by Лорен Уиллиг
Mary generally gave the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale a wide berth. The antipathy had been mutual ever since Mary's first Season when the Dowager Duchess had trained on Mary her infamous lorgnette and pronounced, "I dislike showy looks!"
Mary, younger then, and bolder, had curtsied, replying with deceptive sweetness, "Isn't that better, ma'am, than having no looks to show?"
The reference to the Dowager Duchess's granddaughter, Lady Charlotte, sweet-faced but insipid, had been too obvious to ignore. Mary and the dowager had existed in a state of mutually acknowledged enmity ever since.
If she had it to do over, Mary admitted to herself, she might be more circumspect. The dowager was a rude old bag, but she carried a great deal of weight in the segments of society that mattered to Mary. Mary had always wondered how many of the admirers who had never come up to scratch could be laid at the dowager's door. All the Dowager Duchess had to do was whisper a few words in the right ears. A discreet hint that the chit wouldn't be received — at least not in the houses that counted, of which the dowager's was still one — and the word had gone out, from anxious mother to henpecked son. There had been at least three men her first Season who might have done, older sons from solid families with enough town polish to make the thought of matrimony more pleasant than otherwise. And all three had unaccountably moved, within the space of a month, from pursuit to apologetic retreat.
Mary defiantly took a chair in the same row as the dowager. Other guests had begun to filter in, pouncing on the seats along the sides. Mary caught herself looking for a silver-headed cane among the throng of dampened shoulders and rain-spotted frocks and made herself stop. It was unlikely that Vaughn would stoop to so insipid an entertainment as a musicale, even with the city still half-empty.
Miles Dorrington tottered into the room, wearing a beatific smile and bearing a large, padded chair, which he sat down with a satisfied thump just at the end of the front row.
"Helping yourself again, I see," commented Lord Richard.
The simple words produced a palpable tension among the family circle. Lady Henrietta dropped her roll of sheet music and Lord Richard's wife produced an indiscreet but heartfelt, "Oh dear."
Dorrington looked his former friend steadily in the eye, hurt and resignation written all over his straightforward face. Lord Richard's own gaze faltered beneath his steady regard. He looked, thought Mary, almost abashed.
"I don't think Hen would appreciate the comparison," Dorrington said quietly.
"She doesn't," chimed in Henrietta, taking her husband's arm. She jabbed an index finger into her brother's side. "You, sit. And you — " Henrietta turned to her husband, who beamed at her expectantly. "You sit, too."
Miles stopped beaming.
"And if you can't speak nicely to one another, don't speak at all. That means you," she added to her brother, just in case he might be under any misapprehension.
"Bossy as ever," complained Miles good-naturedly, but he sat.
"Completely power mad," agreed Lord Richard, sitting, too.
"Do you think that means they're speaking again?" demanded Amy of her sister-in-law, in a hearty whisper that carried clear across the room.
Henrietta rolled her eyes. "At least they've moved past words of one syllable. Whatever it is, it's an improvement."
"Power mad and indiscreet," amended Lord Richard from the front row, never lifting his eyes from the polished sheen of his Hessians.
"Agreed," grunted Miles, displaying an equal fascination with his own toes.
The two men exchanged masculine nods of commiseration before quickly returning to their contemplation of their boots.
Lady Uppington regarded her offspring with an expression of maternal satisfaction. It wasn't a look Mary could ever recall seeing on her own mother's face. Mrs. Alsworthy reserved her looks of satisfaction for the milliner and the mantua-maker.
"I do wish you would consider staying," Lady Uppington said to Henrietta. "Not long," she added, in the tone of someone taking up an old argument, "but just until you've refurbished Loring House. It would be such a blessing to have all of my children under the same roof again."
"What about Charles?" Lady Henrietta pointed out, referring to her oldest brother. As heir to the marquisate, he would have been a brilliant catch, but he had already been married by the time Mary made her debut, to the unobjectionable and uninteresting daughter of a minor baron.
