Maggie MacKeever (18 page)

Lady Barbour ground her perfect teeth together. Then, so swiftly that Morgan had no opportunity to fathom her intention, she grasped the papers firmly and tore them right in half. So satisfying was this action that she repeated it again and again, until her hands were empty and the floor around her was strewn with paper scraps. “There!” she said triumphantly. “That’s
that!”

Miss Phyfe unclenched her own teeth. “The deuce it is!” she snapped. “Were you not such a peagoose, Sidoney, you would realize I need only write it all out again, because I have the information in my head!”

“If that’s the sort of thing you have in your head,” retorted her ladyship, “then I must be grateful that mine is empty! Oh, I didn’t mean that! I meant I am growing increasing glad that I am not
clever—
and who put it there, pray?”

“You
may be glad that you are a muttonhead, but others of us are not!” replied Miss Phyfe. “Who put what where?”

Lady Barbour drew herself up to her full height and looked very dignified. “I am not so pigeonheaded I cannot follow a simple conversation! Which seems to be your case! Because I asked you very clearly who told you about—er—
you
know!”

Astonishing as was the concept to Lady Barbour, the idea that the number of one’s offspring could be limited was not original with Miss Phyfe. “No one
told
me,” Morgan said shortly. “I mean—”

“Mercy on me!” gasped Sidoney. “And you denied you had engaged in sordid intrigues! Which is
almost
as bad as the intrigues themselves. I do not know if I am more distressed by your shameless behavior or your fibs! And when I recall that you dared scold
me
about clandestine liaisons—well! Never did I suspect that you possessed such deviousness of mind.”

It was during this tension-fraught moment—in which Lady Barbour gazed upon her cousin with grieved indignation, and Miss Phyfe clenched her fists at her side lest she succumb to the temptation to soundly trounce her bird-witted relative—that voices came to them. Someone approached the chapel. Morgan looked very uncomfortable, noticed Lady Barbour. She glanced at the doorway, puzzled.

The voices drew closer. Predominant were masculine tones raised in enthusiastic discussion of myriad topics of a medical nature, including: The Royal Infirmary for Diseases of the Eye, opened under royal patronage as result of the heavy incidence of trachoma in soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars; Baron Larrey, the famous surgeon of Napoleon’s army; and William Hunter’s Theater of Anatomy, a lecture room and museum located in Great Windmill Street. And then the owner of the voice stepped into the chapel.

“Aha!” said Lady Barbour, who though dim of wit was not incapable of adding two and two together, though not necessarily disposed to reach a sum of four.
“You!”

Upon discovering himself to be the object of a look of unconquerable horror, Dr. Kilpatrick acted surprised. He inquired of Lady Barbour who she had expected him to be. “Because there aren’t any other physicians here today,” he explained. “And you should have called your own physician to come to you at Phyfe House, anyway.”

Lady Barbour’s breast swelled. “I am not in need of a physician!” she declared.

“I wouldn’t have said so,” remarked the doctor. “But I’m not in favor of indiscriminate bloodletting, no matter how overheated a person’s blood. Speaking of which, what is the cause of all this brouhaha?”

“Well you may ask!” cried Lady Barbour, while Miss Phyfe looked chagrined. “You are a cad and a scoundrel, sir! There is no use protesting! I tell you, you stand revealed.”

“What I’ll stand,” retorted the doctor, “is no more of this nonsense! Morgan,
what
is this nitwit going on about?”

“I’m sorry, Alister, but she found a pamphlet I was writing about the advantages of population limitation.” Morgan flushed. “And she’s taken the gooseish notion that I—er—came by my information first-hand.”

“Nitwit! Gooseish!” ejaculated Lady Barbour, her beauty given further dimension by her wrath. “I think you must both be mad! Or at the least
depraved!
Oh, there is no use denying it, because now I see the whole. Doubtless
you,
sir, are responsible for my cousin’s freakishness, because if she did
not
engage in peccadilloes, then someone had to tell her about such things! And
you,
as a physician, must, know all manner of things which you should
not,
and obviously you have shared your knowledge with her! Oh, shame!”

Came a brief silence while Lady Barbour marshaled further levelers, and Dr. Kilpatrick and Miss Phyfe exchanged glassy looks of defeat. Her ladyship’s further Parthian shots, however, were forestalled by the individual to whom the doctor had been holding forth so recently on such diverse topics as diseases of the eyes and anatomical specimens. “You are being extraordinarily stupid, Mama,” said Miss Whateley, who, as usual, was being so unobtrusive as to be virtually ignored. “Even for you.”

