The Madcap Masquerade (19 page)

O
n the morning after the excursion to the little Roman Christian church,
Maeve woke to gray skies and the sound of rain pelting her window. A fitting ambience for the mood she was in, too exhausted from her restless night to rise from her bed. She was still staring aimlessly into the ruffled canopy above her when Lucy arrived half an hour later with a large pitcher of hot water and a cup of steaming chocolate.

“Good morning, Miss, and what have you planned for today, so’s I know what clothes to lay out for you?” The maid’s cheerfulness that grated on Maeve’s tender sensitivities like a fingernail on a slate.

Maeve hunkered deeper into the bedcovers. “Any old thing will do. I don’t plan to leave the house.”

“Aye, the weather’s that fearful now, isn’t it?” Lucy threw open the door of the armoire and started leafing through the gowns hanging inside. “But just in case his lordship should call, you’ll want to look your best.” She held up a yellow dimity gown with white ruffles at the neck and wrists. “How about this one? And if you don’t mind my saying so, Miss, a touch of Bloom of Ninon for your cheeks wouldn’t be amiss. You’re pale as a ghost this morning.”

Somehow Maeve found the energy to sit up and dangle her legs over the edge of the bed. “The dress is fine, the rouge is not necessary. If the earl should call, you’re to tell him I have a sick headache and cannot see him.”

“Oh, Miss, I’m so sorry you’re unwell. I’ll ask Mrs. Pinkert for one of those tisanes she makes up for the squire when he’s suffering from his sick headaches, so you’ll be up to snuff when his lordship arrives.”

Maeve glared at the nauseatingly cheerful maid. “Go away, Lucy,” she said more sharply than she intended. “I do not need a tisane and I do
not
want to see the earl . Furthermore, I am perfectly capable of dressing myself without your help.”

“Yes, Miss.” The young maid’s face crumpled and her full, pink lips trembled noticeably. “I was just trying to be helpful, Miss.”

Maeve sighed. “I know, Lucy, and I apologize for my rudeness. I’m in a foul mood this morning. I just need some time to myself to finish an important letter I’m writing.” She’d started the dreaded missive, as promised, the previous evening and gotten as far as
Dear Theo
.

With Lucy pacified and on her way to the kitchen for her breakfast, Maeve washed her face and hands, dressed herself in the gown the maid had chosen and started in on her letter.

For the balance of the morning, she sipped her chilling chocolate and labored over her letter to Theo—changing a word here, a sentence there—more often than not, scratching out more than she kept.

Recounting her monstrous lies and deceit was difficult enough; explaining her reasons for doing what she did was close to impossible. But finally, after a dozen tear-soaked handkerchiefs, a like number of discarded sheets of paper and nearly as many broken nibs, she was satisfied with what she’d written.

It was all there, every damning word of it, including the exact sum of money she’d persuaded the squire to pay her for her nefarious masquerade. Two things only were left out—her mother’s profession, which she couldn’t bring herself to mention, and her own profession, which she dare not make public.

All that remained was a decision as to if and how she should tell him that in spite of everything, she did truly love him. For more than an hour, she pondered the question of whether or not he would take comfort in such knowledge, and finally decided to end the letter without mentioning her feelings. After three pages of foolscap on which she’d detailed all the ways in which she’d lied and cheated and deceived him, she could scarcely expect him to believe her capable of any honest emotion.

Theo came to call on her, as she’d known he would, once the sun broke through the clouds—and Lucy turned him away, as directed. Heartsick, Maeve observed him from behind the drape as he cast a troubled glance toward her chamber balcony before riding off.

She watched him until the final moment when he disappeared from sight down the tree-lined drive, knowing it might well be the last time she ever saw him. One more memory to add to her painful collection, she reminded herself, dabbing at her teary eyes with a fresh handkerchief. After all the wonderful “firsts” she’d shared with Theo, such an ignominious “last” seemed particularly sad.

But if there was one thing of value she’d learned from Lily it was that grieving over what could never be was beyond futile.

