"Yes, John," he told his brother gravely. "Terrible indeed. Roosters don't bite, my dear fellow. They peck. He did not bite—he pecked you. One must always try to be correct, John even in matters of little moment. You must remember that if you hope to make your way in politics, as you say you do." And with that, he smiled benevolently at brother and chicken, and drew an astonished Miss Tolliver into the house.
"You, sir, should be ashamed," she told him, trying to look severe as she gazed upward, biting her lip to hide her amusement at her last glimpse of John's shocked face.
"Do you think so?" he asked whimsically, brushing a raindrop from her forehead. "I rather thought it was something to crow about!"
Aware that the spot he had just touched felt warm, while all the rest of her face was cool from the outside damp air, Miss Tolliver strove for composure, telling him roundly that she could not be put off by rooster jokes, and making a case for returning to the steps to help John with his charges.
"No, no," the earl said, retaining her hand and leading her toward the morning room to which the other members of their party had already disappeared. "John must learn to deal with all kinds of circumstances, both fair and—er—fowl."
Despite herself, when they walked through the door, Miss Tolliver was laughing.
The remembrance of that laugh continued to make the earl smile as he sat now at his supper table, and his smile grew as he heard her laugh again. Glancing up from a joke she shared with the dowager countess, Miss Tolliver found him watching her, and smiled back unconsciously in that easy, unaffected way that the earl had seen her exercise with all members of his household but himself. Without thinking, he reached out and picked up his wineglass and raised it to her as if in a toast. Suddenly Miss Tolliver seemed to recall her surroundings as well as their relationship, and her smile disappeared as she consciously directed her attention away from him.
With a frown and a slight snap of his wrist, the earl set his glass down again, and picked up his fork, spearing a piece of the chicken on his plate with it, and transferring that chicken to his mouth. Somehow, it was not what he had hoped for, and he thought it a tough and most unpleasant bird.
Chapter 16
After the arrival of Aunt Henrietta and the return of Sir Charles to Willowdale, life settled into its own routine at the manor. People seemed to get up earlier, the earl noted—no doubt due to the exertions of Aunt Henrietta's Lazaurus, who slept in her room and who stood each morning on the sill of her window, greeting the first rays of light with such cries of delight as must awaken anyone sleeping in or near the wing where the old lady and rooster presided. It was not a circumstance that won the bird friends, of course; in fact, the earl was sure that only Miss Tolliver's timely suggestion that they all practice a little trick she herself had learned several years earlier, of tucking cotton into their ears and pulling pillows over their heads at Laz's first crow, that kept the bird from being found one day with his neck mysteriously wrung—a service Miss Tolliver told him she had seriously considered, and would have done, if it wouldn't have so upset her aunt, who loved the rooster dearly.
That, the earl observed, was very true; although Miss Tolliver had, by means unknown to him, convinced her aunt that the earl's dining room was no place for a brown rooster, Lazaurus could be encountered everywhere else in Aunt Henrietta's company. He accompanied her on walks; when they went out driving, a red-crowned head was always seen poking from the back of the landaulet, keeping an eye on the world and sundry; when Aunt Henrietta sat knitting one of her interminable projects in the evening, Lazaurus was comfortably perched in her bag amid the large skeins of wool.
The arrival of Aunt Henrietta and Lazaurus did mean, the earl found regretfully, the departure of all kinds of fowl from his dinner table—a departure that brought him a rather tearful interview with his cook, who told him that he had always understood that m'lord liked his way with a green goose and quails in sauce, and if that were not so, he was sure he would be happy to take himself elsewhere, where his skills were more appreciated.
Because the earl had gone to considerable time and expense to lure his chef from that worthy's former employer, and because he did not want to lose him, he was rather at a loss as to what to do until the redoubtable Miss Tolliver, who had been present for the interview by the mere chance that she wandered into the library from the left just as the chef sought him out from the right, came to the rescue.
