The Tenacious Miss Tamerlane (12 page)

Having delivered himself of this crushing
set-down he turned on his heel, planning to ascend to his rooms,
but he was forestalled by Dunstan’s placid reminder that he had
invited guests to dine at Avanoll this same evening.

The Duke dismissed this bit of news with a
wave of his hand, some faint bit of humor entering his cold eyes.
“Oh, that was all a hum, Dunny. I only said it to give our new
housekeeper a showcase for her talent, a chance to strut out her
expertise and instruct us all in the proper way to handle a
domestic crisis, so to speak.”

This blatant insult was enough to rouse Tansy
from her brown study, the sarcastic remarks touching off a chord of
memory. “One moment, please, before you slosh off, your grace. Just
what, sir—if I, a mere employee, may make so bold as to ask you to
enlarge upon just one of the many pearls of wisdom that dribbled
off your tongue a bit earlier—is the premier disaster in The
History of the World According to Avanoll?”

She then stuck out her chin, her haughty
demeanor slightly undone by the issuance of a violent sneeze—a
sneeze that prompted the belabored peacock feather to give up the
ghost and waft drunkenly down to become the object of a farcical
burial at sea in the puddle at Tansy’s feet.

The Duke halted his progress on the third
step, turned, raised a muddy quizzing glass to his eye, and
regarded Tansy through it as if she were a particularly vile clump
of refuse.

“That, my good woman, should be obvious even
to you. The day you came into my life beats both the Great Fire and
the Black Death by a far piece. You, madam, are in fact a walking
disaster,” he sneered, dropping his glass and exposing the
resulting imprint of mud that etched a perfect circle around his
eye and totally destroyed the few remaining shreds of his
dignity.

Tansy was too upset to find any comfort in
Avanoll’s bizarre appearance, and could only watch silently as he
disappeared toward his rooms—where Farnley was undoubtedly ready to
greet him with a hot tub and a long string of “I told you
so’s.”

But the little drama was not yet done. In the
foyer Dunstan approached Tansy, a look of pity apparent on his
kindly face. She averted her eyes, not quite hiding the tears that
threatened to fall, and asked him if he would be so kind as to have
someone in the kitchens bathe and feed Horatio while she repaired
upstairs to “clean up this mess I have become.”

So overcome by her heroic display of
composure was Dunstan that he himself deigned to transport the damp
puppy belowstairs—at arm’s length, of course. As Tansy reached the
same stair his grace had employed as a dais from which to utter his
cutting remarks, she turned and appealed meekly to Dunstan. “I know
I am impulsive and don’t take time to think things through, but am
I really the monster his grace believes me to be?” she
implored.

Dunstan halted in his tracks and strove to
appear dignified while Horatio licked at his ear. “Indeed, no, Miss
Tansy. You are a capital person, and so say all of us
belowstairs.”

This loyalty buoyed Tansy’s spirits so much
that she summoned up a brief smile and replied, “That is kind of
all of you, Dunny. But I know I can be a bit of a trial sometimes.
Even Papa, who loved me dearly whenever he could recollect my
existence, admitted I was capable of getting tangled up in the most
dreadful coils. I do not set out to get into trouble, Dunny,
honestly I don’t; things just seem to have a way of happening when
I’m around. But his grace thinks—well, his grace is just the
rudest, most arrogant, top-lofty beast in nature! I am thoroughly
out of patience with him. He casts me as a Jonah, a jinx. Let me
tell you, he has been no ray of sunbeams in my life either.”

Tansy’s voice grew stronger and her posture
more erect as she spoke, until now she just possibly did resemble a
Boadicea, albeit a soggy one. She gave a defiant toss of her head,
her natural high spirits finding solace in a bout of unladylike
ferocity, and began a militant march up the steps.

Tossing over her shoulder one last burst of
defiance, she announced, “I hope Ashley takes a cold and his nose
runs and turns red and he has to hide himself away in his rooms for
a fortnight. Then I shall send up nothing but invalid gruel and
weak broth until he begs me to accept his apology. And what will I
do, eh, Dunny? I shall snap my fingers in his face, that’s what I
shall do!”

And with her ego well satisfied, she went
looking for Pansy and a hot tub.

F
or the first few
days after what the servants at Avanoll House dubbed “The Big
Fuss,” everyone tiptoed about the great mansion in Grosvenor Square
as if they were treading on eggshells.

