The Masque of the Black Tulip

by Lauren Willig

  When was the last time he had seen his parents? Four years ago? Five?

  Miles’s father had gout. Not a slight dash of gout, the sort that attends overindulgence in roast lamb at Christmas dinner, not periodic gout, but perpetual, all-consuming gout, the sort of gout that required special cushions and exotic diets and frequent changing of doctors. The viscount had his gout, and the viscountess had a taste for Italian operas, or, more properly, Italian opera singers. Both those interests were better served in Europe. For as long as Miles could remember, the Viscount and Viscountess of Loring had roved about Europe from spa to spa, taking enough waters to float a small armada, and playing no small part in supporting the Italian musical establishment.

  The thought of either of his parents having anything to do with the Black Tulip, murdered agents, or anything requiring more strenuous activity than a carriage ride to the nearest opera house strained the imagination. Even so, it made Miles distinctly uneasy that they had come to the attention of the War Office.

  Miles put both feet firmly on the floor, rested his hands on his knees, and asked bluntly, ‘Did you have a reason for enquiring after my parents, sir, or was this merely a social amenity?’

  Wickham looked at Miles with something akin to amusement. ‘There’s no need to be anxious on their account, Dorrington. We need information on Lord Vaughn. Your parents are among his social set. If you have occasion to write to your parents, you may want to ask them – casually – if they have encountered Lord Vaughn in their travels.’

  In his relief, Miles refrained from pointing out that his correspondence with his parents, to date, could be folded into a medium-sized snuffbox. ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘Casually,’ cautioned Wickham.

  ‘Casually,’ confirmed Miles. ‘But what has Lord Vaughn to do with the Black Tulip?’

  ‘Lord Vaughn,’ Wickham said simply, ‘is the employer of our murdered agent.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Vaughn,’ continued Wickham, ‘is recently returned to London after an extended stay on the Continent. A stay of ten years, to be precise.’

  Miles engaged in a bit of mental math. ‘Just about the time the Black Tulip began operations.’

  Wickham didn’t waste time acknowledging the obvious. ‘You move in the same circles. Watch him. I don’t need to tell you how to go about it, Dorrington. I want a full report by this time next week.’

  Miles looked squarely at Wickham. ‘You’ll have it.’

  ‘Good luck, Dorrington.’ Wickham began shuffling papers, a clear sign that the interview had come to a close. Miles levered himself out of the chair, pulling on his gloves as he strode to the door. ‘I expect to see you this time next Monday.’

  ‘I’ll be here.’ Miles gave his hat an exuberant twirl before clapping it firmly onto his unruly blond hair. Pausing in the doorway, he grinned at his superior. ‘With flowers.’

  Chapter Four

  ‘The Black Tulip?’

  Colin grinned. ‘Somewhat unoriginal, I admit. But what can you expect from a crazed French spy?’

  ‘Isn’t there a Dumas novel by that name?’

  Colin considered. ‘I don’t believe they’re related. Besides, Dumas came later.’

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting that Dumas was the Black Tulip,’ I protested.

  ‘Dumas’s father was a Napoleonic soldier,’ Colin pronounced with an authoritative wag of his finger, but spoilt the effect by adding, ‘Or perhaps it was his grandfather. One of them, at any rate.’

  I shook my head regretfully. ‘It’s too good a theory to be true.’

  I was sitting in the kitchen of Selwick Hall, at a long, scarred wooden table that looked like it had once been victim to beefy-armed cooks bearing cleavers, while Colin poked a spoon into a gooey mass on the stove that he promised was rapidly cooking its way towards being dinner. Despite the well-worn flagstones covering the floor, the kitchen appliances looked as though they had been modernised at some point in the past two decades. They had begun life as that ugly mustard yellow so incomprehensibly beloved of kitchen designers, but had faded with time and use to a subdued beige.

