Jasper

 ok, this one doesn't have a title as such either but it's an opening to the Brandon Scandals of those who were kids in the first series, jumping to 1821. 

It isn't completed yet, so I hope I can keep ahead. Jasper finds himself in the role of helping damsels in distress and might like one of them more than a little. There will be puppies. 

Chapter 1

 

The three bays were perfectly matched, and all worked well together. Jasper was well satisfied.

“Want a drive, Phebe?” he asked his sister, sat beside him in his high perch phaeton.

“Oh, may I?” Phebe was delighted.

“If I can advertise them as used to a lady driver as well, I might get a higher price for them,” said Jasper. ,

Phebe happily took the reins.

“Are you doing well?” she asked.

“Very,” said Jasper.

Their stepmother, Imogen, had settled money on him, and told him that she would help him invest it as he chose. The half-gypsy boy had a magical touch with horses, and chose to purchase young horses, especially those sold up to pay debts, picking them to match as pairs, fours, and in this case, three, to train and sell on. He had more than quadrupled the initial amount he had been given, as profits, and had set the initial amount aside in the funds, for a safe income in case of any mishap. Purchasing four young horses for often under one hundred guineas enabled him to sell them for six hundred guineas, or more, as a matched four.  Of course, he had to work out their keep, and the wages of grooms to help him, which he was determined to do, not just make use of his father’s stables. Evelyn, Marquis Finchbury, would have been happy to let his eldest son do just that, but Jasper was proud to a fault, and wanted to prove he could do well with business, even if he planned one day to merge his business into the family estate, when he served his young, legitimate, brother as a steward. Seven years had passed since Jasper had  come to live with his father and his bride, and Bleddyn, his brother, was recently breeched at six years old. After Bleddyn were Enid, Cassandra, and Jethro, and Jasper adored all of them.

“You’ll be less likely to find a lady who drives unicorn,” said Phebe, plying her whip to disturb the flies around the ears of her leader. “Most don’t.”

“Oh, I can’t be responsible for most people not teaching their daughters the important things in life,” said Jasper.

Phebe laughed. “It was a shame in a way that the fourth one did not measure up to work with the others.”

“Yes, I did not set out to train them to pull unicorn. The wheelers however will pull as a pair, and the leader with either one of them in tandem. So there’s some versatility to them, and the loner a good brisk trotter. I might race with him in my curricle to get my name better known.” Jasper had considered it an investment to purchase several different types of carriage for the training of the horses he mixed and matched. It was no good training a team of six on a curricle, nor to expect a pair to pull a heavy coach.

“Mama would tell you  off and then tell you to take care,” said Phebe. “Oh! What is happening ahead? Those are girls from my school, and some gypsies.”

Jasper took the reins and tooled himself alongside the girls.

“Now then, are you troubling the giorgio girls?” he asked.

“Jus’ beggin’,” mumbled the apparent leader.

“Ladies, would you care to be more explicit?” asked Jasper, raising his hat to the ladies. He leaped down, tossing the reins back to Phebe.

The blonde was half fainting, having fallen backwards at the side of the road; the red-head had been shouting at the gypsies, and had grabbed a fallen branch. It was sere, Jasper noted, and would have broken rather than breaking any heads, but her instincts were good.

“He said we owed him a kiss each before we might pass,” said the redhead.

“Oh? How uncouth of him,” said Jasper.

The gypsies were ganging up closer together, when Jasper hit the leader in the mouth, twice, with a double pile-driving blow. He went down.

Jasper slipped into the Rom tongue.

“Take your lewd friend away and stay away, and leave the girls in the school alone or there will be an accounting. Don’t assume I don’t know the ways just because I’m a didekoi; my giorgio pa gives room for gypsies to camp if you don’t make trouble. I know one of you, Moses Prewitt; don’t you mess with us Lovells.”

It worked, and they melted off the road and away, taking their hurt leader with them.

“Well, now, ladies, perhaps you would like to get up with Phebe so she can drive on to school; and I’ll run along behind to retrieve my phaeton,” said Jasper. He offered an arm to the one who had fallen, to help her up into the phaeton. She gazed up into his face, and clung to him as soon, thought Jasper, as she had assessed the cost of his clothing. 

“Oh, my! These sporting phaetons are so challenging. I declare I scarcely know how to get up!”

