Amanda Scott by The Bath Eccentric’s Son Page B

all to tell him that she had hardly laughed at all for months before meeting him, so she held her tongue and gave her attention to the narrow wooden stairs. At the top she paused, waiting for him to come up beside her, wondering if he would say any more.
    He did not. He smiled at her again and gestured toward a door just inside the corridor leading off the landing. “That is his bedchamber,” he said. “I should like to spring you on him before he has a chance to say he won’t see you, but I daresay that would only send him off into another fit. I don’t mind if he has one, of course—”
    “Sir!” Nell exclaimed, truly shocked.
    Manningford drew a deep breath and let it out again before he said, “Look here, Miss Bradbourne, you might as well know from the outset that I don’t care a damn for my father. He has never given me the least cause even to feel that ordinary consideration one feels for the common man in the street. He has ignored me all my life, exerting himself only to forbid me to do anything of which he does not approve, frequently threatening to cut off my allowance when word of any outrageous behavior reached his ears, but consistently forbidding me to seek gentlemanly occupation.”
    “But surely,” Nell said, looking at the closed door ahead of them, “there must have been something you could have done. Perhaps your brother would have helped you.”
    The glint of sardonic amusement in Manningford’s eyes deepened and he shrugged. “My brother makes few decisions on his own, ma’am, and his wife does not approve of me. To her credit, I must point out that I am just as irresponsible, selfish, and heedless as ever she has accused me of being. Indeed, my myriad faults have been described to me by many others in addition to Clarissa, and with equal regularity. So many who say so very much the same thing must certainly be right.”
    “Goodness,” Nell said, shaking her head with an expression of extreme sympathy on her lively face, “you poor, poor man.”
    The look in his eyes sharpened, then relaxed, and his lips began to twitch. He said in a carefully even tone, “Someone recently told me that you are never impertinent, Miss Bradbourne. I wonder who that can have been.”
    “Why, sir,” she said with wide-eyed innocence, “it was I who told you, but no doubt such adversity has impaired your memory.”
    Taking her arm in a firm grip, he drew her to a padded bench against the wall on the landing and plumped her down upon it. “You deserve that I should take you straight in,” he said, “but I have at least some notion of civility left to me. Moreover, Borland is as likely as my father to have a fit if I simply open the door and present you to their notice. I’d not miss my father, but the entire household would sink without Borland, so you will await me here.” He went to the door of the bedchamber and scratched softly.
    The door opened at once, and Borland stood there, his sharp gaze flying from Manningford to Nell, whereupon his eyes widened and he looked back in dismay at Manningford. “Master Brandon,” he protested in his raspy voice, “you cannot—”
    “I can, Borland, so it is of no use to tell me that I cannot. I have honored my father’s wishes for eight-and-twenty years, but that was before he demanded more than I can give. I quite understand that the wretched novel must be written—oh, don’t look so no-account,” he added when the manservant gasped and stared wretchedly at Nell. “She knows the whole of it, and you may tell him for me that if he does not agree at once to see the pair of us, I shall shout the truth from the rooftops of Bath. It is naught to me if people know his secret. Certainly no one will think for a minute that I had a hand in it, so if they laugh, they will laugh only at him.”
    There was a heavy silence that lasted a full minute before Borland turned and looked back into the bedchamber, his expression as he did so showing clearly that he