Maggie MacKeever (22 page)

Confronted with yet further proof of the very low opinion in which she was held by Simon Brisbane, Angelica did not long retain her powers of speech. “Your—?” she gasped, and sought to free herself from his grip. “Oh, no!”

“No?” This seduction was monstrous uphill work. Inexorably, Simon drew his excessively silly bit of fluff close once more. “Why have you turned so suddenly missish? Next you will say that a liaison with myself is much too dreadful to contemplate, which is a great piece of nonsense. You will like it very well, my darling. As for what the wicked world will say of such an entanglement—why should you care?”

Angelica was, by these remarks, thoroughly appalled. It was no more than she deserved for encouraging Simon to speak frankly to her about the path he followed; he thought her no more than one of the wicked herself. She was not surprised at it, especially. Admittedly she had not expected to be offered a slip on the shoulder—but amazement had quickly taken a lesser place to a much more disgraceful emotion. Scandalous as it was in her, Angelica came within an ace of responding to Simon Brisbane’s infamous proposal with a simple yes.

Passion did not get the better of reason, however, though the race was close. In the very nick of time, Angelica recalled Fennel’s request that in exactly such a case as this she should remember the obligations owed her family; and Valerian’s promise, again in precisely such a case, to challenge Simon to pistols at daybreak. “You go beyond the line of being pleasing!” Angelica murmured into Simon’s snowy cravat. “I am not—I have never—oh, this is all a hum!”

“Never!” echoed Simon, in tones of stark disbelief. “That, my girl, is doing it much too brown. I don’t mind, you know— after all, I
have,
and frequently! It would be very shabby of me to mind if in the past you’ve been a little indiscreet. What a silly girl you are, my darling. As if—”

“Pray, stop!” wailed Angelica, and struggled so frantically that Simon quirked a quizzical brow. Angelica glared at him and spat: “Sir, I find your suggestions insufferable and yourself offensive and demand that you apologize immediately!”

Had he been mistaken in her? Could Miss Smith, as she seemed to wish him to think, view him with repugnance? She looked so very unhappy, with her heaving bosom and tousled hair and blue eyes filled with tears, that he sought to soothe her. “I do apologize, my darling,” he said in kindly tones. “I would not cause you unhappiness for anything. If I have misread your character, let us consider it a temporary aberration on my part, deriving from concern for my father, and speak no more of it!”

But Angelica, in the perverse tradition of every female since Eve, was no sooner presented with a reasonable resolution to her dilemma than she decided it would not do. “Your father!” she echoed.

Simon caught up her hands, which had flown to her hot cheeks. “Don’t try and pull the wool over my eyes,” he said, though sympathetically. “You must know I will not stand for it.”

“Stand for what?” wondered Angelica, and then illumination burst upon her. Simon Brisbane thought her a designing hussy who had set her cap for Sir Randall, and it was with the purpose of thrusting a spoke in her wheel that Simon had paid her court. Thus was the mystery of why a hardened rakeshame should offer
carte blanche
to an ugly duckling solved: he had never dreamed she would agree. Angelica sent up thanksgiving that she had not betrayed the fact that, had not circumstance and birth and every shred of common sense prohibited, she would have liked more than anything to be Simon Brisbane’s light o’ love
.

Naturally Angelica would endure a thousand agonies before she betrayed to Simon the fool he had made of her, or the pain that smote her with the realization that she had been his dupe. “Release me, you brute!” she hissed. So startled was Simon by her vehemence that he complied. He was soon to be even more startled: Angelica boxed his ears.

Chapter Eighteen

It was a quiet afternoon in the fashionable part of town that surrounded the Chalmers town house; a lazy dreaming kind of day that inspired in adventurous souls a sudden yen for some disruption of their daily routine, and in the less bold a tendency to air-dream. Since the Millikins, for all their fits and starts and hankering after romance, were not especially bold, they had chosen to remain within doors. The one exception was Fennel, and he had not set forth wholly of his own accord.

