Despite the inclusion of Cavaliers with their dashing taste in haberdashery, Mary wasn’t sure that was a list she wanted to join. “I do hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Only on alternate Tuesdays.” Wrapping her arm through his, Vaughn guided her through the main room as Aunt Imogen swept unsteadily along in front of them, her trailing skirts picking up dust, crumbs, and a rancid sausage roll. “Ask me again next week.”
Mary caught a brief glimpse of trestle tables set around a low-ceilinged room before Vaughn turned her sharply to the right. “If I’m still speaking to you next week,” Mary cautioned.
“Oh, you will be,” said Vaughn confidently, using the head of his cane to push open another door. Ushering her through ahead of him, he added, “If you want to be paid.”
Mary would dearly have loved to have decimated him with a cutting comment, but it was too late. She was already inside. Revenge would have to come later.
Preceding her escort into the private parlor, Mary automatically adjusted her posture as several pairs of male eyes swiveled in her direction. She might have saved herself the trouble. The gentlemen milling about the room didn’t seem the sort to be swayed by feminine pulchritude, unless she came bearing a tricolor in one hand and a bloody axe in the other, preferably with one foot planted on a pile of dead aristos. They were just as Vaughn had described, the sort of social detritus one would expect to adhere to an outlandish cause, paunchy, myopic, and with the habitual hunch of men who spent more time in the study than in the saddle. They wore ink-stained waistcoats and carelessly tied cravats. Many still sported the longer hair of the previous decade, scraped back with bits of string or, for the more soigné, black velvet ribbon. No wonder they belonged to a revolutionary society intent on the overthrow of the current regime; most of them would be laughed out of any ballroom in London.
There was, however, one man who didn’t fit the general mold. It wasn’t that he was taller than the rest, for the room boasted its share of scarecrows. He was only slightly above medium height, perhaps an inch taller than Mary’s escort, but there was something that made him stand out from his fellows. It was, Mary realized, that he looked healthy. His golden brown hair had the sheen of health rather than grease, and his skin had the warm brown tint that marked an outdoorsman rather than the unwholesome white of his fellow disciples. He might be just above medium height, but he held himself well, without the scholarly stoop that hunched the others, and his red-figured waistcoat stretched across a quite respectable expanse of chest. There was something open and friendly about his face, with its straight nose, wide mouth, and broad cheekbones. Compared with the saturnine visage of her escort, it was an endearingly boyish countenance.
He was also, Mary noted, already taken. As she watched, he bent solicitously over a woman in a dark bonnet who sat in a chair at the far corner of the room. From the distance, it was impossible to make out anything of her features, but given the man’s attentive stance, there had to be something worth seeing to under the voluminous crape that veiled her bonnet. Remembering Vaughn’s comment about reforming gentlemen being easy prey, Mary made a wry face. Someone else had obviously beaten her to it.
Abandoning the couple in the corner, Mary scanned the rest of the scene. Someone had gone to some effort to decorate the room for the occasion. Colorful—and most likely treasonous—bunting in red, white, and blue draped the edges of a table, on which rested the Society’s seal, a battered gavel, and a signed engraving that could only be of Thomas Paine himself. He wore a suitably grave expression and toted a pamphlet on which the words “Common Sense” could be seen emblazoned in flowing script. In one corner of the engraving, the enterprising artist had added several illustrative emblems, including a pair of stays. Mary could only assume the corset was meant to convey an abstruse allegorical meaning.
Nudging Vaughn’s arm, Mary nodded at the engraving and murmured, “The underpinnings of state?”
Vaughn’s lips quirked. “Or simply underpinnings. Before he started peddling revolutionary ideals, Mr. Paine’s trade was corsets. To wit, the construction thereof.”
From what Mary could make out of the stays, either the engraver had never seen a woman’s undergarments or Paine had made a very poor job of his original profession. “I hope he is more adept with his pen than his needle.”
Vaughn answered with a droll expression that made Mary smother an inappropriate chuckle. “Why do you think women’s fashion in France changed so dramatically after Paine descended upon them?” He shook his head in mock regret. “A whole revolution just to do away with a set of stays.”
