The Deception of the Emerald Ring

Chapter Twenty-four

Come home with me.

Geoff's words hung suspended in the air between them, as real a presence as the pattern of green vines twining beneath their feet, and just as knotty. Letty would have liked to know just what he meant by "with." Such a simple little preposition, and yet so fraught with possible meaning. At least, it might be fraught. Or it might not. And there was the problem in a nutshell. They were friends again, certainly, after their little spat a mere two hours before. But whether they were anything more…

"I don't even know where home is. Your home, I mean."

Geoff's long fingers rested comfortably against the edge of the dresser, but his eyes were fixed quite steadily on her. Unreadable, as always. There were distinct disadvantages to being married to a master spy.

"At present, a place on loan from a chap who's in London for the Season. You'll be quite safe there."

"But what about Lord Vaughn? If he knows we're married…"

Geoff's cheeks creased with sudden amusement. "All the more reason that he wouldn't look for you there."

"True."

"Then we're agreed?"

She hadn't moved and Geoff's hand still rested casually against the dresser, but the space between them suddenly felt a great deal smaller.

"Geoffrey?" Jane's curls poked around the edge of the door, hovering about five and a half feet up the doorjamb, as though the door had suddenly sprouted a beard. The rest of Jane followed more slowly.

"The carriage is waiting downstairs," she said, standing just within the doorway. "Letty, you do know that you are welcome to stay here?"

"That's quite all right." Letty kept her voice carefully neutral, and didn't look at Geoff. "I've made other arrangements."

Jane's eyes crinkled. "I rather thought you might." Gesturing them to the stairs with the poise of a well-practiced hostess, she added, "I will expect you here tomorrow at half-three. We can discuss costuming then."

"Costuming?" Letty couldn't quite keep the trepidation out of her voice.

"We can't very well call on Lord Vaughn as ourselves," Jane said matter-of-factly. "People might talk."

"Which selves?" asked Letty.

"Either," replied Geoff. His hand lingered on the small of her back as he helped her into the carriage, burning into her back like a brand. His voice was warm and amused beside her ear. "Unless you've developed some others recently you haven't mentioned yet?"

"I'm considering it," Letty said, and felt, more than heard, his faint chuckle as he boosted her into her seat.

"Tomorrow," said Jane cheerfully, retreating to the front steps and waving as the carriage door clicked closed.

Settling down into the seat next to her, Geoff spread out across it with the ineffable ability of the male to occupy as much space as possible, legs stretched out in front of him and one arm spanning the back of the seat.

Letty's shoulder blades prickled from proximity. Trying not to be too obvious about it, she glanced sideways to where his fingers rested just past her shoulder. Not touching her. Not trying to touch her. Just there, with nothing to indicate whether it was an intentional arm or an accidental arm.

She was being ridiculous. An arm wasn't accidental; it was an appendage, and it had to go somewhere. That somewhere just happened to be right behind her back. Short of folding his hands in his lap like a convent schoolgirl, where else was he supposed to put it?

"—urm-grmm?"

"I beg your pardon?" Letty realized that her husband had been speaking and she hadn't heard a word of it.

"I asked what it is you dislike about costuming." Geoff raised his favorite eyebrow. "Or is it the playacting you object to?"

His sleeve brushed her hair, sending a little chill down her spine. Letty spoke hastily to cover her inadvertent reaction. "It's not the playacting itself that I object to. It's the being bad at it."

"You haven't done too badly so far."

Letty matched his eyebrow and raised him one, radiating skepticism.

"What made you decide to travel as Mrs. Alsdale?"

His arm had definitely moved; Letty was quite sure of it. She was so busy tracking the progress of his fingers in relation to her shoulder that it took her a moment to recall herself.

"Pride," she said, wincing at the memory. "Pure, unadulterated pride."

"Pride?" Geoff shifted to look her full in the face, his knee brushing her skirts.

"It goeth before a fall," provided Letty brightly, smoothing down her skirts.

