Maggie MacKeever (2 page)

Alas, the girl was marvelously dull, nor was she improved by her drab ensemble, done up in an unbecoming shade of Egyptian brown. “We must hire a seamstress,” Sidoney continued. “There are bonnets and slippers to be purchased, gloves and reticules—you must not fret, my dear! Morgan will know exactly how we must go on.”

This blithe assurance recalled Miss Whateley to the present. Years of exposure to Lady Barbour had taught that damsel that her ladyship’s powers of discrimination were no keener than her intellect. “Morgan?” Callie echoed suspiciously.

Roused from visions of morning arid carriage and promenade dresses, frocks and robes and evening gowns, Lady Barbour blinked her huge blue eyes. “My dear! Didn’t I
say?”

Not only was Miss Whateley immune to her stepmama’s dimpled smile, her stepmama’s enactment of wounded innocence left her similarly unmoved. “No, you did not. I thought we were to visit your people. At Phyfe House, was it not?”

“You must not have been paying proper attention, and I’m sure it is no wonder, so busy have we been these past few days.” Lady Barbour toyed with her square shawl of India muslin, worn folded across. “Naturally we are going to Phyfe House. Morgan lives there.”

Explanations as rendered up by her skitterwitted stepmama made Miss Whateley wish to grind her teeth. “Morgan is the owner of the house? The what? Earl?”

“Oh no, my dear!” A more impartial observer, or a more elderly one, would have been guilt-stricken by Lady Barbour’s frown. “I mean, he
is
an earl, but I cannot perfectly recall. I
think
this one’s name is Charles, but it doesn’t signify in the least, because I’m sure he’s not in residence.”

“Not?”
Sometimes conversations with her stepmama grew so laborious that Miss Whateley simply conceded defeat. In this instance she could not afford to behave so cravenly. “Would you explain to me, please, why we’re traveling to a house whose owner is elsewhere?” she begged through clenched teeth.

Lady Barbour’s frown deepened as she wondered why her stepdaughter was grimacing in that horrid way. If the chit meant to go on in so abominable a manner, she’d end up on the shelf. “Charles—or whatever his name is—is almost never in residence at Phyfe House. It is kept open for the convenience of any member of the family who happens to be in town. Morgan is the only one of us who resides there year-round.”

Still Miss Whateley grimaced, for she was in firm possession of that virtue her stepmama most noticeably lacked: common sense. Before she could express an opinion of her stepmama’s latest start, the carriage jolted to a stop. Through the carriage window Callie saw a several-storied structure of rosy brick set behind ornately scrolled gates.

Chapter Two

Happily unaware that yet another member of the family was about to arrive on the doorstep of Phyfe House, Morgan proceeded about her usual business, which this day took her to Saint Bart’s. Established in 1123 by Rahere, court jester of Henry I, Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital was very adequately staffed with apothecary and steward, hospitaler and matron, nurses and an administrative clerk. Additionally, Saint Bart’s was favored twice a week by the voluntary services of Miss Phyfe, although the governors of the hospital were not at all certain how this circumstance had come about.

“Your mind would be unsettled also,” she said now, with a stern glance at the gentleman whom she assisted to fashion a splint. “Did you but apply it properly to that which is in front of your very nose! The House of Lords is made up of men wealthy in land and rents. The House of Commons is made up of men of property who aren’t peers. The franchise has been granted only to landowners. What of the common man, I ask?”

To this rhetorical question, Dr. Kilpatrick ventured no response, nor did the distinctly common individual to whose arm the physician and Miss Phyfe were ministering. Morgan was undismayed by this lack of proper public spirit. She would awaken England’s social conscience without assistance if need be. “You do not answer, because you cannot! At least you cannot without telling me such nonsense as that, without distinctions of rank and degree of order, society would collapse.”

“Erg!” interjected the grubby little man whose besplinted arm Miss Phyfe still absentmindedly held, and in whose behalf she was prepared to go such lengths. “And what about them Frogs, missie?
Or is it that you’re wantin’ to see the regent’s head atop a pike?”

With no small surprise, Miss Phyfe regarded her heckler; she was not accustomed to being interrupted in mid-tirade. He was an ugly little man about whom hovered an effluvium of unpleasantly ripe scents. Miss Phyfe did not flinch or raise a scented handkerchief to her nostrils, as might any other lady of her rank. Miss Phyfe was accustomed to overcoming her more delicate sensibilities, as befit a champion of the vulgar herd.