“Perhaps if I make a stirrup with my hands and Phebe helps you from above,” said Jasper, who had no intention of lifting a girl with eyes a blue as forget-me-nots somehow tinged, in Jasper’s imagination with the pure yellow of calculation, if one might borrow the church’s colours for the deadly sins. Phebe pulled with more enthusiasm than gentleness, and with a toss from Jasper, the blonde almost fell into the phaeton.

He turned to the redhead. The green of her eyes was soft and like moss on old trees.

“Why, what a long way up it is, to be sure,” said the girl, a little disconcerted. “I will make use of your arm, if I may, sir; thank you.”

Jasper noted that she needed very little help indeed to climb up.

“At your service,” said Jasper, raising his hat. “Walk on!” he said to the horses.

Jasper had sharp ears, and he heard the blonde beauty say,

“Well, what’s a child your age doing, driving out with a dangerous blade like that? You’ll be in so much trouble, you know, when The Gorgon finds out.”

Jasper smiled grimly. Presumably ‘the Gorgon’ was the head preceptress and the blonde beauty had no idea that Phebe had a brother, and permission to go home with him for the weekend.                                                                                                

He vaulted a gate, and started to jog across the fields, knowing where the school was, and having what was an almost uncanny bump of direction, was fairly sure he would arrive in the village very shortly behind Phebe.

 

oOoOo

 

Phebe sneered at Marianne Blackley, the blonde, for her comment.

“You’re such a fool, Marianne,” she said.

“Somehow I doubt the gentleman would permit Phebe to drive a bang-up team like that if he wasn’t very well known to her family,” said the redhead.

“You hold your tongue, Laura!” said Marianne. “You know nothing of the world, or of dangerous blades, and you’re not likely to, either, being a bastard brat of who knows who, shuffled off to school out of the way.”

“I’m a bastard too,” said Phebe. “Like Laura, I was born that way. What’s your excuse, Marianne?”

“Really, Phebe, I’m not base-born, I have a very good family,” said Marianne, preening. “You are almost acceptable in society as your father acknowledges you, but I expect you’ll still have to make your living as a governess when you leave school.”

“Well, that’s all you know,” said Phebe. “But of course, we won’t be moving in the same circles, as you go out of your way to irritate those of you who might have got you an entrée into society.”

“Well, you’ll hardly be moving in society, your father’s wife won’t want to have to bring out one of his cuckoos,” said Marianne.

“You’re so bourgeois,” said Phebe.

“Woof!” said the pile of white fluff at her feet.

Marianne made a disgusted face.

“Why you have to bring that mongrel with you, I don’t know,” she said.

“No, I don’t suppose you do,” said Phebe. “Now, were you finished with insulting my family and my pet? Because if not, I’m pulling over for you to walk back to the school, and you can do it alone, for Laura is going to stay in the phaeton as I’m not used to driving on my own.”

“You know we’re not allowed to walk out alone! It’s unladylike!” gasped Marianne.

“That’s why I thought it suited you,” said Phebe. “Going to keep your tongue behind your teeth, then?  Good.”

 

 

oOoOo

 

Jasper was pleased with his speed through woods and fields, and came through the churchyard of St. Michael’s church in the little village of Taddell.  Across the road, and up the drive was Tad Hall, where the school was situated. Jasper checked his appearance, and swaggered up the drive.

As he came in sight of the gracious stone Tudor building which housed the school, he happened upon a woman of uncertain age, though undoubtedly a lady. Jasper raised his hat.

The woman flapped her hands.

“Shoo! Shoo, you horrid dirty creature! Begone! This is a school for young ladies!”

“Well, to be sure it is, look you, for I’d scarcely expect my sister to be at a school for young gentlemen, now, would I?” said Jasper, who was inclined to lapse into the Welsh idiom and accent of his adored grandmother.

“I... I’ll call the constables!” cried the woman.

“To be sure, if it makes you happy to do so,” said Jasper. “Have I actually beaten my sister here? Why, yes, for that sounds like hoofs on the drive.”

“Oh dear, oh dear!” the woman moaned as Phebe drove up the drive at a spanking pace, and drew up outside the school. “Phebe, my dear, drive on, and I will keep this gypsy from menacing you!”

“Why, Miss Phipps, what gypsy? This is my brother,” said Phebe. “He ceded his phaeton to me to bring home Miss Blackley and Miss Cartwright, since they really were menaced by gypsies.” She smiled brightly. “Jasper hit their leader, and they ran away. Most satisfying.”

