Somerville Farce (11 page)

He couldn’t hear the birds singing high
above him in the trees.

He couldn’t hear the cheers from the
shore.

All Harry could hear was the rasping of his
own breath behind the muffler and the sound of his metal runners
scraping across the ice.

It was time to fly, time to float above the
ice, his knees bent to his chest, his head and shoulders flung
front, his arms wide for balance.

He could feel his muscles bunching to supply
the burst of power he would need to launch himself into the air—and
then he was going up, up, the chairs passing underneath him as he
flew above them with nearly half a foot to spare.

Now there was no sound, no scrape of metal
against ice, no rasping breath, since he had taken in a great gulp
of cold air at the last moment and trapped it deep in his
lungs.

Now there was only quiet.

And then he landed, one foot slightly in
front of the other, his arms tilting this way and that like twin
rudders, keeping him upright, and the sounds of the world came
rushing back.

Harry heard his own grunted gasp as his body
absorbed the rude shock of the landing. He stopped four feet in
front of the chairs, to take his well-deserved bow.

Harry heard the shouts and squeals from the
shore as Willie danced about on one foot, calling, “Huzzah!
Huzzah!”

Harry heard birds calling in the trees, his
horse’s whinny... and the faint crackling sound of splintering
ice.

Splintering ice? Splintering ice! Glynde
looked down at his feet to see an ever-widening spiderweb of cracks
flowing out in every direction. The sound grew louder, and he
whirled around to see that a hole had opened behind him and one of
the chairs was already bobbing on top of the water.

He looked toward the shore to see that
Eugenie or Helena—he couldn’t be sure which, and didn’t much care
at that moment—had gracefully swooned into Andy’s arms.

Trixy was yelling to him, telling him to get
down and crawl toward them slowly, a notion Harry didn’t favor, as
he didn’t relish the thought of what he would look like scampering
about on all fours like a hound. Instead, he gingerly placed one
foot in front of the other, his gaze steady on the bank that
suddenly seemed to be a mile away.

Within the space of a heartbeat Harry was
skating uphill on ice that was tipping into the ever-widening hole
behind him. Slowly, so that it almost seemed like something out of
a bad dream, he felt himself descending, still upright, into the
pond.

As the water closed over his head, the last
thing “Good Old Harry” did was curse that miserable Beatrice
Stourbridge for wishing this disaster on him.

“T
here you go,
Harry—now, open your mouth like a good little soldier. Oh, come on,
Harry. It’s only a bit of broth. I don’t see why you’re making such
a fuss about it.”

The Duke of Glynde eyed the spoonful of
steaming liquid wearily. “Who made it?” he asked, holding the
covers protectively in front of his mouth.

Lord William, perched on the side of the
high, wide bed, replaced the spoon into the bowl. “Well, I don’t
see what that has to do with anything, but if you must know, I
think Trixy—Miss Stourbridge—made it. Now, will you eat it?”

“I thought so. It doesn’t smell like
anything Angelo ever prepared for me.” The covers moved up a
fraction. “In that case, I most definitely don’t want it. Not a
drop.”

“Oh, give over, Harry,” Willie scolded,
rising to set the bowl on a side table. “It has been three days;
don’t you think you could stop blaming Trixy for your accident?
After all, she was the one who devised your rescue, you know.”

“And I don’t want to hear that miserable
story again, William,” the duke warned his brother testily,
lowering the covers a fraction now that the bowl was safely out of
the way, uncaring that he must appear fractious. “Anyone would
suppose you’re thinking of applying to Prinny himself, asking to
have the miserable woman knighted.”

Willie paid his brother no attention at all,
immediately launching himself into a recitation of his latest
hero’s—heroine’s—achievement. “There we were, all of us, standing
on the bank completely helpless while you slowly sank into the
pond, looking for all the world like a ship going down in a storm,
when Trixy ordered us to tie all our coats and cloaks together to
make a rope.”

“I repeat, since you didn’t seem to
understand me: I don’t want to hear it!”

“It was magnificent, really, how quickly she
organized us, what with Eugenie fainting all over Andy the way she
was,” Willie persisted, gazing into the middle distance as if
visually reliving the scene. “Tying the sleeves of the last coat
tightly around my waist, Trixy had me crawl onto the ice on my
belly, but I must have been too heavy, for the surface began to
crack some more.”

“William, if you bear me any affection, any
affection at all—”

“That’s when Trixy took it upon herself to
go out onto the ice, risking life and limb to save you—you, who
hasn’t had a kind word for her, before or since.” Waving his hands
back and forth slowly above his head, as if to demonstrate Trixy’s
actions, Willie continued, his voice hushed in awe. “She slithered
like a snake—without a single thought of herself—until at last she
grabbed hold of the collar of your jacket. You were bobbing up and
down like a cork in a puddle, you know, so it was fairly easy to
grab hold.”

“Willie, I’m warning you—”

“We all heaved to on the chain of
clothing—inch by terrible inch—until at last the two of you were
back on shore.” He turned to look down on his brother, frowning as
he remembered what might have happened. “You could have drowned,
you know, yet all you ended up with was a piddling dose of the
sniffles. Trixy was magnificent, Harry. Truly magnificent.”

Harry slunk down into the mattress, giving
up the fight. Perhaps if he agreed with his brother for once, the
lad might stop reciting the tale at the drop of a feather. “When
you’re right, you’re right, Willie. Trixy was... magnificent.”

Willie deposited himself heavily on the side
of the bed once more. “Yes, yes she was—and now you won’t so much
as sip her broth. I have to tell you, Harry, I think it’s mighty
poor-spirited of you. We all of us do.”

