Maggie MacKeever (28 page)

Sir John was growing weary of all these suppositions, which were distracting him from his current main concern, which dealt not with matters of law and justice, but an intention to take the provocative Baroness into his arms, a lapse that may perhaps be forgiven him, because he had not done so for some while. “Get to the point!” he demanded.

“Patience, John.” Lady Bligh straightened her turban for the umpteenth time. “Where Puddiphat erred was in his assumption that Calveley was the cracksman, which of course he was not.” Triumphantly, she smiled. “But Calveley has a very discreet and unobtrusive valet, whom he hired during his travels, and to whom he has grown quite attached.”

All thoughts of dalliance flew straight out of Sir John’s head. “Do you mean to tell me Calveley’s
valet—”

“I mean to tell you nothing.” The Baroness departed from the windowsill. “This is merely guesswork. But you have overlooked the implications.
Were
Calveley’s valet the missing Blood-and-Thunder, he would also be Miss Bagshot’s father.” Mischievously, she smiled.

Sir John had sat too long in his shabby office, had heard too many cases to be surprised by any of the tangled relationships indulged in by the human animal. “You seem to have gone straight from A to Z! What made you suspect the valet?” he complained, then raised his heavy brows. “Of course you knew what the milliner’s brother looked like. You recognized Calveley’s valet.”

“I have always enjoyed skulking about,” Lady Bligh said enigmatically, as she came to a halt before the Chief Magistrate and touched his wrist. “This is the purest conjecture, John! Whoever Blood-and-Thunder was, he has not resumed his criminal activities, and no one is going to pay for his prosecution after so many years. This entire business is best forgotten.”

So it was, and if Sir John deplored the inadequacies of criminal justice, it was not his place to impose reform. “You make forgetting easy, Dulcie.” His smile lifted the weight of years from his tired face.

“I had meant to!” admitted the Baroness, as she moved her cool fingers from the Chief Magistrate’s wrist to his shoulders. “Now you may kiss me, John, and then we shall have our tea.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Lady Davenham was also having her tea, albeit a great deal less cheerfully. Thea was in her bookroom, seated at her kneehole writing desk, upon which reposed the tea tray. Having given up all hope of ever achieving a condition of unobtrusive emaciation, she was munching indiscriminately upon Shrewsbury tea cakes. Opened on her lap was a very old book—
New Principles of Gardening,
by Batty Langley, of which she had not read one word. As result of recent developments, Lady Davenham was feeling very ‘confused.

“There you are, my dear.” Lord Davenham strolled into the bookroom, Nimrod wheezing at his heels. “I have been looking for you. You will be pleased to learn the rhododendron has been restored.”

Deep in a fit of the blue devils, result of her various conjectures, Lady Davenham handed her husband a tea cup. “I have been wondering,” she murmured, “if perhaps we should introduce the Colling brothers shorthorn cattle into our own herd, and thus improve the breed. You had at one time considered doing so, I believe.”

“Shorthorns.” Looking very ruminative, Lord Davenham sat down upon a highbacked chair. “That calls to mind something I particularly wished to say to you, Thea. I didn’t mean that you
should
plant the antlers on my brow, but that I trusted you
not
to!”

By the calmness with which her exasperating spouse uttered this sentiment. Lady Davenham was further depressed. A reasonable husband would not respond serenely to the suggestion that his wife might have made him a cuckold, she thought. Still, Thea wished that misunderstanding to be wholly cleared up. “It was all Malcolm’s idea. We were to flirt desperately with one another so that you would display a dog-in-the-manger attitude,” she confessed, into her tea cup.

Lord Davenham balanced his own tea cup adroitly upon one knee. “That would not have been very generous of me, especially after—or so Miss Bagshot informed me!—I had as good as
invited
you to have a bit of frolic.”

Nor were Thea’s spirits lightened by this reminder of the high esteem in which her husband held Miss Bag-shot. It was little wonder he had exhibited none of the signs of an enraged spouse. Yet he was exhibiting none of the signs of a rejected suitor, either. Thea wondered if she would ever understand Vivien. “A bit of frolic?” she repeated absently. “You did no such thing.”

