“Well, if Lord Worth don’t want to be at the trouble of ordering our lives, so much the better,” said Peregrine. “You want to cut a dash in town, and I daresay I can find plenty of amusement if we haven’t a crusty old guardian to spoil the fun.”
“Yes,” agreed Miss Taverner, a trifle doubtfully. “But in common civility we must ask his permission to set up house in London. I do hope we shall not find him set against us, regarding it as an imposition. I mean: perhaps thinking that my uncle might rather have been appointed than himself. It must appear very singular to him. It is an awkward business, Perry.”
A grunt being the only response to this, she said no more, but leaned back in her corner and perused the unsatisfactory communications she had received from Lord Worth.
It was an awkward business. His lordship, who must, she reflected, be going on for fifty-five or -six years of age, showed a marked disinclination to trouble himself with the affairs of his wards, and although this might in some circumstances be reckoned a good, in others it must be found to be a pronounced evil. Neither she nor Peregrine had ever been farther from home than to Scarborough. They knew nothing of London and had no acquaintance there to guide them. The only persons known to them in the whole town were their uncle, and a female cousin living respectably, but in a small way, in Kensington. This lady Miss Taverner must rely upon to present her into society, for her uncle, a retired Admiral of the Blue, had lived upon terms of such mutual dislike and mistrust with her father as must preclude her from seeking either his support or his acquaintance.
Sir John Taverner had never been heard to speak with the smallest degree of kindness of his brother, and when his gout was at its worst, he had been used to refer to him as a damned scoundrelly fellow whom he would not trust the length of his own yard-arm. There were very few people whom Sir John had ever spoken of with much complaisance, but he had from time to time given his children such instances of their uncle’s conduct as convinced them that he must indeed be a shabby creature, and no mere victim of Sir John’s prejudice.
Lord Worth might think it singular that he who had not set eyes on his old friend once in the last ten years should have been appointed guardian to his children, but they, knowing Sir John, found it easily understandable. Sir John, always irascible, could never be brought during the last years of his life to live on terms of cordiality with his neighbours. There must always be quarrels. But from having lived secluded on his estates ever since the death of his wife and not having met Lord Worth above three times in a dozen years, he had had no quarrel with him, and had come by insensible degrees to consider him the very person to have the care of his children in the event of his own decease. Worth was a capital fellow; Sir John could trust him to administer the very considerable fortune he would leave his children; there was no fear of Worth warming his own pockets. The thing was done, the Will drawn up without the smallest reference to it being made either to Worth or to the children themselves—a circumstance, Miss Taverner could not but reflect, entirely in keeping with all Sir John’s high-handed dealings.
She was aroused from these musings by the rattle and bump of the chaise-wheels striking cobblestones, and looked up to find that they had reached Grantham. As they drew into the town the post-boys were obliged to slacken the pace considerably, so much traffic was there in the streets, and such a press of people thronging the pathways, and even the road itself.
All was bustle and animation, and when the chaise came at last within sight of the George, a huge red-brick structure on the main street, Miss Taverner was surprised to see any number of coaches, curricles, gigs, and phaetons drawn up before it.
“Well,” she said, “I am glad I followed Mrs. Minceman’s advice and wrote to bespeak our rooms. I had no notion we should find Grantham so crowded.”
Sir Peregrine had roused himself, and was leaning forward to look out of the windows. “The place seems to be in the devil of a pucker,” he remarked. “There must be something out of the way going forward.”