Chapter Sixteen
Farnley, showing a belated sense of manly courage (an emotion abetted by the fortuitous grey-mare horseshoe), jumped in front of Tansy and pounded the brass knocker mightily until a harassed-looking manservant-cum-jack-of-all trades yanked open the door with an admonition to “leave off that racket afore Oi calls the Watch down on ya.”
Tansy pulled Farnley back discreetly by the hem of his coat, and stepped into the dim light shining out the doorway. Aping Avanoll’s most supercilious expression (a masterful combination of haughtiness, pride, and utter contemptuousness), she cast her eyes up and down any creature so foolhardy as to dare to block her way—reducing the man to a quivering mass of jelly as he felt a shivering recollection of another such examination not too lately past also directed in much the same way. On that occasion, however, the examination had ended with his person being firmly deposited, rump-down, in a nearby potted plant.
Holding his hands outstretched as if an attack were imminent, and giving out with a strangled, “Oh, no ya doesn’t. Not again, or me name’s not Vernon Q. Cake!” the terrified man executed a former foot soldier’s excellent About-Face and bolted for the bowels of the house, thereby abandoning his post and allowing the enemy to breach his lines without even a hint of resistance.
As he was to remark to one of his cronies at the neighborhood tavern the next day, he—Vernon Q. Cake, late of His Majesty’s Fifth Foot and a man who had served in more than one fearful battle—would do the same again without shame if ever either of those two fire-breathing giants were to blink in his direction, “so crazy-mad and weird-like they wuz.”
For as great an impression as first Avanoll and then Tansy made on manservant Cake, it was a pity that they took as little notice of him as they did. Tansy’s major concern during the ride to Half Moon Street had been how to gain entrance to Sir Rollin’s lodgings. The most notice she took of the man Cake was to be relieved at his seeming cooperation, and only a little chagrined that he did not stay around long enough to inform her of the Duke and Emily’s presence within.
Yet, still a bit heady with this first easy victory, she lost no time in surveying her captured territory—in this case a rather shabby dark foyer—before she counted slowly to ten to compose herself and slow her racing pulse. The first door she then approached led into a masculine bedroom fitted out in ancient if rather sybaritic splendor that, Tansy thanked the gods, showed no signs of recent Occupancy.
The next minuscule room she and the reluctant Farnley entered appeared to be a sort of masculine receiving room, to be used when entertaining the gentler sex. It, too, was empty. That left but one door at the end of the hall, other than the one the servant had used, which led most probably to the kitchen. Tansy pressed her ear against the thick oak paneling and heard indistinct voices, apparently raised in anger.
“This is it,” she mouthed silently to Farnley, whose courage and physical presence had both retreated closer to the still-ajar front door—or bolt-hole, depending on whether the portal was thought of by Tansy or the valet. She cast him a look of utter disgust and mentally adjusted the number of her assault force from two to one before taking a steadying breath, depressing the double latches, and giving the twin panels a gigantic shove that propelled them against the walls inside the room with an explosive Ba-Boom that robbed the room’s occupants of all powers of speech and movement and succeeded in gaining their undivided attention.
While three pairs of startled eyes goggled at this tall, black-velvet cloaked creature who had burst upon the scene so precipitously, Tansy, in her turn, surveyed the room—which appeared to be a private study—and its occupants.
First to fall under her scrutiny was the figure of her recalcitrant charge, who was still buttoned into her outerwear, topped off by a ridiculously youthful looking chip-straw hat tied under her chin by means of a huge pink and white checked grosgrain ribbon. Cowering in a corner, she was standing beside a bandbox undoubtedly crammed full of the necessities of life: toothbrush and powder, a Penny Press novel, three pair of kid gloves, a locked diary, and a half-eaten box of chocolates.
Emily looked frightfully overset, woefully helpless, painfully young, and—as soon as she understood the caped figure to be her cousin Tansy—blessedly relieved. This relief was shared by Tansy, who was assured Emily’s virtue, if not her reputation, was still intact.
