A Masquerade in the Moonlight (16 page)

Thomas dressed unhurriedly, refusing to look down at his right hand, and only watching as the earl regained consciousness and Sir Ralph and Lord Mappleton helped him to a nearby chair, Sir Ralph still fanning him with the towel. Haphazardly tying his neck cloth, he motioned for Dooley to follow him out of the room, ignoring the stares of the men that followed him all the way to the stairs.

“Rushing away in the middle of your glory, aren’t you, boyo?” Dooley asked, frowning. “I would think you’d want to stay a bit, and take a few bows.”

“There’s no time for gloating, Paddy. Something strange was going on here today, and it has nothing to do with boxing. Something between the gentlemen we’re dealing with and Marguerite Balfour, and I’ve just stepped squarely into the middle of it. And even if I’m wrong about any sort of intrigue—the bastards just warned me off her and, Paddy, old friend, you know I’m not the sort to take that lying down. Come on—I have to get back to the hotel and get ready to go out again.”

“You have no engagements tonight, Tommie,” Dooley told him, fairly running to keep up with Thomas’s lengthy strides once they were on the flagway, heading up Bond Street.

“On the contrary, Paddy. And not just me, but the both of us. First, I’ll need a bath. Then we’re going to treat ourselves to a bird and a bottle, for I’ve begun to notice I’m suffering from a most prodigious appetite, and follow it up with a visit to Covent Garden. I have a niggling suspicion I’ll want to witness what’s going to happen there tonight. Oh, yes. And I have to visit a jeweler. Damn, but my hand hurts!”

“Do you think you smashed the thing?” Dooley asked quickly, lifting Thomas’s right arm at the wrist and eyeing his hand consideringly. “That one knuckle looks none too pretty, boyo. Was it worth it?”

Thomas grinned as Dooley used his own handkerchief to wrap the hand. “Worth it? Ah, Paddy, how can you ask? Didn’t you take a good look at his lordship? It’s a good thing he isn’t a talkative sort, for his jaw is broken for sure—sure as I am that I’ll be kissing Marguerite Balfour’s willing lips again before this night is over.”

“You’re a naughty man, Thomas Joseph Donovan,” Dooley said, clapping Thomas on the back so hard he nearly pitched forward into the street. “A bad, roguish, man. And it’s pleased and honored that I am to know you.” His grin slipped a fraction. “Just don’t tell m’wife!”

Thy complexion is black, says the raven.

— Irish Saying

“H
ere we are, Marguerite. Number Seven, and a whacking great pile of blunt I paid down for a single season, too,” Sir Gilbert grumbled, lowering his considerable bulk into a chair at the back of the box so that he could sleep through the performance without being gawked at by the rest of the company in attendance at the Royal Opera House. “How many flights of stairs did we climb, do you think, Twelve? And I still don’t know why I’m here. Got Mrs. Billings. Got this Georgianna gel meetin’ you here. Can’t imagine why I’m needed, especially since I can’t stand the sort of caterwauling they torture you with in this place.”

Marguerite motioned for Mrs. Billings to seat herself and then bent to kiss her grandfather’s forehead. “Now, now, you lovable old curmudgeon, calm down before you do yourself an injury,” she teased before taking her own chair at the front of the box. And why shouldn’t she be up front—for she knew she was more than presentable in her mauve silk, her hair piled high on her head and woven through with pearls. She looked, or so Maisie had told her less than an hour ago, just like the sweet young lady she wasn’t. “Perhaps you’ll be lucky tonight, Grandfather, and there will be a riot in the pits. Shall I buy us some oranges, so we can launch them at the stage if the caterwauling upsets you overmuch?”

Mrs. Billings, her watery blue eyes wide, leaned forward to whisper to Marguerite. “You mustn’t do any such thing, my dear, much as I’m convinced you are only teasing poor Sir Gilbert and cannot really wish to take part in any such debauchery—if it were to occur, which, of course, any young lady of breeding could only consider to be a deplorable exhibit of the lamentable lack of manners in today’s young gentlemen.”

