Maggie MacKeever (15 page)

Here was progress! “What
did
he say?” Henrietta leaned forward, intent.

Jane did not feel qualified to answer that question, not knowing what answer would best suit her purposes—which, for the record, were not of pure intent. “I can’t tell you that, mum. It ain’t my place.”

“You may tell me at least if you made Marriot’s acquaintance during the last six months.” As did any good talebearer, Henrietta had it in her to be sly. “Yes? And I’ll wager you didn’t meet him in Cornwall. I thought not! Which means that Marriot was never
in
Cornwall! I knew it! I knew mischief was afoot.” The nature of that mischief still eluded her, however. She frowned. What could this nondescript female have to do with Marriot? Only one explanation presented itself. Henrietta’s scowl turned to a look of astonishment. What appeal would this pale creature have for a man married to Nell? For that matter, what appeal had Lord Parrington for Eleanor, and Marriot for Lady Amabel? Clearly there was no logic to matters of the heart. “Poor thing!” she said sympathetically. “You don’t
look
like— well!”

“That’s because I ain’t!” Jane had a strong sense of preservation, and an equally well-developed sense of expediency, and she instinctively understood which role would be most advantageously enacted. “I had me a nice little job in a shop—before himself led me astray. At home to a peg he was! Or so I thought—though I ain’t sure but what I’d’ve thought differently had I suspected how things would fall out!”

“How
did
things fall out?” Fascinated, Henrietta stared.

“Terrible!” Jane revealed none of the triumph she felt as result of the ease with which her quarry had risen to her bait. “I thought himself had stuck his spoon in the wall. Not that I ain’t glad to discover he hasn’t
—
I didn’t know who he was, you ken! Which just goes to show that a girl shouldn’t allow herself to be stood to a glass of flesh and blood by a well-breeched swell!”

So very excited was Henrietta rendered by these disclosures that she rose up off the chest. “You poor, poor thing!” she cried. “You discovered that the man who’d led you astray and then abandoned you—he
did
abandon you? I thought he must have!—was not only still alive, but had returned to his home. And so you followed him, in hope of—” Henrietta looked blank. “In hope of what?”

Jane’s aspirations were best kept private. Therefore she said nothing, but sat down on the chest. “You wished to see him again!” decided Henrietta, whose suspicious nature and passion for scandal did not preclude a perverse appreciation of romance. “To gaze upon the scoundrel who abandoned you—how sad! But you shouldn’t have come here. Marriot won’t thank you for it. No gentleman likes to see his dirty linen washed in public—I don’t mean to compare
you
to dirty linen, of course—but you did ask for Eleanor!”

“I’d’ve had to be a perfect block to ask for himself!” retorted Jane, who was as shrewd as she was nondescript, and unsentimental to boot.

“You said he stood you to a glass of flesh and blood.” Inspiration smote Henrietta. “Was he
foxed?”

Jane was not unaware of his lordship’s tendency toward eccentricity when under the influence of the grape. “Drunk as a wheelbarrow!” she confessed.

“Drunk as—” Henrietta was so moved by this admission that she leaned against a suit of armor for support. “You don’t say!”

Nor was Jane entirely unacquainted with Lord March’s errant memory, and from various recent statements had concluded very rightly that Marriot himself wasn’t certain about his recent activities. For several moments she’d been pondering whether this surprising development might be used to good advantage—or whether it was an example of her recent bad luck. “On the square!” she added solemnly. “Himself had been set upon by footpads when I came across him—aye, and he
would’ve
turned up his toes hadn’t I happened along just then. Proper grateful he was to me, too.”

“Oh!” Henrietta clutched the suit of armor tighter. “And then?”

Jane looked down at her shoes, which peeped out from beneath her shabby skirts. “Then I took him home, mum! He claimed he didn’t know who he was—proper knocked about on the head he’d been! At first I thought he was having me on, but then I twigged he wasn’t. The poor bloke couldn’t recall a thing afore he was set upon.”

Henrietta was very melancholy to think other cousin in such straits, and fascinated too. “Heavens!” she breathed.

“It was a right rare puzzle!” A covert glance through pale lashes assured Jane that she held her audience enthralled. Here was a flat! she thought. Were more of the nobs so gullible—but alas, they were not. “We rubbed on well enough, and then one day himself just disappeared. Very queer I thought it, the way he sloped off. Then I heard about this missing lordship who’d suddenly come home.”

