Chapter Seven
By tea-time of that same day, the remaining females had been apprised of the morning’s upheaval, and the dowager was clucking over the obvious inequities between the housekeeper’s books and the actual expenditures for the household.
“You were too easy on her, Tansy, my pet. Too easy by half. The wretch belongs in Newgate. And Ashley, that blockhead, should be locked up for stupidity, for however he could have overlooked such gross mismanagement I cannot fathom. Having a charming wastrel for a father may not have been a pleasure for you, Tansy, but since his laxity pitchforked you into handling the running of his estate, he has indirectly done us a great service.”
This praise was all well and good, but Tansy was wise to enjoy it while she could—for even at that moment Farnley was upstairs bending his master’s ear with his own version of the story while his grace dressed for dinner.
“If you will but recall, your grace,” Farnley pointed out smugly, easing his master into his evening coat once his tale was through, “I did try to warn you about the young lady. I knew she was bad luck for us the minute I clapped eyes on her. All the signs were wrong that day. If you but tie this hag-stone on your door key, it will go a long way toward heading off any more disasters. When you retire for the evening, I can hang it from your bed-head and nothing evil can harm you at night either. Please, sir.”
“I’ll hang you on the bed-head if you don’t shut up, Farnley. You’re as nervy as an old spinster who thinks there’s murderers lurking under her bed.” The Duke walked over to his dressing table and, picking up a small knife, began to pare his nails.
Farnley, who had been momentarily diverted while retrieving the Duke’s riding jacket from the chair upon which its wearer had carelessly tossed it, suddenly realized what his master was about and cried out in alarm—nearly causing Avanoll to give himself a nasty cut.
“What the blazes?” the Duke barked.
His valet scurried over to the dressing table, carefully picked up all the nail-parings, and cradled them in his hand. “You must not trim your nails on a Friday, your grace, as I have told you so many times,” Farnley admonished. “You will have ill-luck for certain. I’ll save these pieces up until Monday and then scatter them over the back garden.”
“Yes, you do that. Damned untidy, if you ask me, and damned silly. Farnley, you must stop all this superstitious nonsense, as it would grieve me deeply to have to let you go. But you are a bit queer, you know, and sometimes most unsettling. Now excuse me while I make my way downstairs to discover for myself just what exactly transpired this morning to send Mrs. Green bolting from this house without so much as asking for her last quarter’s wages.”
To say that dinner that evening was not a resounding success would be dressing up in fine linen a domestic disaster too discouraging to recount step by depressing step. A crushing set-down from his grandparent, touching on the responsibilities of the head of any household in monitoring the goings-on under his own roof—delivered before Avanoll had so much as had recourse to a single glass of port—was compounded by his sister’s undisguised glee in his discomfort and the rendering of a vague warning from his aunt that went: “‘Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.’ Syrus.”
The Duke could not dispute his Grandmama’s words, and dismissed his sister and his aunt as unworthy of his sarcasm. The only target left to him, besides himself, was his cousin—that infuriating termagant who was just then sitting with a deceptively demure expression hiding what he knew could only be an overweening feeling of superiority.
“So,” he suggested as he walked over to stand leering down at her, “you are well on the way to worming yourself into convincing everyone that you are an indispensable part of this household. I didn’t know you were so concerned with either my domestic routine or my purse. Or is it that you are simply a nosey busybody who delights in sticking her fingers into everyone else’s pie?”
Tansy’s brown eyes flashed fire. “That was a sinister remark,” she responded boldly.
“‘There are some who bear a grudge even to those that do them good.’ Pilpay,” came an unmistakable, trilling voice from across the room—a voice his grace ignored as best he could while he asked his acting housekeeper the menu for the evening.
Tansy’s smile fairly dazzled him as she informed him brightly, “Baked river eel in parsley sauce, if it please your grace.”
Once the figurines on the mantelpiece stopped shaking (due to the vibrations caused by the angry slamming of the front door), the ladies repaired to the dining room to partake of an outstanding example of the heights of culinary excellence Cook was capable once supplied with quality foodstuffs.
In the wee hours of the morning, a trifle worse for wear, the Duke stumbled into the foyer and dropped his house key, the hag-stone attached to it making a terrible din in the quiet house. The butler peeped his head around the corner to see what was the matter, and his grace—putting one unsteady finger to his lips—whispered loudly, “Shh, Dunny, it’s only your sweet laddie-boy, home at last.”
“The name is Dunstan, your grace,” the old family retainer pronounced crushingly, before leaving his master to negotiate the path to his bedchamber as best he could in his castaway state.
