Amanda Scott (16 page)

“He is certainly cast away,” James said, observing him with a no doubt experienced eye. “He’s not what I expected, although, according to Ned, he is no more than a cipher these days anyway.”

Her temper flared, but honesty forbade her to argue the point. She could no more imagine the man in the pink and silver Turkish costume leading a host of her fellow Highlanders into battle than she could imagine him flying on a magic carpet. Her hopes seemed to crumble to ashes as she stood watching him ignore what were no doubt entreaties to be sensible from those who had joined him, and hold out his glass to be refilled yet again.

“Let’s get out of here,” James said. “Where’s Lydia?”

“Dancing,” Maggie told him again, “wearing a pink domino.”

They searched the teeming crowd, and finally Maggie, with relief, saw Lydia approaching arm in arm with a man in a black domino. Not till they were nearer did she recognize Lord Thomas.

Grinning at James, Lord Thomas said, “Told you I’d find her in a trice, and she’s perfectly ready to depart, too, for I’ve told her I arranged a splendid surprise for her that she’s very nearly spoilt by leaving Rothwell House tonight. Can’t think why you made such a fuss though, James. We must know dozens of folks here. Saw Lady Carolyn Petersham, for one. Can’t think why she wants to go dressing herself up like a Turkish slave girl to fawn at the feet of that sultan fellow yonder. Stap me, he’s gone now. That’s devilish odd. Made quite a tableau, they did.”

Involuntarily Maggie’s gaze followed his, and she felt vast relief to see that the prince had apparently accepted the advice of others and made himself less conspicuous.

James said abruptly, “We must go at once. Come, Lydia.”

She began to protest, but Lord Thomas tucked her hand in the crook of his arm and said with a teasing look, “You’ll soon be glad, my sweet—if we are not too late, that is. It is half past eleven already, so do as James bids you and make haste.”

James took the lead to make a path for the others through the crowd, and Maggie, following close behind, bumped right into him when he suddenly stopped. Something in the way he stood warned her, but she was nonetheless dismayed when he shifted so that she could see the tall masked figure who blocked his way. It was Rothwell, and the fury in his eyes stirred feelings that James’s anger only moments before had not touched. Her knees threatened to give way beneath her. Her heart began to pound.

Behind her, Lydia said, “What’s toward there? I thought we were in a great hur—Oh.” Not another word did she say.

O
UTSIDE ON THE FLAGWAY
, before anyone else could speak, James said hastily, “What brought you here, Ned?”

“Information received,” Rothwell snapped. “I have no wish to discuss it here in the street, but if you know what’s good for you, you will present yourself at Rothwell House first thing tomorrow to explain to me, if you can, how the
devil
you dared to escort Lydia and Miss MacDrumin to such a house as this one.”

“Boot’s on the other foot,” James said, glancing apologetically at Lydia.

Lord Thomas said naively, “Stap me, Rothwell, what sort of information did you receive? Seemed an innocent enough party to me, but then James and I only just arrived, you know.”

“I see.”

The look Rothwell cast his sister and Maggie boded no good for their future, and when Lydia visibly wilted, Maggie gathered her courage to say as calmly as she was able, “It was not Lydia’s doing, sir. It was mine.”

“I am quite well aware of that,” he replied, his flickering glance sending a flood of ice water through her veins. “We will not discuss that in the street either, however. My carriage awaits us yonder.”

Lydia looked at Maggie, then muttered unhappily, “We came with Oliver, Ned. He is waiting at Essex Stairs, and I daresay if we don’t tell him you have come for us, he will soon begin to believe we have been abducted, or worse, and raise an alarm.”

“No doubt,” he agreed. “I believe we’ll make use of him then, for not only will the journey be quicker by water but I have something to say to young Oliver as well as to you.”

Lord Thomas said, “By Jove, Rothwell, if you ain’t going to use your carriage, perhaps you won’t mind if—”

“By all means, take it if you want it.”

James said, “Thank you, Ned, we will. Do you still want to see me tomorrow?”

Rothwell’s grim expression relaxed slightly and he said, “Since I must suppose now that you came here only to take them away, no. I owe you my thanks, James.”

“Rubbish, but we will take the carriage. Save us walking or paying good coin for a public barge.”

