Maggie MacKeever

BACHELOR’S FARE

Maggie MacKeever

Chapter One

“I do not think I care for London,” remarked Lady Davenham, as with a frown upon her flawless brow she surveyed the town house drawing room, “although it has been so long since we were last here that I do not perfectly recall. Certainly I do
not
care for the way this house has been kept up. I’ll wager the holland covers were taken off the furniture only moments before we arrived. It is in sad need of polishing.” She approached one of the ancestral portraits which hung upon the light-green-papered walls, stood on tiptoes to run a disrespectful finger along the frame. “Dust, just as I expected! Vivien, something must be done.”

Lord Davenham turned away from the window where he stood, and gazed somewhat vaguely at his wife. Her attitude was indicative of awaited comment. “Guano,” he supplied.

“Guano?” Lady Davenham glanced quickly at her finger. “Sometimes I wonder where you take your notions, Vivien; it is merely dust. Not that one wishes to find dust in one’s drawing room; there is no excuse for it, even when one
has
been rusticating in the country for nigh on a year—still, dust is greatly preferable to bats.” She transferred her frowning attention from her fingertip to her spouse. “Why do you think we have bats in our drawing room?”

“Not in our drawing room, surely?” His lordship, a tall well-built man, responded with an abstracted air. “I’m sure I never said such a thing. By the by, I believe the results are very good. I cannot speak with similar assurance about the efficacy of sugar-baker’s scum, or hog’s hair, and I certainly do not approve of the transportation of Egyptian mummies to Liverpool, where they are ground down into bone meal.”

The frown cleared from Lady Davenham’s brow as if by magic. “You are speaking of fertilizer!” she said.

This flash of enlightenment earned her ladyship no praise. “What else would I be talking about?” his lordship inquired, disarmingly perplexed. “Coke of Holkham has the right of it: ‘No fodder, no beasts; no beasts, no manure; no manure, no crops’. It is
you
who said there was guano in the drawing room.”

“I did not! You were not listening to me again— which I do not scruple to tell you, Vivien, is one of your
less
endearing traits!” Lady Davenham joined her husband at the window. “Admit that you’ve not heard a word I said.”

“Personally,” mused his lordship, “I am inclined to agree that no fertilizer exists more effective than that provided in such abundance by the animal population. Still, much benefit has been derived from more exotic materials like lime and chalk, horn shavings and potash.”

To this assertion, Lady Davenham did not trust herself to respond. Silence descended upon the drawing room, broken only by the ticking of the long-case clock.

Gradually, the Duke became aware that all was not well with his Duchess; the Duke was not unintelligent, despite his habitual abstraction. “Poor Thea! I shall drive you distracted one day,” he confessed, with the whimsy that was his saving grace. “You are very good to tolerate my air-dreaming. What was it you wished to say?”

With a gesture of her expressive hands, Lady Davenham dismissed her husband’s gratitude. “Pooh! I’ll warrant you were thinking about spading and raking and seeding and whatever else one does to a garden in the springtime. Excellent! While I am busy with our cousin, you will have something with which to occupy yourself. Just fancy, Vivien—after so many years we shall soon be reunited with Malcolm. What adventures he will have to tell us! I wonder if we will find him changed.”

Lord Davenham had returned his attention to the window through which he had been observing his gardens below. Thea’s pause clearly called for comment. “Watering and pruning,” he observed.

Lady Davenham, whose attention was
not
on the gardens of Davenant House, paused in her contemplation of the neglected drawing room. “What have watering and pruning to do with Malcolm?” she inquired, a trace of irritation in her tone.

“Dashed if I know!” His lordship’s own tones were a trifle strained. “I thought you had just asked me what else it is one does to a garden in the spring.”

