The Tenacious Miss Tamerlane

  Chapter Thirteen

  The final two hectic weeks leading up to Emily’s Come-Out Ball were so filled with activity that Tansy had little difficulty in avoiding Avanoll and his nasty moods. The dowager had the girl’s head in a whirl, trying to teach her the endless intricacies of that nebulous thing called good ton—from the proper way to curtsy to a marquis to warnings about allowing any of her admirers to become too demonstrative in their affections. According to her grace, anything more intimate than a polite smile constituted a proposal of marriage.

  Horatio had been on his best behavior, his only lapses being the soup bone Farnley found in his grace’s favorite slippers and a nervous accident on Aunt Luanda’s satin bedspread when that lady had been so misguided as to waken the hound from his post-luncheon nap by aiming a hairbrush at his head.

  Avanoll’s bad temper had eased somewhat in this interim, but had not totally disappeared. Tansy was still all at sea as to the cause of his sudden withdrawal of friendship (her heart refused to give their association any other name).

  And so it was that, on the night of the ball, four fashionably-bedecked ladies found themselves lined up like well-trained servants at the foot of the stairs in the foyer, waiting for the Duke to inspect their attire and pronounce them fit for the exalted company due in less than two hours.

  Three of the ladies waited with bated breath and fluttering pulses, for even the dowager—who outwardly shunned such feminine vanities—looked forward to hearing her grandson’s confirmation of her ensemble. The fourth lady, standing slightly in the shadows cast by the huge chandelier, was also waiting for the Duke, but she was not on the hunt for flowery speeches. Her chin was raised in an attitude that dared her cousin to say anything at all.

  Finally the Duke descended the staircase to the tile floor, stopped, and ran his eyes up and down each of them, until he at last gave a one-sided smile before executing an elaborate bow. “My compliments, ladies. I shall be the envy of every man present tonight for my lovely family.”

  Four deeply-held breaths released in three gratified (and one exasperated) sighs. If the Duke believed he was to get off this easily, though, he was sadly mistaken. Almost before he had completed his bow, Emily raced to his side to appeal to her brother to be allowed to wear the Benedict emeralds—brooch, bracelets, ear-drops, ring, and tiara—instead of the simple strand of pearls now gracing her swan-like neck. “Too babyish, by half,” she pouted prettily.

  “‘You need not hang up the ivy-branch over the wine that will sell.’ Syrus,” Aunt Lucinda pointed out, while rearranging the tiers of pink, patterned-lace flounces that wrapped round her plump frame from chin to toe before coming to rest upon the tiles some three feet behind her. She looked as if someone had rolled her up within a huge bolt of tulle and she was just now fighting her way out.

  “Aunt is quite right, my pet,” Tansy inserted before Emily’s frown could ruin her previously angelic expression. “There is no need to paint the lily, as it were. You are ‘slap up to the mark,’ as my Papa used to say.”

  Aunt Lucinda nodded vigorously, nearly dislodging one of the half-dozen small ostrich plumes riding precariously upon her curls. “‘Of surpassing beauty and in the bloom of youth.’ Terence.”

  The dowager chose this moment to draw her grandson’s attention to her own attire. “Youth may manage very well unadorned, but what of this old lady? Will I suit?”

  Avanoll ran his eyes once again over his majestically regal grandparent as she stood before him in full battle-dress, with a swatch of purple draperies wrapped round her, a king’s ransom in diamonds sparkling about her neck, wrists and fingers, and her coronet sitting proudly upon her iron-grey head.

  “You do me proud, madam,” he returned. “But heed me,” he unwisely added, “be careful not to overdo this evening. Do not be ashamed to retire early if you tire.”

  “I ain’t in my dotage yet,” the dowager replied heatedly, prepared to do battle.

  “You were last month,” her granddaughter ventured from a safe distance. “I remember quite distinctly your saying you were too old and frail to endure another Season.”

  “That was last month, you impertinent minx. All I really needed was some new blood around here,” her grace shot back. “And what a prime sight she looks tonight, I must say. You’ll have to barricade the windows tomorrow, Ashley, to keep away the beaux our girls will have tumbling over themselves as they come to pay their addresses.”