“Oh, quite, Billie,” Marguerite answered, longing to strangle the woman, who had probably never indulged in a single moment of frivolity in her entire life. But, as Mrs. Billings was as stupid as she was humorless, she made a fitting chaperone, for Marguerite didn’t have time to waste outwitting the woman. Not while she was juggling four plans in her head at once. Four separate yet connected plans—and one maddeningly attractive American. “I was only teasing. Grandfather, did I mention we’re being joined by Lord Mappleton this evening?”

Sir Gilbert sat forward quickly, nearly toppling from his chair. “Awful Arthur? God’s teeth, gel, whatever for? I thought you was done with old men—not that he’ll be breaking down my door, begging for your hand. Holding out for a rich wife, that’s Arthur. Held out so long, nobody’ll have him! Now what’s the matter with that Donovan fella? All right, he’s an American, and with Irish dirt clinging to his boots into the bargain—but at least he’s not got one foot stuck in his dotage and the other already hovering over the grave. You—Mrs. Billings, or whatever your name is—what am I paying you for? Didn’t I tell you to have a talk with the child?”

Mrs. Billings sat up very straight in her chair and inclined her head toward Sir Gilbert. “I most certainly have discussed Miss Balfour’s penchant for favoring older gentlemen,” she said, her voice quiet and slightly pained. “However, as your granddaughter has informed me she will seek my advice if ever she desires it and will most probably do me an injury if I persist in my attempts to lead her down the correct paths, I have held my counsel.”

Sir Gilbert gave a crack of laughter. “What did you say, gel? Did you threaten to put a toad in her bed as you did with one of your nannies?”

Marguerite kept her eyes on the gallery below Box Seven, smiling as she responded to the question. “How you wound me, Grandfather,” she said, feigning insult. “I’m a woman grown now. I haven’t attempted anything so immature in ages.”

“She threatened to insert a notice in all the newspapers that I had become betrothed to the second cousin of the Maharaja of Rampur and would shortly be leaving for India to take up my duties as the man’s fourth wife,” Mrs. Billings said, her voice thin and slightly mean. “She is sometimes not a nice child, your granddaughter. I would have
perished
of embarrassment.”

“Nonsense, Billie,” Marguerite responded, opening her fan and beginning to wave it in front of her, for the heat in the building was stifling. “I would never be so lucky. You will doubtless live forever, never to leave my side until we are both quite old.”

“You will marry one day soon,” Mrs. Billings pointed out, hope coloring her usually drab voice as she settled back in her chair once more, “and I will expect a glowing letter of recommendation to soothe me as I apply for another position of employment. I have earned it, even more so than when I was squiring that unfortunate Miss Linguist about the city last Season. She may have ended wed to a third son, but then what can one expect of a girl with a squint?”

“Done! You’ll have your recommendation, if that will get us quit of you—but not until we have her safely bracketed. I promised her mother, you know. Marguerite, my pet, I had no idea you were so burdened with this woman. Remind me to buy you something pretty someday soon,” Sir Gilbert announced, banging his cane on the floor a single time for emphasis. “Now, with that settled, where is this Georgianna person you’ve told me about? You say I know her, and I’ve racked my brain all of the afternoon without remembering.”

Marguerite pinned a bright smile on her face. “As I told you, Grandfather, Georgianna Rollins is the daughter of an old school chum of Mama’s—or at least that’s what she wrote in the note she sent round the other morning. As far as I know, you’ve never met her, and neither have I, which is why I suggested we meet at the theater. If we don’t like her, we can shed her quickly enough after the performance, but I felt we owed Mama to be courteous to the girl. Who knows? You may see her and remember her mother or even having met Miss Rollins herself. Just, please, Grandfather, be good, and don’t ask any embarrassing questions.”

“I’m always on my best behavior, gel, which is more than I can say for some people sitting here tonight. But, Marguerite, I have to tell you something. I can’t see the point of meeting people I already know and haven’t seen the need to remember, and I don’t have the patience at my age to meet new people I might not
want
to remember. Ah, never mind. This must be the gel now.”

Marguerite, realizing that she was more than a little nervous now that another step of her plan for revenge was actually at the point of being commenced, steeled herself not to overreact and rose to meet the young woman who had just come into the box, her shadow of a chaperone quickly seating herself beside Mrs. Billings in the second row.

