Despite Gillian's vociferous objections that he was much better and intended to go to the drawing room and not his bedroom, thank you, and Peter's assurances that he had suffered no chill on the trip and was indeed feeling quite chipper, both were being shepherded by Nurse and Willowdale's attentive housekeeper up the stairs and indoors. At the same time, Aunts Caroline and Cassandra hovered ineffectually about them, Caroline offering tea while Cassandra drooped and told them stories of boys in much better health than they who had died of mysterious complications for not taking care of themselves. Giles had no doubt that each of the invalids would be tucked up in his bed with a hot brick at his feet in five minutes, and grinned at the thought. The grin faded as Harry approached, Miss Tolliver on his arm.
"Well, well, Giles, you've been having quite a time of it, I hear," Harry said, looking from him to Miss Tolliver and back again.
"Yes, we have had, Harry," Giles answered, removing his fiancée’s hand from the other man's arm and considerably surprising her with a swift kiss on the cheek. "How are you, my dear? Keeping well, I trust."
Miss Tolliver, under Mr. Marletonthorpe's watchful eye, could only swallow her ire and answer, eyes on the ground, "Quite well, thank you."
"I am glad." The earl patted her hand and looked down his long nose at his uninvited visitor. "Was there something special we could do for you, Harry, or is this a purely social visit?"
John, who had never liked Harry Marletonthorpe when they were boys and young Harry would not share his famous kite, and who despised in him now his tendency toward dandyism, answered for him.
"Oh, he came for a reason," John said sarcastically. "He came to see if what Chuffy told him was true. Wanted a look at Miss Tolliver, if you ask me."
"But I didn't ask you, did I, John?" the earl asked pleasantly. John snapped his lips together, and Harry smiled uneasily.
"Well, I suppose in a way John is right—I did want to meet the future countess. Meant to ride over to the inn after Chuffy came home with that ridiculous tale, but then I heard the woman—I mean, Miss Tolliver here, was already gone. With your grandmother, too, they said. Most extraordinary. Of course, I found it hard to believe—" He stopped that sentence and bowed toward Miss Tolliver, who nodded slightly.
"You must excuse me, Miss Tolliver," he said. "I let my thoughts run away with me." Despite her best efforts, the lady appeared uncomfortable, and Harry smiled. He knew himself right in thinking something was untoward. With another bow toward the earl he said, "She is a gracious lady, Giles. You are to be congratulated."
"I am." The earl's voice was calm.
"I suppose you'll be puffing it off in ail the papers soon," Harry said, his tone casual, his eyes sharp.
"A notice has already been sent to the Gazette," the earl replied.
"It has?" Harry, hearing the words come out of his mouth, realized they had been uttered by Miss Tolliver, as well, and his eyes narrowed.
"Yes, my dear," the earl patted her hand again. "Soon we will be receiving the felicitations of all our friends."
"We will?" Miss Tolliver's eyes were wide and her voice hollow.
"Well" Harry laughed. It was a forced sound, and Miss Tolliver wondered for the tenth time since his arrival what there was between him and the earl. "I guess I won't be ahead of the news when I reach London, then."
"No, Harry." The earl's smile had an edge to it. "You won't be making news at my expense-—or that of my fiancée or family."
"Ha!" John couldn't contain himself, and his smugness made Mr. Marletonthorpe's face flush. But his words were pleasant as he bade them all good-bye, saying if he wished to arrive in London before midnight, he must be on his way. He charged them with get-well messages for the invalids, which John said later would more likely make them ill than well, and bowed himself away toward the light traveling coach that sat on the other side of the drive in front of the house. The three watched him go in silence, but once he was safely on his way, Miss Tolliver spoke.
"Well!" she said, turning toward the earl, "What was that all about?"
His eyes were on the traveling coach, and for a moment he did not speak.
"Harry Marletonthorpe is a—" John started roundly, but his brother interrupted him.
"It was nothing, Miss Tolliver," the ear! said. "Nothing at all."
