Maggie MacKeever (20 page)

These were air-dreams only; Sir Phineas had a horror of appearing foolish or
outré.
No pretty little opera dancer, no matter how cruelly neglected, would favor him over Jevon Rutherford. Sir Phineas had no wish to play second fiddle, even to so irresistible a courtier as Jevon was. Anticipating defeat, he would not enter the lists.

But Jevon Rutherford and Sara Valentine? Sir Phineas paused outside the door of the dowager duchess’s morning room. Having settled in his own mind that Jevon would never seek to lead astray a well-brought-up young woman like Miss Valentine, Sir Phineas could only hope that Lady Easter-ling’s inferences had lacked any basis in fact. Were Jevon to try and make a match of it with Sara, his aunt would doubtless banish him forever, from her purse as well as her presence. Very, very narrow was the pathway that the dowager duchess decreed must be walked by her heir. Poor Sara! Sir Phineas thought. One hoped she was not
épris.

Thomas, too, was thinking of Miss Valentine, as he escorted Sir Phineas up the stair; but in very different terms. Miss Valentine’s self-possession had stricken Thomas not with admiration for the nobility of her nature, but with astonishment at her imperviousness to shame. Also, Thomas had begun to doubt his own wisdom. At the time, with Jevon Rutherford’s silver in his pocket, it had seemed only kind to keep a still tongue in his head. Thomas was no gabble-grinder who went about tale-pitching at every opportunity; and it was possible, as Mr. Rutherford had claimed, that the scene Thomas had witnessed was not so shocking as it seemed.

Possible but not probable, he now believed. Had not Lady Easterling said that Miss Valentine had engaged with Mr. Kingscote in similar depraved pursuits? Such goings-on were not at all what Thomas was accustomed to.

He should never have confided in Lady Easterling, Thomas now understood; but he had gotten in the way of telling her things. Lady Easterling had a knack for drawing out information before one realized what he was about. If only she hadn’t spoken out so frankly in front of Sir Phineas! Sir Phineas would repeat the conversation to the dowager duchess, who would immediately realize her butler had been less than honest with her, and Thomas’s goose would be cooked. Should he make a clean breast of things and thus save his own neck? wondered Thomas, and then recalled Mr. Rutherford’s stern warning that in such a case he would personally flay his betrayer to within an inch of his life.

Though he could not know it, Thomas had no need for fear on Sir Phineas’s account; Sir Phineas had no intention of repeating the ridiculous accusations leveled by Lady Easterling. (Lest the reader experience too great a sense of relief on behalf of Miss Valentine, however, the author feels compelled to point out that a large number of servants staffed Blackwood House, and that it is not unreasonable to suspect that others may have been within earshot.) Sir Phineas stepped into the morning room, a churning sensation in his stomach, as if therein nested a large and lively family of butterflies.

“It took you long enough!” observed the dowager duchess, enthroned as usual in her massive eagle-headed chair. “Sit down, Phineas!”

Sir Phineas was relieved to do so; the dowager’s acerbic countenance rendered him even queasier. Without further amenities, Georgiana brought him up to date on the addle-pated antics of her family. “The fishmonger is master in
his
own house!” she concluded waspishly, after confirming Miss Valentine’s previous assertion that Lady Easterling had developed a penchant for boxing gentlemen’s ears, most notably those of Viscount Carlin. “Luckily, Carlin is too much the gentleman to spread the story; and I collect he also made a cake of himself. Then there is Arthur, mooning after Sara, of all people, and she hasn’t a farthing with which to bless herself. I tell you, Phineas, I am out of charity with the lot!”

No whit cheered by this announcement, Sir Phineas folded his hands upon his fluttering midriff. “Perhaps if you were to explain to Mr. Kingscote and Lady Easterling—”

“Don’t talk like a nodcock, Phineas!” responded the dowager duchess, who was not beyond deploring her niece’s common habits of speech in one moment, and in the next appropriating a particularly appropriate phrase. “If you prevent people meeting in the open, you’ll drive them to plots and assignations—look at the French! Besides, it is not Jaisy or Arthur I wished, to speak to you about, but that silly twit of a companion of mine.”

She knew, decided Sir Phineas sadly; she must know or else why mention Sara Valentine and assignations in the same breath? “I am sure,” he offered lamely, “things are not as bad as they seem.”

