Maggie MacKeever (11 page)

The drawing room was furnished with rather rigid-looking rosewood furniture, a geometric-patterned carpet on the floor. Its effect was less to welcome than repel. As was the expression on his sister’s face. “Oh, Vivien, it’s only you.” She had risen on his entrance and now sank back into her chair.

Here was a fine greeting from a sibling he had not spoken with in some days. Vivien frowned. “When last I saw you, you were celebrating your betrothal. Now I find you looking as though you’ve come from a wake. What’s put you so out of humor, Gus?”

Lady Grey shuddered to hear her nickname, so recently formed on other, falser lips. “Oh, do not call me that!” she cried.

Was he never to be free of hysterical females? Vivien knew an ignoble impulse to flee. It was counterbalanced by his genuine fondness for his sister. He sighed and sat down upon a deucedly uncomfortable sofa upholstered in striped silk. “You must ask me more prettily than that!” he said in a joking tone. “In case you had failed to notice, I am grown far too large now for you to box my ears.”

“Not you!” gasped Augusta. “Geoffrey!” Words failed her, and she groped for her handkerchief among the items on the small table beside her, among which Vivien counted laudanum and cordials, hartshorn and a vinaigrette. He frowned again at this indication that his sister had been doctoring herself. Although she spoke frequently of liverish depressions and oppressions on the chest, he had never taken her complaints seriously. The reek of cologne in the closed room was enough to make anyone ill, he thought. “Gus—Augusta! Are you not feeling well?” he asked.

Of course she was not feeling well. Any fool must see that. But Augusta had no wish to quarrel with her brother. “Not I!” she sniffed. “Not, that is, beyond the usual. My nerves, of course—and a certain sickness of the heart! Oh, I cannot bear to think of it!” Once more, she buried her face in her handkerchief. Her further words were muffled. Of them, Vivien understood only “Geoffrey.”

Not surprisingly, Vivien deduced from this that it was not his sister, but her fiancé, who was gravely ill. “My poor Gus,” he said, and offered her his handkerchief in lieu of her own. “Is it so very bad? Can nothing be done?”

Lady Grey lowered her handkerchief. There was a distinct gleam in her green eyes. “Yes! You may call him out!” she cried.

His sister wished him to call out a man who already stood at death’s door? Vivien wondered if Augusta had physicked herself to the point of derangement. Or perhaps he had misunderstood her. “I thought—is not Sir Geoffrey ill?” he asked.

“Ill!” Augusta crushed the handkerchief in her fingers. “Certainly he is ill—of petticoat fever, it appears! I tell you, Vivien, it is very lowering to discover that one has been taken in. When I think of poor dear William—”

Vivien could not bear to hear one more paean to his deceased brother-in-law, whom he had detested in life. Since he suspected his sister’s secret feelings were akin to his own, he was not gentle with her. “Poor dear William was a prig, and he did his damnedest to make you one, too! Come down off your high ropes, Gus, and tell me what all this rumption is about!”

“A prig! I am no such thing!” Lady Grey’s eyes filled again with tears. “How can you be so heartless, Vivien? Just days past I was very happy—I remember it quite well! But now that wretched Quarles female has—oh, I cannot bear to think about it! Never did I think Geoffrey would use me this horrid way!”

Clearly, no neat concise explanation was to be offered. Vivien must piece together the facts. One of his sister’s statements intrigued Vivien greatly.
“What
Quarles female?” he asked.

“Is there more than one?” Augusta looked dismayed. “I suppose I should not be surprised. Whoever would have thought that Geoffrey would turn out to be a philanderer, the wretch? I do not wish to be married to a philanderer, and so I have told him. One in the family is quite enough!” She glanced guiltily at Vivien. “Oh, dear! I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t regard it!” Vivien tried to lighten the proceedings with his most charming smile. “I wouldn’t want to be married to me, either!”

“No,” Lady Grey sighed, in proof of the odd fact that sisters are immune to brotherly charms that drive other women wild. “Nor would you want to be married to Geoffrey—although I really
did,
Vivien, which is what makes it so sad. Goodness, you have never even met him, though he should have applied to you for permission to seek my hand. Yes, and I wish he had, because you would have denied it to him, because you would have recognized at once that he was a great deal too familiar with the game of hearts!”

Vivien was uncertain how it was that his sister’s unhappy romance had become his fault. “You still haven’t told me what happened.”

