Victoria and the Nightingale by Susan Barrie Page A

lonely cottage, and the people who were there last thought it was very lonely. But then perhaps they’d been used to rather a gay life abroad ... And in any case, they had a car. I expect you’ve got a car?”
    “No.” Victoria shook her head as well.
    “No car? Then you really are cut off! Unless Sir Peter—”
    “Sir Peter’s chauffeur will take us for occasional drives.”
    “I see.”
    But Victoria was not convinced that she did see, and as she and Johnny walked back to Alder Cottage—and now that she knew the name of it she decided that it was very suitable, since the garden sloped to a river—she couldn’t help wondering how the rest of the district would react to the news that Sir Peter Wycherley, on the very eve of marriage with a highly suitable young woman, had burdened himself with a ward who could quite easily have been his own son.
    And that set Victoria thinking along quite different lines. She was beginning to feel more and more amazed because Sir Peter had taken such a firm line about Johnny. She simply could not understand why he had had to do anything quite so drastic as the undertaking to look after Johnny for the rest of his adolescent life was likely to turn out to be. If he had children of his own there would almost certainly be awkwardness, and she was absolutely certain that Sir Peter’s fiancee did not approve.
    Hardly any young woman on the verge of marriage would.
    But for the first time she wondered what the district would think, and how Sir Peter would explain away Johnny ... and herself. Surely he was being a little rash in burdening himself with both of them? A young woman whom the postmistress thought looked very young, but was rather too young to be Johnny’s mother.
    Or was she?
    She began to work it out for herself. Since Johnny was eight and she was twenty-two that really put her out of court as a mother for Johnny. But she wasn’t quite sure that she wanted to be put out of court as a mother for Johnny. For some perverse reason she wasn’t in the least sure, since Sir Peter was old enough—and more than old enough!—to be his father!
    Lunch was a tremendous success because the up-to-the-minute stove in the kitchen worked beautifully. One would have had to be a very bad cook indeed to fail to produce something eatable after wading through the list of recipes in the cookbook that had been purchased with it, and hung beside it on the wall. Victoria was debating whether or not to send Johnny upstairs for a short nap when a woman who looked rather like the woman at the post office, but was actually much nicer, arrived at the side door and announced that she had been instructed by Sir Peter to present herself at the cottage for a few hours daily to do essential chores.
    “Like scrubbing the kitchen floor, and things like that.” She beamed at Victoria. “You don’t look to me as if you’re accustomed to scrubbing floors, my dear, and after all it isn’t your job, is it? To look after the little lad is your job.”
    Victoria felt somewhat taken aback.
    “But it’s such a tiny cottage—” she began.
    Her new daily woman waved a hand and laughed.
    ‘‘Don’t you talk about tiny cottages, my dear.” In the whole course of their association Victoria was to be addressed as “my dear” by Mrs. Wavertree. “They get dirty whether they’re big or small, and in my experience the smaller they are the dirtier they get. Especially when there
    are youngsters running around.”
    But she seemed to take a great fancy to Johnny, and as she knew a lot about birds and he was beginning to take a serious interest in wildlife it seemed likely that they would get along very well. Also, there was no doubt about it. Mrs. Wavertree was prepared to revere him because he was Sir Peter’s ward.
    Or about to become Sir Peter’s acknowledged responsibility.
    Mrs. Wavertree gave the scrupulously clean kitchen what she called a going over, and would have performed the same function for the