The Masque of the Black Tulip

by Lauren Willig

  ‘Miles might have something there,’ commented Lord Uppington, eyes meeting his wife’s. ‘If we can play on people’s snobbery…’ He raised an eyebrow.

  Lady Uppington snapped to attention like a Renaissance explorer sighting land after a long and perilous voyage plagued by scurvy and sea serpents. ‘That’s it! If we say it was very small, very select…only the best people, of course…’

  Henrietta caught on, and she gave an excited bounce. ‘We’ll have people falling over themselves pretending to have been there! And no one will want to admit otherwise!’ She turned and caught both of Miles’s hands in hers. ‘Brilliant!’

  Miles squeezed Henrietta’s hands and tried to look as though that was what he had meant all along.

  Lord Uppington chuckled. ‘By the time your mother is through, half the ton will have attended your wedding.’

  ‘At least three royal dukes,’ agreed Lady Uppington smugly. Her smug expression faded. ‘But I do wish one of my children would let themselves be married off normally!’

  ‘There was Charles,’ pointed out Henrietta.

  Lady Uppington waved a dismissive hand. ‘That doesn’t count.’

  ‘I won’t tell Charles you said that,’ said Lord Uppington.

  Lady Uppington batted her eyelashes at him. ‘Thank you, darling.’

  Henrietta and Miles shared a look of pure relief. If her mother was flirting with her father, it meant that good humour had been restored. Of course, it didn’t mean that they would hear the end of their precipitate match any time within the next fifty years, Lady Uppington being quite accomplished at the fine art of exhuming past peccadilloes at inconvenient occasions, but the worst was over.

  And once her parents left… The look between them turned far more meaningful. Miles cocked an eye suggestively at the staircase. Henrietta blushed and broke their gaze, and not a moment too soon. Lady Uppington turned back to them, crooking a finger at Henrietta.

  ‘Come along home, darling. There’s much to be done. We’ll have you fitted for wedding clothes tomorrow, and there are rumours to plant…’

  Lady Uppington started for the door, still talking, but Henrietta remained stubbornly still.

  ‘I would be happy to be fitted tomorrow,’ Henrietta said, holding on to Miles’s hand. ‘But I live here now.’

  Lady Uppington’s green eyes narrowed. ‘I’m not sure I like this.’

  ‘You knew I would marry sooner or later,’ said Henrietta.

  ‘I had thought,’ said Lady Uppington repressively, ‘that I would be given some warning first.’

  Henrietta bit her lip. Since that was unanswerable, she didn’t even attempt to frame an answer; she simply scrunched her face into an expression of exaggerated remorse. ‘Sorry?’ she tried again. If she repeated it often enough, perhaps it would eventually work.

  Lord Uppington came to the rescue, appropriating his wife’s arm. ‘Come along, my dear. You can come back tomorrow and bully Henrietta’s staff.’

  ‘I don’t bully anyone!’ protested Lady Uppington. ‘Although goodness knows, your staff clearly needs a firm hand. I’ve never seen anything quite so dingy.’

  Lord Uppington shared a resigned look with his daughter.

  Thank you, mouthed Henrietta.

  Lord Uppington gave a slight nod, lifting his eyebrows in a way that clearly said, more clearly than words, Just don’t let me catch you doing anything this stupid ever again.

  Henrietta resolved to be a model of married rectitude. At least, when her parents were nearby.

  Lord Uppington turned to Miles. ‘I’ll be by tomorrow to discuss Henrietta’s dowry.’

  Miles nodded stiffly. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And, Miles?’ Lord Uppington paused on the threshold, Lady Uppington on his arm. ‘Welcome to the family.’

  The door closed firmly behind him.

  Miles and Henrietta just looked at each other, in their suddenly very empty foyer. Hands on her shoulders, Miles let his head sag until his forehead touched Henrietta’s.

  ‘Phew,’ he said heavily.

  ‘Phew,’ agreed Henrietta, enjoying just leaning against him after the tumultuous emotions of the past several hours – of the past several days, in fact.

  Miles lifted his head just enough so that he could look at her. ‘Now that your parents are gone…’ he began, eyes narrowing in on Henrietta’s mouth in a way that made her lips tingle and her knees wobble and the foyer suddenly seem much, much warmer.

