Page 2 of Lady Mary's May Day Mischief
Well, hell’s bells!
She winced at the iridescent sky and spoke the bald truth she’d kept locked away inside her. Once she’d been fearless. At six, she’d saved her hunting dog Rolf from drowning when he’d been but five weeks old. At ten, she’d hauled her friend Blake from the same river when he’d fallen in and might have drowned, had she not pumped his chest and forced out the mess he’d swallowed. At twelve, she’d grabbed the fire bucket in the hall at Miss Shipley’s to throw on a blaze, then rolled her friend Fifi in a blanket to douse the flames that could have scarred her pretty face. At twenty, she’d nursed her ailing mother when the doctor told her all hope was lost of that lady’s recovery from a wasting in the stomach. At eighteen and nineteen and twenty-two, she helped three friends secure loving husbands.
However for the past two years, she had performed no feats. She’d stopped aiding her friends when one of her plans—a feint, actually—failed. Ricocheted, more to the point.
She jabbed her trowel into the rich earth and glared at the wispy silver clouds that rolled onward, blithe, uncaring of her desire.
“My lady!” her butler called to her from the kitchen door.
She caught her broad straw hat from whipping away in the wind. “Yes, Thompson?”
“You asked not to be interrupted, ma’am, but Lady Fiona Chastain has arrived. She says it’s urgent she see you.”
I expected her to rush in an hour ago.“Did you tell Cook she’s here?”
“Yes, milady. I’ll bring a tray up to you within minutes.”
“Good.” Long ago, Mary had learned the best way to help Fifi deal with any event was to order a complete tea whenever she called. Her friend loved to eat, especially delicacies that Mary’s Cook created. Today, she had expected Fifi to fly to her as soon as her friend read the announcement of Northington and Esme’s impending nuptials in this morning’s paper. “I’ll be right in.”
He ambled away.
With a tug at her gardening gloves, Mary bent to whisper to her sprouts. “This afternoon I shall return.”
With a nod at the clouds and the sun and the universe that always blossomed here at least into rich results under her hands, she left her tender aspirations in her garden.
Then she limped toward her house.
* * *
“Good morning!” Mary padded across her salon carpet in her stocking feet and threw out her arms in welcome. This morning, her old friend would want comfort, not formality. Not primping, either. And Mary hadn’t. So if her waist-length hair escaped her hastily pinned ribbons and her apron bore grimy signs of the weeding she’d done in her garden box, well then, Fifi never minded Mary’s peccadilloes. Especially today, when what Fifi wanted was consolation. “I’m delighted to see you. How are you? I knew you’d come.”
“Of course you did. I’m terrible! Angry! Very angry.” Fifi looked it, too. Her rich dark mahogany hair bound back tight as a fisherman’s net over his catch. Her large blue eyes snapping with distress. Her little spectacles propped on the tip of her nose. Even her toque was tilted at a tipsy angle. “And you? Aren’t you shocked?”
“At anything Esme Harvey does?” Mary shook her head. Fifi’s anger was her first emotion? “Ha! No. And neither should you be. Come sit down.”
“Sit down! Sit down!” Caesar called from his cage by the tall front windows.
Mary cast the parrot a withering look.
In response, he hopped from one foot to the other. “Good boy. Good boy!”
“Oh, Mary, I can’t sit. I simply can’t.” Fifi was too disturbed to care about the bird. She extracted from her reticule a little ball of paper and shoved it into Mary’s hand. “Look at this.”
“I’ve seen theChronicle.”
“No. This is a letter that arrived this morning. From my Aunt Courtland. A personal invitation to the wedding!”
Mary liked weddings. Had done, too. Until lately. “To tell the truth, I assumed all of us who’d been invited to the May Day frolic and your Aunt Courtland’s ball would go to the church.”
“They planned it this way,” Fifi moaned. “Esme knew we’d be there.”
Fifi must focus on reason. Her friend was an intelligent woman. Except when it came to this irrational interest in Northington. “It’s as good a plan as any.”
Fifi arched a dark brow. “Especially when you’ve acquired a special license and forgo the reading of the banns!”
At the risqué hint Esme might need to marry quickly, Mary was surprised. Fifi was not usually judgmental. “That’s unworthy of you.”
“I agree.” Fifi spun away toward the window and stared down at the passersby in the street. “Forgive me.”
