Maggie MacKeever (7 page)

Edwina stared at this brazen and deplorably dirty miss and then at the great hound. A sound very much like a snort of laughter struck her astonished ears, its source the front of the cabriolet. “Neal!” she said, awfully.

“You must not blame him!” cried Delilah, who wished no censure to fall upon her rescuer. “In the case of Johann, gentle hints do not avail. I was even forced to fend him off with a frying pan! It was a great piece of imprudence that I did not think to bring it with me today—but then, I was in a great hurry to get away. But we have not been introduced! I am Delilah Mannering.”

Faintly, Edwina made known to Miss Mannering both her cousin and herself. Sibyl was to launch this hoyden into society? Edwina wished her joy of the task. Mercifully, Delilah’s debut would be delayed by her period of mourning. Perhaps an acquaintance with that circumstance might deflate some of the damsel’s vulgar high spirits. “My dear Miss Mannering, you must be prepared to hear some very bad news.”

Delilah, pondering her great good fortune, doubted that any news could be dire enough to ruin her pleasure in this day. All the same, in view of the strenuous efforts made in her behalf by these two kind people, it behooved her to be agreeable. She composed her features in an expression of patient resignation. “Yes, ma’am.”

Edwina was encouraged by this unexpected docility. “Miss Mannering, your father—and from your letter, I conclude that your mother, too—my dear, this is most difficult! You must console yourself that he cared for you very much, to the point of leaving to you all his wealth. An orphan! Such a sad affair!”

An astute young lady, Delilah had already concluded that Edwina Childe possessed more hair, and a queer color it was, than good common sense. She fixed her eyes on Lieutenant Baskerville’s strong back. “My father is dead?”

“He is, Miss Mannering.” Neal could find it in himself to pity the chit. “Your letter came to my cousin, as executor of your father’s will. There has been a search underway for you.”

Delilah digested this information. Anticipating maidenly megrims, Edwina extracted handkerchief and vinaigrette from her reticule. The silence was long and suspenseful. Then Delilah became aware that some response was expected from her.

“Fancy that!” she said as she scratched Caliban’s ears. “I really
was
an heiress all the time. I will admit I am relieved to hear it, for I felt very guilty about the whoppers I told Johann, and now it turns out they weren’t exactly lies. My mother always said I was an incurable humbugger, and I fear it is true. But I thought she would have disapproved a mesalliance with a tinker even more than my tarradiddles, and so I persevered.”

A tinker? Mercy! Perhaps the girl was unhinged by grief. “My poor child!” said Edwina. “You must not take it so to heart. In time, due to your father’s foresight, you will be able to command every luxury.”

“I daresay I shall enjoy that,” responded Miss Mannering, with devastating frankness, “but you’re all about in the head, ma’am, if you think my father left me provided for out of fondness. He didn’t like me above half. Nor, for that matter, did I like him!”

The vinaigrette was put to use, but not on behalf of the heiress; Edwina had recourse to it herself. Delicately, she made known her opinion that Miss Mannering was going on a very bad way. Although a young lady in her lamentable position was perhaps entitled to a display of aggrieved sensibility.

“Oh.” Delilah looked doubtful. “But I have no sensibility, ma’am—and while I admit to being an unconscionable little liar, which I
am
in spite of my efforts at curbing myself, I am not at all good at cutting a sham. Even if I
have
been practicing on Johann.  And I have not thought to ask where, since my father is dead, you are taking me.”

Edwina had been afflicted by a raging headache, which was not alleviated by the strong stench of dog that assaulted her fastidious nostrils, and did not trust herself to reply. She gazed unhappily upon the massive hound, whose homely head, due to the confines of the cabriolet, was resting in her lap. Caliban was grateful for this concession, even if his headrest had bony knees; he opened his mouth and panted in a friendly manner, in the process drooling on her skirt. “Neal!” Edwina moaned.

“We are taking you, Miss Mannering,” offered the lieutenant, “to the home of my cousin, the Duke of Knowles, who has constituted himself your guardian until you come of age. And I think it only fair to warn you that you may have good reason to wish that you had remained in the tinkers’ camp.”

