Chapter Fourteen
Ashley Benedict roused himself most reluctantly the morning following the ball, tried to raise his head, and was rewarded for this effort by the appearance of a stabbing pain that shot across his broad forehead. It faded to a dull, sickening throb only after he prudently buried his face in the scratchy bedspread beneath him. The discomfort of lying sideways atop his bed, his long legs dangling almost to the floor, combined with the distinct chill that pervaded the room, convinced him that a further attempt to rearrange his limbs into an upright position was worth the agony such a move entailed.
Slowly, and, oh, so carefully—he prized himself up and away from the dubious comfort of his massive bed, staggered over to lean heavily against his tall dresser, and contemplated his bleary-eyed visage in the tilt-mirror.
“Egad, can that drunken sot be me?” he groaned incredulously. He raised one hand and stroked his beard-shadowed chin. It was he, all right, but the memory of what horrendous happening had driven him to so abuse his constitution he was unable, for the moment, to recall.
Just then Farnley burst into the chamber from the dressing room, without preamble starting in to harangue his master with a complaint about “that she-devil” Miss Tamerlane, who refused to heed signs that were as plain as the nose on his grace’s face, begging his pardon.
Tansy! Of course! Who else but that infuriating menace of a cousin had ever gotten so firmly under his skin that he was forced to resort to take refuge in the bottom of a bottle—or two or three.
“Drat you, Farnley, stow it! Can’t you see I am in excruciating pain? Have you so little pity for a fellow human being that you would so callously add to my burdens by bringing me your petty problems?”
Farnley looked embarrassed for a moment, but after apologizing he made one more try at laying his side of the story before the Duke.
“Enough!” Avanoll barked, immediately raising his hands to his throbbing skull. “Prepare my bath and get some coffee up here. And you may shave me today, if you can collect your nerves sufficiently to refrain from slicing my throat.”
Once dressed for his afternoon meeting with some friends at Tattersall’s, Avanoll gingerly descended to the breakfast room, where he found himself confronted with muddy coffee, underdone eggs, burned bacon, and cold toast. The servants were obviously, in their own subtle way, expressing once again just where their allegiance lay.
As his memory of the previous evening slowly filtered back to him he had to admit that—perhaps this one time, at least—he had behaved just a trifle badly. Furthermore, if he ever hoped to enjoy a decent meal under his own roof again he would either have to make it up with Tansy or replace the entire staff.
As it was less trouble to perform the former requirement, and because he really did feel a slight twinge of remorse for his boorishness, he abandoned his unappetizing meal and went to seek out his cousin, thereby making his first meal of the day a serving of crow.
But the Duke was to be thwarted in his attempt to smooth the domestic waters, for when he entered the main drawing room it was to find the chamber filled almost to bursting with floral offerings from gentlemen guests from the night before. The furniture was likewise littered with fashionable young bucks, foppish dandies, ridiculously perfumed old men, and not a few matchmaking mamas who had chosen this morning as the perfect time to corral the comely young heiress into attending their upcoming entertainments.
Avanoll stood on the threshold for some moments and watched his young sister smugly preening herself, batting her sooty lashes at the circle of adoring males about her, and generally having a merry old time flirting with every male in sight. Aunt Lucinda, he next observed, sat perched in one of her beloved chairs, nervously fanning herself and trying to monitor the goings-on with all the fervor (if not the competence) of a proper chaperon.
Then Avanoll spied out Tansy standing off to one side of the room and was amazed to see that, on second glance, the near regiment of suitors was actually divided into two distinct groups. While Emily held court with a crowd of fortune-hunters and mama’s-babies, Tansy was looking quite at her ease entertaining a half-dozen or so of his own cronies, as well as a respectable sprinkling of more mature gentlemen—all sportsmen of the first rank.
He overheard a snippet of a story Tansy was just then relating, concerning a particularly fine battle she’d had with a trophy-sized salmon whilst she and her Papa were in Scotland (a most unladylike topic for discussion), but missed the end of the tale, which was truly a pity for it seemed to have set her listeners off into ridiculously juvenile paroxysms of mirth.