She folded her letter into a neat square and slipped it into the drawer of the dressing table. She’d drop it at the vicarage tomorrow morning with instructions to Richard that he should deliver it to Theo once she was safely on the coach that would take her to London.

That accomplished, she marched down the stairs to settle her business with the squire while they shared the noonday meal. She fully expected the wily old fox to demand she stay until Meg returned, maybe even balk at paying her the money due her. She would have none of it; when push came to shove, she could be just as obstinate as he.

He was not in the dining room. Nor was Mrs. Pinkert, who had given up eating with her employer now that the staff had been enlarged. Maeve ignored the covered dishes laid out for her on the sideboard and hurried to the kitchen.

“Where is the squire?” she demanded.

Mrs. Pinkert looked up from her plate of food. “Where else but out with the hounds.”

“At this time of day? He never misses a meal unless…”

Maeve stared at the rotund housekeeper in horror. “Oh no! Don’t tell me he’s off on one of his—”

“The sickness is upon him,” Mrs. Pinkert interrupted her, waggling her eyebrows to remind Maeve the two maids sharing the meal with her were listening, wide-eyed, to everything they said.

“Sickness my eye!” Maeve was too angry to care who heard her. The squire knew very well tomorrow was her last day at Barrington Hall. He was hiding out in the kennels to avoid facing her. She clenched her fists in frustration. “If that old reprobate thinks he can bamboozle me, he has a surprise in store for him. I’m going out there.”

Mrs. Pinkert paused in the act of slicing her mutton, her eyes wide with shock. “I wouldn’t do that if I was you, Missy. He’s meaner’n a snake when he’s taken with the sickness.”

“I’m going after him,” Maeve repeated, heading for the door that opened on the kitchen garden and beyond it, the kennels.

“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. And mind you watch your head. He’s been known to throw things at times like this.”

Maeve circled the rows of Mrs. Pinkert’s carefully tended early vegetables, which were obviously thriving in rich, black soil damp from the morning rain, and opened the garden gate. Two kennel boys were sunning themselves side by side on a bench outside the half-timber building in which the squire kept his prize hounds. One of them had a bandage wrapped around his forehead. The door to the kennel stood open and two cinnamon colored hounds lay sprawled across the entrance, sound asleep.

“Is the squire in there?” Maeve asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” the boys answered in unison.

Maeve strode forward, determined to have it out with her father before he got too far into his cups.

The older of the two kennel boys jumped up and barred the door with his thin body. “Ye’d best not go in there, ma’am. He’s liable to wing ye wi’ a bottle or such. His temper be somethin’ fierce when the sickness is on ‘im. Why young Timmy here got a knock on the head not an hour ago as near laid ‘im out, just for tiptoeing in to see iffen the yellow bitch had whelped ‘er pups yet.”

“Well he’d better not try such a thing with me or I’ll raise a knot on
his
head he won’t soon forget.”

The kennel boy, who was a half a head taller than Maeve, smiled tentatively. “No disrespect, ma’am, but you’re kinda puny to be tacklin’ a fella the size of the squire.”

“Size isn’t everything.” Maeve pushed the boy aside and entered the kennel. Instantly, a powerful smell of dog assailed her nostrils, as well as another more pleasant smell of fresh straw emanating from the bales stacked just inside the door.

She blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dim light in the large windowless enclosure. From somewhere deep in the murky interior came the undeniable sound of snoring, but even when her vision cleared, she could see no sign of the squire.

What she could see was a pile of brownish colored fur in the middle of a large straw pallet. On closer inspection, it turned out to be six or eight sleeping hounds sprawled atop each other like a litter of newborn pups she’d once observed in the window of a used bookstore in London’s East End.

The loud, rhythmic snoring continued unabated. Led by the sound, she ventured farther into the kennel and promptly stumbled over a bucket of water sitting in the middle of the plank floor. The horrendous racket woke the hounds, and the three on the top of the pile lazily detached themselves and wandered over to sniff at Maeve’s skirt. She patted their sleek heads somewhat gingerly, but they seemed friendly enough.