With one of her friendliest smiles she explained that the departure of all fowl from the earl's table was a temporary— and to be devoutly hoped not too extended—change in the Willowdale menus. She suggested that the chef look upon it as no more than his host giving up a favorite dish for Lent.
"It is not Lent, mademoiselle," the chef told her severely, his Gallic eyebrows raised alarmingly as he held one wooden spoon like a sword at attention before him, "and m'lord, he is not Catholic."
"No," the lady replied pleasantly, "it is not Lent, and his lordship is not Catholic. But it never hurts to experience the habits and hardships of others, to give one a better understanding of self, don't you agree?"
The chef, whose English was never good, and who lost it almost completely when he was excited, did not agree—in fact, he did not understand—but by means unknown to him he found himself nodding yes and being ushered from the room by the smiling lady whose gentle touch on his sleeve as he passed through the door she held for him, and whose polite "thank you for being so understanding" made him nod again. As she closed the door behind the chef, the earl eyed Miss Tolliver warmly.
"That was very well done," he said.
"I have had a great deal of experience with difficult people," she replied, but so absently that he knew her mind was not on the disappearing chef. He was proven right a moment later when she came toward his desk, her distress evident in her large blue eyes. She stopped before him—in the same spot where Gillian had stood when he started this whole ridiculous venture, his lordship realized suddenly, and smiled. Miss Tolliver returned his smile automatically, before becoming most serious again.
"My lord," she said, "this cannot go on."
The earl, who had risen at her entrance, invited her to take a chair, an invitation she declined as of no moment. The earl disagreed.
"You may find it of no moment, my dear," he told her, in a fair imitation of his Aunt Cassandra at her most irksome, "but I am fatigued nigh to death, and since civility decrees that I must remain standing until you are seated, I beg of you, take a chair."
A reluctant smile touched Miss Tolliver's lips as she sank into the chair nearest to her and the earl, with a great show of relief, sank back into his. "Fatigued nigh to death, my lord?" she asked, with a quirk of an eyebrow.
"Such scenes as the one just endured with my cook always overcome me," he said gravely, his shoulders down as if he were indeed spent.
Miss Tolliver laughed. "As if you couldn't—and wouldn't— handle any number of crises without a flicker of an eye, my lord! I have been watching you. I know! Doing it up too brown—" She caught herself up on the slang and blushed guiltily, but his lordship, who was pleased to hear she had been watching him, appeared not to notice.
"No, no," he assured her with the utmost earnestness. "You misunderstand! My nerves—of the most delicate! My feelings—the tenderest flowers—"
Miss Tolliver laughed again but refused to be drawn into this discussion, which he had hoped would lead her from the conversation she had begun before his interruption.
"You are in a funning mood, my lord," she told him, "but I will not be drawn off what I have come to say to you, and which I started before your flight into fancy. And that is—"
"Do you know, my dear, you bring out my 'flight into fancy,' as you so aptly put it, more than anyone I have ever known?" his lordship interrupted musingly, picking up a letter opener that lay on his desk and using his right hand to tap it gently against his left.
The lady eyed him with some severity. "This is no time
for such talk," she told him. "I am sure it is all very well for your flirts and your fine lady friends—"
"I do wish I knew who has given you this unfair opinion of me," his lordship complained, his brow furrowing as if he were hurt. "It is not as if I have women waiting in the hall, you know—"
It was at that point that they were interrupted by a knock. When the earl called "Enter" the butler walked in to announce, stone-faced, that there was a lady—er, woman— waiting in the hall for his lordship, a woman who said she would not leave without seeing him. Miss Tolliver bit her lip to prevent her laughing at the outraged astonishment on the earl's face. The butler, trying to protect himself as best he could from what he knew was sure to be a thundering scold, if not outright dismissal, excused himself by explaining that it was the newest footman who let the woman in, him not being fully trained and thinking that if she was with Mr. Harry Marletonthorpe, who had been here so recently— which, his lordship would remember, he was—it must be all right. Although, die butler added with strong feeling, anyone with a particle of sense could see that she wasn't quite the thing. . .
