Somerville Farce (20 page)

“Blessed Mother and all the saints, but I
never expected this. Never met a pretty girl yet what had the sense
of a newborn babe when it came ta men. Helena’s already as good as
lost ta us, I suppose—although it’s my guess she’ll be sniffing
back here once the deed is done—but now that there’s only one chick
ta watch, no more foxes will be gettin’ past me inta the henhouse,
if ye take m’meanin’.”

She made to leave the room, holding her head
and complaining of having “the divil of a headache,” before turning
back to glare at Trixy. “Just a word o’ warnin’, missy, though why
I’m botherin’, I can’t tell ye. He won’t be marryin’ ye, ye know.
As me sainted mother used to say, they never does wed the cow when
they can gets the milk fer free.”

Trixy collapsed onto the edge of the bed the
moment the door closed behind the maid, hiding her face in her
hands. Harry quickly sat down beside her, putting a comforting arm
around her shoulders, which had begun to shake visibly. “I’m so
sorry, darling,” he crooned into her hair. “I’ll go after the
woman, and make her understand. Please... don’t cry.”

“Cry?” Trixy exclaimed, raising her head so
that the duke could see the tears streaming down her cheeks even as
she grinned at him. “Why would I cry?” she asked, doubling over
again in laughter.

“Trixy...?” he asked, confused.

She took a deep breath, trying to regain
control of herself. “That has to be the funniest thing I’ve ever
seen. Did you get a good look at her, Harry? Her nightgown would
make a tolerable sail for a man-o’-war, and her nightcap hanging
over her eyes made her look like a drunken sailor out on a spree.
And you—you standing in front of me as if you were saving my
reputation, the reputation you don’t believe in, while you had only
moments earlier been trying to do just what Lacy said you were
trying to do. What a mad farce we all are! Oh, Lord, my sides
ache!”

Harry, his amorous pursuit stymied—and his
interest effectively quashed by the maid’s statement of what had,
he admitted silently, been his intentions—took refuge in anger.
Rising from the bed, he glowered down at Trixy, who was now lying
back on the bed, her arms wrapped around her waist as she gave in
once more to mirth.

“I fail to see the humor,” he declared
coldly, although, in truth, the corners of his lips had begun to
twitch. “If anything, I should say we’ve both had a happy escape.
Good night to you, madam!” With that, and with Trixy’s uninhibited
giggles urging him on his way, he left her chamber to make for his
study once more, and the bottle that awaited him there.

T
he Duke of Glynde
had only limited memories of his mother, because she had succumbed
to childbed fever eighteen years ago, when William was born, but he
instinctively knew that she was perhaps the one woman in the world
who might be able to help him now. His mother, he was sure, would
know how to handle Trixy, how to look her deep in the eyes and
figure out what the dratted girl was thinking.

“And, maybe, just maybe, Mother would be
able to pinpoint exactly where I went wrong,” Harry told the nearly
empty brandy glass he was staring into at that moment, the same
glass he had been filling and refilling all night, until the rain
had stopped and the late-morning sun had at last begun filtering
through the curtains into his study.

It had been a long night, the empty hours
haunted by the memory of Trixy’s tear-edged laughter as he had all
but slunk out of her bedchamber to creep back down the steps to his
study, and he was still dressed in his evening clothes, although
they were, at the moment, very much the worse for wear, not that
Willie seemed to notice that fact as he careered into the room
without bothering to knock.

“Harry! There you are! Good!” Willie
exclaimed in full throat as he immediately took up pacing the
carpet, his hands clenched into fists. “You’ll never believe it,
Harry! Helena’s run off—and it’s all Andy’s doing, the coldhearted
blackguard! He told me the whole of it this morning, as if it were
some tremendous joke. He arranged for the coach and driver—and even
gave them some of his own blunt, as if he ever had two coppers to
rub together this close to the end of the quarter. How could he
have done this to me, to his best friend? I popped him one,
o’course—right in the dining room—and now I demand
satisfaction.”

