The Masque of the Black Tulip

Chapter Thirty-Six

"Sebastian," said the marquise flatly, so flatly that Henrietta couldn't tell if she was pleased or distressed or even the least bit surprised.

The marquise's use of Lord Vaughn's first name did not bode well. The marquise had never admitted straight out to being the Black Tulip. What if she were only a lieutenant, a second in command acting on the orders of someone altogether more deadly and devious?

Miles's reaction was decidedly less ambiguous.

"Vaughn," he gritted out, tightening his grip on the marquise, who was showing a distressing inclination to use the distraction as an excuse to escape. "What in the hell are you doing here?"

"I succumbed to a gallant impulse. I perceive" — Vaughn's lazy eyes took in the dazed French operatives, the shaking settee, and the marquise, her arms pinioned by Miles — "that it was unnecessary."

Miles was in no mood for circumlocutions. "Whose side are you on?" he asked bluntly.

Vaughn extracted an enameled snuffbox from his pocket, and flipped open the lid. With an elegant gesture, he dropped a pinch of snuff upon his sleeve and sniffed delicately. "I must say, I wonder that myself sometimes."

"His own," responded the marquise, trying to yank her wrists out of Miles's grasp. "Isn't that right, Sebastian?"

"Not this time," replied Lord Vaughn, lazily surveying the room. "I find myself inexplicably drawn to altruism in my old age."

"Is that altruism on behalf of the French?" asked Henrietta, hovering protectively next to Miles.

Vaughn looked blank. "Wherever did you acquire that absurd idea?"

"Secret meetings," put in Miles, holding both the marquise's wrists in one hand and hastily yanking the cord around them with the other. If Vaughn was planning to employ his sword for pernicious purposes, Miles wanted the marquise safely trussed. The thought of her looming over Henrietta, stiletto poised to strike, sent black bile bubbling through his chest like the contents of a witch's cauldron.

The marquise flinched as Miles tugged the knot closed with unnecessary force. "Mysterious documents. Clandestine conversations. And" — Miles gave the rope an extra yank — "your obvious acquaintance with her." He indicated the marquise with a curt nod of his head. Rising without ever taking his eyes off Vaughn, Miles moved to stand protectively in front of Henrietta.

Henrietta immediately popped back around.

"Who is the 'she' you were looking for?" asked Henrietta, eyeing Vaughn's sword askance. "Any why did you lie about having been in Paris?"

"That," said Vaughn, "is no one's business but my own, even to you."

Henrietta wasn't quite sure what to make of that "even." Miles was. His shoulders squared in a way that boded ill to Vaughn's preference for privacy. "Not when the safety of the realm is at issue."

"I assure you, Mr. Dorrington," drawled Vaughn, in a tone calculated to annoy, "the realm has little to do with it."

"Then what does?" Miles asked sharply.

"My wife."

"Your wife?" echoed Henrietta.

Vaughn's lips twisted in a mockery of a smile. "I admit, after all this time, the phrase does not dance trippingly off the tongue. Yes, my wife."

"Your dead wife?" repeated Miles with heavy sarcasm.

"His not-so-dead wife," interjected the marquise, a slight smile playing about her lips.

Vaughn twisted sharply to look down at her. "You knew?"

"It came to my attention," replied the marquise calmly. "Would someone care to explain?" growled Miles. "Not you," he added, as the marquise opened her mouth.

"It's quite simple, really," said Vaughn blandly, in a tone that suggested it was anything but. "Ten years ago, my wife… chose to depart. The details are unimportant. Suffice it to say that she left, and in such a way as to make the tale of illness the best way of warding off scandal."

"So you knew she was alive?" ventured Henrietta.

"No. The carriage in which she had departed had an unfortunate encounter with a cliff. I assumed she was in it. I labored under this happy misapprehension until three months ago, when the first of several letters arrived, advising me of her continued existence, and offering up certain of her correspondence as proof."

"Ah!" said Miles. He still had that note floating around somewhere, most likely in his waistcoat pocket, along with the name of Turnip's tailor.

