Maggie MacKeever (2 page)

By this justification of her fears that Angelica meant to behave in her usual strong-minded and managing manner, Rosemary was further depressed. “Well! As if I would! Of course I never thought of such a thing! Still, it need not be common knowledge that poor Lily has no more than a pittance. Consider, Angelica! You wouldn’t want Lily to dwindle into a spinster left upon the shelf.”

Since Angelica had attained precisely that unenviable position, her response was wry. “Better a spinster,” she rejoined, “than engaged in an alliance devoid of either affection or respect.” To her surprise, Rosemary flushed.

“Dear Angelica,” said Lily, who compensated for a lack of native wit not only with rabid imagination but also with the kindest of hearts, “you must not worry about
that!
I mean to marry only for love, and in that case the gentleman I marry won’t care that I haven’t a penny with which to bless myself. Just to be certain, I shall choose a gentleman of property—perhaps even a duke!—and one with enough for
all
of us. So you see that your fears are utterly groundless!” She smiled, enchantingly.

Of the misapprehensions that Lily cherished—gentlemen of property, especially dukes, being notoriously disinclined to wed females unblessed by a single penny—she remained unenlightened, her siblings being too fond of her to cause her unhappiness. Angelica sought a change of subject. “Where is Chalmers?” she inquired.

Where indeed? Rosemary thought resentfully. Trust Angelica to thrust straight to the heart of the matter. Lady Chalmers might not have possessed the most brilliant of understandings, but she was shrewd enough to question whether matters of government accounted for all the time spent by her lord away from his fireside, as the baron claimed. A staunch Tory, Lord Chalmers was very much involved with matters of government, made even more complex by the end of the Continental wars, an event that in some incomprehensible fashion seemed to have plunged the country into economic disaster. Rosemary thought it typically callous of her husband to expect her to concern herself with manufacturers who, without war contracts, dismissed their workmen and closed their doors, or with farmers who suffered a peacetime slump in the prices fetched by their crops. Certainly it was all very sad, but what could
she
do? Rosemary had problems of her own.

But Angelica awaited a response, with an expression that Rosemary interpreted as frankly pitying. “Chalmers?” she echoed, absently, as if caught spinning air-dreams. “He’s gone to confer with Lords Liverpool and Castlereagh—the chief figures in the government, you know! I suppose it has to do with the groups of radicals who are everywhere demanding reform, though what they think to accomplish by smashing machinery I do not know!”

Still Angelica wore that compassionate face, and Rosemary laughed hollowly. “Are you thinking he should have been here to meet you? Indeed, he wanted to be! But Chalmers is an important man, my dears, and his time is not his own. Frankly I’m glad of it; to be always living in one’s husband’s pocket is a dead bore!” If excuses she offered, they were no more than the very excuses provided her by her lord. Resolutely Rosemary engaged Lily and Fennel in a discussion of the gaieties of the metropolis.

Angelica listened without comment. She knew herself to be in truth the oddity that her family considered her, the possessor of the larger portion of the Millikin intelligence, and the least amount of the ravishing Millikin charm. But one of the family must be clever, where the rest were not: marriage had patently failed to inspire Rosemary with more prudence than she had hitherto possessed; Lily could not be expected, even with an advantageous match at stake, to desist from her usual vagaries, most recent among which had been an aborted elopement with an impecunious poet who had written incomprehensible effusions to her shell-like earlobes; Fennel, released from the restrictions of his university, was ripe for any mischief. Were not all three to land themselves in the briars, Angelica must contrive prodigiously. Such effort, she reflected ruefully, was the price demanded of her, the ugly duckling, for inclusion in their ranks. Not for the first time in her twenty-seven years, Angelica wished—oh,
how
she wished—she too might be a swan.

Chapter Two

Within the space of only days, Miss Lily Millikin became the toast of London. Gentlemen had only to receive an introduction to begin to pay her court, indefatigable in their attentions, sighing and dying and sending her countless posies and tokens, dubbing her the Fair Incomparable—all of which gratified Lily’s sister Rosemary, even as it made her wish to gnash her teeth. Rosemary was, after all, the reigning family beauty, and at twenty years of age could hardly be expected to relinquish that position without some feeling of chagrin. Still, she had had her Season, had married Chalmers with the express intention of providing her younger sisters with opportunities to make equally brilliant matches; and it was hardly admirable in her to envy Lily’s success.