Geoff eyed her keenly, the sway of the carriage lamp sending light shifting back and forth across the clean lines of his face.

"Why pride?"

Letty wriggled a bit to avoid an imaginary lump in the seat cushion. "I didn't want anyone to know we were traveling separately. There had been enough talk about our marriage already…. I didn't want to provide more grist for the gossipmills."

"So you became Mrs. Alsdale."

"Not exactly the most inventive of aliases," she said, in a tone designed to repel further discussion.

"The more effective ones seldom are," replied Geoff, accepting the implicit rebuff. "The closer to your own name, the more likely you are to remember to answer to it."

"How do you explain Mr. Throtwottle, then?" said Letty, leaping gratefully on the change of subject.

Geoff sighed. "There are exceptions to every rule. Of course, we may yet find that there is a large and thriving family of Throtwottles somewhere."

Letty had an image of a large flock of geese cackling their way across Salisbury Plain. "But you don't think so."

"No."

"You still believe Lord Vaughn is working for them, don't you?"

"I believe the only person Vaughn works for is Vaughn," Geoff countered. "He could be playing a double game, serving both sides as it pleases him."

"But why?" asked Letty. "What does he get out of it?"

"Power," said Geoff simply. "An escape from ennui. An intellectual challenge. Any number of reasons. And Vaughn, I suspect, isn't overly troubled by the dictates of conscience."

Letty's memory conjured the image of Vaughn, standing above his cousin's coffin. Like the silver he favored, he was cold logic and pure will, unalloyed by pesky questions of morality. Her father's library ran to such books, abjurations to men to fling aside the toils of religion and superstition and let pure reason reign, but never before had Letty seen that philosophy so neatly encapsulated in human form. She didn't like it.

Letty glanced at her husband, who was gazing abstractedly out the window, caught in his own reverie of tulips and treachery. There was certainly no lack of science there, no dearth of reason or logic, but in Geoff, they were tempered by something else, some leavening instinct of humanity. Responsibility, maybe. Conscience. A recognition of human frailty, including his own. It wasn't the sort of quality her father's books could parse or quantify; it couldn't be broken down into its component parts and twisted into a theorem; it just was. It was the sort of rock-deep decency that had made him honor his obligation to marry a girl of no fortune or family because the circumstance required it—even when he thought she had manufactured that circumstance herself. It was the very quality Mary had been depending on when she persuaded him into eloping.

Letty couldn't imagine Vaughn acting similarly in a comparable circumstance; his view would most likely be that any girl fool enough to find herself in such a damning situation deserved anything society chose to throw at her.

The sound of the horses' hooves changed as the carriage rattled from Capel Street onto the bridge that spanned the Liffey. In the water below, the reflection of the carriage lamps looked like the watchtowers of a drowned city.

Letty shivered with a chill that was only partly caused by the nippy night air. Something about the sight of the still water, frosted with lamplight, sent a wash of cold straight through to her bones. Reaching automatically for her wrap, Letty realized it wasn't there. In her precipitous departure, she had left it in their box in the theater. At the time, she had been quite uncomfortably warm, largely with rage.

Next to her, Geoff shifted in his seat. "Are you cold?"

Letty rubbed her hands over her arms, feeling gooseflesh against her fingertips. "A bit."

"Here." That was quite definitely an intentional arm reaching across her back, drawing her closer. Even through the material of his coat, she could feel the heat radiating from his skin, better than a hearth on a winter's day.

"It's not fair," murmured Letty, succumbing to the warmth of him. "You get so many more layers."

Geoff sneezed on a strand of her hair. Brushing it aside, he settled her more comfortably against his side. "Talk to me of unfair at noon, when you are comfortable and cool in your muslin, and I am broiling among my layers."

"You can borrow my sunshade," Letty offered, pressing the back of her hand against a yawn. "And fan."

"That will do wonders for my reputation." Geoff's chest shifted under her ear as he spoke; Letty could feel the vibration of it before she heard the words.