Next, Tansy’s eyes raked over the villain of the piece, a thin-lipped, dark-complected man some women found handsome but who Tansy scorned as attempting to look sinister and succeeding only in looking as if his liver was slightly off. Yet Mrs. Radcliffe had not gained her so-large following of readers without a great love for gothic heroes who appeared to be much of a sameness with Sir Rollin, so either Tansy’s taste was too particular or the followers of the Minerva Press were more romantic than the experienced (for “experienced” read “on-the-shelf spinster”) Miss Tamerlane.
In any event. Tansy wasted no more than a few seconds on the man.
She lastly turned her eyes to the right to see, standing with about half of the fair-sized room between himself and Sir Rollin, the person of the Duke of Avanoll. The look on his face defied description, being neither surprised nor indignant nor even remotely condemning; in fact, if there was a glimmering of any emotion to be discerned, the Duke would have to be termed to have looked amused.
“Good evening to you, cousin,” the Duke said in his normal tone at last, ending the increasingly tense silence. “I do hope you do not have your heart set on a late supper, for I fear Sir Rollin here is promised to me for the next few minutes and is unable to play the proper host,” he drawled in patently unmeant apology.
“Oh, Tansy,” Emily broke in, her voice fast rising to hysterical shrillness. “You must make them stop. Rollin has admitted he meant to ruin me, not marry me—the beast!—and Ashley will not rest until he has killed him. How was I to know Rollin was a liar, Tansy? He was so sweet and in all things considerate until tonight when he—he told me he was amusing himself with me!” she admitted, her china-blue eyes awash with a fresh batch of enormous tears.
Tansy turned to her young cousin, her face showing nary a trace of sympathy, and sniffed in a most unladylike way, “What were you expecting, you bacon-brained nitwit—a romantic flight to Gretna and marriage over the anvil, followed by a leisurely honeymoon touring the Lake District? Emily, you are the most appalling idiot imaginable, and if you get out of this scrape with your skin intact you would be wise to stick to me like a barnacle until such time as you acquire a little sense.”
“But, Tansy—”
Tansy shook her head bemusedly. “Girl, never before in my checkered existence have I come across anyone so capable of giving me such a bellyache, and believe me, you had to go some to reach the top of a long list of morons, dolts, ninnies, and downright jackasses to do it. But outstrip them all you did, and by a long chalk!”
This outburst was gaped at by Sir Rollin, and softly applauded by Avanoll, while Emily went off into a depressingly predictable temper tantrum. Tansy expected at any moment the girl would fling herself prone upon the floor and drum her heels like the spoiled brat who had been her charge in Sussex—and whom she was constrained to punish for tucking up three goldfish in her crayon box, saying she could use their bright color on her next drawing.
A pretty picture, an impetuous elopement, the reasons may have varied, but the spur behind the acts were alike: both girls had been spoiled beyond all thought for any but their own desires. For a moment Tansy’s palm itched to make stinging contact with Emily’s round bottom, the urge so strong she nearly forgot she was still a long way from solving the most pressing problem of how to get Emily and the Duke home and the whole affair buried beyond any hope of discovery by Society.
So, as Emily’s fit of weeping reduced her to a quaking bundle of blue, velvet-trimmed pelisse reposing conveniently out of harm’s way in the far corner of the room, Tansy directed her energies to making a swift end to the affair. The most dan
gerous situation now was the very visible intent of the two men again glaring balefully at each other from across the room.
First, the rug had been rolled back and all the furniture pushed to one side. Secondly, both men had shed their coats, cravats, and Hessians, and were standing up only in their stocking feet, breeches, and rolled-up shirtsleeves. Each already held equally wicked-looking blades, making their intentions impossible to misconstrue by even the most dull-witted of fellows (like Farnley, who had by now ventured so far as to stick his head round the corner of the arch for a look-see).