A dowager so firmly in position at the helm of her own ship had no need of platitudes to ease her passage. “No!” Georgiana retorted. “In my experience, things are usually
worse!
What, specifically, are we talking about, Phineas?”

Not by his lips would Sara Valentine be damned. “Nothing in particular!” Sir Phineas valiantly lied. “I was merely making a generalization.”

“Secrets!” snarled Lady Blackwood. “Everyone has them of late. You needn’t think I don’t know that mischief is afoot, or that Sara is up to her neck in it—and her neck it very well may be if what I suspect is true! I am not in the habit of nourishing serpents in my bosom. I require you to keep a sharp eye on Sara for me, Phineas.”

It took Sir Phineas a brief time to comprehend what she required of him, but then he replied firmly, “You are asking me to spy on Miss Valentine? I regret, my lady, that I must refuse!”

From the dowager duchess, this display of gentlemanly reluctance won no praise. “I promise you
will
regret it, do you say me nay, Phineas!” she replied ominously. “Like it or no, you will stick as close as a court plaster to Sara—pretend you are courting her if it eases your conscience. Not that I have said you may have the silly twit! Bear in mind that if you do not oblige me in this, Phineas, I shall easily enough find someone else who will.”

Some few days later, Mr. Kingscote and Lady Easterling were conversing in a similar vein. The setting for this conversation was Almack’s Assembly Rooms in King’s Street, St. James’s. Founded in the previous century by a Scottish valet of the Duke of Hamilton as a fashionable resort for aristocratic gamblers, Almack’s was the setting for elite subscription balls every Wednesday evening during the Season. A committee of tonnish ladies reigned over the revels, and their rule was absolute. Vouchers of admission to Almack’s were more eagerly sought after, and more difficult to obtain, than presentations at Court. Trade of any sort was barred, to the third and fourth generations, including generals and admirals and ambassadors. There was no appeal from denial of admission.

Picture, then, this temple of the
haut ton.
Was it done up in the Palladian style, with carved and coffered ceilings married to damask or stuccoed walls, with elaborate gilded cornices and triumphal doorways? Were the assembly rooms done up in the Egyptian style, the Chinese? French Rococo or Venetian Baroque? Startling as it may perhaps seem, and did seem to many who ventured for the first time therein, Almack’s was nothing of the sort. The dancing took place in a large bare room with a bad floor, half of it partitioned off by crimson ropes behind which the spectators stood. In a gallery at one end, the orchestra played. Off to the side were two or three smaller rooms, in which refreshments were served. No repast from Gunther’s, these; no tarts and ices and sugarplums. Almack’s ran only to tea and lemonade, bread and butter and stale cakes. Why then, the reader queries, did Almack’s enjoy such popularity? It is all of a piece with Jevon Rutherford’s philosophy. The gentlemen being as perverse as the ladies in wanting what they could not have, the pleasure of Almack’s was not in actually going there, but in the mentioning of the fact to the less privileged among one’s friends.

But to return to more important matters: Mr. Kingscote and Lady Easterling were engaged in conversation. This did not go forward with any great speed, due to the stately movements of the gavotte upon which they were embarked. Thus: Bound for
where?
By way of
what?”
inquired Mr. Kingscote.

“Perdition! The primrose path!” responded Lady Easterling, and pinched him. “Do try and not look as if someone had just planted you a wisty facer. Georgiana is watching us, you goose! Remember, we have made up our minds to take the field.”

As may be deduced from this snippet of conversation, which is very typical of any conversation between Lady Easterling and Mr. Kingscote, the two of them had embarked upon a conspiracy, the purpose of which was to delude the dowager duchess into a false complacency, and thereby to gain time. What Lady Easterling meant to do with the commodity so dearly purchased, Mr. Kingscote had no idea, but he very fervently wished her every success. Close acquaintance had not reconciled Arthur to the young lady whom Georgiana decreed would be his wife.

“I thought it was a cinder,” he protested, when the movement of the dance brought him once more into the proximity of Lady Easterling’s delicate earlobe, “that made her act that way.”

“A cinder!” echoed Lady Easterling, with a scornful glance. “It’s very clear that you ain’t had much to do with designing females!”

A designing female? Sara Valentine? But she had seemed so docile and so meek. Not at all how Arthur would have imagined an adventuress. To think that he had actually removed a cinder from the eye of such a creature. What a mooncalf she must consider him! Arthur flushed.

