Read Online Maggie MacKeever by Strange Bedfellows - Free Book Online

sit beside me and let me make you warm.” Lord March made room for her beside him on the bed.
    “Marriot!” Eleanor sighed, blushing, and complied.
    Lady Amabel sighed also, not only from envy, but also because she foresaw that Lord and Lady March were again on the verge of abandoning practical matters in favor of romance. “I wish the pair of you might try for a little common sense!” she scolded. “To cuddle now is like Nero fiddling while Rome burned. It was Nero who did so, was it not? No matter! Nell, what did you find out?”
    “Hmm? Ah!” With difficulty, Lady March detached her gaze from her husband’s face. “I have been in such a whirl. Lest she demand to accompany me, I dared not let Henrietta discover I planned to leave the house. To do so without her knowledge was no easy feat! She did not remark my return, fortunately. She was entertaining someone in the solar, so I simply slipped by.”
    “Entertaining?” Lady Amabel’s lively curiosity was aroused. “Who?”
    “Had I paused to discover that, I would have never escaped.” Looking both irritable and tragic, Eleanor reached into her huge muff and withdrew a bottle of claret. “You’re going to need this, Marriot. We all shall, unless I am mistaken about what I heard in the streets.”
    “In the streets?” echoed Lord March, glancing in some perplexity from the claret bottle to his wife’s mournful face. Even in the grip of a fit of the blue devils she was nigh-irresistible. “My darling!” he murmured, touching tender fingers to her face. “My darling!” responded Eleanor, passionately kissing his hands. “I will not let you be hanged!”
    “Hanged? Piffle!” Impatient of these ill-timed declarations, Mab reached for the folded newssheet which had also been hidden in Nell’s muff. “I admit that Mar-riot’s case does not look especially promising, but we shall make a recover—damnation!”
    This exclamation, uttered in shocked tones, temporarily roused Lord and Lady March from preoccupation with themselves. Both turned to Mab. Wide-eyed, that young lady was avidly scanning the newssheet. “A parure of rubies and emeralds!” she read aloud when made aware of their attention. “A brooch composed of a spray of diamond flowers set in silver leaves! A heavy golden chain set with one hundred and sixty pearls, every sixteen divided by a large ruby—the latest in a series of appalling, brutal robberies that has for several months plagued the metropolis—the most unstinting inquiries are being made! Marriot!”
    Lady March, whose nerves were not surprisingly shattered, found in this unsympathetic pronouncement cause for grave offense. “How can you think—as if Marriot could— and after I took you in without a word of the scolding you deserved—”
    “Come, Nell, do not take on so!” interrupted Marriot, and drew his wife into his arms. With a last incoherent utterance, which sounded amazingly like “ungrateful little twit,” Nell subsided upon his chest.
    Philosophically, Mab accepted her friend’s censure, though from any other source it would have prompted her to cut up very stiff. “We are agreed that Marriot is incapable of so abominable a proceeding,” she remarked. “It is my opinion that Marriot interrupted a robbery in progress and was consequently knocked on the head, which caused him to at last remember who he was—and caused him to forget why he was missing all this time.” Keenly she regarded Lord March, who had disposed of his wife’s inconvenient high-brimmed bonnet so that he might better kiss her brow. “Unless you are playing some deep game, Marriot? I thought not.”
    Was the absurd child disappointed? Reluctantly Lady March removed herself from her husband’s chest. “I should not have fired up at you! I am very sorry for it, Mab. This discovery has utterly sunk my spirits. I had hoped there might be some easy way out of this fix—” In her brown eyes was an anxious expression. “What do they do