“Certainly I did not
mean
to.” Lord Davenham shifted positions, thereby earning a growl from Nimrod, whose liverish bulk was stretched across his boots. “But I distinctly recall saying you should do as you wished. Miss Bagshot has informed me that it’s only when you don’t care about someone that you don’t mind what they do—which is not the case! What I meant was that I want you to be happy.”

Lady Davenham wished the same fate for her husband, despite her periodic impulses to alternately throttle him and hang weeping around his neck. “Thank you,” she said gloomily. “You are very kind. I would return the compliment, but I know your happiness is impossible to achieve. But that is your own fault, Vivien! You could have cut Malcolm out, had you made the slightest push.”

In a very elegant manner, the Duke drained his tea cup. “You are mistaken, my dear. I
did
make a push.”

The Duchess was not awarding the conversation her full attention, being caught up in dreary remembrance of the Duke escorting Miss Bagshot to the Horticultural Society, and tooling the ribbons in St. James’s Park with Melly beside him on the carriage seat. Apparently Vivien
was
incapable of strong emotion, she concluded, or he would not so calmly accept Malcolm’s triumph.

Lady Davenham’s abstraction had not escaped her husband’s notice.
“Do
pay attention, my dear! This is not the moment to try and repay me for air-dreaming,” he said ironically. “I have just told you that I made a push to cut Malcolm out. And though I would not wish to sound a coxcomb, I fancy I was successful.”

“Oh, Vivien.” This display of wrong-headed optimism quite wrung Thea’s heart. “How can you fail to see that Miss Bagshot is smitten with Malcolm?”

Lord Davenham set down his tea cup on the floor. “But I do not
want
Miss Bagshot,” he explained, with a contemplative expression. “Although I did not think of it before, perhaps I should have let them keep that rhododendron—as a gesture of appreciation.”

Vivien didn’t want Melly? Thea tried very hard to understand. “Rhododendrons? Appreciation?” she echoed. “Sometimes I think I am grown mad as Bedlam, Vivien—or that
you
are! First you admit that you wished to steal a march on Malcolm, and then you wonder if you should reward him for cutting you out!” She massaged her throbbing temples. “Let us end this conversation before I succumb to a fever of the brain.”

Ever amiable, the Duke indicated to his loyal hound that he wished to vacate the high-backed chair. Sulkily, Nimrod removed himself from atop his lordship’s boots. “I have been thinking about your suggestions concerning a reaping machine,” remarked Lord Davenham, as he strolled to the kneehole desk and selected a Benton tea cake. “About those pulleys—”

“I have not the least distant interest in pulleys!” snapped Lady Davenham, pushing back her own chair. “Do not change the subject!”

Upon his Duchess’s inconsistency, the Duke did not comment, merely caught her chair before it could crash to the floor. “Both of us have been somewhat muddle-headed, I fear. You see, my dear, I have no interest in the fleshpots. Nor do I wish to kick over the traces. And I certainly do not hold you in lower opinion than caterpillars and snails.”

“You do not?” Doubtless it was due to the quickness of her rising that Thea felt faint. “But you said—”

“I did
not
say that all Davenants were unsuited to marriage.” Vivien caught his unsteady wife by the waist. “I, for one, have always liked it very well. It was you who hankered after adventure, Thea.”

Naturally, a lady who was being clasped around the waist by a gentleman must of necessity rest her hands upon his arms. “Yes, but that was before I knew what adventure was
like,”
Lady Davenham observed, briefly hopeful. Then her spirits plummeted. “And Malcolm said that if I had made our life at home more interesting, you would not have strayed. I will not play second fiddle, Vivien! Or tolerate you embracing me in another’s place.”

Elusive and vague as he might be, the Duke was still very much a Davenant. “Exactly so, my dear,” he said, and promptly embraced his wife.

“Wretch!” responded Lady Davenham, as she struggled half-heartedly to free herself. “I was not issuing you an invitation.”

“No? Then you should not provoke me, Thea.” Lord Davenham maintained upon his wife’s lush person a gentle but firm hold. “Moreover, I thought you enjoyed being embraced. You used to seem to, at any rate; only since we came to London I thought your sentiments had changed. Then the other evening, I had good cause to believe I had been mistaken—but perhaps that was the result of the ratafia. And for the record, my dear, you have never played second fiddle to anyone.”