Lady Uppington went a guilty pink about the ears.
Henrietta seized her advantage. "Ha! You always forget about Charles."
"Nonsense," Lady Uppington declared loftily. "Charles has children of his own now. He gets his own roof."
"Hmph!" snapped the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale from the back of the room. "Roofs are wasted on the young! Leave the lot of them out in the elements. Toughen them up, I say. Most of this lot wouldn't last the week."
The dowager jabbed her cane illustratively at the pastel-clad debutantes and dandies filtering into the room. Following the line of her thrust — it was either that, or be poked in the eye by her cane — Mary saw a diamond-buckled shoe cross the threshold, a glittering counterpoint to the muddy Hessian boots of the other gentlemen. The matching shoe followed, stepping across the parquet floor with a regal precision that practically demanded a fanfare. With one hand resting casually on the silver head of his cane, Lord Vaughn paused, surveying the crowd with the bored air of a visiting emperor.
Mary's chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with the dowager's cane "accidentally" scraping her ribs. Who would have thought that Vaughn would so lower himself as to attend a musicale? Among the chattering debutantes and tousle-headed Corinthians, his aquiline profile looked as remote and as dangerous as the portrait of a Renaissance prince.
"Caro!" Mme. Fiorila greeted Vaughn with a cry of unfeigned pleasure, and Mary felt the little quiver of anticipation that had flared up in her chest blacken and crumble.
Without missing a step or sparing a single glance for Mary, Vaughn moved smoothly to the front of the room, taking the singer by both hands and bussing her smoothly on first one cheek then the other, in the decadent European fashion. In the candlelight, the opera singer's hair glowed pure red-gold, like the molten metal in a Byzantine emperor's mint. She laughed, and murmured something in a throaty voice that was lost to Mary's ears, something intimate enough to make Vaughn raise an eyebrow in amused reply, so at ease with this woman — this opera singer — that he didn't even need to bother with words.
Caro, was it? Just how caro was he to her? Not that it mattered. Vaughn could prance through the beds of the entire Italian opera corps for all Mary cared. It was simply gauche to display such familiarity in public. One would have thought that a belted earl would have known better.
But not Vaughn. Oh no. He did as he pleased and damn the consequences, whether it was making a public spectacle of himself with a common opera singer or kissing —
"Miss Mary?"
Mary gave a decidedly undignified start at the sound of her name. A large male form cast a shadow over the program in her lap.
"Forgive me," said Mr. St. George, taking her alarmed look for one of indignation. "Miss Alsworthy, I should have said. It's simply that the other suits you so well. You look like a Madonna with your hair pulled smooth like that." His hands sketched the air in a gesture of masculine hopelessness at the intricacies of feminine coiffeurs.
"I thought Madonnas were usually blond," replied Mary, her eyes stealing to the front of the room. Mme. Fiorila wasn't really a blonde; her hair was closer to red, more Mary Magdalene than the Virgin.
"Not always," commented St. George mildly. "In Italy and Spain, one often sees the Blessed Mother portrayed with coloring more like yours. There is a picture by Velбzquez in particular that puts me in mind of you. You have some of that same heavenly serenity."
"You flatter me, Mr. St. George," she murmured, donning serenity like a cloak. Beneath it, she felt about as serene as Beelzebub after a hard day in hell, and j
ust as likely to start spitting bits of brimstone.
"Might I avail myself of the seat beside you? If my services might be of any use, I would be delighted to translate the Italian in the program for you."
Mary gestured graciously to the seat beside her. "That would be very kind of you. Our entertainer is Italian, is she not? I wonder why she styles herself madame rather than signora."
St. George shrugged good-naturedly, intent on the task of folding his long limbs into the tiny chair. "I'm afraid I don't pay terribly much attention to the opera, or opera singers."
