The Parasol Protectorate Boxed Set (17 page)

Professor Lyall, startled by this sudden switch in topic, looked uncomfortably at Miss Tarabotti.

“Oh, is it secret?” asked Alexia. One was never quite certain with the supernatural set. She knew there existed such concepts
as pack protocol and pack etiquette, but sometimes these things were learned via cultural acumen and never taught or talked
of openly. It was true that werewolves were more integrated into everyday society than vampires, but, still, one never knew
unless one was actually a werewolf. Their traditions were, after all, much older than those of daylight folk.

Professor Lyall shrugged elegantly. “Not necessarily. I should caution, however, that pack rules are often quite blunt and
not necessarily intended for a lady of Miss Hisselpenny's delicacy.”

Alexia grinned at him. “As opposed to mine?” she asked, putting him on the spot.

The professor was not to be trifled with. “My dear Miss Tarabotti, you are nothing if not resilient.”

Ivy, blushing furiously, spread open her fan and began fluttering it to cool her hot face. The fan was bright red Chinese
silk with yellow lace at its edge, clearly selected to match the reprehensible shepherdess hat. Alexia rolled her eyes. Was
Ivy's dubious taste now extending to
all
her accessories?

The fan seemed to give Miss Hisselpenny some courage. “Please,” she insisted, “do not forbear needlessly on my account.”

Miss Tarabotti smiled approvingly and patted her friend on the upper arm before turning expectantly back to face Professor
Lyall in his darkened corner. “Shall I come to the point, Professor? Lord Maccon's manners have been highly bewildering of
late. He has made several”—she paused delicately—“interesting incursions in my direction. These began, as you no doubt observed,
in the public street the other evening.”

“Oh, dear Alexia!” breathed Miss Hisselpenny, truly shaken. “You do not mean to tell me you were
observed
!”

Miss Tarabotti dismissed her friend's concern. “Only by Professor Lyall here, so far as I am aware, and he is the soul of
discretion.”

Professor Lyall, though clearly pleased by her accolade, said, “Not to be rude, Miss Tarabotti, but your aspect of pack protocol
is…?”

Alexia sniffed. “I am getting there. You must understand, Professor Lyall, this is a smidgen embarrassing. You must permit
me to broach the matter in a slightly roundabout manner.”

“Far be it for me to require directness from
you,
Miss Tarabotti,” replied the werewolf in a tone of voice Alexia felt might be bordering rudely on sarcasm.

“Yes, well, anyway,” she continued huffily. “Only last night at a dinner event we both attended, Lord Maccon's behavior gave
me to understand the previous evening's entanglement had been a… mistake.”

Miss Hisselpenny gave a little gasp of astonishment. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “how
could
he!”

“Ivy,” said Miss Tarabotti a touch severely, “pray let me finish my story before you judge Lord Maccon too harshly. That is,
after all, for me to do.” Somehow Alexia could not endure the idea that her friend might be thinking ill of the earl.

Alexia continued. “This afternoon, I returned home to find him waiting for me in this very parlor. He seems to have changed
his mind once again. I am becoming increasingly confused.” Miss Tarabotti glared at the hapless Beta. “And I do not appreciate
this kind of uncertainty!” She put down the ribbon pillow.

“Has he gone and botched things up again?” asked the professor.

Floote entered with the tea tray. At a loss for what proper etiquette required, the butler had placed the raw liver in a cut-glass
ice-cream dish. Professor Lyall did not seem to care in what form it was presented. He ate it rapidly but delicately with
a small copper ice-cream spoon.

Floote served the tea and then disappeared once more from the room.

Miss Tarabotti finally arrived at the point. “Why did he treat me with such hauteur last night and then with such solicitude
today? Is there some obscure point of pack lore in play here?” She sipped her tea to hide her nervousness.

Lyall finished his chopped liver, set the empty ice-cream dish on the piano top, and looked at Miss Tarabotti. “Would you
say that initially Lord Maccon made his interest clear?” he asked.

“Well,” hedged Miss Tarabotti, “we have known each other for a few years now. Before the street incident, I would say his
attitude has been one of apathy.”

Professor Lyall chuckled. “
You
did not hear his comments after those encounters. However, I did mean more recently.”