  ‘Oh, they’re gone,’ said Henrietta breathlessly, linking her arms around his neck. ‘They’re very, very gone.’

  ‘In that case…’ Miles leant purposefully forward.

  Crack! The door crashed open

  ‘Oww…’ Miles staggered back, clutching his nose, which had connected firmly with Henrietta’s forehead.

  ‘I came as fast as I could,’ announced Geoff, striding purposefully across the room.

  ‘Huh?’ said Miles irritably, looking at Geoff through watering eyes. ‘Has anyone ever told you that you have the devil’s own timing?’

  Geoff skittered to a halt, eyes moving from Miles to Henrietta and back again in some confusion. ‘Your note?’ he said. ‘The urgent crisis that demanded my attention at once?’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘Yes, that,’ agreed Geoff, with some asperity.

  ‘You’re a bit late,’ said Miles equably. ‘We captured the Black Tulip. Where in the hell were you?’

  Geoff’s lips tightened. ‘Nowhere important.’

  ‘Composing a sonnet to Mary Alsworthy’s eyebrows, no doubt,’ commented Miles, ostensibly to Henrietta.

  Instead of responding in kind, Geoff clapped his hat back on his head, saying tonelessly, ‘If you don’t need me, I’ll be off, then. Wickham has an assignment for me. With any luck, it should prove fatal.’

  Miles looped an arm around Henrietta’s waist. ‘Feel free to see yourself out.’

  Henrietta caught Geoff’s quizzical look and twisted out of Miles’s grasp. ‘It’s not what it looks like,’ she said hastily, automatically reaching up to smooth her hair. ‘We’re married.’

  She and Miles exchanged the sort of look designed to send bachelors straight to the bottle.

  Geoff’s lip curled. ‘Married,’ he said darkly.

  ‘Thanks, old chap,’ said Miles.

  Geoff pressed his eyes tightly closed. ‘Oh, hell,’ he said.

  Henrietta looked at him sharply. She had never heard Geoff utter a word of profanity in her presence before, even in the case of extreme provocation, such as Richard being hauled off by the French Ministry of Police.

  Geoff shook his head apologetically. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. It was just – never mind. I wish you both very happy. Truly.’

  ‘Is something wrong?’ asked Henrietta. There were dark circles under Geoff’s eyes, and his face had a haggard cast to it.

  ‘Nothing that time and a little hemlock won’t cure,’ said Geoff with forced jollity, hand on the doorknob.

  ‘Who’s the hemlock for?’ asked Miles.

  ‘Me,’ said Geoff.

  ‘Well, enjoy,’ Miles said vaguely. Planting his arm firmly back around Henrietta’s waist, he started steering her towards the stairs.

  Henrietta swung them back around. ‘Remember,’ she said, holding out a hand to Geoff, ‘we’re here if you need us.’

  ‘Just not tonight,’ added Miles.

  ‘Understood. Congratulations, both of you. Although’ – Geoff smiled a crooked smile – ‘I can’t say I’m the least bit surprised.’

  The door opened, closed, and was still.

  Henrietta looked at Miles. ‘Charlotte, Geoff, my parents… How did everyone know we were going to get married but us?’

  ‘And Richard,’ corrected Miles ruefully.

  Henrietta sobered. She looked anxiously up at Miles. ‘Do you mind terribly? About Richard, I mean.’

  All was silent in the marble foyer. Miles looked Henrietta full in the face, and slowly shook
his head. ‘Not nearly as much as I would have minded losing you.’

  ‘So that bit about my being nearly as important to you as Richard…’

  Miles groaned. ‘I said a lot of stupid things.’

  Taking pity on him, Henrietta slid her arms around his waist. ‘I can think of at least one sensible thing you said.’

  Miles dropped a kiss on the top of her head. ‘Pass the ginger biscuits?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Albatross?’

  Henrietta poked him. ‘Not even close.’

  ‘Or how about’ – Miles’s breath feathered the hair next to Henrietta’s ear – ‘I love you?’

  Downstairs, in the servants’ hall, the word passed around that the master had been seen carrying his wife up the stairs – again.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  ‘Eloise?’

