The Masque of the Black Tulip

Chapter Thirty-Three

It had all seemed like such a good idea back at Loring House. Henrietta hunched over a grate in the sitting room of a modest townhouse, pretending to rake ashes while her eyes busily searched the interior of the chimney for any suspicious rough patches that might denote a hidden cache of some kind, or the entrance to a priests' hole. Henrietta didn't think the townhouse, a narrow construction in a genteel but hardly fashionable area of town, was of an age to possess a priests' hole, but who was to say that one hadn't been added later for purposes other than priests? There might be a smugglers' hole, or a guilty lovers' hole, or any other manner of hidey-hole tucked away in the bricks of the chimney.

It would have been an inspired course of action, if only the interior of the chimney had not been entirely composed of suspicious rough patches. The soot-caked bricks jutted out at all sorts of angles, any one of which could be the lever that released a hidden door — or simply a soot-caked brick. A subtle peek under the carpet in the guise of sweeping had proved equally fruitless. The panels of the floor marched in faultless order, not a trapdoor among the lot. The walls were lamentably plain, free of ornately carved paneling or gilded moldings that might double as secret mechanisms. In short, Henrietta was feeling quite, quite thwarted.

Back at Loring House, Henrietta had finally chased down the elusive memory that was taunting her to its own hidey-hole, deep in the recesses of her brain. Henrietta would have liked to have claimed it was that mumbled "Pardon me, madam" that had awakened her suspicions, that her trained ear had caught the familiar lilt in that light tenor voice, even through the muffling layers of cravat. It wasn't. The voice had been excellently done, not gruff enough to arouse suspicion, but not high enough to set one thinking about castrati and the breeches roles in Shakespearean comedies. It hadn't even been the breeches themselves; they had been ingeniously padded with buckram, and so many young bucks were eking out their own minor endowments with a little aid from art and padding that, even had the padding been obviously ill-done, no one would have suspected. The fashionable clothes provided an excellent screen. The high points of the collar shaded cheeks too smooth to be masculine, and lent through shadow the specious appearance of reality to the glued-on hairs of a fake mustache. The monstrous cravat shielded a chin too delicately pointed to be male and a throat that was more Eve than Adam. Elaborate waistcoats and stiffened coattails provided better means than binding one's breasts for hiding a female form.

In the end, it was those same clothes that had set Henrietta wondering.

Why would someone so obviously all up to the crack wear his hair in an old-fashioned queue? A young pink of the ton, like Turnip, would have his hair cut short, fashionably tousled in a Brutus crop, or whichever other classical figure was the model of the moment. Queues were the province of the old, the unaware, or the resolutely stodgy, distinctly at odds with boots by Hoby, and a cravat tortured into the complicated folds of the Frenchman at the Waterfall. A nice touch, that, thought Henrietta, sifting ash into her bucket from the side of the shovel, watching the fine fall of not-quite-dead embers.

Once Henrietta had recognized the incongruity of the queue, the rest followed. She had only seen that shade of black hair on two people. It wasn't the rare blue-black of Spain, or the coarse brown-black that so often passed for the color among the dusty blondes and muddy brunettes that dotted the British Isles, but true, deep black that shimmered silver when the light struck it.

One was Mary Alsworthy. Her hair was the sort of shining black curtain that poets blunted their pens on, but Henrietta couldn't se,e her cavorting about unpopular inns in breeches, even if they were fashionable breeches. Mary Alsworthy might elope in the dead of night, but she would do it in full rig, velvet cloak, and a yippy lapdog on her knee, just to make it easier for her pursuers to follow and stage a grand scene.

The other was the marquise.

What vanity, Henrietta wondered, had led her to leave her hair down? Perhaps not vanity, but practicality, Henrietta concluded generously, shoveling ash. To cut off her hair would have undoubtedly occasioned notice — although so many were doing that nowadays, in token of those whose heads had been lopped off in the Terror — and the lush mass was too much to bundle beneath a hat without the shift being immediately obvious.