Alexia put down her teacup and started using her hands as she talked. It was one of the few Italian mannerisms that had somehow
crept into her repertoire, despite the fact that she had barely known her father. “Well, yes,” she said, spreading her fingers
expansively, “but then again, not decisively. I realize I am a little old and plain for long-term romantic interest, especially
from a gentleman of Lord Maccon's standing, but if he was offering claviger status, oughten I to be informed? And isn't it
impossible for…” She glanced at Ivy, who did not know she was a preternatural. She did not even know that preternatural folk
existed. “For someone as lacking in creativity as me to be a claviger? I do not know what to think. I cannot believe his overtures
represent a courtship. So when he recently ignored me, I assumed the incident in the street had been a colossal mistake.”

Professor Lyall sighed again. “Yes, that. How do I put this delicately? My estimable Alpha has been thinking of you instinctively,
I am afraid, not logically. He has been perceiving you as he would an Alpha female werewolf.”

Miss Hisselpenny frowned. “Is that complimentary?”

Seeing the empty ice-cream dish, Miss Tarabotti handed Professor Lyall a cup of tea.

Lyall sipped the beverage delicately, raising his eyebrows from behind the lip of the cup. “For an Alpha male? Yes. For the
rest of us, I suspect, not quite so much. But there is a reason.”

“Go on, please,” urged Miss Tarabotti, intrigued.

Lyall continued. “When he would not admit his interest even to himself, his instincts took over.”

Miss Tarabotti, who had a brief but scandalous vision of Lord Maccon's
instincts
urging him to do things such as throw her bodily over one shoulder and drag her off into the night, returned to reality with
a start. “So?”

Miss Hisselpenny said to her friend, looking at Lyall for support, “It is an issue of
control
?”

“Very perceptive, Miss Hisselpenny.” The professor looked with warm approval at Ivy, who blushed with pleasure.

Miss Tarabotti felt as though she was beginning to understand. “At the dinner party, he was waiting for
me
to make overtures?” She almost squeaked in shock. “But he was flirting! With a… a… Wibbley!”

Professor Lyall nodded. “Thereby trying to increase your interest—force you to stake a claim, indicate pursuit, or assert
possession. Preferably all three.”

Both Miss Tarabotti and Miss Hisselpenny were quite properly shocked into silence at the very idea. Though Alexia was less
appalled than perturbed. After all, had she not
just
discovered, in this very room, the depth of her own interest in equalizing the male-female dynamic? She supposed if she could
bite Lord Maccon on the neck and regret that she left no lasting mark, she might be able to claim him publicly.

“In pack protocol, we call it the Bitch's Dance,” Professor Lyall explained. “You are, you will forgive my saying so, Miss
Tarabotti, simply
too much
Alpha.”

“I am not an Alpha,” protested Miss Tarabotti, standing up and pacing about. Clearly, her father's library had failed her
entirely on the niceties and mating habits of werewolves.

Lyall looked at her—hands on hips, full-figured, assertive. He smiled. “There are not many female werewolves, Miss Tarabotti.
The Bitch's Dance refers to liaisons among the pack:
the female's
choice.”

Miss Hisselpenny maintained an appalled silence. The very idea was utterly alien to her upbringing.

Miss Tarabotti mulled it over. She found she liked the idea. She had always secretly admired the vampire queens their superior
position in hive structure. She did not know werewolves had something similar.
Did Alpha females,
she wondered,
trump males outside the romantic arena as well?
“Why?” she asked.

Lyall explained. “It
has
to be up to the female, with so few of them and so many of us. There is no battling over a female allowed. Werewolves rarely
live more than a century or two because of all the in-fighting. The laws are strict and enforced by the dewan himself. It
is entirely the bitch's choice every step of the dance.”

“So, Lord Maccon was waiting for me to go to him.” Miss Tarabotti realized for the first time how strange it must be for the
older supernatural folk to adjust to the changing social norms of Queen Victoria's daylight world. Lord Maccon always seemed
to have such things well in hand. It had not even occurred to Alexia that he had made a mistake in his behavior toward her.
“Then what of his conduct today?”

Miss Hisselpenny sucked in a gasp. “What did he do?” She shivered in delighted horror.

