by Лорен Уиллиг
Letty refused to be balked. "Are you comfortable? Are you quite sure you have everything you need?"
Except a husband, preferably titled. Mary managed a brittle smile. "Really, Letty, you needn't fuss. I'm quite as comfortable as I can be."
The words "under the circumstances" didn't need to be voiced. They seeped out like smoke, poisoning the air and scorching a deep furrow between Letty's brows. Guilt charred across every inch of her guileless face. Even her freckles looked guilty.
Mary bit back a wordless noise of annoyance. Why did Letty always have to be so earnest about everything? She was welcome to her dreary viscount, if only she would stop looking at her with that hangdog expression, the one that positively panted for expiation. What did Letty expect her to say? No, darling, I don't mind in the least that you've quite ruined my prospects. I always wanted to be made a laughingstock in front of the ton. It only made it worse that Letty hadn't done any of it on purpose. Outright malice would have been easier to bear than blundering virtue.
"What about a biscuit? We have some lovely gingery ones…."
Mary just looked at her.
Letty sighed. "Perhaps, later, we might speak privately?"
Mary's expression didn't change. "Perhaps."
"I have some good news for you."
"I shall look forward to it."
There was nothing Letty could say to that, so she simply furrowed her brow at Mary one last time — her concerned expression, as opposed to her feeding or washing expression — and went off after her friends in pursuit of refreshments. From the supper table, Mary heard the flurry of chatter abruptly peak in volume as Letty rejoined her friends. Like a flock of geese squawking, she thought unpleasantly.
Vaughn still hadn't returned.
He couldn't still be in the gallery, could he? Mary's eyes narrowed as she glanced at the narrow sliver of floor revealed by the half-open door. She couldn't blame him for wanting to avoid the rest of the house party — but where was he? Without his saturnine presence, the gathering felt oddly flat.
"Darling!"
The same could not be said for the maternal bosom, which was currently swollen with unabashed glee and an entire carafe of ratafia. Mary fought her way free of her mother's embrace.
"Isn't this above all things splendid?" gushed Mrs. Alsworthy. "Oh, your darling, darling sister."
So, noted Mary dispassionately, Letty had risen to two darlings. Bring out the Pinchingdale diamonds and she might attain the giddy heights of three endearments at a time. In the space of one wedding ceremony, Letty had gone from disappointment to favorite daughter. As for Mary, she had been demoted down into the depths of parental purgatory. Not hell, since she still had a chance to redeem herself by an advantageous match, but she had quite definitely been booted out of paradise pending further developments.
"Such a house!" Mrs. Alsworthy exclaimed, her cheeks pink with pride and wine. "Have you ever seen anything like it?"
"It is certainly something out of the ordinary." Unless, of course, one happened to live between the covers of a novel by Monk Lewis or Mrs. Radcliffe.
"And the park! I've never seen anything so grand. Why, I'm sure you could fit half of London into it!" Mrs. Alsworthy beamed gleefully about her. "Your sister has done very well for herself, very well, indeed."
"Hasn't she," murmured Mary.
"I do wish we could have found as comfortable a settlement for you," fretted Mrs. Alsworthy, conveniently forgetting that Lord Pinchingdale had originally been intended for her older daughter. "I don't understand it. Three Seasons! One would have thought you would have caught someone by now." Mrs. Alsworthy preened, one ringed hand rising to pat her green silk turban. "I secured your father without even one Season."
"At the Littleton Assemblies," Mary supplied, having heard the story more times than the Prince of Wales had consumed hot dinners. "I know."
"I was wearing my blue brocade, with my hair all piled on top of my head — that was the fashion then, you know, and very becoming it was to me, too — and the sweetest little stomacher all embroidered with purple pansies, and your father was smitten, smitten on the spot."
People who waxed rapturous about love matches clearly had never been privy to the aftermath of one. Her parents' great love had lasted all of a year; the marriage itself had been limping along for three decades.