Delilah was startled by this ungracious statement, and the brusque tone in which it was delivered; she would not have expected such churlishness from the noble Lieutenant Baskerville. Obviously the lieutenant and the Duke of Knowles were not on the best of terms. She glanced at Edwina.

That lady was gazing with arrant disapproval on Caliban. “Brute!” she ejaculated.

Naturally, Delilah could not but defend her pet. She was very sorry, she said stiffly, if Caliban had messed on Miss Childe’s skirt, but she thought Miss Childe had very strange priorities. In Delilah’s opinion, the feelings of her dog—and Caliban had had a very trying time of it lately, what with being dragged around the countryside, with never enough to eat—were a great deal more important than a piece of silk.

Edwina eyed the hound, which was eyeing her lush bonnet, trimmed with pretty flowers and ostrich plumes. Definitely, he looked hungry. “Not the dog!” she cried, jerking back her head. “Sandor!”

“The duke?” inquired Delilah. “Pooh! That he should offer me a home is strong proof of a good heart.”

“Sandor,” Neal offered gloomily from the front seat,
“has
no heart. He is a tyrant. “

“That he is,” agreed Edwina. “Devoid of all humanity.”

“‘He who willingly gives you one finger will also give you the whole hand’,” responded Miss Mannering. “According to Athalia.” Edwina looked thoroughly bewildered, and Delilah patted her hand.

That gesture, Edwina might have appreciated more had not Delilah’s fingers been sticky with peach juice. “You will discover for yourself that we speak the truth,” said she. “Sandor will make of you a cat’s-paw, as he has the rest of us.”

Immediately, Delilah resolved to take this sadly nervous lady, and perhaps even the churlish lieutenant, firmly in rein; obviously they had let themselves fall into the habit of being ordered around. Delilah considered herself admirably well suited to show them how to go about ordering their own lives with a minimum of fuss. “You need not concern yourself with my well-being,” she said cheerfully, as she considered this tantalizing prospect. What better occupation for a young lady of resource and energy? “I’ll stake my—my corset-cover!—that I shall be happy as a grig.”

CHAPTER SIX

Unaware of the severe doubler about to be tipped him by a quixotic fate, the Duke of Knowles passed a very busy day. As a gentleman of fashion, a Corinthian, he was accustomed to such expenditures of energy; as befit his position, the duke was a devotee of the hunt, the race, the cockpit. He gambled for enormously high stakes; he attended his Regent at Carlton House or the Pavilion; he followed the Fancy and even occasionally removed his exquisitely tailored coat to step into the ring with one of those professional bruisers. Furthermore, His Grace did all these things with admirable élan. If the cards were against him, he accepted the most staggering losses with an apt little quotation from Horace, and without batting an eyelash; he could drink the large majority of his acquaintances under the table; he kept his mistress, when a mistress he had in keeping, in the same splendid style as he kept his bloodstock. Nor did those ladies evince any chagrin at such treatment, which implied they were of no greater consequence than any other of His Grace’s innumerable possessions. Alexander Childe, the Duke of Knowles, was very popular among the pretty horsebreakers of London’s Rotten Row.

Currently, no fair incognita was privileged to enjoy His Grace’s generous protection. This was due to no onslaught of delayed prudery on His Grace’s part, but to the fact that his current inamorata already possessed a husband who kept her in excellent style. Unfortunately, the colonel’s good taste did not extend to treating his lady quite so well, and they were as a result estranged. Since the colonel was this day engaged with his Hussars in a sham battle upon the Downs—an event witnessed by most of Brighton, who were in attendance in every conceivable manner of vehicle from barouches to fish-carts; and which would result, before the day was done, in at least one broken arm and considerable confusion—the duke took it upon himself to console the colonel’s wife.

He found her gracefully reclining on her chaise longue, in a most elegant morning dress. The fair Phaedra, it speedily came clear, was in a very somber frame of mind.

