by Лорен Уиллиг
"Radical tendencies in the family, Miss Alsworthy? Tsk, tsk." On Vaughn's tongue, the syllable became a caress. A caress with a sting in its tail. "I had no idea I was clasping a revolutionary to my bosom."
"I thought we agreed that there would be no clasping of any kind," Mary countered crisply, earning a light chuckle.
"Fair enough." Across from her, Vaughn raised a sardonic eyebrow. It was always the same sardonic eyebrow. Given its repeated use over their short acquaintance, she was surprised he hadn't suffered a strain.
It would have been flattering if he could have contrived to look just a little disappointed. But he didn't. He never did. One moment, his heavy lidded eyes would burn with seductive promise and the next they would be as amused and detached as any bored young buck in his box at the theatre. It was both infuriating and intriguing.
Carrying calmly on with their previous topic as though clasping and bosoms had never entered into it, Vaughn said, "The Common Sense Society is the last gasp of the old Revolution and Constitution Societies. They're a fairly bloodless lot, but rumor has it that they still retain some ties with the agents of the French Republic. And if they do…" Vaughn cast her a glance pregnant with meaning.
"You do realize," said Mary darkly, "that this will be nearly as bad for my reputation as being compromised. No man wants to marry a bluestocking."
"Cheer up. Perhaps you'll meet a gentleman of a reforming nature. Idealists generally make easy prey."
"I take it you know this from personal experience?"
Vaughn leaned back lazily against the black velvet squabs. No dull beige for Lord Vaughn in his custom coach; the appointments were all that money and imagination could devise, complete with silver tassels dangling from the hangings at the windows and a trompe l'oeil painting of a stormy sky decorating the ceiling. The painter had arranged it so that a bolt of lightning angled straight at Lord Vaughn's irreverent head. Another case, thought Mary, of art imitating life. If anyone deserved to be skewered by a bolt from above, it was undoubtedly her companion, who was doing his best to live up to his rakish reputation as he drawled, "I never waste my time on the easily won. The sooner had, the sooner bored."
Mary toyed with a tassel, twining the silver thread around the finger of her glove. "How do you know you will be bored?"
"Anything one can acquire is seldom worth having. Wine. Horses. Women."
The ranking was so deliberately intended to outrage that Mary couldn't do anything but chuckle at it. "I suppose I ought to be grateful that our association is purely of a business nature. Lest it otherwise go flat."
"Yes." Vaughn's pale eyes settled on her face, his expression unreadable. "Quite."
Breaking eye contact first, Mary glanced out the window, asking casually, "Whom should I expect to see at this afternoon's gathering?"
Odd how not looking could increase one's other senses, the rasp of fabric, the masculine scents of starch, cognac, and cologne. In comparison, the vista of identical white houses, gray from coal smoke, seemed distant and insubstantial. She could hear the rub of wool against velvet as Vaughn shrugged. "The usual mix of bored dilettantes and wild-eyed reformers."
"Including your Tulip?" Mary asked delicately. Vaughn had only told her where they were going; he hadn't bothered to specify why.
"Good God, no. No sensible spy would waste his time with this lot. They're a bunch of prosy bores and half-mad fanatics. It's only the latter who make the former bearable."
"Into which category do you fall?"
"I? I am but a humble spectator of the human comedy."
Mary refrained from making the obvious comment about his humility or lack thereof. "You seem remarkably well-informed for a mere bystander."
Vaughn's lips curved in the bland smile that Mary had already learned meant he had no intention of answering her question. His countenance was as polished and unyielding as a well-cut piece of marble. "My dear girl, at my age there's very little with which I'm not familiar. Regrettably."
"Your age?" Mary mimicked. For all his world-weary airs, Lord Vaughn was no more than thirty-five. So said Debrett's Peerage, and Debrett's never lied. One could set one's clock by it — if it had anything to do with clocks. "Prior to the flood, I'm sure. I can just picture you frolicking about in your antediluvian idyll."
Vaughn looked down the length of his slightly crooked nose. "I assure you, the ark was highly overrated. Full of livestock and not a decent claret to be had." He looked just a little too pleased with himself as he added, "Not unlike Almack's."