  Greyish yellow sunlight slanted in long rectangles across the library carpet, but I scarcely noticed. Somehow, over the course of the past few hours, I had slid from the overstuffed chair on which I had been sitting to the floor beneath. My shoulders were propped against the red-and-blue upholstered seat, and a Queen Anne ball-and-claw foot made convenient handrests next to each hip. My back was emitting the sort of warning twinges that betokened pain later, but I didn’t care at the moment. On my bent knees, which served as an impromptu writing desk, perched a red leather folio. The folio itself was Victorian in date, with marbled endpapers and the sort of intricate embossing beloved of nineteenth-century leatherworkers, swirls and curlicues painstakingly traced in gold. Inside, however, was something else entirely. Onto the crumbling yellow pages had been pasted older material, which the Victorian compiler had chosen to title ‘Some Memorials of a Lady of the House of Selwick.’ There was a much longer subtitle, but since it had no relevance to anyone but the enthusiastic amateur archivist, I’ll forbear to transcribe it.

  The late-nineteenth-century compiler had made a valiant effort to squelch the juicier bits, striking whole paragraphs out with outraged strokes of the pen. Fortunately for me, Henrietta’s ink had proved sturdier stuff. It was a bit like reading a medieval palimpsest, those close-written documents where the author wrote literally between the lines to save precious parchment, but with some squinting and cursing, and a bit of turning the pages this way and that, I could still make out the original text under the fading brown ink of the censor’s blots.

  In their own way, the annotations were hilarious, and I’m sure a cultural historian working on the late nineteenth century could get at least one paper out of them, maybe two. The anonymous archivist – who coyly identified herself as a fellow scion of the house of Selwick and left it at that – seemed to have very little idea of what to do with her adventurous ancestress and kept desperately trying to explain away Henrietta’s more outrageous actions. Impromptu marriage? Certainly it couldn’t have been that impromptu, anxiously rationalised the editor, if the bishop of London presided over the ceremony. Eavesdropping on a potential spy? It most certainly must have been by accident, since she would never voluntarily lend herself to an activity that must be sure to offend the conscience of any properly bred young lady. Slipping into someone’s house disguised as a servant? Of course not. Lady Henrietta was just having her little joke on posterity.

  I milked all the amusement I could out of those annotations.

  I still had no idea what had happened last night. Zero. Zip. Nada. I’m not referring to those momentary lapses in memory that may attend overindulgence in the bottle (after Thursday’s fiasco, I had quite scrupulously limited myself to two glasses of wine), but my utter inability to come up with any clear explanation for what had happened in the cloister. I knew how I would have liked to explain it, but there was an absolute lack of corroborating evidence, at least corroborating evidence that would convince any unbiased third party. And I don’t mean Pammy.

  I had basked in my own virtue at not giving in to the overwhelming desire to ask Sally whether her sarcastic comment arose from Colin’s behaviour towards me or mine towards him. From there it would only be the merest step to ‘But do you think he likes me? Like, LIKES likes me?’ Instead, I had, with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball, rerouted the subject to monastic ruins.

  After Sally showed me around the cloister, I returned to the party with all my antennae on high Colin alert, that sort of superawareness that signals a crush with the same deadly accuracy as pointlessly dropping that person’s name in conversation or surreptitious excursions into his past on Google. Instead, I was cornered by the vicar, who had conceived the ambition to impart to me several lesser-known verses of Gilbert and Sullivan, without which my life would be immeasurably the poorer (or so he most solemnly swore). Colin reappeared halfway through The Gondoliers and immediately joined a group on the other side of the room. Whether he was avoiding me or the vicar’s piercing tenor, I had no idea. I could fill up an entire diary with ‘Looks, the interpretation of.’ Old looks, new looks, lost looks. All half-imagined, none probative of anything at all. Other than wishful thinking.

  The ride back to Selwick Hall had been…cordial. There was no other word for it. Colin asked if I had enjoyed myself; I said I had; he expressed his pleasure at that fact. If there was an undertone to those words that suggested more than bland social conventions…well, nothing had occurred to give them substance. In the front hall, as Colin extracted his key and I dithered with my coat, Colin’s phone had rung, and he bid me a distracted good night, leaving me to seek my virtuous bed and wonder if Pammy had perhaps been right about that bustier.

