Maggie MacKeever (14 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Any man can make a mistake; only a fool keeps making the same one.
—
Cicero

“Pay attention!” Lady Georgiana rapped her knuckles on the table. Tony gazed at his cards. The most interesting, and most difficult, part of piquet was choosing what to discard. In this instance, it made no difference. Tony wouldn’t have been surprised to learn his mama had an entire deck of playing cards tucked into the long sleeves of her dress. He held no face cards.

Lady Georgiana chose her own discards, then returned to the topic she had been discussing before her son’s inattention threw her off the track, to wit her hired companion’s predilection to desert her post and amuse herself with rascally earls.

“There was more than one?” asked Tony, amazed and also grateful that he’d managed to wriggle out of escorting his mama to the theater that night. If only he had managed to escape the house before she’d caught him today.

She ignored his interruption. Her ladyship had much to say about the danger posed to innocent females by gentlemen of Lord Dorset’s sort. Or not-so-innocent females, for that matter. Ruinous entanglements were mentioned, and squalid intrigues, flattering overtures and amorous vagaries. Though he thought she was making a great piece of work about nothing, Tony withheld comment. If his mama must ring a peal over someone, he’d rather it was Julie than himself.

Georgiana threw down her cards. “I trust I know how many days are to the week!  Ring for more tea.”

No wonder his mama’s health was fragile. She had consumed gallons of the stuff already, and devoured a plate of digestive biscuits as well. “I don’t want tea,” Tony protested.

“You will have some,” retorted his fond parent. “Nonetheless.”

The morning room was a pleasant if overly feminine chamber, with an assortment of brass-inlaid rosewood furniture, an upholstered sofa and armchairs, and pretty blue and white striped paper on the walls. In one corner perched a harp with an elaborately carved wooden frame. Tony skirted a low bookcase and tugged on the bell pull.

Georgiana resumed her grievances. A lady’s companion was required to be well bred and well educated, to possess a spotless reputation and steady nerves. She was expected to display a meek and modest manner in both her action and her dress, as well as in her speech. Unless Georgiana’s ears had deceived her (and if so it would be for the first time), she had heard Julie say ‘bloody hell’ just yesterday.

“I say ‘bloody hell’,” Tony protested. “So do you. Said it when you was told Lady Dorset had been at the British Museum. Heard you myself.”

“That dreadful, dreadful woman. How dare you mention her?” Hannah had contrived to be present when Czar Alexander and his sister visited the British Museum; had conversed with the Grand Duchess about a colossal marble foot, supposedly once attached to an Apollo, donated to the Museum by Sir William Hamilton.

Georgiana continued on for several moments, speaking of serpents clutched to her bosom and snakes in the grass. Uncertain if she was talking about him or Julie or Lady Dorset, Tony strolled around the room and sat down at the harp. He tilted the instrument back to rest against his shoulder, and placed his hands on the strings.

The music, as always, filled him with contentment, which lasted but briefly, until his mother fluttered her handkerchief. “Let us have something less lively,
if you please. This energetic sort of music is wearing on my shattered nerves. Naturally, you get your musical ability from me. Your dear papa couldn’t carry a tune.”

Tony’s dear papa had been more interested in carrying on with dollymops than in anything musical, unless a great deal of liquor was involved, a circumstance which had led to his fatal tumble down the back stair of a house of low repute; and the main thing Tony had got from his mama was a monumental headache. Wondering if he was ever to be allowed to leave the morning room, he abandoned Turlough O’Carolan in favor of a dirge.

The harp sang sweetly beneath his fingers. Tony saw to it that the instrument was kept in tune. He had wanted to study music further, but his mama nipped that notion in the bud. Gentlemen hunted and boxed and gambled, said she. They didn’t go around plucking harps. This particular gentleman wondered if, had he been permitted his music, he might not be in a cleft stick now.

“I asked her to read the
Morning Post
to me,” Georgiana brooded, “and she stumbled over every other word.”

