The Tenacious Miss Tamerlane (26 page)

Her brother’s snort told her she had just
lost her lone ally with her impetuous outburst, but it was left to
her aunt to put the resulting censure into words. “‘Would you both
eat your cake and have your cake?’ Heywood.”

“Cake?” Emily babbled desperately. “Who is
speaking of cake? I declare, I feel as if this entire room has been
somehow lifted up and transported to Bedlam. First Digby, then
cakes, and both subjects too sickeningly sweet to contemplate. I
wish the entire subject dropped, if you please.”

“Oh, no, you don’t, young lady,” the dowager
demanded in a rallying tone. “You are nothing but a dog in the
manger, young lady. You do not want Digby for yourself, but you
cannot stomach anyone else having him. Now it becomes clear. You
wish to remove Tansy from the field, call Digby to heel like an
obedient puppy, and then turn the tables and dismiss him as he has
dismissed you. Well, perhaps your tame pet has slipped his lead and
will acknowledge your summons only by showing you a clean pair of
heels as he scampers off in the opposite direction.”

“But I don’t want him!” Emily shrieked.
“Digby Eagleton’s attentions are the last thing I want!”

“‘Hence these tears.’ Terence,” Aunt Lucinda
purred, rather maliciously.

“Oh!” Emily gasped. And again, “Oh!” before
she jumped up from the table and, whirling about blindly, sent a
large silver tray loaded with stuffed pigeon breasts Dunstan was
just then carrying into the room crashing to the floor, where the
pigeons exploded in an avalanche of rice and vegetables and the
tray and silver plates spun round and round like tops—slowly
clang-clanging to a stop long after Emily had made good her
escape.

In the tense silence that seemed so
ear-splittingly loud after the cymbal-like crashing of the plates,
Avanoll carefully wiped his lips, refolded his napkin with
meticulous care, reinserted it in his napkin ring, rose carefully,
and bowed to the ladies.

“I will take my leave of you ladies now,
secure in the knowledge that you have each contrived to accomplish
whatever obscure objectives you set out to achieve this evening.
No, no,” he said, and held up his hands to ward off their denials,
“do not try to cozen me with proclamations of innocence. Something
smoky is going on here, and I believe it necessary to my grip on
sanity to remain in blissful ignorance of it all.” With a final bow
he quit the room and the house, hoping against hope the atmosphere
would be calmer upon his return.

The dowager, after calmly instructing Dunstan
to have the footman dispose of the pigeon carcasses and bring on
the next course (minus two servings), observed that if it had been
anyone other than her confirmed bachelor grandson, she would swear
he was overreacting to Digby’s attentions to Tansy because of
simple human jealousy. “Perhaps there is a second, more personal
benefit to be derived from our project, Tansy, my sweet?” she
teased.

The following morning found Digby once more
in attendance, regaling Tansy and the old ladies with a tale about
the suicide of one Mr. Boothby, who had left behind a note saying
he could “no longer endure the ennui of buttoning and
unbuttoning.”

“Keeping up appearances in town can be very
trying on any gentleman of taste, I suppose,” the dowager chuckled.
“I have heard tales of you dandies, tulips, and Corinthians
dressing and undressing from the skin out up to five times a day,
and taking hours achieving just the proper crease to a neckcloth. A
criminal waste of time if you ask me, and I do not blame your Mr.
Boothby a bit for sticking his spoon in the wall.”

“Well, no,” Digby hurried to correct the
dowager, “I believe he blew his brains out, actually,” a statement
that sent Tansy into peals of laughter.

Emily chose that moment to enter the room and
stood a moment just inside the door, assuming a pose that combined
innocence and allure most effectively (just as she had practiced it
in front of her mirror all the morning long), before advancing
daintily upon Digby and holding out one soft, white hand to be
kissed.

“Lawks, Digby, it is above all things
delightful to see you again today. You have become such a fixture
in our household that if you were to absent yourself for above a
day I should surely pine horribly and go into a decline. I should
miss your companionship that sorely.”