  It wasn’t a designer’s showcase of a kitchen. Aside from one rather dispirited pot of basil perched on the windowsill, there were no hanging plants, no gleaming copper pots, no colour-coordinated jars of inedible pasta, no artistically arranged bunches of herbs poised to whack the unwary visitor on the head. Instead, it had the cosy air of a room that someone actually lived in. The walls had been painted a cheery, very un-mustardy yellow. Blue-and-white mugs hung from a rack above the sink; a well-used electric kettle stood next to a battered brown teapot with a frayed blue cosy; and brightly patterned yellow-and-blue drapes framed the room’s two windows. The refrigerator made that comfortable humming noise known to refrigerators around the world, as soothing as a cat’s purr.

  A fall of ivy half-blocked the window over the sink, draping artistically down one side. Through the other, the dim twilight tended to obscure more than it revealed, that misty time of day when one can imagine ghost ships sailing endlessly through the Bermuda Triangle or phantom soldiers refighting long-ago battles on deserted heaths.

  Clearly, I had been spending too much time cooped up in the library. Phantom soldiers, indeed!

  All the same… Twisting to face Colin, I leant my elbows against the back of my chair and asked, ‘Does Selwick Hall have any ghosts?’

  Colin paused mid-stir, casting me a glance of unameliorated amusement. ‘Ghosts?’

  ‘You know, ghastly spectres, headless horsemen, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Right. I’m afraid we’re rather short on those at the moment, but if you would like to go next door, I hear Donwell Abbey has a few phantom monks to let.’

  ‘I didn’t realise they were for hire.’

  ‘After Henry the Eighth confiscated the abbeys, they had to find some way to earn their keep. There’s always a stately home in need of a spectre or two.’

  ‘Who are Donwell Abbey’s ghosts? I take it that there’s more to them than just being monks.’

  Colin gave the contents of the pot a final gush and turned off the heat. ‘It’s the usual story. Renegade monk breaks his vows, runs off with the lissom daughter of the local squire – plate, please.’

  I handed over a blue-and-white-patterned plate.

  ‘Enter monk, pursued by squire?’ I suggested, paraphrasing one of my favourite Shakespeare stage directions.

  ‘Close, but not quite.’ Colin debonairly dislodged a large clump of goo from the serving spoon onto the plate. It looked a bit like dog food. I handed him the second plate. ‘The local squire didn’t much care for his daughter, but he did scent an opportunity to turn a profit. With proper paternal outrage, he stormed over to the monastery – more?’

  A laden serving spoon hovered in the air like a phantom hand at a séance. ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘The squire rushed over to the monastery and demanded a strip of land that ran between the abbey and his estate as repayment for loss of his daughter. The monks were not pleased. No one knows quite what happened that night, but the story has it that the monks caught up with the pair in a large field, not far from the abbey.’

  ‘What happened then?’ I’m a sucker for a good ghost story.

  ‘No one knows for sure,’ said Colin mysteriously, or as mysteriously as one can while waving a large ladle. ‘By morning, all that was left was the crumpled hood of a habit, lying discarded on the grass. Of the squire’s daughter, there was no trace. But legend has it that he still looks for her on stormy nights, and you can see him, drifting endlessly through the grounds of Donwell Abbey, forever searching for his lost love.’

  Little prickles ran down my arms as I pictured the deserted heath, the pale rays of the moon illuminating their terrified faces… A large blob of something brown appeared in front of my nose.

  ‘Beans on toast?’ said Colin prosaically.

  It is next to impossible to maintain a ghoulish aura in the presence of b
eans and toast. It’s more effective than waving garlic in front of a vampire.

  The ghosts receded into the dusky darkness behind the window while we partook of beans and toast in the well-lit kitchen. Colin assured me it was his one culinary accomplishment.

  ‘If that’s a ploy to get me to leave, it’s not going to work. Now that I’ve actually seen the archives, a steady diet of ashes couldn’t drive me away.’

  ‘Hmm. Point taken. What about a ghastly apparition, all in white, hovering over your bed?’

  ‘Too late. You already told me you don’t have any ghosts.’

  Colin grinned a rakish grin that had an odd effect on the inside of my stomach – at least, I assume it was the grin, and not his culinary efforts.

  ‘Who said I was talking about a ghost?’

  Before I had quite puzzled out the ramifications of that statement, the door inched coyly open, and a feminine voice trilled, ‘Colin… Colin, are you home?’

  Colin froze like a fox within sight of the hunt. Catching my eye, he made anxious shushing motions.

