Maggie MacKeever (12 page)

“You were to call me Ned.”

His voice was low, his breath warm against her cheek. The intimacy of the moment caused Julie to come over queerly faint.

She stepped away from him. Ned gazed out over the theater. “Niddicock doesn’t accompany you tonight?”

“Niddicock spends as little time as possible with his mama. Do people really call him that?”

“It suits, does it not?”

It did that. “There’s no real harm for Tony, for all his tongue runs twelve score to the dozen. I have to have that glove. Please, Ned.”

He glanced at her. “It’s so important to you?”

“More than you can imagine.” Cap’n Jack might be present. Watching her. Wondering why she hadn’t fulfilled his last request.

Ah well, if she wound up back in Newgate, she would no longer have to tolerate Lady Georgiana’s jobations and whims. Julie had a horrid suspicion that she might have spoke that last thought aloud.

Voices rose behind them. Newcomers had entered the box. Julie turned away from Ned’s quizzical glance. A dark gentleman, a pale woman, and— 

Clea came quickly toward them. “Cousin Hannah says a lady should never be alone with a gentleman for any length of time, lest she be compromised.”

“I don’t want to know that you know what’s involved in being compromised.” Ned said, looking appalled.

“Then I shan’t tell you.” Clea smoothed her white skirts. “Am I not a picture? Fine feathers make fine birds. I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather be a pigeon than a peacock, but we shan’t tell Cousin Hannah that.” She inspected Julie. “Who are you?”

Ned caught Julie’s hand and tucked it through his arm. “Miss Wynne, this is my sister Clea, who has yet to learn her manners. Clea, say hello to Miss Julie Wynne from York.”

Clea cocked her head. “Have we met before, Miss Wynne?”

“I don’t think so, miss,” Julie spoke gruffly, in an attempt to disguise her voice.

Ned chuckled, confound the man. “Have you a frog?”

Frog? What about a frog?

“In your throat.”

“It’s the theater,” Clea said helpfully. “We are all breathing each other’s air.”

Ned spoke to his sister. “You haven’t met Miss Wynne unless
you have been to Yorkshire. She is the daughter of a parson, now deceased.”

“How sad,” Clea said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

The young lady’s gaze was entirely too shrewd. Julie turned away. The newcomers — Lord Saxe and Mrs. Viccars — were speaking of the recent announcement in the press that Wellington, en route from Paris to Madrid, had been waylaid on the road with his two aides-de-camp and murdered, news that had mercifully been proven false.
The lady was wearing a celestial blue gown with long sleeves and a deep flounce of lace. The gentleman was so handsome that no sensible female would trust him out of her eyesight. Lady Georgiana patted around her person in search of quizzing glass,
handkerchief, mirror, snuffbox or smelling salts. She saw Julie standing with Lord Dorset, and beckoned imperiously.

“I warned you,” muttered Julie. “She’ll give me a rare trimming, and it will be all your fault.”

“Allow me.” Ned urged Julie forward. “My apologizes, Lady Georgiana, for monopolizing Miss Wynne. We were discussing mutual acquaintances in Yorkshire.” As he spoke, a buzz swept through the theater. The audience rose from their seats to cheer. The Distinguished Guests had arrived.

They entered not from Bow Street or Covent Garden, but by way of a private staircase through the royal entrance from Hart Street. The sovereigns were in uniform, their hair worn plain in the modern fashion, Prinny the only one of the party with powder in his curls. Generals Chernichev and Bülow attended their monarchs; the Czar and the Emperor of Prussia and the minor princes shared the Regent’s box.
Lady Georgiana pointed out Prince Augustus of Russia, the black
sheep of his family, with whom Princess Caroline was currently entranced; Prince Frederick of Prussia; Prince Paul of Württemberg; thin pale Francis of Austria with his long face and his tendency to go about in the greatest possible state. The audience lined up with their backs to the
stage in hope of getting near enough to shake someone’s hand.
A special anthem was sung, followed by “God Save the King”, repeated twice.

Julie paid no attention to either Lady Georgiana or the Allied Sovereigns, or even the ostracized Princess of Wales, who during the spirited singing had entered another box. Clutched in her left hand, where Lord Dorset had tucked it, was the stolen glove.

Chapter Twelve

Neither will the wave which has passed by be called back; nor can the hour which has gone by return.
— Ovid

Weak morning sunlight streamed through the library windows, past the dusty draperies, across the shabby carpet, alit at last on the ancient desk. Behind it, the current earl of Dorset lounged in
breeches and a loose linen shirt. Opposite him, Lord Saxe was sprawled in a carved chair.

