Maggie MacKeever (5 page)

Rosemary cheered, slightly. “I don’t know how she means to go about it. Chalmers is the greatest beast in nature, and he won’t thank me for making him look a fool.”

Lily’s frown deepened. True, that one of the warmest men in England kept his wife without a feather to fly with argued a great insensibility, but that minor flaw would not weigh with the unfrivolous Angelica, for whom Lord Chalmers was earmarked. Still, there had been something in Rosemary’s tone—”Rosemary! Do you
care
for him?”

“Care!” Rosemary extracted a dainty handkerchief from her reticule. “Of course I care! It is quite midsummer moon with me—not that it signifies, because Chalmers has shown himself determined to hold me at arm’s length. It is not fashionable, my dear, to dote on one’s spouse! So you see Chalmers would hold me in even greater disgust if he knew my affections have become fixed on him to an alarming degree.” She applied the handkerchief to her reddened nose. “But this will never do! Take my advice, Lily: don’t settle in matrimony with a man who’s rich as Croesus because all he’ll ever do is
pinch
at you!”

Lily could conceive of no gentleman so unperceptive as to pinch at her; gentlemen were, in her experience, more likely to be stricken with admiration at her more daring endeavors, or, if not precisely admiration, a strong protectiveness. That she did not point this out to her stricken sister, nor express the viewpoint that Rosemary’s continual lamentations on the topics of her unfeeling husband and her unhappy circumstances were very dull work, were further proofs of Lily’s good heart.

“There, there!” she soothed. “You are going on in a very bad way. Perchance if you were to intimate to Chalmers— No, a high stickler like Lord Chalmers would probably think you too
coming.”

“He would likely,” mourned Rosemary, into her handkerchief, “bid me go to the devil. Chalmers has a very strong sense of propriety.”

Because Rosemary’s woeful face was buried in her handkerchief, to the fascination of the shopkeeper who hovered just out of earshot, she did not see the quizzical expression on her sister’s piquant features. In Lily’s experience, gentlemen gifted with declarations of affection by dazzling ladies were not prone to think much of propriety. Husbands and wives, it seemed, behaved differently.

Belatedly, Rosemary recalled her consequence and her position and her dignity. “It is the way of the world, my dear!” she announced, briskly stuffing the soggy handkerchief back into her reticule. “When the gentlemen come courting, they’re all posies and pretty words—but it is a very different thing once the knot is tied! Do you know the last present Chalmers made me? A book called
Take Your Choice,
by Major John Cartright, the most powerful piece of propaganda, Chalmers tells me, for radical reform. What’s worse, he insisted that I read it, as if I cared for such things! And all so I may understand the danger of the Hampden clubs that have sprung up everywhere, due largely to Major Cartright’s efforts, clamoring incessantly for parliamentary reform and universal suffrage and other such tedious stuff. But why should I afflict
you
with it? Come, my dear, let us rejoin the gentlemen.”

In point of fact, only one gentleman remained, the devotion of Messrs. Gildensleeve and Meadowcraft, Steptoe and Pettijohn having proved inadequate to the rigors of standing for a very long time on a damp and foggy street comer. Fennel, made of sterner stuff, accustomed to the dilatory behavior of females confronted with shops and equally aware of the peals that would be rung over him if he abandoned his sisters, still waited patiently. “Your
beaux
all pleaded prior engagements,” said he to Lily, when the ladies reappeared. “Dashed if they ain’t dull sticks! Hope you mean to look higher, puss, because I don’t scruple to tell you that if
I
had to live with any one of them I’d probably be driven to throttle him!”

“Oh, no!” Lily responded absently. “I must have a peer.” And then she lapsed into a profound abstraction from which she could not be roused even by mention of Princess Charlotte’s impending marriage to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Accustomed to such fits, her siblings ignored her silence.

Lily’s plans had, in the past several moments, received a severe set-back. Well enough to decide that Chalmers should divorce Rosemary and marry Angelica, if Rosemary’s affections were not engaged; but scheming to set at naught the marriage of a sister who was madly enraptured of her spouse was an altogether different thing. Therefore, that course of action must be abandoned, and another potential husband found for Angelica, while Rosemary must somehow be reconciled with her spouse. Yet where was to be unearthed a gentleman of sufficient seriousness and cleverness to suit Angelica? Lily could think of no such paragon offhand. And how was Lord Chalmers’s ardor to be kindled when he was by all accounts a curst cold fish, and additionally apt to discover at any moment that the wife whom he held in such scant affection had been sconcing the reckoning? Lily had set herself a harsh task indeed.

