Maggie MacKeever (5 page)

Miss Baskerville’s companion acceded, gratefully. It was he who had introduced the subject, thinking to perhaps ease the strained relationship between his beloved and his friend—for he was Miss Baskerville’s very ardent admirer, and the Duke of Knowles’s friend; and on one side was frequently regaled with ironic observations regarding the Monster of Depravity, and on the other with vituperative comments about Miss Prunes and Prisms. Quite frequently he felt as if he were caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Of his less than comfortable position, Binnie was aware. “Poor Mark!” She smiled up at him. “All this fuss and botheration has put me out of sorts, and it is very noble of you to take up the cudgels on Sandor’s behalf. I suppose it is no wonder he has so high an opinion of himself, since the ladies were all running mad for him before he was fifteen. Myself, I think that to be sighing and dying for so foul-tempered a gentleman is ridiculous.” Suddenly she laughed, a delightful, gurgling sound. “What high flights! I make it sound as if Sandor strews corpses in his wake. If truth be told, Mark, I enjoy crossing swords with him.”

“He takes,” her companion responded, “unfair advantage. Although, to give Sandor due credit, I don’t imagine he thinks of it that way.”

“Certainly not!” said Binnie. “He doesn’t think of it at all! But we will speak no more of Sandor, if you please.”

Through the streets they wandered, past shops displaying toys and rare china, lace and millinery. Their progress was not rapid; many other people had ventured forth this morning to partake of the salubrious air. There was Lord Petersham to be greeted, and his confidence to be received: he had adapted for his servants’ liveries a certain shade of brown, his preference for the color being due to his devotion to a widow of that name; Mr. Tommy Onslow; Sir John and Lady Lade, who related a risqué tale of how Major Hanger and the Regent had induced country girls to race on the Steine for the price of a new smock. It was a diversion, all agreed, slightly more elevating than shooting at chimney pots. And then Sir John repaired to Raggett’s, where every day thousands of pounds were won and lost; and Lady Lade adjourned to Mr. Donaldson’s library, there to sit under the colonnade and watch the fashionable parade up and down the street.

Binnie contemplated her companion, who was looking a trifle severe. He did not like, she knew, her association with Letty Lade, who before her marriage to Sir John had been the mistress of a notorious highwayman known as Sixteen-string Jack, and whose speech, to say the best of it, was rather coarse. She looked away from his closed face and down the street, and saw the determined approach of a fashionably clad young lady, attended by a footman and a maidservant. “Oh, drat!” uttered Binnie. “Quickly, Mark, let us walk out to the pier.”

With a quizzical expression, her companion complied. In a manner suggestive of great haste, they progressed along the sea-walk, bordered by the beach, that served as an esplanade. It was a busy roadway, crowded with pedestrians, bath carriages, riders, and numerous vehicles. On the beach itself were bathing-machines and donkey rides for the children. Livery stables were interspersed with shops in the business area behind the esplanade.

Miss Baskerville was persuaded to bypass the local fish-market, where one could purchase fish caught but an hour before, and to step onto the pier that jutted into the sea. Part of its purpose was the landing of cross-channel passengers from Dieppe, who before the construction of the pier had been disgorged in boats on the beach. “Now,” said her companion, “what was all that about? Who was the young lady bearing down on us with all the determination of the Royal Fleet?”

“That,” responded Binnie, with a speaking glance, “was Miss Choice-Pickerell. The holder of my brother’s heart. Cressida has drawn the leading-strings about Neal very nicely, but that is no reason why
I
may not hold her at arm’s length.” She sighed. “This is not sour grapes, I assure you, though that is how it must sound. I hope I am not the sort of sister who will resent any female her brother means to wed. But Miss Choice-Pickerell is a very opinionated young lady, with an exalted opinion of herself; and I am convinced Neal doesn’t care a straw for Cressida, nor she for him. Surely such a match can only result in misery.”

Mark, who privately considered that Miss Baskerville was imposed upon not only by her cousin but also by her brother, gazed blankly out to sea. “What is it about the young lady that you so dislike?” he asked. “In appearance at least, she is unexceptionable.”