When the Duke could no longer shut out the glare of the mid-morning sun that had crept relentlessly across his bed the next morning until it sent skyrockets of pain into his eye sockets, he pushed himself up on one elbow and cast his eyes about his chamber. The mantel clock told him it was only ten o’clock—not too late an hour, considering his activities of the night before. Further investigation showed him what his shivering body already had guessed: there was no fire in the grate, and, stranger yet, no cup of chocolate stood on his bedside table, no fresh clothes hung from the clothes-tree visible through the open dressing room door, and Farnley was nowhere in sight. Odd, indeed.
He leaned over, a move that sent cymbals crashing through his head, and pulled the bell rope. Farnley did not appear. When three more vicious tugs produced not one servant, he opened his mouth and gave a mighty bellow. “Farnley!” he called once, then clapped his hands to his head to still the bells that had set up a discordant clanging between his ears.
Finally, convinced help was not forthcoming, he searched out his maroon brocade dressing gown and spied out his slippers beneath the bed, but in the end he chose to forego the slippers as bending over to retrieve them proved too painful a project.
Eventually he groped his way unsteadily to the dining room—for by now his stomach was paying him up—following the sounds of voices in hopes someone would take pity on him and give him something to make his mouth taste less like a stable floor.
Once propped against the door frame he could make out the figures of the dowager, Emily, his aunt, Dunstan, and his accursed cousin, all seated around a dining table piled high with what must have been every piece of silver in the house.
His sister saw him first. “Oh, Ashley,” she giggled, “you look Perfectly Awful!”
“I don’t recall requesting your opinion, puss, and I am not here to amuse you. Where is my breakfast?”
“Oh,” Tansy said sweetly, “we didn’t expect you down before noon. I’m afraid there is nothing to be had right now.” She replaced the lid on a silver bowl with a slightly heavy hand, and hid a smile when Avanoll grimaced in pain.
“What in blazes is going on in here anyway?” he asked.
The dowager informed him that they were, as any ninny could see, polishing the silver. “I know that,” his grace said, “but why aren’t the servants doing it?”
“You can’t trust servants to take care of such good things,” Tansy told him.
“Why not? I always have before.”
“Perhaps that explains all the dented silver we found pushed into the back of the server,” Tansy suggested.
Lucinda held up a small tureen with a very obvious dent in one side. ‘“This dim-seen track-mark of an ancient crime.’ Sophocles,” she intoned
solemnly.
Dunstan, taking pity on his master, who after all wasn’t a bad sort, suggested he set up a place for him in the morning room, to which Tansy replied, “Don’t be silly! Luncheon is in little more than an hour; the Duke wont wish to disturb Cook unduly. Besides, I doubt soft eggs and kippers would be good for his constitution right now.”
“I can speak for myself,” Avanoll said with some heat.
“So, speak,” said Tansy, whereupon his grace reconsidered looking down on a plate of kippers and muttered that he’d wait for luncheon.
Just then Farnley, who had been noticeable only by his absence, appeared in the doorway holding a large glass filled with a most revolting-looking concoction. “I got all the things you asked for, Miss Tansy, and mixed them up just the way you said.”
Farnley, although no fan of Tansy’s, was reluctant to cross her in any way, and his absence from his master’s side that morning was explained as necessary so that he could go to the apothecary and gather the ingredients for a posset. It was one that had worked like a charm every time when her Papa was suffering the aftereffects of too much wine.
“Are you certain you have everything in there? “ Tansy asked with a malicious grin.
“Yes, ma’am,” Farnley assured her. “Two owl’s eggs, a clove of garlic, a half-glass of onion juice, a tablespoon of eel’s blood, one day-old fish head, and some crushed parsley for color.”
There was a loud moan from the opposite doorway, and the Duke bolted toward the stairs with one hand to his mouth. Lucinda turned to Emily and pointed out: “‘Learn to see in another’s calamity the ill which you should ignore.’ Syrus.”
“That’s strange,” Tansy observed mildly, “it always had the same effect on Papa, but he at least had to sniff it first. It’s not meant to drink, you know. I imagine it would probably kill an ox.”
A little less than an hour later—just as they were about finished with the silver—the Duke, now fully dressed, rejoined the company. “That posset of yours seems to have turned the trick, cousin. My head is still a bit more tender than I’d like, but my stomach is much improved.”
The dowager pointed out that his head wouldn’t be so tender if he had not behaved like a spoiled baby. “It wasn’t my idea,” her grandson excused himself. “I was driven to drink by circumstance. Normally, I am most moderate in everything I do.”
“Circumstance my great Aunt Alice,” the dowager sniffed. “Bull-headed-ness is more like it, if you ask me. Here you were with your housekeeper cheating you all hollow and you too stubborn to see that no housekeeper at all is better than a thieving housekeeper. No, instead of being grateful—”
“Grateful!” Avanoll broke in. “I am without a housekeeper, my valet abandons me on orders from my cousin”—this last said with a sneer—“my servants punish me for my rightful display of anger by leaving me alone in my bedchamber to freeze or starve or both, and all this for a few shillings I’d never have missed anyway.”