She did not despair, nor reflect that such arduous endeavor must seriously interfere in her own pursuit of a peer. She would think of something, surely?

At this point, Lily was interrupted in her ruminations by Rosemary, who urged her ungently into the Pantheon Bazaar. Of course Lily would think of something! She always did. Setting aside such arduous undertaking for the future, she gave herself up to the pleasure of rummaging amid ribbons and lace and fancy trimmings and other such delights.

It was while the sisters were comparing the relative virtues of very pretty English poplins at 4s 3d, and equally attractive Irish ditto at 6s, that disaster struck. Lily, hitherto unacquainted with nemesis in human form, dreamily gazed at the personification thereof, a middle-aged woman of haggard aspect, dressed most fashionably. Rosemary, all too well acquainted with this specter, gasped and blanched.

“Madame Eugénie!” she whispered, much less like a haughty baroness than a schoolgirl caught in mischief. “I would not have expected to encounter you here! I mean, it is a pleasure to see you, naturally! Indeed, I have intended to come in and speak with you about, er, a certain matter anytime this fortnight!”

“Vraiment?”
inquired Madame Eugénie, somewhat ironically. One of London’s most successful modistes, Madame Eugénie possessed a shrewd grasp not only of the vagaries of fashion, but of ladies who were potential candidates for that time-honored activity known as outrunning the constable. Lady Chalmers, thought the shrewd modiste, was as nervous as a cat on hot bricks. “The husband is not
sympathique
to milady’s little predicament?” she murmured slyly. “Perhaps milady did not put the matter to him in quite the proper way. Milord would not wish his lady to be dunned in the streets by her creditors,
n’est-ce pas?”

“Oh, no!” Rosemary’s lovely face turned even more ashen, and her expression, as she gazed anxiously about her, was terrified. “I have not yet had the opportunity to broach the matter to him, Madame Eugénie. He is so busy with matters of government that I am reluctant to take up his time with trivialities. Of course,” and she attempted to gather the tattered shreds of her dignity, “he will attend to it most promptly once I have bespoken it to him.”

“Voyons!”
Madame Eugénie spoke even more wryly. “Then I suggest you do so immediately,
ma petite.
If not, milady is likely to find herself in Queer Street—and milord would be a great deal less complacent about that, I think.”

“Do you dare
threaten
me?” gasped Rosemary.

“Threaten?” Madame opened wide her eyes. “Why should I threaten? It is milady who owes the monies; it is milady who does not pay her debts. Me, I am a simple working woman with my own debts to pay.
Chérie,
I am reasonable, I do not expect payment to be immediate.
Tout de même,
I am also practical, I cannot wait forever. In your case, milady, I have no more patience. I give you only until the end of this week.”

“And then?” inquired Lily with keen interest, while Rosemary trembled like an aspen in the wind. “You can’t draw blood from a stone, my good woman.”

“From a stone, no, but milord is rather warmer,
enfin.”
In Madame Eugénie’s eyes, as they rested on Rosemary, there was not the slightest hint of sympathy. “If milady does not wish milord to learn of her extravagance, she knows what she must do.”

“But
how’!”
moaned Rosemary. “It is well and good to speak of contriving, but I do not know what I may do. Pray reconsider, Madame Eugénie! Chalmers will be out-of-reason cross with me!”

The Frenchwoman shrugged and turned away.
“C’est la vie.”

Even as these horrid, if not entirely unexpected, developments took place within the Pantheon Bazaar, Mr. Fennel Millikin lounged in a Byronesque manner in Oxford Street. A shop window displaying colored prints had caught his attention, and he had moved closer to inspect them. Depictions of incidents of the recent European wars, most notably a Russian landscape strewn with frozen Frenchmen, caught his attention only briefly; of much more interest was a series of fiercely libelous, and very popular, prints concerning no less than Fennel’s hero. Byron and other gentlemen of fashion ogled actresses who stood in a group like so many sheep; Byron eloped with an actress, abandoning his wife; Byron dominated a promenade scene with a woman on each arm while a third woman, in a state of pregnancy bordering on the elephantine, confronted him angrily. Now there, thought Fennel with admiration, was a man who knew how to savor life to the utmost!                                      

