Maggie MacKeever (12 page)

Adorée merely nodded, and watched in fascination as her caller without invitation sank into a chair. So devoid of animation was Lady Peverell, so languidly languishing, that she might have expired momentarily. Lady Bliss hoped fervently that to her already bursting budget of woes would be added no death scene. “I am Tansy Phelps,” murmured Lady Peverell. “I’ll warrant the name is not unfamiliar to you.”

“I believe,” Adorée replied, and tugged the bell-pull, “that I am acquainted with your son. There is a marked resemblance between you.” This was no idle flattery: Tansy Phelps was a faded version of her handsome son, with the same guinea-gold hair, and the same brown eyes. In Tansy’s case, however, the golden curls owed less to nature than to artifice, and the brown eyes were not vacant but brimming with an indefinable emotion.

Tomkin appeared once more, bearing a tea tray, which he placed on the table near his mistress. Her butler was an invaluable individual, mused Adorée, as that dignified individual exited the room. Among Tomkin’s countless abilities were considerable culinary art and no small skill as a lady’s maid. At least one person was wholeheartedly devoted to the feckless Ashleys. Thus reflecting, and wondering what possible motive had brought Tansy Phelps to Blissington House, Lady Bliss poured tea.

“Jade!” announced Lady Peverell, as she accepted a teacup. The emotion that filled her eyes was now easily defined, and it was malice. “Hussy! Jezebel! There is no point in denying it, for my son has told me all! He is forever boring on about you, and it is enough to make one wish to scream, for he speaks of you with an affectionate familiarity that is positively nauseating! Even for an unprincipled female, which even you must admit you are, your behavior leaves much to be desired, Adorée Blissington!”

Lady Bliss was thrown by these very great incivilities into a state of such extreme consternation that she almost dropped the teapot. Carefully, she set it down. “I beg your pardon?” she said, weakly. “There seems to be some mistake.”

“I suppose that shoe must pinch!” retorted Lady Peverell, whose habitual invalidism did not prevent her from doing energetic battle in behalf of her son. “Certainly there has been a mistake, and it was yours! Tell me. Lady Bliss, why a tremendous flirt who always has admirers in tow should go out of her way to make a conquest of a scrubby schoolboy? Did you think to prepare for a rainy day by encouraging poor Percy to form a lasting passion for you? To lead him into a life of dissipation so that you might bleed him dry?”

Adorée, left breathless and bewildered by this attack, gaped at her visitor. “Did you think I wouldn’t learn of it?” inquired Lady Peverell, with a ladylike sneer. “If so, you are the strangest mixture of coquette and perfect idiot that I have ever met! I have my spies, Lady Blissington—with a nodcock like Percy as a son, one needs must have one’s spies! Your skillful work has been most artfully done, but you must have known that Percy would speak of you, and that his family would take steps to end the relationship. And if you did not know it, you are as want-witted as Percy is!”

Adorée saw one tiny gleam of enlightenment in this dire and confusing speech. “Percy spoke of me?”

“Fulsomely!” Lady Peverell dipped into her reticule and extracted a vinaigrette. “I’ll own he had sufficient sense not to do so by name. You have, I’m told, an angelic face and lovely figure. You are additionally—Percy’s vocabulary being limited—a regular Trojan and bang up to the nines. And in all things maidenly!” Her keen eye raked her hostess. “Zounds! If I didn’t know before that Percy had bats in his attic, I’d know it now. Maidenly! Faith, you’re thirty if you’re a day.”

Lady Bliss did not take kindly to this remark, even though she was rather more than thirty; just that morning she had surveyed her mirrored image, and had decided that in her simple round gown of white lawn with a long sash she looked absurdly young. Additionally, Lady Bliss was cut to the quick by these wild accusations, for she didn’t number the entrapment of handsome moonlings among her various misdemeanors. “It is very ill mannered,” she ventured, “to refer to a lady’s age.”

“You speak to
me
of manners!” Lady Peverell waved the vinaigrette indignantly. “You, who have displayed to the world the essential vulgarity of your disposition, who can only be condemned for the heartlessness of your conduct? A female elbow-shaker who has so bewitched my poor son that he thinks you a wildly delightful sort of person, and cannot see your basic infamy?” She frowned. “In truth, so befuddled is my poor Percy that he distinctly said your hair was yellow and your eyes blue. And if that’s not proof of your influence over him, I don’t know what is!”