  ‘Colin…’ The door continued its inexorable swing inward, and a blond braid swung around the edge, closely followed by its owner, a tall girl in tight tan pants and a closely fitted jacket. Catching sight of her quarry, she stepped jauntily into the kitchen, booted heels clicking on the flagstones of the floor, riding helmet swinging from one hand.

  ‘Colin! I thought I’d find you here. When I saw your car in the drive… Oh.’

  She had caught sight of me, sitting on the other side of the table. The riding helmet stopped mid-swing, and her jaw dropped. The expression didn’t do much for her, bringing to mind portraits of some of the more heavy-jawed Hapsburgs. Or Red Riding Hood’s wolf. Her teeth were very large, and very white.

  ‘Hello,’ I said into the silence that followed.

  The girl ignored me, her pale eyes fixing on Colin. ‘I didn’t realise you had company.’

  ‘There was no reason why you should,’ said Colin blandly. He set down his fork on the edge of his plate. ‘Good evening, Joan.’

  With her mouth back in place, this time pursed in annoyance, the woman was not, I have to admit, entirely unattractive. Her mouth might have been a little thin and her nose a little on the pug side, but the overall effect of high cheekbones, endless legs, and sun-streaked blond hair against perfectly browned skin could have graced a Ralph Lauren advertisement. I was willing to bet that she was one of those annoying people who tan, not burn.

  Her eyes, I noticed, were a little on the narrow side and a very pale blue. I don’t usually notice people’s eye colour, but these particular eyes were still fixed on me in a decidedly inimical way.

  ‘You haven’t introduced me to your…friend.’ She looked like she was chewing on the ashes I had volunteered to eat.

  ‘Eloise, this is Joan Plowden-Plugge; Joan, this is Eloise Kelly,’ provided Colin, lounging back in his chair.

  ‘Hi!’ I said brightly.

  Joan continued to eye me with the sort of hostility better reserved for large insects that have invaded one’s bed.

  ‘Are you a friend of Serena’s?’ she asked, in the deadly tones of one knowingly asking a losing question.

  ‘Well…’ I had once held Colin’s sister’s head over a toilet bowl while she was violently ill, but I wasn’t sure if that quite qualified as making us friends. ‘Not exactly,’ I hedged.

  Joan looked daggers at me. I looked appealingly at Colin, but he was busy looking at no one in particular, while cultivating a façade of amused indifference. Some help he was. Obviously, I was going to have to take care of this little misapprehension on my own, or, as Shakespeare so eloquently put it, risk a predestinate scratched face.

  ‘I’m a historian,’ I explained helpfully.

  Joan looked at me as though I had just volunteered to introduce her to the Mad Hatter.

  OK, maybe it wasn’t the most illuminating statement I could have made. I tried again. ‘Colin has been very generously allowing me the use of his archives,’ I clarified.

  Joan’s face cleared.

  ‘Oh. You study dead people.’

  Clearly, she was of the Pammy school of history, where Genghis Khan hobnobbed with Louis XIV on Bosworth Field – all wearing hoopskirts. After all, if they weren’t in the tabloids last week, it was all olden days, anyway. If it meant that she wasn’t going to come after me with her riding crop, I really didn’t care if she thought Attila the Hun had been one of the signatories of the Treaty of Versailles.

  ‘You could put it that way. Right now, the dead people I’m studying happen to be related to Colin, so he was kind enough to give me the run of his library.’

  Libraries were evidently not a subject of abiding fascination to Miss Plowden-Plugge. With a swish of her braid, she dismissed me as an impediment of minimal importance, and returned to Colin. Given her position relative to the table, there was no way she could entirely cut me out of the conversation unless she were to stomp around the side of the table and stand between me and Colin, but she did her best, angling her body to maximise Colin frontage and minimise my presence. In profile, her nose appeared decidedly pug.

  She rested her right hand against the table and leant towards Colin. ‘How is darling Serena?’

  Colin lazily tilted his head in my direction. ‘How would you say she is, Eloise?’

  ‘You’ve seen her more recently than I have,’ I replied in bewilderment.