Tansy ground the pointed heel of her slipper
warningly into Digby’s instep and manfully he refrained from
falling to the floor to hug Emily tightly about the knees and swear
his undying love. Merely did he clasp Emily’s hand in a friendly
handshake and, though becoming quite white about the eyes and lips,
he carelessly thanked Lady Emily for her condescension before
dropping his hand from hers almost abruptly and directing his
attention once more to the woman seated beside him on the love
seat.

Emily’s rosy-red bottom lip trembled
poignantly but she marshaled her pride sufficiently to remove
herself to a nearby chair just as Avanoll strolled into the room
with studied nonchalance and took up a position propping up the
mantelpiece.

After a moment Digby searched in his coat
pocket and brought out a fragile, hand-painted fan that he offered
to Tansy to replace the one which had unfortunately come to grief
recently in a carelessly-closed coach door. Neither Tansy nor Digby
mentioned whose masculine hand had sent that door crashing down on
the fan Tansy had treasured ever since the Duke had so off-handedly
bestowed it upon her quite early in their acquaintance.

While Avanoll was eyeing with distaste the
uncalled-for, lengthy hand-holding Digby employed as he begged
Tansy to accept his small gift, Emily’s control was slipping
rapidly until all at once it disappeared completely and she burst
into noisy tears and ran from the room with her hand pressed to her
mouth. Her brother followed close on her heels, disgusted with the
lot of them.

Digby sprang at once to his feet, only to
drop back down onto the love seat by means of Tansy’s violent tug
on his coat-tails and her fiercely whispered, “Don’t bungle it all
now by crumbling just when things are progressing so nicely. Show
some touch of spunk, Digby, or she’ll lead you by the nose your
whole life long.”

The dowager agreed with Tansy. “I am heartily
sick of Emily’s floods and torrents of tears every time she is
thwarted. You can’t knuckle under now, dear boy, or you’ll be
expected to pander to her every whim at the drop of a tear.”

“‘Do not turn back when you are just at the
goal.’ Syrus,” Aunt Lucinda added encouragingly.

“But she was reduced to tears by our
underhanded plotting!” Digby challenged his cohorts. “She will
condemn me as the greatest beast in Nature!”

Tansy rolled her expressive brown eyes, as if
to say Digby had more in common with Emily than first met the
eye—especially when it came to melodramatic exaggerations.

The dowager put an end to the whole affair by
declaring repressively that Emily was being foolish beyond
permission. If she wished to indulge in one of her hysterical
takings she for one saw no reason to deny her the pleasure, and
Emily could stay sulking in her room until she grew roots for all
her grandmother would lift a finger to gainsay her.

“Just allow yourself to be guided by older
and wiser heads and we’ll have the entire matter neatly tied up
within a fortnight—and Emily content to ride in your hip pocket for
life,” she promised Digby solemnly.

After Digby had taken his leave, still
undecided as to the questionable honor of his part in the
deception, and the older ladies had retired to their chambers to
rest before their regular Wednesday evening sortie among the other
dowagers at Almack’s, the Duke sought out Tansy—counting silver in
the butler’s pantry—and demanded a moment of her time.

The fan Digby had given her was lying on the
table beside her, and Avanoll directed a long dispassionate stare
at it before boldly asking if it was really necessary for young
Digby to be forever fondling her hand. “He’d try to take it home
with him if you gave the twit half a chance,” he informed her
tightly. But Tansy only laughed.

“You’re too old for him you know,” he
returned, undeterred.

“We are much of an age, Ashley,” Tansy
responded calmly.

“You haven’t been his age since you were in
your pram,” the Duke countered with a sneer.

Tansy accepted this sharp dig with a smile
and politely asked if there was anything else her cousin wished to
discuss—or did he think he had spread enough good will to consider
himself able to push off and find someone else to insult.

The Duke, with one last frigid glance at the
offensive fan, stomped from the room, turning at the door to
announce almost belligerently that he was off to change for a
dinner engagement—an invitation he had invented on the spot and
foolishly blurted out a second before he realized his lie had
condemned him to Wednesday night’s boiled poultry at Crockford’s
and a thin company too insipid to be borne. Drat Almack’s and its
depressing impact on Society for one day of every week of the
Season.