"Of course," Mrs. Alsworthy was still rattling on, "I was never so tall as you, and we all know that men don't like tall girls. It makes them feel small. You really must get in the trick of looking up at them, like so."
Mrs. Alsworthy hunched her shoulders, stuck out her neck, and attempted to look dewy-eyed.
Mary wasn't quite sure how impersonating a myopic turtle was supposed to help her secure a husband, but it was easier not to argue. "Yes, Mama."
Mrs. Alsworthy squinted thoughtfully at her. "And perhaps a bit more trim on the bodice…Gentlemen do so appreciate a nicely trimmed décolletage."
"I don't think it's the trim, Mama," said Mary.
As she had known she would, her mother ignored her and carried on with her own train of thought as the ribbons on her own exuberantly trimmed bodice trembled in sympathy. "So fortunate that Letty has offered to fund another Season for you — but this will have to be the last, you know. To have five Seasons looks like desperation."
"Letty is paying for my next Season?"
"Why, yes. Isn't it lovely of her to take such notice of her sisters now that she is a viscountess? A viscountess!"
"Just lovely," repeated Mary flatly. It was one thing to make the same tired rounds a fourth time, batting her eyelashes at the same rapidly diminishing crop of men, but it was quite another matter to do so on the sufferance of a younger sister. To know that every shawl, every dress, even the food on the table had been magnanimously donated by Letty for the worthy cause of helping her older sister to a husband.
On those terms, she would rather remain a spinster.
Only she wouldn't. Either way, she would be choking on her sister's charity. She could accept Letty's munificence now — and meekly submit herself to being organized as Letty saw fit — in the interest of one last, desperate bid for the comparative independence of the married state. Or she could remain unwed and be a perpetual dependent upon her parents. Which, in the end, meant being Letty's dependent, since her father's income was scarcely enough to keep him in new books and her mother in turbans. Between the two of them, they neatly dissipated the revenue from her father's small estate before one could say beeswax.
It was rather galling to face a future as a petitioner in the house where she had thought to be mistress.
"And Lord Pinchingdale will be paying Nicholas's fees at Harrow! Harrow! Can you imagine! We could never have done so much."
"Nicholas must be overjoyed," said Mary.
Nicholas would be miserable. Her little brother was the despair of the local vicar, who had been enlisted to teach him the classics. Fortunately for Nicholas, the vicar was as nearsighted as he was hard of hearing, as well as being prone to drifting off at odd moments, a habit Nicholas had done his best to encourage. Mary would be very surprised if Nicholas knew how to read, much less in Latin. Being sent to Harrow would do wonders for him — if they didn't expel him first. It was undoubtedly the right thing to do. Letty always knew the right thing to do. But it set Mary's teeth on edge.
She was the eldest. She was the one who was supposed to be magnanimously funding her brother's education and using her social consequence to bring out her younger sisters. Not the other way around.
It wasn't right.
"Have you tried the duck?" Mary cut in, just to put a stop to the catalogue of all the benefits Letty planned to confer on her family now that she was a viscountess — a viscountess! Her mother enjoyed the title so much that the word had acquired an inevitable echo every time she uttered it.
"Duck?"
Mary took her mother by the arm and steered her towards the refreshment table. "Yes, duck. I hear it's ve
ry good. There's also game pie."
Unfortunately, she didn't think food would do much to fill the hollow feeling that seemed to have settled into the pit of her stomach. It was the same feeling she had had in the gallery before Vaughn appeared, only ten times worse. In the space of three months, she had become superfluous. The grand match she had intended to make had been made by Letty; the benefits she had intended to graciously bestow upon her family were already being bestowed — by Letty. What was there left for her? Nothing but to sit and wait and be an object of charity, fed on Letty's leavings.
As if she had read her mind, Letty spotted Mary and their mother and began to bear down on them. In her hands, she held a plate piled high with food, and her face bore its most determined housewife expression. Someone was going to be fed, and they were going to be fed now.
It wasn't going to be Mary. Without a qualm, Mary tossed her mother to the wolves. "Look!" she called out cheerfully, giving her mother a little shove in the direction of her sister. "Isn't Letty lovely? She's prepared a plate for you."