“Now isn’t this just all too jolly,” Tansy observed silkily, as her nimble mind raced madly in search of a convincing argument. “And what do you intend to prove by this feat of derring-do, Ashley?” she asked, willing to divert his anger onto herself. “I swear, cousin, for a man who decries impetuosity in others—namely myself—you are a sorry example of deliberate, well-thought-out action. Not only did you attempt rescue on the North Road mounted only on horseback, you now intend to duel down a man with complete disregard for the Code of Honor, not to mention the resulting notoriety news of such an engagement will bring down upon the shoulders of Emily, who regrettably has earned every bit of censure, and also your grandmother, who doesn’t deserve such shabby treatment.”
Avanoll and the until now curiously silent Whitstone either didn’t hear or refused to heed Tansy’s words and, exchanging nods, went on their guards as if they had never been disturbed. They made to touch sword tips in salute before commencing a fight that would end with one or both of them spilling their claret all over the bare boards of the room.
At least that was the most usual ending to a duel between two disagreeing gentlemen, but then normally duels are witnessed by seconds and a benevolent surgeon—not a vaporish young miss and an eccentric, unflappable, over-aged hoyden bent on putting a halt to such dangerous nonsense.
The swords clinked as they met in salute, and the men held their weapons pointed directly upwards. The hilts pressed against their chins in a final theatrical gesture (the moves all dictated by some masculine sense of peculiar etiquette sanctioning cold-bloodedly setting out to dispatch each other by means of pricks, stabs, and slashes inflicted by razor-sharp weapons).
Next on the agenda came the duel itself, but this was destined never to take place, for at that moment two shots rang out loudly in the quiet room, the reports following one upon the other in rapid succession (drowning out Emily’s three-octave spanning scream), and the tips of the two rapiers were somehow severed and sent winging into the air, rendering the swords a good half-foot shorter and the two combatants as incapable of movement as the molded figures at a wax museum.
When the Duke recovered his voice, he turned his head stiffly and spoke to the woman holding his silver-inlaid pistols, her head wreathed in a cloud of blue-grey smoke. “You, madam, are beyond a shred of doubt the most incorrigible nuisance this side of Hades,” he observed calmly, with the resigned demeanor of a man who has found the Fates against him at every turn. “I can recall your saying you were taught at your father’s knee, but you didn’t bother to inform me he taught you to shoot as well as speak like a man,” he remarked in a slightly aggrieved tone.
Tansy’s only response was to use one of the pistols to help wave away the cloud of blue smoke that still wreathed her head.
But the duke wasn’t finished. “It can only be a kindness if you would present me with a full written accounting of your, er, talents in the morning. I do so abhor surprises, you know,” he ended, still maintaining a remarkable control over his temper, as well as still clutching the shattered remains of his once-favorite sword. He lowered the blade, then favored his cousin with a mock salute. “I cannot speak for Whitstone here, but I for one know when I am bested.”
Tansy gave a slight bow of her own head in humble acknowledgement of Avanoll’s concession, hiding as she did so her twinkling brown eyes and self-satisfied smirk. “I accept your surrender, cousin, and believe we should now discuss the terms of peace.”
At last Sir Rollin found his voice and added his mite to this bizarre conversation. “You are to be pitied, Avanoll, if these two are any example of your relation. A melodramatic infant and a pistol-toting Antidote! Egad, no wonder you forced a duel on me. You were looking for a quick and relatively painless way of ending it all without having to pull the plug on your life by some means less grisly than hanging yourself with your smoking-jacket sash, or splashing your brains all over the walls with a pistol shot. Much as I have never cared for you, old fellow, I am sorry to have added to your headache,” Whitstone ended with uncharacteristic sympathy.
Tansy ignored the degrading description of herself as an Antidote and spoke only to inform his grace that one of his pistols was fading a hair to the left and was he aware of this imperfection? When her cousin refrained from replying, she merely shrugged and handed the spent pistols to Farnley, who eyed them in genuine horror and held them most gingerly at arm’s-length, as if they might explode at any time. His horror was not confined to the firearms alone, as it included a newborn respect for Miss Tansy and a profound hope that he never nudged such a deadly shot as she into anger sufficient as to compel her to use his protuberant ears for target practice.