Lady Davenham refrained from pointing out that she already knew a great deal more than she wished to know about gardening—as she refrained from wreaking havoc on her husband’s flowerbeds to discover if he was capable of strong emotion, a matter about which Thea had begun to cherish doubts. “It is you who are talking about gardens,” she reproved. “Not I! I was wondering if we would find our cousin altered by his adventures— not that the
on-dits
which have circulated in his absence would encourage anyone in that hope. I would not especially
wish
Malcolm to reform—it was always a special treat to see him when he was sent up to us in the country when his poor papa despaired over him. No one ever dreamed up such larks as Malcolm—no, or was so much
fun!”

Lord Davenham had an aggravating habit of attending to the portions of a conversation that one preferred he wouldn’t, as he immediately displayed. “I do not think Malcolm has ceased to have ‘fun,’ as you call it,” he remarked wryly. “Rumor has it that he was nicknamed Le Roué by the Princess Borghese. Do you know, Thea, while standing here I believe I have evolved a scheme by which to improve the system of irrigation troughs. Tell me what you think,”

What Lady Davenham thought, and it was not the first time she had done so, was that there existed a wide disparity between her husband’s outward appearance and his inner self. All the Davenants were wildly romantic looking, with unruly black curls, flashing dark eyes set beneath flyaway brows, adventurous noses, and sensual mouths; in times more suited to their bold natures, they had been buccaneers, robber barons, skilled courtiers. Yet here stood the current head of the clan, serene, elusive, and vague, plotting his annual assault upon his flowerbeds. In the person of Lord Davenham, Lady Davenham thought unkindly, the swashbuckling Davenant blood ran thin.

“I
think,”
she said, when the Duke had ceased to speak, “that you are trying to pull the wool over my eyes! It will not serve, Vivien; recall that I have known you all my life. You think that if you ignore unpleasant things they will eventually go away—or be dealt with by me, which is much the same thing. And while I understand that some people believe me to be of a managing disposition, I do
not
understand why you should recall Malcolm with disfavor.”

Thea had not ceased her housewifely tour of their environment, passing censorious fingers over window-sills, poking suspiciously at the furniture, shaking the curtains in search of dust. Dust she had found in plenty, judging by the smudge presently existent on the tip of her adventurous nose—Thea was a Davenant by birth as well as marriage, and very like the family in appearance, regret as she did the fact. As the Duke watched, she stooped and peered under the carpet. “Just as I suspected!” sighed Thea. “Tea leaves.”

“Beneath the Brussels carpet?” inquired her whimsical spouse, arching one dark brow. “My dear, that
is
very bad.”

“Not beneath the carpet, on it; they must be spread about and then swept up with a hard brush. That is how it should be cleaned.” Thea straightened. “Not that I intend to bore you further with such stuff!”

“As I have been boring you.” Though Lord Davenham’s tone was kindly, his expression was unreadable. “I
have
been listening, Thea. You have decided Malcolm is incapable of managing his own affairs.”

No Davenant, not even one who deprecated her heritage, emerged from the nursery without an instinctive understanding of worldly things. “I am certain Malcolm manages his
affaires
very nicely,” responded Thea. “You were not boring me precisely, Vivien. Gracious! You are the Duke of Davenham, the head of the family; your preoccupation with estate matters may be forgiven you, I think. I am quite prepared to do so—providing you give me a reason why you do
not
wish Malcolm to come home!”

Conversation being a trifle difficult to maintain with a lady in constant motion, Lord Davenham detached himself from the window and strolled about the drawing room in his energetic wife’s wake. He wandered amid small tables, circumventing several heart-backed chairs. Finding himself entangled with a straight-leg sofa, he arranged himself comfortably thereupon. “I remember Malcolm differently from the way you do, my dear—perhaps because I was eldest. Still
am
eldest, in point of fact! You seem to have forgotten Malcolm’s habit of allowing others to stand the punishment for his deviltry.”