“And you realized that you’d snatched a gentleman back from the jaws of death!” Greatly moved, Henrietta clasped her hands to her breast. “How touching! And how very inconsiderate of Marriot to have nothing more to do with you. Not that it would be proper if he did,”
she added, belatedly recalling Marriot’s wife. “Still, he must be grateful to you for saving his life.”

With this latter statement, Jane perfectly agreed. “The way I reckon it is that now he’s remembered who he is, he’s forgot
me.”

“How wonderful this is!” Henrietta was rendered almost sunny tempered by this astounding account of her cousin’s bizarre conduct and erratic memory. “You would have had no notion of who Marriot was, not being able to read the newspaper accounts—and I’m sure there is no good reason why you should have connected the events! Then you found yourself abandoned! Deserted, cast off! And
then
you discovered not only Marriot’s identity but his address. In hopes of seeing him again, you followed us home.” It occurred to Henrietta that there were several large gaps in this otherwise highly satisfying tale. “Why did you ask for Lady March?” she repeated.

“What’d be the point of asking for Lord March if himself has forgot me?” Wearying of the uncomfortable checkered chest, Jane removed herself from it and strolled to the far end of the hall, there to peer curiously at the screen of carved and wainscoted wood.

“True.” Henrietta followed quickly in the stranger’s wake. “You still haven’t explained what you seek with Eleanor. I don’t think Marriot will be pleased—remember you or no!—if you acquaint her with this tale.”

That Jane didn’t give a fig for Lord March’s pleasure, she was too sly to remark. “What’s a poor girl to do?” she lamented. “When she hasn’t a mag with which to bless herself? That’s a ha’penny to you, mum! No, and not enough of the Ready-and-Rhino to fetch some panis and cash—bread and cheese!”

“One moment, miss.” Henrietta’s suspicions reasserted themselves. “Have you come here because you are
impoverished?”

“Regularly under the hatches, mum! Rolled up!” Aware that her strategy had erred, Jane put on a servile face. “I thought her ladyship might put me in the way of some honest work.”

This response was not what Henrietta had expected. “Honest work?” she echoed, blankly.

“Why not honest work, mum?” Jane was indignant. “I ain’t ready for the other yet! The way I see it, someone owes me something for having saved himself from coming by his just deserts. I wouldn’t
be
without a feather to fly with if it wasn’t for that. I figured the worst her ladyship could do was send me to the right-about, so I decided to put it to the touch.”

“I see,” murmured Henrietta. In point of fact, Henrietta saw rather more than Jane suspected, including that she was being spun an exceedingly tall tale. The purposes for this deception, Henrietta could not fathom, being unaware that a great many people might have excellent reason for trying to get close to Lord March.

Jane stole another covert glance. Had she retrieved her earlier blunder, or further erred? In case sympathy for her plight had not yet been engendered, she gave vent to a great sigh. Henrietta’s attention thus attracted, Jane looked dejected. “It was a crackbrained notion. I shouldn’t have come here. But you can’t blame a girl for trying not to become Haymarket-ware!”

“Certainly not!” agreed Henrietta, although she was uncertain precisely what Haymarket-ware was. “What kind of honest work had you in mind?”

“Anything at all, mum.” Jane’s vagueness is easily explained by the circumstance that she had never done an honest day’s work in all her life. “I fancy I can do anything I set my mind to—I ain’t proud!”

Proud the creature might not be; Henrietta was willing to wager she lacked equal acquaintance with the truth. About what that truth might be, Henrietta grew very curious. That this vulgar female knew the details of Marriot’s mysterious disappearance, Henrietta no longer had any doubt. Yet how to worm those details out of her? “It might be possible,” said Henrietta, “to find you a temporary position in this very house.”

“In
this
house, mum?” Here was luck better than any for which Jane had a right to hope. Covetously, she peered around the hall. “Cor! This is something like! I ain’t never seen anything so fine.”

“I doubt it not.” Henrietta resolutely pushed aside her various reservations concerning the scheme. If anyone was to ferret out the truth of Marriot’s recent activities, it would have to be herself. Anathema, the thought that the truth might never be known. “You will have to remember your place, miss! I daresay it will not take Eleanor long to find you something suitable.”