Champion though she might be of the rights of the rabble, however, Miss Phyfe was not without native prudence; she did not think her efforts would be advanced by a public admission of her secret opinion that the regent’s head might very nicely adorn a pike. “Balderdash!” she uttered, looking pensive. “Though I have every admiration for the principles underlying the revolution in France, I must concede that the revolutionaries allowed themselves to become a trifle carried away. All those severed heads! So wasteful! Some of them might well have been persuaded toward an appreciation of the republican viewpoint.”

“Erg!” commented the representative of the common folk once more as, cradling his injured arm and shaking his filthy head, he staggered out of the room. In the doorway he turned and very nicely thanked his ministering angel, then put forth a most ungrateful viewpoint that she’d got the wrong sow by the ear.

Miss Phyfe took no offense. She had learned to disregard the befuddlement displayed so often by her protégés, as she disregarded Dr. Kilpatrick’s obvious disinterest. “Britain must throw off the oppressions imposed by the aristocracy!” she belligerently announced. “As France freed herself from those of the ancient regime.”

Dr. Kilpatrick calmly tidied away the implements of his trade. “I hesitate to point out that you are a member of the very class that you seek to overthrow.”

“Not overthrow precisely!” Miss Phyfe frowned. “Merely to reform. Consider, Alister! Only the landed interest is properly represented by the government. There are such gross disparities between parliamentary representation and the distribution of the population that a small minority of the adult male population chooses the majority of the House of Commons. Surely even you must admit the need for reform.”

Despite this hopeful assumption, Dr. Kilpatrick would not so easily agree to any such thing. Privately though he might agree that reform was sorely needed in various departments of the government, he did not mean to lend his backing to Miss Phyfe’s campaign to see the whole system revised. “I think this is heavy work,” he said. “You’ll wear yourself to the bone if you keep on at this rate. Though I doubt you’ll pay the least heed to my advice, I prescribe that you should temper these weighty matters with a liberal spicing of frivolity.”

“Frivolity!” Miss Phyfe, who would not allow herself to be diverted from her solemn duties by anything so trivial as a physician’s advice, cast this particular physician a speaking glance. “You must know by now that I am not light-minded, Alister! You are in a funning mood, I think, or you would not suggest I fritter away my time. Not when—”

“—there are so many matters to set right with the world! Odious laws to be put aside and civil liberties restored!” supplied Dr. Kilpatrick. “Cut line, Morgan. If this is the way you choose to spend your time— writing pamphlets and making speeches and in general enacting a thorn in the side of the government—that is wholly your affair. I daresay you could find worse pursuits. But don’t delude yourself that your efforts will accomplish any real change.”

Miss Phyfe grimaced in annoyance, an expression that sat as endearingly upon her classically beautiful face as did the light of crusading zeal. Few people, however, recognized Morgan’s innate loveliness; most, confronted with her forcefully expressed opinions, thought only of escape. Nor did Morgan make any attempt to enhance attributes of which she was only vaguely aware.

In this particular moment, Miss Phyfe twitched her aristocratic nose and blinked her handsome brown eyes. But she did not rip up at Dr. Kilpatrick, as she would have done to anyone else who so maligned her good works. “And no!” the doctor added hastily, before she could speak. “It will accomplish you nothing to ask me again to lend my efforts to your seditious campaign.”

Shrewdly, Miss Phyfe regarded Dr. Kilpatrick, a homely man with sandy eyes and hair, aged approximately thirty years. Despite his continual refusals, she did not despair of bringing him around to her viewpoint. It was not as if there was any question but that her point of view was just. That constitutional reform was imperative could not be denied by any right-thinking man. Alister would come about. Meanwhile, she must hold her tongue.

For Miss Phyfe to thus refrain from airing her view was an achievement far more difficult than it may sound. Morgan was by nature forceful, and impatient of folk who knew not their own minds. Among the many criticisms leveled at Miss Phyfe—for the most part by her protégés—was no suggestion that she might be similarly unblessed. “Lilies of the field!” she suddenly announced.

The good doctor blinked his sandy eyes.
“Now
what the devil are you off about?”

