Maggie MacKeever (16 page)

“Lud!” the golden-haired woman said now. “You gave me a nasty turn. What do you mean, bursting in on a person like this? You might have caused me to go off in an apoplexy, or worse!”

The other woman’s expression was unsympathetic. Grimly, she sat down in a black-lacquered chair. “Would you have seen me otherwise? I think not. And I also think it time we had a little heart-to-heart, Margot. About certain accounts that remain unpaid!”

Mrs. Quarles also chose to be seated, at her dressing table, with her back to her visitor. “Accounts?” she asked. “I am very sorry if some of your customers are not so prompt in paying as you might like, but I still fail to understand why you should burst in upon
me
like some avenging fury, Rose.” She glanced into her mirror, which afforded her a clear reflection not only of her own pretty face but also of her unwanted guest. “I am very sorry for it, of course—but what can I do, pray?”

Rose snorted. “You can stop playing the innocent! You know perfectly well whom those past-due accounts belong to.”

Margot contemplated her own reflection now. She thought she looked very innocent, indeed. “I do?”

Rose sighed. “Cut line, do! You’re under the hatches again, aren’t you? Else why would you be barricaded in your bedroom like this?”

These shrewd observations caused Margot to wince. “You are an excellent creature. Rose,” she said. “I have always thought so, and that is why we have rubbed along wondrous great together these several years. How sad I am to see you now grown so vulgarly inquisitive.”

“Sticks and stones!” retorted Rose. Spots of color appeared in her sallow cheeks. “You may call me as vulgar as you like, do you but pay your bills.”

Margot would have adored to pay her bills; unfortunately, she could not. This unpalatable fact she did not deem prudent to confess to one of her chief creditors. “I haven’t the least notion what you are going on about,” she protested therefore. “Unless— Perhaps you have sent your accountings to the wrong address? In which case, it is hardly fair of you to hold me responsible for reckonings that have gone astray.”

Astray, was it? Rose suspected that the reckonings in question had strayed no father than her hostess’s writing desk. She glanced pointedly at that item of furniture and withdrew a list from her reticule. “Robe of Salisburg drugget, trimmed with gold lace; black velvet pelisse. Full evening dress with long tunic, high split collar and embroidered hem. Ball gown with sleeves of Ionic origin and palmette border at the hemline. Lilac satin spencer. Promenade dress with Tyrolean cloak and lace borders. Hooded evening cloak of purple-blue taffeta lined with rose. Indian shawl made into a dress, with its borders forming the hemline.”

Margot could bear to hear no more. “Which,” she interrupted, “was
not
a success!”

“And so I told you it would not be!” retorted Rose. “You haven’t the figure for it. But would you listen? Not that it signifies a whit to me whether you like the gown or not. What
does
signify is that I’m wishful of being paid for it!”

Margot fidgeted with the jars and bottles on her dressing table. “Was there ever anything equal to this?” she wondered aloud. “Things have come to a very pretty pass when you feel that you must hound me, Rose. If I have failed to pay you so promptly as you might like—through some oversight!—I shall remedy the situation, of course.”

Rose’s long nose twitched. “When?”

Unfortunately, Margot could not answer that question. “Oh, what does it matter?” she cried. “I very seriously and solemnly assure you that your accounts shall be settled in full, and soon. You act as though I were trying to cheat you, Rose. After our long acquaintance! It is a poor way to run a business, forgetting to send out your reckonings and then dunning your customers because they have not been paid!”

Rose was too shrewd a businesswoman to be led down a blind alley. She folded her list. “You received them, right enough. Whether you opened them, I couldn’t say. You’d do much better to deal upon the square with me, Margot.”

Did Margot detect a note of sympathy in that flinty voice? She turned on her chair. “Very well, then. I do not scruple to tell you that everything is going as badly as possible. I vow I don’t know what is to become of me! It is all the fault of this age in which we live. Perhaps Prinny may be enjoying a halcyon period with Mrs. Fitzherbert, but even he must find it difficult to ignore the scandalous behavior of his estranged wife. York consoles himself in the arms of a new ladybird for the embarrassment caused him by a mistress who trafficked in military preferments behind his back; and Sussex, who previously ran afoul of the Royal Marriage Act, is now suing his onetime wife to restrain her from calling herself duchess and using the royal arms.” She paused as if her point had been made.

