Maggie MacKeever (15 page)

These unflattering comments, Jaisy realized, were strangely similar to those voiced by another gentleman—not, of course, that Carlin would ever express himself with such appalling rudeness. Was the whole world gone mad? she wondered. First Carlin had denounced her, then Sara had agreed with him, and now Arthur flew off the hooks. Carlin’s conduct was easily enough understood; Carlin was clever enough to realize that the usual methods of courtship would advance him little in the good graces of so much-sought-after a lady as Jaisy; and Sara, lacking experience in such matters, could not be expected to comprehend so devious an approach. But why should Arthur join his voice to this general disapproval? He certainly did not wish to elevate himself in Jaisy’s opinion; if anything, the opposite.

That, too, was queer, she realized. The large majority of the world’s male population would have flown straight into cloud-cuckoo-land at the mere thought of marriage with Lady Easterling. Arthur, on the contrary, appeared to be in the dumps, almost as if he truly found the notion very much to his dislike.

Dislike? Incredible! He was merely putting a good face on it, attempting to prevent her knowing he had been struck a mortal blow. “Poor boy!” said Jaisy kindly. “No wonder you are sulky as a bear.”

“Jaisy,” responded Arthur, who from his younger sisters had learned to recognize the various types of feminine megrims, and who therefore understood that Lady Easterling was fast on the way to convincing herself of his preference, “it’s
you
who’s queer in the attic! I’ll do my duty because I must, but it’s only fair to tell you that
I
would rather be nibbled to death by ducks than marry a selfish, rag-mannered madcap!”

The sincerity of this passionate avowal even Jaisy could not doubt, nor the revulsion with which Arthur pried her fingers from his sleeve. “I shall spare you that fate!” she cried dramatically.
“You
may be too poor-spirited to do anything but what Georgiana tells you, but I am no milksop! And I very solemnly and seriously assure you that I do not intend to be the plaything of fortune!”

Had Arthur at this point exercised diplomacy, as Jaisy expected that he would, the peace between them might have been restored, and they might have joined forces to try and avoid a
dénouement
abhorrent to them both. But Arthur had for several days been feeling the strain of his own uncomfortable position in Blackwood House, and the frustration attendant upon falling in with plans which he abhorred, and was in no mood to be conciliating. “Tongue-valiant!” he sneered. The reader may not be especially surprised to learn that Lady Easterling thereupon boxed his ears.

The next scene in this day’s drama took place in the garden behind Blackwood House, where Mr. Kingscote retreated after the assault performed upon his person by Lady Easterling. It was not the first time Arthur had been abused in such a manner, although on all previous occasions one or another of his sisters had been the cause of his discomfort. On those previous occasions there had been some slight justification for the action; from his lofty position as eldest of the family, Arthur occasionally condescended to tease his siblings. That Arthur’s sisters should occasionally box his ears, Arthur didn’t consider especially unfair. That Lady Easterling dared do so, however, was very much beyond the outside of enough. Yet he could not refuse the dowager duchess’s demands without wreaking hardship upon his entire family, who were depending upon him to accomplish a mission of rescue from perennially dire straits.

The air in the garden—nay, in all of London—was unseasonably chill and damp. Perhaps, if he were to remain long enough exposed to the elements, he might take a quinsy and expire. Death, decided Arthur, with the utmost seriousness, would be preferable to marriage with Lady Easterling. He contemplated the reaction of the dowager duchess were he to put an abrupt end to his existence. Would she compensate his grieving family for his loss? Or lop them off altogether from the family tree as punishment for having nurtured so weak a twig? Arthur was interrupted in his gloomy cogitations by a vicious snarling, and teeth fastened in his elegant Hussar boot.

“Oh, I say! Hang it!” he cried, attempting to shake Confucious loose. “Unhand me, you wretched little brute!”

In response to these exhortations, yet another figure stirred. Miss Valentine rose from the shell-shaped bench where she had been brooding over the inequities of fate, and swooped down upon Confucious. Then Sara and Arthur eyed each other warily.

Arthur hoped it was the excellence of his apparel that caused Miss Valentine to stare, and not because he looked a quiz, as had been unhandsomely intimated by Lady Easterling, whose judgment demonstrably lacked nicety. For his own part, Arthur was fascinated by Miss Valentine’s bonnet, lilac with a helmet crown and a small front, trimmed with two white feathers and a wreath of laurel, and a ribbon that tied under the chin. It was a very fetching, very frivolous bonnet, wholly unsuited to a female of Miss Valentine’s station and current occupation; and Arthur wondered what had possessed Sara to rig herself out in all her finery simply to walk alone in Lady Blackwood’s garden.