“I don’t think that’s common sense,” protested Mary, casting a watchful eye around them.
“Certainly not,” rejoined Vaughn, with a private smile. “I could think of far simpler ways to remove stays.”
“I’m sure you could,” said Mary repressively. “But now is not the time.”
Vaughn raised an eyebrow. “Is that an invitation?”
“Don’t,” Mary whispered. Two men had abandoned the cluster in front of the engraving and were heading their way. They did not look hospitable. One was tall and gaunt, his nose curved in an arrogant arc like the beak of a bird of prey. With his spare frame and too-bright eyes, he reminded Mary of an El Greco painting of a saint on the verge of martyrdom, half-mad and more than a little smug. Next to him, his friend faded into insignificance, a blur of round cheeks and thinning hair. Mary rapidly arranged her face into a dewy-eyed simper. “You’ll have us booted out before we’ve begun.”
“I’ll take that as a no.” Without missing a beat, Vaughn extended a graceful hand to the two gentlemen approaching. “Gentlemen! How delightful.”
“May we help you?” asked the taller man forbiddingly. With that nose, Mary reflected, he couldn’t help but look forbidding, no matter how benign his intentions might be. Up close, he looked even more like a saint returned from forty days in the wilderness. Rather than the closely tailored coats in fashion, he wore a long frock coat in a rusty black that bore an uncanny resemblance to a cassock. Hollows beneath his cheekbones gouged triangular gashes in his long face.
“We do find ourselves among the distinguished members of the Common Sense Society, do we not?” Vaughn drawled, deploying his quizzing glass in a way that suggested he hoped the answer would be not.
The thin man regarded him warily. “You do. And since you appear to have the advantage of us…”
Vaughn made an elegant leg, lace fluttering and jewels glinting. He was as out of place in the rough-hewn room as a tiger in Hyde Park.
“I am Vaughn,” he announced, with the unconscious arrogance of three hundred years of being able to introduce oneself by one name alone. “I had the pleasure of meeting your estimable Mr. Paine many years ago through the good auspices of my cousin, Lord Edward Fitzgerald. It was…an unforgettable experience.”
The hawk-nosed man inclined his head, his dark eyes never leaving Vaughn. “I am Mr. Rathbone. This”—he indicated the shorter man—“is Mr. Farnham, who acts as chairman for our Society.”
The round-faced man bobbed and mumbled his pleasure at the introduction. It seemed, thought Mary, a rather curious disposition of roles. Mr. Rathbone, with his automatic habit of command, appeared unlikely to take second chair to anyone, much less so insignificant a figure as the pink-cheeked Mr. Farnham, who was beaming welcome and goodwill through his chipped teeth. Either there was some title higher than chairman in their little Society, or Mr. Farnham possessed unexpected talents beneath his humdrum façade.
Vaughn must have entertained similar questions, because he trained his quizzing glass lazily on the taller man, in a way that made the hollows beneath Rathbone’s cheekbones go even hollower. “And you, Mr. Rathbone? What role do you play?”
“I have the honor to serve as vice-chairman,” said Rathbone shortly.
“Vice…chairman,” mused Lord Vaughn, separating the one word into two. “What a very pleasant position that must be. Such…scope.�
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“Are you, too, a reformer, Lord Vaughn?” inquired Rathbone. He seemed to have difficulty wrapping his tongue around the title. Ah, one of those, thought Mary. The problem with revolutions was that they scraped up all sorts of ideologues with ridiculous ideas about doing away with hereditary honors and giving land in common to the masses and all that sort of rubbish.
Polishing a corner of his quizzing glass, Vaughn neatly avoided the question. “I do what little I can. I have,” he added modestly, “been fortunate enough to be admitted into the august company of the Societé des Droits des Hommes.”
Mary had never heard of it, but it worked an immediate magic upon the shorter man, who in his excitement rose to the balls of his feet and flapped his hands like a chicken.
“The SDH! Our sister Society in Paris,” he explained to Mary, for want of anyone else to explain to. His voice emerged in a nasal squeak, too high-pitched for his amply padded frame. “Our model, our guide…I’d always hoped to visit the SDH someday,” he finished wistfully.
