Maggie MacKeever (8 page)

Certainly the duke was clever; Lily could grasp only half of what he said. Since Lily was accustomed to grasping only half of anything that was said to her, she was not disturbed.
“Is
reform necessary, sir?”

“Lord, yes!” replied Gervaise, highly diverted by the look of dogged concentration on his companion’s lovely face. “There are two hundred and twenty capital offenses on the statute books.”

“Then why is the government so against it?” inquired Lily, admirably demonstrating that ladies who aren’t needle-witted can occasionally thrust to the heart of a matter with praiseworthy directness.

It was not only to the heart of the matter to which Lily had thrust, though she was unaware: the duke was finding himself very much in charity with this unusual young lady, who seemed to have no other view but that of gleaning a laborious insight into political affairs. “Because the parliamentary reform demanded by the radicals—annual parliaments, universal suffrage—would greatly threaten Tory supremacy. The government is all atwitter, due to the Hampden clubs that Chalmers mentioned, the purpose of which is to demand, most stridently, precisely those measures. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on one’s viewpoint—the violence of the radicals alienates many who might otherwise support them. The horror of the French Revolution remains painfully clear in many minds.”

“Oh.” Lily had only the haziest notion of what the French Revolution had entailed; something to do with heads in baskets, she believed. “What do
you
think, sir?”

The Duke of Kingscote’s thoughts at that moment were not such as he would confide to his companion, being too comfortable in his bachelor status to announce a suspicion that he’d been stricken by Cupid’s dart, and furthermore being determined to immediately wrest that missile from his chest. Puzzled by his silence, Lily blinked at him. The duke decided to let his wound fester a trifle longer. “I?” He shrugged. “Many of the Hampden clubs entertain highly unpleasant designs of seizing the property of the leading individuals in their communities. Since I am the leading property holder in a great many communities, I can hardly wish them joy of it.”

“Naturally not! I perfectly see that.” Lily sighed. “It must be very nice to be wealthy, I have always thought—my own family hasn’t a feather to fly with, you see.” She looked guilty. “Oh, drat! Rosemary would be very angry if she knew I’d told!”

“Do not distress yourself. Miss Millikin!” The duke’s voice, due to a strong inclination toward mirth, was strained. “Lady Chalmers will never hear of your blunder from
my
lips. Tell me, is it at you that those four young puppies are gaping? I cannot imagine that their attention is for myself.”

Lily glanced over her shoulder, encountered the combined soulful glances of Messrs. Meadowcraft and Gildensleeve, Steptoe and Pettijohn, and giggled. “Pay them no heed, Your Grace;
I
do not! Oh!  Pray do not think me ungrateful, for naturally I must count myself honored that they have chosen to admire me, and I do!”

Gervaise suffered a pang of disappointment that Miss Millikin should utter so ordinary a comment, then took himself to task for expecting that she should be the exception to his maxim that young ladies were invariably humdrum. “I’m sure,” he offered politely, “it is not surprising that the young gentlemen should admire you.”

“Oh, no,” Lily replied simply. “They always do. It is because I am a nonpareil, I suppose. At all events, it doesn’t signify, because I must have a peer—a
wealthy
peer, because as I have told you, our pockets are to let.” Again, she frowned. “Although I have not yet decided exactly how I am to accomplish it, the only peers I have thus far encountered being either married or stricken in years.”

The duke, who as a bachelor must number among the aforementioned afflicted, could no longer restrain his mirth. He chuckled. Lily regarded him quizzically.

“What have I said—oh, dear! I did not mean to infer that you are stricken in years, sir! It would have been odiously impertinent! Although you’re hardly in your salad days—but I daresay any number of ladies wouldn’t mind!
”

“Due to my vast fortune, I conjecture?” Gervaise could not recall, despite his great experience with the game of hearts, having been so thoroughly entertained in many years. “You relieve me!”

“Poppycock,” Lily said gloomily. “I make no doubt I’ve sunk myself quite below reproach. Again!”

This sad little admission had a strange effect on His Grace—strange, that is, in that he had never before experienced a sensation in his breast as if elegant little fingers had plucked at his heart-strings—a sensation that afflicted all of Lily’s
beaux
at some point in time. She was a lovely pea-goose, the duke sternly admonished himself; she had admitted herself to be on the hang-out for a fortune; she was young enough to be his child. But her lovely mouth was trembling, and she looked so damned bereft...