This, from the vague and elusive Lord Davenham, was a very long and lucidly expressed viewpoint. Puzzling over her husband’s unusual attention to the here-and-now, Lady Davenham seated herself opposite him on a carved-and-gilt settee. “You are severe!” she protested. “You may also be a little envious. Malcolm could sow his wild oats, but since you were the eldest you have always known that it was your duty to many young and secure the succession, as I have always known I would be your wife. Perhaps it may seem somewhat unfair—not to
me,
as I’ve no inclination toward adventure!—but necessary to ensure that the line would not die out.”

Lord Davenham contemplated the wonderfully shiny boot which he had propped upon one leather-breeched knee. “The line may yet,” he remarked.

Thus reminded of their mutual failure to produce the heirs that had been the reason for their marriage, ensuring that the next generation of adventurous Davenants were at least partially legitimate, Lady Davenham also regarded her husband’s gleaming boot. “Is that
why you dislike to talk of Malcolm? Because he is next in line? But you are a mere two-and-thirty, Vivien. Surely it will not come to
that.”
And then she glanced up from the Duke’s footwear to discover a disturbing light in his dark eyes. Lady Davenham had not espied that expression since preparations for the journey had begun. Lord Davenham’s habitual abstraction did not usually extend to the marriage-bed. “Vivien—” she murmured, her heart beating faster in her breast.

The expression in his lordship’s eye grew even more intense.
“Primula vulgaris,”
he remarked. “Heartsease. Candytuft.”

“Primula vulgaris?”
echoed Lady Davenham. “How can you speak so to me, Vivien? I am your wife!”

“You are also absurd!” His lordship clasped his hands around his knee. “I may be a trifle absentminded, but I have not forgot who you are, my dear! I don’t know why you claim I have. Have I not been talking to you this past half-hour?”

If the Duke had not forgotten her existence, reflected the Duchess, it was because she made it her object to remind him at least once each day. “Sometimes you can be abominably provoking, Vivien! You do it on purpose, I think. All the same, to call me vulgar is to go too far.”

Sternly accused, Lord Davenham studied his wife. Enthusiasm for life in general animated Lady Davenham, and an intense curiosity—especially about the details of other people’s lives, which she was prone to try and rearrange. “Managing, perhaps; meddlesome, definitely; but
not
vulgar!” he protested. “Can it be, Thea, that you are hearing things?”

Carefully, Lady Davenham folded her expressive hands in her lap. “I distinctly heard you say
‘primula vulgaris,’
Vivien.”

“Primula vulgaris!”
Lord Davenham laughed outright. “Not you, Thea! Bedding out!”

Bedding
out?
Though Davenants inclined toward such endeavors, conducting their liaisons with verve and élan amid great notoriety, Lady Davenham had thought her husband aloof from such escapades. Could it be that it was not only his wife’s embraces that Vivien enjoyed? “Gracious God!” she uttered faintly, shocked to discover how grievously her judgment had erred. “How can you think of—I mean, you haven’t got an heir!”

What
primula vulgaris
and heartsease had to do with his lack of offspring, Lord Davenham had no clue. Puzzled, he looked closer at his wife. She was in exceptional looks, he noted. Her cheeks were pink, and she seemed to be positively fascinated by his footwear.

His boots
were
worthy of attention, decided his lordship, but surely they had not caused Thea to behave so strangely. She was the perfect wife, managing the details of everyday life with the minimum of fuss. Yet here she was, if not precisely making a kick-up, at least looking distinctly miffed. Lord Davenham could not approve of Thea being made unhappy. He applied his not-inconsiderable intellect to recalling precisely what had been said.

Bedding out? Could Thea have mistaken—but she had always been shy to indicate her wishes—could a simple trip to London release a lady from what her husband privately thought of as the results of a large dose of propriety at a very impressionable age? Vivien could visualize Miss Marlypole, the dragon of a governess who was doubtless responsible for his wife’s passive acceptance of the intimate side of married life. That Thea enjoyed their private moments, Vivien was aware. His only regret was that she never, by any gesture, suggested such moments herself.