Lady Bliss tugged a dark curl and blinked her gray eyes. “Blond?” she echoed, on the brink of revelation. “Blue? Oh, Lord!”

“Well you may call upon your Maker!” Lady Peverell said piously, still wielding the vinaigrette. “‘Tis said He listens to even the most unworthy of His flock, and welcomes repentant sinners back into the fold. You might consider the torments of eternal hellfire, if nothing else will sway you from your iniquity.”

Lady Bliss stared once more, stunned by her guest’s abrupt transformation from maternal vengeance into the means of rescuing her immortal soul. She almost explained to Tansy Phelps that it was her niece who held Percy so enthralled, and then realized she could not. The world in general was happily unaware of Cristin’s presence in Blissington House, and an announcement of that fact could only mean Cristin’s ruin. Adorée still hoped that, in spite of her own current difficulties and Innis’s unknown but undoubtedly infamous plans, Cristin might be settled acceptably. How this was to be accomplished, Adorée did not know, unless heaven intervened in her behalf —an event that, in light of Lady Peverell’s most recent remarks, seemed a great deal less than likely—but Adorée could not take a step that would seal Cristin’s doom. “I don’t see,” she protested, somewhat feebly, “what you expect me to do.”

“Well, now, how very obtuse of you!” Lady Peverell, during her hostess’s rumination, had caught her second wind. “I expect you to give him up, naturally! And I might also tell you that I know he’s offered you marriage, a piece of sublime wrong-headedness. I suppose I must give you credit for turning down his suit—or perhaps you knew Percy cannot marry without consent until he comes of age?”

Lady Bliss did not explain that she had never had the honor of refusing Lord Peverell’s hand because he had never offered it to her; instead, she wondered what had prompted Cristin to reject such a nattering offer. And then she realized that if she was unacceptable to Lord Peverell’s family, her niece was not likely to be less so.

“Percy will never be allowed to contract such a
mésalliance
,” added Tansy, setting the seal to Adorée’s distress. “Lud! A baggage from a gaming house! And one who cannot live within her income, and changes residences frequently to avoid the bailiffs! Gad, to even think that our line might be united with the wild blood of the Ashleys!” She shuddered, dramatically.

“As you have pointed out, it is not likely to come about,” Lady Bliss was induced to offer this crumb of comfort by Lady Peverell’s demeanor, which strongly suggested a lady on the verge of an apoplexy. “You distress yourself without cause.”

“Stuff and nonsense!” gasped Lady Peverell, who would not even if dying accept succor from a shameless hussy. “You are correct in saying it will not come about, madam; I doubt that even you are skilled enough to hold my son’s devotion until he comes of age. You may be a diamond of the first water, but you’re far from your first youth, and that a younger woman will eventually catch Percy’s eye is clear as noonday.”

Lady Bliss could not argue with this, nor could she point out that a younger woman already had. Poor Cristin! she thought. Even if the Fates smiled, and the girl was allowed to have her gullible lordling, she would gain this termagent as her mama-in-law. Then Adorée’s thoughts turned to herself, who was no less deserving of pity. Here she was, a woman without protection or solace or the admiration of any gentleman, and what must this inconsiderate Lady Peverell do but harp forever on her age?

“Still,” remarked Lady Peverell, who despite her words wasn’t convinced that Percy would recover from his infatuation, in regard to which he exhibited a refractory behavior quite unlike his usual amiable obedience, “I am willing to parlay with you. My son’s sentiments are not widely known, nor do I wish that they should be. In order that the family may avoid the embarrassment which the publication of such disgusting intimacies would produce, I am prepared to offer you recompense.”

Adorée, whose temper had already been sorely tried, found in this pretty speech considerable grounds for offense, chief among them Lady Peverell’s opinion of the quality of her embrace. Disgusting intimacies, indeed! Had Lord Peverell truly been among her swains, he would have been in extremely illustrious company, for the admittedly lengthy list of those who had sued for—and most ardently—the favor of Adorée Blissington included the most influential gentlemen in the land, up to and including the prince regent. Not, she added silently, that Prinny was any great conquest. But there were practical matters to consider. “Recompense?” Lady Bliss repeated, warily.

“Exactly.” Convinced that she had correctly judged her adversary, Lady Peverell abandoned her vinaigrette. “I am prepared to offer you ten thousand pounds.”

