Maggie MacKeever (4 page)

“And it would not occur to you, I’ll warrant, that any female might hold your person in distaste?” inquired Miss Valentine, who despite herself was beginning to be amused.

Jevon gave this novel notion his full attention, then awarded Sara his enchanting grin. “Odd as it may sound in me, no. You do not hold me in dislike, Sara, and I am very curious as to why you should wish me to think it.”

Miss Valentine herself had no idea of why so bizarre an impulse had taken possession of her mind, and hastily changed the subject. Diffidently, she pointed out that she was indeed engaged in a moonlight tryst.

“So we are!” responded Jevon and raised her hand to his lips, an act of gallantry that roused Confucious to a vicious outburst. Hastily, Jevon restored Sara’s hand to her lap. “If you should not object, my precious, I still would like to know what has cast you into the dumps.”

Upon this untimely reminder, Sara’s spirits once more sank. “Georgiana,” she said glumly. “Ungrateful as it is in me, I am tired to death of dancing to her tune. I should not say so, I know! But she has made Jaisy my responsibility, and Jaisy has warned me against trying to prevent her cutting a dash. I am prey to the most horrid misgivings, even if Jaisy
is
being amazingly good.”

“And so you might be!” responded Jevon promptly, an unfilial attitude explained by his prior acquaintance with the foibles of his younger sister. “There’s no need to put yourself in a pucker, nonetheless. Georgiana will see the little baggage doesn’t go beyond the line—or you will on her behalf. Jaisy isn’t a bad sort of girl, just a little strong-willed.”

For such easy panaceas, Sara had no patience. “Jaisy,” she said bitterly, “means to set herself up in the latest mode. She expects to make an eligible connection as quick as winking, she informs me, and offers to wager that in no time whatsoever she’ll be quite top-of-the-trees. She even wanted to set up her own stables, but Georgiana squelched that idea by refusing your assistance.”

Sanguine as Jevon was, the notion that his harum-scarum sister might have involved him in her kick-ups filled him with a great relief that her attempt had failed. “Good!” he said.

“I might as well have gone for a governess! Now I am expected to play bear-leader to Jaisy, as well as cater to Georgiana’s whims,” mourned Sara, on a sigh. “Although I daresay I shan’t have to do so much longer, because Georgiana has threatened to turn me off without a reference should Jaisy deport herself unbecomingly—in which case I am resolved to go upon the boards, because if nothing else, employment with Georgiana has taught me to play a part very well!”

Jevon was not surprised to learn that his aunt Georgiana had behaved so shabbily; Jevon’s fondness for the dowager duchess did not blind him to her myriad defects of character. All the same, Sara’s speech startled Jevon no little bit. He drew back, the better to regard her, for he had been stricken forcibly by her declared intention to tread the boards. Sara, who had no notion that Jevon had taken her nonsense seriously, stared back at him.

Perhaps because of her startling avowal, perhaps because her avowal had recalled to his mind a certain little opera dancer with whom he anticipated passing an entertaining interval, Jevon found himself reassessing his old friend. He had always found her pleasant to look upon, had enjoyed engaging with her in a comfortable prose; now he realized that Sara Valentine was a deucedly pretty woman, and discovered in himself a temptation to forgo the opera dancer and engage instead with Sara in a flirtatious
tête-à-tête.
Not accustomed to employing reticence so far as the ladies were concerned, Jevon secured his companion’s attention by slipping an arm around her shoulders and encouraging her to rest her head against his chest. So startled was Miss Valentine by this gallant invitation that she complied, and found her position remarkably comfortable.

Fortunately for Sara’s strength of character—so very blue-deviled was Sara that she might well have encouraged her old friend to pay her court, disgraceful as such behavior would have been in both of them—fate, in the guise of Confucious, intervened at that point. Released by Sara when Jevon had drawn her so improperly close, Confucious took prompt advantage of the opportunity to sink his remaining teeth in that gentleman’s hand.

“The devil!” exclaimed Jevon.

“Oh, dear!” wailed Sara, and wrested Confucious away from his victim. Frustrated, the dog snapped at her. Equally frustrated, and feeling foolish to boot, Sara cuffed him, then, remorse-stricken, cradled the beast.