"Ah?" Henrietta looked at him quizzically.

"Later," muttered Miles.

Vaughn, however, had reached his own conclusions regarding missing correspondence and rifled rooms.

"Were you the ruffian who attacked my poor valet? Hutchins has been limping for this past fortnight." Using his quizzing glass, Vaughn gestured languidly at one of the perfectly starched ruffles of his cravat, "k has quite affected his treatment of my linen. Nervous temperament, you understand."

"At least I didn't have your valet stabbed," glowered Miles.

"Stabbed?" asked Vaughn, eyebrows ascending.

"Don't claim you don't know about it."

"He doesn't," put in the marquise, working at the bonds on her wrists.

"Your credibility," Miles informed her, swooping down and yanking the rope into a third knot, just in case, "is not exactly the highest just now."

The marquise straightened her back and looked down her nose, no easy feat for one sprawled on the ground, encompassed by a curtain cord.

"Would the Republic employ such a warped tool?"

"From what I've seen" — Henrietta removed a hidden stiletto from the marquise's hair, eying both it and its owner with distaste — "yes."

"I cannot tell you how flattered I am by the universally high assessment of my character," commented Lord Vaughn. "Remind me of that the next time I contemplate a spot of knight errantry."

Henrietta flushed guiltily. "I am sorry."

"I'm not," said Miles. "Madame Fiorila?"

"An old friend, nothing more. She was kind enough to offer her services in pursuit of my errant spouse. My valet?"

Miles had the grace to look sheepish. "A mistake on my part. One last question. Why all the interest in Henrietta?"

Vaughn directed a shallow bow in the direction of Henrietta, who was mining the marquise's coiffure for instruments of destruction. A small pile had developed next to her, safely out of the reach of the marquise. "You, of all people, should be able to discern the reason for that, Mr. Dorrington."

"Right," mumbled Miles.

Damn. He had liked it better when he thought Vaughn was a spy. But Henrietta wouldn't have been interested in an attenuated rake. Would she? Women did tend to be drawn to the sardonic, brooding type — look at all those romances Henrietta was constantly trading back and forth with Charlotte. The thought was enough to turn Miles's blood icier than the Thames in January. He glanced towards Henrietta, but the blush that heated her cheeks as she steadily met Vaughn's gaze did nothing to allay Miles's fears or improve his temper.

The marquise emitted a husky laugh with an undertone harsh as sandpaper. "So that explains it! I wondered what might move you to interfere in my affairs at this late date, Sebastian. I hadn't thought it would be anything so" — her derisory glance flicked over Henrietta's begrimed face and tousled hair — "common."

Vaughn regarded her with grim amusement. "You always had all the sensibility of a rhinoceros, didn't you, Theresa?"

"There was a time when you thought otherwise."

"There was a time," Vaughn returned, with a fastidious flick of his handkerchief, "when I had very poor taste."

The marquise's lips went white around the edges.

Henrietta felt rather as though she had arrived late to the theatre and entered a play in the third act. "Do forgive me for interrupting," she said, with what she thought was eminently pardonable asperity, "but what are you talking about?"

"Has Theresa" — the way Vaughn drawled the name, drawing out the central vowel, resonated with insult — "told you about her activities in Paris? Marat, Danton, Robespierre, all friends of our fair Theresa. Of course, that was many years ago, when it was still fashionable to court the extreme. But you didn't stop there, did you?"

"You knew them, too."

"It was an intellectual exercise for me. But not for you, was it?" Vaughn tapped a finger thoughtfully against the enameled lid of his snuffbox. "I must say, you have surprised me. I shouldn't have thought you would like your new masters any better than your old ones."

"You never understood," the marquise replied scornfully.

"Far better than you, I believe," countered Vaughn. "With your brave new Republic baptized in blood. Was it worth it, Theresa?"

"Can you ask?"

"Can you answer?"

"Can you save the Platonic dialogue for some other occasion?" demanded Miles, stomping over towards* the marquise. "As fascinating as I'm sure we all find this little window into your past, Vaughn, I, for one, will feel better when our flowery friend here is safely in the custody of the War Office."