“Have I not? How foolish I am being! It seems that you must already know, because it is all as clearly in my recollection as if it had happened only yesterday. Which in fact it did!” How dare Geoffrey disappoint her so? In agitation, Augusta rose from her chair and paced up and down the room. “In short, Vivien, I have learned of Geoffrey’s, er, peccadilloes barely in the nick of time!”

Peccadilloes? Whatever Vivien had expected, it was not this. And what had his sister’s fiancé’s peccadilloes to do with his own elusive Miss Nevermind? “The deuce!” he said.

Augusta was gratified by this response. “You doubt the fidelity of your own ears!” she cried with bitter triumph. “And so did I! Or, rather, it was my eyes. You know what gentlemen are; you will not be surprised.
I,
however, was shockingly misled. Nothing can be more revolting to propriety than to see one’s fiancé’s dirty linen washed in public! Unless it is one’s own, of course, but I have none. And then the creature must force herself upon me against my will and tell me that I have behaved badly to Geoffrey!”

Vivien was still in the grip of a certain confusion. “You’ve spoken with this Quarles female?” he asked.

“Spoken with her?” echoed Lady Grey. “Indeed I have! And you need not tell me that it was a most improper thing! She wasted her breath, of course. I knew there was only one course open to me the moment that creature’s existence came to light.”

Vivien could not help but feel a certain sympathy for Sir Geoffrey, as well as a certain contempt for a man who so grossly mismanaged his affairs. Not that Vivien’s own affairs were in excellent train at the moment. “You immediately determined to cry off.’’

“Of course I did!” Vivien looked stern, Augusta thought. “You must see that I have no choice. How could I remain betrothed to a man with a disagreeable stigma attached to his name? I would be plunged into the scandal-broth with him, Vivien, and I could not bear that! I know what you are thinking,” she added, when his frown did not disappear. “You’re thinking that your escapades should have made me more tolerant. But I know how people talk, because I spent a great many years listening to William, and I simply cannot bear to have such things said about me.”

Vivien winced. He had never thought about his reputation much and had been dismayed to realize that it had caused his Miss Nevermind to run away. Now he wondered if his immense and unsought success with the ladies had caused him to grow brutish and insensitive. His elusive nemesis had also told him her name was Quarles. Now Gus told him that her betrothal was at an end due to a female named Quarles. Vivien didn’t know what to think.

Augusta could not care for her brother’s silence. “I cannot bear it if you should turn your face against me!” she wailed.

Vivien realized that his sister had worked herself into a disturbing case of nerves. “Don’t be absurd!” he said, as he took her in his arms. “Poor Gus, our chickens have come home to roost, have they not? You will not resolve anything by wearing a pathway in that rug! This is an awkward business, but it may not be so very bad. You are very quick to condemn your Sir Geoffrey. The truth is that you don’t know what it is he has or hasn’t done.”

“Oh, don’t I? I was not born yesterday, Vivien! Geoffrey—” Pink-cheeked, Augusta turned her face away and tried very hard not to remember how very practiced Geoffrey’s kisses had been. “Were there not some truth in that woman’s allegations, he would have told me about her, don’t you think? But he made no effort to defend himself.” She sighed. “Nor did he attempt to make a clean breast of the matter to me.”

Confess all to a lady whose most likely reaction would be to send him off with a flea in his ear? Vivien considered Sir Geoffrey’s failure to do so less cowardly than sensible. He also considered that his sister was making a great flap over what might be simple mischief. She was not usually so excitable. He looked searchingly down into her unhappy face. “Gus, have you been drinking?” he asked.

“Drinking! Oh!” Again, Augusta flushed. “I took some wine-and-water for my headache, if that’s what you mean. Not that it has proven of the slightest benefit, so far as I can tell!”

Vivien was on the verge of developing a headache of his own. “What an excellent notion!” he said, and rang the servants’ bell.

Some moments later, Mr. Sanders and his sister were again seated in the drawing room, each with a glass of the excellent claret laid down by her late spouse. “You must admit,” Augusta insisted, “that Geoffrey’s conduct leaves a great deal to be desired.”

Vivien considered that his sister’s behavior was less than admirable. He did not say so, having no desire to engage in a brangle with her. “Shockingly irregular!” he responded lightly. “This Sir Geoffrey must surely be the greatest rascal unhanged. Cut line, Gus! I’ll wager you wouldn’t like your Geoffrey half so much if he hadn’t blotted his copybook every now and again.”