As the two younger men walked away, Lydia, reaching up to untie the strings of her mask, said, “I doubt that you are the great surprise Thomas promised me, Ned. I wonder what it was.”

“Don’t take that mask off,” Rothwell ordered harshly. “How many people inside already know you were there?”

“N-no one,” she stammered. “At least, I did not identify myself to anyone, but someone might have guessed, I suppose.”

“We will hope no one did,” he said grimly.

They had walked some steps toward the tall archway before Maggie, remembering what Lydia had told her earlier, said, “I hope you will not blame your bargeman for any of this, Rothwell.”

“I certainly do blame him,” was the uncompromising reply.

Lydia said urgently, “But you mustn’t, Ned. I utterly coerced him, and so it would be wickedly unfair to blame him. Punish me if you must, but please don’t punish Oliver.”

“He was warned to take his orders only from me.”

Maggie said quietly, “I must tell you that I was determined to come here tonight, sir, and had Oliver not agreed to lend us his escort, we should most likely have hired a public conveyance instead. Faith, but we were safer with him, I think.”

Rothwell was silent, and though Maggie was sure her defense of the bargeman had only plunged her deeper into trouble with the earl, she was not sorry she had spoken. She did not want Oliver to surfer unfairly for helping her.

Although it was not a great distance from Essex Stairs to Rothwell House, the current was running swiftly, so Rothwell hired a second man from one of the many who made themselves available along the river for such duty, to help Oliver row them. They all removed their masks at last, but in the second oarsman’s presence nothing was said about the incident, and Maggie was grateful for Rothwell’s silence. She hoped the crisp night air and restful sounds of the water against the wooden barge would calm his exacerbated temper before she was forced to confront it. They might well have exerted a soothing effect, but it was lost the moment they rounded the curve in the river to hear a chorus of masculine voices upraised in song ahead, vigorously if discordantly accompanied by stringed instruments.

“What the devil?” Rothwell demanded.

“Lud, it must be Thomas’s surprise,” Lydia said, exchanging a look of dismay with Maggie. “He must have hired them to serenade me. No doubt it vexes you, Ned, but ’tis prodigiously romantic of him, you must agree!”

Maggie could have sworn that she heard Rothwell growl, but he said nothing more about the serenaders, who were floating in a barge of their own off the Rothwell-Richmond Stairs. At Rothwell House, the earl waited only until he had paid the extra bargeman and seen him off in a public vessel before saying to Oliver, “I will have something to say to you about this tomorrow, but for now you may take yourself off to bed.”

The young man accepted his dismissal with wary gratitude and turned away to cover the barge for the night. Silently, Rothwell led the way to the gate, opened it, and gestured for Maggie and Lydia to precede him. When Lydia hesitated, casting a last, wistful glance at the serenaders, Maggie took her arm and urged her quickly up the stairs.

Inside the house, when Lydia began to thank Rothwell for his leniency toward Oliver, he cut her off with a gesture and a warning look at Fields and Frederick, who had entered the grand saloon to take their wraps. Giving his gloves, mask, hat and cane into the butler’s keeping, he said, “You may go up to bed at once, Lydia. I will speak with you tomorrow.”

“But—”

“Now, Lydia.”

“Oh, very well,” she said, moving obediently ahead of him into the stair hall. At the foot of the stairs she looked over her shoulder at Maggie, grimaced expressively, and said, “We’ll go to my bedchamber. We have a great deal to talk over.”

Maggie would have been perfectly willing to accompany her, but she was not in the least surprised to feel a strong hand grasp her elbow or to hear his stern voice say, “Miss MacDrumin is not going upstairs just yet, so you may go straight to bed, Lydia. Step into my library, Miss MacDrumin.”

For a minute, Lydia hesitated, looking mutinous, but she held her tongue, and as Maggie was propelled toward the library, she heard the younger girl’s footsteps clicking upward on the uncarpeted stairs.