Mary favored him with a smile of such warmth that the bemused gentleman nearly missed the chair. "That, Mr. St. George, cannot but show excellent judgment on your part." At the front of the room, Vaughn pressed a parting kiss to the back of Mme. Fiorila's hand. It wasn't a brief brush of the air, such as courtesy might demand, but a genuine press of lips against skin. "One wouldn't want to get mixed up with such people," Mary added waspishly.
As Lady Henrietta nodded to the accompanist, Lord Vaughn moved discreetly away, propping one shoulder against a painted panel depicting a young shepherd serenading his lass on a rather improbable lute. The opera singer didn't follow him; like the professional she was, she stood beside the spinet, waiting her turn to sing. But Vaughn had a clear view of her face from where he stood. As Mary watched, Lord Vaughn lifted his brows and the singer's cheeks creased with answering amusement.
Mary looked hastily down at her program, dry eyed and aching. Lady Henrietta's practiced trills felt like a barrage of artillery against her ears, all pounding home the same, unwanted message. Nothing Vaughn did was by accident, everything was deliberate, calculated. The way Vaughn snubbed her at Vauxhall — that hadn't been an accident or a mistake. There was no other explanation. He simply wasn't interested. He was grinding home to her, in the best means available to him, that she was nothing to him other than a business associate. Not even an associate, an employee.
"Do interpret for me, Mr. St. George," Mary purred, angling her shoulder closer to his. "What was that lovely phrase Lady Henrietta just sang?"
St. George tilted his head for a moment, listening. "'Beat me, beat me, dear Masetto,'" he translated.
From the side of the room, Vaughn cast them an oblique, sideways glance.
"Indeed." Mary's lips curved upwards in an intimate smile. "Do tell me more, Mr. St. George."
"'Meekly like a lamb will I stand…'"
"How charming."
Vaughn had left his position on the wall and was moving casually down the ranks of chairs, towards the back of the room.
St. George was still whispering in her ear, but Mary didn't hear a word of it. From the corner of her eye, she followed Vaughn's progress as he approached their seats, at the very end of the very last row of the room. And passed them by, so closely that the tails of his coat brushed the side of her chair. He didn't look down; he didn't look back. He simply left.
Mary's nails bit into the leather of her gloves. What further proof did she need? Vaughn was nothing to her, she reminded herself. Nothing.
Straightening her spine, she smiled upon her companion.
"How very faithfully you translate, Mr. St. George. Do go on."
* * *
The applause following Lady Henrietta's final note drowned out the light tap of the door shutting behind him. Alone in the entryway, once again pristine and puddleless, Vaughn turned unerringly along one of the two corridors that branched out off the entrance hall on either side of the great marble sweep of stairs. His instructions had been explicit.
Lady Uppington's musicale, third door on the left.
Aurelia was singing now; he could hear the familiar magic of her voice weaving its way through the cracks of the door as he prowled down the left-hand corridor, counting doors. It had been a relief to see her there, holding out both hands to him at the front of the room. Her company was always a source of solace. They had been lovers once, so long ago that he could not with any accuracy have named the year. Their liaison had ended by mutual consent, ripening instead into a friendship that was at once more satisfying and more lasting.
Aurelia's presence had never been more welcome than today, with Mary Alsworthy enthroned in the last row, sowing distraction and disorder like a siren of Greek myth. Five days of avoidance had done nothing to dim her fatal effect; they had merely been a panacea. It had taken all the force of five days of resolution, all the steadying influence of Aurelia's presence, to keep him from tossing that sickening St. George from his seat and claiming the place for himself.
The third door on the left was, in fact, the last door on the left. Vaughn helped himself to a candle from the sconce on the wall before turning the brass handle, a precaution that proved to be justified. The room in front of him was as dark as a dungeon. Rain streaked blackly down the windows lining two sides of the room, turning the surfaces slick and dark as polished ebony. The light of his candle reflected wetly off the dark surfaces, sending distorted images of the room wobbling in their depths.