Chapter 15
The earl's suggestion that they go into the house was met by a wrinkled nose on Miss Tolliver's part, and a step back on John's, and Giles watched as a look of mutual sympathy passed between them. He was surprised to find that in the week he'd been away from Willowdale an easy understanding had sprang up between his normally formal brother and his betrothed, and, for a moment, he was uneasy about it. The latter feeling he dismissed as unworthy, and inquired if there was something wrong—some matter he should know about before entering the great hall.
"Oh, no. . ." Miss Tolliver began politely, but John was not as kind.
"You've seen what's wrong, Giles," John told his brother frankly. "Aunt Caroline and Aunt Cassandra are here."
"Oh." Giles digested the information. It was not a happy thought. Then another struck him. "Why?"
"They're worried about your grandmother. . ." Miss Tolliver began.
"That's what they say," John interrupted her. "I think they're just here to see what brought Grandmama to Willowdale, not realizing that it was not being able to bear with them that sent her off to us. And then, of course, when they got here, they decided it must be Miss Tolliver, because Grandmama didn't think it wise to tell them the whole story, their being such gossipy old things—"
"John," Miss Tolliver protested, half-laughing and half-serious as she removed her hand from the earl's arm to place it on Mr. Manfield's shoulder. "That is no way to talk about your relatives."
"Perhaps," the earl interrupted, reclaiming her hand to lay it on his arm again, "but quite true."
"Yes." John defended himself, "and you're a good one to talk when I think of some of the stories you've told this week about your nearest and dearest—"
"Oh." Miss Tolliver blushed. "How unhandsome of you!"
"What?" John was thrown out of stride by her words, and, wondering what he had done to offend, looked toward her anxiously. The earl promptly intervened.
"Yes, John," Giles chided. "A gentleman never contradicts a lady. Particularly when he is right."
Miss Tolliver raised her candid gaze to his face and eyes him consideringly. "Yes," she decided, "I can see why your brothers consider that quite your most disagreeable trait."
Now both John and Giles were startled, John uttering a sheepish protest as Giles said " What?" in a tone that would have made Gillian and Peter gulp. Miss Tolliver remained unmoved.
"That habit you have of always understanding exactly what is happening. Particularly when one would most wish you did not."
The earl's eyes glinted. "It will do you well to remember it, my dear," he said, ignoring her protest that she was not 'his dear' and had told him so before. Blandly he requested his brother to continue.
John did, and the tale he told made his brother grimace in sympathy. The aunts, as John lumped them, had descended on them one day after John, the dowager countess, Sir Charles, and Miss Tolliver arrived at Willowdale. Not being privy to the real truth behind the earl's and Miss Tolliver's engagement, they had jumped without difficulty to the same conclusion reached by Nurse—that it was love at first sight.
"Although your Aunt Caroline will have it that you spied me many years ago in London, but I vanished before you could learn my name, and you have been searching for me ever since," Miss Tolliver said thoughtfully, slanting a sidelong glance toward his lordship.
Giles was clearly surprised. "What?"
"It is most romantic," Miss Tolliver informed him, her lips pursed exactly as he had seen his aunt's time out of mind.
"What a ninny hammer!" the earl exploded.
Miss Tolliver patted his arm kindly. "She never called you that," she told him
sweetly. "We all thought it, of course, but no one said—"
"He means Aunt Caroline, Margaret—Aunt Caroline is the ninnyhammer!" John interrupted, anxious to set her straight.
"Ooooh!" Miss Tolliver's eyes opened wide as she digested John's information. "So silly of me—" She was brimming with laughter as John continued his explanation, and the earl, watching her, was amazed at how hard he had to work to keep his mind on his brother's words.
"Anyway," John continued glumly, "they have been here ever since, trying our patience to the utmost. Grandmama locks herself in her bedroom most afternoons just to avoid them—says she is going to take a nap, but we know she smuggles in one of those high-flying romances and a bottle of the best sherry. That has left most of the entertaining upon Miss Tolliver's shoulders, really, and I must say, Giles, she has been a real trooper about it."
"The capable Miss Tolliver," the earl murmured, looking down at her.
