Lauren Willig - [Pink Carnation 04]

by The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

He was tiring, the strain showing in his voice and his movements, increasingly sluggish as he ducked St. George’s blows. Unhealthy sweat beaded his brow, and his coat was damp with another sort of liquid entirely. Vaughn might have the real sword, but what was two feet of metal compared with eight feet of solid wood? There was no way Vaughn could get close enough to St. George to run him through without getting past that shifting barrier of painted wood. It was too heavy to send flying with a flick of his sword—an attempt bent back his wrist and nearly his sword—and too long to dart past.

  Seized by a sudden inspiration, Mary slipped past the crumpled body of Vaughn’s wife and snatched up a long oar from the interior of Turnip’s Trojan boat. It must have been purloined from someone’s rowboat; rather than a pasteboard imitation, it was the real item, a long shaft of wood with a rectangle on one end. It wasn’t a ham haunch, but it was nearly as long as St. George’s spear, and that was what mattered.

  With her oar at the ready, Mary circled the fighters, looking for an opening. St. George was too tall to hit over the head unless he bent over first. She doubted he would be that obliging. A glancing blow to the head wouldn’t do more than distract him. That moment of distraction might be all that Vaughn needed to get under St. George’s guard and run him through. But watching Vaughn hop over a long sweep aimed at his shins, Mary had another idea.

  St. George knew he had the winning hand. With a triumphant snarl, he pressed forwards, the spear lifted to be brought down upon Vaughn’s unprotected head. Dropping to one knee, Mary stuck the oar out in front of St. George’s legs. An expression of tremendous surprise crossed his face, and he seemed to hover in the air for a very long moment. The spear went spiraling harmlessly into the air, bumping and skidding across the boards of the stage before rolling neatly off the edge.

  St. George fell forwards with a tremendous thump that wrenched the oar clean out of Mary’s hands. Vaughn leapt agilely back out of the way as St. George hit the ground spread-eagled, an arm stretched out on either side. A small explosion of dust motes rose and settled around him.

  A faint groan emerged from the vicinity of the floorboards.

  Planting one foot on St. George’s back, Vaughn grinned at Mary. “Well done, dear girl.”

  “Thank you.” Mary shrugged her hair back over her shoulders, for the first time aware of her tattered and dirtied draperies, disarranged to the point of indecency. She had lost the filet somewhere along the way, and her armlets had all bunched up around her wrists.

  From the expression on Vaughn’s face, he didn’t seem to mind.

  “My very own Boadicea,” said Vaughn softly. “You could set a fashion among warrior maidens.”

  Mary spread her empty hands. “I’m afraid I’ve lost my spear.”

  Vaughn’s eyes glinted with amusement. “I’d be more than happy to loan you one.”

  Mary could feel the warmth in her cheeks as she cast a reproving glance at him over St. George’s fallen body.

  The warmth wasn’t just in her cheeks, though. All of her felt uncomfortably warm, with a prickly sort of heat that wasn’t just from bawdy double entendres or the intimacy of Vaughn’s gaze. In the sudden silence, she could hear a curious crackling noise, a crackle and hiss like paper being crumpled.

  With a sick lurch at the pit of her stomach, Mary remembered Vaughn’s wife toppling over, with the shattered glass of the broken footlights radiating out around her.

  Licking her dry lips, Mary pivoted slowly, following the low trail of flame from the shattered footlights across the stage.

  It ate merrily away at Lady Euphemia’s prized red velvet curtains, devouring any fallen props in its wake. The flames were already licking delicately at the base of the backdrop, blackening the bottom of the painted castle. Adventurous shoots of flame wriggled upwards, scaling the castle walls.

  Behind the backdrop lay the Black Tulip’s infernal machine.

  “Quick!” Using both hands, Mary pushing Vaughn off the stage ahead of her. He landed on both feet. Barely.

  “It won’t—” Vaughn began, slightly out of breath.

  “An infernal machine,” she said tersely, grabbing him by the hand and dragging him along behind her, anxious to put as much space as possible between them and the stage. Heaven only knew if Rathbone’s contraption worked. If it did, she didn’t want to find out. “Backstage.”