Upon this touching tableau, Jevon gazed with a great deal less tolerance than was his habit. Jevon was not accustomed to being balked in the pursuit of flirtation. Certainly he was not accustomed to seeing the embraces which he craved bestowed on a misbegotten cur instead. Privately condemning Confucious to perdition, he drew a deep breath. “Darling Sara—”

“Pitching it too rum!” Miss Valentine interrupted, in rather stifled tones. Miss Valentine was suffering a positive mortification of spirit, due to a suspicion that her friend’s unprecedented overtures resulted from her own heedless comments, which could all too easily be construed as an invitation to a tryst. She dared not look at him, lest she read pity on those incomparably handsome features—for if not from pity, why should so great a connoisseur of feminine loveliness as Jevon Rutherford embrace a poor specimen like herself? And now what must the wretch do but lay gentle fingers on her cheek? “I wish,” said Sara crossly, as she struggled to restrain Confucious, who was struggling so violently in her arms that she feared he would have a heart-attack, “that you would go away!”

Jevon Rutherford was far too wise in the ways of women to believe Miss Valentine wished any such thing, and equally too sagacious to accuse her of uttering outright clankers; but no gentleman alive knew better than Jevon Rutherford that the better part of valor was sometimes a strategic retreat. Accordingly he departed the garden, leaving Miss Valentine to further reflection upon her sorry lot, while Confucious settled down to renewed slumber, during which he snored and twitched and drooled profusely upon her muslin skirts.

Having left Miss Valentine and Confucious to their various somber reflections, Jevon Rutherford returned to Lady Blackwood’s drawing room, there to engage in some meditation of his own, centering upon his sudden impulse to pay his addresses to a lady whom he’d known for twenty-seven of his two-and-thirty years. In retrospect, the impulse seemed a very good idea—one of the best ideas, in fact, to ever take possession of Jevon’s handsome head. He wondered why he had never realized that his dear Sara was a deucedly attractive female. Doubtless he had been distracted by the countless women who had put themselves in his way. Having discovered in himself the vague stirrings of what Jevon recognized from long acquaintance as a distinguishing preference, he had immediately begun to pay his court, only to be interrupted by his fair one with a most decided and peremptory indication that he was fatiguing her to death.

That Jevon Rutherford was in a state of profound abstraction did not fail to penetrate the consciousness of the other occupants of Lady Blackwood’s drawing room, a chamber done up in the Egyptian style, with an abundance of lotus columns and turning lilies and papyrus stems. Lady Blackwood was enthroned on a couch in the shape of a crocodile. Upon espying her preoccupied nephew, she glared.

During the many years of his association with the dowager duchess, Jevon had developed an almost superhuman awareness of her moods, which ranged from mild irritability to vindictive virulence. Therefore he temporarily abandoned his speculation upon the quixotic conduct so recently exhibited by Miss Valentine. Jevon was not so puffed up that he believed every female who looked upon him must do so with the eye of love, but the fact remained that until this very evening, every female
had.
From the lips of his friend Sara, Jevon had received his first rebuff. It was a novel sensation, and Jevon was very curious about Sara’s demonstrable wrong-headedness.

That Sara might simply be indifferent to him never crossed Jevon’s mind; quite simply, no woman ever was. He wished to shake some good sense into Sara, but at the same time derived from her obtuseness an amusement directed primarily at himself.

This was not the time, as evidenced by Georgiana’s basilisk stare, to ponder how best to induce his woolly-headed darling to look more favorably upon his suit. With a queer reluctance, for such things signified little to him in the ordinary way, Jevon withdrew his attention from affairs of the heart.

Quite another manner of affair occupied the conversation of Lady Blackwood’s guests: the party given recently by Lady Jersey at Almack’s in a last attempt to reconcile high society to the scandalous Lord Byron, virtually ostracized following the breakup of his marriage, and the resultant gossip. Rumor linked the poet amorously with his half-sister, a page, a Harrow schoolmate and the larger portion of the population of Turkey; in addition to being guilty of all manner of abominations, he was said to be so frightened of the dark that he slept always in a lighted room, a brace of loaded pistols close at hand, and he had been portrayed most unflatteringly in a series of popular prints. The attempt of Byron’s friends to reinstate him as society’s spoilt darling had failed, as Jevon could have predicted; the poet and his half-sister Augusta had arrived at Almack’s, the latter only to be altogether ignored, the former to be greeted by an abrupt emptying of the room. Even Caro Lamb no longer pursued the poet, but instead deftly fed the malice of his estranged wife. Society’s darling was now hissed in the streets, and his chestnut curls were turning gray.

