Maggie MacKeever (8 page)

Did he think she held him in aversion? Miss Valentine had opened her mouth to earnestly disabuse her companion of this erroneous assumption before she realized that he sought with his flummeries to elevate her spirits. “I suppose now you mean to persuade me that I should like to embark upon a tryst,” she observed irritably.

In point of fact, Jevon would have better preferred no other topic of discourse. No stranger to the addlepated notions that flourished in the fertile minds of the opposite sex, however, he realized that for a conversational gambit of a flirtatious nature, the moment was not propitious. Would the moment ever be? he wondered, as he said: “Oh, no! I will not seek to persuade you. I think that you would like it very well, but you must make up your own mind.”

How cleverly he managed to tease her and yet at the same time hold himself aloof, thought Sara, frowning at her friend. “I wish you would not mock me!” she retorted, more frankly than she had intended. “I am well aware that I am grown a dowd.”

Jevon frankly stared. “You a
dowd?
The devil!” said he.

“You need not be kind about it.” Sara interpreted her companion’s startled expression as further proof of his good heart. “I have learned to accept that I am left upon the shelf. It is not what I had anticipated for myself, but there is no use crying over spilt milk. Oh, dear! I did not mean to be so plain-spoken! When you talk to me of trysts, it recalls to mind the days before I was obliged to earn my living, when I truly
could
have engaged in such.”

“Did
you?” he inquired curiously.

“Did I
what?’
Sara echoed, and then again blushed. “Wretch! Naturally I did not! And I beg you will talk to me no more of trysts!”

“Certainly I won’t, if you wish it.” Jevon reflected that he was fast learning to deal with rebuff. “The subject shall be henceforth taboo—until you introduce it yourself.”

Pigs would fly sooner, decided Sara, further sunk in gloom. Jevon’s deft extrication of the pair of them from a potentially embarrassing situation had put her, most unreasonably, out of charity with him.

More aware than was his fair one of the source of her resentment, Jevon longed to invite her to weep out her woes upon his manly chest, following which he would introduce her to rather more pleasurable pursuits. Lest he receive another, even harsher set-down from the object of his affections, he dared not be so bold. Instead he must bide his time until she had grown a trifle more receptive. Perhaps, were the matters plaguing her resolved, she might prove more amenable to romance.

Chief among those plaguesome matters, decided Jevon, must be his own harum-scarum sibling. Though he had vowed to distance himself in Jaisy’s fits and starts, it grew increasingly obvious that the pursuit of romance required self-sacrifice. Though this too was an unprecedented conclusion—any sacrifice previously involved in his romances had not been required of Jevon—he did not even momentarily hesitate. “You were telling me about Jaisy,” he reminded his silent companion.

Sara took firmer hold of Confucious, who had been reminded by Jevon’s voice of the keen dislike which he harbored for that source. “I’m sure it’s no wonder I am cross as a cat! Your sister has convinced herself that she has taken Carlin’s fancy to an alarming degree, and that his indifference is assumed. Yes,
I
know that is moonshine, but she has decided he seeks to whet her interest. As if it needed whetting! Jaisy is practically stalking the poor man.”

“The deuce you say!” ejaculated Jevon, dismayed by the result of his mischievous impulse. “I should never have indulged the minx by presenting him.”

“No, you should not have.” Sara was not in the habit of mollycoddling her old friend. “But I daresay if you had not, she would have wheedled someone else into making the introduction! I have tried very hard to keep her from going beyond the line of being pleasing, but it is a very wearing task, and sometimes I think I must reach my wits’ end. Well you may look sympathetic, Jevon! I have taken Jaisy to linen-drapers and milliners and modistes, to bookshops and music stores and picture galleries; I have sat through equestrian displays at Astley’s Amphitheater; I even took her to Sadler’s Wells to see Grimaldi perform! And while I am quite willing to concede that Grimaldi must be the king of clowns, I do not derive any particular enjoyment from seeing a grown man sit between a codfish and a huge oyster that opens and closes its shell in time with the music, and sings!”

“Zounds!” Jevon looked intrigued.
“Did
it?”

“It did!” Sara replied bitterly. “This is one of Grimaldi’s most famous songs, I gather: ‘An Oyster Crossed in Love.’ Quite half the audience was in tears.”

“My poor Sara!” responded Mr. Rutherford, much moved.

