Lauren Willig - [Pink Carnation 04]

by The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

  Caro, was it? Just how caro was he to her? Not that it mattered. Vaughn could prance through the beds of the entire Italian opera corps for all Mary cared. It was simply gauche to display such familiarity in public. One would have thought that a belted earl would have known better.

  But not Vaughn. Oh no. He did as he pleased and damn the consequences, whether it was making a public spectacle of himself with a common opera singer or kissing—

  “Miss Mary?”

  Mary gave a decidedly undignified start at the sound of her name. A large male form cast a shadow over the program in her lap.

  “Forgive me,” said Mr. St. George, taking her alarmed look for one of indignation. “Miss Alsworthy, I should have said. It’s simply that the other suits you so well. You look like a Madonna with your hair pulled smooth like that.” His hands sketched the air in a gesture of masculine hopelessness at the intricacies of feminine coiffeurs.

  “I thought Madonnas were usually blond,” replied Mary, her eyes stealing to the front of the room. Mme. Fiorila wasn’t really a blonde; her hair was closer to red, more Mary Magdalene than the Virgin.

  “Not always,” commented St. George mildly. “In Italy and Spain, one often sees the Blessed Mother portrayed with coloring more like yours. There is a picture by Velázquez in particular that puts me in mind of you. You have some of that same heavenly serenity.”

  “You flatter me, Mr. St. George,” she murmured, donning serenity like a cloak. Beneath it, she felt about as serene as Beelzebub after a hard day in hell, and just as likely to start spitting bits of brimstone.

  “Might I avail myself of the seat beside you? If my services might be of any use, I would be delighted to translate the Italian in the program for you.”

  Mary gestured graciously to the seat beside her. “That would be very kind of you. Our entertainer is Italian, is she not? I wonder why she styles herself madame rather than signora.”

  St. George shrugged good-naturedly, intent on the task of folding his long limbs into the tiny chair. “I’m afraid I don’t pay terribly much attention to the opera, or opera singers.”

  Mary favored him with a smile of such warmth that the bemused gentleman nearly missed the chair. “That, Mr. St. George, cannot but show excellent judgment on your part.” At the front of the room, Vaughn pressed a parting kiss to the back of Mme. Fiorila’s hand. It wasn’t a brief brush of the air, such as courtesy might demand, but a genuine press of lips against skin. “One wouldn’t want to get mixed up with such people,” Mary added waspishly.

  As Lady Henrietta nodded to the accompanist, Lord Vaughn moved discreetly away, propping one shoulder against a painted panel depicting a young shepherd serenading his lass on a rather improbable lute. The opera singer didn’t follow him; like the professional she was, she stood beside the spinet, waiting her turn to sing. But Vaughn had a clear view of her face from where he stood. As Mary watched, Lord Vaughn lifted his brows and the singer’s cheeks creased with answering amusement.

  Mary looked hastily down at her program, dry eyed and aching. Lady Henrietta’s practiced trills felt like a barrage of artillery against her ears, all pounding home the same, unwanted message. Nothing Vaughn did was by accident, everything was deliberate, calculated. The way Vaughn snubbed her at Vauxhall—that hadn’t been an accident or a mistake. There was no other explanation. He simply wasn’t interested. He was grinding home to her, in the best means available to him, that she was nothing to him other than a business associate. Not even an associate, an employee.

  “Do interpret for me, Mr. St. George,” Mary purred, angling her shoulder closer to his. “What was that lovely phrase Lady Henrietta just sang?”

  St. George tilted his head for a moment, listening. “‘Beat me, beat me, dear Masetto,’” he translated.

  From the side of the room, Vaughn cast them an oblique, sideways glance.

  “Indeed.” Mary’s lips curved upwards in an intimate smile. “Do tell me more, Mr. St. George.”

  “‘Meekly like a lamb will I stand…’”

  “How charming.”

  Vaughn had left his position on the wall and was moving casually down the ranks of chairs, towards the back of the room.

