Maggie MacKeever (12 page)

Was it? Once more Arthur’s spirits plummeted. “As close as oysters!” He promised, all the same.

“Oh, look!” In a positively disgraceful manner, Jaisy clutched at his arm. “Carlin must not have seen us; he is taking his leave. I must speak with him, Arthur! Can we not walk a little more quickly?”

But Carlin
had
seen them; Arthur had observed his start of recognition, and the abrupt beeline he had made in another direction. Clearly, the gentleman did not wish to encounter Lady Easterling. It would appear that, as regarded Carlin, the dowager duchess’s conclusions had been correct.

“Of all the unjust things to say!” retorted Lady Easterling, with a flashing eye, when thus informed. “You are merely jealous because I do not fancy
you!
But I do not mean to stand here and argue while Carlin gets away.”

“Hang it!” uttered Arthur, and then abruptly closed his mouth. Well did he know the aspect of a young lady on the verge of a temper tantrum, and Lady Easterling had very much that look. Too, presentation to Lady Easterling of his frank assessment of her character, person and habits of speech would not advance fulfillment of the mandate laid upon him by the dowager duchess.

Furthermore, while he sought to control his temper, Lady Easterling had abandoned him to make her way through the crowd. She was headed straight for the doorway where Carlin stood in conversation with his host. Silently cursing all strong-minded females, Arthur followed.

He caught up with her soon enough; Jaisy had stopped dead in her tracks, on her beautiful features a look of stunned disbelief. That expression struck Arthur as very queer. Then he, too, came within earshot of the two gentlemen in the doorway, and Lady Easterling’s shock was easily explained.

“I would not say so to anyone but you,” murmured Carlin, whose back was to them, “but the chit is a young woman of very singular character, capricious and eccentric, eternally exhibiting the most boundless effrontery!” His companion made an unintelligible comment.
“You
may be amused by her vulgarity and pretentious airs,” retorted Carlin, “but
you
aren’t in imminent danger of finding yourself leg-shackled to the chit. I would not put it past her to carry me off by force! Did I not name her well? Fair Fatality! Because I vow she will either drive me to take my life or her own!”

So much for his brief vision of reprieve, thought Arthur, and then winced as Jaisy’s fingernails dug into his wrist. It was not so very loud, the noise he made, but it was sufficient to make the gentlemen aware that their private conversation had drawn an audience.

First to espy and recognize the white-faced Lady Easterling was their host. Upon receipt of that murmured explanation, Lord Carlin swung around. He looked no less furious than did Jaisy herself, thought Arthur, and wondered if he were about to find himself in the middle of a truly appalling scene.

He did not; Lord Carlin was too much the perfect gentleman to grasp Lady Easterling by her lovely shoulders and shake her till her perfect teeth rattled in her head, as was his inclination at that moment. Instead, without a single word, he quit the scene.

Because there was only one reasonable means by which to relieve his exacerbated sensibilities, the next day found Lord Carlin in Jevon Rutherford’s lodgings, delivering himself of a veritable diatribe. This was couched in the least offensive terms due to Carlin’s gentlemanly habit; and consequently went rather wide of its target.

Jevon supposed, had he asked, he might discover what the viscount was prosing on about; but Jevon had more serious matters to contemplate. Beyond noting that his friend seemed a trifle restive, Jevon paid him little heed. Mr. Rutherford had promised himself a visit to Blackwood House that afternoon, and therefore was very much occupied with thoughts of strategy. How would he approach his precious Sara, and how would she respond? An age had passed since their last meeting. Dared he hope she had begun to realize in the interim that the regard in which he held her was rather more than friendship? That only the most harrowing degree of self-control enabled him to suppress the impulse to sweep her off her feet and into his arms? Upon due reflection, Jevon ruefully decided that only a mutton-head could nurture such unfounded hopes. His Sara would be thinking no such thing, would be wholly occupied with his harum-scarum hoyden of a sister.

Thought of Lady Easterling and Sara Valentine in, as it were, one breath, recalled to Jevon his pact. He had promised to intervene in the matter of Lord Carlin. Well, and had he not offered very good advice?