  Tansy, who had kept to the background as much as possible until now, moved forward to contradict her benefactor. “It won’t be my hand the bucks will be battling over, your grace, thank you anyway. I am a far shot from a debutante if you remember, and as dame de compagnie do not entertain thoughts of romance—except as they pertain to Lady Emily.”

  “Oh, pooh,” the dowager returned with a wink. “Ashley, tell the gel how the gentlemen pump you about your cousin.”

  Tansy’s russet-brown eyes turned in astonishment when Avanoll concurred. “It is true, cousin. I can go nowhere without being harassed with inquiries about the fair Boadicea. It’s enough to send a fellow to the dogs directly, if you’ll pardon my weak humor,” he ended with a reluctant grin.

  In the two weeks since the accident to his ankle, Tansy and Horatio had behaved with almost saintly respectability, and he had unbent enough to begin to forgive—if not to forget—his cousin’s lamentable lapses from grace. Tansy, nonplused by this piece of news, silently led the way in to supper.

  During the quiet family meal that was taken in the smaller dining room, the Duke took time to subject his cousin to a covert, but most thorough, inspection. Her gown of soft green was neither plain nor overpowering, and it set off previously unnoticed auburn highlights in her long, brown hair, which had been brushed on the curling stick earlier and was now caught in a topknot from which a few tendrils had escaped in order to curl about her nape. Her unusual height, he had already noted, did not make her appear awkward, and she moved with a fluid grace that made her skirts whisper about her feet like sea-foam. She had learned her lessons well.

  So what was wrong?

  Suddenly his eyes lit up as he realized what was missing from the picture. “Cousin, have you no jewelry?” he asked baldly as the last dishes were being removed.

  Tansy instantly drew back her shoulders and raised her firm chin. “I do not, your grace,’ she told him in a carefully controlled fury. “I came within Ames-Ace of a rather tacky ruby pendant once, but my father’s horse stumbled in the stretch and the stone remained safe in the tout’s hip pocket—to be joined shortly by my silver teething ring, which Papa had put up against it.”

  “Good girl!” yelped the dowager, and dealt Lucinda one firm clap between the shoulder blades as the woman choked on the water she had been swallowing at the moment of Tansy’s outburst. “That was well done, with full marks for spirit and honesty. And don’t you go screwing on your Friday Face, Ashley, for you got that set-down as reward for your uncouth, uncalled-for prying. Does she own any jewelry? If she did, do you think she’d be wiping noses or bear-leading silly chits like our Emily here? Whatever my sins, I cannot believe I deserved such a muckworm as you as a grandson.”

  “Oh, gemini,” Emily hooted, for once not on the receiving end of one of her grandmother’s great scolds. Being called a silly chit was an everyday occurrence. “Box his ears, Grandmama! Muckworm! Oh, that is so good, Grandmama!”

  “‘And in one scene no more than three should speak.” Horace,” admonished her aunt softly, with little hope Emily would either understand or heed the advice.

  The Duke was more direct. “Stow it, brat. You’re not too grown up for a little ear-boxing closer to home, you know.”

  The dowager was forced to rap her fork sharply on her water goblet to restore order. “Enough, I say. Our guests will be arriving shortly, and I would as lief they were left in the dark about this particular strain of insanity in the family that makes you two revert to childhood at the drop of a napkin.”

/>   “Yes, Grandmama,” Emily said soulfully, clearly trying to get back into her grandmother’s good graces, and clearly still holding out hope of at least the emerald tiara.

  “All right, Ashley,” the dowager said more softly as the room fell silent, “now that I am recovered from your lapse of manners I must admit I understand the object of your inquiry, even if I cannot commend your approach. Perhaps you can suggest a remedy?”

  At once Ashley winked at his grandparent and quipped, “Exactly, and I believe you and I even have the same piece in mind.”

  With her own protests pushed aside as too trivial to be considered, it was only a matter of minutes before Tansy found herself in the library with the Duke, standing nervously by as he worked open the hidden panel in the huge mahogany buffet and withdrew a slender, velvet-covered box.

