A Masquerade in the Moonlight Read Online Free PDF Page B

Thomas replied evenly, looking to Marguerite, who now stood smiling at him with an expression that told him he was no longer wanted and should know enough to take himself off. “However,” he added hastily, seeing the cloud of displeasure that descended on Lord Mappleton’s face, “I, too, can no longer remember precisely why. I believe my brains have become muddled from the moment I first was introduced to the most delightful Miss Balfour by that nice gentleman, Mr. Julian Quist. Do you by chance know the fellow, my lord?”
    “Quist? Wonderful lad. Ten thousand a year, I hear, but with not a jiggle of sense of how to set up his stable.” He took Marguerite’s hand and laid it on his forearm, patting her fingertips with not quite avuncular affection. “Not nearly good enough for you, though, my sweet child. And an encroaching mama to boot. No, no, not good enough by half. Well, a pleasure seeing you, Danvers. We must be off now, mustn’t we, m’dear? All the good seats will be snatched up if we don’t hurry. I hear they’re serving up some lovely fat shrimp.”
    “Donovan, Arthur,” Marguerite corrected the man, inclining her head slightly in Thomas’s direction as Lord Mappleton made to pull her toward the stairs. “I believe Americans are very touchy about things like that. We wouldn’t wish to seem
unneighborly
, now would we? Good evening, Mr. Donovan—and thank you so much for rescuing me. I’m sure I could not have asked for a more eventful interlude.”
    “What? What?
Donovan
, you say?” Lord Mappleton blustered as the pair moved out of earshot. “Ain’t that Irish? Bad enough we have to do the pretty with these colonials without them being bloody Boglanders into the bargain.”
    “And the top of the evening to you, too, Lord
Mapletree
,” Thomas muttered under his breath in disgust as he watched the tall, slim Miss Balfour and the shorter, decidedly stouter peer join the throng of people descending to the supper room. And then, left without many options, but not without questions, he repaired to the game room. There he proceeded to handily separate one very disgruntled, talkative Julian Quist from five hundred pounds of his “encroaching” mama’s money.

    “Well, now, Tommie, you’re late enough, aren’t you? Did you see him? Did you talk to him?”
    Patrick Dooley had thrown open the door to the suite of rooms in the Pulteney Hotel the moment he’d heard his friend’s distinctive, confident tread in the hallway outside, then stood back smartly to let Thomas pass by him and into the stylishly furnished sitting room that had been the scene of Dooley’s agitated pacing for the shank of the evening. Thomas’s dark, tight-lipped expression didn’t cheer Dooley’s heart after several long hours spent in nervous expectation of good news.
    Thomas collapsed into the closest chair, his long legs sprawled out in front of him as he ripped at his neck cloth, freeing it, only to send the thing winging in Dooley’s direction. “What do you think, Paddy?”
    “I think you’re getting the same runaround these bloody Bugs are giving every one of our diplomats, that’s what I think,” Dooley spat, grabbing the neck cloth out of the air and wadding the starched material into a ball before dashing it to the floor. “I’d not have dealings with the likes of them. We’re going to have to whip their tails again in an out-and-out war if we mean to see an end to this. Madison was mad to send you. It’s like sending a goose to the fox’s den, that’s what it is.”
    “We all know it will come to war. It’s just the when and the how of the business that we don’t know.” Thomas pushed himself up out of the chair and went over to the drinks table, pouring himself three fingers of brandy. He took a lusty gulp of the liquid, then grinned at his companion. “And if you don’t mind, my good friend, I’d like to think our esteemed president has sent the fox to mind the geese. Besides, the