Maggie MacKeever (16 page)

If Simon had intended with this gentle reminder of her effronteries to abash his companion, his efforts were for naught. “I
don’t
know why you should wish to put me to the blush,” Angelica responded, “but apparently you do. Or are you trying to get up a flirtation? Matters have come to a sad pass when gay and profligate men have no more amusing way to pass their time than trifling with fubsy-faced old maids.”

“Fubsy-faced? You?” Simon paused in mid-stride to grasp Miss Smith’s delicate chin and tilt up her face. “You actually believe that you’re an antidote? And I conjecture you would not credit me if I said you weren’t? I thought not. Tiresome creature! But to answer your question, you blush very prettily.” Almost absentmindedly, he stroked her cheek. “As for the other—I promise you will have no doubt whatsoever about the matter when I
do
trifle with you!”

“Odious man!” retorted Angelica, blushing once again. “As if you would! But here is the gate.”

“So it is, fair one.” So saying, Simon opened the garden gate, having taken the first step toward closing the large gap in her education. Definitely Simon Brisbane meant to trifle with the mysterious Miss Smith, mightily. Savoring already the sweet thrill of victory, he leaned against the gate and watched his next-scheduled conquest walk down the street.

In this manner, Simon Brisbane fell into an error common among gentlemen of his ilk; to wit, counting chicks still hidden in their shells. Simon’s favorite of the present moment was, as has already been stated, without experience in matters of the heart; she truly had no notion of the cause for her giddiness and palpitations, the oppression that had settled on her breast. Yet, even had she understood her symptoms, the outcome would have been the same. Miss Angelica Millikin would have allowed herself to be nibbled to death by ducks before she confessed her nonsensical
tendre
for a hardened rakeshame.

Chapter Thirteen

Lord Chalmers paced the floor of his elegant drawing room, then paused before the marble-fronted fireplace to gaze irritably upon his audience of one. Reproachfully, she returned his accusatory stare. “I do think you might have warned me,” Lily complained. “I was gone quite giddy with surprise.”

Lord Chalmers strove for forbearance, and did not entirely succeed. Had he not enough to deal with? Had not the government at last been forced to reduce expenditures, to jettison the income and malt taxes? Just that morning Castlereagh had spoken sadly of an ignorant impatience of taxation, a sentiment with which Lord Chalmers agreed. Alas, the general populace appeared ignorant of the fact that a government deprived of a portion of its income lost an equal portion of its strength. The services had been again drastically cut, the Regent forced to abandon his dream of gracing his metropolis with a new palace, the northward march of Regent Street halted at Piccadilly Circus. Economy was the order of the day. There was even a proposal afoot to send the Elgin Marbles back to Greece. As if that were not enough to drive a man halfway to distraction, what must Lily do but make a scene.

Still, she had a point: he
should
have intimated to her that she was to receive a most advantageous offer. It was not often Lord Chalmers found himself in the wrong, and he did not care for it. “You should not have been surprised,” he responded sharply. “You made no effort that I could see to check the growing strength of the attachment; you appeared flattered by the attention. Consider, Lily! Gervaise has been dancing attendance on you for weeks. He wished to give you time to fix your affections before making you a declaration. All of this he explained when he asked my leave, as your guardian, to press his suit. He has all along conducted himself very commendably.”

Lily did not look the least bit gratified by the duke’s adherence to propriety. “Oh, yes!” she said gloomily. “A perfect gentleman.”

Lord Chalmers was beginning to feel greatly imposed upon, a sentiment that he was not reluctant to express. “I have always deprecated this tendency to kick up a dust over trifles!” he uttered, most unfairly; Lily was conducting herself not like a hysterical harridan, but like a damsel plunged into grief. Why she should fall into a lethargy at the prospect of a highly eligible alliance he could not imagine, and it put him even further out of frame. “You might exhibit a little more enthusiasm that Gervaise has made you an offer!
I
hold it to be a piece of astonishingly good fortune.”

“You,” responded Lily, through the delicate handkerchief that she’d pressed to her nose, “aren’t being pestered to settle in matrimony with someone who is old. It utterly sinks my spirits, and so I shall tell Fennel, because it is all his fault!”

