Kasey Michaels (14 page)

Lester raised his eyebrows in question, and mock terror. He did have a sense for the ridiculous, which was one of the reasons she so adored him. “That would depend, I suppose. Whom are you planning to kill?”

“Nobody, you blockhead. I haven’t wanted to kill anybody in absolute ages,” she told him, giving in to the nearly overriding need to scratch at a spot just above her left eyebrow. “Ahhh, that’s better. I just thought you could slice me a bit of plum, then slide it into my mouth. I can’t open my lips more than an inch until this mess dries or else Imogene will tear a strip off my hide when she comes in here.”

Lester nodded, signaling his understanding. “Sorry. No knife. I guess you’ll just have to wait. Abstinence is good for the soul, though. The viscountess said so only this morning—right as Roberts was ladling out another whopping serving of eggs onto her plate. I find that queer, don’t you? Just as I find it queer that you should call Her Ladyship Imogene. It don’t seem right somehow.”

“I agree,” Callie said honestly, padding over to the mirror in her bare feet as the hem of the considerably taller, larger Imogene’s old dressing gown dragged along behind her, as if examining her reflection would help in drying the cream on her face and hands. “But, as she pelted me with a half dozen pieces of sugared apricot the last time I dared to address her by her title, I’ve grown more accustomed to the familiarity. As long as I’m careful to call her
my lady
when we’re out and about, of course.”

Another few minutes, and she’d be able to rid herself of her final beauty treatment, thank the good Lord. And if the Viscount Brockton and Noel Kinsey didn’t appreciate all her efforts, she might just shoot the pair of them!

She turned away from the mirror and looked at Lester. “Don’t you just
love
Imogene, Lester? Isn’t she simply the most
famous
person? I’m considering her for Papa, you understand. She can’t be more than a half head taller and a half dozen years or so his senior and, since they’re both ancient anyway, I don’t see how that should matter. Do you?”

“Her Ladyship and Sir Camber?” Lester shivered. “Oh, I don’t think so, Callie. If she’s able to trick him—and my papa—with whatever farradiddle she wrote in her letters to them? Well, once they were wed he’d probably spend the remainder of his declining years hiding out in the stables, drinking himself senseless after realizing he’d gotten himself bracketed to a crafty, conniving old—whoops!”

“Oh, do go on, Lester,” the viscountess purred as she stood just inside the room, one hand still on the door latch. “A crafty, conniving old what—? Biddy? Or worse?”

Lester colored, his complexion only a few shades lighter than the half-eaten plum he held in his hand. “Callie?” he begged, looking at her as if she was the only hope left to him in this world.

“Biddy, probably, Imogene,” Callie answered matter-of-factly, daring to smile at the viscountess, which served to crack the dry, itchy paste on her face, sending a shower of fine pink-and-white powder down the front of her dressing gown. “But he loves you, truly he does. Don’t you, Lester?”

Lester scrambled to his feet, the bowl of plums tipping over so that its contents scattered across the carpet. “Oh, yes, yes! Adore you as if you was m’own mother, I swear it!” He reached down to rescue a single plum, rubbed it against his waistcoat, and offered it to the Viscountess. “They’re delicious. Truly.”

“Idiot!” Imogene barked, snatching up the plum, taking a healthy bite out of it before ordering Callie to wash her face and hands in the basin behind the Chinese screen that stood in the corner. “I can’t tell you, children, how much younger I feel now that the pair of you are underfoot. Busy, busy, all the day long. It’s wonderful. Callie—you do remember that Madame Yolanda will be arriving within the hour?”

Callie splashed more cold water on her face, then groped on the table for a towel, fighting back tears as some of the cream-and-strawberry concoction got into her eyes. Scrubbing at her face as she poked her head and shoulders out from behind the screen, she lowered the towel and squinted across the room at the viscountess. “Madame Yolanda?”

“The hairdresser, dear,” Imogene clarified, licking at one finger after the other; ridding herself of the last of the sticky plum juice deposited there as she had sucked on the pit, then extracted it from her mouth and tossed it in the direction of the cold fireplace.

It hit squarely in the center of the dead ashes. Lester, inspired by this action, grinned and immediately sent his own plum pit sailing in the same general vicinity. His aim proved to be less sure than that of the viscountess, so that the pit clanged solidly against the andirons.

