Maggie MacKeever by Sweet Vixen Read Free Book Online

little wonder that Tess had no little understanding of the ways of men, for she had had only one suitor, the unworldly curate, and consequently no practical experience. Clio suddenly wondered—she was by no means the fool her behavior implied—if that omission was due to a lack of inclination on the part of the gentlemen, or because Lord and Lady Lansbury had surrounded Tess with a wall of solicitude that no gentleman could penetrate. Struck by this unique thought, Clio frowned.
    Aware that she had given both her companions cause for consternation, Tess leaned forward to touch her sister’s arm. “Look!” she said, and gestured toward the window. “While you have been woolgathering, we have arrived in Town.”
    Relieved by this indication that she was to be forgiven so easily, Clio cast her sister a grateful glance. She gazed obediently outside, but accorded little attention to the incessant stream of elegant carriages, the well-mounted horsemen, the countless pedestrians. Mistress Clio was not accustomed to devoting her private reflections to other than herself, and found it a difficult exercise.
    It was not benevolence that caused the countess to treat her young sister with such kindness—Tess was too well used to Clio’s fits and starts to take offense—but a strong suspicion that the girl had sustained a blow to her pride. Clio was not used to such offhand treatment as Sir Morgan had administered; young men had flocked around her ever since she had left the schoolroom and she could not be expected to find in a rake’s conduct a most salutary moral. Tess did and was grateful to him for it. Sir Morgan might admittedly be a man of little principle, but he was not so depraved as to offer a young girl false coin.
    In this manner they passed the journey, which was not without its small excitements and alarums, each wrapped in her own thoughts: Delphine in grim recollection of the squalid little debauch she’d interrupted in so timely a manner the evening before; Tess in amused recollection of the debauchee’s outrageous behavior and even more outrageous remarks; Clio in frenzied contemplation of how she might warn her elder sister that a lame lady no longer in her first youth was easy prey for a reckless and profligate man who was demonstrably more at home in the fleshpots than in the drawing-room. Despite what her mentors might think, Clio was only slightly miffed that her artful lures had earned her cavalier treatment from Sir Morgan. It was not in her nature to bypass an opportunity to flirt with a handsome gentleman, particularly one whom she instinctively knew to be a connoisseur; but in truth she didn’t care a button for him.
    As disparate as their thoughts were the ladies’ impressions of the town. Clio saw only richly dressed gentlefolk and fashionable shops and bastions of the nobility which she hoped to breach; Delphine gazed astounded on the street-sellers who dispensed steamed baked potatoes from brightly painted cans, ginger beer from mahogany fountains with gleaming brass handles, treacle rock and hot meat pies and peppermint sticks. It was Tess who saw the ramshackle tenements and stinking alleyways, the ragged filthy people, the poverty that lurked forever on the edges of London’s magnificence.
    “Look,” she said, “in the distance. That complex is the Tower, the most venerable pile in London. The oldest building there is the White Tower, built by Bishop Gundulf under orders from William the Conqueror in 1089.” This information earned neither comment nor praise. Tess lapsed again into silence, and at length the carriage halted in front of the Bellamy town house in Berkeley Square.
    “Tess,” hissed Clio, as they descended from the coach. Her unusual contrition was prompted by a conviction that Tess was suffering Cupid’s sting, an arrow in the breast that had left a festering wound. “I must speak! I have behaved abominably to you, and I beg you will forgive me for it.”
    “Bosh!”