His mama must mean Julie, Tony decided; Lady Dorset hadn’t been at Ashcroft House today. That he knew of, at any rate. Why she might wish to be, he couldn’t imagine. Tony didn’t wish to be at Ashcroft House himself.

A maidservant appeared in the doorway and curtseyed. “You rang, my lady?”

“Fetch some tea,” said Georgiana. “Tell Miss Wynne that her presence is required.” The maidservant curtseyed again and allowed as she would be happy to inform Miss Wynne of her ladyship’s request, except that Miss Wynne wasn’t in the house.

“Not in the house!” echoed Georgiana. “I sent her to her room.”

“That’s as may be, my lady, but she didn’t stay there long. Went out, she did.” The maidservant had never had the nerve to disobey an order, and was therefore happy to snitch on one who had. “Alone.”

“Alone? No one accompanied her?”

“Very stealthy she was, my lady. Crept out the side door. I happened to be by the window or no one would have seen her go.”

“You mean you happened
to be dillydallying.” Georgiana might spend considerable time rubbing shoulders with prince regents and kings (if not Grand Duchesses at the British Museum), but she knew how things went on below stairs. Just this morning she had perused a most instructive handbook addressed to female servants, which told them on one page how to preserve their virtue, and on
the next how to preserve fruit, and on the third urged them to
refrain from coughing, scratching, whistling and blowing their noses in the presence of their superiors.

Perhaps she should present the volume to Julie, who clearly needed instruction in how she should behave. Or, more specifically, in how she should
not
. Georgiana vented her spleen on the hapless maidservant. By the time the girl went off to fetch the tea tray, she was practically in tears.

Georgiana revisited her primary sense of grievance. “A lady’s companion is required to sit quietly and unobtrusively and be at her employer’s beck and call, not go off without permission. I hope you aren’t paying too generous a salary.”

So much for the soothing effects of music. Tony broke off on a discord prompted by the reflection that he wasn’t paying Julie anything at all. “Um!  That is— Nothing to worry your head about. I have everything in hand.”

Georgiana took leave to doubt it. When Tony’s papa had told her she shouldn’t worry it meant the exact opposite. She feared her son took after him in that regard. “Never tell me you’re under the hatches again.” She reached for her smelling salts.

For a brief instant, Tony considered presenting his mama with the truth. The impulse did not stay with him long. If Georgiana learned the sequence of events that had led to Julie’s presence in the Ashcroft household, to wit his gaming debts, she’d banish him to the country for a year.

And if the word got out that his mama held the purse strings, he’d never be able to show his face in his clubs again.

“Not a bit of it!” he said. “Don’t know where you took such a queer notion. Must have been all that tea you drunk. You should apologize.”

Georgiana should
give him a good shake, like she had when he was younger. “Tell me again how you found Miss Wynne.”

He hadn’t found her. She’d found him. Or Cap’n Jack had found them both. Tony wished he could recall what he had previously
said. “It was Rutledge,” he ventured. “Told him you needed someone because old Milly had run off, and he mentioned Miss Wynne. Fate, that’s what it was.”

Georgiana wondered if she’d given her son one too many shakes already, and thus disordered the proper working of his brain. “You said she was connected to Babbington.”

Had he? Tony couldn’t remember. Not that it much mattered, because he’d pulled both names out of his hat. “She is!  Related to them both.”

Definitely, she was going to have a spasm. “I was not,” sighed Georgiana, “born yesterday.”

Tony’s understanding might not be powerful, but he was not so lacking in intelligence as to comment on his mama’s age. “Don’t know why you should be in a pucker. Julie’s a good sort of girl.”

“Good sorts of girls don’t traipse about the city unescorted.”

“You don’t know that she
is
traipsing about the city. She might have simply felt the need to take some air.” Tony glanced at the door.

“Sit,” said his mama sternly. “Stay. I should turn her off.”

At thought of the consequences of such an action, Tony blanched. “You can’t.”

“What nonsense is this? I run the household as I please.”

Tony contemplated a certain individual’s displeasure were Julie to be turned off, and the unhappy outlets that displeasure might take. “Not in this instance, you don’t. And that's an end to it.”