“Ten thousand!” For that sum, Adorée could have a small mansion in the country and a whole herd of cows. Providing, of course, that Innis didn’t divest her of it first.

“Not a penny more. Do you think me a flat?” Lady Peverell’s vocabulary had been greatly broadened by conversation with her son. “Well, madam, what do you say? In turn all you need do is see my son no more and deny him entrance to your house.”

Adorée’s dreams abruptly collapsed. She took no offense at Lady Peverell’s offer to buy her off, and considered it an admirable solution to a great many things; but she recollected that Percy’s fondness was not for her, and realized that by barring him from Blissington House she would deny her niece any chance of happiness. But, ten thousand pounds?

“Perhaps,” continued Lady Peverell, contemplating her son’s new-found and rather addlepated tenacity, “you had best first blast him with a devastating rejection, and
then
deny him your presence. That would do nicely, I think.”

Lady Bliss, who had never locked her door against any admiring gentleman, and who furthermore had no greater ability to deliver a scathing rejection than she had to fly, goggled wordlessly. Lady Peverell, who had not expected such dull-mindedness from a lady who supposedly lived by her wits, made haste to point out the alternatives. “You are, I imagine,” she remarked, “acquainted with criminal conversion cases? Those legal offenses in which an adulterer may be accused of assault and trespass on a person’s property, which frequently bring for the plaintiff heavy damages, while the defendant, if unable to meet this bill, is sent to debtor’s prison? It would be a great pity, Lady Blissington, if you were sent to gaol!”

Lady Peverell’s grasp of matters legal may have been a bit shaky, but Lady Bliss’s was even worse. In addition to her recurrent nightmare of the debtors’ ward at King’s Bench Prison, she had a horrid vision of herself blazoned throughout the civilized world as a seductress of innocent and unwary young men. Even clearer, however, was her mental image of Percy’s sadness should he be forever parted from the object of his affections, and she rose to the occasion with a nobility of character that surprised even herself. “I cannot do it,” she said sadly. “I cannot be the means by which that young man is plunged into grief.”

Lady Peverell was not gratified by this hard-wrung admission that her son was regarded with some fondness by the notorious Lady Bliss. “You are not only an unscrupulous female,” she announced, with a repetition of her sneer, “but a fool to boot! Very well. Lady Blissington, we shall play this out your way—but I warn you that the responsibility must be upon yourself! I have no recourse but to lay the entire matter before my cousin.” She rose to her feet. “You would have done much better to take my offer. Dominic will make you pay for leading poor Percy to the brink of infamy, and I’ll warrant his price will be dear.”

“I wish,” retorted Adorée, herself on the verge of a distempered freak, “that you would leave! Tomkin!” The butler appeared as if by magic in the doorway, a feat explained by his habit of eavesdropping. “Show this female the door!” With a last reproachful glance, Lady Peverell exited, trailing her shawl. In a mood of great lamentation—which included everything from her virtuous refusal of ten thousand pounds and the consequent loss of a little place in the country and the probable ruin of what remained of her good name, to the countless indiscretions of the Ashley family, to her own reckless career and the inception thereof when at the age of eight she had embarked upon a flirtation with the gardener’s lad— Adorée tottered in a remarkable if unconscious imitation of her recent caller to her own bedchamber, there to console herself with a large dose of laudanum.

Chapter Ten

It was not a great deal later that Miss Lennox, prompted by a prodigiously inconvenient conscience, approached the red brick house in Portland Place and raised an apathetic hand to the door knocker. It was true, as Lord Peverell had pointed out, that if not for her, he would not have returned to Blissington House; and Jynx meant to learn from Cristin just how serious was his case. She rapped on the door.

The portal swung open, and she stared, as did Tomkin, still in housemaid’s attire. “We are at sixes and sevens today, miss,” he said severely. “You would do much better to go away.”

“And you,” Miss Lennox retorted serenely, “are the most rag-mannered butler I have ever encountered. I quite begin to think you dislike me. Do you mean to keep me standing on the doorstep, or will you inform Miss Ashley that I am here?”

“Oh no, miss!” Tomkin allowed her to enter and behind her barred the door. “It is just that I knew you was a lady the minute I clapped my eyes on you, and I was very wishful to keep you out of our little hobbles! But if you wish to see Miss Cristin, I’ll take you to her, and no more said.”