Having dispatched her brother to the office of the benevolent Mr. Thwaite, Rosemary then turned her attention to those other of her siblings beneath the venerable Chalmers roof. Lily she found closeted with Angelica, applying cool cloths to their eldest sister’s brow. In response to Rosemary’s sharp inquiry, Lily recited a list of symptoms that ranged from giddiness and palpitations to an oppression on the chest; and Angelica herself proffered a faint statement that she had come by her just deserts and was no more than consequently fatigued. Though Rosemary could not help but think Angelica had been well-served—had not Angelica selfishly abandoned her family to pursue an ineligible romance?—she could not stand idly by and watch her sister suffer. Therefore she sent a servant to fetch her own supply of Velno’s Vegetable Syrup and Godbold’s Vegetable Balsam. Alas for Rosemary’s kindly intentions, which were greeted by Angelica with an incomprehensible remark about the inefficacy of syrup of poppies and hot bricks: the servant returned not bearing the prescribed remedies, but the intelligence that Lord Chalmers wished to speak immediately with his lady.

With a haste not at all commensurate with her exalted position—baronesses were definitely not expected to pick up their skirts and run hell-for-leather down the hallway—Rosemary sped toward her boudoir. Panting, disheveled, she paused on the threshold. Surely Chalmers dared not rummage through her possessions!

Again, alas: Chalmers had done precisely that thing. He waved a sheaf of papers beneath his wife’s delicate nose. “Come in,” he commanded, “and close the door!”

Rosemary obeyed. With a fine display of nonchalance, she walked to her
chaise longue.
If she sat down a trifle abruptly, her husband was not to know it was due to a quaking in her lower extremities. “You wished,” she said blandly, “to speak with me?”

“Not especially,” her lord retorted irately, “but it seems I must. What the devil have you been about, Rosemary? Did I not warn you about running into debt? Yet you have openly defied me—have in fact made me a figure of ridicule.”

“Oh, surely not!” protested Rosemary. “It is
I
who have run into a little scrape, not you! For my foolishness, you are hardly to blame.”

By this generous admission of folly, Lord Chalmers’s wrath was not assuaged. A most unbecoming jealousy had led him to ransack his wife’s boudoir in search of the identity of the man who dared send her
billets-doux,
and with whom he feared she connived to plant the antlers on his brow. Instead he had discovered that he wronged his wife in suspecting her of infidelity, which left him feeling very silly; and had paid her much too high a compliment in believing she had heeded his exhortations to refrain from running into further debt. In short, she had made a thorough laughingstock of him, which was a sore blow to his pride.

“Not to blame?” he echoed, looking like a thundercloud. “I would that were the case, madam. Could I but do so without coming under the gravest censure, I would wash my hands of you! But I am responsible for your conduct, as well as your debts. Good God, Rosemary, what possessed you? Next I suppose we would have been dunned in the streets!”

Though this was not Rosemary’s first encounter with an enraged spouse, she had never before seen Lord Chalmers make quite so horrid a kickup. She was sorry to have enraged him, and at the same time resentful; she thought it would behoove her to proceed most diplomatically. Accordingly, she remained silent.

But her husband was spoiling for a battle, and his wife’s silence further roused his spleen. “I am very much disgusted with you!” he announced, rather redundantly. “You have displayed a sad unsteadiness of character, a lack of stability—you have shown no more regard for the dignities I have bestowed upon you than—than the kitchen cat!”

“Have we one?” interrupted Rosemary. “A cat?”

“How the devil should I know?” snarled Lord Chalmers. “That’s
your
province! Pray do not interrupt! As I was saying, er—ah! Had you wished to make us food for scandal, you could not have acted differently. I make you my compliments! All the same, I’ve no intention of allowing a disagreeable stigma to be attached to my name.”

Despite her excellent intentions, diplomacy was not Rosemary’s long suit; and these extreme incivilities tried her patience too high. With immeasurable majesty Rosemary rose from her
longue,
placed her fists on her slender hips, announced that her husband’s accusations were more than flesh and blood could bear. Lord Chalmers, who on second thought would realize he might have been a trifle high-handed in his dealings with his wife, had not yet achieved the coolness of temper conducive to hindsight. Therefore, he fired up and repeated that her behavior left much to be desired. “Your profligacies,” he concluded, “are the outside of enough. Understand me, Rosemary, this is absolutely the
last
time you may expect me to bear the expense of your extravagance. To that vow I shall hold fas.! You must perforce learn to practice economy.”