If so, it had failed to reach its target. Rose failed to see what connection the goings-on of royalty had to do with her own post-obit accounts, and said so.

“Why, simply this!” responded Margot, so pleased with her clever reasoning that she abandoned her dressing table and took a turn around the room. “It is up to royalty, surely, to show us lesser mortals how we are to go on. It seems to me that one is either miserable because one is in love or because one is not. Romance is the universal malady. Although, considering how often it goes wrong, I cannot imagine why! The state of my own affairs is such that it is very little wonder that I may have grown a teeny bit remiss about my accounts.”

Rose reflected upon the tendency also of royalty to fail to pay its bills. The world, she thought, was in a shocking way. About the proclivities of royalty, she could do nothing. In her own customers, however, Rose was accustomed to instilling the fear of the Lord. Or, rather, the fear of debtors’ prison. “If I was you, I’d apply to that gentleman friend who you was so wishful of pleasing when you ordered all this!” she said, again indicating her list.

Margot glanced at that item, and guiltily away. “I have not seen him for some time!” she sighed. “He does not answer my letters. I believe he is to make a most advantageous match.”

Rose was wasting her time trying to draw blood from a turnip. “All the more reason to have a little heart-to-heart with him,” she said. “Gentlemen on the verge of stepping into parson’s mousetrap aren’t generally desirous of their brides’ becoming aware of certain facts of life. Otherwise—” She paused. Rose was not entirely without sympathy for Margot. Given a less shrewd intellect and a prettier face, she might have stood in the other woman’s shoes. Business was business, however, and never in the many years they had dealt together had Margot’s accounts been so far in arrears. “I’ll give you a sennight. But if you haven’t made things right by then, I’ll have to make application where you’d rather I would not. I’ll see myself out.”

Margot paled but said nothing. She watched the seamstress exit, heard her footsteps fade away down the hall. Only when silence had again descended did Margot pick up a pretty little bibelot from off the mantelshelf and hurl it at the wall.

Her feelings somewhat relieved by the crash of china, Margot resumed her agitated pacing. She had been put at an unfair advantage, she thought resentfully; but perhaps it was better to be caught
en deshabille
in the middle of the afternoon than to have been discovered wearing one of the costumes for which she had not paid. Not that Margot was to be censored for her failure to get dressed. In the absence of the gentlemen, the ladies may do as they wish, even to the extent of leaving off their stays. It was not the absence of a gentleman, now, that occupied Margot’s thoughts, but grim visions of an execution taking place in her house, with the carts drawn up outside her door, being piled high by her heartless creditors with all she owned in the world.

Silence settled upon the bedroom. Even the parakeet in his gilded cage ceased to sing, as if he’d caught his mistress’s morose mood. The afternoon sunlight streamed through the window, playing upon the crimson and gold in the Persian-patterned carpet, warming the sphinx heads and crocodiles and serpents of the Egyptian-influenced furniture. The bedroom was filled with such curiosities. Even the dressing table and corner basin stand had not escaped lacquer work and water lilies of the Nile. Only the bed was untouched by its owner’s immersion in the Egyptian craze, and it was fitted up complete with cushions in the form of a Turkish sofa, a drapery curtain in front, and girandoles on each side.

The sun glinted also off Margot’s golden curls as she passed by the window, and if those golden curls owned more to artifice than nature, such contrivances must surely be forgiven ladies of a certain age. She leaned over her dressing table and scrutinized her reflection, but no sign of her trouble could yet be read in her pretty, whimsical face. She wondered how long it would be before her constant worry and depression over her perennial financial crises would begin to take their toll. Not that it would matter if her flesh began to sag and wrinkle and her bright eyes dim and her hair turn gray, not if she were in debtors’ prison, for who would see her there anyway?

Margot turned away from her mirror. Since she was already so depressed, it would do little harm to look for those accounts Rose was so concerned about. She fetched the brandy bottle that she customarily kept hidden in her corner basin stand and poured a liberal serving of the liquor into a glass. A pretty feather boa caught her eye, and she draped it attractively around her neck. Then she crossed the Persian-patterned carpet, sat down at the pretty little writing table of slender proportions, pushed back its tambour shutter, stared morosely at the pigeonholes overflowing with post-obit bills. She fortified herself with a sip of brandy, before repairing to her task.