  She was too busy forging straight ahead to see the change in Vaughn’s expression, but she felt it as he rocked to a sudden halt, breaking her grip. With a sharp phrase on her lips, Mary turned, just in time to see Vaughn’s face, frozen like Lot’s wife turned to salt, in an expression of guilt and horror.

  “Anne,” he said heavily. Before Mary could do anything to stop him, he wheeled back towards the stage.

  Mary caught futilely at his sleeve, her fingernails grazing his sleeve with a hideous rasping noise.

  “Don’t—” she begged, but the sound of her own plea was drowned out as a thunderous rattle shook the stage and the world cascaded into flame.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments….

  —William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

  I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thine eyes—

  and, moreover, I will go with thee to thy uncle’s.

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

  Mary woke herself with coughing, and wished she hadn’t. Everything hurt. Her throat was raw, her head ached, and her bare arms stung as though they had been scratched by nettles. Even the inside of her eyelids felt gritty.

  It was with great effort that she dragged them open to see a grimed face hanging over her, lit from behind with a red glow like a bonfire of brimstone. Dark figures scuttled about the infernally illuminated landscape, some standing, chatting and sipping punch, others darting back and forth with buckets. Mary winced at the sound of hundreds of voices raised in excited chatter, which competed with the hiss and crackle of the flames, and an echoing in her ears like a thousand bees buzzing. And about them all gusted great clouds of smoke, acrid with ash, searing the back of her throat and kindling the panicked memory of fire and thunder and a sudden pain that had turned the red flames to black.

  The concerned face dipped closer, blotting out sight and standing as a shield against memory.

  “Vaughn?” Mary tried to say, but it came out as a cross between a croak and a rasp, so she had to content herself with coughing again.

  Vaughn, his cheeks streaked with ash, pressed his eyes shut, drawing in a deep breath in a way that made Mary’s berth on his lap rock like a ship at sea. His eyelids looked very white against his blackened face. They were, she noticed belatedly, sitting on the ground. Not on a rug or a blanket, but right on the grass, with grass stains undoubtedly seeping into Vaughn’s fawn-colored pantaloons, and Mary cradled up against him like a child in her nurse’s arms.

  “Do you know who I am?” he demanded roughly.

  Mary made an incredulous face at him, or tried to. For some reason, the motion made the side of her face sting abominably. She put a hand up to it, and looked in some disbelief as her fingers came away wet with blood.

  “You were grazed by a piece of flying masonry,” said Vaughn brusquely. “Now who am I?”

  Mary scrubbed her fingers together to get rid of the stain. “You’re Vaughn, and as autocratic as ever,” she rasped, pleased to see that her voice had returned to her, even if she did sound like an old crone. “What happened?”

  Pressing her closer, so that she could smell the acrid whiff of ash and the sickly sweet scent of blood on his waistcoat, Vaughn laughed roughly, a wild laugh of relief. “What hasn’t?” he asked. “Your infernal machine went off—”

  “Not mine,” Mary croaked hastily, and Vaughn pulled her closer in a movement that from anyone else would have been called a hug.

  “The infernal machine, then.” His voice was hoarse, too, but not as bad as hers. Just a li
ttle rough around the edges, like an Irish whiskey. “It exploded and brought the whole dome down with it.”

  Dimly, memory returned. Taking Vaughn’s hand and pulling him off the stage, trying to get as far away from the explosives as possible. And then Vaughn, stopping, trying to go back—

  Mary drew in a painful breath. “Did she…?” she asked, not sure she wanted to know the answer.

  “No,” said Vaughn bluntly.

  His eyes strayed towards the remains of the pavilion, belching smoke and flame. Tiny dollhouse figures darted forward, tossing their little droplets of water on the flames. The burning, writhing thing that had once been Lady Euphemia’s theatre responded with little hisses and puffs of scorn, before blazing right back up again. “At least, I don’t see how. She was directly beneath the dome when it fell.”

  The rectangular hall that had housed the audience was still largely intact, although the roof was already beginning to come down on one end. The bulbous dome that had covered the stage was entirely gone, collapsed in upon itself like an interrupted soufflé. Red flames, darker than Mary had ever imagined flames could be, flared out of the crumpled edifice, and the whole was cloaked in a writhing black cloud of smoke, like a medieval painter’s vision of the torments of the damned.