"It isn't any more pleasant for the cattle," retorted Mary acidly. It was one thing to talk about the marriage market, quite another to be taken for a cow.
"I would have thought that your devoted swains would have contrived to keep you better entertained." It was quite obvious that Lord Vaughn was not referring to poetry readings.
Mary's lips twisted cynically. "They tried."
Lord Vaughn's voice unfurled smoothly as black velvet. "Clearly not hard enough."
Mary caught the edge of the seat as the carriage jolted to a stop. "If you meant to offer to remedy the defect, it's too late," she said, somewhat more tartly than she had intended. "We appear to have arrived."
"Pity," yawned Vaughn, as if the prospect couldn't have interested him less. Which it probably couldn't, Mary reminded herself. Vaughn flirted as naturally as he breathed; the mistake would be to take any of it seriously.
"Quite." Mary pointedly diverted her attention to the seat next to her and her remarkably silent chaperone. "Aunt Imogen? Aunt Imogen!"
Aunt Imogen might not be quite deaf, dumb, and blind, but with her broad-brimmed hat dipping low over her eyes and her utter refusal to employ an ear trumpet, she was as close as could be found. The expression on Vaughn's face when Mary had propelled Aunt Imogen into the entryway that afternoon had made up for a week's worth of sarcastic remarks. For one glorious moment, the great Lord Vaughn had been rendered genuinely speechless. Mary considered Aunt Imogen one of her better inspirations.
The famous profile that had once entranced Gainsborough was all but hidden beneath a picture hat that had been all the crack when Mary was a toddler, and the broad-skirted dresses that had once emphasized her stately figure hung loosely from her reduced frame, the formerly rich brocades beginning to fray and fade. Despite the passage of time, Aunt Imogen clung to the fashions of her heyday, either from nostalgia or because she couldn't afford to replace them. Aunt Imogen, Mary had been told, had been one of the great beauties of her day, an intimate of the Duchesses of Gordon and Devonshire, painted by Gainsborough, and ogled by the aging George II. It was a chilling thought.
It was partly penury and partly stubbornness that had reduced Aunt Imogen to her current state. Properly Lady Cranbourne, Aunt Imogen had been an old man's fancy, second wife to an elderly earl with a large fortune, grown children, and a taste for pretty young things. When Lord Cranbourne cocked up his toes, Aunt Imogen had been left a jointure that made the earl's children gnash their teeth and mutter darkly about undue influence. They had booted her out of the family mansion forthwith. Returning to London, Aunt Imogen had merrily dissipated her jointure on two decades of lavish entertainments, younger men, and amateur theatricals. Penniless and passé, she had finally been forced to batten on the generosity of friends, making the rounds of a shrinking circle of acquaintances as eccentric as herself. Aunt Imogen made her home with Lady Euphemia McPhee, a distant connection of the royal family via one of Charles II's many illegitimate children and quite as mad as Aunt Imogen. Mary had only secured her great-aunt's services as chaperone by promising to take part in Lady Euphemia's latest production, A Rhyming Historie of Britain, although she hadn't thought it necessary to confide that little detail to Vaughn.
"Aunt Imogen!" Mary repeated. Decades of sitting too near the orchestra at the opera had wreaked havoc on Aunt Imogen's hearing, and the angle of her hat rendered lip-reading an impossibility.
Vaughn regarded the tilted hat without fa
vor. "Are you quite sure she's still sentient?"
"Only just barely — but isn't that the point?"
"A hit. A palpable hit." Vaughn sighed. "Bring out your aunt. The proprieties, after all, must be maintained."
Grasping what she assumed to be the general vicinity of Aunt Imogen's shoulder, Mary essayed a gentle shake. Happily dreaming of handsome footmen, Aunt Imogen snored on. Abandoning gentle, Mary shook her again. Aunt Imogen might look fragile, but she had the constitution of a carthorse and was harder to wake than the seven sleepers. Aunt Imogen's crumpled lids crackled open over bloodshot eyes. From her open mouth came a noise that sounded like, "Wuzzat?"
A pronounced Whig drawl, the chosen dialect of the previous century's upper classes, made her all but impossible to understand. When in her heyday Robert Burns had written her an ode, the critics had promptly hailed it as "the unpronounceable in praise of the incomprehensible."