Rathbone was less impressed. “Then you know Monsieur Delaroche, of course.”
“Of course,” Vaughn assured him blandly. “Excellent fellow. A bit quick with the guillotine finger, but always good for a spot of revolutionary rhetoric. His extemporaneous harangues were quite the rage when I was last in Paris.”
Rathbone looked at Vaughn sharply, but Farnham cut in, bobbing in front of the other man. “How lucky you were to be in Paris during such stirring times! How did it feel,” he demanded eagerly, “to breathe the clean, pure air of liberty?”
“Rather fetid, actually. The French, you know,” Vaughn replied, touching his handkerchief delicately to his nose.
Farnham’s face fell, but after a moment’s deep reflection, he nodded in understanding. “Of course,” he said. “We are so frightfully cut off here. Did the resolution pass?”
“Which one? Sausages for all, or death to the aristos?”
Farnham frowned uneasily, as though not quite sure whether Vaughn were bamming him. “The latter, of course.”
“Oh, indubitably. Four frogs to one. We adjourned just before midnight, and had a bang-up sausage fest at Mme. Lefarge’s pie shop.”
Farnham looked wistful. Unmoved by culinary considerations, Rathbone’s eyes narrowed. “You seem to treat our goals with a certain levity, Lord Vaughn.”
“Far be it from me to impart undue humor to so serious a cause. I am simply giddy with the delight of being here among you tonight. Do tell me, Mr. Farnham, have you read Mr. Paine’s latest pamphlet?”
“You mean…” Farnham’s head sunk until it seemed to have nearly disappeared into his cravat, leaving nothing but a pair of eyes peering out.
“Precisely,” said Lord Vaughn.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” interjected Mary.
“His new pamphlet,” whispered Farnham, his piggy eyes swiveling madly from side to side. “It is about…It suggests…”
“Invasion,” declared Lord Vaughn.
Chapter Seven
Welcome, destruction, blood, and massacre.
—William Shakespeare, Richard III, II, iv
The word shivered in the air among them.
Lord Vaughn hefted his cane as though testing its weight. “Invasion,” he repeated, rolling the word on his tongue as Mr. Farnham wrung his hands and Rathbone’s eyes continued to narrow until they were all but swallowed up. “A French invasion to bring about the glorious benefits of the revolution to those of us here at home. Mr. Paine has generously offered himself and his expertise to Bonaparte as guide in helping us create a new form of representative government in our degenerate state. A bold prospect for a new age.”
“Indeed,” squeaked Mr. Farnham, clasping his hands together and peering over his shoulder. “But to speak of it…easy enough for Mr. Paine to write from the safety of America, but to talk of such a thing, here…”
“Come, man,” said Vaughn jovially, his diamonds winking incongruously as he dealt the other man a hearty clap on the back. “We are all friends here, are we not, Rathbone?”
“So we have been given to believe,” replied Rathbone tightly. “And you, Miss…”
“Alsworthy,” supplied Mary, with a modest droop of her bonneted head.
“And you, Miss Alsworthy? What do you think of our prospects for a French style of government?”
“I think,” said Mary demurely, “that if it comes with a French form of fashion, I shall like it very well indeed.”
Lord Vaughn took refuge behind his handkerchief.
“The dust, you understand,” he explained innocently, flapping the lace-edged linen in illustration. “Damnable to the delicate nose.”
Mr. Rathbone was unconcerned by the state of Vaughn’s sinuses. “A very light response, Miss Alsworthy, to such weighty events. Am I to understand that you view the fate of nations as nothing more than a diversion? A parlor game, perhaps?”
“It was certainly not my intention to give you that impression,” hedged Mary, even if it did fall close to the truth. Did this scarecrow of a man truly believe he could command the destiny of empires? It would have been laughable if he hadn’t been quite so serious about it. He would, reflected Mary, have made a brilliant Grand Inquisitor, if only he had had a Spanish accent and a small goatee.
Even without those props, he managed to radiate disapproval, all of it in Mary’s direction. “We prefer our members to demonstrate a certain seriousness of purpose.”
Mary struck her Joan of Arc pose, one hand clasped to the bosom and the head tilted slightly back towards the heavens. Or where the heavens ought to be if there weren’t a ceiling in the way.