With some very noticeable exceptions.

Lady Emily, while outwardly demure and
subdued, was often closeted with her maid, heads together. Such
occurrences usually presaged one of Emily’s mad schemes and would
have warned enlightened observers that trouble loomed heavy in the
future. But any likely observers had other things on their
minds.

Aunt Lucinda, once informed of Tansy’s latest
disgrace, waxed eloquent on several topics, dealing mainly with
ingratitude, knowing one’s place, the perfidy of man’s best friend,
and the decline of Greece, the last of which seemed unrelated to
the subject at hand, but it was a thought no one felt inclined to
pursue.

Nothing was known of the reactions of the two
principal participants in the fracas. Tansy refused to speak of the
incident at all, and the only outward change to be seen was the
increasing amount of time she spent secluded in her room—where
Horatio was being given instruction in the behavior expected of
canines who had so far twice mistaken the Duke’s bedpost for a tree
trunk and selected Aunt Lucinda’s satin bedspread as a repository
for his bones and other treasures.

Little, too, can be told about the Duke, a
sorely used man who invariably found his cravats overstarched, his
eggs underdone, and his bedroom fire either meager or damply
smoking, or both. No need to ask who the servants judged guilty in
the affair.

Sad to say, but true, Avanoll—a man judged
quite unflappable in Parliament, termed intrepid in the hunt, and
hailed as a noted wit in the company of his fellows—was at a loss
when it came to dealing with women and servants. Indeed, he had
ignored his staff and avoided feminine entanglements all his
life.

He was neither prepared nor anxious for a
showdown now, so in the end he took the line of least resistance.
He absented himself from his own home as frequently as he could,
and for as long as he dared. He was, when he thought deeply about
it, ashamed of his cowardice. But he did not alter his course. He
saw the constant ribbings his friends gave him about the exploit as
fitting punishment for his faintheartedness.

The dowager, who had lived longer and seen
more than anyone else in the household, considered the brouhaha to
be a huge comedy. Granted, Tansy had had a lucky escape, for she
could have been socially destroyed. Granted, Ashley had some valid
reasons for climbing on his high horse.

But the dowager felt her grandson’s outraged
sense of
ton
was not his only tender spot, and that he was
also suffering from a bad case of nose-out-of-joint-edness. It was
not that unpleasant to witness his discomfort. Truly, things were
developing along quite interesting lines, so the aging intriguer
thought, and she was content for the moment to sit back and watch
the sport.

Yet, unbelievably, one member of the Duke’s
household—though ever mindful to keep birch twigs tucked in his
hatband so as to ward off Tansy’s Evil Eye—had been made almost
jubilant by his master’s latest tangle with Miss Tamerlane.
Farnley, the Avanoll’s live-in doomsday prophet, was almost
disgustingly delighted by the materialization of the heavy run of
bad luck he had predicted Tansy’s presence would precipitate.

Hadn’t the lady arrived on a Monday—a day
everyone knows to mean danger if a person in the household sneezes
twice before breakfast? And hadn’t the Duke been too liberal
peppering his eggs that very morning (so unusual a lapse for the
master), so that two very loud and distinct sneezes were to be
heard ringing through the breakfast room? Farnley knew the way of
things, he did, and from the moment Miss Tamerlane had set foot in
the door later that same day, he had been fearing the worst.

If only the Duke would agree to the wearing
of the blue beads Farnley knew would protect the innocent from the
Evil Eye! But, no, the Duke had merely laughed and tossed the beads
into a corner. He wasn’t laughing now, thought the valet. Perhaps
if he put the beads where his master could see them he would have
second thoughts on the matter.

Yet amulets and domestic contretemps not
withstanding, time was marching on toward the opening of the
Season—with still so much to be accomplished before the young women
of Avanoll House were ready to make their debuts.

It was in partial remedy to this situation
that the women of the household were today hard at work in the
dust-sheeted ballroom.

“No, no, no! My dear gel, you are not, I
repeat, not to take such gargantuan strides. This is a waltz, the
epitome of grace and beauty. You are to float in your partner’s
arms as a fairy drifts across a meadow of daisies.” The dowager’s
voice dipped to a mannish lowness to emphasize her point. “You look
like a farmer wading through his cow pasture and trying not to trod
in anything.”