The voice, the hair, the height, the form, it all fit — but nothing else did. Henrietta would have been willing to stake her best pearls that the man in the inn had indeed been the marquise, but to what end? The marquise's motives all ran in the opposite direction. Estates, title, riches, consequence, husband, all had been stripped from her by the Revolution. Henrietta rather doubted she regretted the loss of that last, for all her pious utterances to the contrary, but consequences and riches were quite another matter. Hadn't the dowager said little Theresa Ballinger had an eye for the main chance?

The main chance might have led her to throw in her lot with the new power brokers in Paris, but if so, it hadn't gained her much. Her townhouse was in an area that was respectable, but not grand, sparsely furnished rather than the silvered opulence one would have expected of the marquise. The rugs were worn, the walls were bare, and the furnishings badly in need of being recovered.

None of it added up.

And she knew, with grim certainty, that if she broached the theory to Miles, he would unerringly poke his finger into each of those logical holes, one by one. And then — Henrietta winced in a way that had nothing to do with the bit of ember that was gnawing a hole in the rough fabric of her skirt and finding it tough going — and then Miles's face would curve into a great, big smug grin, and he would hoot, "You're jealous!" He might have the restraint not to hoot, he might manage to force the words out in reasonably non-hooting tones, but the hoot would be there, taunting her. Henrietta's cheeks burned at the very thought. And what proof did she have other than one black queue, seen in passing in a crowded coffee room? Certainly nothing that would convince a court of law. M'lud, the girl is obviously lovestruck. Makes them unreasonable, you know.

Henrietta had no idea why the opposing counsel in her head sounded quite so much like Turnip Fitzhugh, but, then, Turnip was always popping up where one least expected him.

Banishing Turnip, Henrietta rested her shovel against the grate, and stretched her tired arms, where muscles she hadn't realized she possessed were engaged in vociferous protest. A hot bath, that was what she wanted, with lots of lavender-scented bath salts and enough steam to make the room go hazy.

Hands on her hips, Henrietta took one last look around the sparsely furnished room. She might as well have that bath sooner rather than later. So far, her mission had been fruitless in the extreme, unless one counted finding half a dried apple under one of the settees. It showed no sign of being poisoned, or being anything else of interest, other than old, withered, and thoroughly disgusting.

Taking one of Amy's suggestions, Henrietta had garbed herself as a maidservant, borrowing a coarse brown wool dress from one of the baffled underservants at Lor ing House. Henrietta had gabbled a hastily contrived story about a fancy dress party (the maidservant had appeared entirely unconvinced) and slunk sheepishly back up to the upper reaches to don her prize, which, for all its plainness, had the advantage of being far cleaner than Henrietta's own clothes from the day before, and entirely cabbage-free. Henrietta resolved to give all the servants at Loring House a respectable raise in the very near future. They might think her a madwoman, but she would rather they think her a generous madwoman.

Thus attired, Henrietta had slipped out of the house. Amy had been entirely right; with her plain dress on, and a simple white cap over neatly braided hair, no one gave her a second glance. Her entrance through the kitchen of the marquise's townhouse occasioned no comment; the cook was bent over the fire, and a kitchen maid was too busy chopping and telling the cook about that girl what had been done wrong by the groom's second cousin once removed to pay any notice.

Once inside, Henrietta had first gone upstairs, making for the marquise's boudoir. She wasn't entirely sure what she was looking for — a series of signed instructions from Paris would be most helpful — but anything of a suspicious nature would do to get the attention of the War Office, and wipe the hoot out of Miles's voice. The clothing worn by the mysterious gentleman at the inn, wigs, false mustaches, a cache of correspondence in code. Any of those would provide assurance that she wasn't just — Henrietta grimaced at the possibility — acting out of pure, rank, baseless jealousy.

