Maggie MacKeever by Quin

sounds like a crack-brained scheme to me,” Liliane said severely. “We’re waiting for him to put in an appearance here?”
    Mam oozed exasperation. “No. We’re waiting for this one to grow properly pliant. His lordship’s invitation hasn’t yet been sent.”
    Liliane looked doubtful. “You must know your own business best.”
    Kate wasn’t feeling at all pliant. She wanted nothing more than to give Mam a good kick. Still, she couldn’t find it in herself to be especially afraid. It was as if they were actors playing out a scene, the others strutting and declaiming all around her, while she squatted on the sofa like a broody hen.
    Mam shifted in her chair. Liliane moved aimlessly around the room, touching this, picking up and discarding things.
    Kate had never before been inebriated. Her current condition gave her a better understanding of Quin. It was rather pleasant to be so detached from her surroundings, her thoughts bouncing like a rubber ball from this to that and back again. If she was in a bordello, did that mean Liliane was a fille de joie ? If so, was Liliane a fille de joie by choice or by force? If by force, what hold had Mam over her? Kate imagined any number of potentially extortive situations might arise in the course of an evening’s enterprise. Perhaps Liliane had inadvertently killed one of her customers in an excess of passion and Mam disposed of the corpse.
    Would someone be obliged to likewise dispose of Kate?
    She’d have a few words to say to Quin about his promise she’d be kept safe, when next they met.
    If next they met.
    Kate marveled at her imagination, which was not usually so lurid. And surely she was hallucinating, because suddenly Quin was standing in the doorway, a pistol in one hand. Kate blinked — she was pleased to discover she could still blink — but he didn’t disappear.
    Instead he walked into the room, pistol pointed straight at Mam, and said, “Put down the gun.”
    “Or you’ll shoot me? I think not.” Mam raised her own gun, aimed at Kate. And then she tossed aside the spectacles, spat out the plumpers that distorted her cheeks, pulled off her wig to reveal faded blonde hair.
    Kate stared, struck speechless by more than the drug that she’d ingested. Even Liliane blinked. Quin said, slowly, “So. Kate has naught to do with your vendetta. Let her go.”
    “She’s everything to do with it,” retorted Mam, much more distinctly. “Can you deny you would have married her ?”
    Kate might have denied it, could she have untied her tongue. Quin was not the marrying sort of gentleman.
    He scowled. “You know damned well, Verena, that I never said I’d marry you.”
    “No, but you seduced me easily enough,” Mam — Verena — spat. “I expected any moment you would make an offer. Instead you showed me a clean pair of heels.”
    Quin had seduced this woman? A bolt of strong emotion burned through Kate’s mental fog. A sun-drenched afternoon, the feeling of hands against her flesh, the smell of new-mown hay— If Quin had taken Verena Wickersham to and in that stable, Kate would stick a pitchfork in them both.
    Verena gestured toward Liliane. “That isn’t all you showed me. Say hello to your by-blow.” Quin and Liliane regarded each other with mutually appalled astonishment. “So you see,” Verena added with relish, “Miss Manvers is merely the icing on the cake.”
    This was like watching a melodrama. Kate decided some audience participation was required. “If you refer to Liliane being in Quin’s bedchamber,” she whispered with an immense effort. “Nothing happened. I was there.”
    Verena scowled at Liliane. “Nothing happened? But you said—”
     “ You said he was an elbow-crooker who was full of juice,” interrupted Liliane, scowling in her own turn. “And that he’d die of barrel fever soon enough, but in the meantime he’d bleed freely, and so I should ingratiate myself. But it was all a bag of moonshine. Just look at him! He’s as