Fair Fatality

by Maggie MacKeever

  “Is it?” As always when she’d caused discomfort, the dowager was in good cheer. “Do not despair, Phineas! Do but execute my commission and I might be so grateful that I change my mind.”

  This ray of hope Sir Phineas very wisely ignored. Lady Blackwood was of far too selfish a disposition to so easily give up the meek and self-effacing companion who never uttered a rebellious word. “Twenty-seven makes a poor match for sixty,” he pointed out, hoping to close the subject.

  “Balderdash!” retorted the dowager, incensed. At rather more than sixty, she did not care for intimations of advanced age. “A chit as unfortunately situated as Sara should be grateful for any offer she receives.”

  Unfortunate indeed was Miss Valentine’s situation, as Sir Phineas refrained from pointing out. He need only endure Georgiana’s unpleasantness at occasional short intervals, after which he could repair to his club and regain his composure over a bottle of claret; but Sara must tolerate her employer’s beastliness twenty-four hours a day. Again Sir Phineas wished he might do something to better Sara’s lot. At least he might temporarily temper the dowager’s spitefulness, and at the same time glean some inkling of what distasteful chore she meant to assign. “Apropos of preferences, mention was made of Carlin?” he prodded gently.

  “So it was!” In a very chilling manner, Lady Blackwood smiled. “You may have gathered that my bird-witted niece thinks she’s made a conquest.”

  “Yes.” Resigning himself to his fate, Sir Phineas laced his fingers together across his plump little belly. “I take it that you do not agree.”

  “No, nor would anyone who was not positively paper-skulled. No matter!” Again, that chilling grin. “Let the chit try and attach Carlin; it will only give him a disgust. Once Mistress Fair Fatality comes to realize she’s frittered away her chances and become a laughingstock, she will be more amenable, and making a cake of herself over Carlin will keep her out of more serious mischief.”

  Many years’ service as Lady Blackwood’s man of business had enabled Sir Phineas to cut straight to the heart of her malice. “Amenable to what?” he inquired cautiously.

  The dowager elevated her gaze to the ox-skull frieze. “Amenable to the plans I formulated before ever the baggage came to town! Which brings me to that little errand which I mentioned to you previously.”

  With his clasped fingers, Sir Phineas rubbed his belly, which again had begun to ache. “And that plan is what?” said he.

  Lady Blackwood continued to contemplate the ox-skull frieze, as if from that macabre source she derived inspiration. “The baggage is highly capricious,” she mused aloud. “Rag-mannered, outspoken to a fault — and very wealthy, Phineas. Very wealthy, indeed! The money was left so that she cannot dip into her capital, and must live off the proceeds; but when she remarries, which of course she must, her husband will be under no such obligation. In short, my niece is possessed of a dowry so handsome as to induce her bridegroom to overlook any minor character defects.”

  From what Sir Phineas had observed of the young lady, her defects of character were neither minor nor easily overlooked. All the same, he found it within himself to briefly pity the girl. “Am I to conclude that you have already selected this bridegroom? My errand will concern him? Have you considered that your niece may not approve your choice, Georgiana?”

  “Lud! What difference does that make?” Lady Blackwood lowered her gaze from the ox-skull frieze and glowered upon Sir Phineas. “I flatter myself that I am more than a match for any green girl, even one so mule-headed as my niece. In short, Phineas, I have no intention of allowing Jaisy’s fortune to pass out of the family.”

  Seven

  * * *

  Miss Valentine also wished that her pathway might be eased, though not in the manner suggested to Sir Phineas by Lady Blackwood. Miss Valentine’s aspirations were much more vague, consisting primarily of a nebulous hankering after some manner of heavenly intervention, perhaps a divine lightning bolt of sufficient potency to strike the volatile Lady Easterling suddenly submissive, and render Georgiana either speechless or benign. To her list of longed-for miracles, Sara then added Confucious, and a most unkindly longing for his abrupt demise.

  For this unseemly reflection, Miss Valentine must not be held wholly at fault; many were the responsibilities that pressed upon poor Sara, and Confucious was at present the most troublesome of the lot. In fine fettle this day, the Pekinese had thus far upon their expedition made attempts to savage a watercress-seller and a cat’s-meat man, had interfered disastrously with a potman carrying beer from a nearby public house, and put an abrupt end to a Punch-and-Judy performance. Scarlet with embarrassment, Sara made to these poor unfortunates financial redress — past encounters of a like nature had taught her never to depart Blackwood House unprepared — and hastily quit the scene.