It seemed the melodrama was nearly over for the evening as Avanoll—his usual good judgment at last overcoming his brotherly thirst for vengeance (as well as his inborn masculine pride, which had been badly bruised by Whitstone’s arrogant dismissal of his grace’s ability to protect his own against such a rake-shame no-good as he).
Though still rather put out over the episode, he suddenly realized himself to be quite honestly fatigued, and curtly summoned his sister to his side in preparation for departing Sir Rollin’s abode before Tansy took it upon herself to preach Whitstone a homily on morals. Here was still a decidedly militant glint in her eyes. Too, his sister might yet swoon in a dead faint and have to be hauled to his carriage, slung over his shoulder like a sack of meal.
In the midst of ushering his charges out ahead of him, he turned once more to the thwarted despoiler of young womanhood and issued a warning very thinly dressed up as friendly advice. “I would not brute about the events of this evening, Whitstone, or we will both find ourselves become a laughingstock among the tattlemongers. If you will but promise to keep mum and take yourself out of my sight until at least the end of the Season, I shall deign to consider us quits. If you do not, however,” he intoned with an awful smile, “I shall be forced to return and give you the drubbing you deserve.”
Whitstone made one last arrogant (and ill-judged) remark, suggesting insolently, “You know, Avanoll, you were just lucky to have arrived in time to save your beloved sister. Another few moments and I’d have had her convinced I merely wished to anticipate our honeymoon by a few hours. If ever I saw a wench bent on a tumble it is she, and,” he added with a smirk, “if Boodle’s Betting Book doesn’t soon sport a wager on the day and time she is found flat on her back with her skirts above her head in some hostess’ back garden, I vow it won’t be because the lady refuses to yield. She may be Lady Emily in name, but in nature she’s no better than the little opera-dancer I keep in Kensington. Yes, indeed, your chaste little innocent has all the makings of a first class wh—”
That’s all the further Sir Rollin got (and it was only due to the distractions of finding the fainting Emily a chair and holding back a cousin bent on physical violence that the inevitable was for so long delayed) before Avanoll’s large fist put an end to the flow of verbal filth by the simple expedient of crashing into the speaker’s jaw with all the force—and much of the finesse—of the great Gentleman Jackson himself.
Tansy’s “Well done, Ashley, give him another!” accompanied by some enthusiastic shadow-punching of her own, went unheeded by the Duke as he stood, fists at the ready, watching Sir Rollin stagger for a moment before launching a retaliation.
His punch was thrown wild and missed, but Avanoll’s wicked uppercut connected solidly, pr
opelling his opponent backwards across the floor to bang against the Shearer fire-screen and slide down against it before coming to rest with his legs sprawled on the bare floor. The screen, a rather lovely piece of work, was equipped with a convenient fold-down writing table that the impact of Whitstone’s body served to release. The tabletop, while not designed for such abuse, was sturdily made of solid oak, and it descended to land with some force on Whitstone’s skull—thump-thumping his Brutus Crop-adorned noggin a total of three punishing times before coming to rest. All but the first bump were not felt, more’s the pity, for Sir Rollin was already “fast asleep.”
Tansy was elated and made no bones about it. “That was a neat bit of cross and jostle work, Ashley, and that muzzler surely put a crimp in Whitstone’s style. If his bone-box isn’t broken it’s bruised enough to have him on milk gruel for a sen’night or more.” She patted her cousin on the back amicably and pretended to pout. “And you said I kept secrets from you, while all along you were a talented amateur of the Fancy—as I could see by your form—and the possessor of as fine a pair of fives as Maddox or The Black or even Belcher, I wager. I cannot begin to tell you how proud I am of you, Ashley,” she ended, beaming up at him.
Avanoll covered the hand Tansy had in her excitement put on his arm with one of his “pair of fives” and smiled down at her to observe, “You do have the most charming way of expressing yourself, my dear, although I shudder to think where you gained such firsthand knowledge of fisticuffs.”
“Papa—” she began, only to have the Duke admonish her by using a bit of cant language himself.
“Put a muzzle on it, Tansy,” he admonished kindly, and then—overcome by the pleasure of feeling such great affinity with the outrageous female who dared convention to protect her charge (and himself, he had a slight suspicion)—he threw all caution to the winds, hauled her into a tight embrace, and kissed her quite ruthlessly.
