Somerville Farce (4 page)

What it was, as a matter of fact, was
deucedly unnerving. It wasn’t like William not to be running some
rig, existing in, or on the precipice of, some sort of trouble.
Having a well-behaved William around was much like having a lighted
bomb tucked inside one’s pants—not only extremely uncomfortable but
also deadly.

Harry stood at the window for some time, his
hands clasped behind his back, the afternoon sun glinting dully on
his dark hair and highlighting his clear, chiseled profile. He
frowned once or twice, remembering both his failed revenge and his
brother’s seeming bid for a halo, both remembrances jabbing at him
like small needles, keeping him from enjoying the usually pleasing
scene outside the window.

Perhaps, he thought, shrugging, he was
overtired from spending eight long hours on the road, traveling
back to Glyndevaron, the trip following hard on a nearly sleepless
week spent on a fruitless hunt across London for Somerville. That
could explain the niggling feeling that something wasn’t right.

It could, he mused further, conjuring up yet
another mental picture of his brother’s rather woebegone face as
they had climbed the steps to Glyndevaron a scant half-hour ago—but
he most seriously doubted it.

“Ah, there you are, Harry. We’ve been
looking for you.”

Glynde slowly turned on his heels to stand,
the sun at his back, watching as William and Andrew edged
hesitantly into the study. “William... Andrew,” he said wearily,
inclining his head. “You boys aren’t wearing your usual happy,
smiling faces. Might I assume you aren’t overjoyed with our
precipitate return to Glyndevaron?” he asked, something inside him
making him probe for some slight hint that might explain his
growing feeling that the “bomb” in his clothing was burning down
closer to the end of its fuse. “Perhaps you didn’t get to see every
dark den of iniquity in London but, I assure you, they will still
be there waiting for you when we return to the city in April.”

“Oh, cut line, Harry!” Willie protested,
throwing himself into a nearby chair. “You know as well as I do
that Andy and I didn’t so much as knock over a Charlie’s box or
roll a single pair of dice in any gaming hell for the entirety of
the time we were in town. It was quite dashed dull, as a matter of
fact—almost the whole week.”

“Almost?” Harry questioned, his
instincts—and the pinched look on Andy’s thin face—urging him to
delve deeper. “Then I may relax, William, knowing that you did
discover some small amusement to take your mind off the thought
that your beloved brother might be leaving the house at any moment
either to kill or to be killed?”

Willie gave a careless wave of his hand.
“Oh, that,” he said dismissively. “There was never any danger of
you dying, Harry. All the world knows what a splendid shot you
are—and what a marvel you are with a sword. We never gave a second
thought to your chances for dispatching Somerville without so much
as breaking a sweat.”

“How very gratifying—I think,” Glynde
pronounced ruefully, wondering how he had ever thought William
might have gained his solemn expression from worry about his
safety.

Andrew, prudently taking up an easily
defensible position behind William’s chair, his long fingers
kneading the burgundy leather of the chair back, piped up, “It was
only when you discovered that Somerville had flown the coop that
poor devoted Willie here became distressed.” He leaned forward,
looking down at William even as one long finger poked his friend in
the neck. “Ain’t that right, Willie?”

Willie, slapping Andy’s jabbing finger away,
responded quickly, “Right, Andy. Right as rain. Powerfully
distressed I was, to see m’brother thwarted in his bid for
revenge.”

“Not revenge, William, at least not to my
mind. Justice, I’d call it,” Harry slid in, his sharp dark eyes not
missing Andy’s urgent poke or William’s testy response. “Myles
Somerville bilked our trusting father out of half a fortune, and
the humiliation of the thing hastened Papa’s death. No matter that
I’ve managed to recoup our losses and more, the principle of the
thing remains.”

“Um, precisely,” Willie agreed, nodding.
“I’m a firm believer in principles m’self, as a matter of fact. I
am, ain’t I, Andy?” he asked, pushing back his head to look up at
his friend. “It can really set me off—just to think about the
principle of the thing.”

“Willie’s a real firebrand,” Andy agreed
immediately, looking at Glynde. “That’s why I couldn’t stop him
when he decided to take matters into his own hands.”

