The Madcap Masquerade

by Nadine Miller

  “Oh do be quiet and let me finish, Harry,” Lady Hermione snapped. Turning a beseeching look on Maeve, she continued, “Try to put yourself in Lily’s place. She was desperate. The birth of twins seemed a God-given solution to her problem. She could have both her freedom and her child.

  “I admit I was horrified when she first proposed to Harry that they each take one twin and go their separate ways. But once I thought about it, I could see the merit in the idea. Harry was no happier with her than she was with him.”

  “Amen to that,” the squire muttered.

  “So, I take it you immediately agreed when my mother made her infamous proposal,” Maeve said, addressing her father for the first time.

  “Not right off, I didn’t. If you want to know the truth, it struck me as a demmed odd thing to do. But then everything about Lily was a bit odd, if you ask me.”

  “But you did eventually agree.”

  “I did,” the squire admitted. “No point arguing with Lily. She always got her way in the end.” He shrugged. “And the way she put it—two halves of a whole divided evenly—made a certain sense. At least that way, nobody got the short end of the stick.”

  “Nobody except my twin and me.” A terrible anger gripped Maeve when she thought of how cruelly Meg and she had been used by both their beautiful, care-for-nothing mother and this buffoon who’d sired them. “Did it never occur to either of you that this wonderful solution to your problems deprived us of the joy of growing up together as we were meant to,” she asked with undisguised bitterness.

  She watched the squire squirm as he considered the truth of her accusation and decided to sink the knife a little deeper. “Tell me, sir, why did you bother to seek me out now, when you cared so little you could cut me out of your life with no regret when I was a babe?” she asked.

  “Don’t take that snippy tone of voice with me, Miss. I had my reasons for finding you.”

  “Dare I ask what they might have been?”

  “Women, that’s what. Silly, pestiferous creatures every one of them and your sister, Meg, the silliest of them all. Scared of her own shadow, she is, which I can see right off you ain’t. For more years than I care to count, I’ve put up with her whining and whimpering every time I reminded her of her duty to me and to the name of Barrington—and I’ve never yet raised a hand to her. But, by God, this latest bumble broth is more than any man should be asked to bear. So, you can see why I’m pleased as punch you look enough like her that not a soul could tell you apart.”

  Maeve scowled. “I see no such thing, sir. Please be more explicit.”

  Lady Hermione raised a silencing hand. “Let me explain it, Harry. You’re just muddling it up.”

  She turned to Maeve, her expression solemn. “The gist of it is the squire recently negotiated a most advantageous marriage for Meg with the Earl of Lynley. It is the ideal arrangement since the earl’s estate marches beside Harry’s and the heir the marriage produces will one day own it all.

  “Harry brought Meg to London and asked me to oversee the purchase of her bride clothes—a grueling task at best and an absolute nightmare in the brief time he allotted us.” She hesitated. “As Harry intimated, Meg is terribly shy and reclusive. Between the shopping trip to London and her apprehension over the upcoming betrothal ball that the Earl of Lynley is planning—”

  “Which is but two days away,” the squire interjected.

  Lady Hermione gave him a look that quickly silenced him. “The strain was too much for her, poor thing. Taking her maid with her, she ran away to Harry’s sister in the Scottish Highlands. She’ll come back, of course, once she’s rested up and gathered her wits, but in the meantime—”

  “What will the earl and his high-in-the-instep mama think when his bride-to-be buggers out on the blasted ball?” the squire grumbled. “They’ll think she’s a dimwit, that’s what, and the earl will start looking around for another heiress to pull his fat out of the fire.”

  Maeve turned a baleful eye on her father. “Are you saying the earl is only marrying my sister for the money she brings to the union?”

  “Why else would a grand fellow with a fancy title agree to marry a mousy little nobody like Meg?” the squire asked sourly.

  “Harry is right,” Lady Hermione agreed. “I know the earl personally. There’s not a handsomer, nor more charming man in all of England. Meg is the luckiest of women. Which is why it is so important that nothing disrupt Harry’s plans for her.”

