The Tenacious Miss Tamerlane

by Kasey Michaels

  Chapter Fifteen

  One 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?”

  Farnley made a choppy bow, cleared his throat as if to speak, and ended by simply extending a hand in which he shakily clutched a scrap of pink, scented notepaper.

  “This should, er, explain it all, your grace, I do believe,” he quavered.

  Avanoll grabbed the paper and walked to the candelabra near his desk to read the note that his sister Emily had penned and left pinned to her pillow (this last being supplied between sobs and hiccups by Pansy).

  “To Whom it May Concern, though I Doubt my Fate matters a whit to Any of You,” he read aloud. “Life for me under this roof has become Insupportable. I, like the Simplest Bird in the Sky, must be Free to Fly where I will. Society gives married women So Much more Freedom than Ever I had With You, so I am Winging my way To Wedded Bliss with my Betrothed, a Gentleman who Understands my Sensibilities and Will not Countenance Beauty Such As Mine (his own sweet words) to be Locked Away in a Cage. I Fly now to my Beloved Rescuer. Your Granddaughter, sister, cousin, niece, whatever—Emily.”

  “The dim-wit plans to elope!” the dowager cried. “Again!”

  “‘I shudder at the word.’ Euripides,” Aunt Lucinda said, and then promptly did.

  “Hell and damnation! Was there ever such a pernicious brat? Fly, be damned! I’ll clip her little wings when I get my hands on her,” Avanoll declared hotly as he crushed the note in one large hand and consigned it to the fire.

  “Leave a width or two of her mischief-making hide for me to strip off her smart-aleck bottom, Ashley,” the dowager put in absently as she tapped her index finger against her pursed lips.

  “But first things first.” She turned in her chair to face the teary-eyed maid. “All right, missy, nobody here will harm you. We all know how easily that sly-b
oots granddaughter of mine can wrap innocents like you around her thumb. Lady Emily hasn’t been out of this house unchaperoned in a fortnight. Therefore it stands to reason her Beloved Rescuer,” she sneered a bit over the words, “and she used you as their Cupid. Am I correct so far, dearie?” she ended kindly. “Just nod, you don’t have to speak.”

  Pansy nodded.

  Avanoll cut in, an idea having just struck him. “How long have these messages been traveling to and fro through you?”

  Pansy rolled her fear-widened eyes. “Oh, laws, your worship, for an age, a fearsome age.”

  “‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.’ Sir Walter Scott,” was Aunt Lucinda’s sage, if secondhand, observation.

  The Duke gave himself a mental kick as he realized how the names Pansy and Tansy could so easily be misread for each other, but his musings were caught up short by the dowager’s next question.

  “Just one more little jot of information. Pansy, and you may retire. The name. Give us the name of Lady Emily’s correspondent.”

  “Did you want all the names of all the notes or just the ones from the gentleman dear Lady Emily has loped off with?” Pansy asked innocently.

  “If I—no, not if!—when I lay hands on that girl I’ll fix it so she has no choice but to eat all her meals for a month standing at the mantelpiece, her rump will be so tender!” Lady Emily’s nearest blood kin and guardian vowed.

  The dowager pushed on, unperturbed by this outburst. “Just the one, Pansy, please. But hurry, do, as every moment is precious if we are to put a stop to this nonsense.”

  Aided by a poke in the ribs from Farnley’s pointed elbow, Pansy burst out, “His name be Sir Rollin Whitstone and he lives at—”

  “I know where he lives. That blackguard, that underhanded, despicable cod,” the Duke bit out, crossing the room to take down a dueling sword from over the mantelpiece, “and he’ll rue the day he dared to trifle with my sister! I’ll have his liver and lights before the hour is out. Farnley!” he called over his shoulder as he trotted hastily from the room, “I’ll need your assistance with my jacket and boots. Hurry man, I have no time to waste.”

  Farnley hastened after his master, while Pansy disappeared through the door and down to the kitchens, where she could hide in a corner scraping vegetables until her part in the affair was forgotten.

