Maggie MacKeever Read Online Free PDF Page B

will send him a note. I will remind him you wrote and asked me to come and share your vigil. Papa can’t take exception to that, because he is always saying I must learn to be kind to those who are less fortunate than I! And you are less fortunate, dear Nell, because I don’t have to hide Fergus in the attics.” She laid a thoughtful finger alongside her nose. “Perhaps Fergus may be able to help us straighten out this coil.”
    Lady March knew her young friend too well to be surprised by this intimation that she was destined to become closely acquainted with the gentleman whom Mab’s father had stigmatized as a popinjay. “I suppose I have been dull as ditchwater,” she allowed.
    “I shall tell Papa that I consider it my duty to animate your spirits,” mused Mab and then smiled. “Which you can’t deny I already have! Since my arrival things have gotten positively lively. The cook, incidentally, is very wroth this morning, because it appears one of the servants raided the larder in the middle of the night. We need not worry that Marriot shall starve, at any rate!” Curiously she observed her companion, whose shadowed eyes hinted at insufficient sleep. Precisely what had troubled Nell’s slumbers, Mab sought to discreetly discover. “Did Marriot, ah, change his mind about—”
    “I know what about!” snapped Eleanor. “No, he did not!”
    “Then that is why you are feeling so very cross!” Lady Amabel gave her friend’s hand a sympathetic little pat. “Sometimes the gentlemen can be such perfect gudgeons, with their silly notions of what is honorable and what is not. Still, in this instance, Marriot doeshave a point. I daresay that under the circumstances it would be easier on you, were you to have to see him hanged—not that I expect things to come to that!” Her piquant face turned pensive. “How much Marriot must love you, to act in such a way! Fergus would not be half so self-sacrificing. I vow I am quite envious.”
    What in her present situation anyone could find to envy, Lady March could not decide, being in no mood to appreciate her husband’s nobility of character. Another matter concerned her more deeply at this moment. “Hanged?” she echoed.
    Lady Amabel’s tender heart was wrung by her friend’s horrified expression; apparently Nell did not altogether realize the implications of their fix. Would anything be served by an avoidance of the truth? Mab decided it would not. Perhaps awareness of the perils of the situation might assist Lord and Lady March to concentrate their minds.
    “I do not like to be the one to tell you this!” Amabel said sadly. “Though I am not altogether certain, Nell, I think jewel thieves are always hanged.”
     

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    With footsteps hastened by a persistent vision of her husband dangling from the gallows, Lady March made her way to the attics. She had not exaggerated when she told Mab about the more unusual amenities of the house. The secret room in the attics had been contrived by an earlier Lord March who, in the course of a stormy political career, had incurred the displeasure of both Charles II and Cromwell. Entry was through a secret door, which to the uninformed eye merely appeared as a triangular flap of plaster framed in wood between three beams.
    Though not commodious, the hidden room was comfortable enough. Light entered through a small window cunningly placed so as to be visible from neither ground nor roof. Because the room backed onto one of the house’s main chimneys, it was tolerably warm.
    Old carpeting lay thick upon the floor, to muffle footsteps and sound. Lord March himself lay stretched out, snoozing, beneath the old fur cloak on his narrow bed. On the floor beside him an empty tray bore mute evidence as to the identity of the larder thief.
    Lady March stood gazing somberly down upon her spouse. “Oh, Marriot!” she whispered, softly. “Hanged!”
    Lord March was instantly alert. He swung his long legs over the side of