A groan from Emily, slowly rousing from her swoon, caused the pair to separate hurriedly, placing several feet of floor space between them before Emily could fully open her eyes and Farnley could re-enter the house to inform his master that his carriage, which had been stationed discreetly around the corner, was out front and awaiting their convenience.
“What about Sir Rollin?” Emily quailed as she was led to the street. “If he speaks, I am forever destroyed.”
Her brother informed her of his assurance that Whitstone had learned a valuable lesson in discretion and could not be of any further concern to them—unable to restrain himself from adding a few choice words about her part in the mess and warning of further elaboration on her expected conduct in the future on the morrow.
“I have been dreadfully silly, haven’t I, Ashley?”
“Let’s just say, brat, that if the wits beneath your golden hair were any dimmer you would be not a female, but a dandelion,” her brother told her ruthlessly.
“You’ve been an inconsiderate, impulsive, selfish and none-too-bright little minx who needs a hiding,” Tansy added, in a last burst of temper before relenting a bit and allowing Emily to hide her tear-swollen face against her shoulder until the carriage arrived in Grosvenor Square.
Dunstan swung the door open before they had mounted the portico, while upstairs a curtain moved as Aunt Lucinda peered out into the Square. “‘Throw fear to the wind.’ Aristophanes,” she heralded, just as footsteps were heard on the stairs.
A few seconds later the returning adventurers straggled wearily into Avanoll’s salon, to be greeted by the sight of their aunt swaying slightly on her feet in the middle of the room and holding a nearly depleted brandy snifter in her raised hand. “‘Veni, vide, vici.’ Plutarch,” she slurred in salute.
Tansy, seeing Emily’s bewildered expression, translated: “It is Latin for, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’”
“Oh,” Emily whispered vaguely.
“Precisely,” Avanoll replied, frowning, his eyes scanning his cherished domain to see the furniture awash with bits of feminine draperies, one empty brandy decanter on the silver tray with another already at half mast, a wet, spreading stain and an overturned snifter on the rug beside his favorite chair, and a fine porcelain bowl (that had lately resided on a side table) now somehow come into the possession of that usurping mongrel—who was avidly lapping at its contents, which looked suspiciously like yet more of his choicest brandy.
“Far be it from me to intrude on your little party, Grandmama,” he said, bowing toward the elderly woman who at that moment was trying to present a posture of dignity in a chair so cavernous it did not even allow her feet to touch the floor, while attempting to close her gaping dressing robe and straighten her tilted nightcap—all with little or no success. “But it may interest you to know that all is well, and that no scandal should arise from this night’s adventures.”
The dowager opened her mouth to make some congratulatory remark, found her tongue to be quite dry, and availed herself of a sip of brandy. It was a rather large sip that burned her throat and set off a fit of coughing.
‘“To blow and swallow at the same time is not easy.’ Plautus,” Aunt Lucinda advised, wagging her finger at the sputtering woman.
Tansy whispered to Avanoll, “It would appear our elders chose to blunt the edge of their concern with a bit of your private stock, cousin.”
“That, cousin, is an understatement,” he returned.
Emily picked that moment to scamper across the room and drop to her knees beside her grandmother: “Forgive me, Grandmama, please do, for I am prodigiously sorry!” she cajoled in her most theatrical accents.
Aunt Lucinda, using obvious concentration to wend a reasonably straight line to her niece’s side, poked Emily sharply in the middle of her back and warred, ‘“You have put your head inside a wolfs mouth and taken it out again in safety. That ought to be reward enough for you.’ Aesop.”
“Oh, Lucinda, my dear, that was so intelligent of you. I could not have said it better myself,” the dowager complimented the woman.
“The Duchess actually commending your aunt for one of her quotes? Oh, Ashley, I fear you are right, the pair of them are absolutely bosky!” Tansy giggled.
The dowager heard this and protested. “Slightly up in the world, perhaps, maybe even a trifle disguised, but never bosky. Tansy. Gentlewomen cannot be bosky.”
