The Tenacious Miss Tamerlane (19 page)

Farnley looked embarrassed for a moment, but
after apologizing he made one more try at laying his side of the
story before the Duke.

“Enough!” Avanoll barked, immediately raising
his hands to his throbbing skull. “Prepare my bath and get some
coffee up here. And you may shave me today, if you can collect your
nerves sufficiently to refrain from slicing my throat.”

Once dressed for his afternoon meeting with
some friends at Tattersall’s, Avanoll gingerly descended to the
breakfast room, where he found himself confronted with muddy
coffee, underdone eggs, burned bacon, and cold toast. The servants
were obviously, in their own subtle way, expressing once again just
where their allegiance lay.

As his memory of the previous evening slowly
filtered back to him he had to admit that—perhaps this one time, at
least—he had behaved just a trifle badly. Furthermore, if he ever
hoped to enjoy a decent meal under his own roof again he would
either have to make it up with Tansy or replace the entire
staff.

As it was less trouble to perform the former
requirement, and because he really did feel a slight twinge of
remorse for his boorishness, he abandoned his unappetizing meal and
went to seek out his cousin, thereby making his first meal of the
day a serving of crow.

But the Duke was to be thwarted in his
attempt to smooth the domestic waters, for when he entered the main
drawing room it was to find the chamber filled almost to bursting
with floral offerings from gentlemen guests from the night before.
The furniture was likewise littered with fashionable young bucks,
foppish dandies, ridiculously perfumed old men, and not a few
matchmaking mamas who had chosen this morning as the perfect time
to corral the comely young heiress into attending their upcoming
entertainments.

Avanoll stood on the threshold for some
moments and watched his young sister smugly preening herself,
batting her sooty lashes at the circle of adoring males about her,
and generally having a merry old time flirting with every male in
sight. Aunt Lucinda, he next observed, sat perched in one of her
beloved chairs, nervously fanning herself and trying to monitor the
goings-on with all the fervor (if not the competence) of a proper
chaperon.

Then Avanoll spied out Tansy standing off to
one side of the room and was amazed to see that, on second glance,
the near regiment of suitors was actually divided into two distinct
groups. While Emily held court with a crowd of fortune-hunters and
mama’s-babies, Tansy was looking quite at her ease entertaining a
half-dozen or so of his own cronies, as well as a respectable
sprinkling of more mature gentlemen—all sportsmen of the first
rank.

He overheard a snippet of a story Tansy was
just then relating, concerning a particularly fine battle she’d had
with a trophy-sized salmon whilst she and her Papa were in Scotland
(a most unladylike topic for discussion), but missed the end of the
tale, which was truly a pity for it seemed to have set her
listeners off into ridiculously juvenile paroxysms of mirth.

In a twinkling, all the Duke’s good
intentions went a-flying, and before turning on his heel and
stomping off, he, quite rudely, called across the room for Miss
Tamerlane to attend him in the library. Amid moans of regret and
easily overheard expressions of outrage, Tansy excused herself from
the company, evincing all the social correctness the dowager had
drummed repeatedly into her head. It was only after she was out of
sight of the drawing room that her stride became rather long, her
footfalls disintegrated into purposeful stampings, and her smiling
face took on the narrow-eyed aspects of a hawk on the hunt.

Horatio, who had been dutifully awaiting his
mistress’s emergence from a room strictly out of bounds to canine
types (a truth brought home by repeated application of the
dowager’s cane to his tender hindquarters), joined her in the march
to the library—where he quickly staked his claim to the rug before
the cold fireplace, growled once at the Duke (as was his custom),
and curled up for a pleasant snooze.

Tansy took note of Avanoll’s strategically
superior position, standing behind the wide mahogany desk and,
refusing to sit down, thus placing her at a disadvantage,
belligerently took up her own position directly across the room,
feet braced and slightly apart, arms akimbo, and her chin at a
challenging tilt.

It was left to Avanoll to either shout down
the length of the room or walk around the desk and narrow the gap
between them. He knew he had been out-maneuvered, but there was
little he could do. And as an imposing posturing with one arm
draped on the mantel was impossible without exposing his ankles to
Horatio’s razor-jaws, he did the only thing left to him. He
advanced until he stood face to face with his cousin, a mere three
feet separating them.