Gervaise regained sufficient poise to make an elegant leg and extend an arm. “You grievously wounded me, Miss Millikin; there’s nothing for it but that you must atone. Perhaps if you will accompany me on a stroll around the room, I might recover my spirits. We will proceed at a gentle pace, due to my decrepitude.”

“You are in a very teasing mood, I think, because you must know you’re not
that
old.” Incapable of resisting flirtation with any gentleman who came in her way, Lily placed her fingertips on the duke’s arm and smiled up at him. “We are having a comfortable prose together, sir, are we not?”

Gervaise returned that smile, ruefully. How the world would laugh to know that England’s most elusive, most determined bachelor had been dealt a fatal blow by a beautiful pea-goose.

Chapter Seven

Morning had come. The watchmen who every half-hour throughout the night had informed the populace of the condition of the weather and the streets had been replaced by the dustman with bells and chant, the porter-house boy in search of the pewter pots which had been sent out with supper the previous evening, the milkman; the clatter of the night coaches had given way to morning carts. Chimney-sweeps with their brushes, crossing-boys with their brooms, emerged sleepy-eyed from their hovels; hawkers appeared with their wares, which ranged from hot buns to old clothes. Soon the air would be sweet with diverse horns and bells, the clatter of horses’ hooves and wagon wheels on the cobblestones, the cries of broadsheet vendors, ballad-singers, lavender girls and muffin-men.

Of this restless panorama, the inhabitants of Chalmers House were mostly unaware. Rosemary lay still abed, reluctant to arise and embark upon a day that would doubtless present her yet further problems; Fennel too remained secluded, dreaming of rosy cheeks and cherry lips; Lily, who had arisen, studied her attitudes in her looking-glass. Lily had decided that Lord Kingscote was the perfect candidate for the hand of her sister Angelica. Now it remained only to subtly intimate to the interested parties that they were excellently matched, and then to determine how best to kindle Lord Chalmers’s ardor for Rosemary. Meanwhile, Lord Chalmers breakfasted in solitary splendor, as was his habit; and Angelica—well, Angelica was not there.

Haze had settled on the city, a combination of fen-fog and smutty chimney-smoke, the sickly stench of rotting drains and horse dung. Angelica inhaled the polluted air, happily enough. From the overheated and strained atmosphere of Chalmers House, she had been glad to escape.

Angelica’s various responsibilities were weighing on her heavily. She had hoped to receive word from her elder brother, Valerian, before now; she had hoped Valerian would evolve a means by which Rosemary might be extricated entirely from her difficulties. Angelica could only conclude that so trivial a matter as Rosemary’s imminent disgrace had slipped Valerian’s mind.

At least, with Angelica’s earnings from Sir Randall, Rosemary’s creditors could be held temporarily at bay. Typically, Rosemary had not asked how Angelica had come by those funds, had accepted the money and Angelica’s stern admonition to spend it wisely, with a very poor grace. Angelica sighed, and in her abstraction only narrowly escaped collision with a brewer’s dray drawn by draught-horses as large as Sir Randall’s buffalo. Perhaps she should not have scolded Rosemary, but it was difficult to think of her sister as a woman grown, especially since she did not conduct herself as befit an adult. Still, there was some excuse for Rosemary’s sulkiness. Why did a man so wealthy as Chalmers keep his wife short of funds?

There was no ready answer, and Angelica pushed the question aside. She wondered if Sir Randall would be able to keep this proposed rendezvous, or if his plans would be thwarted by the mysterious Durward. Ample ground for speculation existed in that strange household. Angelica was no closer to enlightenment regarding her employer than she had been on their first meeting, more than a week past. The butler Williams was patently devoted to his employer and by extension to Angelica, whom he seemed to regard as an ace in his employer’s sleeve, cause for even further mystification; while the loyalties of Sir Randall’s valet patently lay elsewhere. But to whom? On whose behest did Durward poke and pry? And why? The valet had an uncanny knack of being precisely where one wished he was not. Angelica would not have been surprised to learn that even then he trailed her down the street. Unable to resist a glance over her shoulder, she saw only apprentices removing shutters from bow-fronted windows, and scarlet-coated porters, and urchins leap-frogging over posts.

