Lady Sherry and the Highwayman by Maggie MacKeever Page B

Marguerite. At this point, a vision rose unbidden of Lady Sherry clad in his diamond and emerald necklace and nothing else.
    He banished the vision with some reluctance. Pleasant as his imaginings were, they in no way helped him to concentrate on how best to earn a lady’s gratitude. At the end of several more moments, Andrew gave up the effort. Sherry clearly needed nothing that he could provide.
    Yet why the deuce was fretting herself to fiddle strings? Lord Viccars devoutly hoped his courtship had not sparked that response. If so, could he in honor go on with it? On the other hand, could he, realistically, desist? Andrew didn’t fancy being crossed in love. Before his patience gave out, or Lady Sherry’s scruples won out, she must be persuaded against further shilly-shallying about setting a wedding date.
    Again, how was the thing to be brought off? The only thing Andrew might supply Sherry that she lacked was the news he’d heard this evening of the highwayman’s escape, and he could not even be certain that he would be beforehand with that. Sherry had taken an almost personal interest in the rogue ever since she’d decided to base her current hero on his exploits.
    From what she had said of him, her own highwayman sounded a very rake-helly sort. Despite his own inclinations in certain directions, Andrew didn’t approve of rakehells. However, the ladies obviously felt otherwise, and it was the ladies who largely made up Lady Sherry’s readership.
    How very much of an oddity was his beloved. Although Andrew couldn’t enter into her feelings, he knew she set great store by her story writing and became very involved emotionally in her plots.
    Sherry’s readership. Escaped highwaymen. Rakehells. Lord Viccars’s realized what he could do to prove his devotion. He would track down and fetch for Lady Sherry the escaped highwayman.
     

Chapter Seven
     
    Meanwhile, a family dinner was underway at Longacre House. Only Lady Sherry, Sir Christopher, and his wife were present, Aunt Tulliver having elected to take her meal in her room, or in the book room, to be precise. Lavinia—blissfully unaware that there was hidden in Sherry’s book room anything more exceptionable than paper and quills and pots of Japan ink—could only be grateful for this unusual reticence on the old woman’s part. This meal, at least, would not be enlivened by muttered but perfectly audible comments on the quality of the food or the even more distressing sounds attendant upon an ill-fitting set of false teeth.
    “Devilish inconvenient!” pronounced Sir Christopher as he set aside the spoon with which he’d been making forays into a bowl of pea soup. Lavinia glanced up from her own soup bowl, alarmed that she might somehow have been remiss in her housewifely duties.
    Sir Christopher had no complaint about either his wife or the dinner she had provided for him—a formal affair of several courses that included roasted beef, fried flounder, potatoes, and French beans, in addition to the soup. “Luddites,” he said in response to her inquiring glance. “Malcontents. One can barely stroll down a street in the City without seeing some meeting or other underway. On the one hand, leading figures want to relieve the distress of the working man. On the other, the working man wants to seize the property of the leading figures. At the same time Castlereagh and Liverpool refuse outright to entertain any notions of parliamentary reform. As a result, we have mobs rioting and smashing machinery and wearing the tricolor.” He reached for his wineglass.
    Sir Christopher believed the ladies should not be kept in ignorance of events that transpired outside their proper sphere, and so he brought with him to the dinner table each day an accounting of current events, a treat for which the ladies were secretly not so grateful as they might have been, perhaps because Sir Christopher had a tendency to sermonize, which may have been the result of the long hours he