In a twinkling, all the Duke’s good intentions went a-flying, and before turning on his heel and stomping off, he, quite rudely, called across the room for Miss Tamerlane to attend him in the library. Amid moans of regret and easily overheard expressions of outrage, Tansy excused herself from the company, evincing all the social correctness the dowager had drummed repeatedly into her head. It was only after she was out of sight of the drawing room that her stride became rather long, her footfalls disintegrated into purposeful stampings, and her smiling face took on the narrow-eyed aspects of a hawk on the hunt.
Horatio, who had been dutifully awaiting his mistress’s emergence from a room strictly out of bounds to canine types (a truth brought home by repeated application of the dowager’s cane to his tender hindquarters), joined her in the march to the library—where he quickly staked his claim to the rug before the cold fireplace, growled once at the Duke (as was his custom), and curled up for a pleasant snooze.
Tansy took note of Avanoll’s strategically superior position, standing behind the wide mahogany desk and, refusing to sit down, thus placing her at a disadvantage, belligerently took up her own position directly across the room, feet braced and slightly apart, arms akimbo, and her chin at a challenging tilt.
It was left to Avanoll to either shout down the length of the room or walk around the desk and narrow the gap between them. He knew he had been out-maneuvered, but there was little he could do. And as an imposing posturing with one arm draped on the mantel was impossible without exposing his ankles to Horatio’s razor-jaws, he did the only thing left to him. He advanced until he stood face to face with his cousin, a mere three feet separating them.
And then they stared at each other—or glared at each other, if meticulous honesty was truly to be served—neither wishing to speak first and so be put on the defensive. At last, possibly her sense of fair play owning up to the fact that by moving from behind the desk Avanoll had already made one concession, Tansy broke the tense silence by demanding:
“Well?”
The Duke came to himself with a start. In the midst of his anger he had somehow found himself overcome with the desire to take Tansy in his arms and kiss her quite ruthlessly. This realization only added fuel to his anger, and he immediately went on the offensive. “Just what do you mean, madam, upsetting my man this morning?” he sneered, grasping at the first straw to come to hand.
This bizarre query was definitely the last of a long agenda of possible bones of contention Tansy supposed Avanoll about to gnaw on this morning. In point of fact, Farnley did not even appear upon her mental list as a subject for debate. As a result, she was in turn speechless, confused and, finally, downright angry.
“You mean to stand there and tell me,” she demanded incredulously, “that you burst into the drawing room, made a perfect spectacle of yourself by bellowing like an enraged bull, and dragged me rudely away from our guests to discuss your superstitious twit of a valet?”
She flung her hands out in exasperation and shook her head in an expression of disbelief. “Ashley, either you’re the greatest ignoramus in nature or you’ve temporarily slipped your wits after your disgusting descent into drunkenness last evening.”
Before Avanoll could search his senses (still oddly disturbed by thoughts of romance), for a rebuttal, Tansy continued, “As all you seem capable of since your first hysterical accusation is to stand rooted to the
carpet like a wilting potted-palm, I imagine I will be forced to dignify your question with a suitable explanation.”
Tansy then began to pace the floor as Avanoll looked on, feeling, if absolute truth was to be the rule of the day, exceedingly foolish. “The set-to—or contretemps, as the dowager would no doubt phrase it, though I see no need to wrap this particular farce up in clean linen—began earlier this morning when I discovered your estimable servant to be the instigator of a near-riot in the kitchen.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“As well you should. It seems one of the servants dropped a crystal wine goblet while clearing away last night’s debris, and the thing shattered in a thousand pieces.”
While Avanoll watched his cousin’s agitated pacings, his brow became more creased as she recounted the morning’s events. Finally Tansy ceased her assault on the priceless Aubusson carpet and told him:
“When I arrived on the scene to discover the reason for the shrieks of alarm audible in the breakfast room, Farnley was being forcibly restrained from reaching the cabinet where the kitchen crockery is kept by the presence of three whimpering maids and an irate Cook, the latter wielding a huge meat cleaver. Once order was restored. Cook explained that Farnley wished to break two more pieces of china—inexpensive items he termed expendable—so that the more costly china would be spared.”
