Maggie MacKeever (20 page)

There was one thing Tess could do something about, much as she disliked the idea. “Clio,” she ventured. “Listen to me, child! I suppose Ceddie may have good qualities of which I am unaware. Indeed, he must! Even the worst rakehell must have
some
redeeming qualities. Perhaps my dislike—and it would be absurd to deny that I dislike him!—has blinded me to Ceddie’s merits.”

Clio remained silent. She could not think that Ceddie possessed any virtue whatsoever, or that Sir Morgan, the greatest blackguard of her acquaintance, was otherwise blessed.

“All I wish,” added Tess, daunted by this uncooperative attitude, “is your happiness, child! If you must have Ceddie, so be it! I only ask that you give yourself time to know him—and to know your own heart. I would not wish you to contract a marriage that would in time make you miserable.”

Clio, who hadn’t the slightest wish to marry Ceddie, and who had no hope of contracting a marriage that wouldn’t make her miserable, being as the only man for whom she nourished the slightest
tendre
was destined for another, greeted this generosity with less than gratitude. “Thank you!” she sniffled. Tess, totally baffled by such bizarre behavior, shrugged and allowed Evelyn to lead her off to the huge shed that housed the noble Elgin marbles.

“Oh, Daffy!” wailed Clio, staring at her sister’s departing back. “Whatever am I to do?”

“We shall contrive,” soothed Delphine, though she hadn’t the slightest idea how.

With little idea that her two closest companions considered her almost past praying for, Tess gazed upon the famous marbles, and then at her youthful escort. “Ugly, aren’t they?” inquired Evelyn. “I think it was a waste of time for Lord Elgin to bring them from Greece! You are looking fine as fivepence, Aunt Tess.”

The countess twitched her fawn-colored sarsenet pelisse trimmed with mohair fringe, adjusted her straw bonnet, and smoothed her Limerick gloves. “Aren’t I just?” she agreed. “A nonpareil, in fact! Gammon, young man.”

Evelyn laughed and grasped the hand that was unencumbered by a cane. “Are you going to marry my father?” he asked bluntly. “I wish you would! Sapphira wants Clio to marry him, and I suppose she’s a good sort of girl, but I’d much rather have you.”

“How nice of you!” responded Tess. “Just how do you know what Sapphira wants, Evelyn? I don’t suppose she told you.”

“Well, no!” The young viscount was totally unabashed. “They forget I’m around, you see! I was in the hallway this morning when she told Clio.”

“You just happened to be passing,” said Tess, considering herself hardly of sufficiently untarnished moral character to chastise Evelyn for eavesdropping.

The boy grinned. “And I heard Drusilla tell Constant that Clio is every bit as bad as her mother was, and will probably go the same way.” He looked puzzled. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” Tess was mortified by the realization that she hadn’t thought of Mirian for several days. “But I think, Evelyn, that we must find out.”

This sounded quite reasonable to the viscount. In perfect accord, they proceeded outside. “Aunt Tess?” he said, exhibiting a laudable tenacity of purpose. “If you won’t marry my father, who will you marry? Sir Morgan?” Tactful beyond his years, he refrained from telling her what Drusilla had said about
that.

“Dear Evelyn,” Tess responded gently, “it is very good of you to think that I am so irresistible!” She glanced at her cane. “Females like myself do not think of marrying.”

“Fudge!” remarked Evelyn, but did not persist. A precocious lad, he had already deduced that even the best of females were prone to queer notions. Gaily he skipped into the street. Tess followed more slowly, pausing to gaze into the window of a shop where the best English glass was displayed, and admiring an exhibit of sapphire- and ruby-colored glass tastefully combined to look like a cluster of flowers from an Oriental garden.

Later she could not say exactly how it happened, but one moment she was staring at the glittering glass and thinking inevitably of diamond necklaces, and the next a rough hand had grasped her arm and thrust her into the street, right into the path of an oncoming carriage. The countess gasped and wielded her cane, only to have it knocked out of her hand. Clio, emerging from the museum, shrieked; the spectators gaped and murmured, but made no attempt to interfere. It was left to Evelyn to grasp a handy rock and hurl it with great accuracy at the assailant, who took quickly to his heels, and to Tess to throw herself out of the way of the murderous carriage-wheels. Revelation, if not the carriage, struck her then: she had the answer to at least one of the questions that puzzled her.