“I have not?” Had Thea heard correctly? How had Vivien taken the absurd notion that she did not enjoy—

Blushing, Thea lowered her eyes, but not before she had glimpsed her husband’s expression, and the very wicked twinkle in the depth of his own dark eyes. Perhaps he was not as indifferent to her as she had thought.

Lady Davenham sought relief from her giddiness by leaning back against the desk. “Oh, I wish we had never left the country! There I did not have to contend with anything more worrisome than epidemics and droughts and failed crops—no, Vivien, I do
not
wish to talk about the crops!”

Lord Davenham, at that moment, had scant interest in his estates. He elevated his gaze from his wife’s delectable bosom to the pulse beating at the base of her throat. “What
do
you wish to talk about?”

“Um,” responded Lady Davenham. Her husband had touched his fingers to the pulse-beat which so intrigued him, and Thea experienced a certain difficulty in concentrating her mind as a result. “If you didn’t want Miss Bagshot, why did you take her to the Horticultural Society and drive with her in St. James’s Park?”

“Because I thought you wanted me to divert her attention from Malcolm.” His lordship made a mental note to provide his wife with several similar treats before they departed London. “That is what I meant by a muddle, my dear. I thought you were infatuated with Malcolm, and you thought I was infatuated with Miss Bagshot. The two of us have been going on in a very bad way.”

“You truly thought I had a
tendre
for Malcolm?” Thea cried, astounded. Then she recalled that she had once thought so herself.

“What else was I to think?” Lord Davenham raised his other hand and placed it against his wife’s flushed cheek. Not unpleasurably, she shivered. “Malcolm’s conduct was calculated to create exactly that impression. My dear, no man alive would relish the spectacle of another man paying such marked attention to his wife. It was deuced difficult to stand by and do nothing, when I would have liked no better than to wring Malcolm’s blasted neck. But I wished that you should make up your own mind.”

Lady Davenham relished this dog-in-the-manger attitude, however belatedly exhibited. “I did not think you had noticed. You are always so confounded
calm!
But Malcolm paid no more attention to me than he would have to any other female in my position. Until he decided you should be made jealous, that is! Never did I suspect that it was such heavy work to carry on a flirtation.” She frowned. “Our cousin is a devil. And we still do not know what brought him home.”

“I do; it was some business matter with which he had to deal personally.” Lord Davenham’s gentle fingers moved from Lady Davenham’s throat downward. His lordship was wearied of conversation. That her ladyship felt similarly was indicated by the rapid beating of her heart.
“Must
we talk about Malcolm?” he breathed.

“No.” Lady Davenham’s voice was somewhat bemused, the result of Lord Davenham’s current whimsies, which included unbraiding her lovely hair.

One small detail still nagged at Thea, despite her rapidly growing contentment with all the world. “Any man who cared a fig for his wife wouldn’t be amused by a chit who tried to blackmail her.”

“That is not necessarily true.” Lord Davenham ran his hands luxuriously through his wife’s curls. “Despite all the hints and warnings given me by Miss Bagshot and James, I knew you had done nothing to be blackmailed for.”

“James?” Lady Davenham was puzzled by this abrupt introduction of the squire. “What has he to say to this business?”

“What James had to say was that mettlesome fillies should not be given their heads.” Lord Davenham was himself looking somewhat bemused, due to the fact that his wife was absentmindedly unbuttoning his waistcoat. “What he has to do with the business is nothing at all, save that there
has
been a certain amount of talk.”

“And it has been my fault!” sighed Thea, stricken. “Vivien, can you ever forgive me for being such a— a
looby?
I cannot help but think a great deal of this contretemps has been my fault.”

Looking very serious, Lord Davenham clasped his wife’s hands. “My dear, there is something yet to discuss. I have recently come to realize that I have neglected you shockingly. I have not meant to do so! It is just that I have so many responsibilities.” A familiar expression stole across his features. “As for my potting shed—”

To this digression the Duchess responded promptly: “May the devil fly away with your potting shed! Oh, do not look so wounded, Vivien; I am as interested in your gardens as anyone can be—but I would prefer to resolve our marital difficulties before we progress to heartsease and candytuft.”

It was not to heartsease and candytuft that his lordship wished to progress. “A fig for gardens!” he said bluntly. “I had meant to tell you that it was not due to indifference that I have not appeared especially . . .
adventurous
of late.”