A Teacher of Love Page 6

  “I can appreciate that, but Jimbo is a very special dog. He understands exactly what is going on and he told me clearly that he did not think the schoolroom was good enough for these two young gentlemen.”

  Mrs. Donaldson looked only a little mollified.

  “Now I’ll show you your room, Miss Wicke – ”

  She next opened a door that led to another bedroom and this, Tasia realised, was one of the State bedrooms to which the boudoir really belonged.

  Her room contained a four-poster bed with carved gilt posts and an eiderdown of blue silk and there were blue curtains over the windows.

  Almost as if she was about to ask the question, Mrs. Donaldson declared,

  “This is the Bluebell suite and I think, Miss Wicke, you’ll be ever so comfortable here.”

  “I am certain I will,” Tasia smiled, “and thank you very much for finding us something so delightful.”

  She looked at Peter and to her surprise he said,

  “Thank you so very much, Mrs. Donaldson. Simon and I would much rather be down here than still be stuck upstairs. Isn’t that right, Simon?”

  “Yes it is,” Simon agreed readily.

  He was kneeling on the floor patting Jimbo and he answered somewhat indifferently as he was concentrating so intently on the dog.

  Mrs. Donaldson rustled towards the door.

  “I’ll now have your bags brought up, Miss Wicke, and the maids’ll unpack everything for you.”

  “Thanks very much,” replied Tasia, as she turned to the boys. “I expect the lessons you have been having were all extremely boring.”

  “Then if you are not going to teach us,” enquired Peter, “why are you here?”

  There was a pause before Tasia answered him,

  “If I tell you a secret, will you keep it?”

  The boys’ eyes opened wide.

  “A secret?” they both exclaimed.

  “It is very very important that no one should know about it, so just see that the doors are shut, especially the one into my bedroom where the maids will be.”

  The boys ran to the doors, while Tasia sat down on the sofa.

  When they came back to her, she suggested,

  “Sit near me, because I am going to speak in a very low voice.”

  The boys did as they were told.

  Jimbo jumped up onto her lap and then she looked over her shoulder before whispering,

  “I am running away and I have come here for you to hide me.”

  “Running away! But why?”

  “Because my father wants me to do something I do not want to do and I am hiding so that he cannot find me.”

  “Will he be angry with you for running away?”

  “I expect so, but when he cannot find me, he will at first be worried, then he will decide that he wants me back. When I do go back, he will surely give up trying to make me do something I don’t want to do.”

  “But you think he will come looking for you?”

  Tasia nodded.

  “I am afraid so, Peter, so we will have to be careful not to go to anywhere I might be seen by people who know me.”

  “I think it is very brave of you to run away,” Simon joined in. “Peter and I thought of running away when that last Tutor kept smacking us when we didn’t do what he wanted, but we could not think where we could go.”

  “And we had no money,” added Peter.

  “I’d expect if you boys did run away, your father would have detectives looking for you, so it would be very difficult to hide.”

  “Will detectives be looking for you?” asked Peter.

  “Not for some time, because my father thinks I am staying with friends, although I did not leave any address.”

  “It’s very plucky of you, but suppose he finds you, will he then make you do what you don’t want to do?”

  “I hope he will be so pleased to see me that he will stop being angry and let me have my own way!”

  She suddenly thought that perhaps she might have encouraged the boys to run away, so she hurriedly added,

  “It is certainly a big mistake to run away unless you have plenty of money and somewhere safe to stay.”

  She realised they were listening and went on,

  “My father would never dream of looking for me here, so I am going to stay with you until I am quite certain he has changed his mind.”

  “We will help you if we can,” offered Peter.

  Tasia smiled at him.

  “That is very kind of you, Peter. I will not forget to ask for your help when I need it.”

  There was silence for a bit and then Simon asked,

  “Does Mr. Seymour know your secret?”

  “No, of course not, and you must not tell anyone. So please cross your hearts and promise me you will not say a word of anything I have told you.”

  Both the boys crossed their hearts.

  “We promise. We promise,” they chorused. “But we thought you had come here to teach us.”

  “That is the whole point. Mr. Seymour thinks that I am, but I am going to do it my own way. Therefore we are not going to bore ourselves with lessons, we are going to enjoy ourselves very much.”

  “How can we do that?” asked Simon, puzzled.

  “I have thought of several exciting adventures for tomorrow, but as I might need to hide when strange people come here, I think that now you should show me round the house.”

  The two boys jumped to their feet.

  “I would love to see all of it! You can point out the places I can creep into if there is someone knocking on the door I recognise.”

  Both boys thought that this was an exciting game.

  They went downstairs to the ground floor, showing her the rooms one after another.

  The drawing room was certainly impressive and so were several of the rooms near it.

  When she saw the music room, Tasia gave a cry of excitement.

  “You have a lovely piano. Can you boys play?”

  “It is something I would like to do,” replied Peter, “but no one has ever taught us.”

