The coffee room was swarming with other travelers tucking into pork pie, brace of duck, and large platters of mutton and potatoes, but Turnip, dint of some cheerful rearranging, secured them a small table in the corner of the room, and dusted off a seat for Henrietta with his handkerchief, all the while expounding volubly on the beauties of Brighton — female and architectural — the dashed fine singer who had entertained them on Friday night, and the wonders of the prince's waistcoats.
" — with real peacock feathers! Seat, Lady Henrietta?" Turnip flourished the recently dusted chair in the direction of Henrietta.
"Pity the peacock," muttered Miles in the direction of Henrietta, but she didn't so much as chuckle.
Henrietta shook her bonnet in the direction of the proffered chair. "If you'll excuse me for a moment, I need to repair the ravages of travel."
At least, thought Miles, she hadn't lost her vocabulary along with her voice. He just wished she'd use it to speak to him.
On a sudden impulse, Miles reached out a hand and grabbed her gloved wrist. Turnip was mercifully distracted, waving his arms in an attempt to attract the attention of a serving maid and acquire a flagon of porter.
"Hen — " he began.
"Yes?" Henrietta's eyes flew to his, suddenly alert.
Miles sat there, mouth half-open, unable to think of a single thing to say. "You aren't planning to climb out a window, are you?" wasn't really an option. "I hate that bonnet" would be honest, but largely unhelpful. And "Why aren't you speaking to me?" wasn't really something that could either be asked in the presence of Turnip, or that could be furnished with a satisfying answer.
"Would you like me to order some lemonade for you?" he finished lamely.
Henrietta's bonnet brim dropped again. "No, thank you," she said politely. Damn.
Miles subsided into his seat, cursing the vagaries of human communication, Henrietta's milliner, and Turnip and all his descendants unto the end of time.
As Turnip bantered with the serving maid, Miles watched Henrietta edge her way around the man who had driven in behind them, a pink of the ton in tan pantaloons, a leviathan of a cravat, and collar points higher than the Tower of Babel. The dandy paused in the door to stare after Henrietta, the stiffened tails of his coat brushing against the wall. Miles scowled openly at the fellow in the doorway. What business did he have staring at Henrietta? She was taken, quite, quite taken, and if that foppish fellow didn't stop ogling her soon (Miles had a fairly firm notion of what "soon" entailed), Miles would have to make sure he knew it. For a moment, the fop looked like he might actually be about to follow Henrietta — Miles's hand went instinctively to where his sword would have been, were he wearing it — but thought better of it, a decision that Miles silently applauded, and instead strolled over to the fire.
Relaxing his vigil, Miles turned back to Turnip, who was engaged in a merry monologue about the wonders of the Prince of Wales's collection of chinoiserie, in which peacocks seemed to figure significantly. Miles wondered if this meant that Turnip was finally going to stop swathing himself in Pink Carnation paraphernalia, and decided that the image of Turnip as a giant peacock was too alarming a concept to contemplate.
"Copied down the name of Prinny's new tailor for you," Turnip said expansively, extracting a small piece of paper from his tightly fitted waistcoat. He beamed fondly at the little scrap. "You wouldn't believe what that man can do with a waistcoat."
Unfortunately, Miles could. Accepting the scrap of paper, he stuffed it absently away in a waistcoat pocket along with other crumpled bits of this and that, some small change, and a bit of string that was there in case it might ever come in useful.
"There was one patterned with emerald green peacocks with real sapphires set into the tails," rhapsodized Turnip, a reminiscent gleam in his eye. "And another — "
"Did you see Geoff there?" asked Miles, in the hopes of getting Turnip off the topic of peacocks and his wardrobe. Over Turnip's shoulder, the dandy in the complicated cravat edged closer to their table, clearly hoping that if he hovered long enough, they would yield their seats. Miles favored him with his best "clear off" glare, before returning his attention to Turnip.
Turnip shook his head. "Not really Pinchingdale's metier, you know. Didn't see the Alsworthy there, either. Thought of stopping by Selwick Hall," added Turnip amiably, reaching for his glass of porter, "but a bit out of the way, you know."
