Lauren Willig - [Pink Carnation 04]

by The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

  “You mean he left you after the money ran out.”

  Anne tossed her blond curls. “He wasn’t what I had thought he was.”

  “People so seldom are,” Vaughn said, with deceptive gentleness. “It is a lesson we all learn sooner or later. And after François?”

  Anne looked away, over one shoulder, as though seeing people and places that weren’t there. “There was an Austrian gentleman. He took me to Vienna with him. For a time.”

  “Until he tired of you,” Vaughn translated.

  She didn’t attempt to correct him or deny it, but there were lines of strain around her eyes that hadn’t been there before. He had seen that look on the past—but not on Anne. It had been in France, a marquis who had been run from hiding place to hiding place, cutting and weaving, always just evading capture, until at the end he had been caught and dragged forth.

  Vaughn had barely known the man, but his eyes had stayed with him for weeks after, the eyes of a hunted thing, scarcely human.

  “After that,” Anne went on, speaking rapidly, “I moved to Rome. There was a cardinal who was kind to me.”

  “How fitting,” said Vaughn softly. “A Protestant whore for a papist priest. What a charming pair you must have made. Does Babylon mean anything to you, my dear?”

  Face twisting with annoyance, Anne made an impatient movement. With her, petulance always had won out over diplomacy in the end. “It wasn’t like that!”

  “Then what was it like?”

  “You wouldn’t understand. It’s all different over there.”

  Vaughn ran a languid finger along the contour of his quizzing glass. “Then why don’t you go back?”

  “I can’t—I don’t want to,” she corrected herself. Nervously working her fingers, the words came rushing out, “It’s not just that. My current protector, he frightens me. I can’t go on with this any longer. Sebastian…”

  The sound of his name on her lips grated on his nerves. In the two years they had been married, she had always begun with his name when she wanted something, in just that tone. A long, drawn-out caress of a salutation, with the emphasis on the second syllable. Gambling debts, jewels…music lessons. Whatever it was, he had given it to her, not out of love—not by then—but out of boredom, because he had it to give, and it was easier to accede than argue.

  “Even if I did want you back,” he said, with deliberate cruelty, “there are obstacles. Your supposed death, for one.”

  “We could find a way around that,” Anne said eagerly. “We could tell people that I was stunned in the carriage accident and lost my memory. I wandered off and—and was taken in by some kind farmers, who nursed me and treated me as their own. And then…”

  “A touching tale, but with one slight hitch. In case you haven’t heard, you were supposed to have died of smallpox.”

  “Oh,” said Anne.

  “It sounded less damning than the carriage accident,” Vaughn said apologetically. “You do understand, I trust. It really isn’t the done thing to die while eloping with your music master.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.” Her eyes narrowed as she attempted to work out the problem, another familiar gesture, one he had found charming in the early days of their courtship. At the time, he had accepted it as indicative of deep thought. Later, he came to know it for what it was, the working of concentrated self-interest.

  “Perhaps…,” she began slowly. “Perhaps you were so mad with grief that you fled from my room believing I was dead.”

  Lace fluttering, Vaughn raised a graceful hand. “Let me hazard a guess as to what happened next. Wandering through the countryside, you encountered that same ill-used farmer and his wife. They took you in, disposed of all your smallpox scars by means of a cunning folk remedy, and treated you as their own.”

  Anne regarded him dubiously, her nose wrinkling. “I’m not quite sure…”

  Vaughn tapped his quizzing glass against his lower lip, as though in deep cogitation. “Just as they were on the verge of marrying you off to their cretin of a son—undoubtedly named Reuben, as cretinous farm boys invariably are—a fortuitous blow to the head awakened you to the reality of your station. You flung off your humble raiment, said suitably tearful farewells to all your favorite farm animals, and sallied forth into the world to regain your proper place.”

  “We might leave out Reuben,” suggested Anne. “And the farm animals.”

  Vaughn let the quizzing glass drop. “Either way, it wouldn’t fool a child. Which is not to say that it might not work on the half-wits who make up society….”