  Had I imagined it all? I took myself off to bed, but couldn’t sleep, mind moving in an endless hamster wheel of Did he? Or didn’t he? I contemplated venturing down to the kitchen for a midnight cocoa, in the hopes of a ‘chance’ meeting. But there was only so low one could sink. Besides, I was afraid I would get lost on the way to the kitchen. How pathetic to stumble around a strange house in the dark in the hopes of being compromised!

  Compromised – I had been spending too much time in the early nineteenth century. Envisioning Colin in knee breeches didn’t help matters, either.

  Sleep was clearly an impossibility. Wrapping Serena’s pashmina over my tank top as a makeshift shawl, I shuffled barefoot down the hallway to the library. After an hour with Henrietta, the Cloister Incident was only a vague murmur at the back of my mind. After two, I couldn’t remember my own name, much less his.

  Oh, this was going to make a juicy chapter! France’s deadliest counterspy, a woman! The women’s history crowd were going to go wild. I envisioned conference panels, grant money raining down like ticker tape, job talks, and articles in Past and Present, the English historian’s answer to the New York Times. It was like watching the little windows on a slot machine clink one by one into jackpot.

  Forget a mere chapter; this might contain the germ of a second book. I toyed with titles. A Sampler of Sedition: Female Spies in the Napoleonic Wars. I discarded that as too much like a reprise of my dissertation, with a gender slant to make it trendy. I could attempt a microhistory, using the marquise as a case study. The Marquise de Montval: The Making of a Revolutionary. Now, there was an idea. How did a gently bred young Englishwoman become a fervent adherent of revolutionary principles and a hired killer for Bonaparte? Even better, I could do a companion study of the Pink Carnation and the Black Tulip, comparing their backgrounds, their allegiances, their methods.

  There was one slight snag.

  ‘Eloise!’ The voice was more insistent now, and, as if from a long way away, I remembered that that was my name, and that it was generally considered a matter of social convention to respond to it.

  So I blurted out what was on my mind. ‘The Black Tulip escaped!’ I looked up wildly from the pile of papers on my lap, shoving my tousled hair out of my eyes. ‘I can’t believe they let her escape!’

  ‘Eloise!’ There was a snap to Colin’s voice that jarred me out of my preoccupations. He hadn’t even bothered to come all the way into the library;
his disembodied head stuck out around the frame of the door like a French nobleman after a jaunt to the guillotine, sans wig or ruffled cravat.

  ‘Yes?’ I sat to attention, suddenly very conscious that I was wearing nothing but an ancient white tank top, washed to invisibility, and a pair of fuzzy pyjama bottoms printed with French poodles frolicking next to the Eiffel Tower. Yes, I had packed in a hurry Friday afternoon. I tried to tuck my legs up under me, but Colin wasn’t paying any more attention to Fifi the Playful Poodle than he was to the transparency of my tank top.

  ‘Listen,’ he said tersely. ‘Something’s come up. Can you be ready to leave in fifteen minutes?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes,’ I repeated blankly. Leave. Fifteen minutes. Leave?

  Information did not compute.

  ‘There’s a train that leaves at seven thirty-two,’ Colin continued in that same harried tone. I got the sense that he was already someplace else entirely, the apparition in front of me simply a machine detailed to relay the message. All that was lacking was Thank-you-for-calling-Selwick-Hall-and-have-a-nice-day. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but it can’t be helped.’

  ‘Of course,’ I stammered, staggering to my feet with the aid of the chair. ‘I’ll just—’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘—get myself together,’ I finished to the inside of the library door. Colin had already gone. Fifteen minutes. He had said fifteen minutes, hadn’t he?

  I gathered together the welter of papers and folios I had been looking at and sorted them back into their proper places with a numb efficiency born of confusion. I glanced at the big grandfather clock on the far wall. Four minutes gone already. I grabbed for my notebooks, tucking them under my arm. I could read through my notes on the train.

  The train. I would have dwelt on that, but I didn’t have time now to figure out why I was being tossed from the house like a Victorian housemaid found to be in the family way. Get ye gone, ye creature of loose morals, and never darken the Squire’s door again! Only, I hadn’t had a chance to display any loose morals, more’s the pity. So why was he throwing me out?