The earl's brow, which had been black before, darkened. "You're telling me," he said, "that there is a strange woman in my hall in company with Harry Marletonthorpe? And you did not show them into the morning room? Or the back parlor?"
The butler, who knew the woman was not as much a stranger to the earl as the earl might like, was torn between trying to explain why he had left the company in the hall, and not wishing to say a word before the exceedingly interested—and, he had decided since her first day at
Willowdale—exceedingly nice, Miss Tolliver. In the end he compromised with a wooden "I did not think it best, my lord."
"Might I ask why?" His lordship said the words softly, between his teeth, and the butler quailed inwardly. Usually an easygoing master, the butler knew that, like his father before him, the sixth earl could be dangerous when angered.
"Oh, for heaven's sake!" Miss Tolliver interrupted, taking pity on the butler and winning his lifelong gratitude. "Obviously there is something the poor man doesn't want to say in front of me, and you are putting him in an impossible position! Let us go see what this is all about, at once!"
She rose as if to put her plan into action, but it was not necessary; another moment, and the noise coming from the hall would have drawn them there immediately. Even through the closed library doors the occupants of that room had no trouble recognizing John's voice, raised in acute astonishment.
"What in heaven—" that worthy started as he entered the hall from the back, coming in after a most satisfactory day of shooting. His eyes fairly bulged at the sight of the grinning Harry Marletonthorpe and the statuesque woman by his side. Gillian, who accompanied his brother, recognized Harry, whom he too had never liked, but not the woman, and gazed at John in puzzlement. "It's the actress, you idiot!" John hissed at his younger brother just as the library door opened and Miss Tolliver entered the scene ahead of the earl.
"Oh, no!" John said, his face horrified at the sight of Margaret. "I beg of you, Miss Tolliver, you must return to the library immediately! Bit of a misunderstanding here. Go on back inside and read a book. That's the dandy!"
John had hold of her arm now, and would have literally thrust her back into the room had not the voluptuous redhead standing beside Harry caught sight of the earl, immediately behind his betrothed, and with a most unladylike shriek of "Giles-y!" hurled herself toward the astonished earl, brushing the smaller Miss Tolliver out of her way and into John's arm as she flew past. The woman's arms encircled the earl's neck, clinging there despite his best efforts to remove them, and her tears poured down his waistcoat.
"Don't!" she cried noisily. "Don't, I beg of you! I cannot let you! Oh, oh, oh!"
Miss Tolliver, who had by this time been set on her feet by John, met the earl's desperate eyes above the improbably colored red hair.
"Dear me." Miss Tolliver's voice was cool. "This must be—Vanessa."
It was Vanessa in all her glory, from the purple bonnet with magenta feathers that adorned her improbable curls, to the low-cut sapphire gown that clung to her curves and did much more to reveal than to conceal her many charms. She was a big woman, and tall, and Miss Tolliver thought dispassionately that she would probably run to fat in her later years. Her later years were not now, however, and Margaret, extremely just, could understand what it was that had drawn the earl—and any other number of men—to her.
"Yes," the actress said, raising her head from the earl's chest to dab tragically at her eyes. "It is I. Vanessa."
"Well, by George, Giles," Gillian, who had been studying her intently ever since John's disclosure, suddenly entered the conversation. "If this is who we were looking for, I'm certainly glad we didn't find—oof."
His sentence ended abruptly with a swift kick to the shins from John, who, when he had Gillian's reproachful attention, nodded warningly toward Harry, whose ears had pricked up at Gillian's innocent remark. Coloring, Gillian subsided into the background. It was just as well, for in a moment a sharp "What is the meaning of this?" drew all eyes to the landing where the dowager countess stood surrounded by her daughters and Miss Tolliver's Aunt Henrietta, armed with her rooster.