Harry lifted his bloodshot gaze to his
brother, noticing yet again how terribly, terribly young the lad
was. “You demand satisfaction for popping him one?” he asked,
raising one eyebrow. “I think you have that the wrong way around,
William—unless you wish for Andy to pop you one back? Do you think
that’s wise? I mean, you should try to remember that your nose has
an unfortunate propensity for bleeding.”

“What?” Willie whirled about to face his
brother, his eyes wild as he ran a hand through his already
disheveled hair. “Don’t laugh at me, Harry. This ain’t funny! This
ain’t funny in the least!”

Harry begged to differ, as he was finding
the scene unfolding in front of him to be laughable in the
extreme—which probably just went to show how excessively put upon
he was feeling at that moment—but he wisely didn’t put thought into
speech. Instead, he calmly pointed out that just last night Lord
William had declared in front of one and all that he was no longer
in love with the fair Helena.

“That is nothing to the point, Harry!”
Willie countered, dropping abjectly to his knees in front of his
brother, all the better to plead his case. “Don’t you see? My best
friend—my bosom chum—has betrayed me! I am devastated!”

Harry frowned, as if considering this
argument. “Helena ran off with her dancing master, after mooning
about the house over the man for the past several weeks—not that we
knew it at the time. Personally, I had just believed her gloves to
be too tight. Be that as it may, this eloping business doesn’t seem
to be the action of a rational woman, William. I’d say, upon
reflection, that you’ve had a most fortunate escape. As a matter of
fact, you might just owe Andy an apology—unless you plan on
mounting your trusty steed and riding off after the chit before she
can be completely ruined?”

Willie sat back on his haunches, his nose
screwed up as he considered this last question. “Ride off after
her? Now, why do you suppose I should want to do a crackbrained
thing like that, Harry? It ain’t like she’s family or anything, and
she did leave us of her own free will. Besides, there’s going to be
a splendid mill just outside Wimbledon today, and I’ve already
promised Andy we would go.”

He hopped to his feet. “Andy! My God, Harry—
when I left him he was dipping his serviette into the water pitcher
and putting it to his eye. I could have blinded the fellow! Excuse
me—I must go check on him at once. Really, Harry, I think you could
have pointed that out to me. I thought you liked Andy.”

“And I thought you were going to call him
out, William,” Harry quickly reminded the youth, doing his best to
hide his amusement. “That is why you came storming in here, isn’t
it?”

Willie looked askance over his shoulder at
his brother. “Call him out? Who? Andy? My best friend —the man what
may have saved me from making the biggest, the most terrible
mistake of my life? Harry, I swear, I don’t know where you get your
ideas sometimes. And, by the by, you don’t look very good. Why
don’t you just nip off upstairs and I’ll have Pinch order a bath
for you? A shave wouldn’t come amiss either. Should I hunt out
Pinch?”

Without waiting for an answer, he trotted
out of the room, the spring back in his step, leaving his brother
behind to wonder aloud as to whether or not the fall off his pony
and onto his head Willie had taken at the age of six could have
something to do with the boy’s current rather scattered mental
condition.

Harry wasn’t left alone very long,
unfortunately for his throbbing head; a few minutes later Mr.
Grover Saltaire was announced.

“Good Lord, Harry, you look dreadful!” the
dapper young man commented cheerfully enough as he sat himself down
in the chair facing the duke’s and blighted the poor, suffering man
with the dazzling smile that had captured Miss Eugenie Somerville’s
heart. “You’ll never guess where Miss Eugenie Somerville is this
morning, Harry. Never. Go ahead—guess. I dare you. You’ll never
guess, not in a million years. A billion years!”

Harry lowered his chin onto his cravat and
gazed levelly at Mr. Saltaire, mentally jotting a note to have
Pinch screen all his future visitors for signs of encroaching
insanity. “On her way to Gretna Green with Percy Sau-something,
visions of ivy-covered cottages and rosy-cheeked babies dancing in
her head?” he offered meanly at last, somehow knowing that Salty
was referring to Eugenie but not above getting some of his own back
for the man’s unnerving cheerfulness.

