Maggie MacKeever (5 page)

What Gothic ruins and Chinese temples had to do with the expense of maintaining estates, Sir Malcolm was not certain; in search of enlightenment, he turned to his lordship’s wife. Enlightenment, however, was in short supply that day. Thea had remembered that, in lieu of offspring, Malcolm stood to inherit. No wonder he was interested in Vivien’s estates—too interested, she thought.

Deftly, Thea changed the subject. “You will be anxious to take up the threads of your old acquaintances,” she announced. “To put in appearances at White’s and Tattersall’s and Gentleman Jackson’s. Then there are the opera, Covent Garden, and Almack’s to visit!” She smiled. “It has been a long time since I engaged in such a round of frivolity. I have been looking forward to your return. Cousin, ever since you first wrote us of your decision.”

Sir Malcolm was appalled to learn of the plans made by Lady Davenham on his behalf, few of which appealed; Sir Malcolm had intended to comport himself in a fashion much less decorous and restrained. “You will stay here with us, naturally,” continued Thea, interpreting her cousin’s silence as consent. Rather shyly, she touched his sleeve. “Forgive me if I seem impertinent, but do you . . . have you . . . that is, are you heartwhole?”

Heartwhole? What sort of question was that for a lady to ask of a gentleman? Sir Malcolm opened his mouth to deliver a sharp rake-down. Then he realized that Thea would not ask such a question without good cause. Yet what cause could exist for such a query? He could think of only one. “Upon my word!” he said.

Happily unaware that her cousin had decided she still cherished a
tendre
for him. Lady Davenham continued: “I am happy to hear that! Oh, Malcolm, we shall have such fun!”

Fun? Perhaps Thea was more adventurously inclined than Malcolm had thought. But Thea had a husband, he reminded himself, and though Vivien might be elusive and vague, he was not negligible. “I am afraid we shall not, my Thea,” Malcolm prudently said.

“You will wish to make your own plans, I credit.” Thea sought to mask her disappointment. “I should have known you would. It is my own fault for being presumptuous.”

No small part of Sir Malcolm’s charm derived from his dislike of causing a lady distress, and as his cousin was his favorite among all the ladies by whose friendship he had been blessed, he performed an abrupt
volte-face,
and nobly fibbed. “You misunderstand. I meant I could not oblige you in your desire to go to Almack’s. I have not the
entrée.”

“Oh, if that’s all!” Lady Davenham was startled by the quick revival of her spirits. “I daresay it would have been very dull, at any rate. It
is
good to have you with us again, Malcolm. Vivien would tell you so himself, were he not preoccupied with Gothic ruins.” Satirically, she eyed her spouse.

“Not
you, my dear!” said his lordship, thus addressed, rousing in turn Nimrod, who snarled at this disrespectful treatment of his ancient and arthritic bones. Lord Davenham bent to scratch the hound’s drooping ears. “I thought I told you that.”

Lady Davenham regarded her spouse with no small degree of exasperation. Theirs had been an arranged marriage; she had known what to expect—but sometimes Thea wished she might spark some reaction other than the somewhat absentminded affection Vivien doled out impartially between her and Nimrod. “I was explaining to Malcolm that he is welcome to take up residence in Davenant House until more permanent arrangements can be made.”

More permanent arrangements? silently queried Malcolm, disliking the implications that he would remain in London for so long. “An excellent notion!” applauded his lordship. “Then Malcolm may view the garden firsthand.” Sir Malcolm at this pointconceded defeat, and, on the pretext of fetching his valet and luggage, left his cousin’s house.

Lady Davenham continued to regard her spouse, with less exasperation now than puzzlement. She recalled her conviction that Vivien was less than enthusiastic about Malcolm’s return. It seemed she’d been correct. Or perhaps she’d imagined the sardonic gleam in her husband’s eye.

Definitely, she had
not
imagined that gleam; it was still there. Lady Davenham felt curiously compelled to defend herself. “Malcolm will settle on an eligible female; I will see to that. Vivien, you must perceive that he will be the darling of the
ton.”

As befit the eldest of a family of adventurers, Lord Davenham’s perceptions, on the rare occasions when brought to focus on the here-and-now, were marvelously acute. “I do not imagine,” he gently remarked, “that it will be the
beau monde
our cousin wishes to embrace. But that’s no bread-and-butter of mine. You must do with Malcolm as you wish.”

