Maggie MacKeever (4 page)

Because the footlights created a large cluster, ‘the rose’, an actor moved to the bright spot each time he had an important speech, then moved three steps to the right or left to make way for
the next speaker. So as not to inhibit gestures, they spaced themselves arm’s length
apart. It was curious to Julie that some players must punctuate a speech by the shaking of a finger, or the clenching of a fist, or plopping arms akimbo on their hips; speak with their profile turned to the stage, as Mr. Sowerby was doing now.

Mr. Kean spotted Julie, and winked. She smiled back at him. There were those who ridiculed Mr. Kean’s small stature and gruff voice, but the actor had taken the town by storm in
The Merchant of Venice
earlier this year. Now he was daring to
portray Iago as a careless cordial villain. Mr. Sowerby’s Othello was considerably less compelling. Rose was so absorbed in the complexities of her character that she was deaf to all else.

Ophelia rubbed against Julie’s ankles. She bent to stroke the cat. Come tomorrow Julie would make her own debut as an actor, her stage the West End.

Chapter Three

Women outshine men in scheming.
— Pubilius Syrus

Hyde Park was more than usually crowded this sunny afternoon, a good portion of the city’s population having ventured forth in hope of glimpsing Czar Alexander of Russia, Emperor Frederick William of Prussia, or any of the generals and field marshals, princes and barons and dukes that accompanied these august personages. All the world was in London, now that hostilities with France had drawn finally to an end. All during the past month, distinguished visitors had flocked to the capital.

Everybody who was anyone rode and drove around the Ring, the ladies driving in their
vis-à-vis,
the gentlemen mounted on glossy thoroughbreds. They made a dazzling spectacle of silks and laces, brass-buttoned blue coats and leather breeches and highly polished top boots. Since Lord Dorset refused to promenade, he and his sister
had drawn up their mounts under a shady tree.

Clea was in high spirits. She was wearing a brand new riding habit of pale green that complimented her eyes and a matching gold-banded cap that perched atop her mahogany hair. In the midst of much confusion, she sat her pretty dappled mare with considerable skill. Ned’s white gelding, Soldier, didn’t care for London crowds. Nor did Ned, but Clea had pleaded to discover what all the uproar was about.

“Look,” she said, and pointed. “There’s Kane.” As powerfully muscled as his huge black Arabian stallion, Lord Saxe had a handsomely rugged face, tousled too-long dark hair, and sleepy brown eyes that had been variously likened by his legion of admirers to whiskey, amber, honey and (more prosaically) burnt caramel
pudding; and an apparently irresistible air of having just left a well-sated lady behind in a rumpled bed. His progress was not speedy. Every female in the vicinity strove to put herself in his way.

Kane reached them at last, and immediately treated Clea to a lazy, bone-melting smile. “You look as fine as fivepence today, Miss Fairchild.”

She dimpled at him. “Do you think so, Lord Saxe?”

“Have I not just said so?” Kane winked. “You cast all the other ladies into the shade.”

Ned supposed he should mind that his sister was flirting with a rakehell. However, she had been flirting with this particular rakehell since she was three years old. “Platoff is so provoked by all the fuss that he’s reluctant to go out of doors.”

“As Russian is the only language Platoff speaks, I don’t wonder at his resolution. Our visitors are all sick to death of the way they are followed about. Even the horses of the Czar’s escort have had their tails plucked for souvenirs.” During the past few weeks, Kane had seen more of the Allied Sovereigns than he wished.

“And the Grand Duchess?” inquired Clea. “How do you find her?” Grand Duchess Catherine of Oldenburg, favorite sister of the Czar and whispered by some to be his evil genius, had arrived in March, whether on a diplomatic mission or to snare an English husband had not been determined yet.

“She is capricious. Whimsical. Her Highness delights in stirring up trouble, especially where the Regent is concerned. Poor Prinny set up her back at their first meeting.” The lady’s reaction to Kane had been quite the opposite, which was how he had become an unofficial
escort, his assignment less to protect the Grand Duchess from her admirers than to protect innocent bystanders from her. “But what woman is not capricious at times? Catherine lost her husband to typhoid not so long ago. Her nerves were shattered by the burning
of Moscow. If as a result she can tolerate neither music nor the Regent, we can make allowances, I think.”