Unfortunately — Henrietta plunged her shovel back into the fireplace — so far, jealousy was looking more and more like the only explanation. She had only moments in the marquise's boudoir before the click of heels heralded the arrival of the marquise's lady's maid, but there was nothing there that wouldn't be found in Henrietta's own. Even the little pots of face paint seemed no more than one would expect to find on the dressing table of a sophisticated lady of the world. Henrietta toyed with the notion of notes slipped into the base of the hares'-foot brushes used to apply cosmetics, but the idea seemed too wild, and certainly nothing to be heeded by the War Office. Besides, they hadn't made a crinkling noise when she squeezed them.

Bucket and shovel serving as a screen, Henrietta had made her way through the other bedrooms, but they were all clearly untenanted. The rooms were painfully bare, carpeted only with dust, the feather ticks sagging dispiritedly on their elderly frames. Henrietta had peeked into one armoire, for form's sake, and found it entirely empty, except for an adventurous spider that mistook Henrietta's shoulder for a tuffet. Remembering her position as an emissary of the War Office, Henrietta didn't scream. She squished it instead, rather more vindictively than necessary.

The barrenness in itself, Henrietta mused, was more interesting than otherwise. Even the marquise's bedchamber, with hangings on the bedposts and gowns in the clothes press, had a starkly temporary air, like the room of a wayside inn. The marquise's belongings formed a fine film over the furniture, hastily unpacked and as easily swept away again.

Of course, Henrietta reminded herself, that could have more to do with poverty than nefarious circumstances.

The sitting room, with the weary air inherent to hired lodgings, had been Henrietta's last hope. It, like the bedroom, seemed at least to be somewhat lived in. There were the remains of a fire in the grate — which Henrietta quickly set about demolishing to justify her presence in the room — and a scattering of books on a spindly legged table by the settee. Henrietta had flipped through them, but found no secret caches containing pistols or vials of poison, no faint marks over letters indicating a code, no filmy sheets of paper wedged between the pages, bearing messages beginning with "Meet me at midnight under the old oak in Belliston Square…" The books themselves clearly belonged to a former tenant. La Nouvelle Heloise might be in the marquise's style — Rousseau's sentimental novels had enjoyed a great vogue in France a few years back — but his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality was decidedly not light reading, nor was the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos. It was in French, rather than the original Latin, but still not the sort of work Henrietta imagined the marquise leafing through for pleasure.

In short, Henrietta's mission had been an utter waste. All she had learned was that the previous owner of the house had serious-minded taste in reading material and that housework was harder than it looked. Miles, she thought grimly, would hoot if he knew.

Well, there was no reason for him to know. Henrietta dropped the despised shovel into the bucket with a little puff of ashes. With any luck, he would have stopped off at White's for a round of darts with Geoff before returning to Loring House, and she could slip back and into normal clothes before he even realized she had been gone. In fact, she could stop by Uppington House on the way home and change into fresh clothes, and if Miles inquired, she had spent the whole morning arranging for her clothes and books — and Bunny, of course — to be sent over to Loring House. It was, she decided airily, straightening and brushing her grimy hands off against an already blotchy apron, an entirely plausible course of action.

Or it would have been, had not a footstep in the hall sent Henrietta flying back into place over the fireplace. As the door to the sitting room opened, Henrietta realized she was holding the shovel by the pointy bit, and rapidly reversed it, hoping the marquise hadn't noticed.

The marquise's attire was at distinct odds with the hopeless shabbi-ness of her hired house. She wore a diaphanous gown of lilac muslin that floated around her in a fine film, more like mist than fabric, and her black hair, that lush, silver-black hair, had been twined into a complicated arrangement of curls, threaded with shimmering lilac ribbon, and winking with diamond-headed pins. There was nothing stark about her attire, but Henrietta was put irresistibly in mind of the warrior goddesses so beloved of the Romans, Minerva in her chariot, or Diana in her glade, both entirely devoid of human weakness.