  St. George was still whispering in her ear, but Mary didn’t hear a word of it. From the corner of her eye, she followed Vaughn’s progress as he approached their seats, at the very end of the very last row of the room. And passed them by, so closely that the tails of his coat brushed the side of her chair. He didn’t look down; he didn’t look back. He simply left.

  Mary’s nails bit into the leather of her gloves. What further proof did she need? Vaughn was nothing to her, she reminded herself. Nothing.

  Straightening her spine, she smiled upon her companion.

  “How very faithfully you translate, Mr. St. George. Do go on.”

  THE APPLAUSE FOLLOWING LADY HENRIETTA’S final note drowned out the light tap of the door shutting behind him. Alone in the entryway, once again pristine and puddleless, Vaughn turned unerringly along one of the two corridors that branched out off the entrance hall on either side of the great marble sweep of stairs. His instructions had been explicit.

  Lady Uppington’s musicale, third door on the left.

  Aurelia was singing now; he could hear the familiar magic of her voice weaving its way through the cracks of the door as he prowled down the left-hand corridor, counting doors. It had been a relief to see her there, holding out both hands to him at the front of the room. Her company was always a source of solace. They had been lovers once, so long ago that he could not with any accuracy have named the year. Their liaison had ended by mutual consent, ripening instead into a friendship that was at once more satisfying and more lasting.

  Aurelia’s presence had never been more welcome than today, with Mary Alsworthy enthroned in the last row, sowing distraction and disorder like a siren of Greek myth. Five days of avoidance had done nothing to dim her fatal effect; they had merely been a panacea. It had taken all the force of five days of resolution, all the steadying influence of Aurelia’s presence, to keep him from tossing that sickening St. George from his seat and claiming the place for himself.

  The third door on the left was, in fact, the last door on the left. Vaughn helped himself to a candle from the sconce on the wall before turning the brass handle, a precaution that proved to be justified. The room in front of him was as dark as a dungeon. Rain streaked blackly down the windows lining two sides of the room, turning the surfaces slick and dark as polished ebony. The light of his candle reflected wetly off the dark surfaces, sending distorted images of the room wobbling in their depths.

  Closing the door carefully behind him, Vaughn touched his candle to one of the mirror-backed sconces that flanked the door, and watched as a warm light flickered tentatively across the expanse of a pale yellow and blue rug. He didn’t need the east-facing windows to tell him that this must be the morning room. The walls and furniture had been upholstered in a cheerful pale yellow stripe that seemed determined to hold the light and help it along.

  Even in the uneven light, it was clear that he was the first one there. The furniture was all of the spindly and delicate variety, too dainty to conceal even the most delicate human form. The long cream and gold sofa was untenanted, and there was no room between the ormolu legs of the escritoire to hide so much as a cat.

  On the mantel was arrayed a fine collection of Oriental porcelain, glazed cobalt blue and fitted, undoubtedly in France, with gilded trimmings. Hands clasped casually behind his back, Vaughn strolled towards the collection of vases, keeping a wary eye on the mirror above the mantel. It was clearly French in origin, unremarkable enough with its shell-shaped curves, but it served its purpose. It reflected the door behind him as the white panel slowly eased open and a slender figure slid through the resulting gap.

  The angle of the glass blurred her features and elongated the pale column of her gown. Her dress was blue, a gray-toned blue that blended with the shadows, like a sha
de fleeing Hades. Like him, she had come prepared. The candle in her hand turned the fashionable frizz around her face into a distorted halo.

  She lowered her light, placing it on a marble-topped Louis XV table, and the nimbus receded, bringing her face properly into focus.

  It was a face he had known well, once. Even masked, at Vauxhall, he had known her. He could have traced from memory the familiar features, the short upper lip and small, straight nose. But she had changed. It wasn’t only the polished surface of the mirror that lent a hard gloss to the once girlish features. The long curls that had framed and softened her face were gone, replaced by a fashionably short crop, held back by a bandeau to reveal a pair of dangling sapphire earrings that even by the uncertain light of the two candles were clearly paste, and a cheap version, at that, as flat and hard as the eyes that followed his in the mirror.