Lady Easterling, too, was ruminating, as she gracefully performed the movements of the quadrille; rumination was a pastime which had occupied her much of late, for there had been precious little else to do while languishing in her room. The diddling of the dowager duchess—and if Georgiana was cork-brained enough to place reliance on the ravings of a broken-hearted damsel, her consequent disillusionment was entirely her own fault—was but a part of Jaisy’s scheme. Jaisy was in the habit of dramatizing herself. Of course she never had any serious intention of squandering her handsome fortune and her equally handsome self on a country bumpkin. Well, just look at him! A cravat so high and wide he could not even turn his head, so tight that his eyes bulged, a pea-green waistcoat! Her companion in duplicity was looking very blue-deviled, decided Lady Easterling, and pinched him once again. That Arthur was out of humor, she had already noticed, but Arthur Kingscote was not of sufficient importance to long engage her rather skitter-witted little brain.

The quadrille ended; Mr. Kingscote and Lady Easterling exited the dance floor. “Miss Valentine seems a good sort of girl,” observed Arthur, who still grappled with the astonishing notion that Miss Valentine might be a base adventuress.

“Oh, yes! Sara is the
best—
except for her one little flaw, which is entirely Georgiana’s fault, or perhaps Jevon’s. Yes, I think it must be Jevon’s, because he started this whole business, and Sarah did once have a
tendre.
And now Sir Phineas Fairfax has taken to dangling after Sara, which is all
my
fault, and Georgiana doesn’t even seem to mind! Which I must consider very
remiss
in her because she’s always prosing on about propriety to me, and I ain’t the one who’s in danger of blotting my copybook. Sir Phineas could be Sara’s grandfather! And I cannot forget it was my tongue that spilled the beans! He never paid Sara any special attention until I intimated to him that Sara’s nature was a trifle
warm,
you see!”

Arthur, whose experience with the fair and the frail was even slighter than his knowledge of adventuresses, thought of the hours he’d passed in company with the worldly Miss Valentine, hours during which he had bestowed upon her not the most remotely indelicate word or glance. What a dolt she must think him! A bumbling bucolic babe in the woods! Though Arthur had no desire whatsoever to engage Miss Valentine in improprieties, the thought that he had been oblivious to whatever subtle invitations she had offered made him wish to gnash his teeth.

“Sara pooh-poohs the notion that Sir Phineas’s sudden tendency to stick as close as a court plaster means anything,” Lady Easterling continued, “but I’ll wager a pony that it
does,
and I fancy I know a little more than Sara about such things. Not that I am one to go in for assignations and trysts, so you needn’t get ideas!”

The sole idea in Arthur’s brain was to avoid his dowager-determined fate. He had scant faith in the ploys of Lady Easterling. For all her airy promises of circumventing the dowager duchess, Jaisy was only slightly more intelligent than a nit. Sara Valentine, on the other hand, was so clever as to have duped the dowager duchess, as shrewd an old gorgon as ever drew breath. Arthur might be a veritable innocent in such matters, but he didn’t think Georgiana would keep in her employ a hired companion whose nature was so sociable. Perhaps his wisest course might be to try and persuade Miss Valentine to utilize her considerable talents on his behalf.

Lady Easterling, who had no inkling that Mr. Kingscote meant to wheedle Miss Valentine into becoming his ally, regarded that young man with considerable impatience. It did not suit Jaisy’s ideas of what was proper that a gentleman whom she had said she would marry—never mind if she meant it or not—would habitually wear so long a face. If Arthur was unhappy, Jaisy was sorry for it, but she had already apologized very prettily for boxing his ears. What more could he expect? Arthur was a very poor-spirited person, she decided, sadly lacking in bottom and in dash. “If you breathe a word of what I have told you,” Jaisy hissed, “I vow I will do a great deal more than box your ears.”

“Hang it!” Arthur responded indignantly, his pride stung. “Oh, I say, there’s Carlin, in the doorway. What are you doing? Unhand my sleeve!”

This unsporting request, Lady Easterling very rightly ignored. “I am going to apologize to Carlin,” said she.

Apologize to Carlin? But Jaisy had vowed she’d be broken on the rack before doing such a thing! Arthur turned his head and encountered the dowager duchess’s flinty gaze, and wondered if Georgiana did indeed have such an instrument hidden away in the depths of Blackwood House.