“She’s refreshingly honest,” Lady Herbert said, coming to Maggie’s defense.
“Mother, she hasn’t any sort of sense of decency! The other day I caught her with the hem of her gown tucked up inside the waistband of her unmentionables, climbing a tree!”
The faces of all three women swung accusingly in Maggie’s
direction. Straightening, she said, with as much dignity as she could muster, “I needed blossoms. For a still life I was doing.”
“Margaret,” her mother chided.
“Really.
You do go a little too far sometimes. You could have asked the gardener to bring you a bough of blossoms.”
“I think,” Maggie said, swallowing, “I shall go and see what the children are up to.”
“I think you should do that, dear,” Lady Herbert agreed, so readily that it was obvious to Maggie that her mother had every intention of talking about her as soon as she was out of earshot.
Sighing, Maggie pushed herself away from the tree, and began wandering in the direction from which she could hear the children shouting. It was an unnaturally hot day for May, the first really warm weather of the spring thus far, and Maggie had been feeling somewhat lethargic since morning. Part of her lethargy, she knew, was due to boredom. Since finishing the portrait of the Rawlings children, she really hadn’t had anything to do, no new projects on the horizon. Oh, there was the portrait old Dame Ashforth wanted done, but it was of two cats, and Maggie hadn’t much interest in painting cats. Painting people was so much more challenging, getting their expression exactly right, rendering an accurate likeness without actually insulting them … now
that
was interesting. Cats were just too easy.
As she approached the children, Maggie saw that Elizabeth, whose smile she’d rendered too sweetly, had her brother’s head locked beneath her arm. Their nurse and the orphanage attendants were nowhere to be seen. Knowing the children as well as she did, Maggie wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that they’d left the poor young women gagged and tied in the shrubbery maze. Sighing, she lifted the hem of her white muslin gown and hurried forward to rescue the shrieking little boy from his sister’s tyranny.
“But he keeps saying
he
’s the prime minister,” Lizzie declared when Maggie remonstrated her. “But
I’m
supposed to be the prime minister today. Mamma said I might!”
“But girls can’t be prime ministers,” John insisted. “Papa said so!”
Maggie, recalling similar arguments between herself and the Duke of Rawlings, many years earlier, looked down at John and said, “Why don’t we play something else instead of Parliament today? What would you think about playing a game your cousin Jerry and I used to play, back when he and I were little?”
Lizzie, who had to crane her neck to see Maggie’s face, looked curious. “You mean you were little once?” she asked in disbelief. “But you’re so tall!”
Maggie, trying to hide her annoyance, muttered, “I’m not all that tall.”
“Yes, you are,” John declared. “You’re taller than Papa.”
“I am not taller than your father,” Maggie said, her irritation mounting. “Your mother, maybe. But not your father.”
“You are,” John said staunchly. “Isn’t she, Lizzie?”
Elizabeth looked Maggie up and down and finally said, “No, she isn’t. But she’s still
very
tall. For a girl, that is.”
Maggie felt herself flush, and then was angry with herself for letting the innocent prattle of children irritate her. She knew she was far too sensitive about her height. So what if she had always been the tallest girl in her school? At least she’d stopped growing. At five feet eight—a height she’d achieved at the age of ten—she was taller than her mother and all of her sisters, and only a little shorter than her father.
But there were undoubtedly advantages in being so tall. She knew she looked very nice indeed in the new half-crinolines that had come into style, the ones that were straight in front but ballooned out in back, a fashion that suited her curvaceous figure very well. And she could always be counted on to reach items on the highest shelves at the mercantile, a plus while shopping.
“Listen,” Maggie said to the Rawlings children. “When your cousin Jerry and I were young, we used to play a game called Maharajah, and it was a good deal of fun. One of you can be the Indian prince or princess. Someone else can be the intrepid English explorer whom the maharajah captures
and ties to a stake to be burned alive in tribute to a pagan god. And the rest of you can be British soldiers who try to rescue him, or savages who dance around the burning pyre and try to shoot the soldiers with poisoned darts. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
“
I
shall be the maharajah,” Lizzie announced.