  “If you will oblige me by turning around, cousin,” the Duke said kindly, and Tansy’s eyes caught sight of an unbelievably lovely strand of bright, aquamarine stones just before they descended to lie comfortably in the hollow between her breasts. But even this joy was overshadowed by the nervous flutterings of her pulse as Avanoll’s finders brushed her nape when he secured the diamond clasp. His fingers lingered even after the task was done, his thumbs rotating slowly as they raised goose-bumps along her spine.

  Tansy knew she must move, and move quickly, to break the spell she felt enveloping her. But when she began to step away, Avanoll’s grip pulled her back against his hard, lean frame. She could feel his warm, sweet breath on her neck moments before his lips descended to blaze a gossamer-light trail of kisses from her nape to the tip of her creamy shoulder.

  “Oh, Tansy,” Avanoll groaned hoarsely, before he turned her in his arms and captured her startled lips in a very different manner than he had ever done before. It was a gentler contact, almost reverent in its soft caress.

  When he at last lifted his head he marveled at the change one small bauble of jewelry could make. The girl was more than tolerably fair, she was really quite lovely.

  After she had quit the room, running from it with only an incoherent mumbling of thanks for the loan of his mother’s necklace, the Duke stood puzzling the odd compulsion to take his cousin in his arms that seemed to be constantly overcoming his best intentions, as well as his native intelligence. The last thing his well-ordered life needed was an entanglement with his irksome cousin.

  As the evening progressed, it became apparent that the Duke was not alone in his opinion that Tansy was in prime good looks, and the bewildered dame de compagnie found herself being whirled from partner to partner without a break until the musicians struck up a waltz. Of course, Lady Emily was forbidden the dance until the patronesses of Almack’s gave their seal of approval—but even if this stricture did not apply to Tansy she had been warned not to insult the ladies by appearing to disregard their silent authority.

  While she, Aunt Lucinda, and Emily sat on a comfortable striped sofa, taking a well-deserved rest, a young man Tansy judged to be about four-and-twenty approached, balancing three glasses of punch that threatened to spill over at any moment. Tansy was drawn to the handsome youth immediately, as she was always prejudiced toward the shy and uncertain. He was a strikingly handsome gentleman, she noted quickly, though not quite her type: tall, but slightly built, with bronze curls as silky and soft as Emily’s, and cursed with an almost feminine pink-and-white complexion that—as one of the glasses tilted and the punch ran over to stain his lace cuff a bright crimson—showed a most lamentable tendency to blush.

  “Hoo!” Emily chortled. “Did you ever see such a gudgeon, Tansy? I swear that Digby Eagleton is the most pathetic creature in Nature. The simple fool believes himself hopelessly in love with me, you know,” she added in a highly audible whisper. “It is most embarrassing, really, the way he tags at my skirts like a mewling kitten.”

  A second punch glass twisted awkwardly in Digby’s grasp, probably as a result of overhearing the love of his life speak so blightingly of his devotion, and with two out of three refreshments running down his sleeve he gave up the effort and withdrew before gaining his objective.

  “‘No one regards what is before his feet; we all gaze at the stars.’ Quintus Ennius,” Lucinda observed solemnly.

  “At my feet is right. Aunt Ce-Ce. Digby clings like a limpet whenever he spies me. He is such a child! I wish he might find someone else to drool over, as I am mightily fatigued with both his romantic prattlings and his tortured sighs. Do you know he had the nerve, the absolute gall, to ask me to marry him? It was all I could do not to laugh in his face!”

  Lucinda let go with her appraisal of the young gentleman. “‘The flower of our young manhood.’ Sophocles,” she gushed girlishly.

  Emily picked pettishly at her demure, white skirts and declared, “If you are so smitten. Aunt, you may have him. I give him to you, or Tansy here for that matter, as a gift!”

  Tansy had listened to as much—nay, more—of this smug recital than she had wished to hear. “Keep up your foolishness, young lady, and you may just whistle a fine young man down the wind.”

  “Never!” Emily declared airily. “If ever I were so unladylike as to whistle, that dumb Digby would come to heel at once like a faithful hound—tongue lolling and tail wagging in ecstasy.”