As Arthur thus pondered the giddy confection perched atop Miss Valentine’s dark head, Miss Valentine regarded him with burgeoning amusement. “You are staring at my bonnet,” she gently pointed out.

Arthur flushed and wrenched away his gaze. “It is a lovely bonnet! You are complete to a shade!”

“Fiddlesticks!” responded Miss Valentine. “It is you who are turned out in prime style. You will be wondering at my extravagance, I’ll warrant. I have never been able to overcome my passion for bonnets. Lady Blackwood pays me a very generous wage, and I am afraid I squander every shilling on my one remaining luxury, which is very reprehensible of me!”

“Nonsense!” His brief sojourn at Blackwood House had already acquainted Arthur with the temptation to kick over the traces and take the reins between his teeth, a temptation which in Miss Valentine found expression in indulgence of her passion for bonnets and air-dreams of indulging a passion of quite a different kind. Of those air-dreams, which would have cast him into an agony of embarrassment, Arthur happily knew nothing. “Nothing of the sort. I don’t see why you shouldn’t spend your wages exactly as you please.”

“That’s because you have not stopped to think what would become of me were the dowager duchess to turn me off.” Sara’s brief good humor had fled. “As she threatens periodically, and as I have no doubt she will eventually do. A wise female would take precautions so as not to be caught unprepared. I, on the other hand, go out and buy yet another bonnet, because to do so gives me pleasure; and then am guilt-stricken by my own fecklessness. But you are shivering! Come, let us stroll about the garden before you take your death.”

Briefly, Arthur toyed with the notion of inquiring further into Miss Valentine’s conviction that she was to be turned off, then decided against it. No doubt Miss Valentine was merely indulging in the crotchets to which females were prey. A young gentleman with as many problems as Arthur could not be expected to burden himself with the additional problems of every chance acquaintance.

Through the little garden Mr. Kingscote and Miss Valentine strolled, to the accompaniment of Confucious’s protests. Unbeknownst to one another, their thoughts followed similar lines. As Arthur pondered Lady Easterling’s fortune—appropriation of which would make the existence of his large family so much more serene, removing them from the dowager duchess’s list of dependents and from beneath her heavy thumb—Sara regretted Jevon Rutherford’s lack of the same commodity; and the term “fortune hunter” was uppermost in each mind. As Miss Valentine was attempting to console herself with the intelligence that a gentleman on the dangle for a fortune was as unlikely to marry a pretty little opera dancer as his aunt’s hired companion, a cinder from one of London’s many fires—smoke from which mingled with the fog to hang over the city like a dark, ominous cloud— flew straight into her eye. “Oh!” she cried.

“What is it? A cinder? Here, allow me to be of assistance!” Arthur withdrew from his pocket a huge speckled handkerchief.

“Thank you!” gasped Sara, turning up her face to receive his ministrations, and tucking the snarling dog beneath her arm, facing the other way.

As a result of this undignified position, Confucious alone witnessed the intrusion of a third person into this scene, and so angry already were his barks that his announcement of this new arrival gained no attention. Nor did the intruder linger to further gaze upon what appeared a very tender encounter. Whatever was to be done? wondered Lady Easterling, distressed beyond measure that her childhood friend and confidante had fallen so determinedly into licentious ways.

When last glimpsed, Lord Carlin had been wishing very strongly that he might shake the aggravating Lady Easterling until the teeth rattled in her head. In the interval elapsed between that day and this, he had not changed his mind. Nonetheless, this day found him in Queen Anne Street, gazing without approbation upon the stone-fronted residence of the Dowager Duchess of Blackwood, and regretting that Jevon Rutherford had persuaded him to call.

This rather surprising development was the outcome of a wager placed between Lord Carlin and his friend across the board of green baize cloth, a wager which Jevon Rutherford had won. Lord Carlin suspected that he had been very cleverly manipulated. All the same, underhanded as were Jevon’s methods, the only honorable course was to discharge his obligation promptly and with good will.