As the dowager spoke, her granddaughter—who
sat curled up daintily in a window seat—bit on her handkerchief in
order to hold back her giggles while Tansy, flushed with
frustration and feeling very little the fairy and very much like a
knock-kneed pachyderm, threw down her dancing partner (a
housemaid’s rush broom) with a resounding slam.

“Try if you can to come to grips with the
obvious, your grace,” Tansy implored, stretching out her arms to
her tutor-cum-tormentor. “I am a hopeless case. The country dances
and the rest are all well and good—I rarely will come close enough
to my partners to risk maiming them—but I am never going to master
this blasted waltzing. I cannot even take to the floor with a
broom, who I might add does not lead with much authority. Besides,
I am to chaperon Emily, am I not? And chaperons do not waltz,” she
ended with conviction.

The dowager sighed and repeated her arguments
for, she fervently hoped, the last time. “My dear Tansy, chaperons
don’t usually dance, I agree. But you are so young, and so
well-known—although my grandson probably would say notorious,” she
added as an aside, “since you rescued that beastly mutt Horatio,
that you are sure to be asked to stand up for the waltz any number
of times. You are moderately proficient in the milder dances, but
in the waltz you must be more than adequate. You must be flawless.
A partner suddenly yelping in pain because you have blundered onto
his instep is not a happening to be thought of as anything less
than a capital sin. And,” she added without a hope of being heeded,
“ladies do not say ‘blasted.’”

At the end of this homily the old lady
signaled to Emily that it was time for some musical accompaniment
to the spoken “one-two-three, one-two-three” cadence they had been
calling out for the past half-hour, and Emily dutifully approached
the spinet.

Tansy looked mutinous for a moment, then
sighed and picked up Sir Humphrey—her fortunately footless partner.
As Emily began playing, Tansy curtsied mockingly to the broom and
commenced whirling about the Avanoll ballroom once more.
“One-two-three,” she said addressing the broom before launching
into an example of the light conversational drivel she was told
must accompany her steps.

“Yes, thank you, I am enjoying the Season
above all things, one-two-three, how kind of you to ask,” she
breathed as she batted her eyelashes at the spikey shafts that made
up her partner’s head. As she completed one turn of the room and
neared the dowager, she could resist no longer and pointed out
impishly, “I wager you have the devil’s own time finding a willing
tailor, Sir Humphrey, one-two-three. Are we to see you at the opera
tomorrow night, one-two-three? Those foreign howlers are such
bores! They make it impossible to hold a decent conversation at
times with their bellowing, one-two-three, but everyone attends,
and what one cannot abjure one must endure, one-two-three. I always
say.”

Both the dowager and Emily burst into
laughter, and once again the broom clattered loudly to the polished
oak floor. This time the unfairly condemned Sir Humphrey was
further insulted by a well-placed kick that sent him skidding
through the open double doors and into the foyer, where he came to
an ignominious halt against one glossy, black Hessian boot.

A few seconds later Sir Humphrey re-entered
the ballroom, this time held grudgingly in the grasp of his grace,
the Duke. He advanced purposefully toward his cousin, who was now
standing with arms akimbo in the middle of the floor, daring him to
say something cutting.

“Your broom, cousin,” he offered solemnly. “I
take it the naughty thing has offended you in some way? Did it make
untoward advances on your virtue, or was it simply a case of mutual
disenchantment? Perhaps you are unfair to the poor thing, judging
it at fault when in truth you are not using it correctly.” His lips
twitched in barely concealed mirth as he dug the needle more firmly
home. “I am convinced if you but put a leg over it the thing will
oblige you by flying you anywhere you wish to go.”

Emily looked vacant for a moment, then
clapped her hands and cried gaily, “Oh, Tansy, Ashley is saying you
are a witch! Isn’t that right, Grandmama? I am right, aren’t I?”
she added as silence greeted her words.

The dowager shot daggers at her granddaughter
and was about to insist her grandson apologize when Tansy replied
warmly, “You are correct, Emily. That is exactly what your brother
implied. And he is quite correct. Indeed, l am a witch. As you can
all see, I have already turned a Duke into a toad. Some other witch
before my time made some inroads on making him a boor and a bully,
so I fear I cannot take all the credit. But since my parlor tricks
so amuse you, Emily, stay around a bit and I’ll see if I can
capture the Duke’s true character and transform him into a
poisonous toadstool. At least then we shan’t have to listen to him
croak.”