Yes, she told him, she had been most capable. Yet she didn't want him to think it had been ail duty—-far from it. She had, she assured him, enjoyed the most informative week! Before coming to Willowdale and meeting his Aunt Caroline, she had never known how many things tea can cure until said aunt arrived to suggest it for everything. Nor did she know how many innocent circumstances and happenings a person can die from, ranging from choking on a toast crumb to sticking oneself with a brooch dipped in poison and dying the most affecting death, until his Aunt Cassandra had acquainted her with the facts. It had, she repeated, been most informative.
"Poor, capable Miss Tolliver," the earl murmured again, favoring her with a smile that made her pulse jump oddly. To squelch it, she smiled right back at him.
"Do not lavish all your sympathy on me, my lord," she said at her sweetest, "for you might require some of it later for yourself. My brother Charles returns tomorrow. With Aunt Henrietta."
Surveying his assembled guests the next evening as they sat at the large mahogany dinner table acquired some years earlier by the fourth earl, Giles could barely suppress a chuckle. Miss Tolliver's Aunt Henrietta was all his betrothed had suggested, and more. At present she was busy out-Cassandraing his Aunt Cassandra—coughing twice for each time Cassandra uttered a small achoo. She seemed entirely unconscious of it, too—something Aunt Cassandra most definitely was not. It was a situation that had Miss Tolliver and his grandmama nearly in whoops, and that was causing his brothers John and Gillian a great deal of amusement as well. The earl knew himself incapable of dampening the spirits of the ladies, but he was quite willing to frown his brothers down. And he planned to do so before Gillian's high spirits at once again being allowed from his sickroom took him beyond the line of what even the most self- concerned individuals—such as the aunts—could ignore.
For that reason he drew his brother's attention from the ladies in question to the footman at Gillian's side as he recommended his brother help himself to the viands offered there.
"Yes, Gillian," Miss Tolliver seconded at once. "Do help yourself to the chick—chick—chicken!" Her eyes met the dowager countess's at the worst possible moment, and both ladies dissolved into laughter behind their napkins.
Not so Aunt Henrietta, whose head snapped to attention and whose eyes grew wide with horror at sight of the large fowl resting comfortably amid piles of chestnut stuffing on the footman's platter.
"Chicken?" the old lady said, shuddering. She pointed a finger at the hapless Gillian who had just helped himself to a large wing, and with a cry of "You heathen " swept from the room. Giles noted that she was not too upset to forget to take her plate with her.
Gillian sat with his mouth open, as did Giles's two aunts, while John, in the midst of swallowing, started to cough, and reached for his wine. The dowager countess, wiping her eyes and giggling as if she were in her teens again, looked across at Miss Tolliver
"Oh, my dear," the countess said, "I do like your aunt! So true to her convictions!" Then she was off in giggles again. Giles, watching the stunned faces of his Aunts Caroline and Cassandra, could only be thankful that Miss Tolliver's brother had chosen to take his supper in his room that night, to recover from the rigors and indignities of his day. The thought of those rigors and indignities made the earl smile again.
It had all started at teatime that afternoon—or rather, the earl thought reasonably, it had started earlier that day, but they were not then aware of it. What they were aware of was the arrival of a coach in the midst of tea, and putting down their cups, all went out to welcome the newest guests—despite the fact, as Cassandra told them, that it was drizzling outside, and they would all no doubt take a chill and inflammation of the lungs from it. She begged her mother not to put herself in such jeopardy, but the dowager countess only eyed her daughter in disgust and said she would not miss meeting Miss Tolliver's Aunt Henrietta for anything.
"Bound to be better than a circus, if half of what Margaret has been telling me is true," she said, surprising the earl with the familiarity upon which his sometimes starchy grandmama stood with his fiancée. It seemed, the earl thought rather wonderingly, that Miss Tolliver was on the best of terms with everyone in his household but himself. It was a circumstance he planned to rectify as soon as possible, and how to do that was on his mind as he followed his grandmother and his betrothed from the room. One quick glance out the front door toward the just-arrived carriage made him think the dowager countess would not be disappointed.
The first sight to greet their eyes was that of Sir Charles, propped up beside the coachman on the box, his afflicted foot out before him and a look of great martyrdom on his face.