“Thank you!” responded Thea, further nettled by this display of husbandly indifference. “I shall.”

Upon hearing his wife’s acerbic tone. Lord Davenham displayed surprise. “Did I sound uncaring, my dear? I did not mean to. I
meant
that I wish you would do whatever makes you happiest.”

Dare she tell him what at this moment would make her happiest? Lady Davenham had sorely suffered her husband’s neglect of late. Thea rose from the sofa, shyly approached her spouse, who had once more assumed his daydreaming attitude. “Absentminded Vivien!” she murmured. “Sometimes I am tempted to
throttle
you, you wretch!”

Lord Davenham was not so sunk in air-dreams that he failed to note that his wife stood very close, wore a rueful blush. Could it be that she—? But no. He had already made that mistake once. It Thea was looking unusually desirable, it was as result of Malcolm’s teasing compliments.

“Throttle?” echoed his lordship vaguely. “Oh no, my dear! It is much better to
squash
the little wretches, by break of day, or after a rain, when they come out of the earth to feed. It is good of you to bend your mind to the task—doubtless you are aware I have had to rise before daybreak to deal with the problem—but I don’t think it is
possible
to throttle a snail.”

So simply was his lordship’s absence from the ancestral four-post bedstead, during one of the several hours when her ladyship would have preferred to have him present, explained. Her ladyship’s lips moved. “Did you say something, my dear?” inquired his lordship, whose hearing—when he so chose—was remarkably acute.

But her ladyship could not air sentiments less befitting to a Duchess than a guttersnipe. “I have become accustomed to your vagueness,” she responded. “Sometimes it amazes me to realize how little I know of what you really think.”

To this far-from-subtle suggestion that he might bare his soul, Lord Davenham responded with a quizzical expression. “Feeling hipped, my dear?” he solicitously inquired. “Never mind! Tomorrow you shall help me mix white hellbore and the root of palma christi, barley meal and egg and milk into a paste with which we will rout the moles. Did you protest? You must not! White hellbore, etcetera, is a great deal more humane than thrusting a wooden stake into the creature’s barrow, and then assaulting the moving earth with a spade, as my gardener is prone to do—yes, and a great deal less demeritorius to the garden, also! Do you not agree?”

There was no rejoinder. Lest she succumb to the impulse to deal with her husband as the gardener dealt with moles, Lady Davenham had fled.

Chapter Five

While Mistress Melly Bagshot schemed to remove herself from yet another pickle, and Lord and Lady Davenham with the assistance of their cousin Malcolm teetered on the brink of one, the Chief Magistrate of Bow Street Public Office was confronted with difficulties of his own. With these difficulties he was acquainting one of his Runners, a dapper little individual whose balding pate was embellished by a scant fringe of black hair, and whose stout figure was enlivened by a carmine satin waistcoat embroidered with gold butterflies.

“Blood-and-Thunder!” he echoed, upon the cessation of the Chief Magistrate’s confidences. “Aye, guv’nor, that’s bad news. I thought we’d heard the end of that rascal all those years ago when he sloped off.”

Sir John gazed from beneath his heavy brows at the bare and malodorous chamber which had served as his office for so long, then down at the scarred desk where he sat. “If he
did
slope off. There was speculation at the time that our cracksman was some neck-or-nothing young blood of the Fancy in whom the gull-gropers had got their talons fast, who’d resorted to burglary to relieve his pecuniary embarrassments. I'm sure I don’t know. But you almost caught up with our nimble-footed cracksman. When I caught wind of this rumor that Blood-and-Thunder has returned to England, I thought I should solicit your opinion, Crump.”

The Runner filled his pipe in a leisurely manner. He was not unaware of the irony in his superior’s tone. Crump had not shown to good advantage in the case of Blood-and-Thunder, as evidenced by the villain’s escape.

“Lord love you, guv’nor,” he said genially, as he concluded the complicated ritual which resulted in the lighting of his pungent pipe. “You must have your little joke! Even if it’s true that Blood-and-Thunder has come home—and I misdoubt that very much, because there was no flies on that lad!—what could Itell you after so long? There was a most rigid and searching inquiry conducted at the time.”