  “Lord love a duck!” Tansy groaned contemptuously. “If ever there was a more unfeeling, self-centered, vain, ungrateful, and cruel—yes, cruel,” she repeated as Emily opened her rosebud lips in protest, “creature, Emily Benedict, I cannot imagine who she might be. I have not met Mr. Eagleton, and know nothing of him except for his misguided opinion of what constitutes a lady of breeding sufficient to doing her the honor of a proposal of marriage. But I tell you this: if he were a Tothill Fields link-boy he’d be too good for you.”

  Emily’s pouty bottom lip began to tremble.

  “And don’t try tears, my fine young actress,” Tansy hinted when Emily added a furious blinking of her china-blue eyes to her repertoire,” for it cuts no wheedle with me. I live for the day Mr. Eagleton finds a new place to fix his interest and snaps his fingers in your face like this.” So saying, Tansy lifted her hand to Emily’s nose and demonstrated with a loud snap.

  Aunt Lucinda leaned across Emily to impart complacently, ‘“This and a great deal more I have had to put up with.’ Terence.”

  “You have my deepest sympathy, Aunt Lucinda,” Tansy said absently, for a plan was just then forming in her agile brain. From under her dark lashes she studied the hapless Digby until his beautiful face was thoroughly familiar and she could not help but recognize him when next she saw him. It was about time one top-lofty young puss was taken down a peg or two, and Tansy Tamerlane was just the one to do it!

  Just then the musicians decided to take a short rest, and the dowager marched over to place herself down rather wearily in the remaining end seat. “How goes the ball, ladies? I never saw a room so stuffed with toadies. Emily, I think you are flinging yourself about just a bit too enthusiastically, my dear. Try for a little less spirit and a tad more decorum, if you please.”

  Emily told her companions they were always trying to throw a damper on her fun and reminded them that it was, after all, her ball. She then escaped, before she could be scolded for her impertinence, with a dashing young hussar who approached to beg leave to lead her into the set now forming on the floor.

  “Outrageous little baggage,” the dowager remarked calmly to Emily’s retreating skirts. “Tansy, did you see that fool Stanhope, the fourth Earl of Harrington if you wish to be precise, prancing about as yet?”

  Tansy shook her head.

  “Oh, my dear, you must keep your eyes peeled for him. He is really quite odd. It was bad enough when he began affecting that inane lisp, but now he has gone beyond the pale. Only imagine, he has painted on a beard!”

  Aunt Lucinda clucked at the dowager’s obvious enjoyment of the foibles of a peer. “‘Society in shipwreck is a comfort to us all.’ Syrus,” she pointed out facetiously.

&n
bsp; The dowager, the bit between her teeth now, agreed. “And you’ll never guess what Lady Clark told me about a very highly-placed personage who shall remain nameless. It seems he has an entire collection of snuffboxes with false lids. Under those lids, on the second covers that he shows about in public quite freely, thinking none are up to his tricks, are dirty pictures! Yes, naughty pictures—painted up in natural colors and drawn in fine detail—with a different scene for each lid. Tansy, I did not bother to measure my words, for I know you are no prudish miss after living with that rakehell father of yours. But if you cannot blush, at least have the decency to wipe that obnoxious grin off your face!”

  “‘What a time! What a civilization!’ Cicero,” Lucinda cried in horror.

  “If I might change the subject, your grace,” Tansy put in, “I would appreciate your opinion of one young Digby Eagleton.”

  “Digby Eagleton? Oh, yes. Fine family, the Eagletons, only son of his widowed mother, and with a good deal of money invested with the four percents, I believe. He’s in line for a baronetcy too, once his uncle sticks his spoon in the wall, and that should be any time now. Why? Are you thinking of throwing your handkerchief in that direction?”

  “I may be a bit raw around the edges, your grace, but I stop at cradle-robbing. No, Mr. Eagleton is head over ears in love with your cruel wretch of a granddaughter, and she won’t give him so much as the time of day. I was just wondering if the poor tyke is worth the time it would take me to give him a few pointers on how best to handle the hard-hearted Emily.”

