The Mischievous Miss Murphy (19 page)

“The originator of the prank may have written out four thousand invitations, but I think the two thousand we sent were sufficient,” Candie said, once again checking her list. “As it’s almost noon, I do believe the traveling coaches should be arriving soon, sent for to carry the newlyweds off on their honeymoon.”

As if on cue, the traveling chariots and four appeared, and within moments the street had erupted into bedlam, the chariots all impeding one another as they struggled to reach the same goal, the horses rearing and plunging as their drivers cursed and sawed on the reins.

The four schemers enjoyed a delicious picnic lunch as lawyers eager to write wills, doctors carrying instruments for the amputation of limbs, artists anxious for commissions, fishmongers bearing cod and lobsters, butchers lugging legs of mutton, filthy coal heavers, and undertakers delivering coffins in which to display the deceased became the targets of the increasingly hysterical Ivy Dillingham’s demands that they all go away and leave her alone.

“The coffins were a nice touch,” Hugh Kinsey told Candie, who acknowledged his compliment by raising her wineglass to him.

There were, as the day wore on, some omissions of invitations that had contributed greatly to the official inquiry the original 1809 prank had set off. The Lord Mayor had not been invited to tea with a visiting dignitary, the Governor of the Bank of England and the Chairman of the East India Company had not been advised that they could learn of ongoing fraud in their companies if they answered their summons, and the Duke of Gloucester was not told that a dying woman, once an attendant of his royal highness’s mother, would make a confidential communication of the greatest importance if he were to present himself at Miss Dillingham’s, but then the four conspirators were not anxious to have their part in the chaos of the day discovered.

By four of the clock, the last of the two thousand had come and gone, leaving the street looking as if a war had been waged on the cobblestones between the flagways, and it seemed only fitting that the last summons of the day brought a man drawing a fully loaded hay wagon, commissioned to spread straw on the street outside Miss Dillingham’s in preparation for an imminent “blessed event.”

Ivy Dillingham’s ancient traveling coach, with hastily stuffed bandboxes tied to its top and its curtains drawn on its occupant, tracked silently over the straw as that harassed lady opted to rusticate at the small country estate dear Harry had left her rather than stay and face the repercussions (and the bills for services rendered) the days’ events were sure to bring.

“A toast, my friends,” Hugh said, filling his companions’ wineglasses. As they all raised their glasses he intoned solemnly, “To a successful rout. May she not stop running till she reaches John O’Groats!”

“Here, here!” his companions seconded and, downing their drinks in one gulp, they all turned and hurled their glasses into the fireplace.

“Through sulking, are you?” Max remarked upon first encountering Betancourt on Bond Street. “M’niece said you were back in town, but she was close as an oyster as to how she knew. Still trying to turn her toes off the straight and narrow? It won’t work, you know. My Candie’s one in a million. Not like you English.”

Tony was in no mood for Max’s taunts. After sleeping the clock round and rising with a head that still housed a few discordantly clanging bells, he had allowed a further twenty-four hours to pass before daring to venture out into the sunlight once more.

A belated but nonetheless distressing recollection of his abominable behavior in front of Candie on his first night back in London had so far kept him from calling on the ladies in Portman Square, for even though he was still resolved to wed Candice, he was deuced embarrassed over his poor handling of his proposal.

The last, the very last thing the Marquess needed was to be forced to endure Murphy’s pointed jibes and veiled innuendos as to Candie’s possible rejection of his suit.

“Now what’s the matter with Englishmen?” Tony at last asked Max, concentrating on what he decided would be the lesser of two evils.

“Greedy devils, all of them,” Max explained. “Would toss their own grandmothers out into the cold if there were a penny to be made in the process. That’s why you’re missing the mark with my Candie. Money and baubles mean less than nothing to her. You won’t win her by dangling diamonds under her nose. Now take your English females—”

“I have,” Tony cut in facetiously, a lopsided grin lighting his previously grim features, “in regular doses since my middle teens.”

“Ah, ‘tis a right fine scoundrel you are,” Max laughed appreciatively. “But avarice is not limited only to the fair damsels of your land, but is evenly distributed throughout the whole of England, from chimneysweep to Duchess.”

“I do believe I should make exception to that remark, perhaps even call you out, but I imagine you have some way of proving your point. Am I right, Max, do I scent a wager in the air?”

“Not a wager, lad,” Max contradicted, “merely a learning experience, aimed at showing you your countrymen as Candie has been made to see them. Candie, like all the Irish, is the real aristocrat. To my niece food is considered nourishment, clothing naught but warmth, and shelter anything with four walls and a roof. She disdains fripperies and niceties as nothing more than gilding on the lily. Nothing puffed up or pompous about the Irish, my lord. It is you English who put so much store on appearances and the accumulation of wealth. Beneath our rags beat the heart of the true aristocrat; strip an Englisher to the buff and you have naught but naked greed.”

They walked on together a few paces while Tony sorted all this out in his head. Then, thinking he had just the right rebuttal, he said, “But Candie says she will not wed me because I am above her. My title and wealth seem to impress her.”

