing a pistol that she would need to faint on the nearest vicar! He doesn’t know Kitty like we do.”

“She’s a good little girl,” said Worthington.

“Formidable,” murmured Kent.

“Totally,” agreed Stephen.

His father was not sure it had been meant as the compliment Stephen took it for.

The vicar, whilst quite understanding of why any girl should wish to shoot Haselbraid, was extremely glad that she was under the care of Stephen’s brother – as he believed Hugo to be, by the way Stephen spoke of him – but was very glad that she had not turned up to nurse Stephen and turn his own, well-ordered life upside-down.

 

Haselbraid had been confounded to find that it really was a young man who had been taken up wounded to the vicar; he had been so certain, hearing the gossip, that it must be Elvira, or someone posing as Elvira, who had been overcome by an irritation of the nerves, since females had no fortitude.  He had scarcely glanced at Hugo’s companion, and certainly had not recognised him in the invalid on the sofa, and he suddenly wondered whether this young man had been the one who had made the imposture in the first place. It would account for him having the fortitude to shoot a pistol, and then calmly assuming the coach’s box to drive off as cool as a cucumber. It stood to reason, no female could manage that! Haselbraid had, at least, plenty of blunt, and managed to walk back to a town where he might reasonably be expected to find decent accommodation in an inn before taking a stagecoach back to town.

He was just unfortunate to have picked the same inn that Griggs had chosen, animadverting about a bad master.

Haselbraid had to put up with meat burned on one side and half raw the other, and wetted sheets, for the landlord’s daughter had liked Griggs more than a little. Haselbraid took a severe chill from a mix of fever from his wounded head and the wetted sheets, and might have died of it, had not the landlord desired to avoid anyone dying in the slightest of suspicious circumstances, and wrote to Haselbraid’s address in London, apprising whomsoever it might concern of his lordship’s illness. He also wrote to Bow Street about a man with a bullet wound; and an Officer of Bow Street turned up to be told to go to hell and not to fuss over an accident. Haselbraid had no intention of letting anyone find out that he had been shot by a woman, even if the said woman was a youth in disguise, and wanted to plan his own revenge if he could find out which of Hugo Bottringham’s relatives the boy was, which he must be, being red.

 

Haselbraid owned more than one vehicle, and his comptroller of the household, who was Haselbraid’s illegitimate brother, came out to collect him, bringing a doctor with him, and bearing Haselbraid tenderly to his own house.  John Hasel would not have wept, had Haselbraid died, but as his own fortunes were dependent upon those of Haselbraid, he did what he could, but managed to introduce to his sick brother a declaration of adoption of his own son, currently at boarding school, and Haselbraid’s closest relative bar any side blows of his own. Signing a will making the boy his heir was a trickier matter, but John Hasel had long been able to forge his brother’s writing, and managed to add this to Haselbraid’s carelessly written will request, which the invalid signed, without reading, when the solicitor brought a fair copy. John Hasel had carefully erased certain parts around the words following, ‘and the residue’ in the draft which read ‘To my mistress, Sally Bowles,’ to read ‘To my mistress’s son, Peter Hasel.’ Haselbraid had had a sufficiency of mistresses, and, indeed, Mrs. Hasel had been a young chambermaid he had used and discarded, and whether Peter Hasel was Haselbraid’s get, or John Hasel’s was a moot point. John Hasel loved the boy, and counted him his, and wanted the lad to benefit.

John Hasel had a number of schemes to rebuild the impoverished marquisate on behalf of Peter, and was much disappointed when Haselbraid pulled through.

It would not take much, however, to speak of his weakened constitution, following a coaching accident, which was all Haselbraid would admit to, and a relapse into pneumonia. Being married to a chambermaid, John Hasel knew all the ways a servant could make life uncomfortable. He was not so crude as to spike the brandy with arsenic, but various herbs which loosened the bowels found their way into Haselbraid’s food, which further weakened him.

 Haselbraid took a repairing lease in his country seat in the north. 

oOoOo

 

In Buckden, neither Hugo nor Kitty had any idea of Haselbraid’s vicissitudes, and it might be said that neither of them would have grieved over them in the least. If Kitty gave that peer a passing thought, it was to hope she never encountered him again; and if Hugo’s thoughts tended to the more practical, of wondering how to manoeuvre planting the man a facer, his ambitions did not really rise higher, or sink lower, than that. He knew that Haselbraid would probably be sufficiently humiliated to stay out of his, and Elvira’s, ways, unless he resorted to out and out abduction by brute force, and he was not sure Haselbraid had the resources to pay off the silence of ruffians sufficiently adept to carry this out. He wrote to Elvira and Sophie as well.