  The dowager laughed and twisted in her seat to give Tansy a broad wink. “You are a constant source of delight to me, my dear. Ashley did me a good turn when he brought you home, whether he will admit it or not.”

  “I’ll admit to being Bonnie Prince Charlie if only my cousin will rescue me from another hour of squiring more uglies and wallflowers about the dance floor. The last one was so huge it was like hefting about a pack of meal to get her to move.”

  The ladies looked up to catch the Duke in the act of wiping at his heated brow with a fine lawn handkerchief.

  “As it is your responsibility to, as you say, squire all the uglies, I can only think you look upon me as part of your duty, with my only attraction being that I will agree to content myself with a sojourn to the refreshment table instead of insisting you stand up with me in the next set,” Tansy returned with feigned hauteur.

  Her heart had begun thumping painfully against her breast at the sound of his voice, but Tansy refused to let Ashley see he had the power to discomfit her. “Do not be afraid of plain speech, cousin, nor try to wrap up your words in clean linen.”

  “Clean linen, is it, cousin The Duke returned with a deceptively bland smile. “It is you who are skirting the real issue by deliberately misunderstanding me. If you do not wish my company, then just go about the business as is your custom—say something nasty and have an end to it. I have had enough pointless chatter this night to last me out my days.”

  Tansy capitulated with a smile. Surely Avanoll wouldn’t have sought her out if he were feeling uncomfortable about their interlude in the library. Obviously the dowager was a bit behind the times and did not realize how much freer society had become since the days when a single kiss was enough to ruin a girl for life. Her cousin wouldn’t so compromise her, she was certain, and she would just have to follow his lead and learn to dismiss his occasional embraces as simply temporary aberrations that meant little or nothing to him.

  So thinking, she again smiled up at her cousin. Little knowing the tumult the sight of her laughing eyes and moist, full lips set off in his solid chest, she laughingly implored, “Do not rage at me, cousin. I would be honored to have your company at the refreshment table.”

  Once the pair had taken themselves off, Lucinda and the dowager cheerfully put their heads together as they perched happily on the over-stuffed cushions.

  “‘The quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love.’ Terence,” Lucinda assured the dowager brightly.

  “If quarrels give birth to love, my dear woman, those two are besotted beyond redemption,” her grace replied in a weary voice. “At times I wish to knock their heads together until they see what I saw clearly the moment the two of them began spitting fire at each other that first morning. A marriage made in heaven, I thought then, and I haven’t changed my mind. I vow to you, Lucinda, if they haven’t murdered each other in the meantime, I’ll have them safely bracketed before this year is out!”

  The dowager then batted at the ostrich feathers that had smacked her in the head.

  “Lucinda, you flea-witted female, stop bobbing your head up and down like the village idiot! Your plumes are jabbing my eyes out. Mark my words, woman, once my two grandchildren are settled I’m going to direct whatever energies I have left to me into trying to make some sense out of you. Like Tansy, I have a weakness for hopeless cases.”

  The Duke somehow braved the crush around the refreshment table, and emerged with two glasses of orgeat (which he loathed) before steering Tansy to an alcove beside the dance floor and commandeering a brocade love seat by directing his iciest stare at the young sprig who was, until then, progressing quite famously in his silken-tongued pursuit of Lord Chatsworth’s youngest and least-homely offspring.

  “Demmed Peep-O’Day boy,” the Duke swore under his breath.

  “How do you know?” Tansy asked, spreading her skirts wide over the seat in an effort to keep her cousin at a less heart-disturbing distance.

  “My dear child,” the Duke imparted with an air of world-weary wisdom, “anyone who chases after a Chatsworth chit has got to be either blind, beetle-headed, a climbing-cit, or a money hungry wastrel. Didn’t you get a good look at that horror? And she’s the best of a bad lot. If my pockets were to let there would be little I wouldn’t do to fill them again, but I draw the line at wedding a Chatsworth. That blank stare she favored you with was the most intelligent expression she’s ever worn.”

  Tansy’s bell-like laugh rang out in pure enjoyment. “I believe I should feel sorry for one of them, but for the life of me I cannot decide who’s more to be pitied—the girl or her ardent swain.”