"I second that," said Henrietta, rubbing her bruised arm. Little welts were already beginning to form where the marquise's fingernails had bitten into her skin, complementing the graze on Henrietta's forehead, the scratches on her knees, and more contusions than she cared to think about.

Vaughn's sword rang free of its scabbard.

Miles whirled into a defensive crouch, casting about for something with which to fight him. Catching sight of a large metal object on the floor, he grabbed for Henrietta's discarded shovel and raised it to the ready. Vaughn ignored him. Instead of turning his sword on Henrietta or Miles, Vaughn put the gleaming tip to the marquise's throat. In a movement so delicate that it didn't even raise a line on her pale skin, he drew out a gleaming silver chain.

"You might want to show this little bagatelle to your superiors when you deliver our charming Theresa to them," Vaughn said mildly.

Miles let the shovel drop, looking rather disappointed at being balked of the chance to bludgeon Vaughn.

Henrietta let out all her pent-up breath. She hadn't thought she was that terribly obvious, but Vaughn quirked a jaded eye in her direction. As Miles bent to examine the marquise's necklace, Vaughn sheathed his sword and took a step towards Henrietta.

"Did you really think I was going to use that on you?"

Henrietta made an apologetic face. "The evidence really was quite damning."

Vaughn's voice was rich with shared memory, smoky and evocative as incense. "So I remain doomed to be damned, Lady Henrietta?"

As always with Vaughn, Henrietta felt her way uncertainly through a verbal maze. This time, however, she was quite sure there were no dragons lurking in its depths.

"Not in that particular circle of inferno," she said firmly, tilting her head towards the marquise. Miles was examining the marquise's necklace, which happened to be resting just above a very impressive display of cleavage. Quashing that line of thought, Henrietta forcibly dragged her attention back to Vaughn. "Whether you linger in other nether regions is, as I told you before, entirely your own affair."

"Dante," commented Vaughn lightly, "had Beatrice to lead him from the depths."

Henrietta resisted the urge to crane her neck around to monitor Miles, and forced herself to smile pleasantly at Vaughn. It was always quite flattering to be compared to literary heroines, even of the more milk-and-water variety. And it was even more flattering to have attached a man of wit and cultivation, even if, like Shakespeare's Beatrice (not to be corn-pared with Dante's), Henrietta found him too costly for workaday use. It would, Henrietta imagined, grow irksome to be perpetually marching through a maze of someone else's devising, to be forever fencing and weighing meanings over the breakfast table and in the bedchamber.

There was nothing subde about Miles. Henrietta lost the battle with herself and peeked. Miles, gratifyingly, was paying very little attention to the marquise's more obvious attributes. Instead, his gaze was fixed upon Henrietta and Vaughn with a scowl that needed very little interpretation.

Henrietta turned back to Vaughn feeling immeasurably cheered.

"I think that you'd be rather bored by a Beatrice," she advised firmly. "What you need is a Boadicea."

"I'll bear that in mind the next time I come upon a band of marauding Britons," said Vaughn dryly. "I've always liked women in blue." Miles's scowl erupted into a loud growling noise. "If I might interrupt?" Henrietta hurried the few paces to his side and peered over his shoulder. "What did you find?"

From the central panel of the large diamond-studded cross that hung about the marquise's neck, Miles had extracted a thin roll of paper. The writing was small, and in French, bits of it reduced to numbers, but the import was still clear.

"My goodness," echoed Henrietta.

"She used to keep love letters in there," said Vaughn, coming up behind them.

"Yours?" asked Miles.

"Among others," said Vaughn. He shrugged. "I consider it a passing phase, like the measles — only sooner cured and with fewer lingering effects."

"The sides also open," Miles told Henrietta, ignoring Vaughn. He opened his fist to reveal a small silver seal. Henrietta plucked it from his palm, turning it over. Incised into the surface, dulled with years of wax, but still legible, was the rounded outline of a small but distinctive flower. A tulip.

