Maggie MacKeever (5 page)

She wasn’t going to marry anyone at any time soon, because any young cawker who looked lustfully upon Ned’s sister would have his liver carved out and fried. “When you marry, you’ll become your husband’s property. He may beat you if you don’t do as he commands.”

“As if I’d marry anyone who would beat me. Just because
. . .
” Clea shot him a guilty sideways glance. “I’m sorry, Ned.”

“I didn’t beat Bianca.” And the vixen certainly hadn’t lived under his thumb.

Clea had already changed the subject. “I
do
want to marry, Ned, someday. I may be but fifteen, but that is not too young to start to prepare. Hannah will prose and preach at me and I will largely ignore her, but she’s the only one who can arrange my come-out, and so we must make use of her.” She grinned, thereby transforming herself from a young girl on the verge of womanhood
to an urchin of perhaps twelve. “We won’t tell Hannah that I’ve decided to have a dazzling career as an acknowledged beauty, with dozens of gentlemen dangling at my slipper-strings, and writing me silly poems, and going off to shoot themselves when I cast them a
side.”

Soldier took exception to the crowd, or his master’s mood, and made his displeasure known. Conversation lapsed for a moment as Ned brought the gelding back under control. “There’ll be no dangling until you are twenty years of age. Maybe thirty. Better forty. This is what comes of letting you read Ovid. I should lock you up until then.”

Clea ignored this brotherly foolishness. “And while Cousin Hannah is fussing over me
,
thereby being distracted from her grief, which anyone must agree has been permitted to go on far too long, you’ll be left free to go about your business.” Her mare
shifted nervously, and she took firmer grip on her reins. “Hannah is prodigious high in the instep. I wonder what term our housebreaker would have for her. It is very awkward to keep thinking of that girl as ‘our housebreaker’!  I wish we knew her name.”

Ned intended to know the girl’s name. He intended to learn all there was to learn about their thief. Once he knew, he would—

Well, that depended, didn’t it, on whether she was an innocent, or no.

Chapter Four

A liar better have a good memory.
— Quintilian

Enter, stage right, Miss Julie Wynne. Impoverished young lady from York. Hopefully no one would recognize the street urchin in this unexceptionable young female disguised in a serviceable dark gown and cloak, standing on the front step of a tall brick bow-windowed townhouse in Grosvenor Square. Julie stared at the door-knocker, which was fashioned as the head of a lion, and wished that she might turn and scurry back where she belonged,
which wasn’t among these fine squares and wide flagstone pavements, but rather the dirty streets and ill-lit alleys and tenements of the East End. Since she could not, Julie took firmer grip on her battered portmanteau — property of Rose, who in the course of her chequered career had done considerable traveling — and raised her hand.

The door swung open. A superior individual in immaculate livery gazed at Julie down the length of his long nose.
“Lord Ashcroft is expecting me. I am Miss Julie Wynne.”

“If you will follow me, miss.” Julie was given no time to admire the entrance hall with its grand stone staircase, but ushered post-haste into the study and left there to cool her heels. Since there was no one to see her, she allowed herself to gawk. Walls hung with gilt-
bordered flock paper. An organ — at least she thought it was an organ — with gilt pipes. Plate glass windows draped with green damask silk; Aubusson carpet and a great deal of some dark, rich-looking wood. Had Julie had the good luck to break into a house like this, she and Rose could have lived in clover for a long time.

Julie strolled around the room, estimating the cost of things —
the pierced steel fender with its hand-sawn design of birds and animals was especially fine, though a person would be hard-
pressed to escape through a window carrying such an item tucked under her arm — due not to any innate acquisitiveness but as an adjunct to her craft. She studied a pair of pewter candlesticks, and a colorful japanned urn. Thirty china figures perched on the marble chimneypiece. Julie was fingering a goat being attacked by a dog when a noise made her turn.

Her first impression was a blaze of color: double-breasted long-tailed claret-colored coat worn over two astonishing silk waistcoats, the first bright pink with an overall pattern, the second plain rose; pale buckskin pantaloons, highly polished Hessian boots, a dazzling white shirt and intricately tied cravat. Her second impression, once her eyes had become accustomed to all this man millinery, was that the wearer of the clothing was of medium height and build, not an out-and-outer but not soft-looking either, with sandy hair and grey eyes and a cheerful sort of face, a smattering of freckles on his nose.