“So you may say!” agreed Miss Valentine. “If all those excursions were not wearying enough, I must constantly be on my guard lest Jaisy decide that she must visit Hoby’s, where Carlin procures his boots, or Lock’s or Weston’s, his hatter and his tailor, or even Berry Brothers so she may weigh herself on the same scale! And then there was the day she announced to me that we should stroll down St. James’s, on the chance that we might encounter Carlin exiting one of his clubs.”

“My poor,
poor
Sara!” Somewhat belatedly, Jevon realized that his sister’s misbehavior, if she did succeed in escaping Sara’s vigilance, would rebound to the good credit of no one involved. “What is it you wish me to do?”

“Scolding her accomplishes nothing; she merely assures me that when approaching an apparently insurmountable hurdle one need only throw one’s heart over and one’s horse will invariably follow—though whether she considers Carlin as horse or hurdle I have not dared ask! Even if I did, she would probably only assure me once again that she is pluck to the backbone!” A trifle tardily, Sara received the impact of his words. “Oh, Jevon! You
will
help me? I will be forever in your debt!”

To receive from Miss Valentine that melting look, to reanimate her classic features and soft gray eyes, Mr. Rutherford would have undertaken tasks far more arduous than hinting away his sister from an unsuitable
parti.
Only in the very nick of time did Jevon prevent himself from explaining to Miss Valentine that fact. Not until Jaisy was fired off could the matter of trysts be subtly reintroduced into his companion’s thoughts. Doubtless it would improve his character to experience impatience curbed.

Doubtless, also, that self-improvement would be devilish hard-earned, decided Mr. Rutherford, as in an excess of gratitude Miss Valentine pressed his hand. Abruptly, Jevon halted the whiskey and descended into the street, where before Sara’s bewildered gaze, he spun the coin with a pieman, and won. He then resumed his seat in the whiskey and shared the profits of his enterprise with her, in celebration of their newly formed partnership. Prevented by the condition of his teeth from joining in this congenial repast, Confucious snarled.

Never one to shilly-shally, especially when to do so was to delay the achievement of a highly desired object, Mr. Rutherford sought to set his scapegrace sister’s affairs to rights at the earliest opportunity. Occasion to hold converse with Lord Carlin presented itself to Jevon that very evening, at the King’s Theater in the Haymarket. The attendance of both Mr. Rutherford and Lord Carlin at this function was no special coincidence. The King’s Theater was London’s most popular center of entertainment, ablaze with bejeweled ladies, and gentlemen with orders strewn across their chests. Boxes cost as much as £2500 for the season, despite the blinding chandeliers which hung before them, casting the actors into the shade; admission to the pit cost 10s. 6d.

Not for Mr. Rutherford nor Lord Carlin was the pit, of course; Mr. Rutherford was a member of Lady Blackwood’s party, and Lord Carlin had his own box. Currently both gentlemen were absent from their allotted spots. Nor could either be discovered among those congenial souls who strolled about during the performance, exhibiting to the world at large an elegance of person and a total lack of consideration for the long suffering performers. In point of fact, at this particular moment, neither gentleman was present in the great horseshoe auditorium with its five rows of boxes, galley and pit, each having discovered within himself a sudden yearning for respite from the sorrows of Cleopatra as enacted onstage.

Mr. Rutherford was first to arrive in the circular vestibule, furnished with sofas and almost entirely lined with looking glass. Since none of his particular cronies had similarly withdrawn from the arena, Jevon amused himself by eavesdropping upon the conversations of those discerning admirers of the opera who had. Beau Brummell, it was rumored, had amassed a larger number of commitments than could be met out of available capital, and had consequently engaged with friends in an annuity scheme. Rumor had it that the so-powerful Beau, supreme arbiter of fashion, master of ironic irreverence, was on his way out, an unfortunate position in which he might well have been condoled by Lord Byron, had not the poet fled England recently, and barely soon enough to avoid Lady Devonshire’s bailiffs, who seized everything in sight. Shocking developments, were these not? One could regret the Beau’s hard luck. One could not feel similarly about Byron, however. Any man who used a fireplace poker to break the heads off bottles of soda water—to say nothing of his further sins—deserved to be brought low.

