Maggie MacKeever (16 page)

“You are absurd.” Had Miss Prunes and Prisms raised her eyes to her cousin’s face, she might have noted that his cold features were unusually kind. “No matter how angry I am with you—and I admit to being frequently angry with you, which can only be what you want, since you provoke me to it!—I should never call you platter-faced. Or at least not with any degree of truth.”

Binnie was not at all assuaged by this flattering declaration; such was the agitation of the moment that she wished to scream. “Let me go.”

Sandor did release her wrist, the better to grasp her shoulders and give her an ungentle shake. Binnie glared at him and raised hands that were none too steady to try and smooth her hair, which with Sandor’s assault had come unpinned. He pushed her hands away. “Tell me.”

Binnie wondered uncharitably if during his fracas with Johann, Sandor had received a blow to the head. “As if you didn’t know when it is all your doing! And I wish you would cease laying violent hands on me.”

This request, the duke ignored. In point of fact, the duke did not hear it clearly, being caught up in bemused contemplation of Miss Prunes and Prisms’s lovely angry face, her sparkling amber eyes, her clouds of chestnut hair. “Binnie, I haven’t the least notion what you mean.”

“How can you be so perverse?” The glitter in Binnie’s eyes was not due entirely to anger; she was perilously close to tears. “You must be playing for high stakes indeed. Don’t come the innocent with me, Sandor. I know it was to spite me that you allowed Neal to become betrothed to Miss Choice-Pickerell.”

“What a coxcomb you would have me.” With difficulty, Sandor refrained from burying his fingers in her hair. “It was only partially to spite you. I knew, you see, that if I didn’t give my consent, Neal would marry her out of hand.”

This reasonable explanation did not impress Miss Baskerville, who didn’t believe a word of it, as her expression indicated. “Is
that
what’s plaguing you?” Sandor inquired, surprised.

Perhaps the shaking she’d received had disordered her faculties; Binnie was feeling oddly light-headed. She fixed her eyes on Sandor’s chin. “Surely even you must see such a marriage will be disastrous.”

The duke, conveniently forgetting his own ill-fated nuptial enterprise, wondered why Miss Prunes and Prisms should think him so shortsighted. He refrained from commenting upon her lack of experience in matters matrimonial. He also refrained from explaining that he had never intended this particular marriage should actually take place. “If that’s what’s fretting you to flinders,” he said generously, “I’ll see the thing’s called off.”

Binnie in her own turn refrained from expressing strong curiosity about why the duke should suddenly wish to turn her up sweet. “I doubt that the breaking off of this affair is within your capabilities. Miss Choice-Pickerell will not easily give up her hopes of cutting a dash in the best society.”

“I did not say it would be easy,” Sandor rebuked. “I said merely that I would see it done. But for my efforts there is a fee.”

Naturally there would be. Binnie scowled. “What an ungrateful creature you are,” Sandor said. “If you continue to grimace at me in that extraordinary manner, you are like to truly become bracket-faced, which would be a great shame. Which brings me to the matter of my repayment for efforts undertaken in Neal’s behalf: I wish that we should call a truce.”

Binnie looked bewildered. “A truce?”

“A cease-fire.” Sandor enlightened her. “A cessation of hostilities.”

Binnie contemplated this proposal, which in execution would doubtless prove damnably difficult. Almost, she refused. But it was her brother’s happiness that hung in the balance, and for that happiness any devoted sister must be prepared to make great sacrifice. “Very well,” she said unenthusiastically.

Sandor did release her then and solemnly shook her hand. Quickly, Binnie withdrew from his grasp and hurried toward the door.

On the threshold, she turned. Although Binnie had pledged peace, she had not promised to deny herself the last word. “Someday, Sandor,” she said grimly, “you will be called to a rendering of accounts.” The door closed behind her, emphatically.

Wearing a very severe expression, His Grace stared after his cousin. He remembered that she had accused him of playing for high stakes. And so he was, though she could have no notion of what those stakes were. If any accounts were to be settled, they would likely be her own.

What a hobble! thought the duke, as he touched his mangled mouth. Surely it was only a temporary aberration, this sudden desire to win a smile from Miss Prunes and Prisms.