Julie was only guessing about the cheerful part. The gentleman didn’t look the least bit happy at the moment. “You’re not going to steal the silver plate, are you?” he asked. “Murder us in our beds?”

Murder was hardly Julie’s business, and Pritchett had made it clear there was to be no filching, save at his command. “No, my lord, to both.” She curtsied. “You must be Lord Ashcroft.”

“I must be, mustn’t I? though I’ll allow as I’d rather not.” The viscount looked about his library with a furtive air. “Damned if this ain’t an awkward business. Don’t suppose I should ask how you
got into this fix? I’ll lay odds you
are
in a fix or you wouldn’t be here. If you don’t want to tell me, I don’t mind!  Wouldn’t want to be vulgarly inquisitive, would I? Myself, I’ve been drawing the bustle too freely and fell behindhand with the world. Tried to repair my fortunes — well, who wouldn’t? — and damned if it ain’t true that it’s never wise to bet against a dark horse!” He clasped his hands behind his back and began to pace. “You’ll say it was stupidly done of me. I admit I may have been a trifle disguised.”

If ever Julie had seen a pigeon ripe for the plucking, one stood before her now. “More like you were as drunk as a lord.”

“But I would be, wouldn’t I?” The young man paused in his perambulations, looking perplexed. “Mean to say,
I
am
a lord. Maybe a viscount ain’t as grand as a duke, but it’s nothing to sneeze at.”

Definitely a pig-widgeon. “Drunk as a wheelbarrow, then.”

Lord Ashcroft couldn’t argue, or he
could
have but there was no point in it, for he had definitely been cup-shot. At any rate, to make a long story shorter, he had in the natural course of such things next found himself talking of securities and credentials with Messrs
Howard and Gibbs, best of the bloodsuckers — here he begged
pardon; he had quite forgot he was talking to a young lady — moneylenders, that was, though she wouldn’t know of such beings!  And he’d thought he had things in good order until he received the unhappy information that someone known as ‘Cap’n Jack’ had bought up his vowels. “And even if I
could
come down with the derbies, the Cap’n won’t accept them, and so I must flop around like a fish on his hook.”

Julie, too, had almost forgot she was a lady, so fascinated was she, not by the viscount’s account, for London was awash with
spendthrift young gentlemen determined to gamble away their inheritances, but by the viscount himself.

“And if Maman
finds out
. . .
” He shuddered in his shiny boots.

“What would your mama do?”

“Have a spasm. At the least.”

“So what if she did?”

Lord Ashcroft rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Maman
in her palpitations ain’t a pretty sight. You’re to take the place of her companion, Mildred, who went to Oxford Street to match a length of ribbon and never came back home, in case you don’t know. A queer thing, that. Not you not knowing, if in fact you don’t, but that old Milly should take French leave. Maman
is in a taking about it. I don’t see why that should be, since she didn’t like the woman above half, but Maman can be pecky sometimes.” He paused for breath. “Do
you
know this Cap’n Jack? I don’t think I want to be told what he has in mind.”

Julie found herself feeling sorry for this foolish fribble, caught so firmly between his mama’s foot and the Cap’n’s thumb. “I know that he is dangerous. You must do as you’re told.”

“As if I didn’t always.” Lord Ashcroft resumed his pacing. “Except when I wagered more than was in my pocket, but everybody
does!
Thing is, I’ve never been a
nacky
one, and now I’m in the devil’s own scrape. Maybe I should just put a period to my existence. I don’t see otherwise how I’m to get clear.”

The viscount acted as if the weight of the whole world rested on his shoulders. Julie set out to persuade the unhappy young man into a less fatalistic frame of mind. All would turn out for the best, she assured him (and without the slightest belief in her own words) if he only gave it time, because time was the healer of all wounds and—

Julie thought of her mentor, and murmured:

“
The time and my intents are savage wild

More fierce and more inexorable far

Than empty tigers or the roaring sea.
”

Romeo and Juliet
had been a trying experience, for Rose had been deemed too old for a Juliet, and relegated to play The Nurse.