“‘I call a fig a fig, a spade a spade.’ Menander,” Aunt Lucinda said, admitting at least her castaway condition before tottering to a chair and dropping into it heavily (with no sign of caring that she now lay sprawled like a rag doll dropped by a careless child), and recited sing-song, “‘O to be a frog, my lads, and live aloof from care.’ Theocritus.”
The dowager roused herself to ask fuzzily, “Theocritus? Is that the Greek fellow who used to stuff his mouth with stones and try to outshout the ocean waves?”
She was destined not to be answered, due to Horatio’s deduction that it was time all good puppies were abed, and all eyes—at least all the ones not yet seeing double—watched in astonishment as the animal traced a meandering course in the general direction of the hall, his four appendages somehow suddenly supplied with an overabundance of joints so that his legs bent and bowed most alarmingly and refused to move in any semblance of simple coordination.
Within mere yards of his goal, these uncooperative limbs collapsed entirely and Horatio rolled onto his side, flung his head upon the carpet, closed his glassy eyes (but was unable to retract his lolling tongue or shut his slack jaw), and, after his tail had given a final spasmodic jerk, commenced sleeping off a prime snootful of brandy.
“He’ll have a rare bruiser of a hangover in the morning,” the Duke observed dispassionately, ignoring Tansy and Emily and their oohs and aahs of compassion. As the dowager emitted a sad moan he added imperturbably, “And so, too, my so-proper grandparent and genteel aunt.”
“They were better off indulging in a little relaxing brandy than pacing the floor in a turmoil all the while we were gone,” Tansy pointed out. By
now the two thoroughly relaxed ladies were endeavoring to rouse themselves sufficiently to retire to their own chambers, and Emily was already long gone—deciding the less she was seen the less reminders of her indiscretion would strike her relatives, resulting in more tiresome lectures. (Now that she was home safe and dry, Emily’s recollections of any fear for her virtue or her narrow escape from a “fate worse than death” were rapidly being reduced to a mild scrape soon righted and, once in her bed, sleep came quickly and untroubled by nasty dreams.)
Avanoll believed it pointless to attempt rousing the drunkenly snoring Horatio, and merely stepped over him to call Farnley to help in putting the ladies to bed.
Aunt Lucinda had partially submerged herself in a hazy fog of contentment and was loath to be disturbed. ‘“Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigued, I said: Tie up the knocker! say I’m sick, I’m dead.” Pope,” she implored Farnley, as he poked tentatively at her shoulder.
“The name is Farnley, ma’am,” he corrected with little hope of being understood, before leading the woman to the stairway. Halfway up the flight Aunt Lucinda turned to utter her exit line with a sweep of her arm. ‘“So ends the bloody business of the day.’ Homer,” she decreed, hiccupped, and disappeared from sight.
Avanoll and Tansy personally escorted the dowager to her chamber, assuring her that Emily’s honor was indeed still intact, and promising a full report in the morning—with which she had to be satisfied since her dratted eyelids refused to remain open any longer.
The Duke walked with his cousin along the hall to Tansy’s door where they stopped, faced each other for a long moment, and then dissolved into paroxysms of hilarity that left them wiping their eyes and clutching their sides. “You know, of course, that only persons of a very odd sense of humor could find anything amusing in the debacle we just survived,” Avanoll imparted with a grin—if a Duke can be described so frivolously—that bordered on the impish.
Tansy could only smile and nod, so complete was their accord that she wished to do nothing to shatter the mood. Avanoll stood looking benignly at his cousin a moment longer before—just as if he, too, felt their rapport, and was disconcerted by it—his expression became shuttered and he abruptly moved off toward his own chamber.
“And a good-night to you too, your grace,” Tansy murmured beneath her breath, opened her door, and hugging her arms about herself (the better to retain the lovely warm glow that still radiated through her body), she drifted across her room to the window. She stood there gazing out at the stars, weaving fantasies that had little to do with the probable future of one very ordinary, very vulnerable, Miss Tansy Tamerlane.