The Tenacious Miss Tamerlane (20 page)

Aunt Lucinda seemed in prime form today and
quickly countered by quoting, ‘“Age carries all things, even the
mind, away.’ Virgil.”

“Now, now your grace,” Tansy soothed, while
pressing the indignant old lady’s thin shoulders back down on the
pillows. “Aunt Lucinda means well.”

“Oh, she’s a well-intentioned enough old
tabby.” This last was said with a quelling stare in Aunt Lucinda’s
direction. “But if l am in fact to be confined to this grotesque
abomination of a room for any length of time, like a molting pigeon
cooped up until I am fit to be seen, I must insist you keep the
dear puss the deuce out of my sight and hearing.”

“Mustn’t say deuce. Grandmama,” Emily
tittered impishly, gaining herself a pithy set-down in the
process.

By mid-afternoon, the doctor had been called
in to pronounce the dowager the victim of a severe bout of
influenza. He prescribed rhubarb and calomel for her headache and
cough, as well as an assortment of vile-tasting possets and
embrocations guaranteed to encourage his patient into full recovery
if only to halt the doses of the stuff.

Aunt Lucinda was in succeeding days wont to
shake her head over the myriad of vials and bottles standing on the
dowager’s bedside table and mutter, ‘“There are some remedies worse
than the disease.’ Syrus,” to which her grace was heard to reply
breathlessly, “Amen.”

This prompted the aunt to offer her opinion
of the doctor. ‘“Old men are only walking hospitals.’ Horace,”
which actually brought a wavering smile to the dowager’s lips, for
she was in truth quite weak.

So encouraged. Aunt Lucinda added one quote
too many. “‘O Death the Healer, scorn those not, I pray, to come to
me: of cureless ills thou art the one physician. Pain lays not its
touch upon a corpse.” Aeschylus.”

It was a full week later before Aunt Lucinda
was brave enough to sneak back into the sickroom to offer the
dowager a copy of John Heywood’s 1562
Woorkes, A Dialogue
conteyning the number in effect of all the proverbs in the English
tounge, compact in a matter concernynge two maner of Maryages,
etc.
, a book that followed behind her in her retreat through
the door some scant seconds later.

There was another ruckus belowstairs when
Farnley removed the cat from the pantry, stating that everyone knew
if a cat was allowed to kill a mouse when someone was sick in the
house it was a sure omen of impending death. Tansy allowed that
incident to blow over by itself, but put a quick halt to the
valet’s plans to drop deadly poisonous henbane seeds onto the hot
coals in the dowager’s sickroom grate so that she could “benefit”
from the resulting vapors.

Farnley was a mite daunted by this setback,
but the innocent devotion that Pansy showed for his higher
intelligence more than made up for any slights Tansy could cast on
his knowledge.

For Tansy had been correct: the guileless
Pansy was thoroughly awed by Farnley’s readily recited store of
charms, curses, cures, and supposed clairvoyances, and hung most
adoringly on his every word. Indeed, unbeknownst to Tansy (thank
goodness, for Farnley’s skin would have been in grave danger
otherwise), the valet had even gone so far as to use his knowledge
to convince Pansy of his—Farnley’s—rightness as her partner (and
mentor?) for life!

Early one April morning, Pansy tiptoed down
the backstairs from her attic room and stole out into the misty
dawn, a willow branch clenched firmly in her left hand. Making
certain no one was about, she held the twig before her and ran not
one, but three full circuits around the large mansion chanting, “He
that’s to be my good man, come and grip the end of it.”

Need it be mentioned that upon completion of
her third circuit a pale, wraithlike hand appeared out of the mist
to grasp the other end of the willow stick, and Pansy was gifted
with a fleeting glimpse of Farnley’s ashen face before the
apparition disappeared into the haze.

Before a dazed but happy Pansy could react,
Farnley was back inside the mansion and rubbing fiercely at the
flour that whitened his face and one hand. He did not feel any
dishonesty had occurred, for after all, the only thing he had done
was to hasten Pansy into taking a step toward what, he felt sure,
was their Fate.

Unfortunately for some other inhabitants of
Avanoll House, Farnley’s tempting of the fates had set in motion
some unforeseen complications. For Pansy was now all a-twitter as
to how to earn some extra funds so she and Farnley could fulfill
their destiny in as short a time as possible.