  Sara tucked the snarling dog under one arm and set off down the cobbled street. Confucious snapped and snarled. Irritably, Miss Valentine warned him that she was within aim’s-ace of following the recommendations so recently given her, and drowning him in the Thames. Having delivered herself of this announcement she paused to take stock of her surroundings.

  They were near Hyde Park Corner, on the south side of the road, practically in the shadow of St. George’s Hospital, where the western entrance to the metropolis was marked by an ascent from Knightsbridge to the turnpike. Wistfully, Sara gazed into the distance. It would be very nice to proceed along that thoroughfare, she thought — in an opposite direction. To dream of escape from her servitude, alas, was to bay at the moon.

  Miss Valentine, mooning at the distant prospect, failed to note that her arrival at Hyde Park Corner had coincided with that of a circus menagerie. Venerable as Confucious was, his senses remained acute. He squirmed out of Sara’s grasp, tumbled to the cobblestones, set off in pursuit of the lumbering wagons, while the startled Sara wondered if he’d broken his wretched little neck, or some less important bones. Events soon proved the futility of this hope.

  To here describe Confucious’s encounter with the circus menagerie and the havoc he wrought, especially in reference to the dancing bear, would in no way advance this tale. Suffice it to say that great confusion reigned, and considerable ill-feeling. Indeed, Miss Valentine was in the novel position of having a violin brandished beneath her nose by the bear’s irate owner when she spotted a familiar vehicle barreling along the roadway. Abandoning all dignity, Sara jerked away from the bear’s angry owner and ran out into the street, waving her arms. “Jevon!” she wailed.

  Though Mr. Rutherford was long accustomed to being accosted by females, this particular episode caused his brows to climb. Nonetheless, he dealt with the situation admirably. In less time than it would take to properly relate, he had installed Miss Valentine and a resentful Confucious in his eye-catching sprung whiskey — vermilion chassis, blue ironwork and violet base.

  “Thank God for your arrival!” Miss Valentine sighed, and tried to set her disheveled self to rights. “I do not hesitate to confess that I had no notion what I should do next. I am very grateful to you for providing rescue.”

  “Then you may repay me by keeping that misbegotten cur at a distance!” reponded Mr. Rutherford, with an unfriendly glance at Confucious. “What the deuce does Georgiana mean, sending you out without an escort?”

  “An escort?” Sara wrinkled her classic nose. “You forget that I am a mere servant. Beside, Confucious would not permit anyone to bother me.”

  With that assertion, there was no quarreling; a steady growling from the Pekinese provided a background to their conversation. “No,” Jevon replied ironically. “He will merely make you pay the price of his vindictiveness. My poor Sara! Shall we manage to lose the beast?”

  Tempting as was this notion, Miss Valentine, after the briefest struggle, nobly set it aside. “I wish you would be more serious!” she scolded. “A few days past you said that you would do anything within your power to assist Jaisy. Did you mean it, Jevon? Because if you did I wish that you
might tell me what to do!”

  Jevon recalled saying nothing of the sort, at least not in regard to his volatile sister; and he did recall his determination to avoid becoming entangled in that damsel’s kick-ups. “What’s this?” he equivocated. “You at point nonplus, my Sara? I cannot credit it.”

  “You could, had you not been taken up wholly with your own pursuits!” snapped Sara, then flushed as she recalled the rumor that her companion’s pursuits currently centered around a pretty opera dancer. “Forgive me; I should not have said that.”

  Jevon, guessing the cause of Miss Valentine’s reddened cheeks, grinned. “No, you should not! First of all, you should not listen to vulgar gossip; secondly, that I am the subject of gossip is altogether your fault.” Even in her present disheveled and bewildered condition, his Sara was a deuced pretty female, he observed. “I would not be making other females the object of gallantry, had you not sent me off with a flea in my ear!”

