The Nonesuch Page 33

  ‘Scrub?’ cried Tiffany, colour flaming into her cheeks. ‘How dare you speak to me like that? I’m not a scrub! I’m not, I’m not !’

  ‘A scrub!’ repeated Laurence, with relish. ‘Distempered into the bargain!’

  ‘Quiet!’ commanded Sir Waldo.

  ‘Oh, very well!’ said Laurence, subsiding.

  ‘I’d liefer be anything but a Bartholomew baby, which is what Courtenay says you are! And also a –’

  ‘I said, Quiet !’

  Tiffany was so much startled by this peremptory reminder that she gasped, and stood staring up at the Nonesuch as though she could not believe that he was speaking not to his cousin, but actually to her. She drew in her breath audibly, and clenched her hands. Miss Trent cast a look of entreaty at Sir Waldo, but he ignored it. He strolled up to the infuriated beauty, and pushed up her chin. ‘Now, you may listen to me, my child!’ he said sternly. ‘You are becoming a dead bore, and I don’t tolerate bores. Neither do I tolerate noisy tantrums. Unless you want to be soundly smacked, enact me no ill-bred scenes!’

  There was a moment’s astonished silence. Laurence broke it, seizing his cousin’s hand, and fervently shaking it. ‘I knew you was a right one!’ he declared. ‘A great gun, Waldo! Damme, a Trojan !’

  About the Author

  Author of over fifty books, Georgette Heyer is one of the best-known and best-loved of all historical novelists, making the Regency period her own. Her first novel, The Black Moth, published in 1921, was written at the age of fifteen to amuse her convalescent brother; her last was My Lord John. Although most famous for her historical novels, she also wrote twelve detective stories. Georgette Heyer died in 1974 at the age of seventy-one.