As she watched, the remaining hounds shifted positions, revealing the source of the rhythmic snoring. At the bottom of the pile, flat on his back, with an empty brandy bottle clutched to his chest, lay the squire. Mrs. Pinkert hadn’t exaggerated; the disgusting man actually did sleep with his dogs.

Maeve stepped closer and kicked the sole of his boot. “Wake up, blast you, we have business to transact.”

The squire snored on, his eyes closed, his mouth slack, his bulbous nose red as a new-picked cherry.

Maeve kicked the other boot. Once, twice, three times. Not so much as an eyelid flickered, but now, after each snore, he emitted a sound reminiscent of a brisk wind whistling through a broken shutter.

Maeve was in no mood to wait patiently while her annoying parent slept off his waltz with John Barleycorn. She had just survived one of the most miserable mornings of her life. She’d painstakingly put every sin she’d committed to paper, wept until she had no tears left and watched the only man she would ever love ride away from her. Her nerves were as raw as open wounds, her temper as short as a burning fuse.

She looked about her for something suitable to crown the sleeping squire. There was nothing in sight…except the bucket on which she’d barked her shins. Without another thought, she picked it up and dumped the contents on his head.

He exploded from the tangle of hounds like an erupting volcano—sputtering, spitting, and turning the air around him blue with his cursing. With a violent push, he dislodged the dog draped across his stomach, wiped the water from his eyes and stared up at Maeve. “I might’ve known ‘twas ye,” he fumed. “Misbegotten spawn of yer hell-born mother.” He winged the brandy bottle at her. Maeve ducked and it shattered against the wall behind her.

“That was smart,” she said scathingly. “Now you can spend your spare time picking chips of glass out of bleeding paws.”

The squire ignored her comment. “What the devil are ye doing in me kennel? No female’s ever set foot in here before ye dared foul it with yer fishwife’s tongue.”

Maeve tossed her head. “I came to settle up my account with you. Tomorrow is the end of my promised fortnight. I’m leaving for London on the mail coach that stops at the village inn at noon, and I want the money due me.”

“The agreement was ye stay till yer sister returns.”

“The agreement was I attend the betrothal ball and stay one fortnight beyond, and I’ve a written contract to prove it.”

“And what am I supposed to tell folks—like say, the earl —when they asks where ye be?” The squire settled back on the straw pallet, a bulldog look on his face. “It won’t do, ye scrawny scarecrow, and I ain’t paying up, so best ye play the cards as was dealt ye. Don’t ask me why, but Lynley, poor fool, is besotted with ye, and it don’t matter a whit to me which of me daughters he marries.”

“As long as he gets one with child before she’s five and twenty so you don’t lose everything you own to the crown.”

“So ye knows about that, do ye. Thanks to that blabber-mouth, Emma Pinkert, no doubt. Well, don’t make no matter down the road. I’ll not pay ye so much as a brass farthing and that’s me final word so ye’d best feather yer nest where ye can, Missy.”

“What makes you think the earl would marry me once he knew how I’d deceived him?”

“What the cloth-head don’t know won’t hurt him.”

“But he will know. I’ve already written him a letter telling him the whole sordid story.”

“Ye done what?” The squire bolted upright, clutched his head, which was obviously paining him sorely, and stared at Maeve through narrowed, bloodshot eyes. “Why’d ye do a bird-witted thing like that, ye silly goose?”

“Because…” Maeve felt a traitorous sob rise in her throat. “Because Theo’s not the rake I thought him to be. He’s a kind, decent man who deserves to know the truth. Because…” She swallowed hard. “I love him with all my heart.” What did it matter if she admitted the truth to this evil old scoundrel. She would never see him again after today.

“Ye
love
him?” The squire’s tone of voice made a mockery of the word. “Then why, when ye had him practically slavering at your feet, would ye write him a letter bound to turn him against ye?”

Maeve felt the tears well behind her eyes. She willed herself to remain dry eyed. She would not—simply would not—let her heartless father see her cry. “I told you why. I love him. I couldn’t bear to live with him as his wife if I’d won him by trickery.”