  Did he think she held him in aversion? Miss Valentine had opened her mouth to earnestly disabuse her companion of this erroneous assumption before she realized that he sought with his flummeries to elevate her spirits. “I suppose now you mean to persuade me that I should like to embark upon a tryst,” she observed irritably.

  In point of fact, Jevon would have better preferred no other topic of discourse. No stranger to the addle-pated notions that flourished in the fertile minds of the opposite sex, however, he realized that for a conversational gambit of a flirtatious nature, the moment was not propitious. Would the moment ever be? he wondered, as he said: “Oh, no, my Sara! I will not seek to persuade you. I think that you would like it very well, but you must make up your own mind.”

  How cleverly he managed to tease her and yet at the same time hold himself aloof, thought Sara, frowning at her friend. “I wish you would not mock me!” she retorted, more frankly than she had intended. “I am well aware that I am grown a dowd.”

  Jevon frankly stared. “A dowd? The devil!” said he.

  “You need not be kind about it.” Sara interpreted her companion’s startled expression as further proof of his good heart. “I have learned to accept that I am left upon the shelf. It is not what I had anticipated for myself, but there is no use crying over spilt milk. Oh, dear! I did not mean to be so plain-spoken! When you talk to me of trysts, it recalls to mind the days before I was obliged to earn my living, when I truly could have engaged in such.”

  “Did you?” he inquired curiously.

  “Did I what?” Sara echoed, then again blushed. “Wretch! Naturally I did not! And I beg you will talk to me no more of trysts!”

  “Certainly not, if you wish it.” Jevon reflected that he was fast learning to deal with rebuff. “The subject shall be henceforth taboo — until you introduce it yourself.”

  Pigs would fly sooner, decided Sara, further sunk in gloom. Jevon’s deft extrication of the pair of them from a potentially embarrassing situation had put her, most unreasonably, out of charity with him.

  More aware than was his fair one of the source of her resentment, Jevon longed to invite her to weep out her woes upon his manly chest, following which he would introduce her to rather more pleasurable pursuits. Lest he receive another, even harsher set-down from the object of his affections, he dared not be so bold. Instead he must bide his time until she had grown a trifle more receptive. Perhaps, were the matters plaguing her resolved, she might prove more amenable to romance.

  Chief among those plaguesome matters, decided Jevon, must be his own harum-scarum sibling. Though he was sworn to uninvolvement in Jaisy’s fits and starts, it grew increasingly obvious that the pursuit of romance required self-sacrifice. Though this too was an unprecedented conclusion — any sacrifice previously involved in his romances not being required of Jevon — he did not even momentarily hesitate. “You were telling me about Jaisy,” he reminded his silent companion.

  Sara took firmer hold of Confucious, who had been reminded by Jevon’s voice of the keen dislike which he harbored for that source. “I’m sure it’s no wonder I am cross as a cat! Your sister has convinced herself that she has taken Carlin’s fancy to an alarming degree, and that his indifference is assumed. Yes, I know it’s moonshine, but she vows he seeks to whet her interest. As if it needed whetting! Jaisy is practically stalking the poor man.”

  “The deuce you say!” ejaculated Jevon, dismayed by the result of his mischievous impulse. “I should never have indulged the minx by presenting him.”

  “No, you should not have.” Sara was not in the habit of mollycoddling her old friend. “But I daresay if you had not, she would have wheedled someone else into making the introduction! I have tried very hard to keep her from going beyond the line of being pleasing, but it is a very wearing task, and sometimes I think I must reach my wits’ end! Well you may look sympathetic, Jevon! I have taken Jaisy to linen-drapers and milliners and modistes, to bookshops and music stores and picture galleries; I have sat through equestrian displays at Astley’s Amphitheater; I even took her to Sadler’s Wells to see Grimaldi perform! And while I am quite willing to concede that Grimaldi must be the king of clowns, I do not derive any particular enjoyment from seeing a grown man sit between a codfish and a huge oyster that opens and closes its shell in time with the music, and sings!”

  “Zounds!” Jevon looked intrigued. “Did it?”

  “It did!” Sara replied bitterly. “This is one of Grimaldi’s most famous songs, I gather: ‘An Oyster Crossed in Love.’ Quite half the audience was in tears.”

  “My poor Sara!” responded Mr. Rutherford, much moved.