And quite a task it was. Cambric petticoats and cotton chemises; day and evening gloves of white kid, Limerick, York-tan; buckram and whalebone stays; assorted hats and bonnets; reticules and tippets, and a swansdown muff. Margot was stunned to think she could owe so much, in addition to what she owed Rose Brown. Grimacing, she reached for a sheet of paper and her inkstand. With furrowed brow and lower lip caught charmingly between her teeth, she struggled to tally her accounts.

The afternoon hours had lengthened when Margot gave up her reckoning. Though she’d reached no grand total, she knew her finances were seriously deranged. There was nothing new in this; she’d been living far beyond her income for months. Before, however, she had found some way out of her financial difficulties. “Oh, bother!” she said aloud in bitter tones, causing the parakeet dozing in its gilded cage to start and very nearly tumble off his perch. “I haven’t a feather to fly with, Dickie!” The bird ruffled his own feathers irritably, and she reached for a stack of missives that had arrived by the latest post. Margot sighed, expecting more of the same. She was not disappointed.

Then she glimpsed a familiar handwriting; the same handwriting contained on a ribbon-bound packet of letters that were ripe with such effusions as “difficult to believe in my good fortune” and “never more pleased with anything in all my life.” Margot smiled wistfully over these pretty sentiments. Her gaze lingered especially upon “You are not mortal, but divine.”

He had not forgotten her entirely, nor altogether closed his heart. It seemed her troubles were at an end.

Happily, Margot opened the latter.   “ ‘Notice to quit,’ “ she read aloud. With considerable effort, Margot quelled an impulse to throw further objects at the wall.

Instead, she drained her brandy glass, pushed back her chair; walked to the window, drew the curtain aside and gazed down into the noisy street. Nowhere could compare with Brighton in its display of vehicles. Often she had derived considerable entertainment from watching the procession of coaches and phaetons, curricles and buggies and gigs;

had, in the pleasure of observing such notables as Lord Petersham and Mr. Tommy Onslaw and Sir John Lade, not minded so very much that she had no carriage of her own.

Now even that small pleasure was to be taken from her. Margot was to be forced to quit this little villa that she had come to think of as her own. How very unpleasant it was to be the plaything of fortune. She sniffled, then sneezed. Dickie, nearly deafened by this outburst, voiced an indignant squawk.

“Oh, hush, you wretched bird!” Margot was indeed desperate, to seek sympathy from a creature that had scant interest in anything beyond the boundaries of its own cage. And she was also overwrought, so that in the absence of another human being she would talk to a bird. “I am expected meekly to pack my belongings and creep away,” she muttered as she walked back to her desk. “Under cover no doubt of darkness, so that no one may see!” Under other circumstances, she might have done precisely that. Margot remembered that the owner of this pretty villa had not been unkind to her in the past.

She also remembered Rose’s threats. Needs must when the devil drove. Geoffrey would not easily forget her at any rate. Once more she reached out for her inkstand.

Margot’s back was to the door. When she heard it open, she thought her tormentor had returned. “Not another word!” she said. “You
did
promise me a sennight to bring my accounts current. Rose!”

There came a throat clearing, and a panting noise, and a scuffling sound. Margot could not imagine Rose being their source. She turned in her chair. Not Rose stood in the doorway, but a young woman dressed in black, who appeared to be grappling with a large and most unattractive hound.

“Oh, do sit down!” cried the young woman in exasperated tones. The dog merely wagged his tail more energetically. “I already am sitting,” remarked Margot, amused. “Do you think you might tell me who you are?”

Tabby flushed with embarrassment. She attempted to render Lambchop less a nuisance by forcing his haunches down on the floor and then keeping them in that position by playing her foot upon his tail. Ermyntrude and Drusilla had wished to accompany Tabby on this excursion, and she had put them off by agreeing to bring Lambchop with her as protection against a possible meeting with a certain rakehell. As a consequence, Tabby had made the acquaintance of many alleys and byways that she’d had no wish to explore, and was short of breath, and felt very hot and tired and cross.