Free Lady in the Stray by Maggie MacKeever Page B

before a fire just then, her kinsman’s words and the chill temperature having combined to make her very cold. “I shall succumb to the muslin disease if I must stand here much longer!” she snapped. “I wish you would tell me what you are talking about. Don’t try and put me off. If this treasure of Marmaduke’s is of so little value, you wouldn’t be so interested in it.”
    “I didn’t say it was valueless. The item that you seek has a great deal of value for me, because I can use it to gain influence and power. That memorandum is worth a great deal more than mere money, Minette.”
    “ ‘Memorandum’?” Minette echoed, incensed. “All this time, I have been searching for a piece of paper?” She lapsed into French profanities, interspersed with a highly unflattering delineation of the late Marmaduke’s character, emphasized by dramatic gestures and considerable stamping of her plump little foot.
    “Hush, petite!” Such was Edouard’s tone that she immediately complied. “By serving me you may yourself be well served. We will join forces. You will assist my search.”
    Join forces with a man who had come perilously close to strangling her just moments past? Minette thought not. She knew the folly of trusting Edouard. Still, it would be to her advantage did he think her compliant. “It is important, this memorandum?”
    “Most important, put to its best use. I wonder what use Mountjoy meant to make of it—but that makes no difference now.” Edouard’s hooded eyes gleamed. “I wonder too why I should believe in your sudden amiability, Minette. Take my word for it, petite. This time you are out of your depth.”
    Edouard was determined to convince her that his precious memorandum was of no value to her, Minette shrewdly thought. “Believe what you wish! It was your idea that I should help you search. Me, I don’t give a fig for a silly piece of paper. It was very bad of Marmaduke to hint he had a treasure, when it was a dreary old memorandum instead.” If Marmaduke’s treasure was a memorandum, she silently added, a matter about which she cherished doubt. Whatever her continued efforts disclosed would not be shared with her kinsman.
    Almost as if he had access to her thoughts, Edouard reached out and roughly grasped her chin. “Do you play me false,” he said with chilling sincerity, “I very seriously and solemnly assure you that I will enact a singularly unpleasant revenge.”
     
     

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    No little time later, Vashti concluded her halfhearted search, and with Mohammed and Calliope and Greensleeves slowly mounted the stair. Sounds of revelry came to her from the gaming rooms. Vashti hoped the gamblers might prove as unlucky as they were roisterous. Were her labors in the library any indication, armaduke’s treasure would not be easily found. True, her thoughts had been a trifle preoccupied with a blond-haired blue-eyed madman, but she had not been neglectful, all the same. That nothing was hidden in the library, Vashti was convinced. She proceeded along the upper corridor to her bedroom.
    Candlelight softened the Gothic outlines of the chamber, rendering it both more welcoming and more opulent. Vashti again marveled at her cousin’s flamboyant taste, the Chinese papered walls and oak mantel with carved mandarins, the huge bed with its gauzy gold-fringed draperies which when closed would resemble an exotic tent.
    Mohammed strolled to the hearth and collapsed there with a groan; Greensleeves hopped into a far corner of the room. Vashti put down the book she had brought with her from the library—Sir Hugh Platt’s popular cookery and household book of early seventeenth-century receipts, Delights for Ladies— and followed Calliope over to the bed. She was almost tired enough to fall asleep without undressing, she thought.
    Calliope growled. In the act of drawing aside the gauzy draperies, Vashti froze. There was a large lump beneath her bedcovers. Surely the madman who had