  “I will show you how to play the piano and this is a marvellous room to dance in.”

  “There is a bigger room than this. It’s called the ballroom, but I can’t remember a ball being held in there.”

  “Let me have a look at it, please,” smiled Tasia.

  They left the music room and were passing another door when she asked,

  “What is in there?”

  “Oh, that’s the library and it is just full of books – ”

  “I must see them,” insisted Tasia.

  “They are all beastly dull. One Tutor made us read about the history of England. Then he made us write down all the dates and it was very boring.”

  Tasia looked round and then she gave a cry,

  “That is a lovely picture over the mantelpiece!”

  Simon smiled.

  “They are horses and when we are in the country we ride horses.”

  “You don’t ride in London?”

  Simon shook his head.

  “In the country we are allowed to ride with Papa or one of the grooms, but in London they say no – so we just walk about the garden or in the Park.”

  “Well, I think that is a waste of good horses. Look how beautiful those horses are in the picture.”

  It was, she saw, the Mare and Foals in a Landscape by George Stubbs.

  Tasia had always loved the pictures of Stubbs. Her father owned three Stubbs in the country house and one in Grosvenor Square.

  She saw the two boys looking at the pictures.

  “I tell you what we might do one day if it is raining. That is to find all the pictures of horses in these books and arrange them together so that we create a parade of horses all of our own.”

  The boys stared at her.

  “I suppose there are pictures in these books,” Peter said, “but we have never seen them.”

  “Of course there are pictures in these books! We will have a ra
ce to see who gets the most horses first. Then you must convince your father that you are really fond of horses and I am sure he will let you ride in London. Or anywhere else you happen to be.”

  “He just might do that – ”

  “I would like to show you a picture of my favourite stallion called Sunbeam.”

  “Oh, that’s a nice name,” Simon called out.

  “What you have to do is to make your father realise that you love horses so much that he will give each of you one of your own. I would have been very unhappy when I was your age if I had not been allowed to ride. Now I have six horses that are all mine.”

  “Then you are very lucky,” murmured Peter slowly.

  “I think I am lucky, but you will be lucky too if you go about getting your own way cleverly. You just have to persuade other people of what you want and then be very, very grateful when you receive it.”

  She looked up at the pictures over the mantelpiece.

  “Just look how beautiful those horses are. I would be thrilled to ride any of them, although actually I prefer a stallion to a mare.”

  “You said there are lots of pictures in the library. Will we have to look in every book to find a horse?”

  Tasia laughed.

  “That would take us far too long, Simon. Is there a catalogue somewhere?”

  “Yes. A man comes every week to put the books in order and to see that no one has stolen them. He has made a list and it’s somewhere in here.”

  He walked round until he found the catalogue on a table near the door.

  “Here it is,” he called, “but I don’t think it will tell you anything about horses.”

  “I’ll bet you a bar of chocolate that I will find one before you!”

  Tasia looked randomly down the list and there were several names she knew well – Michelangelo was one and Philips Wouverman was another.

  She put the catalogue, as she spoke, into Simon’s hand and pointed to the name Thomas de Keyser.

  He understood immediately and walked towards the bookshelves looking for the name.

  She helped the boys collect the books that she knew would undoubtedly have pictures by the great artists, and in an hour they had managed to assemble a large number of pictures of horses on the floor.

  Simon found de Keyser in one book and the horses he had drawn so beautifully in 1600.

  With a little assistance Peter found Wouverman’s Boy with a White Horse and as Tasia told the boys, it was a horse they would all like to ride if they had the chance.

  It was almost time, she thought, for them all to go upstairs and prepare for supper.

  Peter told her they usually ate at seven o’clock and she thought they would enjoy it in their new sitting room.

  However, she would insist tomorrow that they took supper downstairs in the dining room, but she said nothing for the moment.

  She merely looked proudly at the boys’ collection of horse pictures. They had placed them all on the sofa and chairs in front of the mantelpiece.

  “I think Peter is really the winner, but we have all done well. What we must do while I am with you is to find out which horses there are in the stables that we can ride.”

  “There are lots of horses there, but when I asked if we could ride in London, the Tutors all said they would not ride and as Papa had not given any instructions, the answer was no.”

  “We will have to get round that somehow, but you will both have to help me by being very very nice to Mr. Seymour. I find you can get things more easily with honey on your tongue than being sharp and disagreeable.”

  The boys giggled.

  “No one has ever told us that before.”

  “Well, I am telling you now, boys, and by the way, if we have to plead very earnestly for our horses we will be like King Richard III who cried out, ‘A horse, a horse, my Kingdom for a horse’.”

  Both boys looked at her in surprise.

  “Why did he say that?” asked Peter.

  “Because his horse was shot from under him at the Battle of Bosworth and it is the last words he is known to have said. They gave him another horse, but he was killed before the battle ended.”

  Both boys were listening.

