An Extraordinary Flirtation

by Maggie MacKeever

  “How kind of you to defend me!” Lord Mannering said scathingly. “But unnecessary. The lady is a shrew.”

  “Coming it rather too strong,” said Fitz, because the marquess appeared unaware of the correct manner in which to deal with madwomen. “She’s merely taken a bit of a pet, which is understandable, all things considered.”

  Cara’s eyes glittered. She stepped closer to the bed. Prudently, Fitz snatched the draught out of her reach, and removed himself from the chair. “Lustful slug,” she said

  Nick lounged on his pillows like a sultan awaiting the arrival of his harem. “I’m not sure that slugs experience lust. Take another shot.”

  Cara stood gazing down at the almost naked figure on the bed. Well did she remember how Nicky looked naked. Damn him. And how he’d felt. “Just what would it take to satisfy your salacious appetites?”

  Nick stared back at her, and remembered how she had looked sprawled naked in his bed. And what she’d done, damn her. “More than you can offer, clearly,” he retorted, with every ounce of villainy at his command.

  Cara blanched, then flushed, and hurled the fireplace poker straight at him. Nick ducked to avoid it, and yelped with the pain. She looked concerned. “You missed,” he said.

  That was the absolutely final straw, and it broke not only the camel’s back but tweaked its tail as well. “You faithless, rake-helly imbecile!” shouted Cara, and punched him on the jaw. Nick collapsed back onto his pillows. Cara turned on her heel and stalked out of the room. Behind her, the door slammed.

  Cautiously, Fitz ventured out from behind the chair where he’d been cowering, and tiptoed toward the bed, where he hoped to assure himself that it wasn’t bellows to mend with his friend. Well, it clearly was bellows to mend, that was incontestable, but Fitz wished to make sure the facer that Lady Norwood had landed hadn’t knocked the marquess out cold.

  The marquess was very much awake. He lay back on his pillows, staring at the canopy, hand to his newly damaged jaw. “I’m not sure but what you deserved that,” Fitz observed.

  Nick knew damned well he deserved it, which put him in no better mood. Fitz was still clutching the draught. “Give me that damned glass,” he said, and snatched it, and drained it dry.

  Fitz perched cautiously on the edge of the bed. “That’s a fine woman, Nicky. Even if she does have the devil of a temper. You shouldn’t have provoked her like that.”

  Nick moved his jaw about to make certain that he could. “And she didn’t provoke me, I suppose.”

  Fitz wasn’t about to be drawn into a discussion of who had behaved more badly. He had leaned forward to inspect the abused jaw. “By Jove! A matched set of bruises. Maybe you’ll set a new style.”

  In no mood for humor, Lord Mannering snarled. Fitz regarded him with unusual seriousness. “Nicky, you are going to cry off, are you not?”

  The marquess closed his eyes. “I’m not going to do anything just yet. Go away and let me rest.”

  This was the thanks a fellow got for supporting his friend in adversity? Huffily, Fitz removed himself from the bed. “You must know your own business best, of course. But if you don’t cry off, I shan’t stand up for you, so don’t even ask!”

  Chapter 15

  One more fling of the dice, indeed. Cara should have known from bitter experience that she might fling the dice all she wished and never know other than a losing hand, unlike her Great-Great-Great Grandmother Alyce, who had parlayed a lucky tendency toward sevens and elevens into the proprietorship of an exclusive gaming house in Holborn, where she had surrounded herself with a curious assortment of foreign princes, barons, and ambassadors, children and grandchildren, as well as a menagerie that included several cats, an even dozen King Charles spaniels, an excessively fat rabbit, and a little Moorish page, until she died at age eighty-three in the arms of her favorite footman, of a spasm of the heart resulting from retrocedent gout.

  Barrow interrupted these glum thoughts with a vigorously wielded hairbrush. “What an uproar! The whole household is on its ear. And where did you go this morning, I’d like to know? Not that I expect you to tell me, for I’m just a servant, and never mind that I’ve been at your side through thick and thin. Far be it from me to tell you that you shouldn’t be going out alone, for you’re in London, and not in the country now. With your hair looking like a bird’s nest! And what’s become of your green hair ribbon, pray?”