“What!” Willie leapt from the chair to turn
and glare at this traitor to some yet unknown, nebulous situation
Harry was increasingly seeing as “the burning fuse.” Willie took
two steps forward, and Andy took three back. “What do you mean, ‘he
decided to take matters into his own hands’? You were the one that
was prattling nineteen to the dozen about knights of old and blood
feuds and all that rot. You were the one that said it would be as
simple as spitting in a puddle. You were the one that said Harry
would be tickled to death ‘to do the dirty deed.’ You were the one
that—”

“Yes, one! One, I said!” Andy interrupted,
holding up a single finger and wagging it in Willie’s face. “I said
it would work with one. I never said anything about more than that,
now, did I? Think on it, Willie. One was all I mentioned. I thought
we could count on your brother for one. I never said he was a
bloody stallion.”

“Oh, really? Well, who was it who said it
didn’t make any never-mind, huh?” Willie challenged, advancing yet
another step. “And who was it who couldn’t come up with a single
idea to get us out of the mess you got us into—you, who are always
so brimful with marvelous ideas? Answer me that, will you?”

“Boys,” Harry said, interposing himself
between his brother and Andy before the boys could come to actual
blows. He had seen the two friends come to physical violence
before, and it wasn’t easy to intervene once the fisticuffs had
begun.

As a matter of fact, following one memorable
occasion upon which Harry had ended up with an inadvertent black
eye, delivered by one of the combatants, he had taken to throwing a
bucket of water on them as they rolled about on the floor, flailing
at each other. It was messy, and terribly hard on the carpets if
the contretemps took place indoors, the duke had acknowledged when
Pinch showed signs of taking exception to the procedure, but it was
eminently less personally painful to Harry.

“I think we’d best have a small talk, boys,”
he said now. “What is all this business about knights of old—and
why would I need to be a stallion? I have to tell you, I don’t much
like the sound of this. Now, what foolish mess have you two created
this time?”

Willie—his weight pressing hard against his
brother’s palm, which was at that moment pressed against the
younger man’s chest as that same young man leaned forward, the
better to reach his opponent—narrowed his eyes to say
exasperatedly, forgetting that this small particle of information
had yet to be shared with his sibling, “It’s that terrible woman,
of course. What else could be the problem?”

“Just the one woman? What about the others?”
Andy said by way of rebuttal, leaning against the duke’s other
palm, his hands reaching forward on the off-chance he might be able
to get in at least one good shot at his fellow conniver. “I should
think you’d believe the others to be a small bit of the problem.
Especially the last one. She’s the one what queered the whole
thing.”

The Duke of Glynde, suppressing a suddenly
happier memory of days spent battling biting insects and
debilitating heat on the Peninsula while on the lookout for enemy
snipers in the hills, took two fistfuls of shirt—one in either
hand—and pulled the two arguing youths to within a flea’s whisker
of his own face. “From the beginning, boys—now!” he commanded
tersely, his dark eyes flashing fire.

So saying, and after shifting his narrowed
gaze first to one boy, then the other, Harry pushed them both
rudely away and sat down in the chair William had recently vacated.
“I’m waiting, boys. It has, all in all, been a trying week. Don’t
push my patience beyond another moment.”

Willie and Andy, who had only seconds
earlier believed there could be no greater joy in life than that of
beating each other senseless, exchanged glances, immediately called
a silent truce, and joined forces against a common enemy. Arms
linked, they stepped in front of the chair, prepared to make a
clean breast of things.

“I...” Andy began, and then as Willie
pointedly cleared his throat, amended, “that is, we—Willie and
I—were very worried about your distressed state when you learned
that Somerville had flown the coop.”

Willie nodded vigorously. “Terribly worried,
Harry. You could have gone into a decline or taken up gambling or
something, for all we knew. It didn’t seem fair.”

“So, knowing you’d have to return to
Glyndevaron without having the chance to put a ball or a poke into
Somerville, we decided that you might be able to revenge yourself
in some other way.”

Andy leered at his friend. “Yes, Willie
wanted... I mean, we wanted you to be able to poke somebody,
right?”

Willie, who hadn’t blushed in years, turned
beet red from his chin to the roots of his blond hair.

