Netherwood Read Online Free Page A

humble, would receive the same embossed invitation to the party, which would take place in June.
    He was immensely pleased with the prospect, which was more than could be said for the birthday boy. Tobias Hoyland, made in his father’s image, was although absolutely not cut from the same cloth. There was a long list of things in life that Toby enjoyed – girls, clothes, horses, beer, baccarat, dancing – and very few things he disliked. But one of them, and the thing he loathed above all else, was being obligedthrough birth to do what he didn’t wish to. If only, thought Tobias, he could swap places with Dickie and be second son. All the privilege and none of the obligations. When Dickie’s twenty-first dawned, there’d be a family breakfast and a glass of fizz and that would be that – lucky devil. Toby, on the other hand, would have to endure a veritable festival of a celebration populated by thousands of people he’d never seen before and would never see again. He knew how it would play out, too. He’d be stuck indoors at a banquet with the blue bloods, while under his nose but out of bounds would be the beer tents and the pretty girls. It was six months away and already it loomed like an endurance test, clouding the blue skies of his existence. When he allowed it to, as now, it put him quite out of sorts.
    He was hemmed in by other people’s expectations, he fumed inwardly; cornered by his damned
noblesse oblige.
Even now he wasn’t able to do as he wished. He had assumed that his actual birthday, in ten days’ time, might at least be spent in London where the multitude of diversions would take his mind off his wretchedness. But no. His father had insisted that he remain at Netherwood because there was an air of excitement among the people, and Toby would be obliged to wave at them from the back of a motor car before he was free to please himself. The countess – in truth just as keen as Toby for the delights of London and the comforts of Fulton House – had agreed that as soon as duty was done, they would flee south. This, at least, was a crumb of comfort.
    He was in the library, the best place for Toby to be when he didn’t want to be found, being the last place anyone would look for him. He sat crossways on a green leather wing chair, his long legs dangling over one arm, and he gazed morosely at nothing in particular. The past half hour had been spent aiming scrunched up balls of unused notepaper at a nearby waste bin, and the evidence of this sport lay in and around the target, as if a frustrated writer had tried and failed againand again to frame the perfect letter. As a form of entertainment, Tobias had found it perfectly acceptable, and infinitely preferable to the alternative, which had been a site meeting with his father and the land agent at the newly-dug Home Farm cess pit. At the thought of it now, Toby’s face puckered in distaste. His father’s enthusiasm for the disposal of human waste seemed to him to be deliberately controversial, as if he was displaying to his family that, though he was an earl, he was first and foremost a countryman with a countryman’s tolerance for the stink of decomposing ordure. Well, if he expected Toby to fall in behind him on his endless tours of duty, he could whistle for it.
    A squeal followed by a sharp bark of laughter outside stirred him from his mutinous lethargy. In a moment he was out of the armchair and crossing the library towards the window; if there was merriment to be had, Tobias was your man. At first, with his face pressed against the glass, he saw only the usual dull vista of neatly swept gravel and serene swathes of lawn. There it was again though: a breathless squeal of laughter, evidence that there was the possibility of amusement on this dreary Wednesday morning. Tobias frowned, looking this way and that for the source of the fun. And then his face broke into a great grin because all in a rush and none too steadily, his older sister Henrietta