Clea tilted her head and studied him. “You like her.”

“I like all the ladies.” Kane arched a lazy brow.

Clea arched an eyebrow back at him.
“
‘Keep thy hook always baited, for a fish lurks ever in the most unlikely swim.’ I am reading Ovid.
Ars Amatoria.
Don’t tell Ned.”

As if Ned didn’t already know. Clea had a much broader understanding than most damsels her age, her brother’s feelings about education being that beyond the basics she should study whatever she wished. He wondered, not for the first time, if he had done Clea a disservice by dragging her around the world with him after their parents’ death.

His misgivings were not eased when she asked Kane, “What’s an abram mort?”

“A madwoman.”

“And gingambobs?”

Kane regarded her with amusement. “Who have you been talking to, brat?”

“We caught a housebreaker. That is,
I
caught her. Ned let her get away.”

“Her?”

Ned protested, “I didn’t let
her escape, exactly. I have a lump on my head.”

He wondered how his housebreaker had fared. Ned felt a wee bit guilty at sending her off unclothed. Though it was hardly his decision that she should go scampering through his window. He smiled as he recalled the view.

The expression in Kane’s brown eyes was not lazy now. “Was anything taken?” he asked.

Clea shrugged. “That ugly old statue of Taweret.”

In case Kane didn’t understand, which was unlikely because beneath his practiced indolence Kane was very shrewd, Ned added: “The
ugly statue of Taweret that was sitting on my desk. Head of a hippopotamus, legs of a lion, tail of a crocodile, human breasts and swollen belly —
that
Taweret.”

“Tsk!” said Clea. “Think what Cousin Hannah would say if she knew you were discussing breasts and bellies and fertility goddesses in front of me.”

Kane frowned. He did not admire Cousin Hannah. “Taweret. How curious,” he said.

Curious indeed, agreed Ned. Why, of all the things in Wakely Court, had the thief made off with that particular item? Unless she had been sent for it specifically, the theft made no sense. But who could know what the thing was? Everyone involved with Joham Sandoval was dead.

Or so they had believed.

Ned had been one of Wellington’s Exploring Officers, agents who moved behind enemy lines, discovering troop movements and gathering strategic information, risking constant exposure and death. If he had not been able to spare his sister the sight of dead horses and shattered homes, sick and wounded soldiers, he
had
spared her knowledge of men like Joham Sandoval.

Happily unaware of the grim tenor of her brother’s musings, Clea craned her head. “Speak of the devil,” she remarked.

Ned followed his sister’s gaze. The devil — in this incarnation, the Dowager Countess of Dorset, mother of the previous and much lamented earl — was wearing a startling bonnet trimmed with tufts and rows of ribbon and large clusters of flowers, all in shades of deepest mourning.

Her skeletal, black-gloved hand beckoned. “You’d best go and do the pretty,” said Ned. Clea touched her heel to her horse’s flank and rode ahead.

The men followed at a distance, stealing a moment’s privacy. “We need to retrieve that artifact,” Kane said.

“Agreed.” Ned was looking forward to encountering his little thief again. He surveyed the crowd. The population of London had
increased some two hundred thousand with the arrival of the
Emperor and the Czar, resulting in a scarcity of both milk (the cows frightened out of the Green Park by constant huzzas) and
clean clothes (the washerwomen busy working for visiting royalty). “Spies, do you think?”

“My dear.” Kane was sardonic. “I should think, everywhere. Apropos of which, Castlereagh charges me to ask if you have grown bored with civilian life.” There was no more time for conversation. The dowager’s carriage loomed just ahead.

The carriage, and its occupant, had seen finer days, the former in need of a fresh coat of paint, the latter in need of some color in her thin cheeks, some dye to hide the grey that liberally streaked her hair. Lady Dorset inspected Ned, and sniffed. Then she turned her gimlet stare on Ned’s companion, who promptly treated her to his most seductive smile. The tiniest of twitches briefly animated the dowager’s features, confirming Ned’s private conviction that there wasn’t a woman alive who could refrain from smiling back at Kane.