The Chief Magistrate reached into a drawer of his battered desk and withdrew a sheaf of papers. “So there was—conducted by yourself. It was you who named him Blood-and-Thunder, I believe as result of his alleged fondness for that filthy drink.” Without overt enthusiasm, he contemplated the Runner, with whom he was seldom in charity. This was not one of those rare occasions. “Sometimes I take leave to wonder if it was not your fondness for that same drink that resulted in the investigation heading up the garden path—as result of which the Home Secretary had some
v
ery pungent remarks to make about the efficiency of Bow Street, as you may well recall.”

“Aye, guv’nor.” Crump himself would have greatly benefited from a sampling of Blood-and-Thunder at this moment, or perhaps the combination of warm porter and moist sugar, gin and nutmeg, that was known as a dog’s nose. Unhappily, he gazed through the dirty window at a nearby tavern, where, following intervals such as these, a cove’s spirits might be revived. Not that Sir John, though by nature testy, was usually as grumpy as a bear with a sore paw. It was all the result of that accursed Parliamentary investigation-the previous year, when the Select Committee had delved deeply into the goings-on at Bow Street and various other public offices, and certain scandals had been brought disastrously to light. Ever since, a great many people of importance had taken a lively interest in matters that didn’t concern them in the least. What was the world coming to? wondered Crump. The Committee had even abolished the watchmen’s boxes in the wards, so convenient for a little doze, and so tempting to bosky young bucks who delighted in the long-established tradition of boxing the watch.

“Have you suddenly been struck dumb?” Sir John's grumpiness had not been soothed by observance of Crump standing at his window and staring like a moon-calf at the tavern across the street. “I asked for your conclusions. Can it be that you have none?”

“Aye.” Crump spoke around the stem of his pipe. “I have some.” However, it would hardly be diplomatic to accuse his superior of being in a right rare tweak, and little more so to accuse his superior of subscribing to tempests in teapots. “This is a queer business.”

Sir John slammed shut his desk drawer. “Is that all you can say? That it is queer? I will go further: it is deuced queer, Crump! And lacking the rascal’s description, I can hardly cause it to be inserted in the
Bow Street Hue and Cry and Police Gazette.
I have arranged for details of various of the stolen items to be circulated again, but I doubt any of them will surface after so long—especially if he’s been living abroad.”

Ruminatively, Crump chewed on his pipe stem. “ ‘Twas my opinion at the time, guv’nor, that our Blood-and-Thunder wasn’t a swell.”

“You don’t relieve me!” snapped Sir John. “If it is your conclusion that he wasn’t, Crump, then probably he
was—
or is! Devil take it, can’t you recall anything that may be of use?”

The Runner’s bright blue gaze was less genial than usual. Carefully, he removed his pipe from his mouth. “If I could recall anything of that nature, guv’nor,” he responded stiffly, “I’m sure I would
say.”

No mollifying words were immediately forthcoming. Sir John rubbed his weary brow. Not for the first time, Crump toyed with the notion of devoting himself wholly to private inquiry work. As a Runner he was permitted to undertake commissions for anyone who could afford the fee; as a private detective he could devote all his time to such commissions, without being distracted by the poorly paid duties of a Runner, and without being subject to a Chief Magistrate.

Sir John dropped his hands to the scarred desktop. “I received a visit this morning, from a group of women reformers led by the Quakeress Elizabeth Fry. What they wanted I am not certain, nor why they brought their business to me. As near as I could gather, they think Bible-reading in the prisons will put an end to vice. No sooner did I persuade the ladies that I could not help them than I was alerted that the Regent has received a snuffbox set with diamonds, in which were written pertinent verses from Ezekiel about wicked princes whose days have come. The Regent trusts that Bow Street will ensure that his days have
not.
Then I heard this rumor about Blood-and-Thunder. What I am trying to say is that I do want your opinion, Crump.” Only silence greeted this admission. “Oh, very well! I will concede that you are not
ordinarily cow-handed.”

Crump recalled his most recent private commission, which had been to prohibit anything being stolen from the premises of a gentleman during a fancy dress ball. He had done his job very well; the gentleman’s home had been kept safe from the degradations of pickpockets and thieves—but during the festivities the gentleman’s wife had seen fit to elope with her dancing master, a development for which the gentleman had seen fit to blame Crump, and to accuse him of negligence, and to consequently withhold his reward.