Kane’s expression was incredulous. “You gave her the glove.”

To the usual clutter on the desk had been added a coffee urn. Ned poured more of the strong dark liquid into his cup. “It will be interesting to discover what she does with the damned thing.”

“And you will know that how? Ah, the inestimable Bates. I can see him now, skulking about London in the young lady’s wake.”

Ned smiled wryly. “The vocabulary of the usual young lady doesn’t contain ‘bugger’, I suspect.”

“Don’t be so certain.”

 “You grow jaded, my friend.”

“What I’m growing is exhausted. Diplomacy is more wearying than debauchery.” Kane held out his own cup for a refill. “Princess Caroline mistimed her entrance last night. She had meant to arrive separately from the monarchs, and receive her own applause. The princess is so upset at her exclusion from all functions honoring the royal visitors that she’s hounding Liverpool for permission to leave the country.”

Ned had little interest in the Regent’s estranged wife, who was more beloved of the general populace than was her husband, due less to any merit on her part than to Prinny’s vast unpopularity. His thoughts returned to Julie’s stolen glove. He hadn’t taken it with him to the theater with the intention of returning it — or he thought he hadn’t — but had found himself moved by her distress.

Or maybe he had simply been fuddle-brained with lust. Ned hadn’t felt Julie put back the watch. He
had
felt her clever fingers tiptoeing down his waistcoat, and had damned near had her up against the wall.

“Am I boring you?” Kane regarded his friend with a jaundiced eye.

Ned stared into his cup. “The stains on that glove were blood. Which makes me wonder whose blood was spilled, and when, and why the damned thing was in the possession of the French Ambassador’s wife.”

Kane contemplated the contents of his own cup. “It makes
me
wonder what a blood-stained glove has in common with pilfered jewelry and an Egyptian statue. You are protecting a felon, I think.”

“We don’t know that she is
a felon.” Rather, Kane didn’t know, because Ned hadn’t informed him of Julie’s ‘back in’ Newgate. He wondered if she was aware of that revealing slip.

And then he wondered if the slip might have been deliberate.

“Have you considered,” said Kane, with the eerie empathy that made him so proficient at both philandering and politics, “that this
girl might be deliberately rousing both your curiosity and your protective instincts?”

Julie posed no real threat, surely? Ned didn’t suspect her of involvement in anything truly vicious; she wasn’t up to weight for that sort of thing. Or so he sensed, and Ned’s nose for mischief hadn’t thus far steered him wrong.

Except in the instance of Bianca. “There is that,” he muttered.

“I’m glad you admit it. You’ll let me—”

“No. We play this out my way.”

Kane might well have argued — he was certainly in a mood to argue, since tact forbade him voicing his opinions to the privileged individuals who were making him wish to tear out his hair — but a section of the bookshelf swung aside, and both gentlemen tensed.

Clea stepped through the opening, Cerberus at her heels. Ned let his pistol slide back into its drawer. “Found another secret passage, have you, puss?”

She looked more her usual self this morning, with cobwebs in her hair and dirt smudged on her face. “A hidden staircase,” she said cheerfully. “It leads to an attic I hadn’t seen before. I found these marbles as well.” She set her lantern down on the desk.

“One assumes,” Ned said to Kane, “that the previous owners of
Wakely House were either involved in questionable activities or politically inept. There are secret passages, hides, and concealed staircases everywhere.”

To Cerberus’s way of thinking, there were intruders everywhere. The dog’s temper was already exacerbated by explorations of hitherto-unknown and very dirty spaces, and the additional irritation of finding a strange male on his turf (or perhaps not entirely strange; Cerberus dimly recollected the previous instance of the riding crop)
was more than he could tolerate. The dog crouched, wriggled his hindquarters, and with a blood-curdling howl, attacked.

A spirited contretemps ensued. At its conclusion, Kane nursed a damaged boot while Cerberus sat sulking in a far corner, and Ned had laughed himself into stitches, and spilled his coffee as well.

Clea smoothed the pages of the fashion magazine she had snatched up to dissuade the defender of the turf to withdraw his teeth from Kane’s tall leather boot. “Do you think I should purchase false bosoms made of wax?”

Ned choked on his last gasp of laughter. “You should not.”

Clea plopped down on the carpet and set out her marbles. “I wasn’t asking you, silly. Kane’s the expert in such things.”