Rothwell said nothing more until he had released her arm and shut the library door, but then, without so much as asking her to sit down, he spoke with chilling fluency for several uncomfortable minutes without pause. Her experience with her quick-tempered father having long since shown Maggie the futility of attempting to interrupt a gentleman’s tirade in full spate, she braced herself to withstand the verbal flood in dignified silence, but she quickly learned that Rothwell’s anger was altogether different from MacDrumin’s. Where her father tended to explode into fury, to shout, and to say whatever he took it into his head to say—albeit with admirable, even formidable, fluency—Rothwell’s anger was coldly controlled, his manner cutting, his points not only unanswerable but driven home with painful accuracy. By the time he paused for breath Maggie’s dignity was in shreds and she was fighting tears. She did not want to meet his icy gaze, and thus felt a certain pardonable pride when she was able to force herself to do so.

With barely a quaver in her voice, she said, “I am sorry to have vexed you. May I go now?” And with these simple words, she speedily discovered yet another difference between Rothwell and the fiery MacDrumin, since the latter, once he had exploded, would impatiently have dismissed her.

Rothwell said, “Do you have nothing to say for yourself?”

The steel in his voice sent another tremor up her spine, but valiantly, her throat aching with suppressed tears, she said, “I have apologized, sir. I do not know what more I can say.”

“That was no apology, Miss MacDrumin.” His voice was gentle now, but still without warmth. In fact, its very gentleness made it all the more frightening. “Having lived a good portion of my life with a woman whose notion of plain-speaking is just that sort of verbal nonstatement—not to mention having listened to speeches in Parliament the sole purpose of which seem to be to make a listener think he is hearing one thing when he is hearing quite another—I am a veritable expert on such methods.”

She stared at him. “I do not understand you, Rothwell. I most certainly apologized.”

“Not properly, you didn’t. You said only that you are sorry to have vexed me, nothing more. While perfectly understandable, that has nothing to do with the matter at hand.” When she remained silent, thinking over his words, he said in that same soft tone, “Perhaps you might explain just what sort of idiocy prompted you to take my sister to a Jacobite ball. Are you sorry about that, or is no tactic beneath your contempt as long as you can accomplish your purpose, whatever that might be?”

The accusation shocked her. Turning away, fighting for calm, she said, “I certainly meant no harm to Lydia, sir. She is my friend, and had it not been for the necessity of—”

A powerful hand seized her shoulder and spun her back to face him. A second hand gripped her other shoulder, and no longer at all calm, he gave her a shake. “How dare you pretend your interests are more important than hers! What kind of woman are you that you think nothing of compromising an innocent young girl’s reputation merely to serve your own selfish and quite ridiculous ends? Was getting to that ball truly worth ruining Lydia, who has shown only kindness and generosity toward you?”

“We … we remained m-masked the whole time,” she said, fighting the aching constriction in her throat and wishing he would let her go. “I would never have allowed—”

“I don’t want to hear what you think you might or might not have allowed,” he retorted, his grip tightening. “Shall I next discover that it was not by chance that James encountered you in that court room, that his bringing you here was in fact part of some complex Jacobite plot? Fiend seize you, madam!” He shook her again. “What manner of villain are you?”

Tears welled into her eyes. She was aware that his fingers would leave bruises on her shoulders, but she made no attempt to free herself, putting all her energy into finding words that would calm his terrible anger. “I … I am no villain, sir, truly. I did not wish to take Lydia with me, but you had made it impossible for me to get away on my own, and she said she would help. After that, there may have been a way to prevent her from going, but I did not know of one.” She had been gazing at his elaborately embroidered waistcoat as she spoke, but he was silent for so long that at last she forced herself to look up. His gaze was too penetrating. She looked quickly away again.

He released her, and the frightening gentleness turned his words to a spine-tingling drawl when he said, “In point of fact, you are still telling me that you believe my sister’s reputation to be of less importance than meeting your Jacobite friends.”

“I don’t believe that at all,” she cried impulsively. “Had I not thought it so imperative that I meet—”

“Just so,” he said when she broke off in dismay at what she had nearly said. “If you want to deceive me, you had much better learn to think before you speak, for I am more than seven, you know. You say you could think of no way to keep Lydia from going with you, but the fact is that had you thought before acting, you could have prevented her going in any number of ways, not least of which was by staying here yourself until a more felicitous opportunity occurred to meet with your friends. So suppose you tell me the whole truth. I have already taken note of the fact that you did not deny taking part in some damned Jacobite plot.”