Maggie MacKeever Read Free Page B

decade, a très grande dame with elegantly coined—if improbably colored—yellow hair, sharp black eyes, and an air of perpetual discontent. Currently, her features were screwed up in an expression of the utmost disapproval, and the black eyes were fixed relentlessly on her niece. “Well, miss?” she snapped. “What have you to say for yourself? Galloping in Hyde Park! Never have I heard of such a thing.”
    Obviously Eulalia had heard of it, in grand and glorious detail, but Jynx was so amiable a young lady that she did not point out this fact. Actually, so amiable was Jynx that she had never in all her twenty-two years been known to utter a cross word. Nor did she do so now, but gazed serenely on her aunt. “‘Tis naught but a tempest in a teapot, Eulalia. I wished to gallop, and Shannon obliged me.” She bit into her muffin, then licked marmalade from her fingers in a very vulgar way.
    “Roxbury,” offered Sir Malcolm, from behind the Times. Had Sidney Smith ever been privileged to break his fast in Lennox Square, he would have described hell not as an eternity of family dinners, but as a Lennox petit déjeuner. “Well, Jynx?”
    “Well indeed. Papa.” Jynx surveyed the array of cold meats, game, broiled fish, sausages, eggs, kidneys and bacon, and helped herself to generous portions of each. “By-the-bye, what do you know of Ador6e Blissington?”
    This innocent query, which had been prompted merely by a vague curiosity about why Lady Blissington’s presence in the park should have inspired Lord Roxbury to such desperate diversionary measures as a frantic flight, brought Sir Malcolm out from behind his newspaper. His daughter raised a weary eyebrow, and his sister-in-law erupted into scandalized observations on the young lady’s shocking want of delicacy.
    “Oh, do hush, Eulalia!” said Sir Malcolm, irritably. Eulalia, who owed her position in the Lennox household entirely to Sir Malcolm’s forbearance, did so. A pretty pair were Sir Malcolm and his daughter, she thought in disgruntlement, both lazy as the day was long, with no awareness of their consequence, and a reprehensible tendency to find humor in the most unsuitable things. They even resembled one another, Eulalia decided, as she stared at the provoking duo. Sir Malcolm’s hair had long ago turned white, but he as well as his daughter possessed the large hazel Lennox eyes, the arrogant nose and forceful chin.
    “Lady Bliss,” repeated Sir Malcolm, having determined from his daughter’s ingenuous expression that she was unaware of the lady’s association with Viscount Roxbury, and of his own futile pursuit. “She’s a charming scatterbrain who lives by her wits, which are not considerable, and the nonexistent proceeds of the discreet card parties she holds nightly in her home. Entrance by invitation only—you know the sort of thing.”
    “Illegal, ain’t it?” interrupted Eulalia. “Arrest the jade!”
    Sir Malcolm looked pained. Certainly he was a man of the law, a magistrate; equally certainly it was no part of his many duties to imprison a lady to whose favor he had once aspired. “Adorée Blissington is a widow,” he continued, rather hastily. “Her husband, a scapegrace baronet, was killed in a duel over a lady’s honor—not hers. He left his widow penniless.”
    “I saw her yesterday in the park,” Jynx remarked, around a mouthful of eggs. “There was a dark-haired gentleman with her. He may have been a relative, from the resemblance.”
    “Innis Ashley.” Sir Malcolm’s reply was prompt, and delivered in tones of the utmost distaste. “The youngest Ashley. Adorée’s brother. A thoroughly bad lot.”
    “I thought he might be.” Miss Lennox speared a sausage. “One more question, Papa, and you may return to your newspaper. Why is she called Lady Bliss, rather than Blissington?”
    Sir Malcolm surveyed his inexcitable daughter, and his all-too-volatile sister-in-law, and grinned. A close observer might have noted