  Anne’s face lit in eager response.

  To his own surprise, Vaughn found he couldn’t go on. Her naked desperation shamed him.

  How inconvenient and unexpected, after all this time, to find himself moved by pity for his own renegade wife. But there it was. There was no sport left in baiting her, no profit in revenge. Instead, he felt nothing but a sickly sort of pity mingled with disgust—although whether the disgust was for him or her, he wouldn’t have been able to say.

  With an abrupt motion, Vaughn ended the game. “No, Anne. Has it never occurred to you that I might not want you back?”

  “But—you have to!”

  Turning away from her, Vaughn devoted his attention to the collection of Ming vases above the mantelpiece. His bones felt as old and brittle as the cracked china, silent witnesses of centuries of war and betrayal.

  “I will pay you a large enough sum to ensure that there need be no more cardinals in your future. But I will not take you back.”

  “You can’t do that.” Anne yanked ineffectually at his arm, her nails scraping over the wool of his sleeve. “You married me. I’m your wife—till death do us part.”

  Vaughn looked at her coolly over his shoulder. “That could be arranged.”

  Anne’s hand dropped, and she took a step back, her face twisted with inexplicable amusement, a tragicomic mask of humorless mirth. “You wouldn’t. But he—” Anne caught herself, shaking her head so violently that her curls frothed about her face. “I’ll go to my aunt. She’ll make you see reason.”

  “Lady Hester? She still thinks I murdered you, you know. The poor old witch is half-mad. How do you think she’ll feel to hear that you’ve duped her all these years, too?”

  “I don’t care.” Anne’s slippers slapped against the muted patterns of the carpet, weaving an uneven spiral between the door and the mantel. Her voice rose in a note Vaughn recognized well from the short span of their marriage, the shrill insistence of a child on the verge of a temper tantrum. “She’ll have to listen to me. She’ll back me. And then you—you’ll have to take me back, unless you want there to be a scandal. The ton might ignore a woman alone, but they won’t ignore Lady Hester Standish.”

  “Once, perhaps.” When Anne had arranged her own precipitate departure, Lady Hester had still been a woman of substance among the ranks of the nobility. After her niece’s supposed death, Lady Hester had gone from eccentric to something close to genuinely mad. All the affection she had lavished on her favorite niece, all her formidable mental powers, had instead been channeled into the radical politics that had once been merely a pastime. The ton had been first alarmed, then scornful, and finally, inevitably, bored. Whatever clout Lady Hester had once had, had long since dissipated in a jumble of incoherent speeches and revolutionary politics. “You’ve been away for a very long time, Anne.”

  Doubt flickered across the cerulean surface of Anne’s eyes. “It hasn’t been that long. There will still be those who know me, who recognize me. You can’t deny me forever. Sebastian…”

  There it was again, that grating repetition of his name, like an incantation meant to summon back the past. Vaughn was reminded of Glendower’s boast that he could call spirits from the vasty deep. Why, so can I, or so can any man, Hotspur had responded. But will they come when you do call for them?

  Vaughn bent his torso in an impersonal bow. “I suggest you leave before me. We don’t want there to be a scandal
, after all.”

  “This isn’t the end of it, Sebastian. You must know that.” With an attempt at bravado, she squared her fine-boned shoulders and tried to look imperious. “I’ll give you a week to think it over.”

  Vaughn merely inclined his head in response.

  She wasn’t satisfied with that, he could tell, but some instinct of self-preservation taught her better than to argue. Some instinct or, from her tale, some past protector, less patient with her vagaries than her sometime husband. Her blue eyes narrowed, but she moved docilely enough towards the door, working out, Vaughn had no doubt, her next plan of attack. He doubted she would go to Lady Hester. At least, not yet. Lady Hester was a plan of last resort, the last charge of the cavalry.

  In the open doorway, Anne paused, her hand on the gilded latch.

  “Do you hate me that much—for leaving you?”

