The Tenacious Miss Tamerlane Read Online Free PDF Page A

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