“I pray you, sir, do not judge me by my mere façade. Beneath these meaningless rags beats a heart that burns with the injustices perpetrated by an unequal society”—it was, in fact, entirely unfair that some girls should get husbands while other, prettier girls did not—“and I have pledged myself in whatever humble way I may to doing my own small part to remedy those iniquitous inequities.”
Mary was quite proud of the alliteration at the end. All those tedious years of playing poetic muse did have their benefits. She could also do an excellent epic simile if the occasion called for it, but she thought that might be a bit much, even for a revolutionary society.
Rathbone shifted so that they stood a little apart from the others. “Perhaps your part, Miss Alsworthy, may be larger than you think.”
“I would be honored to think that might be the case,” replied Mary carefully, trying not to notice the way his dark frame walled her away from the rest of the room. The expanse of black broadcloth barring her path emitted an unpleasant smell, musty wool with an acrid overtone of wood ash, like a damp fire. Mary darted a glance past him at Lord Vaughn, but Vaughn was arm in arm with Farnham, bending over the man with exaggerated solicitude. She hadn’t really expected him to ride to the rescue, had she? That hadn’t been in their arrangement—and saving embattled maidens wasn’t much in Vaughn’s line.
She was, after all, here for a specific purpose: to roust out French spies. It wasn’t as though Vaughn were squiring her about for the pleasure of her company. She would do well to remember that.
With that in mind, she asked, “What do you think, Mr. Rathbone, of this talk of invasion?”
“I?” There was something cruel about the curve of Rathbone’s lips, a secret knowledge that made Mary, for the first time, wonder at the wisdom of toying with world affairs. But it was too late now. She was committed. And she was damned if she would cry coward before Lord Vaughn. “I think that more subtle methods might be employed to achieve the same ends.”
“I, too, am a great believer in subtlety, Mr. Rathbone.” Steeling herself to rest a hand lightly on his arm, she added pensively, “It has long been a sorrow to me that the disposition of society prevents my playing a larger role in events of so much moment to us all.”
“If the spirit is willing, the opportunity will present itself.”
> “I do so hope so.” Mary looked up at him through her lashes. “But how will one know opportunity when it comes to call?”
His too-bright eyes raked her face, probing at the levels of pretense. Mary returned his scrutiny without faltering. Some people thought they could read another’s thoughts from their eyes. Mary knew that to be sheer bunk. She could lie with her eyes just as effectively as her lips.
Whatever Rathbone saw, it seemed to satisfy him. Enough so that his thin lips relaxed, opening to say…
“Hallo!”
Mary started as a cheerful voice shattered the silence, interrupting whatever it was that Mr. Rathbone had been about to confide. The breath Mary hadn’t realized she was holding went out in a rush, leaving her vaguely light-headed as her gloved hand dropped from Rathbone’s arm.
Straightening, Rathbone nodded coldly to the newcomer. It wasn’t Lord Vaughn, come to intervene, but the gentleman she had noticed from across the room, the one in the red patterned waistcoat with the exuberant golden brown hair. Up close, he was older than he had appeared, with white lines scarring the tanned skin around his eyes. Unlike Lord Vaughn, this man’s wrinkles were the sort that came of squinting at the sun, rather than too many late nights in too many ladies’ bedchambers.
Strolling up beside Rathbone, he clapped the other man on the back, beaming genially from Rathbone to Mary and back again. “Rathbone, won’t you do me the great honor of an introduction?”
“Miss Alsworthy, Mr. St. George.” The vice-chairman looked more than ever like a Grand Inquisitor as he looked down his nose at St. George. “I would remind you both that the meeting will be called to order in precisely two minutes.”
“No need for reminders, Rathbone, old chap. We shall attend faithfully, I promise you.”
For a moment, the vice-chairman looked as though he might like to object, but the other man’s smiling regard was too much for him. With a stiff “See that you do,” he stalked off in the direction of Paine’s painting, collaring Farnham as he went. Mary watched him go, not sure whether to be relieved or annoyed by the interruption.
Lauren Willig - [Pink Carnation 04] Page 10