To complete the scene Peter wandered down the stairs with the rector, drawn to the hall by the noise, just as Sir Charles, leaning heavily on his cane, appeared at the top of the stairway irritably demanding to be told what all the noise was about. He stopped abruptly at the sight of the woman still clinging to the earl, despite Giles's continued efforts to be rid of her, and the name ' 'Vanessa!'' exploded from his lips.
The actress turned her head at the sound of her name, and gave him a friendly wave and a "Hi, Charles-y!"—an action that loosened her grip enough to at last allow the earl to set her firmly away from him.
"Charles!" Miss Tolliver said, astonished, and her brother, who stood for a moment as if he were stuffed, bethought himself of his bedchamber and with a muttered "won't detain you" took himself off to it as fast as his sore foot would carry him.
"Well, I never. . ." Miss Tolliver said thoughtfully. A twinkle appeared in her eye as the earl murmured, "But your brother obviously did."
The twinkle disappeared at once, however, when her glance returned to the earl and the actress, who was doing her best to get her arms around Giles's neck again, and who, failing that, had caught him about the waist and was holding tight, begging him to tell her it wasn't so.
Miss Tolliver was about to recommend that he tell her, and find out later what it was that wasn't so, just to get her to let go, when the dowager countess again entered the fray.
"Unhand my grandson, you hussy!" she cried, hurrying down the stairs and leaving the aunts goggling on the landing. "It's a fine thing when a man isn't even safe from your kind in his own home!"
Peter, whose eyes were wide at the sight of his brother in the arms of a heavily painted woman, and who had missed hearing her name, was heard to ask the vicar, "What kind is that?"
That worthy man, so at home in the world that should be and so out of place in the world that was, bethought himself of a prayer left unsaid at home, uttered something inarticulate, and told his pupil he would see him tomorrow. Then he rushed down the stairs, snatched up his hat from the stand by the door, and with a "so nice to see you all—sorry I can't stay—would be pleased to meet your company—"got himself outside where he stood for several moments as if dumbstruck.
Finally, with a shocked "Well! I never!", he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow. Starting off home, he was so overcome that he was halfway there before he realized he had ridden his trusty old cob to Willowdale that morning, and had to go back for it.
The earl, who never in his worst nightmares had imagined himself in such a scene, wished heartily that he could follow him, but did not. Instead, he stood his ground and watched as his grandmother literally tore Vanessa's arms from around him, and thrust herself between Van
essa and the earl, to the delight of Harry Marletonthorpe, who laughed.
The countess turned her baleful glare toward him. "This is all your doing, isn't it, Harry?"
He raised one hand as if to ward off the accusation, smiling in delight. "No, no," he disclaimed. "I am only here as cavalier to fee fair Vanessa who, reading of Giles's engagement, was so overcome. . ."
His voice trailed off delicately, and the actress took up her part in the story. "Yes," she said, raising soulful eyes toward the earl in a way that, strangely, made Miss Tolliver itch to slap her (a reaction Margaret did not question too closely), "when Harry told me—" Marletonthorpe cleared his throat and, realizing she had missed her lines, the actress quickly changed to "—that is, when I read of your engagement, Giles, I had to come see you, for I know it can be nothing more than the desperate act of a man on the rebound, and I cannot let you do that. Had I known how much you were hurt when we parted-—"
Watching critically, it occurred to Miss Tolliver that the earl had at last found his cue, for his mouth tightened and he looked down his nose at the woman in distaste, so obviously disgusted that her words petered out, and Vanessa at last stood in silence, her eyes tear-drenched—and attractively so, Miss Tolliver noted, wondering why some women could do that while she and others like her always ended up with a red nose when they cried—her lips pleading and her hands raised in prayerful supplication.
"Grandmama," the earl started, "Miss Tolliver—" His eyes were beseeching as they sought Margaret's. "Really—" He got no further for Miss Tolliver took up her part in the scene, applauding gently as everyone stared at her in surprise.
"Really," she said, walking up to Vanessa and extending her hand, "you are very good!" She turned toward the earl and said accusingly that he had not told her how talented the actress was,
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