  “So you may say!” agreed Miss Valentine. “If all those excursions were not wearying enough, I must constantly be on my guard lest Jaisy decide that she must visit Hoby’s, where Carlin procures his boots, or Lock’s or Weston’s, his hatter and his tailor, or even Berry Brothers so she may weigh herself on the same scale! And then there was the day she announced to me that we should stroll down St. James’s, on the chance that we might encounter Carlin exiting one of his clubs.”

  “Definitely, my poor Sara!” Somewhat belatedly, Jevon realized that his sister’s misbehavior, if she did succeed in escaping Sara’s vigilance, would rebound to the good credit of none involved. “What is it you wish me to do?”

  “Scolding her accomplishes nothing; she merely assures me that when approaching an apparently insurmountable hurdle one need only throw one’s heart over and one’s horse will invariably follow — though whether she considers Carlin as horse or hurdle I have not dared ask! Even if I did, she would probably only assure me once again that she is pluck to the backbone!” A trifle tardily, Sara received the impact of his words. “Oh, Jevon! You will help me? I will be forever in your debt!”

  To receive from Miss Valentine that melting look, to reanimate her classic features and soft gray eyes, Mr. Rutherford would have undertaken tasks far more arduous than hinting away his sister from an unsuitable parti. Only in the very nick of time did Jevon prevent himself from explaining to Miss Valentine that fact. Not until Jaisy was fired off could the matter of trysts be subtly reintroduced into his companion’s thoughts. Doubtless it would improve his character to experience impatience curbed.

  Doubtless, also, that self-improvement would be devilish hard-earned, decided Mr. Rutherford, as in an excess of gratitude Miss Valentine pressed his hand. Abruptly, Jevon halted the whiskey and descended into the street, where before Sara’s bewildered gaze, he spun the coin with a pieman, and won. He then resumed his seat in the whiskey and shared the profits of his enterprise with her, in celebration of their newly formed partnership. Prevented by the condition of his teeth from joining in this congenial repast, Confucious snarled.

  Eight

  * * *

  Never one to shilly-shally, especially when to do so was to delay the achievement of a highly desired object, Mr. Rutherford sought to set his scapegrace sister’s affairs to rights at the earliest opportunity. Occasion to hold converse with Lord Carlin presented
itself to Jevon that very evening, at the King’s Theater in the Haymarket. The attendance of both Mr. Rutherford and Lord Carlin at this function was no special coincidence. The King’s Theater was London’s most popular center of entertainment, ablaze with bejeweled ladies, and gentlemen with orders strewn across their chests. Boxes cost as much as £2500 for the season, despite the blinding chandeliers which hung before them, casting the actors into the shade; admission to the pit cost 10s. 6d.

  Not for Mr. Rutherford nor Lord Carlin was the pit, of course; Mr. Rutherford was a member of Lady Blackwood’s party, and Lord Carlin had his own box. Currently both gentlemen were absent from their allotted spots. Nor could either be discovered among those congenial souls who strolled about during the performance, exhibiting to the world at large an elegance of person and a total lack of consideration for the long suffering performers. In point of fact, at this particular moment, neither gentleman was present in the great horseshoe auditorium with its five rows of boxes, galley and pit, each having discovered within himself a sudden yearning for respite from the sorrows of Cleopatra as enacted onstage.

  Mr. Rutherford was first to arrive in the circular vestibule, furnished with sofas and almost entirely lined with looking glass. Since none of his particular cronies had similarly withdrawn from the arena, Jevon amused himself by eavesdropping upon the conversations of those discerning admirers of the opera who had. Beau Brummell, it was rumored, had amassed a larger number of commitments than could be met out of available capital, and had consequently engaged with friends in an annuity scheme. On-dit had it that the so-powerful Beau, supreme arbiter of fashion, master of ironic irreverence, was on his way out — an unfortunate position in which he might well have been condoled by Lord Byron, had not the poet fled England recently, and barely soon enough to avoid Lady Devonshire’s bailiffs, who seized everything in sight. Shocking developments, were these not? One could regret the Beau’s hard luck. One could not feel similarly about Byron, however. Any man who used a fireplace poker to break the heads off bottles of soda water — to say nothing of his further sins — deserved to be brought low.