Miss Tarabotti promised to tell her the particulars later. Although this time, she suspected, she would not be able to reveal
every detail. Things had progressed a little too far for someone of Ivy's delicate sensibilities. If merely looking at that
wingback chair could make Alexia blush, it would certainly be too much for her dear friend.

Professor Lyall coughed. Miss Tarabotti believed he was doing so to hide amusement. “That may have been my fault. I spoke
to him most severely, reminding him to treat you as a modern British lady, not a werewolf.”

“Mmm,” said Miss Tarabotti, still contemplating the wingback chair, “perhaps a little too modern?”

Professor Lyall's eyebrows went all the way up, and he leaned a little out of the shadows toward her.

“Alexia,” said Miss Hisselpenny most severely, “you must force him to make his intentions clear. Persisting in this kind of
behavior could cause quite the scandal.”

Miss Tarabotti thought of her preternatural state and her father, who was reputed to have been quite the philanderer before
his marriage.
You have no idea,
she almost said.

Miss Hisselpenny continued. “I mean to say, not that one could
bear
to think such a thing, but it must be said, it really must…” She looked most distressed. “What if he only intends to offer
you
carte blanche
?” Her eyes were big and sympathetic. Ivy was intelligent enough to know, whether she liked to acknowledge it or not, what
Alexia's prospects really were. Practically speaking, they could not include marriage to someone of Lord Maccon's standing,
no matter how romantic her imagination.

Alexia knew Ivy did not intend to be cruel, but she was hurt nonetheless. She nodded glumly.

Professor Lyall, whose sensitivities were touched by Miss Tarabotti's suddenly sad eyes, said, “I cannot believe my lord's
intentions are anything less than honorable.”

Miss Tarabotti smiled, wobbly. “That is kind of you to say, Professor. Still, it seems as though I am faced with a dilemma.
Respond as your pack protocol dictates”—she paused seeing Ivy's eyes widen—“risking my reputation with ruination and ostracism.
Or deny everything and maintain as I have always done.”

Miss Hisselpenny took Miss Tarabotti's hand and squeezed it sympathetically. Alexia squeezed back and then spoke as though
trying to convince herself. She was, after all, soulless and practical. “Mine is not precisely a bad life. I have material
wealth and good health. Perhaps I am not useful nor beloved by my family, but I have never suffered unduly. And I have my
books.” She paused, finding herself perilously close to self-pity.

Professor Lyall and Miss Hisselpenny exchanged glances. Something passed between them. Some silent pact of purpose to do… Ivy knew not what. But, whatever the future, Miss Hisselpenny was certainly glad to have Professor Lyall on her side.

Floote appeared in the doorway. “A Mr. Haverbink to see you, Miss Tarabotti.”

Mr. Haverbink entered the room, shutting the door behind him.

Professor Lyall said, “Forgive me not standing, Haverbink. Too many days running.”

“Not a worry, sir, not a bit of it.” Mr. Haverbink was an extraordinarily large and thuglike man of working-class extraction.
What origins his cultivated speech left in doubt, his physical appearance demonstrated. He was the type of good farming stock
that, when the oxen collapsed from exhaustion, picked up the plow, strapped himself to it, and finished tilling the fields
by hand.

Miss Tarabotti and Miss Hisselpenny had never before seen so many muscles on one individual. His neck was the size of a tree.
Both ladies were suitably impressed.

Professor Lyall made introductions. “Ladies, Mr. Haver bink. Mr. Haverbink, this is Miss Hisselpenny, and this is Miss Tarabotti,
your charge.”

“Oh!” said Ivy. “You are from BUR?”

Mr. Haverbink nodded affably. “Aye, miss.”

“But you are not…?” Miss Tarabotti could not tell how she knew. Perhaps it was because he seemed so relaxed in the bright
sunlight or because how grounded and earthy he seemed. He showed none of the dramatic flair one expects with excess soul.

“A werewolf? No, miss. Not interested in being a claviger either, so I shan't ever become one. Gone up against a couple in
the boxing ring once or twice, so do not worry yourself on that account. Besides, the boss does not seem to think we will
have trouble from that quarter, leastways not during the daytime.”