“Dolt,” Imogene chided affectionately, then turned to Callie once more. “She comes highly recommended.”

Callie dried her hands on the towel, turning away to place it back on the table as she asked, her face carefully hidden, “This Madame Yolanda, Imogene. Does she care for your hair as well?”

“Oh, no, no—Kathleen serves me well enough. Why?”

Her face carefully blank, Callie came out from behind the screen and looked at the viscountess once more, at the mass of brassy yellow curls more suited to a much younger—and less wellborn—female. “No reason, Imogene. But I am nervous about anyone touching my hair. Do you suppose we could
both
avail ourselves of Madame Yolanda’s services this afternoon, with you taking your turn first? That way I shouldn’t be so, um, so apprehensive.”

“Lies no better than you, Lester, for all she prides herself on her supposed vices,” the viscountess said, subsiding into a chair, her purple-and-white-striped day gown billowing out around her considerable bulk like a hot-air balloon ready to lift off from Hyde Park Corner. “Simon hates the color, you know. I suppose Kathleen wouldn’t be too upset if I were to let Madame Yolanda have a whack or two at it. I was thinking red this time—something to pull a gentleman’s eyes higher, away from my figure. What do you think, Lester? Would that do the trick? Would that help snag me an earl?”

Lester searched the carpet, possibly on the lookout for a convenient trapdoor through which he might successfully disappear. “Well... I really don’t... that is, I’m not so well up on such—
red
, you say, ma’am?”

“Congratulations, Lester,” Imogene said, pushing at her girlish curls. “You have more tact than my son, who says I resemble nothing less than an overgrown canary in the midst of a bad molt.” She sighed, looking to Callie. “If Madame Yolanda can’t get it back to the mousy brown I sported until the white started creeping in—galloping in, actually—what do you think about the notion of turbans? They’re all the crack I understand, for miserable old ladies past any hope of matrimony. Well, the devil will! Not while there’s a dye pot left on this earth!”

Callie bent to pick up the remainder of the plums that still littered the carpet, rubbing one against her hip before taking a lusty bite of the sweet fruit. She chewed for a moment, considering the viscountess’s words, and the mulish expression on the woman’s face. “I still don’t understand why you should be so afraid of the title of dowager, Imogene.”

“You wouldn’t, gel, as you are young, and still believe you’ll remain young forever. I look at you—” The viscountess sighed and shook her head. “It was only yesterday that Simon’s father and I spent our days laughing at life. Now I’m a dried-up old prune of a widow, forced to sit on the edge of the dance floor and watch the fun pass me by, watch life pass me by. Stick dowager in front of my title, gel, and I might as well go into the home wood and fall on my sword—or start collecting cats who climb the draperies with their nasty claws and cough up horrid-looking clumps in the middle of my best satin coverlet. I want a
man
in my bed, gel, not a hairball!”

“I don’t think I should be hearing this.” Lester bent his head, to hide his flushed cheeks, and headed for the door. “Oh, no, Papa would say I
definitely
shouldn’t be hearing this.”

“Oh, sit down,” Imogene ordered with a wave of one beringed hand. “Nothing’s being said here that isn’t true. What I’m talking about here is life, my young friends,
life
. Men and women have been pleasing each other under the sheets since the beginning of time. Or did you think your mamas found you both in a cabbage patch?”

Lester collapsed into the striped satin slipper chair and stared up at the ceiling. “I’d rather not think about where she found me, if that’s all right with you, ma’am. Or picture the event in my mind, now that I think on it. The whole notion is unconscious.”

“Unconscionable, Lester,” Callie corrected, trying not to giggle at the sight of her friend in such embarrassed agitation, “although I believe unconscionable to be too strong a word. Imogene—you’ve been telling a fib, haven’t you? You don’t care about being a dowager, not really. You don’t care that your son might marry—and are even pushing me at his head. All of that dowager business is no more than a pack of lies. In truth, you just care that you might have missed your last chance to—how did you say that?—be pleased under the sheets?”

“Oh, God, make them stop,” Lester groaned, dropping his head into his hands, covering his ears. “Please!”