Soda water? Deuced odd, Jevon thought, that a hardened reprobate like Byron should quaff so innocuous a substance. Port wine or claret, sherry or Madeira, rum from the West Indies or brandy from France, a bowl of punch or Biship, even Blue Ruin—indulgence in one or any combination of the preceding would not have prompted a single flutter of Jevon’s eyelid. Soda water, on the other hand, convinced him even further that only complete and abysmal debasement awaited those rash young bloods who did not mend their profligate ways. Lest he be reduced to such ignoble straits, it behooved him to reform, and with all possible haste.

As Jevon pondered his own personal salvation and the sole means by which it might be achieved, to wit through the tender ministrations of one Miss Sara Valentine, ministrations which Mr. Rutherford had not the least solid reason to suppose he would ever experience, his somewhat somber gaze alit upon a familiar figure. Prom the opposite side of the vestibule, Lord Carlin approached. Jevon recalled his decision that his sister’s
affaires
must be tidied up before he embarked upon his own, and there was no time like the present. “You are looking devilish Friday-faced, Kit!” he remarked.

So might Mr. Rutherford have looked, had he fallen under decree to in the near future wed, and this Lord Carlin tried to explain. Due to his position in the world, he must choose a wife from among a bevy of young ladies for whom he didn’t care three straws. It was the most damnable of dilemmas, and one with which Jevon must sympathize, himself being a gentleman devoted to flitting unattached from flower to flower.

“You must not think I presume to comment upon your way of life!” Lord Carlin added hastily, as Mr. Rutherford quirked a sardonic golden brow. “Nothing of the sort! But I could hardly do better than seek the advice of a gentleman after whom all the ladies run mad—oh, dash it, Jevon! You know what I’m trying to say.”

On that topic, Mr. Rutherford was a great deal less clear than his lordship thought. Unaccustomed to frank discussion of personal matters, too proud to easily admit himself at point nonplus, Lord Carlin had quite frankly made a rare muddle of the thing. So obscure had been his language, so harried his manner, that Jevon was led to highly erroneous conclusions concerning the manner of female that his friend sought. ‘The devil!” he said cheerfully. “I never thought I’d see the day when Kit Carruthers started chasing the petticoats! Still, you need only crook your finger to earn a place in every heart. You are Carlin, remember? There’s no need to make a piece of work of it.”

An odd way to describe a man’s search for a bride, surely? Admittedly, Lord Carlin had little prior experience with such things. Though he could not quibble with Jevon’s greater knowledge, he thought his friend might have evidenced a little more compassion for his plight.

“I don’t know what you expect me to do for you!” Mr. Rutherford responded, when acquainted with this viewpoint. “I have my own difficulties. Self-improvement, I must tell you, Kit, is deuced uncomfortable. If you take my advice, you’ll have nothing to do with it!”

Self-improvement? Lord Carlin fairly goggled, not at the notion his own character might be bettered, a notion which never crossed his mind, but at the suggestion that the indolent Jevon was embarked upon so bizarre a pursuit.
“Why?”
he asked.

“Byron,” Mr. Rutherford responded simply, obviously considering this sufficient reply. For the informed reader it will serve as such; the reader is already aware that Mr. Rutherford had derived from the poet’s
débâcle
a very salutary lesson indeed. Lord Carlin, alas, was not similarly privileged. Therefore, he stared.

Jevon was only vaguely aware of his friend’s bewilderment. He was not thinking of Lord Carlin but of Miss Valentine, relegated by her lowly status as paid companion to missing this and many another evening’s entertainment. Doubtless she was at that very moment engaged in some odiously menial pursuit, such as brushing the misbegotten Confucious, or ruining her gray eyes mending lace, both tasks which Jevon had countless times seen Sara perform.
That
would change, Jevon vowed grimly, once these plaguesome matters were cleared away and the topic of trysts subtly reintroduced. But he must apply his thoughts to the plaguesome matters at hand if ever they were to be cleared away, and not waste time with roseate visions of leading his Sara up the garden path.

“The surest way to attract a young lady’s interest,” he offered generously to his puzzled friend, “is to display interest in another young lady. They no sooner see they can’t have something that they want it, you know.” It occurred to Jevon that this good advice might work with his Sara, and he fell silent as he contemplated how best to rouse jealousy in the breast of a lady long acquainted with his progress amid ladybirds of every imaginable description and degree.