Free Maggie MacKeever by The Right Honourable Viscount

moments, the viscount eagerly grasped. Offensive as was the question to his notions of propriety, did he still want Sidoney? The sleepless nights he had recently begun to suffer would seem to indicate he did. Miss Phyfe would not be put off by an indication that his sentiments were none of her affair, he thought. Resigned, he answered in the affirmative.
    “Capital!” said his companion. “Then you will not mind making a push to attach her interest immediately, before it is too late.”
    “Too late?” Viscount English was tormented once more by images of headless bodies and streets awash with blood. “I wish you would reconsider, Miss Phyfe!”
    No wonder Sidoney was adverse to marriage with the viscount; he was sadly lacking in spirit. Perhaps an accounting of his various defects, as related to Miss Phyfe by Lady Barbour, might dispense with this tedious vacillating. Without preamble, Morgan informed the viscount that he was a good deal too discreet to suit his ladylove, who had grown very weary of being coddled and cosseted. Sidoney did not wish precisely to be mistreated, but would not be adverse to a degree of imprudence. She wanted to see how ordinary people lived.
    Since Viscount English had not the slightest notion of how ordinary people lived, he doubted that he could provide her ladyship enlightenment. Perhaps it would be more honorable, he suggested, if he simply retired from the lists.
    “There you go, talking fustian again!” Morgan was growing very annoyed by the viscount’s chivalrous precepts. “Have you no backbone, man? I cannot think much of your honor, if it means you must stand back and allow the object of your affections to fall prey to a hardened reprobate.”
    What reprobate was this? The viscount had thought they were talking about revolution. No wonder Miss Phyfe’s agitation for parliamentary reform had accomplished her so little, if this was the way she set about the thing. “What the deuce are you talking about. Miss Phyfe?”
    “Darby!” responded Morgan, no more amiably. “Do try and concentrate your mine! I have told you Sidoney would not be adverse to a display of imprudence, and the devil is like to give her a great deal of it. I vow I could throttle the pair of them! There is the situation in a nutshell, English: Sidoney is a wealthy ninnyhammer who makes a perfect victim for a rake, and she has very obviously decided to set her cap at Darby. Nor will the knave discourage her, I think. Sidoney cannot be warned against him outright, because she would stand on very bad terms with anyone who dared hint that any gentleman could be so deficient in good taste as to fail to wholeheartedly fall in love with her. So unless you would see Darby play fast and loose with my poor cousin, you will help me bring, her off safe.”
    In Viscount English’s experience, it was more likely Lady Barbour who would treat Lord Darby in a cavalier fashion. Still, he could not like the idea that her name might be vulgarly bandied about. Though it stung his pride to think that a rakehell might fix the affections of a lady who had scorned his own honorable advances, the viscount could not reconcile it with his conscience to abandon her to her richly merited comeuppance.
    Too, there remained the possibility that Lady Barbour might get caught up in the inevitable consequences of Miss Phyfe’s sedition, and that dire fate she did not at all deserve. He shuddered at the thought of Sidoney confined to Newgate, or transported to Australia via one of the dread prison ships. No, he must take whatever steps were necessary to rescue her from her present sorry plight. “What is it that you would have me do, Miss Phyfe?”
    This was a vital moment, and Morgan must strain to the utmost her limited powers of diplomacy. The Right Honorable Viscount English would not be pleased to discover that he must learn to be dishonorable. As she pondered how best to phrase her instructions, she bore her startled companion out of