The Mischievous Miss Murphy (13 page)

At Patsy’s pleading, Candie rose and walked to the center of the room, where she stood in a demure pose, eyes cast down, and her hands clasped behind her back. “‘When you receive orders to go into the room where your parents are,’” she began in a singsong voice, “‘bow, stand still till such time they bid you sit down or inform you what is their pleasure with you—’”

“Oh, dear, yes,” Patsy broke in, rolling her eyes. “In my case, the ‘pleasure’ was usually a stern lecture for something I had done. Please, Candie, go on. I think it’s famous!”

Candie, happy to see her new friend smiling once again, complied. “‘Sit still, upright, and silent,’” she intoned awfully. “‘Look not at anyone that is in the room, so as not to stare or ogle at them. Play not with anything about you, viz., buttons, handkerchief, and the like. Put not your fingers in your mouth, bite not your nails, make no faces—’ Patsy,” Candie broke off, laughing. “Stop making faces!”

Patsy, who had been busily acting out all of the actions Candie had so far recited, only giggled and crossed her eyes.

“To continue,” Candie pushed on, her voice taking on the arctic monotone of Miss Hardcastle, “‘Make no noise with your feet, put not your hands in your pockets. Turn your toes out, lay not one leg over the other.’”

Unbeknownst to either of the young ladies now convulsed with mirth, Tony Betancourt, paying a morning visit on his only sister, had heard their laughter and was even now standing at the entrance to the room, taking in the scene unfolding in front of him. Urchin, he thought in amusement, watching Candie as she posed and postured, giving a splendid imitation of every headmistress and headmaster ever born, and surprised himself by finding himself to be quite proud of her performance.

“‘If you cannot avoid sneezing—’”

Patsy obligingly sneezed into her handkerchief.

‘“Or coughing—’”

Patsy’s cough was, Tony realized, grinning, their father’s loud bark to the life.

Favoring Patsy with her sternest headmistress look, Candie intoned crushingly, “‘Turn aside and make as little noise in doing so as you possibly can. It is very vulgar in anyone to make a noise in coughing and sneezing—’”

“And nearly impossible not to,” Patsy pointed out before once again demonstrating both vulgar indulgences.

“‘You should have a special care not to make any kind of faces, that is grinning, winking, or putting out your tongue, and the like,’” Candie ended, her face a solemn, forbidding mask, “‘for that will make you despised!’”

Patsy clapped her hands in delight. “Oh yes, I always abhorred that part. I once held back a sneeze for so long that my eyes watered and Papa refused to punish me because I looked so penitent, when I really was just trying not to have him despise me. How I worried that they would not love me.” She then sighed reminiscently.

This admission took Tony by surprise, as he would have sworn Patsy never worried a lick about anything. “Papa fairly doted on you, puss,” he said, entering the room and giving his sister a kiss on the cheek. “Why else do you think I put that frog in your bed if it wasn’t out of jealousy?”

Candie stood back and enjoyed the sight of brother and sister smiling over shared memories. Really, she mused consideringly, if he weren’t so dreadfully disconcerting to her emotions, Tony would be her choice for the brother she’d never had. Patsy was a lucky woman.

When Patsy at last released him, Coniston turned to greet Candie with genuine friendliness, happy to see her positive effect on his sister. But his smile hardened into a grimace as Patsy gushed out the news that Miss Murphy was to be her houseguest while Mr. Murphy was away on business.

“Patsy, love,” he said from between clenched teeth, “I saw your maid in the hallway, and she said to remind you of that appointment with your modiste this afternoon. You look fetching as you are, but I believe your maid may have laid out a more suitable ensemble for Bond Street.”

“Oh, lud!” Patsy exclaimed, gathering her draperies about her as she jumped to her feet. “I have a mind like a sieve, don’t I? Well,” she flustered, realizing she was leaving Candie unchaperoned, but then dismissing any fears as ludicrous, as it was, after all, only Tony, “I’ll be just as quick as I can. You two amuse yourselves for a moment, and then we’ll all have a nice luncheon before my appointment.”

Once she had reached the relative safety of the hallway, Patsy shivered at the look she had seen in Tony’s dark eyes. She had, somewhere in her flighty brain, realized that Tony might not like her plans for Candie above half, but it had not occurred to her that he would outwardly oppose her scheme. Now, closing her eyes and giving her head a little shake, she was not so sure. Tony had long since graduated from frogs in her bed when it came to showing his displeasure for any of her actions.

The chill that pervaded the room once Patsy had launched her verbal broadside had made Candie retreat to her former seat on the settee in an attempt to cushion the force of Tony’s inevitable icy blast of temper. She didn’t have long to wait.

“All right, madam,” he said, attacking the moment he was sure Patsy was out of earshot. “I doubt it will improve with keeping. Tell me, what maggot has Max taken into his head now?”

Momentarily nonplussed that Tony had dismissed his obvious disenchantment with Patsy’s plans in order to take umbrage with her uncle, Candie could only stall for time. “Why do you ask that?”

Tony arranged his handsome face in a knowing sneer. “Because I’m beginning to know how that larcenous leprechaun thinks, that’s why. Come clean, Candie, what rig is he running now? And why aren’t you with him—although I’m glad to see the man’s finally getting some sense into his head, even if that does mean he’s deserted you.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Candie responded with more heat than she would have liked.