“Stepmama”
corrected Lady Barbour with absent-minded annoyance. Belatedly, she grasped the significance of Callie’s presence. With a genteel oath she sprang upon her stepdaughter and grasped her firmly by the ear. “Oh, my poor
poor
child! Exposed to such a pernicious influence! Morgan, I shall never forgive you if this horrid man has led Callie astray.”

“For the love of heaven, Sidoney!” responded Miss Phyfe, as Miss Whateley said: “Mama, you are all about in the head! Alister—Dr. Kilpatrick—has only taken me to view the Tower and the Mansion House and the Guildhall, as I told you! And the Royal Exchange.”

So
this
was the cold fish who had been taking advantage of her lumpish stepdaughter, and at the same time leading Morgan into abominable indiscretions? Clearly Sidoney was right to loathe him.
How
she had come to loathe the doctor Sidoney was not certain, but thought it had something to do with a fireplace.

“Morgan, we will speak further of this later, when I have had a chance to compose myself!” she uttered ominously, taking firmer grip on Miss Whateley’s ear and inexorably leading that reluctant damsel toward the chapel door. “I disremember when I have been put in such a pucker. To think that my own cousin has been advancing theories that would make even a Paphian woman blush! Or so I assume, because no matter what Darby may insinuate, I have never had dealings with. I do not scruple to tell you, cousin, that I very seriously question
which
of us is the chucklehead!”

Chapter Sixteen

There was, in the mind of Morgan Phyfe, not the slightest doubt as to which of her immediate relatives was the most addlebrained. Moreover, that affliction seemed to be contagious because Morgan was very close to her own wit’s end. These things she was explaining to her caller, who stood near the simple marble chimneypiece.

Miss Phyfe looked even more than usually distrait this day, which may have had something to do with the considerable inroads she was making on her nomadic cousin’s excellent wine cellars. Currently, an opened bottle of superb port stood on a mahogany pillar and claw tripod table that was more often used for serving tea, and in Morgan’s hand was a full wine glass. Her hair was also coming unpinned.

In great agitation she paced out the dimensions of her sitting room. From the simple writing desk to the chintz-hung windows she stalked, from pine bureau bookcase to wing armchair. At this point her feet became somehow entangled in the hand-knotted Savonnerie carpet that lay upon the polished wooden floor. Somewhat abruptly, she sat down. So that her caller might not guess that this action was not premeditated, she suggested that he might be comfortable on the cabriolet-legged love seat.

“You will say this is a farrago of nonsense,” she muttered, as he moved from fireplace to love seat, “and that it is very silly of me to be thrown into such a pucker by a pea-brain. But when I think of all the
serious
matters that warrant my attention—harvests have been poor and times are hard; the national economy is dangerously out of balance; the working classes labor under grinding poverty—yet reform of any sort is regarded with the utmost suspicion due to the fears engendered by the recent excesses of the French! Major Cartwright is correct; reformers must concentrate their efforts on one thing at a time. Only by presenting a united front can we be effective. If then. I tell you, Darby, I sometimes grow very dispirited! There are over two hundred capital offenses on the statute books, as if law and order may be maintained only through repression of the masses—and of course the wretched Tories fear their supremacy must be threatened by parliamentary reform.” She frowned. “I suppose you are a Tory. Doubtless that is why you are so prodigious unhelpful. At all events, it will come as no great surprise that I am a little out of sorts.”

Not only was Miss Phyfe feeling a trifle cross, she was well on her way to becoming more than a trifle cast-away. Lord Darby did not mind especially if Miss Phyfe became positively tipsy—no gentleman achieves Lord Darby’s reputation without becoming inured to excess—but he was very curious as to what had inspired her to abandon her hitherto high-minded attitude. It was toward that end he had been directing his efforts for several moments, without appreciable success.

“High-minded!” echoed Miss Phyfe, with upraised glass. The liquor—or the presence of his lordship—had brought a becoming color to her cheeks. This, combined with her tumbling curls and dishevelled appearance, put Lord Darby very strongly in mind of rural trysts and maidens tumbled in the hay. “My cousin would not agree with you, sir! My cousin Sidoney, that is! And if she
could
she would no doubt acquaint my cousin the earl with her conclusions in hope that he would turn me out of the house. Saphead! Sidoney, that is, not you!”