  ‘But you were the one who took such charming care of her when she was ill the other night.’ Colin smiled beatifically at me before turning back to Joan, saying in a confidential tone, ‘We were at a party given by one of Eloise’s friends the other night, and Serena felt a bit rough. But Eloise saw to her, didn’t you, Eloise?’

  There wasn’t anything in that statement that one could point to as technically untrue. Pammy had thrown a party, Serena had been taken ill, I had hustled Serena off to the bathroom. Of course, what Colin had neglected to mention was that the party had been a huge PR extravaganza thrown in Pammy’s professional capacity, not an intimate little cocktail party; Pammy had invited Serena, along with a whole group of her other old school chums; and I, in my role as Pammy’s oldest friend in the world, had been tagging along after Pammy. I had been as surprised to see Colin and Serena as they were to see me. At the time, I had also been labouring under the misapprehension that Serena was Colin’s girlfriend, but that was a whole other story.

  Put the way Colin had put it, the whole thing did sound pretty damning – and it was clear that Joan was jumping to all the conclusions he wanted her to jump to.

  ‘I thought you were here for the library,’ she said accusingly.

  Colin stretched in that infuriating way men have and rested a casual hand on the back of my chair. It would have been funny if I weren’t so miffed; I was sitting far enough away that the tips of his fingers barely brushed the chair back. As it was, he had to scoot slightly sideways in his chair to reach that far.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Eloise is more of a houseguest, really. Wouldn’t you say, Eloise?’

  What I wanted to say was unprintable. If there were any family ghosts in residence, I was going to sic them all on him. Headless cavaliers, wailing women in white, you name it. I never liked being the monkey in the middle. Especially when I had not been informed that there was a game in progress.

  I directed an acid smile at Colin. ‘I would never presume.’

  Colin choked on a laugh. ‘Yes, you would,’ he said bluntly. ‘If there was a historical document in it for you.’

  Despite myself I started to chuckle. ‘It would have to be a really, really important historical document.’

  Thwomp!

  Joan’s riding helmet smacked down onto the middle of the table between me and Colin, jarring a piece of precariously balanced toast off my plate.

  ‘I’ll just be off then, shall I?’ she said in saccharine tones. ‘Colin, you are coming to our little drinks party tomorrow night, aren’t y
ou?’

  ‘I don’t—’ Colin began, but Joan cut him off.

  ‘Absolutely everyone will be there.’ She began rattling off a list of names, clearly designed to convince Colin that he would be ragingly out of the loop if he didn’t don a sport coat and sally forth. I retrieved my toast.

  ‘Nigel and Chloe are coming, and they’re bringing Rufus and his new girlfriend. And Bunty Bixler will be there – you do remember Bunty Bixler, don’t you, Colin?’

  Towards the end, I was convinced she was making up names, just to have more people I wouldn’t know. From the look on Colin’s face, he didn’t recognise half the names, either, and I got the feeling that he wasn’t overly fond of Bunty Bixler, whoever that unfortunately named person might be.

  Sensing she was losing ground, Joan resorted to desperate tactics. ‘You can bring—’ Joan looked at me blankly.

  ‘Eloise,’ I provided helpfully.

  ‘– your guest, if you like,’ she finished, in the tones of one making a great concession. Turning to me, she said hospitably, ‘Naturally, it won’t be terribly amusing for you, not knowing anyone. I suppose you could talk to the vicar. He does enjoy going on about old things. Churches, and all that.’ I had been properly relegated to my place, doddering in the corner with the clergy.

  After such a gracious invitation, how could I refuse?

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Of course, if you’re too busy in the library…’

  I bared my teeth, which weren’t nearly as large or white as hers. ‘I wouldn’t miss it.’

  A muffled snicker emerged from the head of the table.

  I looked pointedly at Colin.

  ‘So sorry,’ he said blandly. ‘Bean in my throat.’

  Indeed.

  His ill-advised humour had had the well-deserved side effect of re-focusing Joan’s attention on him. ‘We’ll see you tomorrow then, yes? Don’t forget, tomorrow night at half-seven.’

  The kitchen door slapped soundly shut behind her.

  I stood, plunking my fork and knife onto my empty plate with a clatter. I had the feeling there was history there. Colin shifted in his chair behind me.