Closing the door carefully behind him, Vaughn touched his candle to one of the mirror-backed sconces that flanked the door, and watched as a warm light flickered tentatively across the expanse of a pale yellow and blue rug. He didn't need the east-facing windows to tell him that this must be the morning room. The walls and furniture had been upholstered in a cheerful pale yellow stripe that seemed determined to hold the light and help it along.
Even in the uneven light, it was clear that he was the first one there. The furniture was all of the spindly and delicate variety, too dainty to conceal even the most delicate human form. The long cream and gold sofa was untenanted, and there was no room between the ormolu legs of the escritoire to hide so much as a cat.
On the mantel was arrayed a fine collection of Oriental porcelain, glazed cobalt blue and fitted, undoubtedly in France, with gilded trimmings. Hands clasped casually behind his back, Vaughn strolled towards the collection of vases, keeping a wary eye on the mirror above the mantel. It was clearly French in origin, unremarkable enough with its shell-shaped curves, but it served its purpose. It reflected the door behind him as the white panel slowly eased open and a slender figure slid through the resulting gap.
The angle of the glass blurred her features and elongated the pale column of her gown. Her dress was blue, a gray-toned blue that blended with the shadows, like a shade fleeing Hades. Like him, she had come prepared. The candle in her hand turned the fashionable frizz around her face into a distorted halo.
She lowered her light, placing it on a marble-topped Louis XV table, and the nimbus receded, bringing her face properly into focus.
It was a face he had known well, once. Even masked, at Vauxhall, he had known her. He could have traced from memory the familiar features, the short upper lip and small, straight nose. But she had changed. It wasn't only the polished surface of the mirror that lent a hard gloss to the once girlish features. The long curls that had framed and softened her face were gone, replaced by a fashionably short crop, held back by a bandeau to reveal a pair of dangling sapphire earrings that even by the uncertain light of the two candles were clearly paste, and a cheap version, at that, as flat and hard as the eyes that followed his in the mirror.
Vaughn could feel her eyes on his back, a palpable pressure against the layers of wool and linen.
"So you did come," she said, with no little satisfaction. She had always had the voice of a courtesan, low and throaty, with just a hint of a pout. The years had brought the pout into prominence.
Turning slowly to face her, Vaughn sketched an elaborate court bow, one leg cocked and one arm gracefully extended.
"As you can see," he drawled.
"I had thought you might not." Her words were meant to be coy, but her hands gave her away, locked tightly at her waist. She glanced quickly over her shoulder at the closed door to the hall.
"How could I resist such a summons? Beauty may be ignored, but threats tend to garner results," he added dr
yly.
Glancing in the mirror, she made a quick adjustment to one of the little curls on her forehead. "I wouldn't have resorted to them if I had thought there was any other way of getting your attention."
"Then how do you explain the visits I had from your charming Italian friend this spring?"
Taken off guard, she wasn't quick enough to pretend ignorance. "What did you do with Marco?"
Vaughn idly inspected the facets of his great diamond ring. "Was that his name? I must confess, we were never on those sorts of terms. One seldom is with one's blackmailer."
"You didn't — dispose of him?" she asked breathlessly.
"Let your fears be set at rest. The creature for whom you are so concerned — although one can hardly see why — is currently cooling his heels in the West Indies."
"Really, Sebastian! How could you?"
"More to the point, how could you? Then again," Vaughn added meaningfully, "you always did have appalling taste in men."
The woman in front of him stiffened, her teeth digging into her lower lip.
"How can I argue?" she retorted. Shaking back her blond curls, she looked provocatively up at him from under her lashes. "After all, I married you."
Chapter Eighteen
Claudio: I am your husband, if you like of me.
Hero: And when I lived, I was your other wife:
[unmasking]
And when you loved, you were my other husband.
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, V, iv
It wasn't every day that one had the opportunity of sparring with a ghost.
Crossing his arms across his chest, Vaughn smiled lazily at his dead wife. "Ah, the tender joy of the matrimonial bond. What do you want, Anne?"
She tilted her head at him in that practiced way she had had, eyes growing wide and misty in incipient supplication.