And then they stared at each other—or glared
at each other, if meticulous honesty was truly to be served—neither
wishing to speak first and so be put on the defensive. At last,
possibly her sense of fair play owning up to the fact that by
moving from behind the desk Avanoll had already made one
concession, Tansy broke the tense silence by demanding:

“Well?”

The Duke came to himself with a start. In the
midst of his anger he had somehow found himself overcome with the
desire to take Tansy in his arms and kiss her quite ruthlessly.
This realization only added fuel to his anger, and he immediately
went on the offensive. “Just what do you mean, madam, upsetting my
man this morning?” he sneered, grasping at the first straw to come
to hand.

This bizarre query was definitely the last of
a long agenda of possible bones of contention Tansy supposed
Avanoll about to gnaw on this morning. In point of fact, Farnley
did not even appear upon her mental list as a subject for debate.
As a result, she was in turn speechless, confused and, finally,
downright angry.

“You mean to stand there and tell me,” she
demanded incredulously, “that you burst into the drawing room, made
a perfect spectacle of yourself by bellowing like an enraged bull,
and dragged me rudely away from our guests to discuss your
superstitious twit of a valet?”

She flung her hands out in exasperation and
shook her head in an expression of disbelief. “Ashley, either
you’re the greatest ignoramus in nature or you’ve temporarily
slipped your wits after your disgusting descent into drunkenness
last evening.”

Before Avanoll could search his senses (still
oddly disturbed by thoughts of romance), for a rebuttal, Tansy
continued, “As all you seem capable of since your first hysterical
accusation is to stand rooted to the carpet like a wilting
potted-palm, I imagine I will be forced to dignify your question
with a suitable explanation.”

Tansy then began to pace the floor as Avanoll
looked on, feeling, if absolute truth was to be the rule of the
day, exceedingly foolish. “The set-to—or contretemps, as the
dowager would no doubt phrase it, though I see no need to wrap this
particular farce up in clean linen—began earlier this morning when
I discovered your estimable servant to be the instigator of a
near-riot in the kitchen.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“As well you should. It seems one of the
servants dropped a crystal wine goblet while clearing away last
night’s debris, and the thing shattered in a thousand pieces.”

While Avanoll watched his cousin’s agitated
pacings, his brow became more creased as she recounted the
morning’s events. Finally Tansy ceased her assault on the priceless
Aubusson carpet and told him:

“When I arrived on the scene to discover the
reason for the shrieks of alarm audible in the breakfast room,
Farnley was being forcibly restrained from reaching the cabinet
where the kitchen crockery is kept by the presence of three
whimpering maids and an irate Cook, the latter wielding a huge meat
cleaver. Once order was restored. Cook explained that Farnley
wished to break two more pieces of china—inexpensive items he
termed expendable—so that the more costly china would be
spared.”

Now the Duke was completely at sea, and his
baffled expression registered the fact. “Why break more china?” he
asked bleakly.

Tansy laughed ruefully. “Surely, your grace,
you have heard that all bad events come in threes. Farnley wished
to fulfill the requirements necessary to end this particular run of
bad luck with the least cost to you and your heirloom china. I,”
she ended rather smugly, “sent him away with a flea in his ear, and
he obviously scurried straight to you to give vent to his injured
feelings.”

Avanoll had the good grace to look ashamed.
“Farnley is, as you say, a bit superstitious,” he explained
feebly.

“Superstitious!” Tansy chortled. “The man’s a
lily-livered ninny with more hair than wit. My major complaint, if
I might be allowed the same freedom Farnley has to talk behind
another’s back, is his influence upon my own ninnyhammer attendant,
Pansy, who is so susceptible to his ravings.”

“I understand your concern, cousin, but I
fail to see any way, short of dismissing Farnley, that can serve to
put a halt to it. If only we could find some personal weak point of
his we could, er, convince Farnley to leave off filling the poor
girl full of his nonsense.”

Tansy gave an exasperated sigh. “His weak
point is easy to spot, Ashley, as it sits directly above his neck.
Would you suggest the Froggies’ contraption, the guillotine?”