Fair she was, in truth, a tall and voluptuous creature with black hair, a porcelain complexion, dark eyes that alternately melted and flashed. Upon the appearance of the duke, she roused sufficiently from her abstraction—result of a remark made to her that the Tenth were held in some contempt, having, while other less exalted regiments suffered heavy losses in Spain, been engaged in nothing more perilous than exhibiting themselves at reviews and gracing the parties of their commander in chief—to sit coquetting with him. The duke might have more appreciated her efforts to divert him had he not recently come to suspect that only a desire to serve her colonel an ill turn prompted Phaedra to open intrigue. That she would dare involve him in her scheming did not please Sandor, who considered the mapping out of subtle plots his own province; nor did he derive any humor from the situation. Still, he would not add to the discomforts of a lady already laboring under a budget of woes. At one time, before she discovered that she was in love with a husband whose disinterest matched his jealousy, Phaedra had been very good company.

Sandor took his leave of her after a scant half hour, reflecting that since the game of hearts fatigued him to death, he might be wise to consider indulging in it no more. Moreover, he decided, fair barques of frailty had bored him for some time. It was a startling realization, and one that left the duke unaccountably depressed, suggesting to him as it did that he was growing old. Next, he supposed, he would find himself abandoning his other habitual pursuits—his gaming and his bloodstock, the ring and the racetrack—for the pleasures of hearth and home.

In this vein reflecting, and reflecting also that a fireside encumbered with Miss Prunes and Prisms, as alas his was, would offer scant comfort to a man grievously stricken in years, His Grace strolled along the Steine. He derived no pleasure from the greetings of those acquaintances that he met, nor animation from the brisk sea breeze that swept inland, carrying with it the scent of gorse on the surrounding Downs. Indeed, he quite unwittingly snubbed several of his friends.

What the deuce possessed him? wondered the duke. He was in a very odd mood. He wished to do something, but he knew not what; the sham fight on the Downs held out as little allure as had Phaedra herself—and that the fair Phaedra had held out no allure was a clear indication that a man had lost possession of his senses, as the lady herself would have been first to agree.

In this frame of mind, the duke repaired to the library on the Marine Parade, in hope that the London newspapers would alleviate his ennui. The newspapers did not, nor did Miss Choice-Pickerell, whom he inadvertently interrupted at the telescope. Miss Choice-Pickerell, he was informed, was a little out of sorts, having been cut dead in the street by Miss Baskerville. Oddly, this information somewhat relieved Sandor’s gloom; in a world that had grown flat, Binnie could still be depended on to irritate him.

With this point of view the duke did not acquaint Cressida. She may have been a young woman of singular character, but he did not make the mistake of thinking she would understand his admittedly singular, and eminently masculine, viewpoint. Instead, the duke offered consolation of a sort: Miss Baskerville, he said, was prone to queer flights. What signified her megrims, he inquired; it was young Lieutenant Baskerville with whose conduct Miss Choice-Pickerell need be concerned. He trusted that young Lieutenant Baskerville had given his fiancée no reason for offense.

Young Lieutenant Baskerville had not, but the same could not be said of the duke himself, as Cressida archly explained. She could only think, due to the duke’s habit of interfering with Neal’s plans, that he did not approve his cousin’s betrothal. His Grace was also growing rapidly bored with Miss Choice-Pickerell but had his own reasons for wishing this betrothal to remain in effect; he therefore politely responded that, had he wished to scotch the affair, he would hardly have given his approval the match. No longer in the mood to peruse newspapers, and definitely in no mood to further bandy words with Miss Choice-Pickerell, he took his leave of her before he succumbed to the temptation of uttering a setdown so harsh that it must set his good work all at naught.

The duke understood Cressida perfectly. She was as selfishly single-sighted as he was himself. This circumstance roused in him no sense of kinship; Sandor thought that Neal had gotten himself betrothed in a fit of folly, so eager to gain his freedom that he would even marry in hot haste. Miss Choice-Pickerell might be at the very top of the trees, but she was not the duke’s notion of a comfortable little wife.

This reflection did not, despite his cousin Edwina’s views on the subject, recall to His Grace his own brief marriage. So far was he from being heartbroken by the demise of his ill-fated young wife that he had not spared her a thought for a shocking number of years. Had the duke been of a contemplative temperament, which he was not, he might have admitted that his marriage to a flighty, rather cowardly, definitely skitterwitted damsel had been a mistake. He had been fond of her, as any man might feel kindly toward a charming child; but he was a man singularly devoid of the more noble emotions, and what few finer sentiments he possessed were not wasted on a lady so long in her grave.