“No,” John shouted. “
I
shall!”
“You,” Lizzie said, calmly, “can be the intrepid explorer.”
John promptly became as infuriated as Jeremy used to become when Maggie had insisted that he be the explorer. Feeling that she’d done her duty, Maggie turned and started back toward the group of women seated beneath the shade of the cherry tree, but not before their lilting voices arrested her mid-step.
“There’s nothing the least bit improper about lady portrait painters, Anne,” she heard Pegeen say in her distinctive, throaty voice, her soft Scottish accent slightly blurring her vowels. “There’ve been any number of them, you know, throughout history—”
Anne interrupted, indignantly, “And how many of them ever married, I’d like to know? Very few, I’ll wager. A woman can’t have a marriage as well as an occupation.”
“Perhaps not,” was Pegeen’s thoughtful reply. “Unless she marries very wisely, that is. To a man who understands … .” Then, in a more cheerful voice, she added, “But the nice thing is that, talented as she is, Maggie need never marry at all. I mean, unless she wants to. She could support herself quite nicely doing portraits of society children.”
Aware that they really were talking about her, Maggie felt her cheeks begin to burn once more. She knew she ought to announce herself, but the temptation to eavesdrop was just too great. Feigning a sudden interest in a stalk of irises, Maggie strained her ears to overhear what was being said.
“But that’s exactly what I’m most afraid of, Pegeen,” Anne exclaimed. “You know how unconventional Maggie can be. Supposing she falls in love with some starving French poet, and has to live in a nasty garret near Montmartre with a lot of other artistic types? None of them believe in
the institution of marriage, you know. They think it bourgeois. Maggie will be a fallen woman. And what will people say about us then, I’d like to know?”
Pegeen inhaled to reply, but Lady Herbert said quickly, “Really, Anne, you’re being too hard on your sister. She isn’t a silly girl. I think it entirely unlikely that she’d do anything as stupid as fall in love with a Frenchman.”
Anne did not share her mother’s opinion. “She’ll do far stupider things than that, Mamma. On that you may count. You and Papa have let her run completely wild: Kindly don’t try denying it, I’ve seen it with my own eyes! You’ve spoiled her, Mamma. How else can you explain it? None of us, not Elizabeth nor I nor Fanny nor Claire are anywhere near as stubborn and headstrong as Maggie is.”
“Well,” Lady Herbert said thoughtfully. “None of you had quite the same
influence
Maggie had, either … .”
Lady Herbert’s voice trailed off, but Maggie wasn’t the only one who caught her meaning. Pegeen was quick to rush to her nephew’s defense. “Oh, you mean Jerry, I suppose,” she said airily. “Well, it’s true the two of them were thick as thieves at one time. But I do have to say that despite the fact Jerry was so much older, it always seemed to me that
Maggie
was the one running things. She was so much bigger than he was for so long. You know, I once caught her rubbing his face quite forcibly in some dirt. Jerry was perfectly helpless to stop her. He was twelve at the time, I believe, which would have made Maggie only about seven, but even so, she was taller than he was. I do think it was rather humiliating to him, at the time … .”
“I suppose we won’t be seeing His Grace anytime soon,” Anne ventured, in a deceptively casual voice. Maggie knew perfectly well how much her sister disliked the duke. “He’s still at Oxford, is he?”
“As a matter of fact,” Pegeen said calmly, “we received a wire from him just last night, saying he was coming home today. According to Lucy, who heard it from Cook, whose nephew has been acting as Jerry’s valet this term, there was some sort of secret assignation between Jerry and his uncle just this morning, which necessitated that Edward sneak
down to the village to meet the carriage an hour ago, ostensibly so I would not learn the reason for Jerry’s sudden return. It shall be interesting to see how long the two of them think they can keep it a secret from me this time.”
