A Masquerade in the Moonlight(73)
“You are spending entirely too much time with my grandfather, Finch,” she said as primly as she could, knowing no matter what she said Finch would do as he pleased. He had been at Chertsey since before she’d been born and had long ago become immune to any save his own authority. Besides, she truly had enjoyed the butler’s jokes. “Please, show Sir Peregrine in—and do try your utmost to keep a civil tongue in your head while you’re about it. Sir Peregrine is a dear friend.”
“I wouldn’t know why. He’s only been here a moment and already he’s told me that vase on the hallway table—the one your sainted grandmother put such stock by—is nothing but a worthless lump of crockery.”
“He did? What a—no, never mind. Just go fetch his creaking lordship in here before he starts directing the underfootmen to rearrange the furniture.”
Finch turned, shaking his head as he made for the doorway. “Never met such a perishing, puffed-up prig in the whole of my life.”
Marguerite laid aside the copy of La Belle Assemblée she had been leafing through without really paying attention to any of the announcements of beauty creams and figure-enhancers advertised on its pages, and prepared her mind for her first encounter with Sir Peregrine since he had holed himself up in his offices with the coded manuscript he’d unearthed the afternoon he had visited the bookstalls with her.
She had expected him sooner, which was her own fault, for she had somehow flattered him by believing he possessed at least half the intelligence he boasted of with such depressing regularity. She must be careful not to fall victim to Sir Peregrine’s high opinion of himself, or she might not be able to guide him toward the next step without first employing both a lantern and bell she could ring over his head as she led him down the path to public disgrace.
She’d just folded her hands in her lap and pinned a demure, expectant smile on her wide-eyed face when Sir Peregrine’s slim figure fairly bounded into the room. He was waving the yellowed manuscript above his head.
“Marguerite!” he exclaimed, falling to one knee in front of her with a youthful sprightliness that, if Finch were to have witnessed the maneuver, doubtlessly would have surprised the butler no end. “Give me your dainty hand, so that I might salute it! Allow me to kiss the nethermost hem of your garment! For I owe it to you. I owe it all to you!”
“La. sir, you make my girlish head swim with these compliments,” she answered, extending her hand and rolling her eyes as he planted a fervent kiss on her third knuckle. “But, rise, please, and explain yourself, for I vow I cannot understand a word of what you are saying. Surely, Perry, you have not been imbibing so early in the day? It’s not at all like you.”
He clambered to his feet, sparing a moment in his enthusiasm to wipe at the knee of his pantaloons, then sat down beside her, his two hands clutching the brittle manuscript in a death grip. “But I am drunk, my dear girl. Drunk with excitement! With the thrill of discovery! With the thought of what that discovery will bring to the intellectual community!”
And to yourself, Marguerite thought happily. Dear Perry, you won’t disappoint me by allowing your genius to remain hidden under a bushel. Not if my father and I know our man. She extracted a lace-edged handkerchief and began fanning herself with it. “Please, Perry, you move too quickly for a lowly female. Can you not control yourself enough to explain? And what do I have to do with anything even the slightest bit intellectual? You know as well as I that I’m barely out of the schoolroom. If there is credit to be earned in whatever it is you’re speaking of, it belongs solely to you, dear Perry. I would not have it any other way!”
Sir Peregrine frowned, as if the thought of openly sharing credit for his grand discovery had never entered his mind, then patted Marguerite’s hand. “Not to worry, dear child. I have no desire to bandy your name in public. I only meant that you had been the one to lead me to the bookstalls that fateful day. Of course, you had nothing to do with my brilliant discovery. Why, if you’ll recall, Marguerite, you were about to lay down twenty pounds of your quarterly allowance for a clumsily rendered copy of Chaucer.”
“Machiavelli, Perry. It was a clumsy copy of Machiavelli,” Marguerite corrected him, a line from the cunning Machiavelli’s Il Principe popping into her head. “There are three sorts of intellect,” the political philosopher had written, “the one understands things by its own quickness of perception; another understands them when explained by some one else; and the third understands them neither by itself nor by the explanation of others. The first is the best; the second very good, and the third useless.” Donovan, bless and damn him, comprehends by himself, she decided. Sir Peregrine, blown up by his own assessment of his intellect, was “useless.”