The promptness Kit could manage, but he was less confident about the good will. Why the blazes had Jevon insisted he pay his respects to the dowager duchess, anyway? There was no sense to be made of it.

In point of fact, there was no sense to be made of Jevon himself, as borne out by their encounter the preceding evening. This meeting had taken place behind the Corinthian pilasters and well-proportioned facade of White’s, most illustrious of the exclusive gentlemen’s clubs, where wealthy aristocrats plunged day and night at hazard and faro. A man could enter White’s with a few coins in his pocket and emerge a couple of hours later with enough coins to buy an abbey, or so it was claimed. Lord Carlin did not care to play for such high stakes. Nor did Jevon Rutherford, whom he found lingering over his dinner of boiled fowl and oyster sauce, and whose aspect had been decidedly lugubrious. Interrogation had revealed that the absence of Beau Brummell from White’s famed bow window was the source of this gloom. Jevon had a great deal to say upon the subject of the Beau’s disgrace.

Certainly it was a very desponding reflection, thought Lord Carlin, that Brummell’s quaint absurdities would be heard no more at White’s or Brook’s Gambling Club in St. James’s or any other haunts of the
ton.
Still, the Beau’s
débâcle
did not seem sufficient cause for the bizarre conduct which Mr. Rutherford had recently begun to display. Perhaps it was the head cold acquired under what could only be considered mysterious circumstances that led Mr. Rutherford to act like a gentleman laboring under a fever of the brain.

Just how
had
Jevon come down with that affliction? wondered Lord Carlin yet again, as he slowly mounted the steps of Blackwood House. Quizzing Jevon on the source of his sniffles and sneezes had led to no enlightenment; Jevon had replied merely that his affliction had been brought down upon him in the most delightful way imaginable, which prompted visions of torrid trysts with pretty little opera dancers in chill outdoor settings to seethe in Lord Carlin’s brain. Though he was man of the world enough not to begrudge his friend a single one of the little opera dancers who invariably put themselves in his way, Kit was much too high a stickler to stand by mute and unprotesting while his friend contracted a ruinous
mésalliance.
He might as well allow Jevon to blithely embark
en route to
the devil in a handcart—yet how to stay his course?

It was a dreadful puzzle, and further attempts to discuss the matter with Jevon accomplished nothing but additional rebuff. Then there were Kit’s own problems, for he still had not brought himself to choose a wife from among the bevy of hopeful beauties who were dangling after him, and no longer could he turn to Jevon for advice about how to discover a female for whom he
could
care three straws.

Meantime, Lord Carlin mounted the stone steps, arrived at the recessed and pedimented door, gained admittance into the entrance hall and was escorted up the stairway and into the first-floor drawing room. Kit was not unfamiliar with this chamber; this was not his first visit to Blackwood House. With a pained expression, he gazed upon the lotus columns and turning lilies and papyrus stems, the frieze painted with figures representing pharaohs and Egyptian deities, then crossed the room to absently inspect the contents of the sphinx-headed bookcase. Once more he wondered why Jevon had insisted that he call upon Lady Blackwood. Though Lord Carlin had been acquainted with the dowager duchess for many years, and was as unfailingly polite to her as propriety required, he privately didn’t like her above half.

Perhaps the dowager duchess thought he had been remiss in his social obligations of late. True, he had paid her less attention since the installation of the aggravating Lady Easterling in Blackwood House. Very well, he would reinstate himself in Georgiana’s good graces, not because he cared tuppence for her malice, but because to behave uncivilly to a lady of her years was not the act of a gentleman. He would amuse her with the current
on-dits,
and then, duty satisfied, he would take his leave—hopefully without encountering the rag-mannered Lady Easterling, whom he trusted would be employed elsewhere at this time of day, such as engaged in frittering away her fortune in the countless London shops designed specifically to attract the patronage of ladies with more wealth than wit.

Thought of Lady Easterling caused Lord Carlin to realize he had been left to kick his heels in the drawing room for an unconscionably long time. Was he to be left in this atrociously furnished chamber until some breathless servant tracked down her ladyship and bade her hasten home from her shopping expedition? Lord Carlin would not have put it past Lady Easterling to arrange precisely such a thing, even though she lacked the slightest reason to think that he might call. And where the deuce was Lady Blackwood? Frowning, Kit turned toward the door. As he did so, perfectly on cue, Lady Easterling stepped into the room and closed the door.