“Lilies of the field. They sow not, nor shall they reap.” Denied one outlet for her indignation, Miss Phyfe would always contrive to still make herself heard. “Or something of that nature. That is the sort of person you would have me emulate, giving myself over to dissipation when factories are staffed by girls, and children are harnessed together and sent crawling on all fours to do the work of ponies in the coal pits. Moonshine! You would do much better to attend to your patients instead of hectoring me, Alister.”

These accusations were monstrously unfair. Dr. Kilpatrick had never in his life hectored anyone, including Miss Phyfe, and he had been dealing with his patients throughout this exchange, as Miss Phyfe knew perfectly well since she had been providing him assistance. As a member of the honorary medical staff of Saint Bart’s, Alister visited the hospital twice a week. On remaining days he contrived to busy himself with the lucrative private practice inherited from his father, and other pursuits befitting the dignity of a graduate from Cambridge and a member of the Royal College of Physicians. If not a particularly arduous schedule, it was one which excused him from agitating for reform.

His duties at Saint Bart’s dispatched—this was the day he saw a crowd of outpatients, new cases and any emergencies—Dr. Kilpatrick applied himself to escorting his protesting companion ruthlessly along the hospital corridors and out into Giltspur Street. Irritably, she wrenched out of his grasp, ruthlessly shoving escaping tendrils of rich chestnut hue back under her shabby bonnet. It was one of Miss Phyfe’s many inconsistencies that her mind should be excessively tidy and her appearance the opposite. Even on her better days Morgan’s lovely and eccentric person was unbuttoned or pinned together or none too steady at the seams, an inattention to detail as disarming as her enthusiasm for reform. This not being one of her better days, her slippers were mismatched.

“I have recently made the acquaintance of a Quakeress named Elizabeth Fry,” she said as they set out down Giltspur Street. “She seeks to organize a ladies’ prison visiting association. If she is successful, her first mission will be to Newgate, there to inquire into the physical needs of the female prisoners and to explore the possibility of educating them.” She paused, listening to the melancholy bell of Saint Sepulchre’s which tolled out the last hours of criminals condemned to death in the prison. Once, armored knights riding down this street from the jousting grounds at Cheapside had paused to make offerings at the church.

“Elizabeth is determined that there must be Bible reading,” she added, a trifle less enthusiastically. “I am not so certain it is a good idea. I have no objection to the Bible, mind! It is an excellent volume. But I am not convinced that the characters of Newgate’s female prisoners will be radically altered by exposure to it. Nor am I convinced that such unhappy creatures will be uplifted by Elizabeth’s philosophy, which is that every event
is divinely ordered, and that every human soul must face divine punishment.”

Heavy work! Dr. Kilpatrick thought again, but this time kept the opinion to himself. Many and varied were the specimens of humankind who came in a physician’s way.

All unknowing, Miss Phyfe proceeded to bear out her escort’s opinion. She gestured toward the Watch House that stood beside Saint Sepulchre’s, “We must be constantly on the alert against the increasingly ingenious devices of the body snatchers who serve your own profession, Alister. And look! A house of correction stands opposite! Yet you encourage me to engage in frivolity. I fail to understand how anyone can be frivolous when the world itself is so grim.”

Grim? Dr. Kilpatrick did not find it so. A student of human nature, he was far more interested in the animated street scene than in watchhouses and institutions of correction. Gazing curiously about, he allowed Morgan’s voice to wash over him, like waves on the seashore.

Milkmen and watercress sellers and muffin men were no part of the vista now; their places had been taken by sellers of hot eels and fried fish, pickled whelks and sheeps’ trotters, meat puddings and plum duff. Baskets and doormats were available for purchase, as was brickdust for the cleaning of knives, at one penny the quart. For twopence, a chair could be mended, or scissors ground and set. Ballad singers stood on street corners, carrying yards of songs, raising their voices in fierce competition with organ-grinders and Punch-and-Judy shows.

“Elizabeth is very naive in some aspects,” remarked Morgan, as they came to Harley Street. “She is very considerate of her servants and anxious for the salvation of their souls, but at the same time observes that the difference between their station and her own is divinely ordained. I vow I do not know how people can believe such nonsense!” The doctor being too prudent to put forth an opinion, she lapsed at last into silence.