Comfort was much too busy nursing the
dowager—and making a fine job of it, by the way—so the Lady Emily
was left very much to her own devices. Her social outings had been
drastically curtailed since her grace’s illness.

Pansy may have made a dreadful botch of her
first assignment—which had resulted in the purloined letter—but
Emily was willing to give the girl another try at subterfuge. There
was this simply exquisite gentleman who miraculously appeared in
the Mall each morning when Pansy accompanied her on a morning
stroll amid the nursemaids and their precious charges. It was
child’s play to lose Pansy long enough to make the gentleman’s
approach possible, and less than difficult to enlist the maid’s aid
in the passing of messages—for a slight fee, of course.

Alternating spoonfuls of milk pudding with
dainty forays into the box of sugarplums lying beside her on the
coverlet, the dowager remarked on Emily’s magnanimous acceptance of
her limited social life. “The girl is hopelessly silly, but she
bears watching. It isn’t normal for her to be so docile. I smell
something rotten—like a man,” she told Tansy seriously.

Avanoll was also concerned. “Even with
Grandmama still abed, I think, cousin, it is time you and m’sister
were out and about.”

Tansy agreed with them both, but it was left
to Aunt Lucinda to put a seal on it. “‘He who is bent on doing evil
can never want occasion.’ Syrus.”

So, with Aunt Lucinda lending an air of
respectability if not a whit of restraint, Tansy and Emily were
launched on a mad round of routs, balls, theatre parties,
assemblies, tea parties, dinners, luncheons, and at-homes. Emily
fairly glowed as she whirled from partner to partner, and was
fervently courted by no less than a half-dozen youths as brainless
and flighty as she.

Tansy, on the other hand, was bored to
flinders within a sen’night. She knew for certain now that she had,
against all good sense, tumbled headlong into love with
Avanoll.

The Duke, refusing to admit to any deep
emotional entanglement, doggedly clung to the lively sense of
self-preservation that had so far kept him ahead of the parson’s
mousetrap, and refused to dwell on his more tender feelings—making
a huge show of busyness and detachment where his cousin was
concerned.

The dowager, once her charges were safely
back in Society, spent her convalescence teaching Horatio to beg
prettily for bonbons, and telling him the story of her life as he
curled up next to her on the coverlet.

Perhaps these reasons do not excuse the
inability of her guardians to penetrate Emily’s compliant facade.
But then, who could have foreseen the latest maggot the fair
woman-child had taken into her head?

O
ne fine night not
too many days hence, the Duke was to be found spending a longed-for
peaceful evening by his own fireside. Tansy was attending a quiet
card-party in Brook Street, which—not so surprisingly—Emily had
declined, calling the game a rather insipid amusement. Assuring
both her brother and her Aunt Lucinda that she was more than happy
to bow this once to Tansy’s preferences, and personally planning to
retire early, she daubed her petal-smooth complexion with Denmark
Lotion because, as everyone knew: “If but a single freckle were to
appear I should absolutely perish from embarrassment.”

And so it was that, while the dowager was
tucked up snugly between the covers of her outlandish bed (her
attention riveted upon the lurid marble-backed novel propped upon
her bent knees, Horatio companionably warming her toes and feeling
quite fatuously content), and Aunt Lucinda was busy doing whatever
she usually did to keep herself occupied (which included a
complicated myriad of pointless exercises too silly to enumerate),
the Duke of Avanoll had just comfortably ensconced his large frame
in his favorite overstuffed armchair in his private salon. His
grace was armed with a pair of well-worn slippers, a decanter of
fine old brandy, and a nearby silver tray upon which reposed an
ample supply of thin cigarillos.

Farnley held a lighted spill to the tip of
the cigar already gripped between his grace’s strong white teeth,
and just as the cigar—with the aid of a series of satisfying
puffs—was lit, a sound from the door threatened to break the
peace.

“Psst,” went the sound. And then, “Psst,”
again.

Farnley cast a furtive look toward the door
and allowed his small jet eyes to widen a fraction. He then swiftly
shook his head in the negative, and just as swiftly assured his
grace brightly—or at the least, with more animation than was usual
for the valet— that he had neither heard nor seen anything to upset
his grace, no sir! Not a single solitary thing.