"Not really," countered Miles, thanking whatever conjunction of the planets had kept Turnip from pursuing that course. A rampaging French spy running about the premises garbed as a Phantom Monk was bad enough; to have added Turnip to the mix would have been a sure disaster. Turnip would probably have invited the spy in, complimented him on the cut of his habit, asked him how he thought it would look in pink, and offered him a glass of claret.
"It's only an hour from — " Miles broke off abruptly.
"Not by coach, old chap." Mulling over the matter, Turnip didn't seem to notice that Miles's eyes were bulging and his mouth gaping like an unfortunate highwayman at the end of the hangman's noose. "Took me well near two hours last time from Brighton to Selwick's place."
Miles surged across the table and grabbed his former classmate by the sleeve. "Was Lord Vaughn there?"
"At Selwick's? Can't say that he was. 'Course, that was over a year ago, and — "
"At Brighton," interpolated Miles rather more forcefully than he had intended. "Not last year. This weekend."
Damn, he was really no good at the whole subtle questioning game. More than once, Miles had seen Richard at work on a suspect, spinning information out of a suspect as smoothly as a silkworm his thread, spooling it out, question by question, until he knew everything there was to know.
Fortunately, Turnip, not being the brightest vegetable in the garden, didn't seem to notice his gaffe.
"Vaughn?" Turnip tilted his head in contemplation. "Nice chap. Can't say much for his taste in waistcoats — silver is dashed dull, don't you think? — but he does have a nice way with his cravat. What does he call that style of his again? The Serpent in the Garden? A bit like an Oriental, but there's something about that last twist — "
To the devil with subtlety. Miles had always ascribed more to the "thump them on the head" school himself.
"Brighton," Miles repeated. "Lord Vaughn. Was he there?"
Turnip pondered. "Y'know, believe I did see him at the Pavilion. Intimate of the prince, they say — used to go wenching together back in the eighties."
Having no desire to hear any more about the intimacies of the prince's bedchamber, Miles cut Turnip off. "Do you recall which night it was? That you saw Vaughn, I mean?" Miles hastily specified.
Turnip shrugged. "Might have been Friday… or Saturday. Pavilion looks much the same from one night to another, you know! I say, why all this interest in Vaughn? Not a friend of yours, is he?"
"Vaughn has some horseflesh I've a mind to acquire," prevaricated Miles, quite proud of himself for having come up with a story Turnip would find completely credible. "I was hoping to look him up in London, but if he's away…"
"His grays?" Turnip asked enthusiastically. "They're bang-up to the mark. Prime goers! Didn't know Vaughn was looking to sell. May give you a bit of a run for them myself, old chap:"
"You do that," said Miles absently.
Now that he knew Vaughn had been in Brighton… Turnip's protests to the contrary, for a man with a swift team of horses and a light carriage, it was a mere hour's run from the Marine Parade to Selwick Hall. In fact, Richard had frequently bemoaned his proximity to the Regent's pleasure palace, citing the congestion of the roads and unexpected visits from the likes of Turnip as causes of complaint. Miles winced at the thought of his best friend — his former best friend — and forcibly bent his mind back to Vaughn. If that wasn't proof of Vaughn's guilt, Miles wasn't sure what would be — aside from a large placard proclaiming the black tulip slept here. There would be no use to turning around and thundering off to Brighton; by no
w, Vaughn must be well on his way back to London.
In which case, Miles would be waiting for him. He just had to collect Hen, and they could be off. Where was Hen?
Miles cut Turnip off in the midst of a tangled exposition about a pair of chestnuts he had seen at Tattersal's last month. "I wonder what can be keeping Hen?"
Turnip frowned into his glass of porter, shifting his shoulders beneath the rich brocade of his coat and fidgeting on the hard wood of his seat.
"I say, Dorrington," began Turnip uneasily. "Didn't want to say anything before, with Lady Hen present, but it ain't at all the thing for you to be here alone with Lady Henrietta. Reputation and all that. Know you're like a brother to her, but — "
"I'm not her brother," snapped Miles, watching the coffee room door. How long could it possibly take for one woman to go to the necessary and back? The young fop in the immense cravat was still standing by the fire, so he didn't have to worry about her being abducted by force, but… Hen wouldn't have bolted out a window. Would she?