"And this," said Miles grimly, opening his other palm to reveal a small vial, fashioned out of glass, and filled with a grainy substance that shifted with the movement of Miles's hand.

"What is it?" asked Henrietta.

"Enough poison to put half of London off their dinners — permanently," supplied Vaughn, assessing the white powder with a practiced eye.

"Enough to see her swing, that's for certain," said Miles, favoring Vaughn with a cprl of his lip that strongly suggested just which Londoner Miles would like to see put permanently off his dinner.

Vaughn turned to Henrietta and executed a practiced obeisance. "Leaving London," he said, face and voice perfectly bland, "free for the fair to reign unhindered."

Henrietta, face streaked with grime and hair in a snarl, rolled her eyes.

Miles reacted somewhat more strongly. He dropped the marquise's necklace and rounded on Vaughn.

"She's taken," gritted out Miles. "So you can just stop looking at her like that."

"Like what?" asked Vaughn, enjoying himself hugely.

"Like you want to take her home and add her to your harem!"

Vaughn considered, "Last I looked, I wasn't in possession of one, but you know, Dorrington, it really is an excellent idea. I shall have to see to it at once."

Henrietta, who had been watching the exchange with hands on hips and mounting incredulity, marched in between the two men.

"In case you forgot, I'm standing right here. Hello!" She executed a sarcastic little wave. "And I'm not," she said with a repressive glower at Vaughn, "being carted off to anyone's harem."

"I can see that," replied Vaughn, the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes deepening. "You would be dreadful for morale. Even if pleasing to the eye. No," he shook his head, "the Chief Eunuch would never agree."

"It's not the eunuch I'm worried about. He" — Miles jabbed a finger at Vaughn, looking fiercely at Henrietta as he did so — "is just a rake."

"Just?" murmured Vaughn. "I prefer to regard it as a way of life."

Miles ignored him. "He may be able to turn a clever phrase, and do that… thing with his cravat — "

"A design of my own devising," interjected Vaughn blandly. He subsided with a slight gurgling noise as Henrietta's foot descended heavily on his.

Miles saw the interplay but misread the significance.

"Dammit, Hen, how can you let yourself be so taken in? All those flowery compliments — they're just what rakes do. It's pure flummery. It's not real. No matter what he says, he doesn't love you like — er — " Miles broke off, face frozen in an expression of hopeless horror.

A shocked silence descended over the room. Turnip's head poked curiously out from under the settee.

"Like? " prompted Henrietta in a voice that didn't sound like her own.

Miles blinked rapidly, mouth opening and closing in soundless alarm, looking like a condemned man brought face to face with the headsman's axe for the first time. Concluding there was no escape, Miles climbed the scaffold with dignity. "Like I do," he said heavily.

"Love? Me? You?" squeaked Henrietta, both vocabulary and vocal range deserting her. She thought a moment, and added, "Really?"

"That wasn't how I was going to say it," burst out Miles, looking at her entreatingly. "I had it all planned out."

Henrietta's face dissolved into a dizzying smile. Shaking back her hair, she announced giddily, "I don't care how you said it as long as you don't take it back."

Miles was still mourning the loss of his Romantic Plan. "There was be going to be champagne, and oysters, and you" — he held out both hands as though shifting a piece of furniture — "were going to be sitting there, and I was going to get down on one knee, and… and…"

Words failed Miles. He waved his arms about in mute distress.

Words seldom failed Henrietta.

"You great idiot," she said in such loving tones that Vaughn discreetly removed himself several paces, and Turnip climbed all the way out from under the settee to attain a better view.

Holding out both hands to Miles, Henrietta lifted shining eyes to his battered face. "I never expected grand declarations of love or romantic gestures."

"But you deserved them," Miles said stubbornly. "You deserved flowers and chocolates and…" He paused, scrabbling around in his memory. He didn't think it was precisely the moment to bring up the peeled grapes. "Poetry," he finished with grim triumph.