“Economy!” Rosemary’s lovely eyes flashed. “If you had a grain of proper sentiment you wouldn’t be talking such fustian to me. Yes, fustian!” she repeated, as Lord Chalmers, nettled, made as if to speak. “Hear me out, sir; you owe it to me after the horrid things you have said! It is cruelly unfeeling of you to scold me when the whole thing is your fault—you keep me without money for common necessaries and yet expect me to live in the very best possible style. I’m sure it is no wonder I am brought to a standstill!”

Lord Chalmers was again strongly tempted to turn his wife over his knee, and might very well have done so had it not occurred to him that he had already conducted himself with a great deal less than baronial dignity. He said, repressively: “You are severe.”

“Oh, no!” responded Rosemary dramatically. “It is not
I
who am severe. Even so, it is useless to expect you to enter into my feelings on this subject—or any other! I’ll warrant that in the entire history of our marriage you have not been conversant with my feelings on any subject. Well, I take leave to tell you, sir, that I don’t care a button for your starving workmen and your political stratagems and your Hampden clubs!”

“So I perceive!” said Lord Chalmers frigidly.

“You perceive nothing!” snapped Rosemary, who was so sorely tried by all this fuss that she had not the least inhibition about displaying a definitely vulgar rage. “You are so enamored of your accursed affairs of government that you have no affection left to bestow upon
people.
I never expected that you should love me; that would have been a great deal too much to ask. I did think that you must
like
me a little to wish to marry me, but evidently I over-anticipated your capacity for warmth!”

Astounded, Lord Chalmers regarded his wife, who possessed the Millikin ability to look quite splendid in a rage. A brilliant orator as regarded affairs of state. Lord Chalmers now found himself in the most uncomfortable position of not knowing what to say. Even had words come to him, however, it is doubtful whether Lord Chalmers would have been given the opportunity for speech; Rosemary, who had for months been painstakingly discreet about her sentiments, was now throwing caution, with great gusto, to the winds.

“Because if you did like me, even just a little,” she continued, “you would not be eternally ringing peals over me. It was used to make me very sad! Now you will say it was no more than I should expect. Certainly you never gave me reason to think you might come to care for me.”

Not only astounded but more than a little embarrassed by these frank disclosures, Lord Chalmers sought to silence his wife. He shook her, ungently. “Rosemary, mind your tongue!”

Rosemary was not so easily dissuaded once embarked upon a bout of histrionics. “I will not!” she snapped. “It has never been the least use disputing with you, for you always have the best of it—and you shan’t this time! You may cut me off without a farthing, or publicly denounce me; it makes no difference. I would rather you did either than remain married to a man who won’t allow me sixpence to scratch with even though he’s rich as Croesus!”

Always it came back to his fortune. Lord Chalmers thought acerbically. Once more he shook his wife, this time with such savage energy that her mouth dropped open and her hair tumbled forward on her brow. “Chalmers!” she gasped. “How dare you use me in this way?”

“It is all of a piece with the other, madam!” retorted Lord Chalmers, shaking her still. “Am I not a brute?”

Rosemary suspected, from the look on her husband’s face, that her prudent course of action would be to disagree. Since the Millikins were not prudent folk, she said instead that her husband was indeed a brute, at which point he abandoned all remaining shreds of dignity and did indeed turn her over his knee.

It was perhaps an hour later when Fennel Millikin made his way down the upstairs corridor that opened into his sister Rosemary’s boudoir. His steps were not quite steady, nor his sense of direction trustworthy; he blundered into any number of chambers, including the chamber where Lily administered to Angelica, before broaching the boudoir. “What the deuce ails Angelica?” he demanded of Rosemary, who was stretched out face-down on her
chaise.
“Lily says she’s suffered a disappointment of the heart.”

“The devil,” responded Rosemary, sitting painfully upright, “fly away with Angelica! The worst has come to pass, Fennel: Chalmers Knows All!”

To this ominous utterance, Fennel responded with a frown. It was not possible that Lord Chalmers could be aware of
all
the ramifications of the awkward businesses in which the Millikins were involved; Fennel himself had just learned of some of those ramifications, which had been of a nature to send him posthaste into the nearest boozing-ken, there to revitalize his flagging spirits with a lethal potation known as Blue Ruin. “All what?” he said.