  She smiled. “And that’s where you come in, my dear. Since I knew how closely you resembled your sister, having seen you both in recent years, I suggested you could stand in for her at the ball—and until such time as she sees fit to return to England. Once he saw you, Harry instantly agreed. No one will be the wiser and an otherwise sticky situation will be avoided.”

  Maeve bolted from her chair. “You must both be mad,” she exclaimed.

  “On the contrary, my dear, it is another heavensent solution to an unfortunate problem. Lily would be the first to applaud my idea. For all her extravagances, she was basically a practical woman—as I feel certain you must be also. Your father is a very wealthy man. He will make it worth your while if you do him this favor, and I happen to know Lily’s untimely death left you strapped for money. Think how handy a few hundred pounds would be right now.”

  Maeve studied the faces of the two schemers and felt nothing but disgust. Still, Lady Hermione had given her something to think about. On the one hand, she abhorred the thought of falling in with her father’s plans. On the other, she could see that doing so could work to her advantage, as well as place her in the best possible position to protect her twin.

  If Meg was truly as timid as they claimed, she would need protection from them and from the Earl of Lynley, whom Maeve felt certain was far from being the paragon Lady Hermione had described. For no woman, no matter how shy, would hie herself to the wilds of Scotland simply to avoid appearing at a ball. It was obvious poor Meg was fleeing from the dreadful earl.

  Maeve’s heart pounded wildly in her breast at the very idea that she had a twin sister who desperately needed her help. She had never before been needed by anyone—certainly not by Lily, who had been a force unto herself.

  At the thought of Lily and the heartless plan she had conceived two and twenty years ago, Maeve felt a wave of pain surge through her. She clenched her fists, determined to out-scheme the schemers who once again were trying to manipulate her and her twin’s lives to suit their own purposes.

  She had one advantage. Living with Lily had sharpened her instinct for survival, and that instinct told her that the squire was more desperate than he cared to admit to bring about this marriage between Meg and the earl. There was more involved here than acquiring a title for his daughter, or even combining the two estates. She had no idea what that might be, but she sensed it gave her the leverage she needed to drive a hard bargain.

  “I will masquerade as my twin at the ball and for a fortnight afterwards, but only if you agree to my terms,” she said finally.

  The squire and Lady Hermione exchanged a look of surprise.

  “And just what are your terms?” the squire asked.

  Maeve drew a deep breath, exhaled, and calmly declared, “I want Lily’s outstanding debts paid in full.”

  Lady Hermione gasped. “But that is unconscionable. Rumor has it she owed more than ten thousand pounds at her death.”

  “True, and the figure mounts daily,” Maeve said. “As her only known daughter, I am being hounded by her creditors—a situation I find unconscionable. But, nevertheless, I shall not be unreasonable. I’ll settle for exactly ten thousand pounds—no more, no less.”

  Actually, Lily’s debts amounted to but a little over six thousand pounds, but Maeve felt no compunction about nicking her father for the balance. He owed her for all the years he’d failed to contribute to her support when she was a child.

  Between what was left after she paid off Lily’s debts and her snug, little house, s
he’d have the security she’d always longed for. If all went well, she might even be able to offer her twin an alternative to marrying a man she obviously feared.

  “Ten thousand pounds! You’re your mother’s daughter all right, greedy little witch,” the squire grumbled.

  “And you, sir, are free to accept my terms or reject them and explain Meg’s absence at her betrothal ball to the earl, if you can. The choice is yours.”

  “I am bitterly disappointed in you, young lady,” Lady Hermione declared in a coldly disapproving tone of voice. “What you demand is out-and-out robbery, and no man in his right mind would agree to it.”

  A scowl darkened the squire’s beefy face. “Now just a minute, Hermione, I haven’t said I would—but I haven’t said I wouldn’t either. I’m thinking on it.”

  “You can’t be serious. Surely you’re not considering meeting her demands.”