Crossing to the window that overlooked the street, the marquise flicked an impatient hand at Henrietta, and said in a voice as flat and hard as Minerva's breastplate, "You may go."

Keeping her head down, Henrietta bobbed a clumsy curtsy, and began to gather the accoutrements of her disguise. She was just hefting the bucket of ashes, mentally rehearsing the tale she intended to tell Miles, when the marquise looked at her again, sharply. Henrietta's shovel handle rattled against the side of the bucket.

"You. Girl."

Henrietta stilled, shoulders hunched, head bowed, her cessation of movement, she hoped, answer enough.

The marquise spoke again, her voice sharp with impatience, and something else. "Yes, you. Come here."

Bucket in hand, Henrietta shuffled slowly forward.

"Where do you have her?"

The door of Lord Vaughn's breakfast parlor slammed into the silk hung wall, driving a long snag into the fragile hangings. The door itself held to its hinges, but only just.

After Wickham's revelation, Miles had covered the space between the War Office and Grosvenor Square in record time, heedlessly upsetting applecarts, shouldering aside innocent passersby, and stepping on small animals, all the while assuring himself that Henrietta was a notoriously late sleeper, that she would never have left the house, that the Black Tulip couldn't have possibly traced them to Loring House yet. He had held the image of Henrietta, brown hair fanned across the crimson counterpane, peacefully slumbering, to him like a talisman.

Seeing that empty bed had been one of the worst moments of his life. The worst. Worse than the scene in the garden, worse than the loss of Richard's friendship. Wild with disbelief, Miles had tossed aside the bedcovers, crawled under the bed, even thrown open the doors of the ar-moire as if, for some arcane reason, Henrietta might have crawled in there and gotten stuck. It wasn't until after he had charged through both dressing rooms, turned the old wooden bathtub upside down, and yanked down the bed-hangings that he'd seen the note lying there among the discarded bedclothes. He'd snatched it up, hoping — well, he wasn't even sure what he was hoping for. His mind hadn't been working along orderly lines.

Beneath his message, in Henrietta's graceful, looping letters, it said only, "Gone out, too. Should be back by noon. H." And beneath that, a postscript, in mirror to his own. "Splendid."

Miles had crushed the note in his hand, making promises to any minor deity he could think of, anyone, anything, just so long as he could get Henrietta back, unharmed.

She hadn't been at Uppington House. Penelope hadn't seen her. Nor had Charlotte. Geoff couldn't be found to be questioned, so Miles left a note, marked urgent. One last stop at Loring House, where Henrietta hadn't reappeared — Stwyth didn't know where she had gone — and her very absence screamed out a reproach, announced the worst. She must have been taken. And Miles knew bloody well where to go to get her back.

Fueled by anxiety and rage, cravat askew and jacket begrimed from having spent the day sprinting through the malodorous streets of London, Miles wasted no time in heading straight for the dragon's lair, Lord Vaughn's London residence. And if he didn't have Henrietta…

But he would. There was no point in admitting other possibilities. He would bloody well give her back, and then Miles would make equally bloody sure he would swing for it. Slowly and painfully, until his face turned as black as that thrice-damned tulip he employed as his insignia.

"What have you done with her?" Miles demanded, breath rasping in his throat, as the door creaked and swayed behind him.

Attired in a dressing gown patterned with oriental dragons, Lord Vaughn sat at his ease at one end of a round table made of satiny cherry wood, circumscribed with an inlay of pale woods in a geometrical pattern. At one elbow stood a fluted coffeepot, and he sipped from a cup of the same beverage as he flipped idly through the pages of the morning's paper. He was the very image of a gentleman at leisure.

Waving back the footman who drew up stiffly to attention as if to ward off the intruder, Vaughn treated Miles's precipitate entrance with as little attention as though such scenes were a commonplace of his breakfast routine. Or, thought Miles darkly, as though he had been expecting him.