  Vaughn could feel her eyes on his back, a palpable pressure against the layers of wool and linen.

  “So you did come,” she said, with no little satisfaction. She had always had the voice of a courtesan, low and throaty, with just a hint of a pout. The years had brought the pout into prominence.

  Turning slowly to face her, Vaughn sketched an elaborate court bow, one leg cocked and one arm gracefully extended.

  “As you can see,” he drawled.

  “I had thought you might not.” Her words were meant to be coy, but her hands gave her away, locked tightly at her waist. She glanced quickly over her shoulder at the closed door to the hall.

  “How could I resist such a summons? Beauty may be ignored, but threats tend to garner results,” he added dryly.

  Glancing in the mirror, she made a quick adjustment to one of the little curls on her forehead. “I wouldn’t have resorted to them if I had thought there was any other way of getting your attention.”

  “Then how do you explain the visits I had from your charming Italian friend this spring?”

  Taken off guard, she wasn’t quick enough to pretend ignorance. “What did you do with Marco?”

  Vaughn idly inspected the facets of his great diamond ring. “Was that his name? I must confess, we were never on those sorts of terms. One seldom is with one’s blackmailer.”

  “You didn’t—dispose of him?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Let your fears be set at rest. The creature for whom you are so concerned—although one can hardly see why—is currently cooling his heels in the West Indies.”

  “Really, Sebastian! How could you?”

  “More to the point, how could you? Then again,” Vaughn added meaningfully, “you always did have appalling taste in men.”

  The woman in front of him stiffened, her teeth digging into her lower lip.

  “How can I argue?” she retorted. Shaking back her blond curls, she looked provocatively up at him from under her lashes. “After all, I married you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Claudio: I am your husband, if you like of me.

  Hero: And when I lived, I was your other wife:

  [unmasking]

  And when you loved, you were my other husband.

  —William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, V, iv

  It wasn’t every day that one had the opportunity of sparring with a ghost.

  Crossing his arms across his chest, Vaughn smiled lazily at his dead wife. “Ah, the tender joy of the matrimonial bond. What do you want, Anne?”

  She tilted her head at him in that practiced way she had had, eyes growing wide and misty in incipient supplication.

  After all these years, it came back to him with a thud of recognition, collapsing the decade in between to the space of days. He knew that expression. Next would come an innocent flutter of the lashes, followed by a charmingly perturbed expression, as though she were searching for the right words. And, finally, the long, drawn-out, wheedling rendition of his name. Sebastian…

  Vaughn’s voice sharpened, cutting her off before she could get past the first flutter. “How much?”

  Anne blinked up at him disingenuously. “It’s not money I want, Sebastian,” she said, dewy-eyed as a bride “I want to come back.”

  “Back,” Vaughn echoed delicately.

  “I want to come home,” she repeated artlessly, resting a confiding hand on his sleeve. Against the dark wool, the small white fingers looked like claws, the bright rings like bits of a jackdaw’s hoard. “I’m sick of abroad. All those foreigners with their smelly food. And their breath! If I never see another garlic clove again it will be too soon.”

  She tried to smile up at him, but the bright curve of her lips warred with the watchful tension of her eyes. Beneath the attempt at levity, her expression was as brittle as an eggshell, fine cracks showing in the lines around the corners of her mouth and eyes.

  Dropping her eyes to his sleeve, she went on in a voice so low as to be almost inaudible, “I’m sick of it all. It was amusing in the beginning, but now…I’ve seen what happens to…to women when their looks begin to go.”

  “So have I,” said Vaughn tonelessly. “There is one slight problem with your solution. You’re dead, you know. You managed all that yourself, as you might remember.”

  Anne chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip, a habitual gesture that Vaughn had found seductive a long, long time ago.