That very advice Lord Carlin was discussing, and in tones that were far from appreciative. Just what maggot had the viscount taken into his head? Jevon frowned and put down the silver-backed brush with which he had been toying, and set himself to find out. Alas, enlightenment was not so easily achieved. In one breath Kit denounced Lady Easterling— as bold and brass-faced a baggage as his lordship had ever seen—and in the next lamented that he must marry a chit for whom he didn’t care three straws.

“The devil!” interjected Jevon, so startled that he knocked the silver-backed brush off the table where he had set it. “Who said anything about
marriage?”

“My father!” Lord Carlin picked up the brush. “It is not a subject which I am eager to discuss. I hope I know my duty, and there’s an end to it. No Carlin has ever been less than honorable. I had hoped you might offer some advice along those lines, but I perfectly understand why you might be a trifle out of patience.”

“You do?” Mr. Rutherford was not similarly blessed. “I beg you, explain.”

Lord Carlin cast his friend a withering look, and made a very pungent reference to rubbing salt in open wounds, then added: “That accursed nickname!”

“Ah.” Jevon was pleased to achieve even so small a degree of progress. “Fair Fatality. I don’t mind, why should I? In point of fact, I doubt that Jaisy herself took exception to it.”

“Oh, no!” Lord Carlin replied bitterly. “I can tell you on the best authority that she did
not!
If she were not your sister, Jevon—but that’s neither here nor there. I wish you would tell me how the blazes one goes about developing a preference.”

Upon receipt of this bizarre conception of romance—Lord Carlin appeared to think of Cupid as a habit to be cultivated—Mr. Rutherford quirked a golden brow. He was always ready to oblige a friend, however, particularly in those cases where to do so brought no perspiration to his own handsome brow. Jevon was a kindly soul, and genial, for all his innate laziness; and there was no gentleman alive better qualified to expound upon romance.

“One either discovers a preference or one does not,” he explained gently. “If you find yourself thinking of a young lady at queer times of day, and without the slightest cause; if the time that you are apart from her seems an eternity, and the time you spend together a mere instant; if a day that passes without a glimpse of her is a day uninspired—then, Kit, you may fairly conclude that you have discovered a preference.”

It was obvious from Lord Carlin’s expression that so mawkish a condition did not meet with approval. “Gad!” he said, revolted. “Are you
certain?”
On this absurdity, Mr. Rutherford’s other eyebrow rose. “I mean, of course you must be certain, because if anyone you should know—but must it apply in every case? If I think frequently of a young lady— any young lady—even a vulgar little chit who has made a dead-set at me—am I of necessity on the way to stepping into parson’s mousetrap?”

Perhaps fortunately, Jevon did not pause to ponder the identity of his lordship’s “vulgar little chit.” Instead, he hastened to clear away a misapprehension under which his lordship labored. “The two don’t necessarily follow!” he reproved. “Love and marriage, that is. A man doesn’t go around making a habit of marrying his ladybirds.”

Briefly distracted from his own dreadful dilemma, Lord Carlin regarded his friend. Had Jevon not hinted that he, too, thought of marriage? Lord Carlin wondered with which lady Mr. Rutherford meant to enter that state. The only female who came to mind as currently enjoying Jevon’s favor was a pretty little opera dancer who trod the boards at Drury Lane.

An opera dancer? Surely not! “Hopefully one’s preference,” Kit ventured tactfully, “will fall upon a lady of one’s own station in life.”

Mr. Rutherford was not a man to tolerate any slur upon his beloved who, though of eminently respectable birth, was currently embarked upon an existence of the utmost ignominy. “Balderdash!” said he.

His wild guess had been correct, concluded Lord Carlin: Jevon
did
mean to marry his fancy-piece. Kit could only think that Jevon had suddenly gone quite queer in the attic. This was the great sage whose wisdom he had sought? With laudable self-restraint, Lord Carlin set down the silver-backed brush on a table, uttered a scathing denunciation of the quality of his friend’s advice, and departed the premises.

In a ruminative manner, Jevon gazed after his lordship. Kit’s unappreciative comments regarding his own good sense, Jevon sensibly ignored; he was certain he hadn’t grown so addle-pated as to profess that the ladies not only wanted what they couldn’t have, but also didn’t want what they could, a piece of very shabby reasoning that failed to take into consideration the innate capriciousness of its subject. But Kit had been most adamantly concerned with matters matrimonial. With the intention of frankly warning his scapegrace sister to leave off plaguing Lord Carlin, Jevon donned his many-caped greatcoat and his curly-brimmed beaver hat. Exiting his lodgings, he pulled on his gloves.

