Maggie MacKeever (27 page)

Sir Malcolm’s tone was very serious. “But you
have
stolen something. Melly: my heart.”

“Zounds!” enthused Miss Bagshot, when she was allowed to draw breath.
“Now
are we going to toss my bonnet over the windmill?”

In a nigh-miraculous burst of self-control, Sir Malcolm set her away from him. “No, my darling. We are not going to go near that accursed windmill again until a settlement has been drawn up. Not all of us are nipfarthings, Melly.”

“Bless my heart!” Miss Bagshot pressed her hands to her palpitating breast. “If you don’t know everything there is to know about women, sir, you know more than anyone
should!”
And then—alas for Sir Malcolm’s self-control and good intentions—she blushed and giggled and cast herself upon his chest.

Chapter Twenty-four

“Slowtop! Muttonhead! Peabrain!” uttered the Chief Magistrate of Bow Street. Having thoroughly demoralized Puddiphat, he turned his acerbic gaze on Crump. “You are little better. Stolen rhododendrons and attempted blackmail and antlers planted on ducal brows.”

By this somewhat cryptic utterance, Crump understood that he was to be held responsible for Puddiphat’s errors of judgment. Due to long experience with his Chief Magistrate, Crump understood also that it was pointless to try and put forth a defense until Sir John’s wrath had ebbed. The Runner withdrew to the window, in which the broken glass had been replaced, and brought forth his pipe. Profitable as had been his private inquiry work, it had apparently prevented his involvement in rare shenanigans.

Bow Street’s emissaries in those shenanigans were disposed about Sir John’s scarred desk. Puddiphat stood before it, in receipt of strict orders not even to breathe, let alone move, lest he wreak further havoc.
His posture was as rigid as if he were indeed a member of a military organization. Lady Bligh, perched on a corner of the old desk, was considerably more relaxed.

“Don't be so stuffy, John!” The Baroness awarded the Chief Magistrate her roguish glance. “I have already read poor Puddiphat a severe scold. He has tried to do a good job for you, even if he did manage to only make a Jack-pudding of himself.” She flourished the saber which she still held.

Anxious as Puddiphat might be to please, he had his sticking point, and he still smarted from the ignominious spectacle he bad presented, being marched at saber’s point through the London streets. “Dashed if it’s fair,” he muttered. “All I did was look for proof, like I was told to do. I was even going to turn it over to Crump, and let him take credit for my work.” He craned his head to cast the Runner a hostile glare.

“Ah, no, laddie!” responded Crump, around the pipe clamped between his teeth. “I’ll take none of the credit for you making a cake of yourself.”

“Tsk tsk, Crump!” Lady Bligh laid the saber across her lap and applied herself with gusto to the hot chestnuts she’d purchased en route. “You were responsible for drawing Puddiphat into this business—although it was Miss Bagshot who set him to rainbow-chasing. Have a chestnut, John! You would have liked the minx.”

What Sir John would have liked was to clear his office of irresponsible Runners and inept bunglers wheedled into carrying out their tasks, and devote his full attention to a certain irrepressibly nosy Baroness. But the Chief Magistrate of Bow Street was a serious and dedicated man. He kept his peace and helped himself to hot chestnuts.

Despite Sir John’s forbearance, the peace was not long kept. Footsteps pounded up the stairs. In the doorway appeared a sharp-faced, fashionably clad female with heaving bosom and a lace cornette atop her faded hair. “Ah!” said Lady Bligh, through a mouthful of hot chestnuts. “John, this is my milliner, Madame le Best.”

“Your
milliner?” suspiciously inquired the Chief Magistrate, swallowing his own hot chestnuts a trifle too fast. Solicitously, the Baroness pounded him on the back.

Madame le Best had known Lady Bligh far too long to be especially surprised to find her dangling her elegant ankles from a desktop, eating chestnuts and cradling a saber. That latter item, Madame darted across the room and snatched, then brandished under Puddiphat’s nose. “What have you done with my niece, you—you puppy? Don’t deny it! I know she left with you!”

Puddiphat concentrated so hard on the menacing saber that his eyes crossed. “The rhododendron!” he gasped.

“You’d clap the child in jail because someone gave her a rhododendron she should not have?” Madame recalled various other reasons why members of her immediate family might be clapped in jail, and additionally that she claimed to be French.
“Ma foi! Mon Dieu! La vache!
I won’t stand for it, you hear!”