  A woman, unconscious beneath it, wouldn’t have stood a chance. Even if the falling stones didn’t kill her, the smoke or flame would.

  “I am sorry,” said Mary hoarsely.

  Vaughn looked down at her with a curious expression of his face. “No, you’re not.” His lips twisted in brutal self-mockery. “And the most damnable part of it is that I’m not, either.”

  Mary would have protested, but Vaughn wasn’t looking at her anyway. His gaze was fixed far away from her, on the burning rubble of Lady Euphemia’s theatre.

  “What a tombstone that is,” he said softly. “What an epitaph. Fifteen years married and not even missed. Crushed out like the inconvenience she was. Poor Anne. I can’t even hate her anymore. Hate might have been closer to love.”

  Streaked with soot, lit by the lurid glow, his features stark with self-loathing, he looked more than ever like Milton’s Satan, doomed forever to be his own hell. Mary’s heart ached for him, for the bleakness that shrouded his expression like the thick black smoke upon the pavilion.

  “My wife’s life snuffed out, and I haven’t even the will to mourn her. The most I can muster is pity, the poor cousin to emotion. Anyone deserves better than that. Everyone deserves at least one person to mourn.”

  Thinking nasty thoughts about women who ran off with their music masters, returned to blackmail, and got themselves smothered under several tons of smoldering rubble, Mary struggled up on her elbows, managing to drive several holes into Vaughn’s stomach in the process.

  “She was dead already,” she said staunchly. “Fourteen years ago. You can’t be expected to mourn her twice.”

  Something in her voice brought Vaughn back from the hazy realms in which he was wandering. His eyes refocused on her face. His lips twisted in a cynical smile, but his hand was gentle as he smoothed the tangled hair back from her brow.

  “My hard-hearted Mary,” he said tenderly. “Always quick to seize on whatever is most convenient.”

  Mary winced and pulled back as the great diamond on his finger tangled in the knots and snaggles in her unbound hair. “Just because it’s convenient doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  Vaughn rested his forehead against hers, gritty with dirt and ash. “True,” he agreed. “But even so.”

  It was very hard to argue with someone whose head was right up against yours, but Mary tried.

  “I won’t have you tormenting yourself,” she said tartly, somewhere in the vicinity of his left ear.

  Vaughn lifted his head and smiled at her, a genuine smile through the grime and fatigue. “No, that’s your job, isn’t it?”

  There was such a wealth of meaning in his voice that Mary felt, suddenly, more than a little bit wobbly and oddly unsure of herself. She looked at him uncertainly. “Is it?”

  Whatever Vaughn might have said was lost, as a sound like a convulsion of the earth erupted above them. Shifting her gaze hastily up, Mary saw that it wasn’t an earthquake or a reenactment of Pompeii—Lady Euphemia devoted her energies purely to English scenes—but her sister’s husband, clearing his throat loudly enough to do that organ permanent damage. Similarly smeared with soot, Geoffrey looked tired, and harried, and distinctly put out at Mary’s using Vaughn’s lap as her own private chaise longue.

  “Is Letty all right?” Mary asked hoarsely, heading off any comments about her undeniably compromising position.

  “Yes.” Geoffrey’s harried expression briefly lightened. “She is organizing the bucket brigade.”

  The stiff muscles of Mary’s face involuntarily quirked into an answering smile. “I should have known it wasn’t Lady Euphemia.”

  “Letty has matters well in hand,” said Geoffrey proudly, turning to look back at the small figure of his wife, who was bustling up and down the line, making sure everyone had buckets, and understood they were to pour the water on the fire and not on one another.

  Unwisely drawing attention to himself, Vaughn broke in, “Has there been any sign of—”

  “St. George?” said Geoffrey, blessedly misinterpreting Vaughn’s concern. “I don’t see how anyone else might have got out. He was the Black Tulip, I take it?”

  Vaughn nodded in assent.