“I knew you were a sharp one, Callie,” the viscountess said, slapping the flat of her hands against her legs. “Not that I could tell Simon the whole of it, of course, as sons don’t seem able to see their mamas as anything more than sweet tabbies who embroider slippers and wait until there are a dozen people within earshot before inquiring if their offspring are wearing fresh linen.”

Lester let out with a strangled cough, even though he’d hadn’t had a bite of plum in a good five minutes.

“Buck up, son—I’m almost done,” Imogene said bracingly. “I have some reason to be fearful, you know. Suppose Simon marries before I can find myself a willing mate and bring him up to the sticking point. What then, eh? I’m too old to be ogling the stablehands the way I could a few years ago, and too proud to beg. So, with dowager added to my title, I’ll end up on the shelf forever. A
dowager
, Callie. Think on it! Might as well hang a sign over my head saying ‘too old to bed, too young to die.’ ”

“That tears it!” Lester exclaimed, jumping to his feet and racing to the door, flinging it open so hard that it banged back against the wall before swinging shut behind him.

Imogene grinned. “I don’t know about you, but I thought he’d never leave,” she said, sitting back against the cushions. “Now, I suppose your next question, as we’re being so wonderfully blunt, would have to do with why I think you and Simon will be making a match of it before the Season is out—and why that particular development doesn’t bother me.”

Callie picked up the ends of the sash she’d tied tightly about her waist and began picking at the fringe attached to each end. “Since you haven’t said a word about any such association since that first day I met you, I had rather hoped you’d forgotten the notion, actually.”

“Well, I haven’t,” Imogene chirped happily, putting her hands on the arms of the chair and boosting herself to her feet. “You’re the one. Definitely. He doesn’t plan to marry, you know. Has said it so often he believes it, not that I do. And then when I read that Austen woman last winter—well, that has nothing to do with this, except to say that it concentrated my mind on the inevitability of Simon’s fate, and made me take a good long look at the stablehands. Pitiful lot! Anyway, one way or the other, I suddenly realized that I was rapidly running out of time to find my own happiness again. I’m no milk-and-water puss, Caledonia Johnston, and neither are you. We may not need a man in our lives, but we damn full well would
enjoy
one.”

Callie tipped her head to one side inquiringly. “Why?”

Imogene took hold of Callie’s hands and led her over to the bed, pushing her down on the edge of the mattress and sitting down beside her. “Caledonia, how old were you when your mother died?”

“Twelve,” Callie said, turning her head and looking at the viscountess out of the corners of her eyes. “What has that to do with anything?”

“A precious lot, I’d say, if I know men and their stammering, stumbling ways with young daughters,” Imogene answered. “Your governess—did she tell you about, about the more
intimate
goings-on between a man and his wife?”

Callie believed her cheeks had now turned as fully red as Lester’s had earlier done. “Miss Haverly taught me my sums, geography, proper posture, and how to sip soup. My education, however, was not limited to Miss Haverly’s view of the world, if that’s what you’re asking. I have seen animals in the fields. I understand nature. And I’ve heard more than one of the maids giggling from behind my father’s bedchamber door late at night when I was sneaking out to meet Lester and take a moonlight ride to the pond to catch frogs. That
is
what you’re asking, isn’t it?”

“It is, indeed. Although I do not believe there are any women in existence who are incapable of enjoying the wonders of
nature
, as you’ve termed it, I do believe there are those of us who are more
disposed
, as it were, to seek the mystery and adventure of the thing.” She squeezed Callie’s hands. “
You
, gel, are one of those lucky creatures. You grab at life with both hands, the way I have always done. You
enjoy
life, enjoy adventure. You’re willing to take risks. You have courage and fire and spirit. Why, if it weren’t for the fact that you’re a pretty little thing and I’m as homely as a mud fence, I’d swear I had given birth to you, truly I would. And I
will
swear that you’re just what Simon needs, which is why I’m willing to see him married to you even before I snag a body for myself. I’m even happy about it.”

She squeezed Callie’s hands again, then stood up, turning away as she added, “Not that he’ll see what’s in front of his face, of course, no more than his father did.” She turned back to lean her face close to Callie’s. “Which is why you’re locked up here, gel, until I can gild the lily. Simon thinks he is embarking on this adventure solely to best that Filton fellow, and we’ll allow him to stumble along in his ignorance, at least for a while. But we know better, don’t we, gel?”