This remark, concerning a damsel generally accorded a diamond of the first water, caused Binnie to smile. “In all fairness, I know nothing against her, save that her father is a wealthy cit, and that makes no difference to me. Or it
wouldn’t,
if I thought Neal had a sincere attachment for her. Miss Choice-Pickerell has never to my knowledge involved the slightest censure; she adheres strictly to propriety, even in its slightest form. I cannot say why I am so deficient in good taste as to positively loathe the girl. Yet I wish that Neal would encounter someone more suited to him. I’ll wager that if he did, he would find himself—as regards Miss Choice-Pickerell—heart-whole in an instant.” Again she sighed. “Although, since they are formally betrothed, it would be best if he does not! Neal cannot cry off from the engagement, and Cressida certainly will not.”

Her companion made no response, but merely stood gazing out at a fleet of coastal fishing boats. Binnie fell silent, listening to the pounding of the waves and, in the distance, a military band. Again she had been tactless. It was easy to forget, in her easy friendship with Mark, his unflagging devotion to her—a devotion that Binnie, despite her efforts and his own, could not bring herself to return.

Covertly, she studied him. Mark looked very elegant in his curly-brimmed beaver and drab Benjamin, his tightly fitting coat of superfine and fawn inexpressibles and Hessian boots. The face above the deep, stiff white cravat was not handsome, but such was his easy charm and grace of manner that to be handsome would have been superfluous. Mark Dennison was beloved by all of his acquaintance—and of all that acquaintance, Binnie couldn’t imagine why his greatest regard was for a frump like herself. She decided he only thought he loved her, and that—like Neal—he would benefit from acquaintance with a lady more suited to him. Yet it caused her a pang to contemplate a day unbrightened by a glimpse of his delightfully homely face, his green eyes and dark hair. Unaccountably gloomy, she plucked at a loose thread on the sleeve of her redingote.

Binnie had misjudged her companion; he was contemplating not his own wounded feelings, but her concern for her brother’s plight. Mark was very well accustomed to Miss Baskerville’s refusal to take him seriously. “What will you do?” he asked abruptly. “About Neal?”

“What can I do?” Helplessly, she spread her hands. “It is Sandor’s place, is it not, to offer interference?—if interference there is to be. Truly, I think he’s left it too late. But it is too fine a morning to be sunk in gloom! You will oblige me, Mark, by speaking of other things.”

Mark did indeed oblige, as was his habit, with a story of an August day some years back when all of fashionable Brighton had turned out to witness on the Downs a great sham battle of seven thousand troops, which featured various jolly incidents such as the arrest of a military officer for sitting on a drum. Halfway through his narration, he became aware that the attention of his audience had strayed. Now it was she who gazed out to sea, and the bleak expression in her lovely eyes aroused his compassion. “Binnie,” he said quietly, and touched a chestnut curl that had escaped from beneath her bonnet. “Have you ever been in love?”

Binnie stared at him, startled not by the bluntness of the question, but at its appropriateness; she had been contemplating the disastrous nature of that emotion, and the havoc it wreaked with common sense. “I was very far gone in infatuation, once,” she said doubtfully. “Not that I imagine it is the same thing. Brief though splendid it was, until I discovered that I had been sadly taken in.” She smiled. “The object of my affections, as I recall, accused me of unbecoming levity.”

So far was Mark from sharing her appreciation of this denouement that his face grew grim. “My poor darling!” he said, gruffly.

Her amber eyes opened wide. “Do you think I nourish a broken heart? Fiddlestick, Mark! Why, I haven’t even thought of it for years—ten, to be precise. A long time to wear the willow, you must agree. Don’t envision me some poor creature of romance, I pray. I shall be perfectly content to be a spinster aunt.”

“A spinster!” he echoed, even more roughly. “You, at your last prayers! Utter fustian, my darling. Or has it escaped your attention that I have been dancing attendance on you these past several months? Oh I know this is no moment to tell you once again that I am desirous of setting in matrimony, or that my affections have become fixed—because you will only tell me once again that we shall go on more prosperously if I refrain from pitching you gammon.” Mark paused for breath and regarded his beloved, who was gazing steadily at his immaculate cravat, and whose cheeks had grown quite pink. “All the same, and though you don’t wish to hear it, I am offering you a love-match.”

“I must count myself honored,” murmured Binnie, in an agony of embarrassment. “You are a bachelor of the first stare! With everything prime about you, as Neal would say. And much as I dislike to shatter your hopes, I must tell you that this fixation you have about marrying me is the absolute height of absurdity!”

