Maggie MacKeever (13 page)

Chapter Twelve

The drawing room of the Aethelwine townhouse, resplendent with imitation bamboo and lacquer-work and furniture japanned in soft shades of slate and green, with window hangings of an Oriental nature and leering mandarin door knobs, was rendered no more felicitous by morning light. Indeed, no sooner did the Honorable Adolphus enter the drawing room—an entry accomplished in a very furtive manner—than he tiptoed across the hand-knotted Turkey carpet and pulled shut the window hangings, thus plunging the chamber into murky gloom. This expenditure of energy exhausted him. He collapsed upon an armless settee.

Not against the brilliance of the morning did the Honorable Adolphus close the drapes, nor even against the garishness of the drawing room. It was the bright daylight that he found offensive, and it was to spare himself the agony of loud noise that he trod on tiptoe. After leaving Park Lane the day before, Dolph had proceeded to King Street, there to entrench himself more firmly still in the quicksand of the River Tick via the gaming tables of Capitaine Chançard. In the process he had consumed a great quantity of intoxicating beverage. Consequently all was of a daze and dazzle this morn.

Into the Honorable Adolphus’s painful cogitations burst his sister, blithe of spirit and heavy of foot.
“There
you are!” observed Lady Camilla wisely, as she trod across the Turkey carpet and flung open the drapes. Dolph winced at the combination of bright light and sound and garish shades of blues and reds and violets on white, with yellow and green mixed in. “Shot the cat, did you?” Milly inquired shrewdly, as she settled beside her brother on the settee. “Why?”

This display of sisterly concern, Adolphus thought deserved reply. “All to pieces!” he groaned.

“Yes, but you always
are!”
pointed out Lady Camilla, sweetly reasonable. “It doesn’t do to dwell upon it, you know! Think about more pleasant things.” Toward that end, she launched upon a discussion of her plans for refurbishing Pennymount Place in the Egyptian style, with sphinxes and mummies and lotus leaves, chairs painted black with gilt ornaments. “And though I may be shatterbrained, I am not so shatterbrained that I don’t realize that it is very
educational
to have such stuff about, because it must always remind one that Napoleon invaded Egypt and that Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile!”

With respect Adolphus gazed upon his sister, who looked very fetching in a morning dress of cambric muslin with a ruff, and around her shoulders a triangular cashmere shawl. Dolph himself had lacked spirits for the exigencies of a complicated toilette this day, and had settled for a shooting jacket and buckskins, informal attire that he would ordinarily have shunned. But this, alas, was no ordinary day.

Of the import of this morning, which well might be the Honorable Dolph’s last, Lady Camilla was unaware. Thought of Napoleon and Nelson had put her in mind of her wedding gifts, in particular a pair of salt-glazed stoneware Turks, painted with enamel colors.

Into her rhapsodies her brother thrust a discordant note. He inquired whether she’d read the morning newspapers.

“Silly!” giggled Lady Camilla, diverted by the notion that she should occupy herself in such a dreary manner. “Of course I have not! You know Papa flies into a tweak if anyone musses up his
Morning Post—
not that I should wish to anyway! Do stop groaning, Dolph! If you are feeling poorly, I am sorry for it; but you should know by now that if you drink too much you will regret it the next day!”

“It ain’t for that I’m sorry!” responded Dolph, fixing his sister with an unfriendly and distinctly bloodshot eye. “Come to think of it, I ain’t sure you ain’t to blame!”

“To blame for what?” wondered Lady Camilla.

“Because it was you who told me I was in the petticoat line!” he muttered. “When it’s plain as the nose of your face that I ain’t cut out for romantical stuff!”

Obviously if she was to enjoy a peaceful contemplation of her numerous bride-gifts, Lady Camilla must first calm her irritable brother, in whose pathway to happiness a pothole apparently loomed. “A pothole!” echoed the Honorable Adolphus, incensed by this ignoble description of his travail. “Yes, and so you might well call if, because even
I
can see marriage is a stumbling block!”

“Marriage?” Lady Camilla contemplated this novel viewpoint of marriage as a stumbling block along the primrose pathway to romance. “What
are
you talking about, Dolph? If it is Pennymount you are referring to in that queer manner, I wish you would not! He is not a block, merely a bit of a crosspatch.”