To fail to hear Madame would have required a state of deafness, thought Sir John, who had never heard the French language so uniquely pronounced, or in tones that were quite so shrill. “Compose yourself, Helen,” said the Baroness. “Your niece has not been imprisoned, despite her propensity toward attempted blackmail. Give me back that saber, if you please, before poor Puddiphat swoons from shock.” Having recovered the weapon. Lady Bligh removed the last chestnut from Sir John’s fingers and popped it into her mouth. “Why are you in such a pucker, by the by? You threatened to turn the chit out.”

“Only if she cut another lark.” Madame protested quickly; there was something in the Baroness’s dark glance that prompted her to self-defense. “I never seriously meant to turn Melly out, although I vow I
do
not know what to do with the child.”

Dulcie wiped her fingers on her jaconet gown in a very vulgar manner. “I fancy,” she said serenely, “that matter has been taken out of your hands. At least you need no longer worry about the chit tossing her bonnet over the windmill now that she has already done
so.”

“Bonnet?” gasped Madame, so faintly that Crump abandoned his window long enough to push forward a wooden chair. “Windmill?
Hélas!”

“It is nothing so bad as all that.” The Baroness remained unmoved by her milliner’s histrionics, which included eyes rolled heavenward, and a rigidity of the extremities, and culminated in collapse upon the wooden chair. “Calveley is in very easy circumstances— and I do not think he has ever traveled with a female companion before. You must realize by now that your niece is incapable of
not
cutting larks, Helen! At least this way she may cut them as far away from you as is possible.”

Although Madame keenly felt the force of this argument, she did not wish to appear heartless. “Hartshorn! Vinaigrette!” she moaned.

“Moonshine!” retorted Dulcie, and leaned forward to thwack her milliner with the saber, an act which caused the Chief Magistrate to reflect wistfully upon her superb physique.

The Baroness sighed in a manner that would have done justice to Miss Bagshot. “Ah, La Roué.”

Puddiphat had listened to this dialogue with a rapidly burgeoning sense of rhw injustice done himself. Everyone was devilishly tolerant, he thought, of a damsel who’d done her utmost to diddle Bow Street. Puddiphat wasn’t entirely convinced, moreover, that the damsel hadn’t succeeded. In the whole miserable time he’d spent in this office, Blood-and-Thunder hadn’t once been named.

“Blood-and-Thunder!” ejaculated Puddiphat, thus remedying that oversight and casting a very effective damper on the conversation under way. “Aye, and what
about
Blood-and-Thunder?” inquired Crump, from the window. Due to the discomforts Blood-and-Thunder had caused him one way and another, Crump was beginning to take a distinctly proprietorial interest in the rogue.

“That’s what I’d like to know!” Puddiphat craned his head to look again at the one sympathetic person in the room. And then he launched into a long and garbled expostulation, the main contentions of which were that Sir Malcolm Calveley had indeed been Blood-and-Thunder, and that Miss Bagshot had been his accomplice, and that corruption must be rife in high places, else so dangerous a duo would not be allowed to go free. “A suspicious and dangerous character!” he said in conclusion. “Miss Bagshot herself said he should languish behind bars.”

“Miss Bagshot is an incurable humbugger,” Lady Bligh retorted dismissively. “You must take my word for it that Calveley is not the man you seek.”

Puddiphat saw no reason why he should do anything of the sort.
“Physiognomical Fragments!”
he protested. “Calveley left the country under a cloud!”

Sir John had all this time been raptly—and most improperly—reflecting upon the bounty inadequately concealed by Dulcie’s jaconet morning dress. That he roused now was due only to the sharp pinch she bestowed upon his arm. Repressively, he inquired, “Do
you
remember that old scandal?”

“I always remember a rogue.” The Baroness smiled, leaned across the desk, and whispered a name in the Chief Magistrate’s ear. “Thunder!” said he.

“Blood-and-Thunder!” supplied Puddiphat helpfully. “Told you so! Yes, and that blasted dog bit my boot!” He extended his mangled footwear for all to see. Alas, as might have been anticipated, this act caused Puddiphat to lose his balance. He stumbled across the room and fetched up at last on the lap of Madame le Best. “Young man, you are a perfect block!” she snapped.

“No such thing!” Ludicrous as may have been his position, Puddiphat glowered. “I know what I know, even if nobody wants credit given where it’s due. Tell you what; I don’t think I
want
to become a Runner after all this.”