  “That was bad luck,” murmured Simon.

  “Oh, he well deserved it. He was a wicked man who killed the little Princes in the Tower, because he wanted to be King and they were the heirs in front of him.”

  “That was cruel.” Simon sounded horrified.

  “Very cruel,” agreed Tasia. “I have always been so sorry for the poor little Princes. I expect you would like to see them? They were only little boys, like you.”

  Both boys stared at her.

  “What do you man – see them?”

  “There are waxworks of them in Madame Tussaud’s in Baker Street, not far from here. We could go and look at them tomorrow, if you wanted?”

  Both boys’ eyes widened further.

  “We would really love to. No one has told us about the waxworks. Do they look like real people?”

  “Of course they do. You will see lots of people you recognise from the history books.”

  The two boys looked at each other.

  Tasia realised that they had probably refused history lessons with all the Tutors who had pushed it insensitively on them.

  “Enough about history for the moment, boys. We are really thinking about horses and our collection.”

  She touched one of the pictures.

  “I suggest that when the curator comes, we ask him to leave our books where they are, so that if we find any more pictures of horses we can add them later.

  “When we have time, we will make a list of all the pictures and then we can show your father when he returns exactly the sort of horses we want him to buy for you!”

  “You will have to persuade him, but I am sure that he will buy us a horse if we really want one,” said Simon.

  “What is difficult is to find someone to ride with us,” added Peter. “Papa said our Tutor could do so, but as soon as Papa went aboard both our Tutors in the country refused and Mr. Dawson will not let us ride alone or with one of the grooms.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We will be very nice to Mr. Seymour and we will suggest that you ride with me just in Regent’s Park. We will not go into Hyde Park yet as there are too many people. We can ride in Regent’s Park, although it is much smaller.”

  Tasia paused for a moment before suggesting,

  “Then perhaps we could go up to Hampstead where there are plenty of good places to ride and no one to pay any attention to us.”

  “That does sound smashing,” enthused Peter, “but I would still like to see the waxworks and the little Princes the King killed.”

  “We will go there tomorrow,” Tasia promised, “and I hope there is a waxwork of King Richard. If not I expect we can find a picture of him in one of these books.”

  “As he was so wicked,” Simon proposed, “he ought to look ugly, as wicked people always have ugly faces.”

  “It is very sensible of you to know that. What we must do is to pick out pictures of people and describe from their looks whether they were good or wicked like Richard III.”

  “That will be fun,” agreed Peter.

  Tasia looked at the clock.

  “Now you must go and tidy yourselves for dinner. I am going to ask if we can have dinner in the dining room as now you are older that is the place you should be.”

  She knew the boys were listening to her wide-eyed.

  It had never occurred to them that they should have dinner downstairs.

  Tasia expected when their father was here they had luncheon with him, but they always had eaten a rather dull supper in what had once been the nursery.

  They walked back, leaving the library in a rather untidy state.

  Tasia thought with glee, she was certainly upsetting the undoubtedly boring routine of the house, and she could understand that the staff thought children should be kept in the nursery and
be seen and not heard.

  It was therefore not surprising that the two boys had been bored stiff. On top of that their tutors were more accustomed to teaching older children and lessons were conventional and dull.

  Tasia went into her own bedroom. All her clothes had been unpacked and hung up in the wardrobe.

  She thought with a smile that her father would have called ‘mischievous’, that today she had begun educating Peter and Simon and they had not even realised it! As well as the history lesson she had also taught them a good deal about art and hopefully piqued their interest in learning more.

  ‘If I keep on being so subtle,’ she told herself, ‘the Earl, when he does return, will be surprised and the Tutor who eventually takes my place should be very grateful.’

  Then she recalled her own problems and it seemed as if a sudden dark fog eclipsed the evening sun.

  What would her father say when he found that she had gone?

  What would he do?

  She could not be certain what her departure would mean to him and whether he would change his mind regarding her marriage.

  He had always been a most unpredictable man and however angry it might make him, she was quite certain of one thing –

  She had no intention of returning to her home until she was quite sure that he would no longer try to force her to marry Lord Hazelbury.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The next day they set off after breakfast to visit the waxworks at Madame Tussaud’s.

  Tasia had asked Mr. Seymour for a carriage, telling him that they were not only going there, but might wish to go on somewhere else.

  “You will be coming back for luncheon I suppose, Miss Wicke?” he enquired.

  “I certainly don’t wish to pay to eat elsewhere!”

  The boys were thrilled at going to the waxworks.

  On the way Tasia remarked,

  “There is one special horse we ought to add to your collection, but I am afraid it will be rather difficult to find.”

  “Which one is that?” Peter asked her.

  “The horse owned by the Roman Emperor Caligula Caesar who was born in AD 12. I expect you know what that means?”

  The boys thought for a moment, then Simon said,

  “I think AD means Anno Domini, and it comes after BC or Before Christ.”