Binnie, in the hallway, had leaned against the wall. What was wrong with her that she should be so weak-kneed? It could only be the result of Sandor’s bullying. What an unfeeling man he was, to exploit her concern for Neal. That Sandor meant to amuse himself at her expense was obvious; he would taunt her in his heartless manner and derive great satisfaction from the fact that she could not in good conscience, without endangering Neal’s future happiness, retaliate in kind. Well, the Machiavellian duke would soon learn he could not bring
her so
readily to heel! Slowly, engrossed in diabolic plots for the duke’s downfall, Binnie trudged up the stair.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It was two days later when Mr. Dennison—having endured a rigorous course of steam bath and “shampoo” after the Turkish fashion, which included vigorous plummeting and slapping, in the Oriental baths established by an Indian, in the vestibule of which hung the crutches of former martyrs to rheumatism, sciatica, and lumbago; not that Mr. Dennison suffered those particular complaints, feeling only a trifle out of sorts—found himself sufficiently composed to besiege Lord Knowles’s bow-fronted house on the Royal Crescent. Not the duke drew Mark there, but Miss Sibyl Baskerville, to whom he had a great deal to say.

She was in the morning room, plucking absentmindedly and inexpertly at the strings of the harp that once Sandor’s young duchess had played. Judging from the unmelodious twangs which Binnie’s fingers produced, the harp had not been tuned since Linnet’s death. And judging from Binnie’s appearance—her golden eyes were shadowed, as if from sleeplessness; her chestnut hair piled atop her head every which way; her dowdy gown a horrible example of how very far in the wrong direction a misguided modiste could go— Binnie was in a similarly bad way. An odd aroma assailed Mark’s nostrils. His nose twitched.

“Horseradish and sour milk.” Binnie said gloomily, as she abandoned the harp for a sofa upholstered in striped silk. “Edwina’s freckle remedy.”

Mark chose a rather rigid chair. He wondered if the charmer of his heart and soul had grown quite addlebrained. “But you don’t
have
freckles, my dear,” he pointed out gently.

Where once Binnie would have been amused by this misunderstanding, now she was further depressed. Binnie was deep in the grip of the blue devils. The source of this dejection was, as might be expected, her cousin the duke, who was holding in a most tenacious manner to the terms of their truce. He was all that was civil and kind, politeness personified—and Binnie, aware that he was mocking her, was very hard pressed to take his unexceptionable utterances in good part. Equally hard to swallow were Edwina’s raptures. Edwina considered Sandor’s reformation further proof of his infatuation with Delilah, and the mellowing influence thereof. Binnie was further disheartened by the odd humors to which she had lately fallen prey. And she could not even find relief for her affliction in administering the bane of her existence a stinging rebuke.

She became aware that Mark was regarding her with concern. “Forgive me, I wasn’t paying heed. What did you say?”

“That you do not have freckles,” Mark repeated patiently.

“Of course I do not,” said Binnie with some bewilderment, before she recalled the subject of their conversation. “Oh! It is Delilah to whom Edwina has administered her antidote. She was here with me until just a few moments ago.”

For Delilah’s absence, Mark rendered thanks. What he had to say to Binnie was of a private nature, and not for the ears of an irrepressible madcap. He wondered if perhaps Binnie might have suffered a revulsion of feeling for the girl, so melancholy had been her tone. “My dear, if I may say so, you look as if you have been racketing yourself to pieces. I fear that by entrusting Miss Mannering to your care, your cousin has put you to a great deal of inconvenience.”

‘Inconvenience’ wasn’t the half of it, though Binnie lacked the energy to explain. Nor did she feel it necessary to remark that the most strenuous other recent undertakings had been a game of loo, a sort of card-sweepstakes in which the subscribers were limited to eight, and the outcome determined by the dice. It was not Delilah, or even Sandor, who was worrying Binnie to death. Always she had recognized in herself a strong streak of eccentricity and stubbornness. Now she had begun to wonder, so inexplicable were her megrims, if that eccentricity verged on outright lunacy.

She made an effort to rouse from her despondency sufficiently to entertain Mark, and thus acquainted him with the latest episode of the adventures of Miss Mannering—to wit, the arrival of the tinker Johann with the purpose of blackmail. “The greatest blackguard alive,” she remarked. “Threatening to spread stories of the most compromising nature about Delilah. But Sandor dealt with him admirably.” Then she smiled. “Delilah, at least, exhibited not the least horror upon learning he’d offered to bandy her name about. She seemed to feel that he deserved to have his claret drawn.”