  Aunt Lucinda, who the dowager had more than once commented possessed more hair than wit, clapped her dimpled hands in girlish glee and sang out, “‘No sooner said than done—so acts your man of worth.’ Quintus Ennius.”

  “Lucinda, you brainless ninnyhammer,” the dowager exploded, “this is not a play performed upon the boards where Good never fails to triumph over Evil and the hero always emerges unscathed from any heated encounter. This is the real world, and both my grandchildren are in mortal danger.”

  Aunt Lucinda subsided into her chair, pulled her rosebud-red mouth down at the corners, and proceeded to look properly subdued.

  Soon footsteps were heard to pass hurriedly by, and the banging of the front door told the women that Avanoll was off to Half Moon Street and his appointment with Destiny. The dowager looked disinterestedly about her grandson’s private salon until her eye alighted on the brimful brandy decanter at her elbow. “Lucinda,” she ventured, “if you could search out another snifter for yourself, we might better pass the time sharing a sip or two of my grandson’s best stock.”

  By the time Tansy returned to Grosvenor Square some twenty minutes later—both the card party and the company having proven too dull to hold her interest—she followed the trail of voices to the Duke’s salon and was quickly brought up to date on Emily’s latest indiscretion.

  “All that meek and innocent manner she has been parading by us these past weeks were nothing but a sham. She has made a May Game of all of us, the little monster!” Tansy exclaimed hotly when the dowager told her what was going forward. “She promised me she would behave, and like a fool I believed her.”

  “‘A woman’s vows I write upon the waves.’ Sophocles,” Aunt Lucinda quoted with a wise nod.

  “And Sir Rollin! Why, everyone with a jot of sense knows he’s nothing more than a hardened seducer who eats babies like Emily for breakfast,” Tansy continued as she paced furiously back and forth, her fist pounding into the palm of her other hand. All at once she stopped, took a deep breath, and yelled at the top of her lungs, “Farnley!” (which was really quite unnecessary, as the valet was eavesdropping just outside the door to hear whether his beloved—who was by some coincidence also the greatest admirer of his exceptional insight and knowledge—was to be sacked for her blunder).

  The valet appeared at once, and watched in gape-mouthed astonishment while Tansy took down the black leather case containing the Duke’s favorite dueling pistols and calmly loaded the pair. Tansy hefted each piece and nodded, apparently satisfied, before slipping a pistol into each of the ample pockets in the evening cloak she had yet to discard. “All right, Farnley, I am ready. About-face, my good fellow, and let us shove off.”

  “Wh-where do you think you are going?” the dowager asked hollowly.

  “I’m off to stop a duel, your grace,” Tansy replied without a blink. “A rare bumblebath it will be if Ashley kills his man and must flee the country. Men don’t think, you know. A simple horsewhipping or a sound thrashing would serve the purpose just as well, but men tend to lean toward histrionic displays whenever they believe their honor is at stake. I’d be damned if I’d get myself exiled for a silly chit like Emily. Better to blacken Sir Rollin’s peepers and lock Emily in her room on bread and water than spend the next five years touring India or some other outlandish spot, don’t you think?”

  The dowager was sure she should put a stop to Tansy’s plans, but love of her grandchildren (and a goodly intake of vintage brandy) had dulled her wits just enough that she could not think of any rebuttal but to say chaperons do not carry pistols or disrupt duels.

  Tansy quietly pointed out that it wouldn’t matter a tinker’s curse (oh, these recurrent lapses into cant language!) what her title was if Emily was ruined—because then, logically, chaperon or no, the Lady Emily would be beyond the pale, never to set foot in Society again. Therefore she, Tansy Tamerlane, was off to do her best to aid Avanoll in saving the day.

  ‘“United we stand, divided we fall.’ Aesop,” Aunt Lucinda proposed, taking another large sip from her snifter.

  “Indeed,” the dowager echoed, drinking a toast to her companion’s oratorical brilliance.

