Free The Tenacious Miss Tamerlane by Kasey Michaels Page A

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