So shocked was Lady Georgiana by this unprecedented display of defiance that she stared open-mouthed. Tony didn’t notice, for the tea tray had arrived, complete with pot and sugar box, cups and saucers and a cake plate piled high with an assortment of biscuits and macaroons. The maidservant carefully set her burden on the card table and backed out of the room.

Georgiana picked up the teapot and took advantage of the familiar ritual to marshal her thoughts. In the normal course of events, Tony couldn’t say boo to a mouse. Yet moments ago he had said ‘no’ to her face. It was clear as the nose on
his
face — an unimpressive article also reminiscent of his wretched sire — at whose doorstep this outrageous conduct might be laid. Tony at last showed preference for a female, an event so long in coming Georgiana had begun to wonder if his preferences lay in another direction and now found she regretted that
t
hey did not. He had formed an attachment to the girl he’d brought home as a companion for his mama, which was the sort of thing his papa would have done, so she supposed she shouldn’t be surprised.

She watched her son consume a ginger biscuit, in the process strewing crumbs down his canary yellow waistcoat. “Whatever is going on between you, I’ll not have it beneath my roof,” Georgiana said.

Tony had no notion his mama had decided he resembled his papa in more ways than she had hitherto realized. Thinking of the reasons for Julie’s presence in the household, most specifically the Cap’n — at least Tony could claim he’d never cheated at play, for whatever good it did him — he retorted, “It ain’t your roof. And you have no more say about what goes on beneath it than I do.”

Worse and worse!  Georgiana took a great gulp of her tea, and then replaced the cup in its saucer with an audible clunk.

Confronted by the unmistakable signs of an outraged mama —
flared nostrils, compressed lips, knitted brow and the abuse of
china — Tony lost his appetite. He feared for a dreadful
moment that he had been found out. Further reflection led him to conclude Georgiana couldn’t know about Cap’n Jack, not unless she could tell by looking at a fellow what he was thinking, which he fervently hoped she could not.

Tony was caught between Sicily and Charbydis, or whoever those two sea monsters were that ate any sailor who came too close. In this case, the lesser of the two evils was clearly his mama, and the best that he could do was try to get over heavy ground as light as he might. “You ain’t going to have one of your fits, are you?” he said bracingly. “Because I have to tell you it won’t do any good. And don’t go plaguing me with questions, because there’s some things a fellow don’t want his mama to know about.”

There were any number of things a fellow’s mama didn’t
want
to know about. “The chit has neither breeding nor wealth nor countenance to recommend her,” Georgiana pointed out.

Tony didn’t immediately grasp the thrust of his mama’s conversation, a not unusual occurrence, for he had long ago developed the habit of listening to one word in three. They had been discussing Julie, had they not? He’d told his mama she must withdraw her threat to turn Julie off.

“Can you imagine what people will say if word of this gets round?” Georgiana continued, for she hadn’t ceased speaking while her son cudgeled his brain. “Lord Ashcroft smitten with a wretched little nobody — all Society will titter behind their gloves. A parson’s daughter. A hired companion!
I warn you, I won’t be made a laughing stock.”

Smitten? Him? With a female? “But—”

“Not another word!” snarled Georgiana. “She has compromised you, I suppose, and is resorting to blackmail. It is no more than you deserve for making sheep’s eyes at someone of that sort.”

Tony had not previously realized that his mama possessed so vivid an imagination. He couldn’t decide which misconception to address first. “Er—”

“Silence! I am thinking.” Georgiana plucked a macaroon from
the plate. The disobliging Miss Wynne — hadn’t Georgiana told her on their first meeting that she wasn’t to think she might catch Tony’s eye? — must be gotten rid of, but how?

Chapter Fifteen

Who will watch the watchmen?
— Juvenal

The chandeliers blazed brightly. The orchestra strove valiantly to be heard above the chatter of the crowd. Everybody of importance was in attendance at Lady Jersey’s midsummer ball, including the Royal
Visitors — save the Grand Duchess, due to her dislike of music — for Lady Jersey was the Czar’s current flirt, or one of them at any rate.