  It did not require the wisdom of Solomon, or any of the other sages Aunt Lucinda was so fond of quoting, to deduce that both the dowager and Aunt Lucinda were—to put it kindly—a trifle up in the world due to the brandy they had so far ingested. But Tansy hastily decided that a tipsy dowager was better than a frail old woman lying prostrate on a bed of sorrow over her missing granddaughter and knight-errant grandson, and opted to ignore the situation.

  Grabbing the bewildered Farnley by the sleeve, Tansy bundled the valet down the stairs and through the door Dunstan already held wide open, then ordered the valet to flag down the first hackney cab he saw. Once inside the shabby vehicle Farnley hired, Tansy ordered the valet to tell the driver Sir Rollin’s address, which she was sure the busybody servant would know.

  He did, and they were off, clip-clopping down the street behind a large conveyance that was proceeding with all the speed of a funeral procession. “Give that carriage the go-by, driver, and push that slug of yours to his limit. There’s a guinea in it for you if you do,” Tansy promised rashly.

  For a guinea the driver would have gotten out and pulled the hackney himself if it would make it move any faster, and the next two blocks passed quickly.

  The only other vehicle now on the street was a fully loaded hay-cart, just then approaching from the opposite direction, and looking very much out of place in Mayfair.

  “Oh, no,” Farnley cried. “Was there ever worse luck? A full hay-cart, and com
ing right at us!”

  “So?” Tansy inquired without interest, her thoughts devoted to the scene that would greet her in Half Moon Street.

  “Any child knows a loaded hay-cart is only lucky if it is traveling in the same direction as you. To pass one means bad luck sure as check.”

  “Really,” Tansy said absently, turning in her seat to lean out and look at the evil cart just as it disappeared around the next corner. Suddenly Farnley saw what she was about and rudely hauled her back under the canopy. “Please say you didn’t look at it. Miss Tansy,” he begged.

  “I confess, Farnley, I did peek at the cart, but not for long, I promise, for it rounded the corner as I watched.”

  Farnley turned white as a sheet at her words and for a moment Tansy really suspected he might cry. “The worst luck, the very worst luck to see it turn a corner. Oh, Miss Tansy, your uncaring attitude toward proven omens has destroyed any chance at a successful rescue tonight by either the Duke or yourself. Oh, woe! Oh, woe, betide us now,” he whined, rocking back and forth on the greasy leather seat like a man demented.

  There were a lot of things Tansy was willing to put up with in this life, but traveling with a weeping valet through the streets of London in a hackney carriage after midnight was not one of them. Just as she was about to soundly box his ears, a lone rider out late passed by and, wonder of wonders, his handsome grey mare tossed her hind shoe just as Farnley was casting his eyes about and mumbling incantations calling for a miracle.

  “Stop! Stop this hackney at once!” he screeched, as he jumped nimbly into the street and ran forward to pick up the lost horseshoe. The hackney driver sawed on the reins and he and Tansy watched in stupefaction as Farnley gazed reverently at the shoe, spit on it, made a mumbled wish, and tossed the shoe over his left shoulder before walking away from both the shoe and the hackney without looking back.

  Never turning his head an inch, he called back to the driver to move up so that he could re-enter the hackney, as looking about would destroy his good luck. Once back beside Tansy, he assured her this latest bit of good luck overruled the lesser evil power of a loaded hay-cart—and that the chance for a happy ending to the night’s trials was now assured.

  “You cannot possibly imagine how gratified I am to hear that, Farnley,” Tansy said dryly, before adding more candidly, “I would wager a pound note to a hat pin you make up these curses and counter-curses as you go along. When it comes to downright silliness and superstitious nonsense, Farnley, I vow you bear off the palm.”

  Before the aggrieved servant could form a rebuttal, the hackney had drawn up before a rather dusty stucco building. The driver announced his belief that he had earned his bonus, even if the odd gent had slowed them down a bit chasing horseshoes and all that.

  Tipping his battered hat in thanks to the pair who had quickly scrambled onto the flagway and up the short flight of steps, he then tested the shiny guinea with his two good teeth—and turned his horse toward the nearest tavern known to supply cheap gin and convivial female companionship.