Avanoll chuckled at the joke, then noticed
the air in the room was no longer fraught with tension. Crossing
his fingers behind his back he launched into a belated apology, a
note of bitter self-mockery in his voice. “I know I blotched my
copybook last night and was in general behaving like the worst of
boors. I have no explanation, unless it is to plead that I was a
trifle up in the world at the time.”

Tansy magnanimously accepted Avanoll’s out
and out drunkenness as being a trifle castaway and replied
soothingly, “Please do not think me to be such a looby that I would
be overly put out by what a man says whilst deep in his cups.”

“Yes, well, I thank you, cousin. But I know I
behaved like a regular hot-headed halfling, and for no reason other
than my own perverseness.”

Now Tansy giggled. “You were proper sloshed
at that, your grace, I agree.” And with that bit of plain speech,
any remaining constraint floated magically away and the pair quit
the room quite good friends once more—Tansy to return to her
gentlemen callers, Avanoll to trot off to his engagement at
Tatt’s.

Once the last of their admirers had been
reluctantly shifted back onto the flagway outside Avanoll House,
the three ladies ascended the stairs to look in on the dowager, who
had pleaded fatigue and remained in bed for a rest following the
excitement of the ball.

“Get up, you slug-a-bed,” Emily trilled,
still heady with her triumph as she burst into her grandmother’s
chamber. “You will not believe the absolute success my ball has
been.”

“It’s true, your grace,” Tansy supplied more
calmly. “The entire household has been knee-deep in posies and
bucks all this morning long.”

She approached the spare figure still
reclining in the huge dome bed, almost lost amid the heavy wood
head-and-tester deeply carved with clouds, suns, and cupids, and
hung about with red velvet, richly fringed round with weighty gold
tassels.

Tansy cast her eyes around the huge room,
still steeped in shadow behind the firmly-drawn, red velvet
draperies, and took in an intricately fitted-out Ince dressing
table, a many-compartmented writing desk, a Chippendale commode and
clothes-press, as well as a china case awe-inspiring in both size
and decoration—and stuffed full of a motley assortment of painted
glass birds and small forest animals. Finally her attention was
drawn to a chaise-longue that could only have been the result of an
early brainstorm of Sheraton’s. Draped all over in rusty-red velvet
cut in an overblown rose pattern, its frame was decorated in
burnished gold and carved into contortions that defied
description.

“Awful, ain’t it?” her grace chuckled weakly.
“The only thing good about this room is the dumbwaiter that leads
right to the kitchens. My food arrives hot, even if the room itself
robs me of my appetite.”

As the dowager spoke. Tansy could not help
but notice the huskiness in her voice and questioned the woman as
to how she felt.

“I must admit I am not quite in plump
currant. No doubt the hey-go-mad pace I set myself making ready for
the ball has finally caught up with me. You ladies just stay back
so that you don’t catch anything from me, though it’s just a little
cough and a bit of a tender throat. Don’t let me spoil your fun,”
she ended stoutly.

Tansy took no heed and walked straight up to
the bed. “That’s deuced agreeable of you, ma’am, but I think there
is a trifle more amiss here than a simple tickle in your throat. If
you don’t mind, I’d like to feel your forehead, for your cheeks
look a sight too pink and your eyes, though always twinkling, are a
tad too bright to suit me.”

“Stay away, I say!” the dowager croaked. “I’m
not so feeble that I’ll stand any sauce from you, gel. And ladies
do not say deuced,” she added automatically as Tansy’s cool hand
descended to touch the old lady’s fevered brow.

“Aha, just as I thought. Trifling cold,
indeed. You, madam, are burning with fever,” Tansy declared. “We
must get you something for it at once.”

“‘Better use medicines at the outset than at
the last moment.’ Syrus,” Aunt Lucinda proffered helpfully, if
somewhat pessimistically.

“Be quiet, you beetle-headed widgeon!” the
dowager rasped while Tansy smothered a chuckle.

“Such a kickup,” Emily pouted, seeing her
moment in the limelight rapidly being replaced by the household’s
overreaction to her grandparent’s piddling indisposition.
“Grandmama has lived long enough to recognize whether or not she is
really sick.”