"With whom, my dear fellow?" Vaughn asked idly, turning over another page of the paper.

"Who?" Miles demanded incredulously, clamping down on the urge to strangle the bounder with the sash of his own robe. Only the recollection that Vaughn could tell him more alive than asphyxiated held him back. "Who?"

Summoning up coherent phrases was a matter of another order of effort entirely.

Vaughn looked lazily up from his copy of The Morning Times. "As edifying as I find your owl impression, I believe a name might be more to the point."

"Right." Miles flexed his hands, grappling with his temper. "If that's the way you want to play it."

"It might be helpful if you apprised me of the rules of the game I'm meant to be playing," remarked Vaughn mildly. "It would be vastly unsporting of you to do otherwise."

"No more unsporting than you sitting there, pretending you haven't any idea of what I'm talking about," countered Miles heatedly.

Vaughn raised an eyebrow.

Miles planted both hands on the table, leaned forward, and lowered his voice to a dangerous undertone.

"What have you done with Lady Henrietta?"

Vaughn presented an excellent facsimile of surprise. His jaded eyes lifted momentarily from his coffee cup in an expression of mild interest. "Lady Henrietta? Gone missing then, has she?"

"She hasn't gone missing. She's been abducted, and you damn well know it. Where have your henchmen taken her, Vaughn?"

"Henchmen," repeated Vaughn flatly. He placed his cup carelessly in its saucer, the very picture of amused urbanity. "As much as I admire and — dare I say? — esteem Lady Henrietta, I do draw the line at abduction. So common."

Vaughn signaled for a footman to pour him another cup of coffee.

Miles fumed. He hadn't expected Vaughn to crack instantly — after all, the man was a deadly spy, and they were adept at this sort of thing — but he had hoped for some sort of reaction, a shifty flicker of the eyes towards a hidden door, a mysterious motion to a footman. He could threaten to search the premises, but he doubted it would avail him anything. Vaughn was too sensible to have hidden Henrietta in his own house. He must have a hidey-hole somewhere, a cottage in the country, or a dodgy flat in one of the seedier parts of town, where he could question his victims at his leisure.

Victims. Miles remembered Henrietta's unfortunate contact and wished he hadn't.

He took some slight comfort from Vaughn's presence at the breakfast table. The identity of the Pink Carnation was important enough that Vaughn would want to question her himself. Damn. Miles could have thumped himself over the head with the heavy silver tray on the sideboard if it wouldn't have impeded his ability to rescue Henrietta. Why hadn't he thought of that before? The thing to do was to lie in wait until Vaughn left the house and then follow him to his hidden lair. Damn, damn, damn. Why hadn't he thought of that before he came haring over here?

"Why am I meant to have abducted Lady Henrietta?" Vaughn inquired with deceptive mildness. "Let me see." Vaughn drummed his fingers against the polished wood of the table in a practiced gesture that set Miles's teeth on edge. "Overcome with passion, I spirited her away in my carriage to Gretna Green — no, that won't do, will it, as I'm still here? Come, Mr. Dorrington, this is the stuff of Covent Garden, not civilized people."

"I'll duel you for her." Miles knew that the more valorous course would be to feign embarrassment, apologize, and back out, but worry spurred him on. Who knew how long it would be before Vaughn went to see Henrietta? Or what his minions might be doing to her now? He wanted this settled now.

And he wanted to do bodily violence to Vaughn.

The latter, Miles assured himself, was a purely secondary consideration, but if poking holes in Vaughn could make him reveal Henrietta's whereabouts, Miles wouldn't sneer at the opportunity.

"A duel?" Vaughn sounded more amused than otherwise. "I haven't been challenged to one of those in years."

If looks could wound, Vaughn would already have been spread out on the turf of Hounslow Heath. "Consider this your opportunity to make up for lost time."

"Much as I relish the prospect" — Vaughn cocked an eyebrow at Miles — "I really cannot do so under false pretenses. You see," he said apologetically, "I don't have Lady Henrietta."

