Chapter Three
The duke of Avanoll was not ordinarily left at a loss for words. Indeed, many of his cronies would have gladly plunked down a hefty sum to be privileged to see this normally almost infuriatingly articulate man in his present state. He was utterly without a rejoinder. His mind, however, was tripping over itself in rapid thought—and not a single one of those thoughts appealed.
The gel was a positive quiz. Even seated as she was in the gig, he could see she would tower over every female he knew, although she would fall far short of his own greater-than-average height. Her clothes and hair were abominable, her speech perhaps unexceptional in a man but totally untenable in a lady of quality. She was rude, unmannered, and, in total, unacceptable to the Duke’s mental picture of what any of his blood kin should be.
“I believe, Emily, my pet, that Miss Tamerlane said she was on her way to a new post,” the Duke finally offered without any real hope he would be heeded.
“A position! Governess, no doubt. Ashley, how can you allow a Benedict to hire herself out like any Common Person?” Lady Emily fairly shrieked.
“If I may interject a moment?” Tansy began coolly. “First, I am barely a Benedict. I did not even get the nose—perhaps my one blessing. Secondly, I deeply resent being talked around and across as if I were a piece of goods on a store shelf. In my opinion—”
“Pish-tosh to your opinion, dear cousin,” cut in Lady Emily. “You are like a lone ship in a storm-tossed sea, and none but your family should even be contemplated as a safe nesting place. Am I not correct, Ashley? We have A Duty, do we not?”
The duke opened his mouth, appeared about to speak, and then folded his lips together in a thin line. He opened them once more and admitted his defeat. “Dear sister,” he began, “your metaphor is mixed but, rest assured, your point has been made.” He turned, his eyes to Miss Tamerlane, manfully suppressing a wince, and added, “Miss Tamerlane, my home is at your disposal. It would give my sister and myself extreme, er, pleasure if you were to avail yourself of our hospitality for,” he sighed, “as long as you wish.”
“Your pleasure? Ha! In a cocked hat it is,” Tansy returned with some heat. “You long for my presence the way your chef yearns for the sight of roaches in his pantry. Thank you for the gesture, all references to stormy seas and warm nests are greatly appreciated, but Tamerlanes do not sink to charity nor fly to nests lined with conscience-soothing featherdown reluctantly offered by almsgiving hypocrites who would rather wish me at the bottom of the ocean. One can drown so easily in the outpourings of pity, you know—besides finding so little warmth in the molting feathers that cloak all obligatory poor-relations.”
When the import of these words was realized (at least in part) by Lady Emily, she started in again to snuffle. The Duke, who by rights should have felt the heavy mantle of familial obligation floating blissfully off his already burdened shoulders, was amazed to find himself irrationally incensed by this cavalier refusal of his largesse. Ignorant drab, he thought, heedless of the trap he was setting himself. Does she know she has just bailed out of one of the deepest gravy boats in all England? And how dare she flippantly snap her fingers at me, the head of the family and, worse yet, by her thoughtless cruelty reduce my poor baby sister to tears?
Actually, poor Lady Emily, left to her own devices, would probably forget the girl in less time than it took to ride back to town. But who’s to say she wouldn’t take it into her head to pout, even go into a minor decline? Females could be touchy that way. Witness the dowager, for heaven’s sake!
“Fie, my good woman! Fie and foul!” the Duke blustered, as he had always supposed a head of family was called to do, for hadn’t his pater always gotten his way by merely railing louder and longer than anyone else? “Look what you have done to my dear little sister.” (Far be it from him to remark on any lowering blow to his own mighty Benedict pride.) “I did not believe a member of the gentle sex could be so cruel. To think you would so malign your kinswoman as harboring such self-serving motives, when her golden pure heart was—and is still even after being forced to hear such calumnies—full of none but the milk of human kindness.”
“Oh, give over, your grace,” Tansy came back with a barely suppressed smile. “I cannot abide another muddled metaphor. You know as well as I that I regard this watering pot by my side as no less than the greatest of Samaritans. It is you I accuse of baser reasons for your half-hearted invitation to visit your establishment.”
The Duke colored angrily. “If you think I have designs on your virtue, my good woman,” and his voice was frosty as a winter morning, “let me cast your fears upon the winds.” That should squash her, he congratulated himself.
But Tansy only laughed, a clear, bell-like tinkling laugh that set the Duke’s hackles even more on edge. “I had hardly any fears of cousinly compromise, your grace,” she retorted gaily. “My greatest fear is the belief you mean to make of me an ape leader-cum-warden to this young puss here, and so free yourself for your own selfish pursuits. Come now, cousin, make a clean breast of it. You see in me a golden opportunity to unload your frisky little filly into hands you think capable of holding her.”