The Honorable Dolph’s head throbbed so badly that the leering Chinese door knobs seemed to ebb and swell. “Not Pennymount!” he groaned. “Jessabelle!”

“Ah!” Lady Camilla smiled encouragingly. “You are already on first-name terms! And you said you weren’t in the petticoat line! But you were always one for telling clankers, Dolph, not that I understand why you should tell
me
fibs. I was the one told you how to fix it up all right and tight!”

“Oh yes!” Adolphus curled his lip. “Right as a trivet! That’s how I came to be on the verge of getting leg-shackled to a divorced female!”

“Leg-shackled!” If Lady Camilla’s eyes were wide as saucers, her open mouth was reminiscent of a dinner plate. “To Jessabelle? Dolph, you
must
have windmills in your head!”

With this contention the Honorable Adolphus did not argue; the way his skull throbbed, it might well be true. “And Jessabelle must be equally queer in the attic,” added Milly, “or she wouldn’t want to marry you! Are you quite certain she
does
want to marry you, Dolph? Could you have misunderstood?”

“It ain’t likely!” Dolph snapped. “I left her composing a notice to be put in the newspapers. And when the old gentleman casts his peepers onto
that—”
Words failed him. Apprehensively he glanced at the doorway. “Tell you what, I
should
blow out my brains!”

Lady Camilla sympathized with this craven viewpoint. Though Sir Edward’s wrath had never yet descended upon his daughter, she was frequently privy to very heated exchanges between father and son. “I think,” said Milly, glancing also at the doorway, “that you had better tell me how all this came about.”

Adolphus obeyed. In the midst of all his tribulations, he had overlooked his sister’s influence with their irascible sire; and now he thought that, could Milly be persuaded to speak out for him, he might yet be saved. Were he so inclined, Sir Edward could convince any number of ex-countesses that they did not wish to step with Adolphus into parson’s mousetrap, and creditors that they were not anxious to be repaid.

“Told her she was fine as fivepence,” he gloomily explained. “Had all the other fillies beaten to flinders. And then she told me she’d allow no one to stand in our way! I said we both lacked feathers to fly with; she said ladies who lived under clouds couldn’t look so high! I thought she was shamming it at first, but then she cut up very stiff and accused me of offering her false coin; and no sooner did I convince her I
wasn’t
than she was vowing nothing could keep us apart—I tell you, sis, it was a pretty to-do!”

“So it must have been!” responded Milly, awed. “Why didn’t you just tell her she’d made a mistake?”

“It would’ve been curst ungallant!” The Honorable Adolphus flushed. “Didn’t want her to take a pet! Recalled that she’d bit Pennymount, and didn’t want her similarly biting
me!”

“Yes, but Pennymount is always disputatious, and you are not!” Lady Camilla pointed out. “I daresay if you are conciliating, she won’t
wish
to bite you,”

“Hah!” Recalling his new status as a man of the world, Dolph treated his less experienced sister to a condescending glance. “Maybe
you
would wish to explain to a female who goes biting people that your intentions
ain’t
honorable, and that you was wishful of offering her a slip on the shoulder, but I don’t! Hang it, if she bit Pennymount for nothing half so bad, she’d probably have been fit to
murder
me—not but what I might as well have let her, because the old gentleman is bound to feel similarly.”

This explanation Lady Camilla followed with a cross-eyed frown. Even after the application of intense concentration, she was not sure she understood. “I wish you would not talk like a nodcock!” she mourned.

“Anyway,” added Adolphus, “I don’t
wish
to oblige Jessabelle. Not if to do so I must marry her. And moreover I very clearly heard her say she’d just kicked her clock.” It then occurred to him that he might owe some small degree of loyalty to a lady he’d so enthusiastically embraced. “Which ain’t to say she ain’t fine as fivepence, because she
is!
”

With each new revelation about her predecessor, Milly grew more intrigued. “If you did not wish to marry Jessabelle, you should not have popped the question,” she sternly remarked. “And if you did
not
pop the question, then you have nothing to worry about.”

This example of his sister’s logic did not impress Dolph.
“Now
who’s talking like a nodcock! Or are you forgetting the notice she had put in the newspapers? And moreover she promised me she’d see the old gentleman came about.”

“But
did
you pop the question?” Lady Camilla persevered.