My dear sisters,

We spoke briefly of Elvira having the sense not to succumb to the instructions of an anonymous letter warning of danger to me, and be assured, I will never place my name to such, in order to trick either of you. Kitty suggests that we should have certain code phrases to use, which seems melodramatic, but perhaps she is right. Therefore, ignore any note purporting to be from me, or written on my behalf, unless signed, ‘with deep affection, Hugo’. I know that you know better than to permit yourselves to be in a situation where you might be jostled into a coach.

With deep affection, Hugo.

 

Elvira and Sophie settled in to a shared room on the ground floor in the Worthington’s town house, a salon overlooking the garden with wide French windows, where Sophie might readily be wheeled out. Mrs. Worthington was a skilled gardener, making the most of the limited town garden, with a small terrace which gave onto arbours which hid the lack of space, though the garden was quite deep if not wide. The sunken kitchen garden was hidden by trellises, which grew peas and beans to cascade down, whence the tunnel to the mews opened off the back door of the servants’ quarters, where herbs for the kitchen grew in pots. Sophie was delighted to stay somewhere else, and she and Elvira wrote a long, and rambling letter to Hugo and ‘Kit’ and being careful not to use any personal pronouns for them.

 

It might be said that Kitty was delighted when this letter arrived on her second day of being an invalid. It gave her much to discuss with Hugo, about improving his own town house garden, for Sophie. It came, indeed, in good time to stop her being bored enough to try to do more than she was capable of managing.

“If she can have somewhere flat, it will give her a feeling of independence, to only need someone to wheel her out,” she said.

“Yes, and perhaps you will draw some designs while you are laid up here,” suggested Hugo. “You’ve seen the garden.”

Kitty sniggered.

“Calling it a garden is a bit like calling a washing-tub a ship,” she said.

“Oy!” said Hugo. “It has flower beds and a lawn… well, a grassy area.”

“Much neglected,” said Kitty.

“My father was a keen gardener, and it’s not something I saw as a priority,” said Hugo.  “And, yes, I know the shrubbery needs pruning.”

“The jungle needs several jungly-wallahs from the John Company,” said Kitty. “That, or goats.”

“I don’t think it used to extend that far,” sighed Hugo. “It was a wilderness, but it never used to be that wild. There’s a gazebo inside it somewhere.”

“Really? It is completely overgrown. Definitely needs explorers from the John Company,” said Kitty.  “If you go in there to seek for mythical gazebos, if you aren’t out by tea, we’ll send in elephants.”

“Brat,” said Hugo, amicably.

Kitty laughed.

“I think it needs a few gardeners who know what they are doing, with specific instructions,” she said.

“Yes, it’s beyond my knowledge. I did not inherit my father’s love of gardening; only his love of horses,” said Hugo.

“Mama says that the muckings out of the stable are good for roses,” said Kitty. “So that will be helpful.”

Hugo went out to purchase sheets of paper for Kitty to make fair copies of her designs on, having marked for her the approximate location of the gazebo, so she might include it in her plans, and sketched it from memory.

“We need to build up the land beyond it too plant up as though it receded into the far distance; shrubs that look like trees, and seem further away than they really are, and perhaps a pond with a pump to take water to the top of a pile of stones to be a cascade, and paint the back of the mews in a mottled green like a distant forest,” she said. “We can do it when we are married, so Sophie does not feel left out.”

Hugo felt a distinct lump in his throat; she had said ‘when’ of their marriage quite readily and naturally,but her first thought was that Sophie might feel left out after the marriage had taken place.

No, he would have to go a long, long way to find a bride as thoughtful about his crippled sister as was Kitty, who was becoming very dear to him.

“Perhaps we might make a high rock garden leading down to it,” he suggested.

“Oh, yes, that could work nicely,” said Kitty. “We should have to build a mound of earth to put the rocks on, though; it would be easier than stone.”

Hugo sniggered.

“We could get it rapidly enough by offering to muck out every mews, and take away what was left; though it would reduce somewhat, it would be rich soil between the rocks, and we might have rambling roses climbing them.”

“Oh, now that would be nice,” said Kitty, and then giggled.

“A rose by any other name might smell as sweet’

Wert not for other smells in which she beds her feet,” she quipped.

“Now that was a definite misuse of Shakespeare,” said Hugo, severely. “The smell goes off after a while.”

“Just as well, or we would be unpopular neighbours,” said Kitty. “But it would be very pretty.”

 

2 comments:

  1. I was going to say I hope this Reverend Doesn't see the Newspaper Item OF The Engagement And Marriage, But IF, Stephen Is Going to look out for young Charlie, The Reverend Will KNOW The WHOLE!!

    IS He Going to get A Placement IN Hugo's/The Worthington's Desmain Somewhere?

    To "keep him in the 'family' ", as it were?

    Cheeky me, may I request a bonus, just because, Sunday.

    Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, in due course, he will know the whole; and I think he is a sufficiently broad-minded man to keep quiet with the proper resolution through marriage. I expect he will end up with a nice living somewhere.

      a bonus for Sunday? goodness me! all righty, then.

      Delete