Maggie MacKeever Read Online Free Page B

you again. But what are you doing down there on the floor? It is not at all a ladylike posture. I shouldn’t have to tell you that! I had thought you should be the one to take Callie in hand—you do know the crème de la crème, even if they sometimes wish you didn’t, which is entirely your own fault, because you will not guard your tongue—but now I wonder if perhaps someone shouldn’t take you in hand! You’ve allowed the servants to get a great deal above themselves. We were treated as if we’d come to steal the family plate!”
    That another alleged member of the family had already done so, Morgan did not again explain. Silently, she moved aside so that Alister could satisfy himself as to the existence of Lady Barbour’s pulse, a process during which Lady Barbour’s big blue eyes remained fixed soulfully on his homely face. Miss Phyfe recalled gloomily that before her cousin’s demure retirement into matrimony with first one and then the other elderly spouse, she had been an arrant flirt.
    Dr. Kilpatrick was not susceptible to lovely ninnyhammers, having in the practice of his profession become inured to beauty, albeit of a very different class. “Right as a trivet!” he announced to the room at large, then abandoned Lady Barbour in favor of a close inspection of the room’s monumental chimneypiece.
    Lady Barbour narrowed her fine blue eyes. She was not accustomed to such cavalier treatment. Never before had any gentleman successfully wrenched himself away from her languishing gaze, and certainly for nothing so mundane as a chimneypiece. It was a very nice chimneypiece, she granted; nonetheless Lady Barbour disliked to play second fiddle, especially to a cold hunk of stone. She immediately conceived an intense dislike for the gentleman who had forced her into so ignominious a position.
    Meantime, Miss Phyfe pondered Lady Barbour’s sinister allusions to the crème de la crème. It was true that Morgan was, in one capacity or another, acquainted with those excessively well-born individuals who made up London society. Indeed, by birth Morgan herself was entitled to move within those select circles. Fortunately, from Morgan’s standpoint, her lack of fortune spared her such frivolity.
    Frivolity! The word, nay, the whole notion of bedecking herself in laces and silks and jewels, and casting every serious consideration to the winds left her thoroughly appalled. And what had Sidoney said about taking someone in hand? Morgan studied the drably dressed, plain-faced damsel who sat staring so steadfastly at her feet. “This must be Callie.”
    As always Lady Barbour was impressed by the swiftness with which her clever cousin Morgan put two and two together and arrived at the sum of four. “Whateley’s girl!” she responded. “I’ve brought her to town to make her debut. Oh, Morgan, what a time we’ve had—unaired linen and mutton hanging in the hall! Then we arrived here, only to be treated as if we were tradesmen come about an unpaid bill. Well! It is partly my fault, I know, for I forgot to send you word. But surely I can be forgiven for overlooking one little detail!”
    Upon this assertion, Miss Whateley raised her eyes from the floor to her stepmama’s face, on her own plain features an expression of faint derision. She almost issued warning, but shyness tied her tongue.
    That brief moment of rebellion went largely unremarked. Lady Barbour’s attention was wholly focused on her clever cousin Morgan, her own brain being such as could encompass only one concept at a time. “You are looking just a teeny bit out of sorts, Morgan!” she observed. “You must not let the misconduct of the earl’s servants put you to the blush! It’s not your fault if they’ve no notion of their place! Poor Morgan! I had not previously realized how dreary and dull you have grown.”
    Naturally a lovely pea-brain would not appreciate the virtue of an existence devoted to good deeds. “You refer to my change of fortune,