  But Maeve could see her father was already close to agreeing to her outrageous terms—terms she would demand be in the form of a written and signed contract.

  Slowly and precisely she removed her worn gloves, finger by finger. She intended to write that contract herself, just as she intended to orchestrate every turn her life took from this minute forward. Painful and disillusioning as this past hour had been, it had taught her one very valuable lesson. She could trust no one except herself—and maybe, just maybe, the twin sister who was the other half of that self.

  Theodore Hampton, the eighth Earl of Lynley, rose from the bed of his mistress shortly before dawn and gathered up the shirt and breeches he’d so hurriedly tossed to the floor some six hours earlier. He dressed quickly, placed a farewell kiss on the forehead of the woman with whom he’d spent a vigorous and satisfying night and silently slipped from Sophie Whitcomb’s small, neat house before her neighbors wakened to the new day.

  He doubted there was a soul in the village who was not aware of his relationship with the voluptuous widow. Still, it would be the height of bad taste to be caught exiting his mistress’s domicile the day before the ball at which he was scheduled to announce his betrothal to his neighbor’s daughter.

  Mounting his horse, which he’d tethered behind the house, he set off for his nearby estate just as the first flush of rosy light painted the eastern sky. A picture of the mousy little creature his precarious financial position had forced him to agree to marry flashed through his mind, and something akin to panic gripped him.

  In all the years Meg Barrington had been his neighbor, he had exchanged less than a dozen words with her. Furthermore, when he’d tried to kiss her hand the day he’d offered for her, she’d cringed in horror and fled from his presence.

  “Meg is a wee bit shy,” her gargoyle of a father had explained when he’d signed the marriage contract. But how was a man supposed to build a marriage, much less produce an heir, with a woman as timid as that?

  Not for the first time, he cursed his father for his incompetent management of Ravenswood, an estate that had once been one of the richest and most productive in all of Kent. The illustrious house of Hampton had fallen low, indeed, to be forced to align itself with a loose screw like Squire Barrington and his attics-to-let daughter.

  In due time, he arrived at the Ravenswood stables, dismounted and handed his favorite stallion over to his head groom, who was well acquainted with his employer’s nocturnal habits. For a long moment, the earl stood watching the pale morning sun caress the mellow stone walls of the ancient manor house that was now his to maintain as seven generations of Hamptons before him had.

  “Whatever it takes to save Ravenswood from the auction block, I will do,” he vowed to himself as he strode toward the rear entrance that allowed him private egress to his suite of rooms on the third floor. Grimly, he reminded himself that he’d survived horrors during his five years on the Spanish Peninsula that were far worse than any miserable marriage might produce.

  And there were compensations. Sophie, for instance. Good sport that she was, Alderman Whitcomb’s generous-hearted widow had accepted his need to marry the Barrington heiress without a whimper—even assured him that as far as she was concerned, their “arrangement” need not be altered. After all, he would have more of the ready to see to her needs as well as those of Ravenswood.

  Then there was the London season, where he’d cut such a swath before purchasing his colors, despite the fact that, with his jet-black hair and dark eyes, he looked more like an Italian or Spaniard than an English aristocrat. It would be good to escape his work at Ravenswood, and his brainless bride, for a brief period each spring. He could visit his club, see his friends, look over the latest crop of opera dancers—partake of all the pleasures available to a titled man of means.

  By the time he’d climbed three flights of stairs and arrived at his chambers, his gloomy mood had brightened considerably. Now all that stood between him and his peace of mind was the niggling thought that if and when he did manage to get his skitterish wife with child, he had no guarantee the resulting offspring wouldn’t take after her witless side of the family.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The ride from London to Kent seemed interminable to Maeve, particularly the last hour when a sudden squall drove the squire to relinquish his saddle-horse and sink into the stained velvet squabs inside his antiquated travel carriage. She had thoroughly despised her father before ever meeting him and so far he had not improved with acquaintance. Furthermore, he had obviously been imbibing freely from the flask of brandy she had seen him slip into his saddlebag just before they left London. Still, she made a halfhearted attempt to initiate a conversation.