The young woman who had entered was slightly taller than Marguerite, and most modestly dressed in a simple long-sleeved ivory gown that reached from her satin slippers to the lace ruching and quantity of Berlin floss at the base of her long, slim throat—along with an extremely lovely diamond necklace. Her hair was blond—an exceedingly fashionable color this season—and her pale face was just short of pretty, for her brows were very straight and significantly fuller than could be considered flattering, and her jaw possessed more steel than gentle curves. But she was rather lovely in her own way.

Even surprising.

“You must be Georgianna!” Marguerite trilled, racing up the two shallow steps to envelop the young woman in a welcoming embrace. “How good it is to meet you, and you’ve found us in this immense building without any trouble at all. How utterly brilliant of you.”

“Nope. Never laid m’peepers on either the hen or the chick,” Sir Gilbert grumbled from behind them. “I may be old, but I’m not the sort to have forgotten those eyebrows—a lapse that I’d have to consider to be something only a whisker short of remarkable. Here, here, Marguerite, let the poor thing go before you crush her. There’s little enough air in this box as it is now that Mappleton’s standing here, blocking the doorway. Besides, I don’t want to talk to him.”

“What? What? Oh, you’re funning me, aren’t you, Sir Gilbert?” Lord Mappleton asked, pushing himself into the box, for the area
was
becoming rather crowded. “Always were one for the jokes, as I remember—those times I met you when we was all visiting down at Laleham Hall. Good times we had then, didn’t we—until that day last year when your dear daughter... yes... well...” His voice trailed off as he lifted a hand to his mouth and indulged in a fit of coughing most probably caused, Marguerite decided, when he’d nearly choked on his babbling tongue.

“Rhubarb and calomel,” Mrs. Billings prescribed, earning herself a corroborating nod from Miss Rollins’s chaperone. “Only thing for a cough like that.”

“Billie,
please
,” Marguerite said, glaring at the woman before rushing into a dizzying round of introductions that ended with Lord Mappleton being seated to the left of Georgianna, while Marguerite took up her own chair on the other side of the narrow center aisle. “Georgianna,” she prompted as she caught out Lord Mappleton staring at the way Miss Rollins’s thigh pressed intimately, daringly against his own, “are you enjoying your sojourn in our fair metropolis? Have you seen the sights?”

Georgianna smiled, not at Marguerite, but at Lord Mappleton. “Alas,” she said in a high, faintly affected voice, batting her eyelashes at the man, “I have not been more than a few blocks from our rented house in Brook Street. I so wish I could see some of the city before I am forced to return home next week. My uncle, with whom I have lived since my dear parents were run down in that horrid carriage accident, is now poorly himself. I cannot bear to stay from his side for too long, and not simply because I am the sole heir to his
considerable
fortune. I am only here because he insisted, dear, generous man that he is. You see, Uncle said I should see something of life before putting on my caps.”

“What? What? Your caps? You’re far too young and beautiful to think of any such nonsense,” Lord Mappleton protested, somehow having become possessed of Miss Rollins’s left hand, which he was fondling with more than friendly interest as his fingers toyed with the large pearl and diamond ring on her second finger. “And I should be greatly honored to take you up tomorrow—show you a bit of the sights and all that rubbish. What? What? I say, is that a tear I have spied out in your eye, Miss Rollins? No, no! I won’t hear of it. I am totally unmanned by female tears. Never could abide them without my own heart fairly breaking. You must be happy, my dear, for your smile is like that of the angels, and we mere mortals cannot survive without it.”

Marguerite rolled her eyes at this bit of flattery directed at Miss Rollins. Lord Mappleton, in her eyes, had become the living definition of “an old fool.” Her father would have been pleased, although not even he could have predicted his lordship should have grown so pathetically eager to court young—not to mention,
rich
—females as he edged closer to a pitiful old age. Why, Lord Mappleton must be near to dropping onto his knees right here in the box to thank the good Lord that the rich Miss Rollins found him attractive. In any event, it was fairly apparent Georgianna already held the fortune-sniffing man in the palm of her hand.