  “Well, we didn’t want you following us,” she said, as if it were only logical.

  “Don’t worry. I built you a lovely monument in the classical style. Persephone pulled down to Hades, I believe, was the theme. It seemed appropriate. In more ways than I knew, apparently.”

  Anne shrugged aside classical allusions. “Oh, monuments! It’s all very well to talk about monuments, but one can’t eat marble. Where am I to live, how am I to go on?”

  “Who will keep you in jewels?” echoed Vaughn, sotto voce.

  Instead of getting angry, she took a deliberate step towards him, tilting her head up in an intimate smile. “You haven’t changed a bit, have you, Sebastian?”

  Her voice was soft, nostalgic, deliberately drawing him back to shared memories, a shared past. He could see their once-upon-a-times reflected in the slick surface of her china blue eyes, like a rococo painter’s fantasy of man and maid.

  Everything had been pastel in those halcyon days: the soft shades of her clothes, sashed at the waist and topped with the filmy fichus demanded by sentimental fashion; the long, ash-blond curls tumbling clear to the great bow at the back of her dress; the muted straw of the great, sweeping hats that crowned her curls, shading her expression and masking her eyes. There had been boat rides, with servants to do the rowing; rural picnics, properly supplied with linen and silver; and long strolls in a conservatory where constantly burning stoves and a regiment of gardeners maintained a wilderness of flowers in eternal and artificial summer.

  Like all illusions, it had been a very pretty one. Until it crumbled. Afterwards…no, what followed hadn’t been pretty. Some of it, he had brought down upon himself, deliberately seeking the low, the dark, the debauched. The Hellfire Club, the stews of St. Giles, anything that would serve to obliterate the cloyingly sweet scent of false flowers from his memory. He wanted the noisome, the foul, the gritty, those seamy subterranean swamps of humanity too ripe to be anything but real.

  Some of it had found him, and been almost more than he had bargained for, for all his vaunted sophistication. France. Teresa. Compared with France, the creative perversions of his friends in the Hellfire Club had been nothing but a tawdry pastime, the petty transgressions of bored boys. Sophistication, pitted against real evil, was about as much protection as a fine coating of gold leaf against a hurricane. France had toughened him, hardened him. It wasn’t even the mob, crying with mad joy as the heads of their former masters tumbled into the straw. No, that was a good little malice, comprehensible in its own way. It was the Talleyrands, the Teresas, the men who coolly presided over the demise of civilization with an eye to nothing but what they themselves could glean from it, condemning former friends and lovers with
no more ear to their cries than a butcher slitting the throat of a bleating sheep. If he had had any belief left in the innate goodness of human nature, it had bled out in France, into the straw beneath the guillotine, among the linens he shared with his lover, his accomplice, his éminence grise.

  “I’ve changed more than you think,” Vaughn said flatly.

  She might have demurred, but he raised one hand, the great diamond on his finger winking a warning. Her eyes fixed on it with a magpie’s fascination for shiny objects. “I believe we can spare ourselves the bourgeois joys of tender reminiscence. There is, after all, so little one would care to recall.”

  His wife tilted her head softly to one side. “That’s not how I remember it…Sebastian.”

  Vaughn didn’t move, but something in his face hardened, became as cold and glittering as the diamond on his finger. If she wanted to stroll down memory lane, there were certain avenues that bore exploring.

  He raised a lazy eyebrow. “Whatever happened to—Fernando, was it?”

  “François,” Anne corrected sharply.

  “Forgive me,” Vaughn murmured. “François.”

  The man who had been fascinating enough that young Lady Vaughn had abandoned husband and rank in a precipitate midnight flight, along with the contents of her jewel box and a fair portion of what ancestral silver had survived the Civil Wars. He had been her music teacher. It was an embarrassing cliché, the wife running off with the music master. He supposed it could have been worse. It could have been the dancing master.

  Anne’s eyes dropped to the pale blues and yellows of the Aubusson rug. “François proved…uninteresting.”