  Avanoll’s answering smile became arrested on his face as he listened to the velvety peals of Tansy’s laughter. “Do you know you have a most delightful laugh? M’sister squeals like a pig caught in a gate. In fact, I can’t think of another woman whose laughter I can stand for more than a few moments, as they either giggle, or titter behind their fans, or cackle like hens in a barnyard. Why is your laughter so pleasant?”

  Tansy strove for lightness as she could feel her none-too-recovered heart melting again toward this man. “The answer to that is exceedingly simple. I studied chuckling in Vienna under the great Professor Herbert Von Laughington, your grace,” she replied, tongue-in-cheek.

  Now Avanoll’s laughter burst forth, full and rich and deep, and although Tansy was pleased with the sound she withheld comment and quickly steered the subject to less intimate areas.

  “Who is that atrociously vulgar-looking man standing beside the orchestra? He speaks so loudly his voice nearly drowns out the music, and the words I’ve heard so far have been far from fit for mixed company. And his dress!” she went on. “I do not pretend to be all the crack, but that gentleman, fine though his clothes might once have been, looks like he spent the afternoon riding to hounds.”

  Avanoll’s eyes quickly picked out the man Tansy described. “That old roué, for your enlightenment, is Sir John Lade. He and his wife are both horse-mad, and he has taken to imitating groom in both language and dress. His wife is, if it is possible, even more vulgar and crude than he, and I advise you to cut a wide path around the pair of them. Two years ago Sir John was locked up in the King’s Bench for debt, but his luck turned and he was released. There is a rather amusing story about the man, if you wish to hear it.”

  Tansy did. Anything to keep Ashley at her side for a few more precious minutes.

  “Well, it seems S
ir John, a betting man, wagered the rather portly Lord Chalmondely he could carry him around the Steine twice on his back—no mean feat, as it is quite a distance. As Sir John is of a much smaller build, his lordship was more than willing to make a large wager against him.”

  “What an odd wager. Although I will say that my father once wagered his own valet that he wouldn’t nick him with the razor. Needless to say, my father lost that bet, not to mention a few drops of blood.”

  Ashley smiled his appreciation. “I can see it will be hard to best that, but let me try. At last the day for the test came, and everyone and their Uncle William crowded about the Steine to watch the fun. The participants were there, the crowd was there, but Sir John just stood quietly inspecting his nails until Chalmondely asked him the reason for the delay.”

  “And what reason did Sir John give?” Tansy asked, thoroughly intrigued.

  “‘I am waiting,’ said Sir John, ‘for you to strip. I said I’d carry you, but I’ll not carry an ounce of clothes. Come now, do not disappoint the ladies.’”

  Avanoll was rewarded for his tale with Tansy’s unaffected laughter. “And how did it all end, cousin?”

  “Chalmondely forfeited, of course, and Sir John was the toast of Brighton for many a day afterwards, though of his lordship little was seen for some time,” he informed her. He then frowned as Lord Dartly—who was fifty if he was a day, even if he was well-preserved—interrupted to lay claim to Tansy for the next dance.

  For the next two hours Avanoll propped up the wall with one broad shoulder and looked like a thundercloud whenever Tansy took the floor with another partner. He hadn’t thought to ask her to pencil in his name on her card, as it did not occur to him that she would be such a huge success.

  When later he espied her at supper, surrounded by no less than three fawning admirers, he could not resist the temptation of approaching her table and reminding her in a strident whisper that she had a job to do and was not free to fritter away the hours with a bunch of flea-witted greenheads.

  Tansy was brought up short by this lightning change of mood, and was prompted to snap back testily, “And how can I serve you, your grace?”

  “I should not think you could serve me at all, madam, but if you could possibly find the time to locate your charge before she lands us all in the basket I am sure my grandmother would be most grateful.”

  With that, the Duke bowed shortly to the three gape-mouthed gentlemen who were clearly astonished by his cavalier treatment of Miss Tamerlane, and withdrew to the cardroom. Here he remained for the balance of the evening, to the delight of his opponents, who departed the ball quite a deal richer than when they had arrived. Avanoll did not even notice the extent of his losses. He was much too busy making serious inroads on the wine decanter Dunstan was ordered to keep full at his elbow.