"I think we can contrive to muddle by without it," Henrietta said with mock solemnity. "Of course, if you could see your way to the occasional ode…"

"You deserved better," Miles insisted. "Not a hurried marriage, and a hurried wedding night and — "

Henrietta dimpled. "I have no complaints on that score. Do you?"

"Don't be absurd," he said gruffly.

"There you have it, then," she said firmly.

Miles opened his mouth to argue. Henrietta stopped him by the simple expedient of placing a finger on his lips. The gentle touch silenced

Miles more abruptly than being tackled by a horde of rampaging Frenchmen. Henrietta resolved to remember that for future arguments. She just hoped the French never figured it out.

"I don't want better," she said simply, eyes eloquent on his. "I want you."

Miles made a strange choking noise that sounded like it wanted to be a laugh when it grew up. "Thanks, Hen," he said tenderly.

"You know what I mean."

"Yes." Miles lifted the hand she had help to his lips and kissed the palm, in a gesture of such reverence, it made Henrietta's throat tight. "I do."

"I love you, you know," she said, around the strange obstruction in her throat.

"I didn't know, actually," Miles said, looking at her wonderingly, like a voyager viewing his home after a long journey, putting together all the old familiar places again in a new and beloved way.

"How could you not?" demanded Henrietta, "with me following after you like a lovesick duck?"

"A duck?" echoed Miles, face creasing into an incredulous grin. His shoulders shook with suppressed laughter. "Trust me, Hen, you never looked like a duck. A hen, maybe." Miles wiggled his eyebrows. Henrietta groaned. "But never a duck."

Henrietta whacked him on the chest. "It's not funny. It was dreadful. And then when you were forced to marry me…"

Miles coughed, his amusement fading. "I'm not sure 'forced' is exactly the right word."

"What else would you call it when someone threatens to call you out?"

"There's one slight problem with that logic." Miles paused, looking slightly sheepish. "In case you didn't notice, Richard didn't exactly want us to marry."

Henrietta's eyes narrowed as she digested this information. She looked closely at Miles. "You mean…"

"Mm-hmm." Miles scrubbed his hand through his hair. "I was afraid that if I gave you time to think it through, you would recover your senses and agree with him. It could have been hushed up, you know. Richard's staff is inhumanly discreet, and as for the Tholmondelays…" Miles shrugged.

"That," said Henrietta meltingly, looking like someone who had just been handed a decade's worth of Christmas presents all at once, "is better than poetry."

"Good," said Miles, taking her into his arms. "Because," he added, his lips a whisper away from hers, "I'm not writing you any."

Their lips met with a purity of emotion that was ode, sonnet, and ses-tina all in one. No rhymes had ever been smoother, no meter more perfect, no metaphors more harmonious than the melding of mouths and arms, the press of her body against his, as they leaned against each other in an enchanted golden circle where there were no French spies, no sardonic ex -suitors, no importunate schoolmates, nothing but the two of them meandering languorously through their own personal pastoral idyll.

"Devil take it, I knew there was something havey-cavey going on," said Turnip, who had climbed entirely out from under the settee, and was looking as censorious as someone in a carnation pink coat can contrive to look. "It's not havey-cavey," tossed back Miles, eyes never leaving Henrietta, who looked delightfully flushed and even more delightfully befuddled. "We're married."

Turnip considered. "Don't know if that makes it better or worse. Secret marriages, not at all the thing, you know."

"They will be now," prophesied Miles. "So why don't you just go find yourself one, before everyone else starts contracting them, too."

Vaughn coughed discreetly. That eliciting no reaction, he coughed somewhat less discreetly.

"As charming as this is," he said in a tone that caused a flush to rise to Miles's cheeks, "I suggest you postpone your raptures until the Black Tulip is in the possession of the proper authorities. I assume you do know those proper authorities, Dorrington?"

Miles reluctantly relinquished his grasp on Henrietta's shoulders and turned to face Vaughn, keeping one hand protectively on her waist, just in case Vaughn still cherished any notions about harem girls.

"I do," he said, adding, with just a hint of malicious satisfaction, "They're the ones who set me on to you."