"The political meeting, Auntie," Mary shouted. "Lord Vaughn has escorted us to a meeting of the Common Sense Society. Shall we go in?"
"Arrr-bar," pronounced Aunt Imogen imperiously.
Mary chose to interpret that as, "Do let's." It might even have been so. Aunt Imogen, if rumor was to be believed, had harbored quite a weakness for radical politicians in her day, canoodling with the elder Mr. Fox and flirting with the masses at the hustings. She and the late Duchess of Devonshire had scandalized society by trading kisses for votes during the general election of 1784. At least, Aunt Imogen claimed she had been trading kisses for votes; malicious gossip maintained that she hadn't insisted very hard on securing the latter before bestowing the former.
Lord Vaughn climbed out first, holding out his arms to Aunt Imogen, who revived sufficiently to bat her eyelashes coquettishly in his general direction. An earl was an earl, after all.
"My lady," murmured Vaughn, ushering her forwards.
Aunt Imogen gurgled appreciatively, although whether in response to Lord Vaughn or at the footman holding the door, whose finely turned calves she was unabashedly ogling, remained unclear.
Shaking her head, Mary helped herself out of the carriage. If she was to be a bluestocking for the afternoon, in the model of that dreary Wollstonecraft woman, she might as well start acting the part. It wasn't their message Mary objected to; it was that they dressed so shabbily as they delivered it.
Pausing on the second step, Mary stared in dismay at the scene before her. She wasn't quite sure where she had expected a philosophical society to meet, but her imagination had conjured a great white-walled room, ringed with pillars and decorated with the marble busts of great men. Instead of a temple to learning, the building before them was built of brick in the lower story, surmounted by crossed timbers set in plaster above. A sign creaked above the door, displaying a frog with a five-pointed crown on his head, crouching within a ring of feathers.
In short, it was a tavern.
"Welcome," said Vaughn, "to the Frog and Feathers."
Mary tugged her bonnet down forward over her face, wishing she had worn a cloak and hood instead of a fashionable spencer. The short jacket might display her figure to admiration, but it provided very little extra material for the purpose of hiding her face.
"A tavern?" she demanded.
"What did you expect? The Royal Academy?"
Since that was sufficiently close to the truth, Mary chose not to answer. Putting her nose in the air, she swept grandly down the final steps.
Vaughn wasn't fooled for a moment. Holding out his arm directly so that she had no choice but to take it, he said in an undertone, "Such meetings are illegal twice over. Our friends would be fools to hold them in a more noticeable venue. Besides," he added mockingly, "they have precedent behind them. The tavern has always been the preferred meeting place for illicit activities. Cavaliers, Jacobites, revolutionaries…all of history's schemers find their way sooner or later to the alehouse."
Despite the inclusion of Cavaliers with their dashing taste in haberdashery, Mary wasn't sure that was a list she wanted to join. "I do hope you know what you're doing."
"Only on alternate Tuesdays." Wrapping her arm through his, Vaughn guided her through the main room as Aunt Imogen swept unsteadily along in front of them, her trailing skirts picking up dust, crumbs, and a rancid sausage roll. "Ask me again next week."
Mary caught a brief glimpse of trestle tables set around a low-ceilinged room before Vaughn turned her sharply to the right. "If I'm still speaking to you next week," Mary cautioned.
"Oh, you will be," said Vaughn confidently, using the head of his cane to push open another door. Ushering her through ahead of him, he added, "If you want to be paid."
Mary would dearly have loved to have decimated him with a cutting comment, but it was too late. She was already inside. Revenge would have to come later.
Preceding her escort into the private parlor, Mary automatically adjusted her posture as several pairs of male eyes swiveled in her direction. She might have saved herself the trouble. The gentlemen milling about the room didn't seem the sort to be swayed by feminine pulchritude, unless she came bearing a tricolor in one hand and a bloody axe in the other, preferably with one foot planted on a pile of dead aristos. They were just as Vaughn had described, the sort of social detritus one would expect to adhere to an outlandish cause, paunchy, myopic, and with the habitual hunch of men who spent more time in the study than in the saddle. They wore ink-stained waistcoats and carelessly tied cravats. Many still sported the longer hair of the previous decade, scraped back with bits of string or, for the more soigné, black velvet ribbon. No wonder they belonged to a revolutionary society intent on the overthrow of the current regime; most of them would be laughed out of any ballroom in London.