  While they reminisced of days gone by, the concert must have ended. Down the length of the hallway, Vaughn could see the clustered groups of guests, waiting for their wraps, discussing the music, exchanging the latest on-dits. And, among them, Miss Mary Alsworthy, smiling disingenuously up at the besotted Mr. St. George.

  With unerring instinct, Mary’s blue eyes honed in on his, flicking from Anne to him with a look of scorn that burned like ice, before she pointedly returned her attentions to St. George, smiling up at him as though the fate of the kingdom depended on it.

  “No,” Vaughn said honestly. “Only for coming back.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  But these are all lies: men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

  —William Shakespeare, As You Like It, IV, i

  “Your watchdog is following us.”

  “My—?” Mary twisted to look, and saw only Lord Vaughn, cool and urbane, examining the set of his sleeves with an absorption that implied that everything else in the room was beneath his notice. His companion appeared to have departed.

  Blue eyes narrowed, Mary turned back to St. George. “I would scarcely call him my watchdog.”

  “What would you call it, then, when I have had scarcely a moment to speak to you without his interruption?”

  Mary shrugged helplessly.

  Leaning a hand on the wall against her head, St. George’s voice dropped. “Please forgive me for being so forward, but…” He hesitated, searching for words. “Is there something of which I ought to be aware? If you have an understanding—”

  Mary dropped her eyes before St. George’s earnest gaze, examining the braid trimming her sleeve with every bit as much attention as Lord Vaughn. “No,” she said, addressing herself to her gloves. “We have no understanding.”

  That much, at least, was absolutely true.

  St. George looked unconvinced.

  “If your sentiments are engaged—” he began.

  Mary cut him off with a quick movement of her hand. “Lord Vaughn,” she said, making sure to pitch her voice loud enough to carry across the hall, “has been kind enough to take an avuncular interest in my affairs.” Fluttering her lashes prettily at St. George, she added piercingly, “Bachelor gentlemen of a certain age often do.”

  Brushing the golden-brown curls back from his brow, St. George smiled ruefully down at her, the skin on either side of his eyes crinkling. “I hope you don’t cast me in that category.”

  It had never occurred to her to do so. St. George, she supposed, must be at least as old as Lord Vaughn; there was a fullness to his form and a maturity in the lines of his face that only came with age. It was a good sort of maturity, the sort most women would find attractive, with a few lines adding depth and character to his undeniably pleasing countenance. Yet, next to Vaughn, he seemed like a boy, young and callow—and infinitely less interesting.

  Unlike Vaughn, however, he was willing to come up to scratch. Nothing else mattered.

  Mary forced herself to smile warmly up at him. “Never, my dear Mr. St. George. You defy categorization.”

  “There is a category in which I would greatly desire to be placed. Were you to be so inclined.”

  “And what might that be, Mr. St. George?”

  In the hidden place between their bodies and the wall, St. George possessed himself of her hand.

  Pressing it earnestly, he said, “That of your friend.”

  Mary managed to hold the corners of her smile in place. “But, of course, Mr. St. George,” she said smoothly, drawing back on her hand. “I esteem myself honored in the friendship of so worthy and honorable a gentleman.”

  St. George’s grip tightened around her fingers. “Your friend and—”

  Behind them, someone cleared his throat, forcefully enough to scour the inside of a chimney.

  “Miss Alsworthy,” Vaughn drawled, standing at his ease with his quizzing glass poised at one eye. The glass flicked to her companion. “St. George.”

  St. George hastily dropped Mary’s hand. “Vaughn.”

  Vaughn wagged the quizzing glass in St. George’s general direction. “What a penchant you have, my dear sir, for conversing in corners. Are these country manners?”

  St. George drew himself up to his full height, which put him at least an inch over Vaughn. “In the country, sir, we are accustomed to the luxury of completing a conversation unmolested.”

  “Indeed?” Vaughn affected an expression of polite interest. “What a charming, rural custom.”

  Ignoring him, St. George bent over Mary’s hand. “I hope we may continue our conversation on a more auspicious occasion?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Mary could see the flash of Vaughn’s glass as he dangled it languidly from one finger, the silver winking in the light. “I should like nothing better.”