"Darling!" Mrs. Alsworthy exclaimed, and made for Letty with both arms outstretched, although whether to embrace her or to snatch up the plate was largely unclear.
Mary didn't wait to find out.
Leaving her relations to it, Mary hastily made her exit stage left, back into the relative quiet of the upper gallery. It should take Letty some time to extricate herself from the maternal embrace. Well, it was only fair, Mary decided. If Letty wanted to be a two-darling daughter, there was a price to be paid.
Mary had her mind set on a very different sort of price. Lifting her skirts clear of the dusty floor, she made straight across the upper hall into the Long Gallery. The painted Pinchingdales held no fascination for her this time. She strode rapidly past them, seeking the living rather than the dead. There was no one standing between the torches, no one sitting on the window seat. The gallery was empty, deserted.
Mary reached the window and turned, thwarted. Where was he? She would have seen him had he returned to the Great Chamber. There had been no sign of movement downstairs in the hall. Of course, he might have retired to his room or gone out to the gardens or climbed up to the battlements to howl at the moon. He could be anywhere in the vast old pile. He might even have left — really, truly left.
That was too dreadful a prospect to be thought of. She had to find him. Because anything, anything at all was better than spending the winter hearing her mother sing an endless chorus of the wonders of her sister, while she herself faded into something not quite alive. She would see just what sort of price Lord Vaughn's theoretical flowery friend was willing to pay. And if Vaughn himself was the Black Tulip…well, then, surely the government must provide rewards for that sort of discovery.
But where had he got to? She couldn't very well seek him out in his bedchamber. That would spell ruin, and Vaughn, Mary could tell, was not the marrying kind.
Not like Geoffrey.
Of course, even being truly ruined would be more interesting than another evening of game pie.
Hands on her hips, Mary stalked over to the red velvet curtain by which Vaughn had posed when he first appeared earlier that evening — and stopped, her eye caught by a glimmer of light where there had been none before. The archway half-concealed by the curtain led off into the western half of the wing that fronted the garden, the bottom half of the second long stroke of the H. Earlier that evening, both corridors leading off the gallery had been dark and still. Now, lamplight seeped across the floor, coming from a partially open door just a little way down the corridor.
A superstitious shiver snaked down Mary's spine. Framed in red velvet, the deserted hallway might have been a stage set for Don Giovanni, black as a scoundrel's heart except for the reddish tint of hellfire to come. She could, of course, go back to the safety of the Great Chamber. She could fix her mother's plate and listen to her tales of success at the Littleton Assemblies.
Brimstone, it was.
Squaring her shoulders, Mary set off to strike her bargain with the Devil.
Chapter Four
Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav'n.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost, The First Book
A skull made a very restful companion.
Stretching one leg out in front of him, Vaughn settled more comfortably into the squashy interior of a squat wooden chair. In front of him, paired peasants shouldered the burden of the hooded mantel, grinning at an unpleasant rural secret. The little room must once have served an undistinguished purpose, antechamber to a grander room or perhaps even a privy, but at some point in the last century the room had been converted into a private den, lined with books and tricked out with the latest in the Gothic style. A blackened walnut table had been fitted out with an illuminated medieval manuscript, placed next to a decanter and goblets hammered out of semi-precious metal and set about with misshapen chunks of colored glass meant to look like a prosperous chieftain's hoard. The skull, grinning winningly from one corner of the table, completed the scene. A tentative tap of the fingernail confirmed that it was not, in fact, a plaster facsimile.
No detail had been neglected. Gargoyles stuck out their tongues from the joins in the vaulted ceiling, and a mirror had been cunningly angled above the fire to mirror and magnify the stained-glass window hung above the door. The distorted reflection transformed the tiny chamber into a towering cathedral, licked at the edges by the orange flames of the hearth. A cunning illusion, reflected Vaughn, as long as one didn't look away from the mirror.