  Cara bit her lip. The green ribbon was the least of the items she had left at Nicky’s house. “I’m sure it will turn up. Stop fussing, Barrow. I look well enough.”

  So she did, due in no small measure to the abigail’s clever fingers, which had persuaded the bird’s nest into neat coils and braids, and the rest of her ladyship into a round dress of pale blue cambric. Barrow set down the hairbrush with a last disapproving sniff. “I know what I know. Take care, my lady, that Squire Anderley doesn’t wash his hands of you, and then where would you be?”

  Safely at home in the Cotswolds, with her lilacs and her roses and her kumquat tree, where she was now prevented from returning by Zoe’s impending nuptials. “That will be enough, Barrow!” Cara said, with unaccustomed severity, and walked out of the room. The abigail dropped down on the dressing stool, and regarded her own reflection in the looking glass. If that green ribbon turned up anywhere in the vicinity, she’d eat it on toast.

  Ianthe was in the drawing room, seated in a cabriole-legged wing chair, on the table in front of her a hand-engraved silver teapot made by Mr. Robert Hennell of London in 1782, alongside her dainty-slippered feet. Scattered about the carpet were wads of paper, as well as a dejected Daisy, who was in disgrace for her part in this morning’s contretemps, although no one except Zoe knew for certain exactly what Daisy’s part had been. That ebullient young miss had gone riding with a party of her friends, whom she was entertaining with a lavishly embellished account of her romantic adventure with Lord Mannering in the front hallway of her papa’s house, thereby shattering the dreams of several Hussars, both viscounts, the baronet, and the admiral, though the aged knight held out hope that it was early days yet. Ianthe wore a long-sleeved dress of figured chintz, and around her shoulder a fringed shawl.

  She looked up as Cara walked into the room, followed by two footmen carrying a sorry-looking sapling in a wooden tub. Ianthe eyed it doubtfully. “What are you going to do with that?”

  What Cara would have liked to do was bash a certain marquess over the head with it, if only she could figure how, not that she wished to damage the poor thing. The tree, that was, not Nicky. “ ‘That’ is a Sophora japonica, a Japanese pagoda tree. In time it will grow to as much as seventy-five feet tall, and equally as wide around, if given enough space. It flowers in the summer.” Cara touched a leaf. “I’m told there is an especially fine specimen at Kew.”

  Doubtfully, Ianthe eyed the sapling, which didn’t look as if it would achieve seven feet in height, let alone seventy-five. “But, Cara, there is hardly sufficient space for such a thing—lovely as it is!—in the drawing room,” she said.

  The Sophora japonica wasn’t the least bit lovely, although it was heavy. Cara bade the footmen set it down. “I will tell you where to take it later,” she said, and sent them from the room.

  Ianthe was still staring at the tree. “Take it?” she said.

  “I am going to return it to its rightful owner.” Cara stared at her cousin’s feet, propped on the tea table in a posture sufficiently rag-mannered to be worthy of Zoe. “Ianthe, are you well?”

  Ianthe poured a cup of tea for her cousin. “Beau says that this latest disaster is all my fault.”

  Cara watched Daisy crawl across the carpet on her belly. She relented and gave the dog a pat. “Why is it your fault that N—Lord Mannering!—tried to seduce Zoe?”

  Why was it that Lord Mannering had given Cara a Sophora japonica, sorry a specimen as it might have been? Ianthe had no doubt where the tree had come from. “Beau has gotten into the habit of thinking everything is my fault. For him t
o call me a wet goose was one thing, or even a watering pot, for I realize that I have had a tendency to be a little damp. But to call me a goose-cap was the outside of enough, and then to compound matters by accusing me of being an arch wife—" Ianthe lifted her teacup as if to propose a toast. “I have had an epiphany.”

  The family was prone to epiphanies, along with their adventures. “Beau is a sapskull,” Cara soothed. “He’s probably already sorry for what he said.”

  “I doubt it.” Ianthe wrinkled her nose. “He will have gone to one of his clubs—or one of his mistresses— without giving the matter another thought. And that is my fault, for I have made him into every bit as great a monster as he has made Zoe.” She looked at the wads of paper strewn about the floor. “Furthermore, I don’t see why I should be the one to make up a list of wedding guests!”