Lady Dorset bowed. Lord Saxe tipped his hat. A polite conversation regarding the weather ensued.

The dowager, along with the rest of London, had questions about the Royal Guests, which as soon as politely possible she was quick to ask. “Speaking
of whom,” remarked Ned, as he looked into the distance where plumes and cuirasses could be seen dancing among the trees.

“Charming as is the company, I must excuse myself.” Kane winked at Clea.
“
‘
Video meliora, proboque; deteriora sequor.
’”

The Dowager frowned after him. “Eh?”

Clea was also watching Kane.
“
‘
I see the better way, and approve it; I follow the worse.
’”

The Dowager turned her frown on Clea. “Saxe will never make a tolerable husband. And you should be wearing mourning, miss.”

“Clea is too young to think of marrying anyone.” Two sets of eyes fixed incredulously on Ned. “Well, isn’t she?”

This absurd question was deemed unworthy of an answer. “Kane is ineligible, based on his forays among the fleshpots?” Clea demanded of their cousin. “Fiddlestick!  And while I’m sorry for your loss, Cousin Hannah, I won’t wear mourning for someone I never met. I don’t see the point of dressing in black, at any rate. You’re either sad or you are not, whatever colors you wear, and whatever colors a person wears will hardly make a difference to the dead.”

Hannah’s jowls quivered. “You are a great deal too outspoken, my girl! Moreover, young ladies shouldn’t know about fleshpots.”

“Yes, but I wasn’t
a young lady until recently,” Clea pointed out; reasonably, her brother thought. “I have gone overnight from
being a soldier’s sister to a female of good breeding who might anticipate making an advantageous match. Or so you have said.”

“And so you might.” Hannah squinted at Ned. “Were your brother not so neglectful of his duties. Had he a proper way of thinking. Did he not leave you to your own devices while he goes
about his —” this said with the utmost disapproval — “worldly pursuits.”

She made Ned sound the worst of scoundrels, which he was not, although he did bear responsibility for his sister’s awareness of fleshpots. He was tempted to toss the old bat into the Serpentine. Bat-
tossing being conduct unsuitable for an earl, Ned reminded himself the dowager was grieving the loss of her son, not that she’d been any joy to be around even before tragedy struck. “Cousin, I assure you that I strive to conduct myself with the utmost propriety and prudence at all times.”

“What a clanker!” hooted Clea. “You are almost as good a liar as Kane.”

“And
you,
” Hannah announced, “are impertinent!”

“Yes, I am,” Clea admitted, without a trace of shame. “If I am to form an eligible connection, you will have to take me in hand.”

Hannah said, suspiciously, “What brings about this sudden change of heart?”

“It is not so sudden. I have decided I would like to have children, in which case I believe it is customary to get married first.”

Hannah blanched. Ned sympathized.

Came a commotion in the park as Platoff, the Hetman of the Cossacks, appeared on the scene alongside two attendants armed with long spears, followed by the hugely popular Marshal Blücher and his splendid mustachios. The crowd went wild when the Czar arrived, mounted on a beautiful horse, dressed in a scarlet uniform, and sporting a large collection of feathers on his head. “We will speak further of this, miss!” promised Hannah, before she commanded her coachman to join the mêlée.

Shouts and curses and excited voices rang out as the Royal Equestrians, preceded by the Duke of Kent, galloped over the green to Kensington Garden. The crowd attempted to follow them through the private gates. Boots were dragged off in the crush, and the Master of the Horse thrown to the grass, and Marshal Blücher backed up against a tree.

Ned was more concerned with his sister. “What are you up to, puss?”

Clea treated him to a dimpled grin. “It’s you
who doesn’t want me made into a pattern-card of respectability. I don’t mind. We
are
respectable now. More or less.”

The instincts that had kept Ned alive behind enemy lines were all shrieking ‘danger’ now. “I’m expected to believe that suddenly you wish to live a dull, boring, and unexceptionable life.”

“You needn’t look at me as if I am a traitor.” Clea patted his hand. “Is it so strange that I want to have pretty dresses, and to go to parties and be admired?”

“I
admire you,” Ned protested.

“You’re my brother, silly. I’m not going to marry
you.
”