Max shook his head. “Candie don’t give a snap for your title or your gold, you daft man,” he contradicted positively. “But
you
do. It’s you she’s thinking of when she turns down your proposal. She did turn you down, didn’t she?”

“As if you didn’t know.”

“I didn’t,” Murphy admitted, hating to show Coniston how his control over his niece had slipped a notch so that she no longer confided in him. “I knew she liked you, any fool could see that she had allowed her head to be turned by your pretty face, but I didn’t know things had come to this point. So tell me, what are you going to do about it? Put your tail between your legs and run away?”

“Isn’t that what you’d like me to do?” Tony asked, looking at the man intently. “Lord knows I have you to thank for warning her off.”

“And what else could I be doing but my duty, being her only relative still above ground? Yet, to tell you the truth, lad, I’ve been doin’ a bit of pondering on the subject and I do believe I’ve found myself softening a bit. You’d be good to my Candie, I’m thinking, and I’d sleep easier at night if I thought her future secure, don’t you know.”

Tony stopped in his tracks, so surprised was he over this last statement of Murphy’s. “And is it sickening for something you are?” he asked in a broad affected brogue. “Besides being a dedicated rake, I’m an Englishman into the bargain. I find it hard to believe what you’re saying, not that I’m not happy to hear it.”

Max’s ears turned a bright red. “There’s English and then there’s English, though it pains me dear to say it. You’re one of the good ones. Having met more than a few of the bad ones, I’ve learned to tell the difference. So has my niece, although she has another reason of her own for shying away from you.”

“I know she’s not ashamed of being Irish,” Tony reasoned aloud, “so it has to come back to this business of rank and wealth. Damn and blast, Max, if her being poor and having to live by her wits doesn’t bother me, why should it bother her?”

Max looked at his young friend a moment, trying to gauge whether or not to confide in him, then shook his head and changed the subject. “Ah, here’s a fine-looking jewelry establishment. Just what I need to prove my point about your countrymen. Care to join me, lad?” he asked as he turned to enter the prestigious establishment.

Knowing that no amount of questioning about Candie would accomplish anything once the Irishman chose to end his confidences, Coniston only shrugged and followed after the man, willing to allow himself a bit of amusement.

Once inside, Max poked about a bit, eyeing various pieces of jewelry that lay in glass-topped cases before purchasing a rather inexpensive bauble that he requested be placed in a box bearing the establishment’s name. Then he motioned Tony over into a corner and, opening the box, lifted out the bauble and replaced it with a quantity of brightly colored various sized pieces of glass he poured from a pouch he had extracted from his pocket. Replacing the lid of the box, he gave Tony a broad wink. “Now we’ll have a bit of fun,” he said, bowing the Marquess in front of him through the doorway.

Max took no more than three steps onto the flagway before he pretended to stumble, the jeweler’s box tumbling from his hands and spilling open upon the ground. To the untrained eye, it appeared that a considerable fortune in emeralds, diamonds, and rubies was bouncing and rolling about in the dust at their feet, and the resultant chaos was all that Murphy had known it would be.

Tony, pushed rudely against the front of the jewelry store by the sudden crush of people bent on scooping up some of the jewels for themselves, could only gape open-mouthed at the sight unfolding before his eyes. Sweeps jockeyed with buckram-padded dandies, ladies of quality risked their finery to scrabble on their knees beside painted women of the evening, and bankers, sportsmen, and valets scuffled like urchins fighting over a toy. When he spied out his recent mistress, Lady Bledsoe, clutching a particularly large green stone to her bosom and screeching, “Mine, mine I tell you!”—his look of incredulity faded, to be replaced by a smile of unholy glee, and he clapped Max on the back in congratulation of a point well expressed.

“Max, to quote Syrus, no Irishman you understand, but a good man for all that, ‘Society in shipwreck is a comfort to us all.’ Why it should so amuse me to see my fellow man brought so low I cannot tell you, but I must agree you have proven your point to a fare-thee-well.”

The older man, slipping a hand around the Marquess’s elbow, merely smiled his agreement before urging his friend to join him in breaking a bottle or two at a nearby inn. “It’s a great thirst I seem to have worked up this morning, don’t you know. But then, who needs an excuse to drink with a friend, hmmm?”

As he paid down his blunt for two bottles of the inn’s finest, it never even occurred to Tony that any motive save pure friendship lay behind Max’s cherubic, smiling face.

L
iving in Portman Square, surrounded by luxury and being treated as if she were a real lady, was beginning to appeal to Candice more than she would have cared to admit. It was almost as if she had been born to such luxury, such elevated status. She felt comfortable with Lady Montague and the several members of the ton Patsy had introduced her to, and as the days had passed into weeks, the idea of going back out on the road with Max lost more and more of its allure.

There were times, even as her finer self tried to deny it, that she immensely regretted turning down Betancourt’s drunken proposal, if only so that she could continue to live in the style to which his sister had accustomed her. But no, her finer self always reminded her, that wouldn’t be fair. Besides, it wasn’t really the luxury of soft living that so seduced her; it was the absence of worry over where she would next lay her head, when she would next be able to fill her belly, what she would do when Max’s good luck finally ran out, that lent such a rosy glow to her current lot.