Now the Duke was completely at sea, and his baffled expression registered the fact. “Why break more china?” he asked bleakly.
Tansy laughed ruefully. “Surely, your grace, you have heard that all bad events come in threes. Farnley wished to fulfill the requirements necessary to end this particular run of bad luck with the least cost to you and your heirloom china. I,” she ended rather smugly, “sent him away with a flea in his ear, and he obviously scurried straight to you to give vent to his injured feelings.”
Avanoll had the good grace to look ashamed. “Farnley is, as you say, a bit superstitious,” he explained feebly.
“Superstitious!” Tansy chortled. “The man’s a lily-livered ninny with more hair than wit. My major complaint, if I might be allowed the same freedom Farnley has to talk behind another’s back, is his influence upon my own ninnyhammer attendant, Pansy, who is so susceptible to his ravings.”
“I understand your concern, cousin, but I fail to see any way, short of dismissing Farnley, that can serve to put a halt to it. If only we could find some personal weak point of his we could, er, convince Farnley to leave off filling the poor girl full of his nonsense.”
Tansy gave an exasperated sigh. “His weak point is easy to spot, Ashley, as it sits directly above his neck. Would you suggest the Froggies’ contraption, the guillotine?”
Avanoll chuckled at the joke, then noticed the air in the room was no longer fraught with tension. Crossing his fingers behind his back he launched into a belated apology, a note of bitter self-mockery in his voice. “I know I blotched my copybook last night and was in general behaving like the worst of boors. I have no explanation, unless it is to plead that I was a trifle up in the world at the time.”
Tansy magnanimously accepted Avanoll’s out and out drunkenness as being a trifle castaway and replied soothingly, “Please do not think me to be such a looby that I would be overly put out by what a man says whilst deep in his cups.”
“Yes, well, I thank you, cousin. But I know I behaved like a regular hot-headed halfling, and for no reason other than my own perverseness.”
Now Tansy giggled. “You were proper sloshed at that, your grace, I agree.” And with that bit of plain speech, any remaining constraint floated magically away and the pair quit the room quite good friends once more—Tansy to return to her gentlemen callers, Avanoll to trot off to his engagement at Tatt’s.
Once the last of their admirers had been reluctantly shifted back onto the flagway outside Avanoll House, the three ladies ascended the stairs to look in on the dowager, who had pleaded fatigue and remained in bed for a rest following the excitement of the ball.
“Get up, you slug-a-bed,” Emily trilled, still heady with her triumph as she burst into her grandmother’s chamber. “You will not believe the absolute success my ball has been.”
“It’s true, your grace,” Tansy supplied more calmly. “The entire household has been knee-deep in posies and bucks all this morning long.”
She approached the spare figure still reclining in the huge dome bed, almost lost amid the heavy wood head-and-tester deeply carved with clouds, suns, and cupids, and hung about with red velvet, richly fringed round with weighty gold tassels.
Tansy cast her eyes around the huge room, still steeped in shadow behind the firmly-drawn, red velvet draperies, and took in an intricately fitted-out Ince dressing table, a many-compartmented writing desk, a Chippendale commode and clothes-press, as well as a china case awe-inspiring in both size and decoration—and stuffed full of a motley assortment of painted glass birds and small forest animals. Finally her attention was drawn to a chaise-longue that could only have been the result of an early brainstorm of Sheraton’s. Draped all over in rusty-red velvet cut in an overblown rose pattern, its frame was decorated in burnished gold and carved into contortions that defied description.
“Awful, ain’t it?” her grace chuckled weakly. “The only thing good about this room is the dumbwaiter that leads right to the kitchens. My food arrives hot, even if the room itself robs me of my appetite.”