"Charles!" Miss Tolliver cried in real consternation, hurrying down the steps despite the drizzle to stand looking anxiously up at her brother. "What on earth—My dear, why are you riding out in the rain instead of inside the carriage? Your poor foot. . ."
Sir Charles sat stiffly erect as he gazed down at her, his mouth tight as water dripped off his beaver and down his neck. "I do not ride with poultry, Margaret," he said.
"Oh, Charles!" Miss Tolliver shook her head, torn between vexation at his stuffiness, and real concern for his discomfort. "You silly thing! Do come down from there and let us help you into the house and up to a nice warm bed and a hot toddy. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"
Sir Charles knew he would like that very much. So much, in fact, that he was willing to overlook his sister's ill- considered "silly thing" epithet, and would have done so if at that moment his Aunt Henrietta hadn't stuck her head out of the coach to demand Margaret's assistance in descending from the carriage—despite, Charles noted bitterly, the fact that two perfectly able-bodied footmen stood ready to assist her, as well as the earl himself. Charles was further outraged to discovered that the reason his aunt required Miss Tolliver's assistance, and claimed her attention over his far more deeply felt need, was to hold "that confounded chicken," as he phrased it.
Miss Henrietta informed everyone in sight, in the tones of the slightly deaf, that Lazaurus was a high-strung aristocrat who could only be handled by someone he knew well or someone who understood the temperament and soul of a rooster—and that someone was Margaret. Smiling, Miss Tolliver took the bird, stroking his feathers with one hand as she cradled him to her side with the other.
Miss Tolliver did suggest that it was most unkind of her aunt to make Sir Charles ride on the box in the rain, with his bad foot, but her aunt only looked at her and said in the most reasonable tones imaginable, "But my dear, Charles makes Lazaurus nervous. We can't have that!"
Once she descended, in a wave of trailing shawls and tangled fringe, her gray crimped curls covered by a black mantilla because, as she would later tell them, she could not abide hats, Aunt Henrietta took the bird back again. Then she suggested that they all go into the house because, as she confided to one of the footmen who so far forgot himself as to look astonished, "travel always makes Lazaurus bilious." She considered for a moment before jerking her head backward toward the coachbox, and adding, "Just li
ke Charles there." Her long-suffering nephew sighed heavily.
Aunt Henrietta took several steps forward, then stopped suddenly, nearly tripping John, who followed behind her. She turned and her eyes sought her niece as she said, "Oh yes. Almost forgot. Come to meet your earl, Margaret. Charles says he has 20,000 pounds a year. I am sure I shall like him excessively."
She gazed about her in expectation while Sir Charles sat on the box as if turned to stone. Margaret cast him a reproachful look before stepping forward to make the introductions. She was relieved to find the earl appeared amused rather than irritated, and had opened her mouth to present her aunt to him when she realized that his amusement did not surprise her. There was something about him that was so—well, dependable, that way. . . Trying to figure out what it was, she became so lost in thought that, after a brief moment, the earl stepped forward and performed the introductions himself.
Aunt Henrietta gazed up at him placidly, paying particular attention to his face. "Oh yes," she declared, "you'll do nicely. Twenty thousand pounds! You may carry Lazaurus!" And so saying, she thrust the rooster into his hands and made her stately way up the steps, trailing shawls and hosts behind her.
"Oh my!" Miss Tolliver said, hurrying forward. "I am so very sorry! She has never allowed anyone but me to carry Lazaurus before—I never thought—" She reached for the bird, but the earl was before her.
"No, no, my dear," he said, handing the rooster off to an unsuspecting John, and catching Miss Tolliver's hand to lead her after her vanishing aunt. "Do not be concerned. John will take care of the bird. Won't you, John? And you'll see to Miss Tolliver's brother, too, won't you?"
They had reached the top step when John's indignant "Here! I say—ouch!" stopped them, and both the earl and Miss Tolliver looked back questioningly.
"This obnoxious fellow bit me!" John said, regarding Lazaurus in indignation.
"How terrible!" Miss Tolliver cried, preparing to descend the steps immediately. The earl held her hand to keep her from it even as he agreed with what she said.
Kidnap Confusion Page 13