Tansy objected to this statement. “Those few shillings, from my best reckoning, add up to over three hundred pounds in the last two years. Wellington could have fed his troops on less than Mrs. Green was skimming off the household budget.”
Avanoll looked skeptical, but as Dunstan nodded his head in agreement his skepticism turned to reluctant belief. Perhaps if his head were not buzzing as if there were a thousand bees building a nest between his ears, he might even have found it in himself to be grateful. But it was, and he wasn’t.
Instead, he climbed upon his hobby horse and started in to ride.
“Three hundred pounds, a thousand pounds—it don’t make a pennysworth of difference to me as long as I can feed my belly at my table in my house at my convenience. What good is three hundred pounds if I’m to be made to suffer the country bumpkin housekeeping methods my cousin believes proper—even when applied to the establishment of a Duke?”
He knew his last thrust had hit home as Tansy visibly flinched at the words “country bumpkin.” If but only for the sake of his pride (and his buzzing head), he would have gone on, had not the dowager come to her feet with an excruciatingly loud screech of her scraped-back chair.
“Grandson, I have listened to all the childish tantrums I intend to hear from you this morning,” she announced sternly, reducing him with one sentence to the rank of naughty toddler. “Of all the selfish-minded, poor-spirited, rude, crude, and ungrateful wretches I have ever met, you, my buck, carry off the palm. Now, can I be assured of an end to this nonsense or must I first box your ears?”
Lucinda’s fragile nerves were becoming terribly overset by all this shouting and she rose to retire from the fray, leaving behind her some typical words of wisdom (indeed, everyone would have felt sadly deprived if she hadn’t). “‘Of all animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.’ Plato.”
Once Lucinda’s exit had broken some of the tension, and since he was secretly grateful the light-fingered Mrs. Green had been rousted, and because he had great respect for (and not a little justified fear of) his formidable grandparent, and in view of the hurt look in Tansy’s eyes which was causing him a slight unfamiliar tender stirring in his chest, the Duke at once bowed to his cousin and uttered an apology. He then walked over and kissed the dowager on her overheated forehead and apologized once again.
Emily, who throughout the past few minutes had been twisting her head back and forth between the speakers with an expression of unholy glee upon her pretty face, felt her top-lofty brother may have been set down a peg or two—but not quite enough.
“Ashley,” she said artlessly, “do you not think a more fitting apology would be to take Cousin Tansy out for an airing in the Park this very afternoon? I know she has been simply pining to try out your new chestnuts. Why not hitch them to your phaeton—you know, the one that is so dreadfully high that it makes me quite faint with dizziness—and let Tansy take the reins?”
She turned from one startled face to the other and smiled an innocent cherubic smile. “Don’t you think that would be a more fitting apology?”
Tansy never blushed in embarrassment; she only flushed in anger. She was flushing now. The dowager, however, seeing a chance to give Cupid a hand, quickly and quite firmly endorsed the plan. Mentally she made a note to scold her granddaughter later for her incidentally helpful but definitely maliciously meant suggestion.
Avanoll, not trusting his voice, grated his teeth together audibly (sending up a thundering racket in his head), mutely agreed, and then quit the room. The dowager Duchess, well satisfied with her morning’s work, went off to closet herself away with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Lady Emily, having polished one half of a saltcellar in all this time, laid down her polishing cloth and retired posthaste to the safety of her chamber—out of reach of her vengeful brother.
Dunstan, who had been busily trying to appear invisible while soaking up every word of this juicy family squabble, muttered something about securing more polish from the kitchens and scurried away to give a line-by-line report of the contretemps (complete with proper inflections and gestures) to his good friend Leo, the Duke’s groom.
Farnley rushed out of the kitchen as soon as Dunstan appeared, quick to seek out his master and try to get back into his good graces—although he could not resist reminding his grace of his prior dire predictions of this being only the beginning of a most dreadful period in Avanoll history.
Tansy was left alone in the dining room, deciding whether to hold the Duke to such blatant blackmail as Emily forced on him or to be sweet and understanding and let him off the hook. After all, the poor man had enough on his plate without having to squire his “country bumpkin” beanpole of a cousin through the Park at five o’clock with all the ton looking on.
But then again, as she thought on it a bit more, he really had been insufferable. She pictured his face as it looked when the dowager was ringing that mighty peal over his head and laughed aloud in the quiet room. Served him right, the pompous ass! How dare he react
so boorishly when her intentions were so honorable? Besides, she really was itching to get her hands on those horses of his!
She rose slowly and carelessly pushed an errant brown curl back from her forehead—leaving behind a grey smudge of polish that neatly balanced out the ones on her chin, nose, and cheek—and went off to make sure her driving ensemble was not in need of pressing. She’d show him a thing or two about driving, or her name wasn’t Tansy Tamerlane!