“You all do? Have you had a conference,
then, Willie? Have you taken a vote? Tell me, am I to be
horsewhipped the moment this damnable fever leaves me and I can get
up from my bed? Or perhaps none of you will talk to me for a month.
No, that can’t be it. I’d never consider that a punishment— the
resultant silence would be more in the way of a gift.”

An impartial observer of this scene could
not have been faulted for believing that his grace, the Duke of
Glynde, was behaving in a most surly, ungrateful, even self-pitying
manner.

That impartial observer would, alas, have
been correct.

The duke was behaving badly. The duke was
feeling most exceedingly ungrateful toward his rescuer, as well as
extremely put upon by his brother, who, along with every visitor
he’d had since his dunking, had recited the facts of his rescue
ad nauseam
—Andy, in fact, had even employed props!

Yes, the duke, to be plain about the thing,
would have liked nothing better than to forget the incident had
ever happened.

But Harry’s wish was impossible, for
Glyndevaron was in the country, the countryside was gripped in the
dragged-out end of a long, boring winter, and there was precious
little to talk about other than the one piece of excitement to hit
the estate since Willie and Andy had nearly set fire to the drawing
room lighting the Yule log last Christmas.

The rousing tale of “The Dunked Duke” had
permeated the household from attic to cellars, then traveled
rapidly from stable to outlying farm. There was no avoiding it,
there was no getting away from it, there was—as the long-suffering
duke had learned to his complete disgust— absolutely no way to stop
hearing it even in the privacy of his own bedchamber, a place he
had almost gratefully retired to at his first sneeze, on orders
from the distressed Lady Amelia.

And it was all Trixy Stourbridge’s fault!
Harry had convinced himself of that the moment he’d heard the ice
cracking beneath his skates, and nothing that had taken place since
that moment had served to change his mind.

After all, if she had not been such a lax
companion as to allow her charges to become part of an ice-skating
party, none of this would have happened in the first place.

And if she had not pilfered his skates, and
then all but dared him to try skating far out onto the pond—oh,
yes, she had dared him, he was sure of it, for a warning was as
good as a dare—he wouldn’t have taken that leap... or broken
through the ice... or had to be rescued... or be hiding out here in
his bed, suffering from an annoying runny nose and this miserable
fever—as well as the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Did Harry, deep in his heart of hearts, know
that he was being unreasonable? Yes. He knew it. Of course he knew
it. He had fought it for the first two days, fought it mightily,
but he was a reasonably intelligent man, and he realized that Trixy
Stourbridge had not been the real cause of his dunking. Pride had
pushed him out onto the ice; pride and a sinking feeling that he
had taken on the trappings of adulthood at the loss of the freedom
he had experienced as a youth.

But even though he was ready to admit his
own culpability to himself, Harry was not ready to share that
knowledge with anyone else. Above all, he was not ready to confront
Trixy herself, for if he did, he would have to thank her for
rescuing him—and that, to Harry, could only be seen as a fate even
worse than that of an icy, watery grave.

“What are you thinking, Harry?” Willie asked
at last, interrupting the duke’s brown study. “Your forehead is all
furrowed, as if you’re lost in deep thought. Or are you in pain? Of
course you are. How could I be so unfeeling as to tire you out this
way? Should I send for the doctor again?”

“The doctor?” Trixy inquired concernedly
from the doorway. “What’s wrong, Willie? Can his grace have taken a
turn for the worse? You should have rung for me at once.”

“Rung for you, madam?” Harry bit out
testily, turning his head to see that Trixy, not waiting upon
ceremony, and most certainly not bothered by the notion that she,
an unattached female, shouldn’t be inside a grown man’s bedchamber,
was making her way purposefully to his bedside. “There’s a pair of
my breeches hanging over that chair in the corner. Perhaps you’d
like to try them on for size?”

Willie screwed up his face, looking at
Trixy. “Try on his breeches? Trixy, do you think Good Old Harry’s
gone delirious?”

Trixy shook her head, looking over to see
the still-full bowl of rapidly cooling broth sitting on the side
table. “He was never that sick in the first place. Good Old Harry,
as you call him, Willie, is not delirious. Good Old Harry is simply
being snotty.” She leaned down to adjust his covers. “You
are
being snotty, aren’t you, Harry?”

It took a great effort for Glynde not to
snap back childishly, “I am not!” but he did it, limiting himself
to a short snort of derision. “Are you comfortable, Trixy, running
my household?” he asked, looking up at her.

“Quite comfortable, thank you,” she
answered, gently pushing Willie aside so that she could take his
place on the bed. Reaching out a hand, she tested Glynde’s forehead
for traces of fever. “Oh, that’s much better, isn’t it, Harry? Your
fever is all but gone, not that you ever had much of one in the
first place. Now, if we could only get you to take some of this
broth, we would all be happier.”

“Which ‘we’ would that be, Trixy?” The duke
asked wearily as he watched her retrieve the bowl and spoon from
the side table. “I must warn you that you are beginning to sound
distressingly like my Aunt Fauntleroy.”

“I can think of worse fates,” she responded
easily, lifting the spoon toward his mouth. “Now, open up wide—oh,
come on, Harry, it’s nothing more than chicken broth.”

“I don’t want it,” Harry said, tight-lipped.
“I want some of Angelo’s roast beef—rare, and with horseradish
sauce.”

“I’m sure we all do, Harry, but that’s
impossible,” Trixy answered placatingly, bringing the spoon closer.
“Unfortunately, Angelo departed early this morning for London.”

“What! Angelo has done what?” the duke
bellowed just before the spoonful of broth was dumped onto his
tongue. He swallowed the liquid down automatically. “Dammit, woman,
what did you do to Angelo? William!” he called out, looking past
Trixy to see that his brother was in the process of tiptoeing
stealthily out of the room. “Don’t move another muscle, William.
Now, tell me, what has this miserable, managing woman done to
Angelo?”