Nor could Lord Chalmers imagine what Fennel had to do with Kingscote’s proposal, which he considered a stroke of luck quite undeserved by the young lady to whom it had been addressed, and which she seemed to regard as a very unpleasant and unexpected event. He recalled Valerian’s prediction that his pea-goose of a sister would do nothing so sensible as make an unexceptionable match. That Valerian had been proven most prescient did not elevate him in Lord Chalmers’s estimation. Lord Chalmers had decided that the whole Millikin family was sadly deficient in brains.

Since common sense had no effect on Lily, he would subject her to a little scold. “If you did not seriously entertain Kingscote’s addresses,” he said severely, “you have behaved in a way that is open to very unfavorable interpretations, Lily.
I
know you would not be so shameless as to play fast and loose with a gentleman, but the world would not take so generous a view. You must marry Gervaise, or people will say you are a hardened flirt.”

Lily lowered her handkerchief, unmoved. “As if I should care for that! I
am
a flirt! It is not kind of you to accuse me of encouraging Kingscote’s pretentions when I didn’t
know
he was trying to fix his interest with me!”

Perhaps she was just being missish? Lord Chalmers was beginning to find this interview a dead bore. “You do not mean to tell me that you hold Gervaise in low esteem?”

“Oh, no!” Lily widened her tearful blue eyes. “I have a great regard for His Grace. But I do not
love
him, and the idea of marrying anyone that I cannot love is very repugnant to my feelings.”

“Love!” Lord Chalmers’s derision derived from thought of his errant wife. “Young ladies of your station do not marry for love. Lily. They marry for advantage, wealth, position—all of which Gervaise will provide you. To make precisely such a match was the purpose of your Season, and for you to cut up stiff over achieving just that purpose is the height of ingratitude.”

“But—” protested Lily.

“Cut line!” abjured the baron, who had little liking for feminine chatter at the best of times, and who, gifted with Lily’s gooseish opinions, had reached the end of a scant patience already severely strained by a failure to discover what inspired Rosemary to act as if she were afraid of him— though were his suspicions proved correct, Rosemary had every reason to be frightened out of what few wits she possessed. “You are of no age to make such decisions for yourself, Lily, and must abide by the judgments of older and wiser heads. In this instance, mine! Make no mistake about it: you
will
marry Gervaise!” On this Parthian shot, he exited the room.

Only moments later, Fennel entered, to find his sister collapsed on a needlepointed sofa, a handkerchief obscuring her face. “Just met Chalmers in the hallway!” he remarked, as he disposed himself on a window seat. “Have he and Rosemary been at dagger-drawing again? He looked like a thundercloud.”

“Not Rosemary.” Feebly, Lily allowed the handkerchief to drop. “Me. I must tell you, Fennel, it is all your fault.”

Fennel pondered that remark. Had Lord Chalmers been aware of the current state of Fennel’s affairs, he might well have flown into the boughs; Fennel felt strongly inclined to fly into the boughs himself. However, the baron was
not
aware, although Fennel had little hope for the long duration of that blissful innocence. All the same— “That won’t fadge! I didn’t put Chalmers so devilish out of humor. Stands to reason: I wasn’t even here. You know what, Lily; you did it yourself! And you shouldn’t have! Putting Chalmers in a tweak ain’t going to help Rosemary.”

Lily regarded her brother with a distinct lack of affection and asked to be informed what Rosemary had to do with anything. “Thought you had a good memory, puss!” said Fennel. “Rosemary’s in the suds! Popped the family sapphires!”

Briefly, in contemplation of her own dilemma, Lily had forgotten the necklace. The reminder did not cheer her; a damsel who took her self-imposed tasks seriously, she realized that it must be very selfish of her, when Rosemary stood in such grave need of financial assistance, to whistle the Kingscote fortune down the wind. She sighed deeply.

Fennel might not have been the most perspicacious of souls, but it had become evident to him that Lily was behaving queerly. Stretched out on the sofa, one hand pressed to her brow, the other hand trailing the handkerchief on the floor, she gave every appearance of a lady teetering on the brink of a decline. “In the mops?” he inquired sympathetically. ‘Tell me about it!”

Lily greeted this suggestion with a visible shudder. “Kingscote!” Her voice was hollow. “I am very angry with you, Fennel, because if you had not said I wasn’t in his style I would not have set out to prove you wrong, and now I wouldn’t be in the basket! But you did, and
I
did, and now he has—and Chalmers says I should be quite content to have landed a fish who’s so plump in the pocket, and that I should take care he doesn’t wriggle off my hook!”