“Take my word for it, laddie!” observed Crump, from the window. “You don’t!” Genially, he met his Chief Magistrate’s unappreciative stare. “If that’s all, guv’nor, I’ll be off.”

“Do!” responded Sir John, testily. “And take this precious pair with you.” He indicated the wooden chair, whereupon Puddiphat was informing Madame le Best that they were partners in misfortune, both having been thoroughly diddled by a sad romp.

“Never mind, Helen.” soothed Lady Bligh, as the milliner forcibly evicted Puddiphat from her lap. “You shall provide me several new gowns. One, I think, must be made up in London Soot.”

London Soot? It was not the first time Crump had wondered if perhaps the Baroness was quite mad. He shepherded his charges out of the office and into the nearby tavern, where he did his utmost to persuade Puddiphat against a career as a Runner, and Puddiphat alternately bewailed his ruined boots and the wriggling of Sir Malcolm Calveley off the hook of justice, and Madame le Best silently congratulated herself on a similar escape.

Meanwhile, in Sir John’s office, a brief silence reigned. The Chief Magistrate contemplated Lady Bligh, who in her turn looked pensively down upon Puddiphat’s saber, which she still held. Then she put aside the saber, tucked her feet beneath her, and rested her elbows on her knees. “Now we may be comfortable, John!”

Comfortable the Baroness may have been, but Bow Street’s Chief Magistrate was not. Hastily, he pushed his chair back from his desk. “A pretty to-do this has been,” he said, crossing to the window where Crump had so recently stood. “And furthermore, I’m very much aware that you know more than you’ve told.”

Dulcie’s glance was wicked.
“Dearest
John, you have only yourself to blame for this muddle. Puddiphat would not have had occasion to leap to so many erroneous conclusions had you enlisted my aid in the first place—not that you ever had any real cause to get the wind up.” She untangled herself from her highly provocative position and slid off the desk. “I have told you before that you work too hard! If you allowed yourself some recreation, you would not be so prone to fashion mountains from molehills.”

“What sort of recreation?” inquired the Chief Magistrate, in most unmagisterial tones—for Dulcie had come to stand beside him, and her scent was thick and sweet in his nostrils.

“Shame on you, my friend!” Dulcie leaned against his arm. “You owe me a favor in return for my efforts on your behalf. I think you must escort me to the theater tonight. The world will be abuzz with the news of Calveley’s departure, I’ll warrant; and we may chuckle among ourselves because we know the truth of the tale.”

The Chief Magistrate was well acquainted with Lady Bligh’s talent to distract.
“Was
Calveley a cracksman?” he bluntly inquired.

Replied the Baroness, with equal bluntness: “John, you are in grave danger of growing positively dull!
What does it matter who Blood-and-Thunder was, since the man has obviously reformed? Ah, I see you do not agree with my reasoning.”

Sir John was at that moment far more interested in Lady Bligh’s patrician face, in her heady perfume, and in the warm and lissome body so tantalizingly close to his own. Sternly, he reminded himself that she was a married woman, and he the Chief Magistrate of Bow Street Public Office, and that many years had elapsed since they had been more than friends. Those reminders having done him not the least good, he moved away.

The Baroness wrinkled her aristocratic nose and perched at the windowsill.
“Definitely
dull! I will make you a bargain, John. Providing you promise not to act on it, I will pose you a hypothesis.”

“Very well.” Sir John folded his arms and prepared to limit his enjoyment to Lady Bligh’s keen mind.

“Suppose you had once had in your employ an excellent seamstress whose only failing in the world was that she had a brother who was a great deal less high-minded than herself,” suggested Dulcie, who had the rare ability to, whilst discussing serious matters, look very roguish indeed. “Suppose also that when that seamstress left your employ you assisted her in setting up her own shop. Naturally under such circumstances you would keep in touch, would be aware her rascally brother had left the country. Suppose then that it was brought to your attention that this seamstress had roused the curiosity of Bow Street.”

Roguish as the Baroness might look, Sir John was not so disarmed that he failed to realize she had been less than forthright. “Dulcie, are you telling me—”

“I am trying to
tell
you nothing!” the Baroness reproved. “Merely to offer one of many hypotheses which an intelligent person might, under these circumstances, have formed. Where was I? Ah, yes. Certain suspicions were harbored by Bow Street.” She tapped a fingernail against her perfect teeth. “Suppose that there was some basis for the suspicions of Bow Street, as occasionally there are; suppose that the seamstress’s rascally brother was in fact Blood-and-Thunder, and that he
had
come home.”