"Mm-hmm," agreed Letty absently, more interested in his warmth than his words. His jacket was softer than she would have thought against her cheek, not scratchy at all. There were no fobs or stickpins or buttons to poke at her, no lumpy braid or other ornament, just the ends of his cravat tickling the base of her nose.

Letty burrowed farther into Geoff's sleeve, away from the starched linen, curiously content and overwhelmingly sleepy.

"Comfortable?" Geoff asked.

"Mm-hmm." Letty fought gravity in the matter of her eyelids, and lost miserably.

Between the rocking motion of the carriage and the welcoming warmth of Geoff's body, Letty's mind drifted off among the jumbled events of the past few days. Black tulips and gilded railings and Emily lying crumpled on the ground…Vaughn, exchanging meaningful looks with Jane in the crypt of Saint Werburgh's. What if Jane were wrong? What if Vaughn had been the one to murder Emily? All that black hair, black like Mary's, spread around her on the ground. Mary drifted wraith-like through Letty's memory. Who asked you to interfere?

Letty's hands were cold, and bloody as Lady Macbeth's. She had interfered because she wanted to, and the worst of it was that she wasn't sorry. Letty snuggled closer to Geoff, watching bemusedly as Mary turned into Vaughn, who danced a gavotte with Mrs. Ponsonby through an echoing hall composed of giant flowers, all carved of stone. The flowers were singing, a soft, humming song that rocked back and forth, back and forth….

Though he was caught up in his own plots and plans for the following day, Geoff wasn't so distracted that he didn't notice when Letty's breath lapsed into the slow exhalations of slumber. He was, he realized, disturbingly aware when it came to her. He could have pinpointed the exact moment that she drifted off to sleep, recited from memory the location of each of her freckles, and repeated, verbatim, the bulk of their earlier conversation. Especially the bit about pride.

Glancing down, Geoff couldn't see her face at all, just a confusion of hair, lightly limned by the carriage lamp, punctuated by the hint of a freckled nose. Against the dark fabric of her skirts, something green gleamed greasily in the uneven light, like a murky pond with sunlight skating over it.

Geoff touched a finger lightly to the central stone, remembering, as through a glass darkly, the resentment that had roiled through him when he had placed it on her finger nearly a month ago. It seemed a very long time ago, a tale told about someone else. A very rash, selfish, and decidedly blind someone else, Geoff thought, resting his chin on the top of her head. Her hair smelled pleasantly of chamomile, like the old herb garden at Sibley Court in summer.

They would have to find something more appropriate for her when they returned to London. Aside from being ugly in itself, the Pinchingdale betrothal ring was far too heavy for Letty's hand. The stone spanned all the way from the base of her finger to the knuckle, too large for the delicate bones of her finger. A smattering of freckles testified that someone had been out without her gloves, and the paler mark of an old scar showed along the side of her thumb. Instead of the fashionable oval, her palm was nearly square. The sturdy shape was belied by the fineness of the bones that composed it, vulnerability masked beneath a shield of capability. Beneath the weight of the emerald ring, her hand seemed disconcertingly delicate.

He had never thought of her as particularly young or small before, but sleeping, she seemed smaller, softer. The top of her head rested just against his breastbone, nestled against him as trustingly as a child's.

The rest of her, however, did not feel the least bit childlike. If he hadn't feared waking her, Geoff would have squirmed as far to the other side of the carriage as possible. Instead, he nobly gritted his teeth and tried to recall the personal dossiers of every French spy currently resident in London. In alphabetical order.

He had only made it as far as "Carre, Jean" when the carriage drew up before a secluded cul-de-sac. Trying to jar her as little as possible, Geoff eased an arm beneath Letty's knees. Carefully maneuvering her dangling legs around the doorframe, he carried her out of the carriage, painstakingly navigating the folding steps.

Letty stirred as he started down the walkway to the house. Raising her head, she peered bemusedly down at the ground, as if trying to figure out how she had come to be dangling in midair.