Despite these stern admonitions to herself, Rosemary remained envious. If only Chalmers—but he paid more attention to her sisters. Bleakly, Rosemary envisioned her future, through which paraded a steady succession of her siblings, each gayer and younger and lovelier than herself. Even Angelica, she thought bitterly, was more fortunate. A spinster of seven-and-twenty, never blessed by masculine admiration, could hardly expect other than to be left upon the shelf.

In this, Rosemary seriously misjudged her sister; Angelica had more than once studied her reflected image and questioned whether she was quite so dowdy as her glamorous family considered her to be. Yet Rosemary’s lack of perception must not be held against her; she was young, and unhappy; if she was also self-centered it was because she knew no other way to be.

That particular failing was not shared by the next eldest of her sisters; Lily Millikin might be fairly called a complete flirt, but in her exquisite person there was not a single selfish bone. Furthermore, the possessor of a rampant imagination must needs also possess an avid curiosity. Lily was not only aware that Rosemary was deep in a fit of the blue-devils, she also knew why. As she pondered what might best be done with this knowledge, she gazed dreamily about the Chalmers drawing room.

That chamber was packed to its wainscoted walls with persons of rank. The gentlemen were resplendent in double-breasted dress coats and evening breeches, luxurious waistcoats and high stiff cravats; the ladies equally splendid in silks and satins and crape, lushly bedecked with flowers and jewels and the occasional plume. With a formal dinner party —the menu for which had included dishes too numerous and varied to record, all adjudged superb, which judgment, had he but been made aware of it, would have assuaged the Chalmers’ superior and highly volatile French chef, currently indulging a Gallic nerve-storm in his immaculate kitchen— Chalmers House had been thrown open to select members of the
ton.

Lily moved through the crowded room, an ethereal-looking creature in a gown of white gauze, on her golden curls an Austrian cap of satin and blonde. To Lady Jersey’s reminder to present herself at Almack’s, to Beau Brummel’s gentle quips, Lily responded in her usual musical tones, and with her usual dreaming expression, with the result that all who spoke with her decided that Miss Lily Millikin was a good, biddable girl, a trifle lacking in animation perhaps, but a damsel who would be unexceptionable once she’d acquired some town-bronze.

These conclusions, as Lily’s fond family might have attested, had they been applied to concerning the matter, were marvelously incorrect. To use the word with no bark on it, Lily was as biddable as a mule. When Lily looked the vaguest, she was most to be reckoned with; behind her bemused manner, her romantical high flights, lurked a startlingly strong will. This mule-headedness, combined with Lily’s lack of what her family called horse-sense, was the reason why Angelica had abandoned the younger members of the family to their own devices while she accompanied Lily to London in the role of gooseberry.

This, too, Lily understood, and didn’t mind in the least; Lily was far too kindly to harbor such emotions as rancor and resentment. Indeed, Lily hoped Angelica would succeed in preventing her from getting in a pickle, an event that would distress Angelica far more than Lily herself. Lily was accustomed to involving herself unwittingly in difficulties. She was also accustomed to Angelica extricating her from them. Lily’s delicate eyelids twitched, then, as inspiration struck. Who better than Angelica to deal with Rosemary’s little problems? Pensively, Lily approached her eldest sister, engaged in conversation with Lord Chalmers near the marble-faced fireplace.

“The situation,” said that informative gentleman, “grows steadily worse. All over the country banks are calling in their money; some have stopped payment and closed their doors. With bankers unwilling to advance or discount, not even the rich have money to spare. I assure you, Miss Millikin, that thousands of servants are out of a place.”

“Goodness!” responded Angelica, rather foolishly.

Lord Chalmers appeared to consider this an adequate rejoinder. “Conditions in London,” he continued, “are no better than in the provinces. The city is crowded with demobilized sailors and soldiers, the East End districts are crowded with thousands of half-starved unemployed workers, the workhouses and debtors’ prisons are crowded past capacity.”

“How terrible!” said Angelica, since comment was clearly expected of her. “Surely something can be done!”