Though Jevon Rutherford possessed no foibles of the magnitude attributed to Byron, he understood and sympathized with the poet’s plight. Again Jevon mused upon the havoc wreaked upon a comfortable existence by imprudence. It then occurred to Jevon that a gentleman so successful in the petticoat-line as himself could hardly be considered prudent. Perhaps it was as result of the champagne he’d consumed with his supper, combined more recently with Lady Blackwood’s excellent punch—or perhaps it was derivative from the appalling account presented him of the poet Byron’s woes—whatever the cause, on that certain April evening, whilst passing indolently among the guests in his aunt’s overcrowded drawing room, Jevon Rutherford first conceived the startling notion that his way of life might stand in need of reform.

So alien a germ did not immediately take root and flourish; indeed, its host’s initial reaction was a sudden crack of laughter that made him an object of no small curiosity. Still, the notion would not be banished, and returned to tease Jevon as he strolled around his aunt’s drawing room, even as he engaged in amiable conversation with Prince Paul Esterhazy and Lady Holland, the Austrian ambassador and the great Whig hostess; Henry Luttrell, the wit; the proud and ambitious Countess Lieven. His progress led him into further conversation with Beau Brummel and Lord Alvanley, two of his intimates, who professed themselves delighted with his sister, the Beau predicting that the incurable levity of Lady Easterling’s disposition would prompt her to give the usual observances of civility short shift, and Lord Alvanley protesting that her ladyship more than atoned for an essential vulgarity by her frankly mischievous manner and pretty, caressing ways.

To these gentle criticisms, Jevon offered no argument; in all good faith, he could not. Instead, he continued on his way. At length he arrived at the sofa perched atop a sphinx, where a dimpling, giggling Lady Easterling was holding court.

Deftly he extricated his sister from her admirers and led her away. “I hear that you are bent on making a stir in the world, puss.”

“And why should I not be all the crack?” Jaisy pursed her rosy lips in an enchanting pout. “You’re as Friday-faced as that old gorgon Georgiana, who’s forever trying to tell me I ain’t top-of-the-trees! But Easterling was always used to swear I was fine as fivepence, so Georgiana may prose on till doomsday, because a man don’t need to throw the hatchet at his wife!”

Jevon contemplated his sister’s exquisite person, precious little of which was left to the imagination by her revealing gown, and his sister’s lovely face, and simultaneously arrived at two conclusions. The first—that Jaisy was every bit as light-minded as Brummel adjudged her; and additionally, alas, as shameless as intimated by Alvanley—he was not inclined to share. The second conclusion, however, could not but gratify its object. “Fine as fivepence it is, sis! This season’s crop of beauties are destined to have their noses put out of joint.”

“Palaverer!” Jaisy retorted, with a giggle. Despite this modest disclaimer, it had obviously never occurred to Lady Easterling that she might do other than leave all her rivals at the post. “That reminds me, Jevon: there is something I particularly want to say to you.”

Jevon recalled the warning issued him by Miss Valentine that Jaisy wished to set up her own stables, and remembered also his own determination to remain uninvolved in his sister’s fits and starts. “Don’t expect me to put you in the way of some proper highbred ‘uns!” he said hastily. “Georgiana is quite correct in saying it wouldn’t be the thing.”

The dowager duchess had been correct as regarded another matter, decided Jaisy, as she studied her indolent brother’s handsome face: Jevon would not risk the Blackwood fortune in the gratification of any female’s casual whim. It was a pity, she thought, that Jevon’s competence did not enable him to be independent of Georgiana. Already her brief sojourn in Blackwood House had given Jaisy a very fair notion of how unpalatable was an existence passed beneath the dowager’s heavy thumb. There was only one solution to Jevon’s uncomfortable position that his sister could see: She must marry a gentleman so
trés sympathique,
and so very well-heeled, that he would not only permit her to keep Sara in bonnets, but also make Jevon a generous allowance.

Having arranged Jevon’s future to her satisfaction, Jaisy awarded him her dimpled grin. “I have given up that notion,” she said, with good cheer. “As Sara pointed out, once I am established I can have as many elegant tits as I please.
Then
I may be a thorough out-and-outer, and no one will scold me for being fond of a bit of blood, or wishing to have something that can go!” Almost overwhelmed by these visions of future felicity, she clasped her hands to her breast. “But that isn’t what I wished to discuss with you!”