An understandable pandemonium ensued, the spectators expressing belated concern and the driver of the carriage uttering mingled oaths and apologies, but at last the crowd was dispersed, the barouche summoned, and the countess placed tenderly within. “It was the man in the park,” hissed Evelyn. “I recognized him.”

“
Voyons
!” erupted Delphine.

“It was nothing!” Tess said, almost calmly. “A mere accident! I have taken no harm. You will all oblige me by not speaking of it.”

Evelyn, alarmed not a little by the possibility that Tess might extract from him a promise to keep silent about
this,
rattled into quick praise of the antediluvian remains he had observed at the museum, chief among which seemed to be—according to him—an enormous and remarkably perfect pair of stag’s antlers. The young viscount was a clear-sighted lad, and he didn’t like the appearance of things.

Since Evelyn was not the only one to harbor misgivings, and since Tess had effectively forestalled further comments by the simple expedient of closing her eyes, the trip back to Bellamy House was accomplished in a tense silence. Their arrival coincided with that of Sir Morgan, who was ascending the steps. The Wicked Baronet was a man of legendarily quick action; no sooner did he set eyes on the shattered cane, which Evelyn bore aloft like a trophy of war, than he was down the steps, across the courtyard, and firmly clasping Tess in his arms.

Before Delphine could utter so much as a single word regarding
les covenances,
he had carried the countess inside. Clio stared glumly after them, wondering what Tess could possibly see in a monstrous man who treated her with as little respect as if she were a member of the frail sisterhood.

“Truly, I’m not hurt!” concluded Tess, having acquainted Sir Morgan with the details of her misadventure as, to the scandalized amazement of various servants, he carried her up the stairs.

With a booted foot he kicked shut the door and dumped her unceremoniously on the bed. “You should be!” he thundered, his dark face forbidding. “Of all the bird-witted things to do! I could throttle you.”

“It seems an odd way to conduct a flirtation!” replied Tess, fascinated. “But I will concede you must know far more about such things than I.”

“I would like,” uttered Sir Morgan wrathfully, “to turn you over my knee!”

“Then by all means do so!” Tess invited cordially. “I’m not one to flinch away from a new experience.”

Sir Morgan regarded the countess, a rueful expression in his golden eyes. She had lost her bonnet, her pelisse was in a shocking condition, there was a smudge of dirt on the end of her nose, and her hair had again come unpinned. “You must now admit,” he said, in gentler tones, as he sat on the edge of the bed and applied his handkerchief to the smudge, “that your possession of that necklace is damned dangerous.”

“I admit no such thing,” Tess replied sternly. “I am surprised at your lack of spirit, sir!” With an oath, Sir Morgan rose and paced with determination toward her portmanteau. “It’s not there. I changed the hiding place after our last talk.”

“Thinking I would steal into your room in the dead of night and reclaim it?” inquired Sir Morgan. “Unworthy, little one!”

“Thinking,” retorted Tess, who was not at all averse to the notion, “that the culprit would be sure to look there for it, having placed it there himself.”

Sir Morgan looked to be on the verge of a veritable frenzy. “So you will concede,” he uttered, with severely strained patience, “that the person who placed the diamonds there will not cease in his efforts to regain possession of them. Then you must also concede that you are in grave danger!”

“Pooh!” Tess waved an airy hand. “I don’t care for that! It is an admirable opportunity to catch the brute red-handed, and then your lady friend will have no opportunity to point the finger of suspicion at you.”

His lady friend, thought Sir Morgan, would be more than a little incensed if her necklace came to light in another woman’s boudoir. “Sheer insanity!” he exclaimed.

“Do not think I am unprepared!” Tess delved into the chamber pot that was discreetly hidden beneath her bed. Sir Morgan found himself looking into the muzzle of a deadly looking little gun. “I think I may say without conceit that I am a crack shot, my father having made it a point to instruct me in the use of firearms. Why he did so I cannot imagine, since I’m sure he never thought I would be called upon to protect my virtue! However, it is a useful ability.”

“Good God!” was Sir Morgan’s only comment.

“I know,” agreed Tess sadly. “I exhibit a shocking insensibility. I have often deprecated it! But it is not in me to succumb to vapors, even in the most trying of circumstances.” She regarded him anxiously. “Not that the incident today was at all trying—indeed, it was positively felicitous! And I fancy it was meant to merely frighten me, for it was shockingly mismanaged. Had that man wished it, he could easily have contrived that I was crushed by that carriage, but he did not! He obviously does not wish to add murder to his other crimes.” She sighed. “I regret only the loss of my cane. It is beyond repair this time, I fear.”