  “I am curious about my sister,” she said. “Tell me about her if you please, sir.”

  “There’s nothing much to tell. She’s just a plain as dirt kind of woman, same as ye. Only where ye’re cheeky and sharp-tongued—she’s so shy she fair turns herself inside out just trying to say a simple word or two.”

  “How interesting.” Maeve didn’t care much for her father’s description of herself, accurate though it might be, and she suspected her twin’s social ineptitude stemmed from a lifetime of living under the clod’s tyrannical thumb. “Won’t our glaring differences present a problem when it comes to convincing Meg’s friends I am she?” she asked sourly.

  “She don’t have any friends, far as I can see, except perhaps the local vicar and he strikes me as something of a dimwit. Why just last month the fool preached a sermon against the hunt, of all things. Made out it was some kind of sin against nature instead of the fine, gentlemanly sport everyone knows it to be.”

  Maeve felt it prudent to keep mum about her violent opposition to the ghastly pastime with which a large segment of England’s richest inhabitants were obsessed.

  “Just keep your eyes on the floor and your mouth shut, same as Meg does,” the squire continued, “and there’s none will twig ye ain’t who you pretend to be—least of all the Earl. Only time he’s seen Meg in the past ten years is when he made his marriage offer, and what’d the silly twit do then? Run from the room bawling like a babe with a bellyache, that’s what. So, quit your fretting. There’s no reason whatsoever why anything should go amiss.”

  Maeve could think of any number of reasons why such a crazy scheme might blow up in their faces, but before she could voice them, the squire dismissed the subject and launched into a discourse on his pack of hunting hounds. In glowing words, he extolled their fine blood lines, their uncanny ability to sniff out the poor fox who was their victim and the fine litter of pups he expected his prize bitch to whelp shortly after he returned home. It was all too obvious his interest lay with his hounds, not with his daughter.

  Maeve soon came to the conclusion that she had been lucky to have been the twin Lily took as her “half of the whole.” With all her faults, her beautiful, self-centered mother had once in a while managed to show a little affection for her plain offspring. She found herself wondering if Meg’s shyness stemmed from a feeling of unworthiness because she felt no one cared about her. If
so, finding a twin sister to love and support her might be the very thing she needed to make her blossom as she should.

  At long last the carriage passed through the massive iron gates of the squire’s estate just as the first shades of night darkened the rain-soaked landscape. With the luggage coach trailing behind them, they slowly traversed the muddy lane that led to Barrington Hall—a huge three-story stone structure with a recessed entry and at least eight tall chimneys protruding from its high, gabled roof.

  Maeve stepped from the carriage into a driving rain and stood for a moment surveying what, except for a quirk of fate, might have been her home for the past twenty-two years. It was not an inviting sight. Ugly patches of moss clung to the gray stone walls of the ancient manor house, the square, mullioned windows looked dark and dirty and forbidding and a rivulet of rainwater spilled from a clogged drain in the eave directly above the front door.

  “Damn and blast, meant to have that drain cleaned out after the last rain. Plain forgot it once the sky cleared,” the squire mumbled, stepping through the miniature waterfall to bang on the door with an iron knocker in the shape of a dog’s head. He knocked again, tried the knob, then gave the door a sharp kick with the toe of his boot when no one answered. “Hallo in there. Open up if ye know what’s good for ye,” he bellowed at the top of his lungs.

  Finally, the door creaked open, revealing a woman whose plump pink cheeks were framed with vivid, henna-colored sausage curls. Cook or housekeeper, Maeve surmised, since the woman’s barrel-shaped body was covered by a voluminous apron which might once have been white but was now as gray and stained as the stone of the ancient manor house.

  “Hold your water, squire. It’s a fair piece from the kitchen to this door and these hell-bred hounds don’t make it no easier,” the woman snarled, tripping over a pair of ancient foxhounds who chose that moment to wriggle past her and leap on the squire in a frenzy of devotion.