So fascinated was Fennel by these disclosures that he moved from the window seat to sprawl on the sofa at Lily’s feet. ‘Threw the handkerchief in your direction, did he? I thought he might! Now don’t go glowering at me, puss; Kingscote’s been dangling at your shoe-strings this age. You’d have known it wasn’t Angelica he was taken with if you wasn’t such a pea-goose!”

Admittedly she must be a pea-goose, confessed Lily; she hadn’t had the ghost of a notion that Kingscote fancied herself. “Poor Angelica!” she sniffled. “If all the eligible gentlemen make
me
offers, I don’t know how I am to contrive to get her off the shelf! None of this would have happened, Fennel, if you had not driven me to persuade the duke I was the very woman calculated to suit his taste. You might have had a thought for Angelica, who’s at her last prayers!”

Fennel was not thrilled to be cast as the villain of this piece. “Don’t go into alt over Angelica again!” he begged. “I have other things on my mind!”

“Oh, yes! Macaws and drinking cups fashioned from skulls and silver funerary urns!” Lily elevated herself on one elbow, the better to glare. “You are very
selfish.
Fennel!”

Drinking cups fashioned from skulls? Funerary urns? What the deuce would Byron have done, wondered Fennel, if plagued with Phoebe Holloway’s dragon of a mama? This was obviously not a propitious moment in which to inform Lily that his own affairs had progressed from bad to worse. Reflecting that she was spouting a great deal of gammon, he rubbed her pretty little feet. “Take a damper! It ain’t at all like you to go cutting up so stiff, especially over a gentleman popping the question. Kingscote ain’t the first to make you flattering overtures.”

“No.” Lily sank back once more and spoke in dying tones. “But he may well be the last! Chalmers has ordered that I must marry Kingscote. I suppose if I refuse I will be kept on bread and water in my room. Rosemary is right about Chalmers; he
is
cruelly unfeeling! He actually dared accuse me of blowing first hot, then cold.”

“If that don’t beat all!” In Fennel’s opinion, Lord Chalmers had made a rare mull of the thing. Charitably, he decided that his brother-in-law’s cow-handed dealings with Lily were due to a lack of understanding of the feminine mind. Fennel, blessed with a bevy of sisters, suffered no such lack. If applied to for guidance, which he wished that he had been. Fennel would have been happy to inform the lord that the way to insure that a young lady followed a certain course of action was to bid her do the opposite. “No wonder you’re in a pucker! Still, you was telling me just the other day that you and Kingscote rub on very well.”

“I do not love him,” Lily said simply.

With that viewpoint, Fennel had empathy. To a man, or woman, the Millikins believed the world well lost for romance. “Poor puss! Then of course you shan’t marry him. Did you tell Chalmers?”

“I did. And Chalmers told me I should console myself for a lack of affection with Kingscote’s position and wealth.” Looking highly indignant, Lily again sat up. “Then he gave me a rake-down! Oh, Fennel, I
do
pity Rosemary!”

Fennel could only contend with the problems of one sister at a time. “Maybe Chalmers was roasting you?” he suggested hopefully.

“Hah!” retorted Lily.

“Then tell Kingscote! He can’t still want to marry you if you don’t want to marry him, surely?”

“Fennel!” Lily looked reproachful. “As if I could be so cruel. Think of how the poor man must feel were I to say such a thing—his heart broken, his hopes dashed! No, no, do not ask me to wound him.”

It occurred to Fennel that there were inherent in this situation complexities which he had failed to grasp. “Seems to me you’re mighty concerned over the feelings of a man you don’t like above half!”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like him; I said I didn’t
love
him. You are not paying attention, Fennel, or you would not say such things. How could I possibly love a man who in his make-up hasn’t a speck of romance?”

“No romance?” Fennel echoed blankly. “When he just made you a proposal—offered you his heart and hand? You know what it is, Lily: you’ve got bats in your attic! I never heard such fustian.”

Lily regarded her brother soulfully. ‘That’s just it, Fennel: he
didn’t!
Offer me his heart and hand! He didn’t even profess to be my very ardent admirer! It was all very proper and above-board, and the dullest stuff. To marry such a man, who clearly hasn’t a grain of proper feeling—it is much too dreadful to contemplate!”