Well-acquainted as Sir Morgan was becoming with Tess’s erratic processes of thought, these offhand statements caused him to sit down, rather abruptly, on the edge of the bed. “I will get you another cane,” he said, bemused. “But
felicitous?”

“Well, yes!” Tess smiled. “It was the strangest thing, but all I could think of in those few moments was my other accident. I remembered it all quite clearly, though I have not done so in years.” She reached up and brushed back the lock of dark hair that had fallen onto his brow. “And I recalled at last where we had met before.”

Chapter 16

“Oh,
la vache
!” muttered Delphine under her breath, as a nervous little housemaid poured a brass can of cold water, then one of hot, into a hip bath. A third can waited to one side. It was not the maid, clumsy as the creature was, who roused Delphine’s wrath. She glowered impotently at her mistress.

Tess, ignoring this Friday-face, thanked the housemaid and dismissed her. “I tell you,” repeated Delphine, as soon as the girl had gone, “I saw your precious Sir Morgan in whispered conversation with the Duke of Bellamy’s valet—and you can bank on it that the pair of them are up to no good!”

“Twaddle!” With approval, Tess regarded the new cane—ebony with a fierce lion’s head mounting in silver—which Sir Morgan had sent her by messenger. It was a very handsome article; it was additionally a very cleverly disguised sword-stick.

“Mon Dieu!”
Delphine exploded with rage. “If it was so innocent, then why did money exchange hands?”

“Did it?” inquired Tess, with a faint spark of interest. “I’ll admit Pertwee is marvelously sinister-looking, Daffy, but I doubt Sir Morgan was engaged in anything more nefarious than seeking the secret of Giles’s gleaming boots.” She looked contemplative. “I wonder what Pertwee does use. Perhaps champagne?”

“Imbecile!”
retorted Delphine, but under her breath. “You will tell me also that I am air-dreaming when I say your sister is ill, suffering nausea and sleeplessness.”

“I’ll tell you no such thing,” began the countess, but they were interrupted by a knock on the door. The housekeeper stood there. “The Duchess of Bellamy wishes your presence, miss,” Mrs. Bibby announced, “in the drawing-room.”

“Then I must attend her, must I not?” Tess replied. “You may go, Delphine! I’ll have no more need of you tonight.” The abigail stiffly inclined her head. She was all out of patience with her mistress, whom she considered to be waltzing gaily down the pathway to ruin without the least regret.

Sapphira had arranged herself with every intention of awing the ramshackle creature who had invaded her house, but Tess walked calmly down the length of the long drawing-room without visible embarrassment and with no indication whatsoever of feeling as though she were entering the presence of royalty. Nor did she curtsy, or bob her head, or show any other sign of respect. “You wished to see me?”

“Hah!” barked Sapphira, immediately determining to keep the ill-bred wench standing. “Where the devil did you come by that cane?”

“Sir Morgan gave it to me.” Tess contemplated the item. “Handsome, is it not?”

“It should be!” Sapphira had to admit Morgan knew how to wage a campaign. “Being a family heirloom. I cannot think why he gave it to
you!”

Tess ventured no explanation, but serenely took a chair. The dowager scowled ferociously; the countess regarded her with unimpaired patience.

“Hah!” Sapphira said again, very successfully concealing a grudging respect. Few people dared stand up to her. “What’s my son to
you,
girl? You’ll do well to forget him!”

“So we’re to lay our cards on the table?” queried Tess. “Splendid! I prefer plain speaking, and I see that you agree with me.”

Somewhat taken aback, Sapphira surveyed this audacious twit. She was passable, the dowager decided sourly, if one admired blue-green eyes, and finely sculpted features, and dark flyaway brows. She was also definitely unfashionable, in that dark gown, and with that fair hair piled so carelessly atop her head. Not at all in Giles’s style, Sapphira mused, and said so. “Don’t get notions in your head because he’s kind to a cripple, girl! Giles has a way about him with the lower classes, and he can’t abide deformity.”

“How sad for you!” condoled Tess, with a speaking glance at Sapphira’s invalid chair. “He disguises his repugnance very well! I don’t think you need let it worry you.”