Angelica was aware that it was extremely reprehensible in her to lend her efforts to this morning’s enterprise—which had been at its inception explained by Williams as an effort to show them as wished he wasn’t that Sir Randall was still master in his own house—but she had been only too eager to grasp at an excuse to absent herself from breakfast with her sisters. Since Lily tended to wax enthusiastic about romance, and Rosemary the opposite, and it fell upon Angelica to maintain the uneasy peace, breakfast was traditionally the most uncomfortable of meals. Too, Angelica had grown very fond of her employer during the scant duration of their association. She was pleased to lend her efforts to Williams’s scheme to thwart Durward, even though she suspected the butler’s efforts were prompted by a desire to put the valet’s long and twitching nose sorely out of joint.

Sir Randall was waiting, precisely as planned, bundled up as on their first encounter, with his disreputable hat pulled down over his ears. He espied Angelica and grinned. “Success, my dear!” he said mischievously. “What shall we do with our freedom?”

“I don’t suppose,” replied Angelica, as she returned his smile and took his arm, “that you’d care to discuss your memoirs?”

“No, I would not—and I must tell you that I find it very tedious of you to be forever nattering on about the same thing! Do you think I hide some great secret in my past? I assure you I do not. Now, shall we proceed? I have in mind a particular destination, and one that I fancy may interest you.”

Angelica had become very fond of Sir Randall and very familiar with his household, including the menagerie, but on the memoirs that were allegedly the reason for her employment she hadn’t done a stitch of work. Consequently, she felt very guilty. She explained this, as Sir Randall conducted her through streets filled with peddlers and pedestrians and carts.

“Balderdash!” responded Sir Randall, with a reproving glance. “Take heed, my dear, lest you turn into a shrew. ‘Tis too fine a morning to be thinking about those dratted memoirs— and moreover, what I pay you for is the pleasure of your company.” And then he embarked upon a most interesting dissertation on the temperature and weight loss of hibernating hedgehogs.

It was, in Angelica’s opinion, anything but a fine morning; the air was thick and damp and odoriferous; but she resigned herself to yet another several hours being frittered away. Angelica was not accustomed to leisure, her days having been crammed with the problems of her siblings for the past many years; and she was not comfortable with unproductive idleness. Yet, as Sir Randall had pointed out, the time he purchased of her was his to do with as he pleased. And if he chose to amuse her, Angelica needs must bear it with good grace.

So thinking, she returned her attention to her companion, who was in a distinctly garrulous mood, and who had progressed from the topic of hedgehogs to animal life in general and the classification thereof, in line with which he stated modestly that he could identify the genus and species of any animal existent given but a single small bone. From bones he moved on to nerves, and the two types thereof, motor and sensory, as expostulated by his great friend, Sir Charles Bell. “A dedicated man and a great surgeon,” Sir Randall concluded. “After the battle of Waterloo, Charles went to Brussels and offered his services to the English army. He operated an entire week almost without rest. If only these old hands of mine—but you are not paying attention, Miss Smith! What can you find of more interest than what I am telling you?”

Since Angelica could hardly confide to Sir Randall that she had been speculating upon whether he did or did not have windmills in his head, she sought a more innocuous response. “I beg your pardon! I had a letter from my stepmother by the last post and it has made me apprehensive, but I must not worry you about my concerns. Do continue! I promise that I will refrain from further wool-gathering.”

“Piffle!” Sir Randall said genially. “I hope you have not received bad news?”

Angelica refrained from an uncharitable remark that any news proffered by her stepmother was ill. “Not precisely. Marigold writes that they are all merry as crickets—which, since my stepmother’s ideas do not at all accord with my own, I find positively ominous.” She glanced wryly at Sir Randall, who was looking very thoughtful. In a rush of confidence, she added: “Do you know, sometimes I am tempted to toss my bonnet over the windmill and consign them all to—to blazes! Not that I should ever really
do
it, but the notion grows more tempting each day!”

At this bad-tempered comment, Sir Randall evinced no dismay. “Tell me about this family.”