Jane was sure of it. Were she in Lady March’s place, it would not have taken Jane two shakes of a lamb’s hindquarters to show herself the door. “Crikey! Herself must be a very fine lady, to bother with the likes of me. Maybe I could do something to repay her kindness. Look after her gowns, for instance. Or her jewels.”

Though Henrietta was demonstrably a pigeon for the plucking, she was not so very featherheaded as to grant a stranger access to Eleanor’s boudoir. “Lady March does not care for jewelry,” she said absently, thereby convincing Jane that her ladyship was queer in the cockloft. “And she already has an abigail. I must think what story we should tell.”

“Whatever you say, mum!” Jane responded readily. After all, few dyed-in-the-wool villainesses hold veracity in high repute.

Came Eleanor’s voice from the bottom of the great staircase, which she had descended unnoticed: “Tell whom about what, pray?”

“Eleanor!” Henrietta clutched at her throat, then realized Nell could not have overheard a conversation at this end of the hall. What tale would best serve? wondered Henrietta again, as Eleanor approached. The truth? Or some less shocking explanation for the presence of this nondescript female? Jane Verney was a very strange sort of fallen woman in Henrietta’s opinion; but she had very little practical knowledge of demireps. One did not expect bits o’ muslin to be so very
ordinary,
somehow, or prim. But here was Eleanor come up to them, looking weary; and Henrietta must decide. Should she be kind and cushion the blow of Marriot’s infidelity—or reveal which one of them knew what was what? After all, had not Henrietta predicted Marriot was prone to petticoat fever? Had not Eleanor in turn intimated that Henrietta had windmills in her head?

Given this choice, the outcome was never in real doubt. Melodramatically, Henrietta flung her arms wide, in the process knocking Jane’s red silk bonnet askew. Eleanor looked startled. Jane neither flinched nor elevated her gaze from her toes.

Well did Henrietta savor this triumphant moment.
“Here
is what Marriot has been up to!” she exclaimed.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“There’s something damned smokey here!” exclaimed Lord March from the depths of the intricately carved four-poster bedstead, a comment inspired not by his surroundings, but by the story his wife told. “I want to see this female I supposedly seduced.”

“No, you do not!” Lady March prevented her husband’s hasty departure from the four-poster by grasping the sleeve of his nightshirt, an item of masculine attire in which he looked extremely fetching. “Take my word for it! Beside, you haven’t yet heard the half of what she had to say.”

Because his wife looked fetching also in a profusion of cambric muslin and green ribbons, his lordship settled back down by her side. He had not made the acquaintance of this Jane Verney who claimed to know him, having been occupied during that interval with Lady Katherine, who felt that she was supremely meritorious of everyone’s attention, as result of her various afflictions—and in the process acted like a very dire affliction herself. Only now, a considerable time later, was he learning what had transpired elsewhere.

Those events Marriot regretted. “You had better tell me all about it!” he said.

Nell did not do so immediately, but smiled at her husband over the rim of her wineglass, the mate to which he held. A fire blazed merrily in the fireplace, glinted off the decorative colored marble, cast merry shadows on the figures and foliage painted on the plaster walls. All in all, it made a cozy domestic scene—amazingly so in view of the recent disclosure that one participant in this snug domesticity had strayed.

Perhaps Nell did not believe the worst of him? “I do not think I could be unfaithful to you even if I
had
forgot your existence, love!” said Marriot.

“My darling!” murmured Nell.

Followed an interval during which the wineglasses were emptied, and the fire burned low, and Lord March’s nightshirt joined his brocade robe on the floor. “But I must tell you what the creature said!” Lady March remarked at last. “Tis the most diverting tale. You are at home to a peg, did you know? A very well-breeched swell.”

Lord March was not breeched at all in that moment, as became apparent when he reached to retrieve his wineglass. Modestly, if a trifle tardily, her ladyship looked elsewhere. “You were set upon by footpads, and our Jane happened along just in time to prevent you sticking your spoon in the wall, after which she took you along home with her, and proper grateful you were!” Nell paused to accept her replenished wineglass. “I do not know if this was before you stood her to a glass of flesh and blood, or after
—
did I say you were in your altitudes? Well, you were! And she lost the nice little job she had in a shop before you led her astray—but neither of you knew who you were because the footpads had knocked you on your head!”