"Just what I was saying," agreed Turnip, looking relieved that Miles had grasped the crux of the problem so readily. "Don't mean to be Mrs. Grundy, you know, but…"
"Trust me," said Miles, frowning at the grandfather clock in the corner of the room, "it is a role for which you are singularly unsuited."
"Oh, you mean not being female?" Turnip considered. "Dare say I would look deuced odd in skirts, though some of those sprigged muslin rig outs ain't half-bad. Little flowers, you know. But what I meant to say" — Turnip abandoned the fascinating subject of haberdashery to drag himself doggedly back to the topic at hand — "is, that is to say…"
Miles dragged his attention away from the door and fixed Turnip with a quelling look. "There is nothing havey-cavey going on between me and Henrietta." Miles twisted in his seat to look anxiously at the coffee room door. "But where is she?"
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Havey-Cavey (adj.): highly suspect, clandestine, illicit; behavior generally indicative of some nefarious purpose. To be strictly monitored by the conscientious agent.
— from the Personal Codebook of the Pink Carnation
Tucking her shawl more securely around her shoulders, Henrietta started up the narrow flight of stairs to which she had been directed by a busy maidservant. With only the meager illumination to be had from a window on the landing above, the stairwell was dim, and the well-worn treads dipped in the middle. Henrietta picked her way gingerly up the stairs, but her mind was back downstairs in the coffee room, on a pair of anxious brown eyes.
What had Miles really been about to say? No one, not even Miles, could contrive to look that earnest over a beverage. Henrietta mulled through possible endings to that plaintive "Hen — " She didn't like any of them.
Henrietta sighed and shook her head at herself. She was driving herself to distraction with these futile speculations. Playing a game of "What can Miles be thinking?" was not only fruitless, it was absolutely…
"… maddening!" someone exclaimed.
Henrietta paused, one foot on the landing, one on the penultimate step. It wasn't just that the word exactly encapsulated her own sentiments. She knew that voice. The last time she had heard it, it had been employed in a slumberous murmur of seduction rather than an expression of agitation, but the tones were as unmistakable as they were misplaced.
"You must be patient," counseled another voice, a woman's voice with a light foreign accent. Even the wooden barrier of the door couldn't quite detract from the fluid charm of it; although she spoke softly, every tone was as finely hued as a delicately painted piece of porcelain. "You do no good to yourself by this, Sebastian."
Henrietta was so surprised that Lord Vaughn was in possession of a first name that she nearly missed hearing what came next.
"Ten years." Lord Vaughn's cultured voice thrummed with frustration through the chinks in the door. "It has been ten years, Aurelia. What sort of paragon would you have me be, to practice patience for that long?"
Henrietta engaged in rapid mental mathematics. A decade… 1793. The little gossip she had managed to glean about Vaughn had been maddeningly imprecise, but the year might coincide with his precipitate departure from England.
It was also, recalled Henrietta, the year the French king had been dragged beneath the blade of the guillotine. Which one was it? Or were they related?
"If so long, why not a little longer?" replied the other.
Lord Vaughn — Henrietta really couldn't think of him as Sebastian, whatever the mysterious woman might call him — drawled something in a low tone that was lost somewhere between the door and Henrietta's ear. Whatever it was, it elicited an intimate chuckle from his companion.
"I do not think" — the accent was very much in the ascendant, as was the affectionate note of laughter — "that a paragon should speak so."
Vaughn's voice again, quick and impatient. "Are you quite certain there was nothing else there?"
Nothing else where? Henrietta frowned at the uninformative wooden panels of the door, wishing there was some way she could get closer, some way she could see.
There was a swish of fabric, as though someone had just subsided into a chair. "I made the inspection of his belongings with much thoroughness. And most unpleasant it was, too," the woman's voice added tartly.
Richard's belongings, perhaps? Henrietta listened with all her might, willing the conspirators to speak further.
Henrietta heard boots on bare wood as Vaughn strolled across the room, followed by the sound of lips meeting — a hand? Lips? Henrietta couldn't tell. Vaughn spoke, voice heavy with rue and reluctant charm. "Forgive me, Aurelia. I am an ungrateful beast."
Blast. Henrietta scowled at the door. Now he chose to apologize? "I know," replied the other complacently, and equally uninformatively. "But you have your compensations."