“I am relieved,” responded his lordship, amorous impulses firmly in check, and tongue firmly in cheek. “It would be a sore blow to my pride were the lady whom I wish most to please to speak of me in such unkind terms. Oh yes, I
do
wish to please you, my dear! But the more I hear of Lady Barbour, the less I want to make a dead-set at her. To use the word with no bark on it, I suspect that prolonged exposure to her ladyship would render me fit to blow her brains out.”

Miss Phyfe was forcibly stricken by his lordship’s choice of words, which so perfectly described her own sentiments. “I cannot blame you,” she said cordially. “I have come within an ace of murdering her myself! Nor do I think I deserve censure for it, because no respectable female cares to be told she is of equivocal character, or dead to shame.” She gestured vaguely with her wine glass. “Or that she is the slyest thing in nature. But it was not until Sidoney accused me of engaging in paroxysms of debauchery that I begged her to cease talking like a nodcock. Debauchery! Lud, sir, I ask you!”

Nor does any gentleman achieve Lord Darby’s astonishing reputation without developing nigh inhuman powers of self-control, which alone enabled him to refrain from indulging in said paroxysms on the spot. “If you are asking me if I should care to engage in paroxysms of debauchery with you, the answer is yes, Miss Phyfe,” he murmured, and observed her guilty start. “Yes, I know it is not kind of me to tease you when you are feeling so pulled about, but it is your own fault for looking so adorable. Now suppose you try and tell me more precisely what has chanced.”

With as much care as if she held the Holy Grail, Morgan set down her glass. Whether her cousin’s excellent spirits or her caller’s incomparable compliments, something was having a most bizarre effect on her head. “I wish you would not talk such flummery to me.
Sidoney
is adorable;
I
am drunk as a wheelbarrow. And so would you be, Darby, if your life were like a cake that had suddenly gone flat.”

Abruptly, lest he commit the unforgivable gaffe of allowing a lady to witness him convulsed with laughter at her expense, Lord Darby rose from the love seat. He strolled around the sitting room, pausing to inspect a table clock with a handle on top; moved to the pine bureau bookcase; leafed through
Village Politics
and
Shepherd of Salisbury Plain,
allegedly written by one Will Chip, a country carpenter. Then he picked up a pamphlet entitled
Reasons for Contentment; Addressed to the Laboring Part of the British Public.

“That,” observed Miss Phyfe, who had come to stand at his elbow, “is very dull stuff. Any poor person who reads it—providing he
can
read, which is most unlikely considering our present system of education, which is another area in sad need of reform—must shudder in horror at the notion that some miracle will make him rich. Sometimes I am very much in sympathy with the two gentlemen who aspired not only to restore the Anglo-Saxon constitution but Anglo-Saxon battle tactics as well, to which end they compiled an arsenal of battle-axes and pikeheads.”

Lord Darby set aside the pamphlet and turned to his hostess, who in her effort to remain upright had gone slightly cross-eyed. “My poor darling,” he said.

“I am
not
your darling!” responded Miss Phyfe gloomily. “No matter if Sidoney
does
say I am steeped in depravity.”

Depravity? Debauchery? With each of these disclosures, Lord Darby grew more intrigued. Once more he tested his theory that ladies in their altitudes could benefit from gentle exercise, and engaged Miss Phyfe in a brisk perambulation around the perimeter of her sitting room, paying special heed to such obstacles as wing armchair and Savonnerie rug. Only when her cheeks were pinker yet as result of her exertion did he allow her to collapse on the love seat, where he immediately sat down beside her.

“You are the oddest fellow!” gasped Morgan, whose somewhat overwrought condition was not wholly due to the exercise she’d been forced to take. “Although I suppose that one might say the same of
me.
Not that I am a fellow, of course—Oh dear!” She pressed her fingers to her hot cheeks. “You must be very much disgusted by a female who has taken too much wine to drink.”

It was not in Lord Darby’s makeup to be disgusted with any female, foxed or otherwise. Certainly he could not harbor that unappreciative emotion for this passionate innocent who with her total disregard of fashion, her impatience with convention, and her zeal for reforming everything in sight had quite unwittingly stolen away his heart.