A
lmack’s was no
excursion into delight for Emily that night either when
Digby—acting on orders but with his heart not in his work—barely
nodded at her in passing and stood up for three dances with Tansy
before retiring to the card room, only to reappear in time to
accompany Tansy home.

Melancholy and more than a few glasses of
burgundy had combined to sink Digby into the glooms, and he sulked
in a corner of the coach all the way to Grosvenor Square,
alternately sighing and moaning and hiccupping while elsewhere in
an equally dark corner of her grandmother’s coach, Emily
alternately sighed and sniffed and whimpered.

It required no great flight of the
imagination to see that things were soon to come to a head when
Emily lost control completely the next morning at breakfast and
tearfully declared that she had been the greatest fool in creation
for not recognizing sooner that Digby was the only man on earth
“with the power to move my heart.”

After Comfort was summoned to lead a weeping
Emily away to lie down in her chamber and have her temples patted
with eau de cologne, the dowager happily declared the Digby Plan a
resounding success.

“And I shall soon be free to get on with my
life, unhampered by a certain histrionic debutante and her sweet
but somewhat wearing on the nerves beloved,” Tansy pointed out,
smiling bravely into the unknown future, her eyes deliberately
directed slightly to the left and above her companions’ heads.
Thus, although a certain emotion-sparked brilliance in her eyes was
apparent to them, their conspiratorial winks at each other went
unnoticed by this unsuspecting object of yet another minor intrigue
the two ladies were plotting in their fertile minds.

Tansy repaired to the sun-lit morning room to
compose a letter to Digby, telling him that Emily was ripe for the
taking, but if he were smart he would stay completely away from the
house for a full week, disappearing from sight socially as well.
Meanwhile Tansy would drop hints that he had been mistaken in his
feelings for her, and friendship was their only bond. Perhaps, she
would suggest, he was ill, or depressed. By the time he made his
triumphant arrival in Grosvenor Square a week hence, Emily would be
too overcome to do more than fall on his neck with relief and joy
that he was still willing to have her. Remember, Tansy cautioned
him, he must not break down, he must remain strong until Emily was
completely at his mercy. Then he should demand—repeat, demand—she
marry him at once and put an end to this foolishness. He must be
strong-willed, masterful even, and Emily would melt as surely as a
snowflake in June.

Sighing in relief that all would soon be
settled, Tansy made an error in judgment and entrusted Pansy with
the task of giving the note to a footman for delivery. Pansy
promptly turned the note over to Farnley, who beat a hurried path
to his grace’s chambers and waved the envelope under Avanoll’s nose
with an I-told-you-so flair that was almost nauseating in its
smugness.

To the Duke the envelope showed all the signs
of a
billet-deux
. So that was how the land laid, was it? he
thought with the single-minded blindness of the emotionally
involved. He ordered Farnley to make sure the message was delivered
immediately, and just as immediately decided to accept his friends’
invitation to visit Newmarket for Race Week, leaving as soon as
Farnley could pack bags for them both.

He tracked down Tansy, sitting alone in the
now dusk-dimmed conservatory, where she was bravely trying to
envision a future devoid of a certain arrogant Duke, but where he
supposed she had escaped to weave dreams of her wedded life with
that peach-fuzz faced infant Digby.

He crept up behind her stealthily, turned her
about by the simple method of propelling her with his hands on her
shoulders, and crushed her startled, half-open mouth beneath his
own in a long, hard kiss that threatened to loosen her front teeth.
After an endless time, with Tansy’s body all the while remaining
ramrod stiff beneath his merciless grasp, Avanoll allowed the kiss
to soften, his lips moving caressingly along hers until she began
to respond. His fingers slackened in their grip as his arms lowered
to encircle her back in an embrace she returned with a fervor she
was too honest to conceal.

But as always, Tansy was to be suddenly
thrust away while just on the brink, she was sure, of some
earthshaking discovery.

“There!” Ashley crowed triumphantly as he
grinned into Tansy’s bemused face. “Compare that with that halfling
Digby’s idea of grand passion, if you dare.”

“Are you saying you are harboring a grand
passion for me, your grace?” Tansy asked quietly.