"Most of them measured by guineas," Vaughn replied drily.
"If I were any other woman," the accented voice chided gently, "I would take offense at that."
"If you were any other woman," countered Vaughn, "I would not have said it." There was a pregnant pause, a rustle of fabric that might have been an embrace, or merely the woman shifting in her chair — Henrietta cursed her sightless state — before Vaughn resumed, his tone brisk. "I leave for Paris on Tuesday."
"Are you sure that is wise, caro?"
"I would have an end to this business, Aurelia. The game has been played for long enough." Vaughn's voice rang with grim finality, sending a reluctant shiver through Henrietta's thick shawl. So might Beowulf have sounded outside Grendel's den, girding himself for havoc and death. "The time is come to behead the hydra."
"You don't know that it is she." The soft soprano voice made one last attempt.
"Everything points to it." Vaughn's tone brooked no argument.
Everything pointed to what? To whom? Henrietta shifted her weight to the top step to press her ear more firmly against the door frame. The elderly step shifted and groaned, protesting her weight.
Booted feet clipped toward the door, clicking ominously against the bare planking.
"Did you hear that?"
Henrietta froze, one hand on the wall.
"What am I meant to be hearing, caro?"
"Someone. By the door."
"This old building, it is full of the creaks. You are too imaginative, my friend," the lightly accented voice chided affectionately. "You quarrel with shadows."
"My shadows carry swords."
Vaughn punctuated his words with a staccato flurry of footsteps.
Henrietta didn't wait to hear more. She careened down the stairs in reckless haste, clinging to the banister as she all but fell down the last three steps. She flung herself around the turn of the wall just as, at the top of the stairs, a door creaked open.
Pressed against the wall, panting, Henrietta heard Vaughn's muttered curse, and a warm female voice say, "Did I not tell you it would be so? Come, sit by me, and leave the shadows to their rest for an hour."
He couldn't find them there.
Henrietta's mind raced in tandem with her rapidly beating heart. If Vaughn had been searching Richard's study… If the she to whom he had referred was somehow, incomprehensibly, Jane… If — Henrietta mustered the greatest, most alarming if of all — if Vaughn was the Black Tulip, they must get away before he knew they had been there.
Vaughn had said he wasn't leaving till Tuesday. If he were the diabolically clever Black Tulip, he might have been deliberately laying false clues, but Henrietta didn't think his alarm at hearing a footstep outside the door had been feigned. Their best chance was to return to London and inform the War Office of everything that had transpired and allow them to take the appropriate steps.
Tearing into the coffee room, narrowly avoiding a slender man in an immense cravat, wearing a high-crowned black hat pulled low over his ears, Henrietta grabbed Miles by the arm and tugged. "I really think we ought to go now."
Miles looked at her quizzically. "The food only just arrived."
Henrietta cast him a look of urgent appeal. "Please? I'll explain in the carriage."
Miles shrugged, bemused but game. "Righty-ho, then."
Rising, he stretched — Henrietta gave an agitated little hop — snagged his hat and gloves from the chair beside him — "Come on, come on," urged Henrietta under her breath — and tossed a few coins on the table.
"That ought to cover it."
"But — " began Turnip, gesturing inarticulately to the platters and jugs arrayed before them.
"Sorry, Fitzhugh" — Miles paused in the doorway to wave his hat in the Girection of his friend — "must be going."
Miles abruptly staggered out of view from the door frame as Henrietta applied pressure to his arm.
"Havey-cavey," muttered Turnip, shaking his head after them. He speared a piece of mutton and regarded it fiercely. "Deuced havey-cavey!" Henrietta chivvied Miles out into the yard, glancing anxiously behind them as Miles sent for the curricle. There was no sign of Vaughn in the doorway, or lurking around the sides of the building (Henrietta hadn't discounted the possibility of other exits) or at the windows above their heads. Only the dandy in the absurd cravat had strolled out behind them, yawning in the afternoon sunlight as he waited for his carriage and team to be brought about. There was something vaguely familiar about the man, but Henrietta didn't have time to waste chasing memory to its lair. Undoubtedly one of the many chinless wonders with whom she had stood up at the series of endless events that comprised her two and a half Seasons on the marriage market.
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