  Ianthe was in a temper. It didn’t happen often, but she was, after all, a member of the same family as Cara and Zoe. “I have also been accused of being the reason that his daughter has a weakness for promiscuity,” she added, before Cara could speak. “Me! After I have devoted myself to his interests all these years. With perhaps the exception of a few discreet escapades, but Zoe never knew about them, and neither did he!”

  Nor did Cara wish to know, although she was glad her cousin had had some consolation for her doomed romance. “I am so sorry, Ianthe.”

  “Why? I’m not.” And indeed, Ianthe’s gaze was brighter than was usual, and her cheek more flushed, which was not entirely attributable to the brandy that she’d poured into her tea cup. “I have decided that once Zoe is safely married, I shall remove to Brighton, or perhaps to Bath. Perhaps Wilhelmina will have recovered by then from her disaster with that Frenchman. Gentlemen are the very devil, are they not? I wish I might leave right now. But I cannot, any more than you, lest we provide more fodder for the gossip mill.” Ianthe waved her handkerchief. “However, I shan’t arrange the wedding, and if you’ll take my advice, you’ll also refuse. Let Beau deal with his brat.”

  Mention of Zoe’s marriage plunged Cara back into the dumps, which she had already visited as result of her decision to return the Sophora japonica, since a lady could hardly accept presents from gentlemen who went about seducing young women on stairways. “What if there were no wedding?” she said.

  Ianthe had her own notions about who had seduced whom on the stairway, or had attempted to. The marquess hadn’t looked especially rapturous. Or even particularly comfortable. A pity Daisy couldn’t speak.

  With a deft diversionary maneuver of her handkerchief, Ianthe slipped more brandy into her teacup. “Of course there will be a wedding. All has worked out for the best.”

  Daisy looked as woebegone as Cara felt. Cara scratched her ears. “Worked out for the best?”

  “Certainly! Zoe will be married, which will make Beau happy, and you may return to your home, which will make Squire Anderley happy, and everyone will live happily forevermore.”

  Cara wasn’t certain she hadn’t liked Ianthe better heartsore. “You failed to mention yourself.”

  Ianthe lifted her teacup, and inhaled its aroma. “I am not destined to be happy. Remember, I had my heart broke long ago.”

  “Hearts don’t break! Or if they do, they heal,” retorted Cara, though her own hadn’t, or if it had, then she’d turned around and broken it open once again. “You neglected to mention Lord Mannering.”

  “Nicky,” hadn't Cara called him? “Oh, well! How can he help but be happy when he has been favored by Zoe? After all, he did show her a marked partiality.”

  “All my eye! She laid siege to the poor man.”

  “You don’t think he’s smitten?”

  “I know he isn’t! Or I thought I knew. Oh, drat!”

  “Have some more tea,” said Ianthe.

  Cara sighed. “You knew.”

  Ianthe removed her feet from the table and tucked them up beneath her in the chair. “I guessed. Part of it, at least. You referred to the marquess by his first name. And then there is the Sophora japonica.”

  Cara looked at the tree. “I have done some absurd things in that quarter, I fear.”

  “We have all done absurd things! It is part of being a Loversall. And now I am positively agog with curiosity, so pray tell me everything.” Ianthe paused to reconsider. “Or not everything, perhaps. There is a limit to how many embarrassing revelations I can tolerate at what Zoe refers to as my advanced age. Come, Cara! I am awaiting your revelations with bated breath.”

  So she was, along with bright eyes and flushed cheeks and not a tear in sight. Cara supposed she must confide in someone, and who better than her cousin? “Nicky and I—That is, we—Oh, he never had the least interest in Zoe! It was all a subterfuge to lure me back to town.”

  “How very enterprising of him! And how romantic.”

  “Yes, it was, wasn’t it?” There came a brief, nostalgic pause. “And now the horrid child has compromised him, because it’s sure as check he didn’t wish to compromise her, although I accused him of it. As well as other things.” She looked so unhappy that Ianthe extended the handkerchief. “Nick will never forgive me for the things I said. And if he does, I may never forgive him for what he said in return!”

  Ianthe was fascinated. Drama had been going on all around her, and she had been oblivious to it, caught up in her own troubles, which in comparison seemed minor, save for the destruction of her favorite vase. “What did you say?”

  “I accused him of being a complete knave.”

  Ianthe looked judicious. “That’s not so very bad.”