  Tansy spent her time chasing Emily out of dark corners and keeping an eye on the girl as she skipped about the dance floor with a seemingly unending supply of eager partners.

  Finally Emily lodged a protest. “I have a good mind—” she began heatedly, before an overwrought Tansy cut her off.

  “That is an extremely debatable point, young lady, and precisely why I shall remain as watchdog until the last guest departs.”

  And she did.

  If a ball is judged enjoyable by the amount of food and spirits the guests consume and the lightness of the early morning sky as it looks down on the carriages bearing off the revelers, then Emily’s Come-Out Ball was a resounding success.

  As Dunstan closed the door on the last straggling couples, Lucinda leaned on the banister before she turned and wearily mounted the stairs—for once, too fatigued to cap an event with a maxim.

  Emily, still chattering and showing no signs of fatigue, thoughtfully helped the dowager up the steps, careful to keep clear of Lucinda’s dragging flounces.

  Only Dunstan and a few other sleepy servants were around to accept Tansy’s thanks and to be reminded of the ball to be held in the servants’ hall later this same day.

  “I hope you set aside enough food from the Ball to make your evening enjoyable,” Tansy said with a weary smile. “From the way everybody was eating you would have thought they’d been starving themselves for weeks to get ready for a Roman feast.”

  Dunstan assured her that there was more than enough for the staff, and thanked Tansy again for arranging the servants’ ball. “It made a big hit belowstairs, if I may say so, Miss Tansy. Everyone speaks highly of your kindness.”

  “That’s our Miss Tansy, all right, kind and thoughtful to everyone, everyone but the poor fool who puts a roof over her sainted head.”

  Tansy and the servants turned to look, open-mouthed, at Avanoll, who was at the moment swinging back and forth precariously as he gripped the drawing room doorknob with one hand and tipped wine into his mouth (and down onto his crumpled, twisted cravat) from the decanter held in his other hand.

  “You’re castaway!” Tansy accused hotly.

  “You’re damned right I am, cousin, and never did a man have more right to the solace only a good bottle like this can provide. Don’t think I didn’t see you tonight, hopping from man to man like a common strumpet. But do you spare a kind word for the simpleminded dolt who took you in, who feeds you, who puts the clothes on your back?”

  The Duke’s voice dropped and he whispered harshly, “That back—that lovely, snowy-white kissable, soft back. No!” his voice rose again, “you do not think of that man! God,” he groaned, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Tansy stood straight as a poker throughout the Duke’s verbal assault, although her eyes were suspiciously bright.

  “Good!” she shouted at his last words. “Good, good, good!” She advanced on him, fumbling with the catch on her necklace. “Here,” she cried, flinging it into his face so that he dropped the decanter in reaction.

  As he stood in the archway with the necklace clutched against his chest and his fine, clocked silk stockings dripping all over with wine, Tansy gave him a piece of advice.

  “Make up your mind, Ashley, for I cannot stand this constant shifting of moods. Either you want me under your roof or you don’t. In either case, in the future I would appreciate it if you would stay away from me.”

  Her full bottom lip trembled for a moment before she pointed her index finger into his chest and jabbed him ruthlessly to punctuate every word she spat out between her gritted teeth. “Just stay away, cousin, or I’ll, er, I’ll— oh, curse your stupid hide!—I’ll break your bloody nose!”

  Ashley Benedict stared in stunned silence (as did the servants) as Tansy whirled on her heel and catapulted up the stairs, hand pressed to her mouth, as if all the hounds of hell were after her. He turned to meet his butler’s condemning countenance and tried feebly at a joke.

  “I’ll lay a monkey to a turnip I’ve got to call you Dunstan again, old friend.”

  The long-term servant was not called upon to answer, but just to pull open the front door hastily to allow his grace the dubious pleasure of casting up his accounts on the flagway adjoining Grosvenor Square.

  “Good,” Dunstan echoed Tansy’s opinion softly. “Very, very good.”