As the dowager spoke. Tansy could not help but notice the huskiness in her voice and questioned the woman as to how she felt.
“I must admit I am not quite in plump currant. No doubt the hey-go-mad pace I set myself making ready for the ball has finally caught up with me. You ladies just stay back so that you don’t catch anything from me, though it’s just a little cough and a bit of a tender throat. Don’t let me spoil your fun,” she ended stoutly.
Tansy took no heed and walked straight up to the bed. “That’s deuced agreeable of you, ma’am, but I think there is a trifle more amiss here than a simple tickle in your throat. If you don’t mind, I’d like to feel your forehead, for your cheeks look a sight too pink and your eyes, though always twinkling, are a tad too bright to suit me.”
“Stay away, I say!” the dowager croaked. “I’m not so feeble that I’ll stand any sauce from you, gel. And ladies do not say deuced,” she added automatically as Tansy’s cool hand descended to touch the old lady’s fevered brow.
“Aha, just as I thought. Trifling cold, indeed. You, madam, are burning with fever,” Tansy declared. “We must get you something for it at once.”
“‘Better use medicines at the outset than at the last moment.’ Syrus,” Aunt Lucinda proffered helpfully, if somewhat pessimistically.
“Be quiet, you beetle-headed widgeon!” the dowager rasped while Tansy smothered a chuckle.
“Such a kickup,” Emily pouted, seeing her moment in the limelight rapidly being replaced by the household’s overreaction to her grandparent’s piddling indisposition. “Grandmama has lived long enough to recognize whether or not she is really sick.”
Aunt Lucinda seemed in prime form today and quickly countered by quoting, ‘“Age carries all things, even the mind, away.’ Virgil.”
“Now, now your grace,” Tansy soothed, while pressing the indignant old lady’s thin shoulders back down on the pillows. “Aunt Lucinda means well.”
“Oh, she’s a well-intentioned enough old tabby.” This last was said with a quelling stare in Aunt Lucinda’s direction. “But if l am in fact to be confined to this grotesque abomination of a room for any length of time, like a molting pigeon cooped up until I am fit to be seen, I must insist you keep the dear puss the deuce out of my sight and hearing.”
“Mustn’t say deuce. Grandmama,” Emily tittered impishly, gaining herself a pithy set-down in the process.
By mid-afternoon, the doctor had been called in to pronounce the dowager the victim of a severe bout of influenza. He prescribed rhubarb and calomel for her headache and cough, as well as an as
sortment of vile-tasting possets and embrocations guaranteed to encourage his patient into full recovery if only to halt the doses of the stuff.
Aunt Lucinda was in succeeding days wont to shake her head over the myriad of vials and bottles standing on the dowager’s bedside table and mutter, ‘“There are some remedies worse than the disease.’ Syrus,” to which her grace was heard to reply breathlessly, “Amen.”
This prompted the aunt to offer her opinion of the doctor. ‘“Old men are only walking hospitals.’ Horace,” which actually brought a wavering smile to the dowager’s lips, for she was in truth quite weak.
So encouraged. Aunt Lucinda added one quote too many. “‘O Death the Healer, scorn those not, I pray, to come to me: of cureless ills thou art the one physician. Pain lays not its touch upon a corpse.” Aeschylus.”
It was a full week later before Aunt Lucinda was brave enough to sneak back into the sickroom to offer the dowager a copy of John Heywood’s 1562 Woorkes, A Dialogue conteyning the number in effect of all the proverbs in the English tounge, compact in a matter concernynge two maner of Maryages, etc., a book that followed behind her in her retreat through the door some scant seconds later.
There was another ruckus belowstairs when Farnley removed the cat from the pantry, stating that everyone knew if a cat was allowed to kill a mouse when someone was sick in the house it was a sure omen of impending death. Tansy allowed that incident to blow over by itself, but put a quick halt to the valet’s plans to drop deadly poisonous henbane seeds onto the hot coals in the dowager’s sickroom grate so that she could “benefit” from the resulting vapors.