Vaughn sighed, brushing an imaginary speck of dust from the ruffles of his sleeve. "I don't understand. I lead such a quiet life."

"Like Covent Garden at sunset," muttered Miles. "Ow!"

"That's what shins are for," explained Henrietta benignly.

"If that's what you think, remind me to wear thicker pantaloons," said Miles, rubbing his aching appendage. "Potentially armored ones."

"I'll make them for you myself," said Henrietta.

"I'd rather you remove them yourself," Miles whispered in her ear.

The two exchanged a look of such smoldering intimacy that Vaughn found it necessary to cough again, and Turnip burst out with, "Discussing a gentleman's nether garments — not at all the thing in mixed company, you know!"

"We're married," chorused Henrietta and Miles.

"Sickening, isn't it?" commented Vaughn to no one in particular. "Remind me never to be a newlywed. It is an insufferable state."

A sarcastic voice rose from the floor. "Could you please get on with deciding my fate? This floor is exceedingly uncomfortable, and the conversation even worse."

Henrietta glanced down. "You don't seem unduly perturbed."

"Why should I be?" said the marquise, in tones that suggested she saw this as merely a temporary setback. "You have a most amateur organization."

"Who managed," pointed out Henrietta, "to catch you."

"A mere technicality," snapped the marquise.

"We'll have to take her to the War Office," Miles interrupted. "And then" — he exchanged another look with Henrietta that made her go pink to the tips of her ears — "we are going home."

Home. It was such a lovely word.

"I find myself again moved to gallantry," said Vaughn in tones of intense weariness. "If you wish, I will undertake to deliver our mutual friend to — the War Office, you said?"

Miles visibly hesitated.

"Or," said Vaughn smoothly, angling his head towards Turnip, "you could have him do it."

Miles handed Vaughn the ends of the rope. "You're a good chap, Vaughn. And if she escapes, I know where to look."

"You have a rare jewel, Dorrington. See that you take good care of her."

Miles had no difficulty whatsoever in promising to do so.

As dusk settled on the city, Miles and Henrietta wandered hand in hand through the tangled streets of London to Loring House. Strains of red and gold flared in the sky like heraldic banners signaling triumph. Henrietta and Miles didn't even notice. They meandered through the gloaming in their own rosy glow, eyes for no one but each other. The special providence that looks out for fools and lovers guarded their path. If refuse grimed the ground underfoot, neither noticed; if footpads plied their sinister trade, they did it elsewhere. And if, from time to time, the couple took advantage of the lengthening shadows to exchange something more than whispers, spying eyes and wagging tongues held no fear for them.

Given the profusion of long shadows and convenient cul-de-sacs, it was a very long walk home, indeed. It was full dark by the time Grosvenor Square came into view, and they had worked out to their satisfaction a program of events for the evening, which included a bath (a suggestion to which Miles acceded with an alarming alacrity that boded ill for the elderly bathtub), bed (Miles), supper (Henrietta), and bed (Miles).

"You already said that," protested Henrietta.

"Some things bear repeating," Miles said smugly. He leaned closer, his lips brushing her ear as they walked up the stairs to the front door, in the uneven light of the torchieres. "Again, and again, and again."

"Incorrigible," sighed Henrietta, with a look of mock despair.

"Indubitably," agreed Miles, just as the front door swung open in front of them.

Miles opened his mouth to inform his butler that they would be not at home to callers. Not today, not tomorrow, preferably not even next week.

"Ah, Stwyth," began Miles, and stopped short, careening into Henrietta, who was doing her best to imitate a pillar of salt.

It wasn't Stwyth at the door. Nor was it the under housemaid from whom Henrietta had borrowed her current costume.

In the doorway of Loring House stood a petite woman dressed in rich traveling clothes. Lady Uppington's gloved hands were on her hips, and one booted foot beat an ominous tattoo against the marble floor. Behind her, Henrietta could see her father, also dressed in traveling attire, arms folded across his chest. Neither looked happy.

"Oh, dear," said Henrietta.