The famed eloquent Benedict eyebrow rose
slightly at this bit of gammon, but he refrained from doubting his
valet outright. Obviously the man had an assignation planned with
one of the housemaids and the chit was become impatient (although a
picture of the spindley-shanked Farnley indulging in a round of
slap and tickle was nigh impossible to envision).

The Duke decided on a bit of devilment. “Care
to draw up a chair and chat a while, Farnley?” he asked in a
world-weary voice. “I find my own company devilishly flat, and I’m
convinced you can serve to amuse me with some farradiddle or other
concerning yet another affront dealt Dame Fortune by my dear
cousin’s irreverent abuse of the Sacred Code of Chants and Charms,
or whatever name you give to your devotions.”

At any other time the valet would have been
inordinately pleased at such a generous invitation (besides taking
time to inform his grace of the folly of laughing at ancient
customs). But at the moment he had more pressing matters on his
mind—as witnessed by his nervous pulling at his neckcloth and the
sly looks he kept darting toward the salon door.

Avanoll allowed himself an injured sigh. “Oh,
very well, Farnley, I can see you find my company no less dull than
I do myself. You may be excused.”

As Farnley scraped a hurried bow and fairly
ran toward the door (from behind which could now be heard the sound
of soft sobbing), the Duke called out, “Tch, tch, Farnley, such
haste is unbecoming. It will do the girl well to cool her heels a
bit. Never let them think they can have you trotting after them
every time they crook their little finger,” he ended with a
laugh.

“Yes, yes, your grace. Whatever you say, your
grace. I shall remember your words and, er, thank you kindly, your
grace,” Farnley blustered, and disappeared around the door, giving
the Duke only a second’s sight of a maid—Tansy’s own hapless
abigail, if he was not mistaken.

But, wait a moment. Hadn’t his cousin
complained to him that Farnley exercised much too much influence
over this girl? Pansy, he thought her name was. Yes. Yes,
indeed.

And now he could hear Farnley’s voice raised
in anger (for they had not removed themselves from the other side
of the door by more than two feet), while the girl Pansy was
sobbing in ever-crescendoing wails! Perhaps he owed his cousin a
favor for all her help with the dowager. Any other consideration
for his cousin he hastily denied with a pungent oath.

“Farnley!” Avanoll growled, whereupon the
valet stuck his head round the door and asked quakingly, “You
called, sir?”

“You’re demmed right I called,” Avanoll
replied dampeningly. “Haul your skinny arse in here! And bring the
town crier with you as well, before she shrieks the entire
household into believing we have been set upon by cutthroats and
murderers.”

It would seem, alas, that the warning (or
perhaps that same warning, which when rendered by the Duke’s clear
baritone, echoed throughout the first floor with remarkable
clarity) had come too late. Entering his previously sacrosanct room
hard on the heels of the red-faced valet and the whimpering Pansy,
Avanoll was dismayed to see his aunt—flounces and lace and ruffled
nightcap all billowing in the breeze she stirred as she flitted
into the room—crying distractedly, “‘What now if the sky were to
fall.’ Terence!”

“It needed only this,” the Duke gritted out
under his breath.

But his aunt, it seemed, was not the only
person who had come on the run, for his grandmother, with Horatio
tucked under one arm, was not a half-dozen steps behind Aunt
Lucinda, and it was she who enquired testily, “Just what in the
name of all that’s decent is going on here? Cannot a woman even lie
sick upon her bed undisturbed by ear-splitting shouts and those
incessant—I say, Pansy, stop that caterwauling this instant—wails
and gnashing of teeth?”

His grace took a last deep puff of the first
cigar he had enjoyed in a very long month, sighed longingly, and
dispatched it to the coals. With a minimum of fuss he settled first
his irate grandparent and then his agitated aunt in wing chairs
facing the fire. Then he turned his attention to the two
guilty-looking servants, who were at that moment endeavoring to
melt into the furnishings. As soon as he turned his eyes on Pansy,
the maid responded by setting in again to sobbing loudly, her hands
shredding a handkerchief into a small pile at her feet.

“Oh, good grief,” Avanoll swore. “Farnley, I
leave it to you to untangle this ridiculous coil. Whatever is it
that has set this girl off?”