There was, however, one man who didn't fit the general mold. It wasn't that he was taller than the rest, for the room boasted its share of scarecrows. He was only slightly above medium height, perhaps an inch taller than Mary's escort, but there was something that made him stand out from his fellows. It was, Mary realized, that he looked healthy. His golden brown hair had the sheen of health rather than grease, and his skin had the warm brown tint that marked an outdoorsman rather than the unwholesome white of his fellow disciples. He might be just above medium height, but he held himself well, without the scholarly stoop that hunched the others, and his red-figured waistcoat stretched across a quite respectable expanse of chest. There was something open and friendly about his face, with its straight nose, wide mouth, and broad cheekbones. Compared with the saturnine visage of her escort, it was an endearingly boyish countenance.
He was also, Mary noted, already taken. As she watched, he bent solicitously over a woman in a dark bonnet who sat in a chair at the far corner of the room. From the distance, it was impossible to make out anything of her features, but given the man's attentive stance, there had to be something worth seeing to under the voluminous crape that veiled her bonnet. Remembering Vaughn's comment about reforming gentlemen being easy prey, Mary made a wry face. Someone else had obviously beaten her to it.
Abandoning the couple in the corner, Mary scanned the rest of the scene. Someone had gone to some effort to decorate the room for the occasion. Colorful — and most likely treasonous — bunting in red, white, and blue draped the edges of a table, on which rested the Society's seal, a battered gavel, and a signed engraving that could only be of Thomas Paine himself. He wore a suitably grave expression and toted a pamphlet on which the words "Common Sense" could be seen emblazoned in flowing script. In one corner of the engraving, the enterprising artist had added several illustrative emblems, including a pair of stays. Mary could only assume the corset was meant to convey an abstruse allegorical meaning.
Nudging Vaughn's arm, Mary nodded at the engraving and murmured, "The underpinnings of state?"
Vaughn's lips quirked. "Or simply underpinnings. Before he started peddling revolutionary ideals, Mr. Paine's trade was corsets. To wit, the construction thereof."
From what Mary could make
out of the stays, either the engraver had never seen a woman's undergarments or Paine had made a very poor job of his original profession. "I hope he is more adept with his pen than his needle."
Vaughn answered with a droll expression that made Mary smother an inappropriate chuckle. "Why do you think women's fashion in France changed so dramatically after Paine descended upon them?" He shook his head in mock regret. "A whole revolution just to do away with a set of stays."
"I don't think that's common sense," protested Mary, casting a watchful eye around them.
"Certainly not," rejoined Vaughn, with a private smile. "I could think of far simpler ways to remove stays."
"I'm sure you could," said Mary repressively. "But now is not the time."
Vaughn raised an eyebrow. "Is that an invitation?"
"Don't," Mary whispered. Two men had abandoned the cluster in front of the engraving and were heading their way. They did not look hospitable. One was tall and gaunt, his nose curved in an arrogant arc like the beak of a bird of prey. With his spare frame and too-bright eyes, he reminded Mary of an El Greco painting of a saint on the verge of martyrdom, half-mad and more than a little smug. Next to him, his friend faded into insignificance, a blur of round cheeks and thinning hair. Mary rapidly arranged her face into a dewy-eyed simper. "You'll have us booted out before we've begun."
"I'll take that as a no." Without missing a beat, Vaughn extended a graceful hand to the two gentlemen approaching. "Gentlemen! How delightful."
"May we help you?" asked the taller man forbiddingly. With that nose, Mary reflected, he couldn't help but look forbidding, no matter how benign his intentions might be. Up close, he looked even more like a saint returned from forty days in the wilderness. Rather than the closely tailored coats in fashion, he wore a long frock coat in a rusty black that bore an uncanny resemblance to a cassock. Hollows beneath his cheekbones gouged triangular gashes in his long face.