Even Lord Carlin’s odd behavior had not power to perplex him long, and Jevon’s thoughts soon returned to the subject that had occupied him before his lordship’s appearance: a way of life that, with the assistance of a certain Miss Valentine, must speedily be reformed. Bad enough that Byron had been forced to flee the country in disgrace; but Byron had been a queer bird, with his club foot and his carefully disheveled curls, his dining habits that centered around eating vinegar and potatoes and drinking from a skull, his highly publicized
affaire
with the spoilt and selfish Caro Lamb. Brummel was an altogether different kettle of fish, and Jevon would sincerely miss the Beau’s outrageous impertinence. No more would he be glimpsed riding in Bond Street, reins grasped between forefinger and thumb as if he held a pinch of snuff; no more send his linen to be washed and dried on Hampstead Heath; no more exchange snubs with his one-time friend, the Prince Regent. It was a very great pity, felt Jevon, whose unflagging good humor and large sense of the ridiculous rendered him immune to the quips of gentlemen whose habit it was to be unspeakably rude in the politest possible way.

Jevon did not anticipate that he would suffer so great a lapse of his usual good sense that, like Brummell, he would amass debts he could not pay, or, like Byron, indulge in several too many affairs of the heart; but rather viewed these
débâcles
from a broader viewpoint. One could only maintain a position at the summit for a finite period of time before the props were knocked out from beneath one. Downfall was inevitable. Jevon Rutherford had for a long time dwelt upon the heights. Before unspecified disaster tumbled him from his perch, Jevon would descend of his own volition.

As he pondered the manner of his withdrawal from the lists, and the lady whom he hoped would make the retirement worthwhile, Jevon executed the brief journey between his lodgings and Lady Blackwood’s home in Queen Anne Street.

At last the stone-fronted house of fine proportions loomed up before him. The butler Thomas opened the door and informed Jevon that the family was gathered in the drawing room. “Never mind escorting me!”said Jevon, shrugging out of his greatcoat. “I know the way.” He mounted the stair. That all was not rosy in the dowager duchess’s drawing room became clear as soon as he arrived in the upper hallway.

“The weather has been so dreadful,” said a young gentleman, whose rather desperate voice Jevon did not know. “These stupid fogs and mists! The cold! My mother writes that several of the sheep have expired in the snow.”

“Oh, do stop boring on about your wretched sheep!” Very easily did Jevon recognize the venomous tones of the dowager duchess. “Do you but oblige me regarding our little secret and you may buy an entire flock! As for you, young woman, put down that horrid book. Caro Lamb is mad as a Bedlamite. I have thought so for some time.”

“You are just out of frame because you are in these pages!” responded Jaisy, in a mulish manner that halted her fond brother’s progress down the hallway. “Lady Mandeville is actually Lady Oxford, Buchanan is Sir Godfrey Webster, and of course Glenavron is Lord Byron.”

“Byron!” Georgiana sounded scandalized. “Don’t let me hear you mention his name again, miss. Better you should take a lesson from Caro Lamb, who has with that accursed volume capped a most reprehensible progress, and finally ruined herself. Why, she used to dress up as a page and steal into, er, that man’s lodgings. To say nothing of throwing things at her servants and slashing her wrists. You see what happens to ladies who blot their copybooks.”

“Well!” responded Lady Easterling, very irate. “If that don’t beat all! It is Carlin who should be condemned for his conduct, not me, because to be talking in so very loose a way is not
gentlemanly!
Not that I am wholly convinced that he did not say those things about me just to further whet my interest, no matter what you and Sara think! And furthermore, Georgiana, it is very hypocritical of you to talk about Caro Lamb being unkind to her servants when you have just sent poor Sara out into the cold—if you will forgive me for being so presumptuous as to point it out!”

Jevon anticipated that within seconds the ladies would be at daggers drawn, and sympathized with the young gentleman who could not follow Jevon’s excellent example of affecting a quick escape. It was not the dowager or his sister with whom Jevon wished to converse, especially not when in one of their relative takings, but his own true love, callously rendered prey to the inclement elements.