But then, that was the way of illusions, wasn't it? All charlatans, whether the stage magician or the amorous rake, relied upon man's yearning to be deceived, to gaze in the mirror of his own desirings and be gulled by the image therein. It was a tempting prospect, to look and believe, like Faust panting after Helen's shadow. In the end, however, the mirror always cracked, revealing the images for the shams they were. Loyalty, love, the joys of home and hearth — no more substantial than an opium dream and just as debilitating while they lasted.
Of course, none of the earnest young people cavorting in their innocent frolics in the Great Chamber would admit a word of it. They all believed in fates worse than death, True Love in capital letters, and the innate goodness of man. Even Jane, for all her perspicacity, suffered from an unaccountable attachment to abstract notions of honor. Except, perhaps, for Miss Alsworthy.
Now there was something out of the ordinary.
Hooking an arm over the side of the chair, Vaughn gazed reflectively into the mirror. He was, he realized with some surprise, suffering from an entirely unaccountable sense of disappointment. But, then, the whole evening had been entirely unaccountable. Enjoyable, even. Her opening jab about solitude had been nicely done, very nicely done indeed, although she had lost ground later on by letting herself be rattled by his abrupt switch away from seduction. Conversation, when conducted properly, wasn't unlike a good fencing match, a constant attempt to sniff out one's opponent's weak spots and throw him off guard. Under that carefully cultivated mask of vapidity, Miss Alsworthy harbored a natural knack for the sport. In want of training, certainly, but with an acid tongue that boded well for future bouts.
The last thing he needed just now was yet another black-haired beauty getting in the way of his plans. And yet, the complications might have been adjusted to his advantage. He might have sworn off raven-haired agents, but surely one more, employed in just the right way…What were vows for, but to be broken? No one knew that better than he.
Ah, well. After the way their little interview had ended, the point was decidedly moot.
Drumming his fingers against the blackened wood, Vaughn addressed his new friend, Yorick Redux. "Another lost opportunity, my dear chap. I would imagine you know something about those."
"My lord?"
It wasn't Yorick. Not unless Yorick had suddenly become a good deal more talkative and female. The voice was a woman's voice, low and imperious. A voice recently heard and even more r
ecently remembered. A shadow swayed over the table, falling across Yorick's bald pate and the barbaric splendor of silver and gems.
Vaughn stilled, his hands closing over the arms of the chair. Beneath his languid demeanor, anticipation thrilled through him, sharp as a foeman's steel. It was merely an antidote to the grinding ennui of the past week, the anticipation of a verbal duel with an unexpectedly adept opponent, nothing more.
"Miss Alsworthy," he murmured, rising smoothly from his chair.
Lapped in shadow, her graceful figure looked insubstantial and oddly fragile. The hearth light picked out the hollows beneath her collarbones and the shadows under her eyes, whittling away the armor of the flesh to the brittle bone beneath.
He had, reflected Vaughn wryly, been spending altogether too much time in the company of corpses if he could look at a beautiful woman and think only of the grave.
He moved swiftly to shut the door behind her.
"What a pleasant…surprise."
Miss Alsworthy's shoulders stiffened as though the door had thudded into her back rather than its frame. She hid it well, though, taking the moment to stroll forwards, one pale hand trailing lightly along the edge of the table. Only her shoulder blades betrayed her, brittle as glass above the scalloped back of her dress.
"A friend of yours?" She nodded to the skull with commendable sangfroid.
Vaughn closed the short distance between door and table. Resting a caressing hand on Yorick's bald pate, he traced the brow with a deliberation that would have brought a blush to a more susceptible maiden's cheek. "I've only just made his acquaintance. A decent enough sort, although his conversational style appears to be somewhat lacking."
"I thought all men desired such a complaisant companion." Mary's deep blue eyes glinted up at Vaughn from beneath lowered lids. "Someone to offer unconditional agreement."
"'The grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace,'" Vaughn recited meditatively, lingering on the last word. "Rather a high price to pay for unwinking devotion, don't you think?"