The Madcap Masquerade Read Online Free Page A

titled man of means.
    By the time he’d climbed three flights of stairs and arrived at his chambers, his gloomy mood had brightened considerably. Now all that stood between him and his peace of mind was the niggling thought that if and when he did manage to get his skitterish wife with child, he had no guarantee the resulting offspring wouldn’t take after her witless side of the family.

CHAPTER TWO
    T he ride from London to Kent seemed interminable to Maeve, particularly the last hour when a sudden squall drove the squire to relinquish his saddle-horse and sink into the stained velvet squabs inside his antiquated travel carriage. She had thoroughly despised her father before ever meeting him and so far he had not improved with acquaintance. Furthermore, he had obviously been imbibing freely from the flask of brandy she had seen him slip into his saddlebag just before they left London. Still, she made a halfhearted attempt to initiate a conversation.
    “I am curious about my sister,” she said. “Tell me about her if you please, sir.”
    “There’s nothing much to tell. She’s just a plain as dirt kind of woman, same as ye. Only where ye’re cheeky and sharp-tongued—she’s so shy she fair turns herself inside out just trying to say a simple word or two.”
    “How interesting.” Maeve didn’t care much for her father’s description of herself, accurate though it might be, and she suspected her twin’s social ineptitude stemmed from a lifetime of living under the clod’s tyrannical thumb. “Won’t our glaring differences present a problem when it comes to convincing Meg’s friends I am she?” she asked sourly.
    “She don’t have any friends, far as I can see, except perhaps the local vicar and he strikes me as something of a dimwit. Why just last month the fool preached a sermon against the hunt, of all things. Made out it was some kind of sin against nature instead of the fine, gentlemanly sport everyone knows it to be.”
    Maeve felt it prudent to keep mum about her violent opposition to the ghastly pastime with which a large segment of England’s richest inhabitants were obsessed.
    “Just keep your eyes on the floor and your mouth shut, same as Meg does,” the squire continued, “and there’s none will twig ye ain’t who you pretend to be—least of all the Earl. Only time he’s seen Meg in the past ten years is when he made his marriage offer, and what’d the silly twit do then? Run from the room bawling like a babe with a bellyache, that’s what. So, quit your fretting. There’s no reason whatsoever why anything should go amiss.”
    Maeve could think of any number of reasons why such a crazy scheme might blow up in their faces, but before she could voice them, the squire dismissed the subject and launched into a discourse on his pack of hunting hounds. In glowing words, he extolled their fine blood lines, their uncanny ability to sniff out the poor fox who was their victim and the fine litter of pups he expected his prize bitch to whelp shortly after he returned home. It was all too obvious his interest lay with his hounds, not with his daughter.
    Maeve soon came to the conclusion that she had been lucky to have been the twin Lily took as her “half of the whole.” With all her faults, her beautiful, self-centered mother had once in a while managed to show a little affection for her plain offspring. She found herself wondering if Meg’s shyness stemmed from a feeling of unworthiness because she felt no one cared about her. If so, finding a twin sister to love and support her might be the very thing she needed to make her blossom as she should.
    At long last the carriage passed through the massive iron gates of the squire’s estate just as the first shades of night darkened the rain-soaked landscape. With the luggage coach trailing behind them, they slowly traversed the muddy lane that led to Barrington Hall—a huge three-story stone structure with a recessed entry and at least eight