"I can walk," she said fuzzily, squirming a bit.

"Are you sure?" Geoff made no move to relinquish her. "I'm perfectly happy to carry you."

Pressing her eyes together, Letty stifled a yawn with the back of her fist and nodded. "I can manage."

She effected her descent by the simple expedient of linking her arms around Geoff's neck, turning sideways, and sliding down, inch by agonizing inch. Agonizing for Geoff, that was. Letty, groggily rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, seemed entirely unaware of the distress she was inflicting.

She gaped at the vista in front of her. "Good heavens. Where are we?"

Geoff held out an arm to steady her. "Home. At least, for the moment."

The house in front of her looked as out of place among the orderly rows of red brick as a camel caravan outside Dublin Castle. It was scarcely larger than a garden folly, a miniature fantasy of a house that billowed out of its own private bower of flowering plants. In the light of the torchieres, the gleaming white stone had a ghostly, insubstantial glow to it, as though at any moment the house might tremble and blow away like a silk scarf on the night breeze. The shape of the building added to the sense of movement; the building was all curls and curves, from the rounded arches of the fanlight to the bay windows that undulated from the walls of the first floor. The whole was surmounted by a whimsical dome, more suited to the pleasure palace of a Baghdad caliph than an island marooned in a chilly northern sea.

Geoff opened the door with a key as ornately curved as the oval shape of the entrance hall. To either side, Letty saw doll-sized salons opening off, one upholstered in a ravaged red reminiscent of depictions of Pompeii, painted with murals representing the sack of an unfortunate city. The women—and they were all women—appeared to be fleeing in a considerable state of upset and undress. Letty could only assume the men had been away with the vanquished army, hopefully somewhat more clothed, although the statues that flanked either side of the staircase, ebony blackamoors lifting gilded torches, were as bare as their counterparts on the wall.

"You must be tired." Geoff hustled Letty up the stairs before she could peer into the second salon.

"Not anymore." Letty craned her neck back to try to get a better look at the truly peculiar bas-relief that arched above the bedroom door. Geoff hastily ushered Letty inside before she could attain more than a muddled impression of a very enthusiastic game of leap frog in fine Grecian style.

Looking increasingly ill at ease, her husband set his candelabrum down on a marble-topped table supported by two very playful caryatids who made Letty's pectoral development look positively anemic.

She was beginning to have her doubts about the sort of establishment to which Geoff had brought her, especially when she spied the open book on the bedside table. Bound in gilt-edged leather, it had the sort of richly illuminated illustrations one generally associated with medieval manuscripts. From the looks of it, Letty doubted the monks would approve.

Geoff slapped the cover closed, but not before Letty caught a glimpse of two people entwined in a way that challenged all the known laws of gravity.

"The owner is very fond of…philosophy," prevaricated Geoff.

Letty reached for the book. "That didn't look like Aristotle to me."

"Aristotle explored the motions of heavenly bodies." Geoff whisked the volume neatly into a drawer and slammed it shut.

"Not those sorts of heavenly bodies," said Letty emphatically, nodding toward the drawer. "There was nothing celestial about it."

"Well, actually…never mind." Geoff shook his head. "I don't know what I was about to say."

Letty wandered in a bemused circle around the room, her eyes roving over the furnishings. It would be an understatement to say she had never seen anything quite like it before. She had never even imagined anything like it. An immense bed dominated the center of the room, as much with its opulence as with its size. Simpering golden Cupids supported a demi-canopy of gold-shot pink gauze. Yards of pink silk billowed across the bed, tufted and trimmed in yet more gold. All that pink made Letty's eyes ache.

Directly above was the dome she had spied from outside. In the daytime, inserts of tinted glass would cast colored shadows across the bed. Letty could only imagine how the yellow and blue and green would clash with the pink coverlet. Or how the colors would reflect off the skin of anyone lying on the bed, pillowed in pink and lit by the stained glass.