Mark decided, in light of his ladylove’s obviously misguided attachment to Miss Mannering; that it behooved him to tread warily. “Binnie, I hesitate to say this, but have you considered that there may be some basis for the man’s claims? I mean, what do you actually
know
about the girl?”

“Cut line, Mark!” she responded irritably. “If Sandor accepts Delilah, and he does, you can hardly do less!”

Certainly Mark accepted the chit, as a great affliction to all whose paths she crossed. He did not say so, lest he inspire Binnie to further distempered freaks. Instead he offered the information that he had seen Sandor the previous evening, at the local theater, in attendance on the fair Phaedra Fortescue.

As a conversational gambit, this fell flat. Mark therefore remarked that he had fallen into talk with the fair Phaedra’s husband, at Raggett’s. “Colonel Fortescue does not seem to be happy with Neal.”

“How could he be?” retorted Binnie. “When Neal’s cousin is dangling after the colonel’s wife? I tell you, this is a dreadful coil, and Sandor is to blame for all of it. It is no wonder my spirits are positively sunk!”

So disturbed was Mark by Binnie’s downcast manner that he moved to sit beside her on the sofa. “I dislike intensely to see you so disturbed, my dear. What has your cousin done now to cut up your peace?”

Heartily ashamed other vaporings, Binnie smiled weakly at him. “Pay me no mind. I am merely indulging in vagaries.” Privately she wished very much that might be the case. In such crowing spirits had Delilah heard an account of Johann’s endeavors that Binnie feared the tinker might in truth be the source of that damsel’s calf love. But if so, why had Delilah gone to such effort to escape him? Perhaps she had doubted the sincerity of his affection—and events had borne out the validity of such a doubt. Yet Delilah had evinced none of the chagrin of a young lady confronted with proof that her fortune was more desirable than herself.

After due reflection, Mark decided to share his suspicions of the duke. “Perhaps you are  not,” he said judiciously. “I have myself wondered— Binnie, your cousin has been suffering considerable losses of late. Oh, nothing to signify in a man of his supposed wealth; but in view of Sandor’s control of your brother’s inheritance, and his refusal to allow you access to your funds, and now his odd guardianship of Miss Mannering, it begins to look strange. I wonder what he is about.”

With these disclosures, he earned Binnie’s full attention, which was horrified. “Mark! You don’t think—”

“I don’t know
what
to think!” Mark grasped her hands. “Yet from something he let drop, I harbor grave doubts about Sandor’s intentions toward Miss Mannering. A child under his own protection! It argues a great insensibility.”

It argued more than that, thought Binnie, who was not happy to have her own suspicions confirmed. She had hoped her doubts about her cousin were no more than the product of an overactive imagination—even if one disliked a member of one’s family, one could hardly relish proof that he truly was a Monster of Depravity. Were Sandor in desperate need of money, it would explain his tolerance of Delilah: even though she was his ward, he meant to marry her. No wonder he had dealt so harshly with Johann! Sandor already looked upon the Mannering fortune as his own.

“Mark!” Binnie wailed. “We cannot allow this to happen. Delilah, married to a man of such diabolic disposition, forced to endure his inconstancy, to watch him dissipate her fortune as he has his own—and maybe even Neal’s! Oh, what are we to do?”

Thus applied to, Mark was forced to confess he did not know. Binnie, realizing that by his offered truce Sandor had made a fool of her, envisioning her entire family perishing in Sandor’s foul intrigues, reacted as would any lady of good birth and sadly shattered sensibilities: she burst into tears. Mark reacted in an equally fit and proper manner: he drew her into his arms and rained kisses on her brow.

In these respective pastimes they continued for some time, both having found them rather enjoyable. Then Binnie sat up and tried to set herself to rights. “I must look a fright.”

Mark was not a gentleman who admired watery eyes or reddened noses or disarranged coiffures; but he was far too much the gentleman to admit that his companion’s estimation of her appearance was correct. “Fustian!” he said politely, as he brought forth a handkerchief. “As always, you are without peer.”

Never before had Binnie realized how very
good
was her most devoted swain. He would not rip up at a person, or try and goad her into flying off the hooks. Always, Mark would conduct himself in a manner so as not to disturb a person’s peace of mind. So she informed him, rather incoherently.