Free Barbara Metzger by An Affair of Interest

Sydney to disparage such a well-breeched gentleman.
    “Besides,” she said, “I did not cut my hair for you. I always hated that impossible mop. It weighed down my head and would never take a curl. Now I couldn’t make it lay flat if I wanted to, and I feel free of all that heaviness and constant bother. Look at me. I am almost fashionable! You better be careful I don’t steal all of your beaux away!”
    “You could have all the admirers you want, dearest, if you would just go out and about more. Why, the gentlemen will flock to your feet when they see you in your new bonnet. You can have your pick!” Winnie giggled, her spirits restored. “Maybe one of the Bond Street fribbles will catch your fancy.”
    Sydney didn’t think so.
    * * * *
    The Duchess of Mayne was a student of breeding. She had intricate charts of the bloodlines of her dogs, their conformations, colors, temperaments. When she selected a mating pair, she was fairly certain of the results. Hers was the most noted establishment for Pekingese dogs in the kingdom. Lady Mayne was proud of her dogs.
    She herself collected seeds from the best blossoms in her garden, for next year’s blooms. Her gardens were mentioned in guidebooks. She was proud of her flowers.
    She should have stopped there.
    In the middle years of her marriage, when Lady Mayne still discussed her marriage at all, she used to boast that her husband could accuse her of many things, but never infidelity. All four of her children had his dark hair and the Mainwaring nose. (Fortunately the girls had pleasing personalities and large dowries.) She used to say that blood would tell, that breeding was all. She used to be proud of her sons, tall and straight, darkly handsome, like two peas in a pod.
    Like two peas in a pod that had been left on the vine too long, stepped on by the farmer’s hobnail boots, then run over by the farm cart.
    “This is why I sent you to London? This is how you help your brother and keep the family name from the tattlemongers? This is how you were raised to behave?”
    If Forrest had expected loving kindness and tender sympathy from his mother, he was disabused of that notion as soon as he helped Brennan past the front door. The duchess didn’t even wait for the servants to retreat before lighting into her eldest offspring.
    “This is what comes from letting you go off to the navy. You did not learn violence with your mother’s milk! It’s all that man’s fault, I swear. There has never been so much as a soldier in my family. The Mainwarings were ever a belligerent lot, so proud of tracing their roots to William the Conqueror. Merciful heavens, who wants to be related to a bloodthirsty conqueror? And all of those kings’ men and cavalry officers your father’s always nattering on about, that’s where you got this streak of brutality. And you are supposed to be the sane and sober one, the heir. Heir to your father’s lackwits, I’d say. A diplomat, he calls himself. Hah! If he was ever around to teach his sons diplomacy, they wouldn’t behave like barroom brawlers and look like spoiled cabbages!”
    “Thank you, Your Grace,” Forrest teased, trying to coax her into better humor. His mother hadn’t been in a rant like this since last Christmas, when the governor came down to visit. “I am pleased to be home, too.”
    Brennan was grinning as best he could around the sticking plaster, since it was his brother under fire. Then the duchess turned that fond maternal eye, and scathing tongue, in his direction.
    “You!” she screamed as if a slimy toad had arrived in her entry hall. “You are nothing but a womanizer. A drunkard. A gambler. Up to every tomfoolery it has been mankind’s sin to invent! You are even more harebrained than your brother, associating with such riffraff. You”—her voice rose an octave—”inherited your father’s dissipations.”
    Bren tried to reason with the duchess; Forrest could have told his brother he was making a mistake,