Her cheeks turning pinker than the coverlet, Letty tilted her head back and conspicuously busied herself examining the dome. Above the glass, inscribed on the underside of the dome, the gods held court at Olympus, in the style of domes the world over. Departing from the usual hierarchy, this dome was dedicated to Aphrodite rather than Zeus.

Aphrodite appeared to be having a simply marvelous time.

"Whose house is this?" demanded Letty.

Geoff stuck both hands in his pockets with the look of a man determined to brazen it out. "It belongs to a friend of mine."

Letty cast him a quick look.

"Not that sort of friend," Geoff amended. "A chap I went to Eton with keeps this house for his lady friends."

"Hmm," said Letty noncommittally. Given the nature of the decorations, she suspected that the term "lady" was singularly inapt.

Geoff moved to block a porcelain clock, which featured an amorous shepherd and his lass, enjoying the sorts of pastoral pleasures at which poets only dared hint. Given the plethora of equally objectionable items, the action was singularly ineffectual.

"Since the house isn't currently occupied," Geoff explained rapidly, "I asked if I could borrow it. It's set well back from the street, and the servants are generously paid to look the other way."

That brought Letty to a halt. Pausing in front of a small marble statue, she stared over her shoulder at Geoff. "Your friend probably thought…"

"There's no probably about it."

Letty's face flared with sudden color. "So, all the servants must think…"

"Yes."

"Oh." Letty sank down on the bed, an endearingly prim figure in her simple black dress against the billowing opulence of pink silk that surrounded her. She rubbed her forehead with the heel of one hand. "I do seem to be having a varied career recently."

Geoff's conscience dealt him another uncomfortable blow. Now, he supposed, was as good a time as any to begin apologizing for all the manifold wrongs he had visited upon her. It was a matter of pure justice, he assured himself, not an attempt to get his wife into bed.

Well, not entirely.

"I am sorry," said Geoff, joining her on the pink coverlet. The feather tick sagged obligingly.

"It's really not all that bad," remarked Letty, cocking her head to inspect the pattern of cavorting deities on the ceiling. A sudden stiltedness betrayed her awareness of their new proximity, but she didn't pull away. "As long as one avoids the pink."

"The pink?" Was that shorthand for "Carnation"? Letty's way of telling him that a damaged reputation was manageable but spies were not? Funny, Geoff had thought that was the bit Letty minded least of the whole affair.

"The coverlet," Letty elucidated. "The large and very bright object on which you happen to be sitting." She patted it in illustration.

"Oh, right." That made his second botched apology of the evening. "That was intended as more of a blanket apology."

Letty's blue eyes crinkled. "As in this blanket?"

Despite himself, the corners of Geoff's mouth turned up. "That's not what I meant, and you know it."

Averting her eyes, Letty gave a little shake of her head. "I've given up trying to figure out what you mean."

"I'll just have to make myself plainer, then." Tipping Letty's chin up, Geoff looked her straight in the eye. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry about that idiotic remark earlier. I'm sorry for having plunged you into all of this. I'm sorry—"

"Don't." Reaching up, Letty stopped his mouth with her hand. "Please."

The last thing she wanted was to be an object of pity, or, even worse, remorse. No one liked a hair shirt. They might believe it was good for them, but that didn't mean they actually enjoyed wearing it.

But that was only the smallest part of it. Letty couldn't have quite put it into words, but she knew, with agitated certainty, that going over the past would be the worst possible thing they could do, no matter how generous an impulse drove the enterprise. Any discussion of the past would invariably come back to Mary. And once Mary entered the conversation…how could he help but resent Letty?

"We don't need to go through all this again," Letty insisted.

Pressing a kiss to her palm, Geoff removed her restraining hand, holding it just below his chin. "I misjudged you. Horribly."

"That was all I wanted to hear," Letty lied, lacing her fingers through his. "Truly."

It wasn't, of course. But it would have to do.

"Shall we start again?" asked Geoff, his keen gray eyes intent on Letty.