  Geoffrey allowed himself a grim smile. “Lady Euphemia is convinced the bomb was set by French agents determined to stymie her patriotic pageant. She’s quite chuffed about it, despite the loss of her theatre.”

  “The more reasonable assumption,” countered Vaughn, “would be an enraged poet determined to stop such an execration taking place ever again.”

  Geoffrey shrugged. “She’s planning to publish the verse in a memorial volume and present it to his Majesty as a gift.”

  “Good God,” shuddered Vaughn. “With allies like these, who needs the French?”

  Geoffrey turned a jaundiced eye on Lord Vaughn’s seating arrangement.

  “You seem to have adopted certain French manners,” he said pointedly. With the air of a man making a great concession, he added, “Given the events of the afternoon, no more need be said. But you might want to rectify the situation before anyone else notices.”

  “I don’t see anything the least bit improper about it,” said Vaughn blandly, as if it were entirely normal to be having a conversation sitting cross-legged on the ground with a woman on one’s lap. He smiled down at Mary. “Do you, my dear?”

  Mary narrowed her eyes impartially at both men in a universal condemnation of masculine folly. Neither of them paid the least bit of attention to her.

  Geoffrey folded his arms across his chest in the classic pose of offended guardian. “You may not see anything wrong with it, Vaughn,” he began darkly, “but as for the rest of civilized society—”

  “Since,” Vaughn smoothly overrode him, “Miss Alsworthy has done me the honor to agree to be my wife.”

  “Mmph,” said Geoffrey, or at least as near as Mary could tell.

  “Of course,” Vaughn added, with a devilish glint in his eye that belied the studied indifference of his voice, “we could always elope…”

  Geoffrey’s soot-smeared countenance went stonier than Lady Euphemia’s fallen columns.

  “…but I think St. George’s, Hanover Square, is much nicer, don’t you?”

  Geoffrey looked like he wanted to say something decidedly improper. Calling on the reserves of self-control that made him one of the War Office’s more trusted agents, he gritted out, “Have you set a date yet?”

  Vaughn waved a dirty hand. “Sometime soon. You can tell your wife to start making the arrangements. Once she’s done with the buckets,” Vaughn added generously.

  “Brilliant,” said Geoffrey, and turned on his heel, presumably to report the news to his wife, although from the stiff set of his ba
ck, he looked as though he might first seek out a discreet spot where he could punch something in private and pretend it was Vaughn.

  Vaughn watched his future relation’s retreating back with unconcealed pleasure. “Poor Pinchingdale. He’s spent months trying to make me out to be the Black Tulip. It must kill him that our offspring will be first cousins.”

  “There is one ever so slight problem with your plan,” Mary pointed out.

  Vaughn looked quizzically down at her.

  “What might that be?” His face darkened as he inclined his head slightly towards the smoldering theatre. “There can be no further impediment.”

  The expression on his face made Mary sorry she had spoken, but she shouldered gamely on. “You seem to have forgotten that I can’t have agreed. Since you never asked me.”

  Vaughn arched a sooty eyebrow. “Do I need to?” he asked mildly.

  Mary had meant to return a lighthearted answer, the sort of sophisticated riposte to which she was accustomed, but the airy words wouldn’t come.

  Instead, she found herself saying, with schoolgirl earnestness and a tongue that was suddenly too thick for her mouth, “Are you sure you want to?” Mary’s eyes searched his blackened face. “After—”

  She inclined her head feebly towards the burning building. The movement made her head ache. A cheer went up among the clustered members of the ton as a still-standing section of wall went tumbling down, crashing into the rubble in an explosion of smoke and ash. Mary caught the involuntarily flicker of Vaughn’s eyes in that direction, the fleeting look of pain he couldn’t quite suppress as the stones thudded down, a cairn for his wife’s grave.

  Vaughn’s hand tightened around hers. “The real question is, are you? The women in my life seem to have an uncomfortable time of it.”

  He might not mourn for the woman who had left him thirteen years ago, but what about the woman who had turned against the Black Tulip for him today and lost her life in doing it? He had turned back for her, in that stony trap of a building. The last word on his lips, before the theatre had exploded, had been her name. Whatever he might claim, Anne’s ghost was still there, an impediment in death as well as in life.