“Oh!” Augusta was aflame with embarrassment, perhaps because her brother’s last remark was very near the truth. Of course Vivien would be sympathetic to Geoffrey, being himself no stranger to escapades. “But not,” she said somewhat incoherently, “while he’s betrothed to me!”

“But was he betrothed to you?” asked Vivien. It was not a question without merit. A man who trifled with one female while betrothed to another could well be considered a reprobate. Thought of a reprobate trifling with his sister could not please Vivien. Indeed, it made him very angry. “When did this, er, episode take place?”

Augusta recklessly drained her claret glass. “Which episode?” she asked bitterly. “Geoffrey’s, er, liaison with that creature? I do not know. I first became aware of her existence just yesterday. And she paid her call on me not an hour past.”

Vivien began to doubt that this was the tempest in a teapot that he had first thought. Still, he was aware—none better!—of how appearances may deceive. “What does this Quarles female look like?” he asked.

Between cold fingers, Lady Grey pleated the skirt other pretty yellow-spotted muslin gown. “Quite ordinary,” she said spitefully. “Nothing out of the common way. A plump little squab of a female with nothing at all to recommend her. Except”—and her eyes filled with angry tears— “that she is quite young!”

That rankled, Vivien realized. The fact that her rival had nothing to recommend her but her youth was a blow to Gus’s pride. Still, he required a more exact description. “What color was her hair?”

“As if I cared for such a thing!” snapped Augusta, so annoyed by her brother’s question that she ceased mutilating her skirt. “What is it about that female? Now she has fascinated even you, it seems! For myself, I never heard of her before, and I wish I hadn’t now!”

So did Vivien wish. Still, his sister’s troubles gave him temporary respite from his own. Or might have done, if not for his suspicion that the source of their troubles was the same. “Oh, very well!” said Gus. “Her hair was brown. I already said she was quite common, so I don’t know why you’d care!”

“I must know for whom I am searching,” Vivien said, and rose. “You may leave Mrs. Quarles to me, Gus. I’ll find out what I may about the woman, and then—well, we shall see.”

Chapter Thirteen

The entire family sat down to dinner at Elphinstone House that day. Ermyntrude had dressed for the occasion in emeralds and low-cut green silk. The fare was unexceptionable: turtle soup, turbot and lobster sauce, a quarter of lamb and cauliflowers, to be followed by fruits and soft pudding, a gooseberry-and-currant pie. Cook’s creations were much more conventional since Tabby had taken charge of the store cupboards and doled out weekly portions of jam and butter, sugar and tea, and cooking sherry. Even the service was unexceptionable. The food reached the table while it was still warm, and scarce a bite was spilled, a fact that warmed Tabby’s weary heart and filled Lambchop—skulking in the hallway, since he was banished from the dining room—with gloom.

Tabby’s heart was being wrung by the morose expression on her employer’s face. She felt very culpable, as if Sir Geoffrey’s predicament was some fault of hers. Tabby knew better; Sir Geoffrey’s liaison with Mrs. Quarles had taken place long before Tabby arrived in Brighton. But his unhappy expression reminded Tabby of her papa, after her mama had run off. Love was a dangerous business, causing people to engage in absurdly reckless acts, such as riding out on a half-broken horse. The turtle soup tasted suddenly like dishwater. Tabby set down her spoon.

Ermyntrude did likewise. She noticed that the atmosphere in the dining room was glum. It was not her fault; Ermyntrude had done her best to enliven the occasion. A pity there was none but the family to appreciate her efforts. Soon, Ermyntrude consoled herself, St. Erth would dote upon her beauty. It merely needed to be presented to him in a sufficiently forceful way. Meanwhile, Ermyntrude knew that she looked her best and must content herself with that. And with the lobster sauce that she particularly liked.

Alas, it was difficult to enjoy oneself in the midst of such gloom. Tabby was deep in a brown study, and Drusilla only nibbled at her food. Sir Geoffrey made no pretense of eating, but slumped in his chair. Ermyntrude decided that her papa was the source of the dejection that seemed to have infected them all. “Pa!” she said. “What ails you? You look quite old!”

So he looked old? Sir Geoffrey was not surprised. He supposed he’d always known that he wouldn’t live to reach a ripe old age. Would Gus be sorry then for the horrid accusations she’d made to him? Remembrance of those accusations inspired Sir Geoffrey to refill his wineglass. But one could hardly discuss such things with a daughter, especially of such tender years. “Nothing!” He sighed.