It must here be stated that although Fennel wished to emulate his hero, his admiration was that of an inexperienced youth, and he had no desire whatsoever to emulate the poet’s much-discussed depravities. As was natural in any lad of his age and inexperience, Fennel was not without aspirations in the petticoat-line; but he knew very well that pretty opera-dancers were above his touch, their smiles and more intimate favors being reserved for gentlemen a great deal more plump in the pocket than himself. As for the rumors concerning Byron and his half-sister Augusta—well! The notion of a similarly bizarre relationship with his own half-sister convulsed Fennel with whoops.

Nor was he tempted to overindulge in brandy or laudanum, or to behave in such a manner as would cause every face to turn against him. Definitely, he didn’t wish to leave behind him a trail of broken hearts. What Fennel aspired to was a certain recognition by his peers, the sort of recognition attendant upon collecting about him such notably eccentric items as macaws and silver funerary urns from Greece, and drinking cups fashioned from human skulls. Too, he would have liked to set feminine hearts aflutter, preferably from afar. Fennel had too many sisters to remain in ignorance of the wearisome high-flights of young ladies of good birth.

A gay blade he would fashion himself, a sport and a bit of a rogue—but never beyond the line of being pleasing, because then Angelica would have his head for washing, perhaps even send him promptly back to his university. Having settled this important point, Fennel studied his reflection in the shop’s plate glass window.

A narrow cravat of white sarsenet with the shirt-collar falling over it, black coat and waistcoat embellished with seals and watchchain, broad white trousers—complete, Fennel decided, to a shade. But what the devil was taking his sisters so long? He had promised Angelica to keep an eye on them. Fennel turned away from his own image to stroll toward the entrance to the Pantheon Bazaar. Would a limp,
à
la
Byron, be a trifle overdone? After due reflection, Fennel decided that while a limp might add immeasurably to his aura of brooding mystery, it might be tediously difficult to sustain. Fennel was possessed of a certain dilatoriness of memory. As he reached this monumental decision, he collided head-on with a young lady in the fog.

“Oof!” said she, and tumbled right off her feet. Appalled, Fennel quickly knelt to assure himself that he’d inflicted upon his victim no fatal injury.

“Dashed if I saw you!” he protested. “It’s this accursed fog! I say, are you all right? Beg you’ll accept my apologies.”

“It’s nothing, truly! Do not concern yourself. If you might assist me to my feet—oh, thank you, sir.”

Fennel not only heaved the young lady upright, he restored to her the package that had upon their collision fallen into the street. Then he took a close look at the damsel.

She was not at all the sort of female to whom he was accustomed, being neither blue-eyed nor yellow-haired. She was not ravishing or dazzling or ethereal. Instead, her figure was plumply pretty, and the face turned up to him was dimpled, rosy-cheeked and cherry-lipped, adorned by twinkling brown eyes, surrounded by curly dark hair. “I say!” uttered Fennel. “You’re a deuced pretty puss. Guess I shouldn’t have said that, eh? Beg pardon, again!”

The young lady did not appear disturbed by such frank manners; she dimpled even more. “La, sir, I don’t know why you should apologize for coming the pretty, unless you was bamming me! And you weren’t, were you? I thought not! I can generally tell when someone’s offering me Spanish coin. But let me introduce myself! I am Phoebe Holloway.”

What would Byron have done, Fennel wondered, in a moment such as this? Alas, he did not know. But he recalled his sister Lily’s last, and most ill-fated, suitor and that individual’s predilection toward spouting poetry. Fennel was not averse to taking a great many pages from someone else’s book. Therefore he informed Miss Holloway that her teeth were like pearls, her eyes like stars, her complexion the finest porcelain—and, he’d wager, though he could not see them beneath her fetching bonnet, her ears like seashells.

Highly diverted by this flummery, Miss Holloway giggled and revealed yet another dimple, then suggested that since Mr. Millikin patently had nothing better to do with his time, he might proffer her escort. Fennel promptly professed himself eager to do her bidding. Highly pleased with one another, the pair set out, abandoning Fennel’s hapless sisters to the perils of the Pantheon Bazaar.