To this uninformed viewpoint—if there was a means to alleviate the country’s current economic crisis, that means remained unknown to the government—Lord Chalmers responded politely with an erudite discussion of the Corn Laws passed in the previous year, measures designed to protect the price of home crops from the devaluation attendant upon the introduction into the country of cheap foreign corn, and also designed to restore agricultural prosperity at the cost of the consumer, which had so enraged the poor that Members of Parliament known to support the measure were attacked en route to the House.

Angelica attended his words closely; Lord Chalmers was as interesting as he was erudite. Yet, though she liked the baron very well, Angelica could not help but wonder why Lord Chalmers, whose turn of mind was demonstrably serious, had chosen to marry the frivolous Rosemary. Her sister’s choice, decided Angelica, as she covertly studied Lord Chalmers, was more readily understood: the baron was a very handsome man in a stern, aloof style. He was tall, athletic in figure; his hair was dark and his eyes a chilly gray; his attitude, when not engaged in discussions of a political nature, was that of a man laboring under perennial boredom. In short, Lord Chalmers would present a stimulating challenge to any ambitious, enterprising miss.

Thought of enterprising damsels recalled to Angelica her current responsibility, and she looked around rather anxiously for Lily. “Here I am!” said that young lady, at her elbow. “Dearest Angelica, you
were
looking for me? How very fortunate, because I wish to speak to you most particularly!”

Lord Chalmers was a gentleman of acute perceptions: realizing his presence was not wanted, and additionally harboring a keen distaste for conversations of the frivolous nature habitually carried on by females, he excused himself. Lily stared after him, dreamily. “It’s a pity Rosemary saw him first,” she remarked. “Chalmers would have suited
you
very well, Angelica. Not only are you both very clever, you’re almost of an age.”

Angelica, inured by repetition to Lily’s romantical high nights, looked a trifle sardonic. “Fiddlestick!” said she. “I’m quite sure Chalmers is perfectly content with Rosemary, while I am quite content to be an ape-leader. We’ll have no more of your absurd attempts at matchmaking, Lily!”

Angelica was content? Lily knew prevarication when she heard it; heaven knew she was well qualified to do so, having uttered her own fair share of clankers. It was a pity, thought the kind-hearted Lily, that Angelica had been born into the Millikin family, where a slender purse had allowed only one sister to have a London Season, that sister quite naturally not Angelica but Rosemary, and where Angelica dwelt forever in the shadow of the staggering family loveliness. Though she never said so, Lily considered Angelica poorly treated by her siblings. Of course they all adored her; if not the loveliest, Angelica was the best loved of all the Millikins—and by that very affection, by their ceaseless demands, the Millikins kept Angelica bound to them without any opportunity for a separate existence of her own. It was a very great pity, and Lily had long ago resolved to make amends. It was an effort in which she had received little cooperation, and less appreciation, from Angelica, who was currently regarding her with the beginning of a frown.

“I don’t think so,” Lily said simply. “I don’t think Chalmers is content. Nor would
you
think so, had you overheard the things he said to Rosemary just before the guests arrived.”

Angelica bit back a sigh. In search of fuel for her imagination, Lily displayed amazing initiative. “And just how did
you
happen to hear this conversation, miss?”

Lily looked simultaneously indignant and seraphic. “I just happened to be passing by the room where they were talking,” she protested. “Good heavens, Angelica, you will next accuse me of being vulgarly inquisitive, and it was no such thing.”

“Doing it rather too brown!” remarked Fennel, joining his sisters in time to witness Lily’s enactment of slandered innocence. “Eavesdropping again, were you, puss? Damned if
I
haven’t heard the queerest thing! You know the poet Byron? You must, everyone does! It seems he’s terrified of the dark and sleeps in a lighted room with pistols under his pillows, which I must say is mawkish behavior for a grown man. Anyway, his wife’s going about saying he’s a madly wicked person, guilty of all sorts of abominations. He may even have to leave town!”

There was on Fennel’s handsome features a look of admiration for such masculine boldness, and Angelica suffered a distinct pang. Bad enough that Fennel should have set his heart on a captaincy in the Hussars, a position far above his touch and the resources of the family pocketbook; but that he should contemplate modeling himself on the scandalous Lord Byron, one of whose discarded ladyloves had just published a shocking novel in which the poet played a leading and un-laudable part, was infinitely worse. “We were talking,” she said repressively, “about Rosemary.”