“Oh!” protested Lady Emily, much offended. “She is as bad as you, Ashley. As if I am either a feline or a horse! I have quite changed my mind. If Miss Tamerlane wants no part of us I think it unseemly to embarrass her or ourselves by begging.”
Lady Emily did not know it, but her statement set the seal on the matter as far as his grace was concerned. Here indeed was just the chaperon he needed for his witless sister. Egad, that antidote would give even the most desperate fortune-hunter pause. The Duke felt a conspiratorial smile pass between himself and Miss Tamerlane. The lady obviously knew her own worth. To his amazement the exchanged smiles widened into shared grins, and the grins burst forth into laughter. Within moments the two adversaries were chortling with unholy glee.
Lady Emily, her histrionics totally ignored, lifted her face from her bone-dry handkerchief and looked from Tansy to her brother, dissolved over a joke she could not quite—thank heavens, or there would be the devil to pay—fathom. She refused to be shut out from any gaiety, and so half-heartedly chuckled along with them for a little while, until the effort of her forced laughter was overcome by the numbing cold penetrating her fashionable half-boots.
“Ashley,” she pouted. “Ashley!” she cried again, whereupon the ridiculous laughter died raggedly away. “Are we to sit here all the afternoon? I begin to feel the chill.”
His grace looked down at Miss Tamerlane, testing the tenuous rapport that had been established, and cocked one fine dark eyebrow. “Well, cousin?”
Tansy, finding herself the object of two sets of penetrating blue eyes, shrugged her shabby brown shoulders and surrendered to her—as Lady Emily termed it—Fate. She arched one sable-brown eyebrow in mimicry of his grace and said, “Lead on, Macduff. We shall follow you with all deliberate speed. Which is to say we should make London by late December, I should think, if noble Dobbin’s performance to date is to be used as a yardstick.”
“We shall hire a vehicle in the village where you borrowed that sad beast—and I recollect his name as Horace, I believe. Perhaps you have insulted him. I have no wish to spend the next nine months completing a journey that should take no more than three hours. Turn his carcass if you can, cousin, and let us be off.”
Tansy bowed to the inevitable. “Get going, Horace,” she urged.
“Horace,” the Duke moaned as the aged creature groaned himself into a laborious turn. “Why, in the name of all that’s holy, would anyone—even a blacksmith—name a horse Horace?”
“Oh, not the blacksmith. I think that worthy dubbed our noble steed Dobbin,” Tansy corrected as they inched their way back from whence they had come. “I renamed him Horace after a childhood pet of mine that also refused to heed my commands.”
“A singularly intelligent creature, I would say. What was it? One of those repulsive little lap dogs with a pushed in
phiz?”
“You insult me, sir. I would rather forego a pet than have one of those horrid little beasts about, forever yapping and becoming nervous all over the drawing room rugs. Perhaps owing to my own size, I prefer large dogs. Large, romping, tongue-lolling, tail-wagging brutes who are invariably affectionate to a turn. Besides, Horace was not a dog. He was a goldfish.” This last was delivered with a solemn face that could not conceal the twinkling of two russet-brown eyes.
His grace was not daunted. “And he did not heel? Poor specimen, I dare say.”
Tansy agreed gravely. “Indeed, sir, you are so right. In the end, I was forced to be content with the ordinary tricks: fetching a stick, catching a ball between his jaws. You know the sort, I’m sure.”
This was too much, even for his grace. “Were you spanked often as a child. Miss Tamerlane?”
Speechless for a moment, Tansy merely shook her head.
“A pity. If you were mine I would have applied corporal punishment quite often, I believe.”
“But then I believe I should have run off at a very young age if you were my parent,” she returned triumphantly.
“And I would have had the housekeeper pack your portmanteau, and myself supplied a map to the Orient—not to mention enough of the ready to set you firmly on your way.”
Tansy opened her mouth to retort and found she had for once been solidly trumped. “Touché,” she said gaily and made a mock bow, sadly ungainly when done while sitting in a gig.
Lady Emily interposed at this time, reminding the foolishly giggling pair of idiots that she was chilled to the bone. Tansy urged the horse into a bone-crunching trot, leaving behind, and quite out of mind, the dining room of Squire Lindley’s snug country house, where the Squire’s lady, still content in the delusion that her four squalling brats were to be taken off her hands by a penny-cheap governess, was at that moment gleefully biting into a fluffy, cream pastry.
The Tenacious Miss Tamerlane Page 3