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“Malcolm!” she said in her sternest voice.
“I came for the cake!” George shouted, his face beet red and his fists clenched. He climbed onto the table. “Stupid Frederick Shits-in-His-Pants Chase says there’s no cake, and I ain’t being polite while these wormy-tongued gundiguts call me names!”
“You know you didn’t come for the cake,” Emmie said, keeping her voice low and calm.
“That’s what you think!” With that George pulled another egg from the bucket he’d commandeered.
“Don’t do it,” she warned him, shifting a little to put more distance between her and the already splattered quartet of shrieking children nearest to her.
Whoever had decided an entire separate room should be set aside for the youngsters to have luncheon was clearly an idiot. At the same time, she had to admit that no one could possibly have anticipated her children. The cook certainly hadn’t, or she wouldn’t have left a bucket of fresh eggs anywhere the resourceful eight-year-old could find them.
He threw the egg. This time Emmeline saw it coming and ducked. Directly behind her, the thud and crack was answered by a low grunt. She risked a glance over her shoulder, to see her husband framed in the doorway, frozen as his previously white cravat dripped with yellow yolk and light brown eggshell.
Will took a breath, eyes narrowed as he assessed the chaos of the room. “This is going well, I see,” he commented, motioning her to circle left as he veered around another patch of food-smeared youngsters to the right.
“We nearly made it through luncheon,” she returned, smiling grimly.
“I’m rather proud of us, my dear.” He slipped behind a pillar and ducked out of sight.
“Come down from that table, young man!” she ordered, trying to keep George’s attention on herself until Will could work his way around behind the food-strewn battlefield. “We use our words in this family. Not our fists. And certainly not eggs.” A handful of spring peas rained down around her, at least one of them bouncing down the neckline of her gown and squishing coldly into her bosom. “Or vegetables!” They hadn’t even served peas; heaven knew how they’d ended up in his pockets.
“There is cake, Georgie!” another familiar voice announced from somewhere behind the table where a dozen more children cowered behind chairs and pillars and their parents, as the grown-ups began arriving from the dining room. “I found it in the kitchen hallway!” A plate teetered up over the edge of the table, atop it a misshapen white lump of what had most assuredly and very recently been a finely decorated cake. Rose’s white-icing-and-pink-ribbon-streaked brown hair and oval face popped up behind the rounded blob. “It was too big, so I brung you the top part of it.”
“It doesn’t matter now, Rosie,” George responded, bending down to take her hand and pull her up onto the table beside him. “We don’t want it. Stupid, noddy Roderick Lord-Pig-Face Ramsey said we was gutter rats not fit to eat their fine food, and he said you had fleas in your hair.”
“I don’t have fleas!” Rose yelled, dipping down for a handful of cake and flinging it at the cowering Roderick, Viscount Ramsey, where it added to the dripping egg already covering the young viscount’s front. “It was a beetle, and you put it there, you pig-widgeon!”
The flung frosting added a festive patina to Emmeline’s gown as well, but most of it went to her left, across the front of her second—or was it third?—cousin’s torso. “This isn’t helping your cause, dears,” she said, keeping her voice level.
“We don’t have a cause. We did what you asked, and look! Stupid and fancy and snobbish is all they care about, and that ain’t us. I reckon you should send us back to the orphanage!”
Rose bent down and picked up a table knife, pointing it at Roderick. “En garde, you niffynaffy scrub!”
At that moment Will launched himself forward out of the destruction, grabbing a child beneath each arm. Emmie swept in from the front, shoving the bucket of eggs well out of reach. “Take one,” Will grunted, lifting Rose in her direction.
Emmeline wrapped both arms around the squirming, yelling five-year-old, bending her head to reach Rose’s ear. “This is my fault,” she whispered. “Just take a deep breath. We’ll take care of everything.”
As she turned around, though, she froze. The huddled relatives young and old, children dripping with egg and cake and God knew what else, parents all frowning and yelling at the food and abuse being hurled at their offspring, grew quiet. A heartbeat later, she saw the reason for the sudden silence.
The Duke of Welshire himself stood in the doorway. “What the devil is going on here?” he asked, his low voice tight and clenched.
Taking a deep breath, Emmie hefted the sobbing Rose to her other shoulder. As she did so, a silver fork fell from the hem of the girl’s pink gown and clattered onto the floor. “Yes. I believe I owe you an explanation, Grandfather.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“I was the one who ruined it,” George muttered, pulling against Will’s grip on his arm. “Rose said she liked when Mrs. P—and not Mama—read to her at bedtime, and I tried to distract everyone by saying I could pitch pennies and would take anyone on, and then everything…” He put his hands out and wiggled his fingers as if dirt was trickling through them. “It just fell apart.”
“Who started calling whom names?” Will asked in a low voice, keeping pace behind Emmeline and Rose, who in turn followed the Duke of Welshire into the depths of his rambling house. “The truth, because I heard you using some rather colorful descriptions.”
“They figured out we didn’t belong to you, and they started calling us gypsies, and then said the gypsies had sold us to you, and then Rose said we were orphans. That damned Lord Ramsey put a beetle in her hair and started yelling that she had lice, and then Frederick Chase said we belonged in a stable. I had to hit him with an egg to shut him up.”
“Can’t say I blame you, lad.”
“But I ruined it.”
It was ruined, undoubtedly, unless Emmeline meant to spin another of her masterful stories about how vivid her children’s imaginations were, and that they always took turns making up stories to pass the time while they were in their sickbeds. Hmm. That might actually work.
Catching Emmeline’s shoulder, he whispered the basic outline to her. “Welshire’s more likely to believe you than the pompous little brats teasing our children, anyway,” he finished.