Harry closed his eyes as the fuse burned
down closer to the bomb, lighting a small fire in his belly. “Go
on,” he urged quietly, the words “knights of old” ringing in his
ears. Had the two nodcocks actually believed he would...? No, it
was impossible, even for them.

When the boys hesitated, he added, still
with his eyes shut, “Perhaps it might help move things along a
trifle if I tell you that I am aware Somerville has two
daughters.”

Andy’s thin, underpaid-assistant-rector’s
solemn face split into an unholy grin. “Oh, yes, sir, that does
help, indeed. Did you know they are twins—the daughters, I mean?
Sleep in the same bed and everything?”

Glynde’s eyes popped open and he impaled
Andy with their hot glare. “And just how did you come by that
interesting piece of information, Mr. Carlisle?” he asked tightly.
“To this moment, I had foolishly assumed you two were lamenting the
failure of what I’m sure, in your minuscule minds, you perceived to
be a brilliant plan. Are you trying to tell me you actually took
your lunacy so far as to succeed in gaining access to Miss
Somerville’s bedchamber?”

“The Misses Somerville,” Willie stated
punctiliously, stepping forward a pace to help bring home his
point. “There are two of ’em, Harry, remember?”

“How silly of me to forget,” Glynde
responded, something in his tone causing Willie to beat a hasty
retreat, and he rejoined Andrew, the two of them all but clinging
together for, obviously, they were about to come to the crux of the
story.

“Yes, well, sir,” Andy said, running a
fingertip beneath his suddenly too-tight collar, “it is important,
I suppose, to remember that there were—are—two of them. That makes
four, altogether.”

“Four
what
altogether?” the duke
asked, unable to understand. “Four women you threw into high
hysterics? Four women who are, even as we speak, laying charges
against you in London? Four women whose throats you slit to gain
their silence? Four women who... Good God, now I’m thinking like
the pair of you!”

“Just four altogether, Harry,” Willie added,
his courage reviving as he saw his brother’s anger begin to crumble
into incomprehensibility. “The girls—they’re twins, you remember;
you seem to keep forgetting that, and it’s quite important,
actually—the maid, and that terrible governess woman. She’s the
worst of them. Everything would have been fine—even if Miss
Somerville being twins had thrown a kink into our plans—if it just
hadn’t been for her.”

Still, like Willie, smarting from his
treatment at the hands of the Somerville governess, Andy burst into
speech. “I still say we could have scraped through with the maid
and the girls. If only that dratted female hadn’t had the
pistol.”

Grown men shouldn’t cry, Harry knew, but
there were times when it seemed the only alternative to physical
mayhem. “William!” he commanded, rising to place himself directly
in front of his trembling brother. “I demand you tell me what you
did to Miss Somerville—either one or both Misses Somerville—and I
demand that you tell me now.”

As Willie opened his mouth to speak, Harry
held out a hand to silence him until he finished laying down the
conditions of the confession. “But, William, before you say
anything, think: if you are about to tell me that now, at this
moment, there are two hysterical young girls waiting upstairs in my
bed, ready for me to enact some Middle Ages revenge on their
undoubtedly chaste bodies, I shall most probably murder you!”

“Well, of course not!” Willie exploded in
exasperation, shaking his head. “Why would I do a thing like that?
Two of ’em in your bed—and at one and the same time? I should
hardly think so, even for you. Don’t talk nonsense, Harry.”

Harry allowed his chin to sink onto his
chest.

“Thank God,” he murmured, relieved. For a
moment there he had actually begun to believe his brother had been
idiotic enough to kidnap the Somerville twins and bring them to
Glyndevaron for him to deflower.

He should have known better. William and his
maggoty friend had probably gone so far as to climb a drain and
peep in on the girls—that much folly he could easily lay at their
doorsteps—but even William was too intelligent to actually carry
out such a harebrained scheme.

“No,” Andy corrected happily—just as the
duke remembered something about there being two other women, and a
pistol that seemed to figure heavily somewhere in the story—“we
wouldn’t do anything half so shabby. They’re upstairs in the west
wing, all tucked up nice and tight.”