Miles was rather surprised that Vaughn persisted in maintaining his charade. He didn't think it was fear of the field of honor — Vaughn had a reputation as a fierce and practiced swordsman, whatever he might say about a recent dearth of duels — but it was deuced annoying.

"Do you expect me to believe that?" demanded Miles.

Vaughn spread his arms in an expansive gesture. "Would you care to search the premises?"

"Oh, no." Miles narrowed his eyes. "I'm not falling for that. You wouldn't have her here; that would be too obvious. A flat somewhere… or a cottage in the country…" He watched Vaughn closely for a flicker of recognition or fear, but the man's face betrayed nothing more than well-bred incredulity.

"All the same," Vaughn said politely, "my house is at your disposal, as are my staff, should you care to question them." His tone suggested that he thought Miles would be a fool to do anything of the kind. But that, reasoned Miles, was just what Vaughn would want him to think.

Miles played his last card. "Do the words 'Black Tulip' mean anything to you, Vaughn?"

"As a flower" — Vaughn shook out his paper with a nonchalant gesture — "they leave something to be desired. If you hope to win Lady Henrietta back with bouquets, you would do better to buy her roses. Red ones."

Before Miles could tell Vaughn exactly what he should do with his roses, in horticultural detail, the quiet of the breakfast parlor was breached by the sound of a large object plummeting to the floor just outside the door. China crashed; spurs scraped against the parquet floor; a male voice rose in remonstration. Miles whirled towards the door, filled with formless hope. Henrietta might have freed herself from Vaughn's henchmen and fought her way downstairs. That was his Hen!

The happy image shattered as the door once again rebounded against the wall. A slender man in brown barreled through, followed by the huffing form of an agitated servant.

"Sir!" The latter flung himself upon his employer's mercy, his wig askew and his stock untied. "I tried to stop him. I tried — "

"Mr. Dorrington?" the other man elbowed past, halting abruptly in front of Miles. Any hopes Miles might have had of his being Henrietta in disguise were firmly dashed. It was hard to make out the man's features, since they were caked in a thick mask of grime, but they weren't Henrietta's, and that was all Miles cared about.

"Yes," said Miles warily.

He glanced to Vaughn, still seated in state at the head of the table, but Vaughn looked, for once, quite as baffled as Miles felt.

"Followed you here," the man in brown explained, still fighting for air. His garments, on closer inspection, might have once been some color other than brown, but looked as though they had been washed in mud, allowed to dry, and muddied again. "I've been looking for you all day."

"For me," said Miles flatly.

"For you or for Lady Henrietta." At the mention of Henrietta's name, the denizens of the room snapped to attention, with the exception of the footman, who had lowered himself to his knees, and was mournfully examining the scratches in the elaborate inlay of the floor, occasionally emitting small whimpering noises at a particularly jagged gash. "I'm to give you this."

Miles snatched up the note the courier proffered, as grimed as the man himself, immediately recognizing the hand. Jane had wasted no time on explanations. There were only three words written on the little piece of paper, and Miles exclaimed them aloud without even realizing he had done so.

"The Marquise de Montval?"

Crumpling the note in one large hand, Miles shoved it into a pocket. He pointed a ringer at Vaughn. "I will be back," he warned, and slammed out of the room.

The fine lines around his eyes more pronounced than usual, Vaughn watched him go, directed a footman to take the courier to the kitchens to be fed, and thoughtfully drained the last of his coffee.

Folding his paper, Lord Vaughn flicked a finger in the direction of the silent footman who stood by the sideboard.

"Tell Hutchins to attend me in my dressing room. And see that my carriage is brought around. At once."

"My lord." The footman bowed his white-powdered head and departed.

"I," commented Vaughn to the empty air above the sideboard, cinching the waist of his dressing gown, "have an assignation to keep."

His lips twisted into a sardonic smile.

"With Lady Henrietta."