Farnley was a mite daunted by this setback, but the innocent devotion that Pansy showed for his higher intelligence more than made up for any slights Tansy could cast on his knowledge.
For Tansy had been correct: the guileless Pansy was thoroughly awed by Farnley’s readily recited store of charms, curses, cures, and supposed clairvoyances, and hung most adoringly on his every word. Indeed, unbeknownst to Tansy (thank goodness, for Farnley’s skin would have been in grave danger otherwise), the valet had even gone so far as to use his knowledge to convince Pansy of his—Farnley’s—rightness as her partner (and mentor?) for life!
Early one April morning, Pansy tiptoed down the backstairs from her attic room and stole out into the misty dawn, a willow branch clenched firmly in her left hand. Making certain no one was about, she held the twig before her and ran not one, but three full circuits around the large mansion chanting, “He that’s to be my good man, come and grip the end of it.”
Need it be mentioned that upon completion of her third circuit a pale, wraithlike hand appeared out of the mist to grasp the other end of the willow stick, and Pansy was gifted with a fleeting glimpse of Farnley’s ashen face before the apparition disappeared into the haze.
Before a dazed but happy Pansy could react, Farnley was back inside the mansion and rubbing fiercely at the flour that whitened his face and one hand. He did not feel any dishonesty had occurred, for after all, the only thing he had done was to hasten Pansy into taking a step toward what, he felt sure, was their Fate.
Unfortunately for some other inhabitants of Avanoll House, Farnley’s tempting of the fates had set in motion some unforeseen complications. For Pansy was now all a-twitter as to how to earn some extra funds so she and Farnley could fulfill their destiny in as short a time as possible.
Comfort was much too busy nursing the dowager—and making a fine job of it, by the way—so the Lady Emily was left very much to her own devices. Her social outings had been drastically curtailed since her grace’s illness.
Pansy may have made a dreadful botch of her first assignment—which had resulted in the purloined letter—but Emily was willing to give the girl another try at subterfuge. There was this simply exquisite gentleman who miraculously appeared in the Mall each morning when Pansy accompanied her on a morning stroll amid the nursemaids and their precious charges. It was child’s play to lose Pansy long enough to make the gentleman’s approach possible, and less than difficult to enlist the maid’s aid in the passing of messages—for a slight fee, of course.
Alternating spoonfuls of milk pudding with dainty forays into the box of sugarplums lying beside her on the coverlet, the dowager remarked on Emily’s magnanimous acceptance of her limited social life. “The girl is hopelessly silly, but she bears watching. It isn’t normal for her to be so docile. I smell something rotten—like a man,” she told Tansy seriously.
Avanoll was also concerned. “Even with Grandmama still abed, I think, cousin, it is time you and m’sister were out and about.”
Tansy agreed with them both, but it was left to Aunt Lucinda to put a seal on it. “‘He who is bent on doing evil can never want occasion.’ Syrus.”
So, with Aunt Lucinda lending an air of respectability if not a whit of restraint, Tansy and Emily were launched on a mad round of routs, balls, theatre parties, assemblies, tea parties, dinners, luncheons, and at-homes. Emily fairly glowed as she whirled from partner to partner, and was fervently courted by no less than a half-dozen youths as brainless and flighty as she.
Tansy, on the other hand, was bored to flinders within a sen’night. She knew for certain now that she had, against all good sense, tumbled headlong into love with Avanoll.
The Duke, refusing to admit to any deep emotional entanglement, doggedly clung to the lively sense of self-preservation that had so far kept him ahead of the parson’s mousetrap, and refused to dwell on his more tender feelings—making a huge show of busyness and detachment where his cousin was concerned.
The dowager, once her charges were safely back in Society, spent her convalescence teaching Horatio to beg prettily for bonbons, and telling him the story of her life as he curled up next to her on the coverlet.
Perhaps these reasons do not excuse the inability of her guardians to penetrate Emily’s compliant facade. But then, who could have foreseen the latest maggot the fair woman-child had taken into her head?