Perhaps because he was bemused by her flushed countenance, Mark took this blunt dismissal of his ardent courtship in very good part. Because he did not speak, Binnie peered up at him anxiously. “It is not that I am indifferent to you,” she added quickly, “but believe me, Mark, we should not suit. I think Sandor must be correct in saying the man does not exist who would suit me—but that is my fault.”

Mark regained his composure sufficiently to express a wish that Sandor might repair straightaway to the nether regions. Promptly, Miss Baskerville agreed. “It was very good of you to make me a candid confession of your sentiments,” she continued briskly, “and you need not fear that I fail to understand that it was done for the sole purpose of elevating my spirits—which it has. But if you continue to console blue-deviled ladies by the offer of your heart and hand, you will speedily find yourself in the suds. Now I must return home and make ready for the arrival of Sandor’s latest acquisition.” Mark looked puzzled. “Good gracious, I haven’t told you that Mannering’s daughter has been made Sandor’s ward!” She repaired the omission immediately.

In silence, Mark listened, as they walked back past the fish-market and along the esplanade; he was accustomed also to Binnie’s frantic evasion of serious discussions of romance. That she was not indifferent to him, he knew very well; what he did not know was whether Binnie’s fondness for him was the warmth of simple friendship or something more. He did not think she herself knew the truth of it; she shied away not only from his offers of marriage, but from a closer examination of her own sentiments. She was a bit of an enigma, this lovely lady who went to such great lengths to make herself unattractive, who bristled up at professions of devotion like a huffy porcupine. Mark could only conclude that she had been very badly treated by the long-ago object of what she termed ‘infatuation.’ Himself, Mark would have called it a great deal more. He also would have very much liked to wring its object’s neck.

“You are not paying attention to me,” Binnie chided, as they turned in at the entrance to the Royal Crescent, where her cousin owned an elegant bow-fronted house. “Or else you are very blasé, for I have just told you that Mannering’s heiress is currently in residence at a tinkers’ camp. You realize you must breathe a word of this to no one. It would hardly enhance the chit’s credit were
that
to become known. And I wish the girl no ill, even if Sandor does mean her to be an apple of discord.”

Mark abandoned his conjectures, which included a fervent wish that Binnie would confront her own emotions before he grew old and gray. “Mum as an oyster!” he agreed. “My love, you are very hard on your cousin. I am the first to admit Sandor has faults, but he would hardly bring this girl to Brighton merely to cause you discomfort.”

“No?” Binnie paid scant heed to this observation; a sudden thought had struck her, had brought a speculative gleam to her golden eyes. The Mannering chit was a minx, on all accounts, and Neal— “Well! I see I cannot convince you that I am what is vulgarly called in for it. And perhaps—if only—but you will not wish to hear about that! Good day, my friend, and thank you for your companionship, and do forgive my sulks. We shall meet again ‘ere long!” So saying, she whisked herself through the front door.

Mark stared at that nicely carved and painted item, above which was a pretty fanlight, then smiled as he turned away. Miss Baskerville was decidedly original. He admired her character, even as he mourned her cavalier conduct toward himself. For that treatment he did not blame her; Binnie was more frightened than unkind. But frightened of what? Surely she could not think that he would ever treat her as less precious than she was? A small frown upon his engaging features, Mr. Dennison strolled slowly along the Royal Crescent. There must be some manner in which to break through her awesome reserve.

Within the Duke of Knowles’s elegant bow-windowed house, Binnie leaned breathless against the door. She had been rude and graceless, had acted abominably, and that Mark accepted such behavior from her in no way mitigated her sin. What a fool he must think her! A missish ninnyhammer! ‘Twould be far better for the both of them if he—since she lacked sufficient resolution, another circumstance which she deplored—washed his hands of her. Were he not so patient, so damnably optimistic—belatedly Binnie became aware that the butler was staring at her curiously. Her cheeks hot, she mounted the stairs.

Mark she would think about some other time, she decided, and cravenly dismissed him from mind. Of more pressing importance was the problem of Neal. Absently Binnie surveyed herself in the looking glass, and noted with disfavor that her bonnet was crooked, and that there was a smudge of dirt on her chin. Ah well, her various deficiencies did not seem to weigh with Mr. Dennison. And then she reminded herself sternly that she did not mean to think of him.