A Masquerade in the Moonlight(28)
“You’re dressed for riding, I see,” Sir Gilbert said, his voice deep and rumbling, as if it arose from the very pit of his rather enormous stomach. “I’ll have Finch here”—he smiled up at the butler who had appeared silently to pour steaming coffee into Marguerite’s cup— “send round word to the stables that you’ll have need of my winch in order to set yourself in the saddle. You’ve enough food there, gel, to keep a full battalion moving for a week.”
“Very good, sir,” Finch said, backing away from the table. “I’ll see that your order is delivered at once.”
“Yes, you do that, Finch,” Marguerite warned the man genially, taking the wedge of toast from her mouth, “and then I’ll tell Maisie how you were ogling that new upstairs maid yesterday when she bent over to pick up her pail.”
“Miss Marguerite, please no. Maisie will lecture me for an hour, probably making me listen to her read from that book of sermons she’s always carrying in her pocket. You wouldn’t do such a thing.”
Sir Gilbert’s appreciative laughter boomed throughout the breakfast room, threatening to rattle the cutlery. “God’s teeth, man, don’t make it worse by daring her not to. Of course she would. The child lives for mischief.”
Marguerite’s giggle ushered the butler out of the room, and then she turned to Sir Gilbert. He was looking fit this morning. “Naughty old man,” she told him, picking up her fork and pointing it in his direction. “Anyone would think I was some devil’s spawn, to hear you tell it. Did you take your morning dose of the new tonic the doctor gave you yesterday?”
“Of course I did,” Sir Gilbert answered, his rheumy blue eyes shifting to his plate, where remnants of his own substantial breakfast obscured the pattern on the china. “You’re going out of your way to be impertinent this morning, aren’t you, gel?”
Marguerite frowned and laid down her fork. Her grandfather was all she had, and she was becoming increasingly aware of the man’s age. No matter how hard she tried to deny it, he was growing older, especially since her mother’s death last year, and she was terrified of his dying, of his leaving her. She was going to keep him alive for another ten years—another twenty years—even if she had to do it through sheer force of will. “You shouldn’t lie, old man. You do it very badly.”
Sir Gilbert lifted his serviette to his mouth and coughed into it, eying her owlishly. “Damn, if you ain’t twice the woman your grandmother was, and that’s three times as much woman as I like riding herd on me. I’ll take the blasted tonic later, child—I promise—and follow its nastiness down with a medicinal nip of gin.”
Marguerite smiled, then took a healthy bite of bacon and looked around the sun-drenched room, glorying in the promise of good weather. “Fair enough,” she told Sir Gilbert when she had done chewing. “Only it shall be a half glass of canary, and not your usual Blue Ruin, that terrible name you have for gin. Now—don’t you wish to hear about the gentleman who is coming to take your only grandchild out riding?”
Sir Gilbert pushed his plate away from him and propped his elbows on the table. “That depends. Is he younger than God? You’ve got a queer way about you, Marguerite, allowing yourself to be surrounded with men more suited to have courted your dear, departed mother in her grass time. And they all did, now that I think of it.”
Marguerite kept her eyes on her plate. “None of them is all that much older than my father would be if he were still alive,” she agreed quietly. “Hardly ancient. But this morning’s gentleman is considerably younger.” And quite possibly twice as dangerous, she added silently.
Sir Gilbert leaned forward on his elbows, his eyes narrowed, “How young? I’ve got a wager going with Finch. Forty? Thirty? Well, speak up, gel—I’ve got five pounds resting on your answer.”
“One and thirty on my last birthday, sir, and it may please you to know I still have all my teeth.”
Marguerite’s head whipped around toward the hall and she saw Thomas Joseph Donovan leaning his long frame against the archway, Finch beside him, his mouth open, as he had been about to announce the visitor’s presence. The butler recovered quickly, more rapidly than Marguerite, who found herself struck yet again by Thomas’s laughing blue eyes. “That’s a fiver you owe me, Sir Gilbert,” Finch said, grinning in obvious satisfaction, then bowed respectfully and withdrew.