So that his answer might be truthful, Adolphus stopped and thought. He could not recall making any mention of matrimony to Mme. Joliffe, he allowed. But his sister must not place too large a significance on his recollections, he cautioned; having been invited to kiss Mme. Joliffe, he had consequently grown a trifle flustered; so would any young gentleman similarly blessed.

“Good gracious!” responded Milly, thunderstruck. “You
kissed
her, Dolph?”

“I did.” The Honorable Adolphus’s manly chest swelled. “Did a deuced good job of it, too! Stands to reason; I must have! Because she said I’d made her very happy, and invited me to do it again.”

“Lud!” breathed Lady Camilla
“Did
you?”

Better tardily than never, Dolph realized that this was no proper topic to be discussing with an unmarried damsel of eighteen. Additionally he flinched away from an admission of his own cowardice. “Never mind that!”
said he, with a worldly air. “Thing is, what the deuce do I do now? The old gentleman’s bound to be mad as fire when he learns about
this—
and if he ain’t persuaded to provide me with the wherewithal, I ain’t never like to get out of the basket!”

Lady Camilla was not prepared to hear additional laments concerning her brother’s pecuniary embarrassments. “Do be quiet, Adolphus, and let me
think!”

Clearly there was more to this business than she’d originally realized. That Jessabelle had allowed Adolphus to kiss her struck Milly as very strange. Lady Camilla was not without experience with such matters, though she should have been; and Jessabelle’s behavior had her in a puzzle. Milly could not imagine why any female who’d gotten in the habit of kissing the saturnine and highly skilled Lord Pennymount should settle for the amiable and eminently
un
skilled Adolphus. Of course Pennymount’s kisses must hitherto be reserved for his fiancée, or so one expected; but there were other gentlemen in London who possessed comparable expertise.

With bated breath Adolphus watched his sister, awaited the issuance of pearls of wisdom from her lips. So wrapped up was Dolph in his own tribulations that he failed to note certain oddities in his sister’s own behavior—for example, her failure to comment upon her introduction to Capitaine Chançard.

He did not fail to note her expression, however; even the Honorable Adolphus was not such a dunce. Milly had very much the aspect of a cat who’d got at the cream. “You’ve thought of something!” he said.

Certainly she had, and Milly was not about to tell her brother what had made her smile. Therefore she was pleased when her papa appeared in the doorway before Adolphus could further press her for explanations. That pleasure Adolphus obviously did not share. As if for protection, he pressed closer to his sister. “Erg!” he said.

“‘Erg’?” echoed Sir Edward, scathingly, from the doorway. He was a stout and balding little man of advancing years, whose nondescript appearance was in startling contrast to his children. His only concession to vanity was a dazzling gold watch-chain draped across his protuberant midriff. As he irritably brandished his newspaper, the gold chain danced. “I read here I am to wish you joy, Adolphus.”

Valiantly Dolph tried to defend himself. “No! Not joy! I don’t
want
to be tied up!” he gasped.

“Then dashed if I know why you’ve got yourself betrothed to this—” Sir Edward scowled at the
Morning Post,
“this Mme. Joliffe, whoever she may be! Whatever else, I hope she may be an heiress, my lad, because you needn’t think I’ll stand the expense!”

“She ain’t an heiress,” Adolphus confessed. “Come right down to it, she ain’t even quite the thing—but all the same, she’s first-rate!”

“A fancy-piece!” So extremely exacerbated was Sir Edward’s countenance that there was a very good possibility he would, as concerned fatal fits, outdo Lord Pennymount. “Even
you
couldn’t be such a looby as to offer marriage to your ladybird!”

“I didn’t—She ain’t—” All blushes and stammers, the Honorable Adolphus descended further into his personal quicksand, while his incensed parent breathed heavily and glared.

Lady Camilla decided she did not wish to see her papa enact mayhem upon her brother before her very eyes. Although Adolphus had not introduced her to Mme. Joliffe, as agreed between them, thus absolving her of any responsibility to speak out on his behalf, it smote her to the heart to see her brother trembling like an autumn leaf.

“Mme. Joliffe is not a high-flyer, Papa!” she explained. “Although she isn’t an heiress either, which makes me wonder why she should wish to marry Dolph. It’s not as if he were a man of substance!”

Frequently Sir Edward marveled at the feebleness of intellect so frequently exhibited by his offspring. “No,” he pointed out, “but I am.”