“Tell me another one,” Betancourt said contemptuously.

“Salvation seize your soul,” Candie retorted in Max’s best brogue, “and why should I be lying to you?”

Tony allowed himself a small smile. “Force of habit?” he offered drily.

Her sense of humor touched, Candie gave in and told him what she knew, which wasn’t much. Max, clad in his Budge-Budge costume and carrying a small valise, had departed early that morning, saying he could be reached at the Pulteney if Candie needed him.

“Budge-Budge!” Coniston spat contemptuously. “I should have known he was up to something when he didn’t meet me this morning. After failing to run him to ground in Half Moon Street, I gambled on finding him here, running some rig on m’sister.”

“Instead, you found me here running some rig on your sister?” Candie prompted with infuriating insight.

“Indeed,” he concurred coldly. “However, I’ll have to deal with you later. Right now I’m off to put a spoke in Max’s wheel before he lands us all in Newgate.”

“So it’s off to the Pulteney you are, with your fingers in your mouth?” Candie spat contemptuously, causing Lord Coniston to halt in his tracks and whirl about to face her.

“And just what do you mean by that earthy Irish proverb?”

“It means you’re off on a fool’s errand, and no mistake,” Candie told him smugly, looking more relaxed than she had since he first entered the room.

Tony bristled a moment, but then his ego reasserted itself. “I think not, madam. For the day has not dawned that I shall be made a fool of.”

“Googeen,” Candie muttered under her breath, employing the Irish term for simpleminded as she watched Tony stride out the door, clearly off to confront Max.

“Has Tony gone, then?” Patsy asked when she returned to the room some minutes later.

“That he has,” Candie said sweetly, smiling at her friend. “And there’s many a dry eye after him.”

T
he Pulteney Hotel, with its impressive stone pillars and modern bow windows, looked out across Picadilly on the deer and cattle that browsed near the white-stuccoed Ranger’s Lodge in Green Park and the red- bricked facade of Buckingham House, the whole framed by the Abbey towers and the soft Surrey hills. It was one of the most exclusive and most expensive hotels in the city, and as Lord Coniston hurriedly vaulted up the wide steps and passed into the vast lobby, he was not surprised to see the place stiff with the rich, the titled, and the mighty.

That Maximilien would dare to run another Budge-Budge rig did not surprise Tony in the slightest. But the idea of using the Pulteney as his base of operations was a move the Marquess deemed to be foolhardy in the extreme.

Can’t say the man lacks audacity, Tony thought as he searched out “his highness’s” private suite. He knocked imperiously on the heavily paneled door, which opened under the force of his clenched fist, and strode into the room prepared to do battle.

What he saw and heard stopped him in his tracks.

“I cannot thank you enough for your offer to mention me to his royal highness, your excellency,” Sir George Ringley, a very small cog in the ministry office, was saying with earnest subservience as he bowed in half from the waist.

“‘Tis nothing,” the Maharajah of Budge-Budge, sitting cross-legged in regal splendor amid a dozen silken cushions, replied in a heavily accented singsong voice.

His royal highness? What the devil?
Coniston could not fail to notice the matched set of chased silver goblets resting at Max’s feet, obviously put there by Sir George in an overt act of bribery. A quick look about the sitting room revealed the place to be cluttered with similar “welcoming gifts,” ranging from silver tea sets to framed oil paintings.

Greed has many faces, Tony mused, shaking his head at the folly of his fellow man, and Max has elevated taking advantage of that greed into an art form.

“We meet again, your highness,” he said now, causing Sir George to straighten hurriedly and turn to see who else had come to curry favor from the visiting Maharajah.

“Coniston!” Sir George smiled smugly, thinking he had scored a minor coup in courting Budge-Budge if the man hobnobbed with the likes of the Marquess.

“Ringley,” Tony returned lazily, running his gaze up and down the other man before saying dismissingly, “You were, I earnestly hope, on your way out?”

Once Sir George had bowed and scraped his way ungracefully from the suite, Tony closed the door with a meaningful slam and turned to attack. “The Devil take your bladder, Max,” he ejaculated sharply. “We’ll all end in the suds yet, no thanks to you!”

Max ignored this outburst, lifting one of the silver goblets to inspect it, saying, “Nice, don’t you think? I tried to knock another shilling or two out of him, but it’s miserly he is, and ‘tisn’t today or yesterday it happened to him.”

Tony distractedly ran a hand through his carefully arranged dark locks and stormed over to snatch up a newspaper that was lying on a side table. “Where is it, Max? Out with it! I know it’s in here somewhere.”

Murphy didn’t bother to dissemble. “Page six, lad,” he answered, arranging his pillows about him so that he resembled nothing more than a plump spider sitting in his web awaiting prey.

Nearly tearing the pages in his haste, Coniston soon located the black-edged notice announcing the Maharajah of Budge-Budge’s arrival in the city as well as his willingness to greet journalists and government dignitaries at the Pulteney Hotel for the period of three days before his audience with his royal highness. “This is nothing more than an advertisement for bribes and you know it,” Tony accused, stabbing a finger at the notice.