“B...b...brother?” quavered Miss Phipps.

“Finch, at your service, Miss Phipps, now we are introduced,” said Jasper, doffing his hat again and making a flamboyant leg. “Take her round to wherever your baggage is offloaded, Phebe, and I’ll help you unload it, and your luggage as well.”

“Behave, Jasper,” said Phebe.

“No, must I? It’s more fun misbehaving,” said Jasper. “Ah, servants for your boxes, valises, fal-lals and the other unnecessary appurtenances of female life.”

“I’ll remind you of that next time you ruin a dozen neckcloths in the morning before you are collared to your satisfaction,” said Phebe.

“A dozen? Never so few. A score at least,” said Jasper, who did his tie in one attempt. This was, however, an old joke, because a dandy had to claim to need many attempts. And the image helped him sell horses.

Jasper leaped up after assisting the other ladies down, and Phebe and Moppy, her dog, came down from the Phaeton without assistance with the grace of long acquaintance, in Phebe’s case, and like a controlled fall in Moppy’s.

“Be good, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks,” said Jasper. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“That leaves me almost endless leeway,” said Phebe.

“Cheeky brat,” said Jasper, from the superior age of nineteen to rising fifteen.

Phebe laughed. She and Jasper had been very close, from the time when she had first been brought to live with her father, and whilst her stepmother was still working on overcoming his moral scruples to marry her, being beset with scandal. Phebe had missed Jasper sorely whilst he was up at Oxford, and had relished every letter he had sent. As Jasper, whilst fond enough of his studies, could never have been described as an angel, he described all the larks and pranks he and his fellows had got up to, and Phebe had digested, and learned.

She had been a part-time boarder at Tad Hall School for almost a year now, going home at least once a month, sometimes permitted to bring her friend, Harriet, with her, and had not yet dared to perpetrate anything too daring. But that was before Marianne Blackley had arrived, to do two years finishing, and learning how to associate with those in whose society her fond parents hoped she might find herself. Tad Hall took, on the whole, girls who were nominally of the gentry, like curate’s daughters, or those who had an embarrassment of birth circumstances, and Evelyn, Marquis Finchbury, had decided that his daughter would be happier there, where she was one of those of better, if irregular, birth, than in a school where the daughters of other noblemen might bully her for her illegitimacy. On the whole, Phebe agreed.

Harriet, also newly returned, squealed with delight, and hugged Phebe. She was a pleasant looking girl with sandy curls and blue eyes.

“I saw you driving unicorn!” she said. “And I wondered if you had brought the team to school! Whatever possessed you to give a lift to Morgause and her slave?”

“We fell in with them, menaced by gypsies, and my brother saw them off, the gypsies not the fell fae female, and he suggested I drive them back to the Hall,” said Phebe.  “Laura isn’t so bad, actually; she tried to stand up to Marianne. Why don’t we steal her as a friend and sour lemons to Morgause?”  Naturally, Phebe knew her folklore and the tales of King Arthur’s wicked sister.

Harriet pulled a face.

“I suppose it’s our Christian duty,” she said, “But she is a rather big girl.”

“She’s seventeen, only two years older than we are,” said Phebe, bracingly.

Harriet sighed.

“I suppose so,” she said. “Papa would expect it.”

Harriet’s father, Michael Brent, was the rector of St. Michael’s, and Harriet boarded weekly, so she might, her mother said, firmly, enjoy being with girls her own age, rather than going home every day as her father considered more sensible. Harriet was overjoyed that her uncle was paying for her to board. She loved her father dearly, but he was very austere, and it had taken a visit from Lord Finchbury to ask him in what particulars he and his daughter were not good enough to permit Harriet to visit Finchbury Hall, since if it was good enough for his Brandon in-laws to visit, he might wonder what manner of prodigies Harriet and her family might be.

Since it was the scandals surrounding Evelyn and the Brandon family which had been a bar, the vicar had begged his pardon for listening to gossip.

Harriet relished her visits to Finchbury Hall, but all of Phebe’s attempts to matchmake between her friend and her brother had so far failed on both sides, Jasper seeing Harriet as a delightful child, and Harriet seeing Jasper as a fun, but rather scary family member.

Phebe had not given up.