  “I also called him a lecherous wretch, and a lustful slug. And pond scum. He called me a shrew.”

  Perhaps it was the brandy, or her sudden sense of liberation, but Ianthe wished to laugh. “Somehow I’m not surprised.”

  “Nor am I.” Since Ianthe seemed so comfortable, Cara tucked up her own feet. “In one tiny corner of my brain I knew Nicky had deliberately set up my bristles, because he was angry that I’d think for a moment that he would try to do what he was accused of doing, let alone with Zoe; but the rest of my brain was consumed by a ferocious rage.” Despite her melancholy, she smiled. “Baron Fitzrichard said Nicky was a loose fish. What’s that you’re pouring into your tea?”

  Ianthe passed the brandy decanter. “Baron Fitzrichard was witness to all this?”

  Cara poured a liberal splash of brandy into her cup, and set the decanter down on the table. “Oh, yes. By that time, I had already broken a ewer, and kicked a suit of armor, and flung a book into the fire at that point.”

  “A suit of armor?”

  “Ferdinand stands in the corner of the bedroom, Ianthe, it is the most amazing old house.”

  “You were in Lord Mannering’s bedroom.”

  And not for the first time. “Well, that’s where he was. It appears that he has hurt his back. Baron Fitzrichard was also there, so it isn’t as if I wasn’t chaperoned.”

  As if a Loversall would care about such stuff! Ianthe gave her cousin a chiding glance. Cara added, “And then Nicky said it would take more than I could offer to satisfy his salacious appetites.”

  Ianthe was fascinated. “And then?”

  “And then I threw the fireplace poker at him, and called him a rake-helly imbecile, and punched him in the jaw!”

  Ianthe fell back in her chair. “Oh, my!”

  “Just so.” Cara stared into her teacup. Daisy laid her head in her mistress’s lap. A teardrop splashed onto the dog’s head.

  Ianthe held out a second handkerchief. “Cara, why did you marry Norwood?”

  Cara blew her nose. “Need you ask? To begin with, we have Great-Aunt Amelia and Grandmother Sophie, Great-Great-Great Grandmother Alyce and Third-Cousin Ermyntrude. Then there are Francesca and Gwyneth and Leda and Ariadne. Not to mention Romola and Odo and Casimir!”

  “Drusilla,” added Ianthe. “And don’t forget Maria-Louise, who became so incensed with her husband for not coming home at night that she locked him in his own win
e cellar and swallowed the key. In short, you were afraid.”

  Cara studied her teacup. “Perhaps. And then Lucasta Clitheroe told me that she and Nicky had been having an affaire at the same time he was pledging eternal devotion to me.”

  “Gracious! He pledged eternal devotion, Cara? Truly?”

  “I don’t recall exactly what was said, but it was heady stuff.” Cara remembered what had been said afterward clearly enough, and it had been remarkably similar to what she had said early that very morning, with the substitution of “maw-worm” for “pond scum.” Although she hadn’t hurled a fireplace poker on the previous occasion. Cara dropped her face into her hands.

  Suddenly Ianthe wished for no more brandy. “So it was Mannering even then.”

  “It’s always been Mannering. And I am very much afraid that it always will be.”

  “Then there’s only one thing to do,” Ianthe said gently. “You must apologize.”

  Cara raised her head. “That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t solve the problem of Zoe. What if Nicky does want her?”

  “No man with a grain of sense would want her!” retorted Ianthe. “She must have taken him by surprise.”

  “Nonetheless she is still betrothed to him.”

  “My dear,” murmured Ianthe. “One muddle at a time.”

  There came a tapping at the door, and Widdle stepped into the room. “Squire Anderley,” he announced. Daisy sprang to attention. The butler took a backward step.

  “Daisy, no!” Ianthe said sternly, as Cara looked around the room in search of a hiding place. “You have already done enough damage for one day. Widdle, where have you put the squire?”

  Widdle had gained a fair notion of how things worked in this household, and didn’t think Lady Norwood much cared for Squire Anderley, who hadn’t been inclined to offer a gratuity today, as result of which he’d left his squireship cooling his heels in the front hall. In point of fact, Widdle took considerable pleasure in leaving all manner of people cooling their heels in the front hallway, as discovered earlier by Lord Mannering.