“A hit, a palpable hit,” that gentleman remarked, with no small degree of irony; Ned was hardly a stranger to the foibles and frivolities of the fairer sex
.
“As a general rule, brat, gentlemen don’t like to be deceived.”

“But what if one is a trifle deficient in that area?”

“One is only fifteen and need not despair just yet.”

“Are you certain?” Clea peered down at her chest.

Only someone who was watching closely would have seen Kane’s lips twitch. “It is quality not quantity that counts.”

Ned propped his feet up on the old desk. “Is this what I have to look forward to? Conversations about bosoms?”

Clea added, “And bums. I’m not certain—”

Kane smiled outright. “Your bum is fine. Trust me on that.”  Ned dropped his head into his hands.

Clea placed a marble on the second knuckle of her forefinger, positioned her thumb behind it, and gave it a flick. “Don’t be so dreary, Ned. It isn’t like you are unacquainted with female body parts. I am growing older, and I must discuss these things with someone, and I don’t think Cousin Hannah counts. Now, are we playing marbles, or are we not?”

Ned removed his boots from the desktop. Kane took off his coat. The carpet was rolled back, and charcoal from the hearth used to inscribe a circle on the old wooden floor. An interval passed in the pleasant pastime of marbles, during which Clea contrived to knock her opponents’ missiles into the far corners of the room. Cerberus crept closer to encourage the players by means of whuffs and snarls.

Came a tap on the door, and Tidcombe entered. Sight of the gentlemen in their shirtsleeves, and the young lady in her dirt, all three sprawled in the most undignified manner on the floor, caused him to stop dead in his tracks.

“I told you it was unnecessary to announce me.” Sabine stepped around the butler to enter the room. At sight of the pretty-smelling lady, Cerberus wagged his stump of a tail. Stiff with disapproval, Tidcombe withdrew.

Sabine untied her cloak. “Who’s winning the game?”

“I am, of course.” Clea scooped up her marbles and clambered to her feet with an agility envied by every other person in the room. Cerberus recalled that he was sulking and withdrew to do so in the shadow of a stack of books. “What do
you
think about false chests made of wax, Sabine?”

“I’ve already told her that gentlemen aren’t so shallow as to judge a young lady on the bounty of her bosom.” Kane brushed dog hair and dust off his breeches and reached for his coat.

Sabine observed the play of manly muscles as the baron donned his jacket. “Nonsense. Of course you are. I feel I should point out that wax is prone to melt.”

“So in the midst of passion,” Clea reasoned, “one’s bosoms might start to slide down one’s chest. I can see that might throw a damper on romance.” Kane laughed. Ned groaned.

Sabine emptied the coffee urn into Ned’s abandoned cup. “I promise, Clea, that you will break whatever hearts you wish without resorting to false body parts. Not that there is any harm in the use of artifice.” Ned wondered what had brought Sabine to them at this early hour. She looked as if she’d had less sleep than Kane.

“Speaking of artifice, I have been thinking of Don Miguel.” Clea glanced at Kane. “Don Miguel Sanchez, one of the
guerrilha
chiefs. He had a marvelous curled moustache of which he was exceedingly proud. He
usually wore a pelisse reminiscent of the 16
th
Dragoons, along with an immense hussar cap that had the Eagle of Napoleon reversed, and a brace of pistols tucked into a gaudy red sash.
One might never see a more verminous set of rascals than Don Miguel and his men.”

“They were the worst nightmare of every French convoy commander,” remarked Sabine.

Kane lounged deeper in his chair. “One of your swains?”

“Not mine. Don Miguel had a fondness
for Clea. He considered it barbaric that Ned dragged her through a war.”

“It would have been more barbaric if he’d left me behind,” Clea said, with feeling. “I might have fallen into Cousin Hannah’s hands. And anyway, it was not so bad as all that. Remember the winter we spent in Frenada? Frenada is a grindingly poor Portuguese village,” she added, again for Kane’s benefit. “The better sort of inhabitant had a two-level dwelling, the ground floor reserved for livestock. Somehow Francis obtained lodgings large enough for the three of us to live in comfort and sometimes entertain a few guests — since Ned was frequently gone on Wellington’s business, I
spent much of my time in Iberia with Francis and Sabine. We had a roast goose and plum pudding for dinner that Christmas, and singing afterward. The officers of the Light Division performed Shakespeare’s
Henry IV
in a ruined chapel on the outskirts of town.”