Salty put out his hands and shook his
head—still smiling that blighting smile, damn him. “No, no, Harry,
you’ve got it all wrong. That’s Helena who’s run off to marry over
the anvil. Eugenie explained it all to me in a note just this
morning. They played a little trick last night, with my dearest
darling Eugenie pretending to be her sister at Lady Hereford’s.
Wasn’t that quite a joke? Even I didn’t know her.”

“Quite a joke, Salty,” Harry agreed tightly,
reaching for the nearly empty brandy decanter. “As a matter of
fact, I’ve been sitting here laughing out loud about it nearly the
whole night long.”

Salty puckered up his forehead, which did
nothing to mar his near-feminine, fuzzy-cheeked blond beauty—and
visibly less to improve his never-sterling intelligence. “You have?
My goodness, I hadn’t thought about that before. I’ve just
realized, Harry, you won’t look quite the hero once this gets out,
will you? I mean, letting your ward slip away like that, from right
beneath your nose. There might be those who would even say you
urged her toward such an obvious misalliance in order to revenge
yourself on her papa—not that I believe it for a minute, because
Eugenie has told me how truly decent you’ve been to her—all things
considered, that is. There was that contretemps about the gloves,
if I recall correctly.”

Salty took his bottom lip between his teeth.
“Letting the chit toddle off to Gretna, and not so much as
pretending to take up the chase? That is a bit much, old son.”

Harry pondered whether it would prove worth
his effort to brain Salty with the decanter, then decided that it
most probably would not. “No one will be any the wiser that Helena
eloped, if the child has the belated good sense to return to
Portman Square with her groom—which I’m convinced is precisely what
they will do, considering the fact that neither of them has a
feather to fly with without Helena’s portion, which I, for my sins,
have agreed to furnish. I’ll put a small announcement in the papers
in a few days, saying something about how they were childhood
sweethearts and were wedded quietly from some nonexistent aunt’s
house in Cornwall or some other ungodly place no one would ever
think to visit.”

Harry took a sip of brandy, happy with the
story he had made up as he went along, even though he wasn’t quite
sure why he thought he owed Salty an explanation. He liked the
fellow well enough, he supposed, but both Grover and Sir Roderick
were more in the way of acquaintances than friends, and now he was
no longer sure if he even liked either one of them. Especially
Roddy, he decided meanly, taking another sip of brandy.

A small silence descended on the study as
Harry became lost in his own thoughts and Salty waded through all
that had been said, vaguely aware that he still hadn’t told Harry
something of the greatest importance. “I have it now!” he exclaimed
at last, jarring Harry’s head back with the sheer exuberance of his
exclamation. “You haven’t guessed yet, Harry.” Salty hopped up from
the chair.

Harry expelled a deep sigh, wishing himself,
if not Salty, at the other end of the earth. “I haven’t guessed
what yet? Oh, yes. Miss Eugenie Somerville’s whereabouts, wasn’t
it? Please, Salty, I beg you not to keep me in suspense another
moment,” he said, his tone one of patent disinterest that was not
totally lost on Grover. “Tell me the whole, not that I believe you
would leave anything out—not a single word. You run with Roddy a
lot these days, don’t you, Salty?”

Grover pouted, not liking the duke’s lack of
interest in what, to him, was the most wonderful thing to happen
since he had turned five-and-twenty and had at last learned to
whistle through his teeth like a coachy. “Eugenie is visiting with
dearest Mama at the almshouse!”

Harry, remembering something Trixy had said
just last night about believing the way to Mrs. Saltaire’s heart
lay in Eugenie’s shared love of “causes,” once more found himself
unable to resist temptation. “Your mother lives in an almshouse?
Strange, I had always thought you kept a house in Brook
Street.”