Lord Ashcroft stared at her with admiration. “That’s the dandy!  I’ll leave it to you to fix it up all right and tight. Dashed if you ain’t the answer to a fellow’s prayers.”

He expected
she
would haul his coals out of the fire? Julie added knock-in-the-cradle to her list.

Before Julie could disabuse the viscount of his delusions, the library door opened, and a woman floated into the room. She was very pretty, in an ethereal antique fashion, draped in pale lilac cambric and a lacy shawl and a fetching French lace cap.

The otherworldly aura faded when her eyes lit upon Julie. “What is this?” she inquired. Again, Julie curtseyed. She felt like a jumping-jack.

Impervious to nuances, Lord Ashcroft beamed. “Look what I have brought you, Maman. A new companion to take poor Milly’s place. Her name is Julie Wynne. She is a parson’s daughter. Related to Babbington. And she promises that she will fix us up all right and tight. Miss Wynne, this is my mama, Lady Georgiana. I’ll leave you two alone to get to know one another.” With a nod and a bow and a flick of his elegant coat tails, and the air of a man who hadn’t a care in the world, he stepped out into the hall.

The viscount’s mama resembled her son in looks, though her hair was a darker shade, and no freckle would dare pop out on that aristocratic nose, and she didn’t look at all carefree as she arranged herself gracefully in a chair. “Fix us up all right and tight?”

Julie fought an impulse to fidget. “I didn’t say that.”

“I didn’t imagine that you had. What a good
boy my Tony is, to be always thinking of his mama. And if you have ambitions in that direction, Miss Wynne, you may abandon them at once.”

“No, my lady. I mean, yes, my lady.” Julie eyed the rings on Lady Georgiana’s fingers; estimated their value; reminded herself that she wasn’t a knuckler now, but a respectable female.

“Do sit down, Miss Wynne!  If I must continue staring up at you, my head will begin to ache. I do not enjoy a strong constitution. Well? Have you nothing to say?”

What? That she wished she might be elsewhere? “No, my lady,” Julie murmured.

Lady Georgiana sighed. “This is like trying to make conversation with a post. I can see that you are a perfectly correct young person wearing a dreadful dress. Tell me what else there is to know about yourself.”

Her ladyship wanted conversation? Very well. Julie took a deep breath, put herself in the role, as Rose had taught her, and became the orphaned daughter of a country parson, left destitute in the world. She spoke of tithe dinners, and raising funds for charitable institutions; of providing soup for the villagers during hard winters, and clothes and blankets; of bars of soap boiled up in the rectory, and helping to operate the Penny Bank and the Clothing Club. She explained how annoyed her papa had been when the singers were told not to sing the Responses in the Common Service, but had the impudence to do so anyway. Told of the young lady who, after two months of Bible study, could do no better than tell him that on Palm Sunday Jesus went up to Heaven on an ass.

Lady Georgiana interrupted. “Was your papa an Evangelist?”

If she said he was, would she be turned off? Julie didn’t dare. “Papa believed that the Church was as gentlemanly a pursuit as any other, and that a lack of religious conviction in no way interfered with his overall supervision of parish affairs.”

Georgiana wasn’t interested in ecclesiastical lessons, which was fortunate, because Julie had come to the end of Rose’s reminiscences, or those of Rose’s reminiscences that were suitable in this instance to relate. “You are not in mourning, I hope, Miss Wynne. A companion who is in mourning would be of no use to me at all.”

Again temptation reared its head. Julie stamped it down. “Papa died some time ago, my lady. He was meticulous about visiting the sick, and contracted a putrid sore throat. I have been living with a relative. She married recently, and there is no longer a place for me in her household.”

“You are too attractive,” said Lady Georgiana. “Your looks would be a consideration with me also, were my son in the petticoat-line. Who did Tony say you were related to? Babbington? I
don’t believe I know a Babbington. Not that it matters, because I need someone, and here you are. You appear amiable enough. I hope you have good sense.”