  “In that case…” St. George pressed a kiss to the back of her hand, his lips brushing glove, not air. “I shall call upon you. Soon.”

  “Do,” Mary said, the word sounding stiff on her lips beneath the lowering influence of Vaughn’s cynical gaze. Fixing her attention firmly on St. George, she repeated, with a flirtatious smile, “Do.”

  Mary watched St. George depart, wishing she could feel anything at all. He carried himself well. Even if his coat was ill cut, the breadth of his back stretched pleasingly beneath the fabric and the candles caught the gold in his tawny hair. He was a respectable figure of a man, a solid one, a kind one, and she ought to feel something, if only gratitude for the prospect of rescue from spinsterhood. She ought to be relieved. But, instead, as she watched him clap his hat on his curly head, all she felt was a dull sense of resignation.

  “Am I to wish you joy?” Vaughn’s breath was warm against her ear.

  “Coming from you,” Mary said tartly, turning towards Vaughn, “it would undoubtedly be a barbed gift. Did you have something to say to me, my lord?”

  “Other than the usual pleasantries?”

  Tipping her head to one side, Mary indicated that she was not amused.

  Vaughn cocked one dark brow. “Unless other affairs have intervened, I believe we have an outing to arrange.”

  “An outing,” Mary repeated.

  “To Hyde Park,” Vaughn reminded her smoothly. “For matters of a martial kind.”

  So they were to continue with their association then. Having not heard from him for a week—Mary’s lips tightened automatically at the memory—she had assumed that their bargain had ended. After all, he knew that the Black Tulip was to be at Hyde Park at the appointed day and hour. He didn’t need her anymore. He didn’t need her or want her—and she most certainly didn’t need him.

  Even now, though, the prospect of a day with Vaughn thrilled her. It was painful and embarrassing to be so drawn to someone who had already proven his indifference to her twice over. Yet there was no denying that words seemed sharper, colors brighter, ideas clearer, the very air more exhilarating when he was there, taunting, teasing, baiting. In short, being himself.

  “I suppose my other affairs can wait the day.”

  “I am relieved,” Vaughn sai
d smoothly. “I should have hated to disappoint our friend.”

  “But you have so many friends,” murmured Mary. “In all sorts of places.” Down the hall, for example.

  Vaughn regarded her lazily though his quizzing glass. “Some are more demanding than others.”

  Despite having opened the topic, Mary decided she didn’t want to know. “What time do you call for me?” she asked abruptly.

  “It will be early,” Vaughn warned her. “Well before noon.”

  “I believe I can contrive to drag myself from my bed,” Mary said with heavy sarcasm. “I’m scarcely such a hothouse flower as that.”

  To her surprise, instead of replying in kind, Vaughn just looked at her. His eyes, without their accustomed armor of the quizzing glass, dwelled on her face for what felt like a very long time.

  “No,” he said quietly. “I don’t believe you are.”

  Mary couldn’t figure out whether or not she had just been insulted. It was hard to be sure of anything under the dizzying force of Lord Vaughn’s concentrated regard.

  “Not all of us have hothouses,” retorted Mary belligerently.

  “You wouldn’t want one,” said Vaughn softly, his eyes never leaving hers. “They aren’t all one thinks they would be.”

  Mary tossed her head. “As opposed to the common wildflower?”

  “Never common,” countered Vaughn, with just a glimmer of a smile. “And only a little bit wild.”

  There was a strange ache at the back of Mary’s throat. Why wouldn’t he just let her hate him? No, not hate; despise, revile, all those other socially acceptable emotions. Why did he have to look at her like that?

  Because, she reminded herself bracingly, he was a rake, a rogue, and a seducer. They did that. The rake looked at a woman as though she were his sole hope for salvation—and then he went right on along to the next one, to the opera singer, the blonde in the back room, and heaven only knew who else.

  “My lord Vaughn?” Lady Richard’s country cousin interposed herself between them.