Maggie didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. She didn’t stop to listen to it. The moment she heard Jeremy’s name, and the fact that he was on his way back to Rawlings, a slow smile spread across her face, and her feet, as if of their own accord, began moving briskly toward the front of the house. She was well aware that if Jeremy were coming home today, he would have to ride through the allée of oak trees that lined the drive. Which meant he’d have to pass under one of the oldest oaks on the estate, the one that leaned so closely to the drive—despite the best efforts of the gardeners, who for years had tried to prop up the trunk with metal supports—that its branches hung like a canopy only seven or eight feet from the paved road. Wouldn’t it be fun, she thought, to ambush him, the way they’d used to attack the traffic approaching the manor house when they were children? With any luck, she’d be able to knock him flat off his horse. No more than he deserved, for getting himself thrown out of yet another school, if what Pegeen had said was correct.
Forgetting all of her sister’s exhortations to act like a lady, Maggie hiked up her skirts and began running across the front lawn of Rawlings Manor, perfectly heedless of the fact that her long, shapely calves were showing above the tops of her flat-heeled boots. It had been so long since she’d last seen Jeremy—years, in fact, since their school holidays had generally never coincided, or when they had, one or the other of them had nearly always been in the city or abroad—that she wasn’t even sure she’d recognize him. If one could believe his aunt and uncle’s proud reports, Jeremy had turned into everything a young gentleman ought to be: a skilled equestrian, superb fencer, excellent boxer, strong swimmer. She’d heard rumors from her elder sisters, who had occasionally run into him at society balls in London, that the Duke of Rawlings had matured into an extraordinarily good-looking man, a fact Maggie found hard to believe. Even more laughably, they insisted that he had actually grown tall,
which she believed not at all. Jerry, taller than she? Impossible!
After she’d shimmied up the oak’s trunk, a feat Maggie performed easily, despite ripping one stocking, tearing her crinoline, and popping a pearl button from the front of her bodice, all of which she ignored, it was the work of a moment to settle herself in the leafy shelter of its branches. From this perch, some eight feet off the ground, Maggie had a fairly unimpeded view of the driveway, down which a lone horseman was cantering, even as she watched. But it couldn’t, she saw with disappointment, be Jeremy, since the rider was far too broad shouldered, and too tall in the saddle, besides It looked a good deal like Lord Edward, only Lord Edward’s horse was a bay, and the horse this man was riding was black as pitch … not unlike Jeremy’s mount, King.
Leaning forward until she lay fully stretched out along the sturdy branch, Maggie squinted past the green foliage and saw, to her utter astonishment, that the horse really was none other than King, the first horse Jeremy had ever owned, and his admitted favorite. But no one was allowed to ride King except Jeremy, and that meant …
But no! It couldn’t be. No one could change that much, not in only—Maggie looked down at her fingers, counting swiftly—five years. Lord, had it really been
five years
since she’d last seen the duke? Looking up again, Maggie saw that the horse and rider were very nearly beneath her now, and there was no mistaking it, it
was
Jeremy.
And her sisters hadn’t been lying, he
was
good-looking … if one liked those kind of Byronic, brooding types, which Maggie did not, preferring fair-complexioned men. His dark hair curled raffishly out from under an expensive-looking top hat, beneath the brim of which his piercing gray-eyed gaze stared derisively. His expression was one she recognized instantly. Jeremy was angry, his determined jaw set, his clefted chin held high above a frilled cravat, his long, gloved fingers curled easily round the reins of his mount, which he rode as naturally as if King were an extension of his own body. A body which, Maggie observed with interest, looked every bit as lean and as hard as those belonging to the men who
worked at the local blacksmith, men whose naked chests Maggie had often observed surreptitiously while they hammered out shoes for her father’s horses … .
Lord, there went another one of those carnal thoughts!
But this was
Jerry
! She shook herself. What was she
thinking
? She couldn’t possibly be thinking of
Jeremy
that way! She had pounded that body down there with snowballs more times than she could count, and rubbed that face in the dirt just as often. And now he was riding directly beneath her, so close she could easily have knocked the hat from his head. In another second, he’d shoot right past her, and the surprise would be utterly ruined.