by Лорен Уиллиг
Whatever he whispered must have pressed the bounds of propriety, because the girl with the silver-gilt curls furled her fan and rapped her suitor sternly on the shoulder. Stepping neatly out of range, he captured the hand with the fan—and Letty caught her first full view of his face.
The room felt very close, and the band that fastened beneath her breasts very, very tight. The other guests pressed around her like birds of prey, too loud, too shrill, too near. The room was too hot, the scents too oppressive, and her eyes ached with the smoke of the candles. She wanted, desperately, to be back in London. Anywhere but here. Even tea with Mrs. Ponsonby would be preferable. Anything would be preferable to watching her husband kiss the hand of another woman.
All of Letty's daydreams charred and shriveled, like a posy fallen too near the fire.
If only there were an innocent explanation! Letty toyed with the stock characters of fiction, the unexpected double, the long-departed twin. For a moment, the latter almost seemed believable. The features might be the same, but this man, with his too-knowing eyes and his leering lips, had nothing in common with the contemplative man who had so tenderly paid court to her sister. But Lord Pinchingdale was an only child. She knew that, because she had overheard him telling Mary about it once, what seemed like a very long time ago, in a London ballroom. His father, older brother, and two younger siblings had all been carried away by the same virulent attack of smallpox when he was eight.
The girl couldn't be a long-lost sister or an Irish cousin. One didn't lean that close to whisper into the ear of a cousin, or smile at a long-lost sister in that slumberous, heavy-lidded way. Every movement screamed seduction. He had never looked at her like that, or even at Mary. With Mary, he had always been respectful, almost reverent, never with that challenging sexuality simmering just near the surface. It made Letty squirm with embarrassment, and something else, something that she didn't care to analyze.
Across the breadth of the drawing room, her husband was lifting the blond girl's hand to his lips. He paused in that pose, toying with the circumference of the sapphire bracelet that circled her wrist, running one finger around the jeweled length.
Letty's own hands clenched into fists. She could feel the Pinchingdale betrothal ring, the only concrete proof of her marriage, boring into her palm. On the boat, she had turned it around on her finger, wondering about the man who had given it to her, and what it would mean to make a true marriage with him. She had been naively, blindly optimistic, taking the ugly ring as a tangible token of things to come. Of promises given and meant. Oh, she knew that he didn't want to be married to her—it was hard to miss—but she had thought him an honorable man, not the sort to dishonor his vows a week after the wedding. Vows were vows, after all.
How could she have been such a fool? Spinning pretty daydreams while her husband of less than a week chased after the first skirt that caught his fancy.
Letty writhed in an agony of wounded pride. She remembered the endless conversations she had rehearsed in her head on the voyage over, the apologies she had made to him, the way his handsome face turned from condemnation to respect as she explained what had really happened that fateful night. Shaking his head with self-reproach, he would apologize for having misjudged her, and apologize again for having run off (in Letty's daydreams, he did a great deal of apologizing), pressing her hand between his and declaring that if he had known what she really was, he would have stayed. Sometimes, when Emily was fast asleep in the next bunk, and the ship rocked gently on the tide, and anything seemed possible, he would even lift her hand to his lips for a gentle kiss.
As Letty watched, Lord Pinchingdale kissed, not the woman's hand, but one gloved finger, turning the simple gesture into an act of homage so erotically charged that Letty blushed just to witness it, and more than one woman in the vicinity resorted to her fan. The blonde wagged her head and simpered in a way that was more invitation than discouragement.
Letty felt ill in a way that had nothing to do with the over-spiced mutton she had eaten for dinner.
"Who is that?" she asked Mrs. Lanergan, doing her best to imbue her voice with nothing more than polite interest. "The girl with the blond hair."
Always delighted to assist where gossip might be had, Mrs. Lanergan leaned forward, her bosom straining precariously against her dйcolletage as she peered past Letty.
"Oh, that's Miss Gilly Fairley. Quite an heiress, they say—and a beauty, too! The woman with her is her aunt, Mrs. Ernestine Grimstone." Mrs. Lanergan indicated a dark-garbed woman who sported a ferocious scowl. The scowl, Letty was pleased to see, was trained directly on Lord Pinchingdale. At least someone in the room showed some sense. Lowering her voice slightly, Mrs. Lanergan added, "Between the three of us, she's a cold fish, that one. Or do I mean a sour grape?"
"Don't tease, Mrs. Lanergan!" protested Emily, sweeping aside Mrs. Lanergan's culinary metaphors with a shake of her dark curls. "Who is the gentleman?"
Under the circumstances, Letty found the use of the word "gentleman" decidedly inapt.
"That," said Mrs. Lanergan importantly, "is Lord Pinchingdale, newly come from London. And to my little soiree!"
"I take it that Lord Pinchingdale is, as yet, unwed?" The words cracked off Letty's tongue like buckshot. She wondered fleetingly what the penalties for bigamy might be. Mrs. Grimstone didn't seem the sort to let her charge settle for anything less than matrimony.
Unsuited to nuance, Mrs. Lanergan answered the question but ignored the tone. "Oh, quite! And a most eligible gentleman, too. I hear he has a splendid estate in Gloucestershire, and an income of no less than forty thousand a year. Although, from the looks of it, he'll not remain a bachelor long," she added, with a smiling nod at Miss Fairley, who was fluttering her unfairly long lashes with enough determination to set up a squall in the Irish Sea.
Letty set her chin and tried to convince herself that her husband's blatant defection didn't matter to her in the slightest. How could it, when he had never been hers to lose? The only hold she had on him was words spoken under duress. From what she had witnessed, she didn't want any hold on him, under duress or otherwise. Miss Fairley was welcome to him, infidelities, betrothal ring, and all. A pity there wasn't some way Letty could just sign Lord Pinchingdale over to her, as one might any other kind of property for which one no longer had any use, like a piece of barren land, or a horse with a tendency to buck.
"Don't despair, my dear," said Mrs. Lanergan, patting Emily reassuringly on the arm. "We have another unmarried peer present. He came over on his own private yacht. Just fancy! He's a bit older than Lord Pinchingdale, but still a very handsome man for all that."
Letty resolutely turned her attention back to her companions, away from Lord Pinchingdale's "handsome" face. He was a rake, a scoundrel, a cad, a bounder—there weren't enough words in the English language to plumb the depths of his vileness. And she didn't care. Not one bit.
But no matter how hard she tried not to look, all she could see was her husband, breathing amorous accolades into another woman's ear.
* * *
"They have five hundred muskets being stored at the depot on Marshal Lane," the notorious Lord Pinchingdale murmured seductively to the beauty simpering beside him. "And they've ordered one hundred pairs of pocket pistols and three hundred blunderbusses."
Miss Gilly Fairley plied her fan so that her silver-gilt curls wafted in the resulting breeze, the shining strands glittering like a web of diamonds in the candlelight. Beneath the cunningly contrived blond wig, not a strand of Miss Jane Wooliston's own stick-straight brown hair slipped out. In the flighty creature arrayed on a low settee next to Geoff, no trace remained of the chilly beauty who had excited the admiration of the dandies at Mme. Bonaparte's salons little more than a week before. Diana, they had called her, paying tribute to her reserve and her classical features alike, as the poets among them composed odes to the symmetry of her face and the gravity in her gray eyes.
There was nothing the least bit antique abou
t Miss Gilly Fairley, whose cheeks were pink with the excitement of a party, and whose eyes were rounded in perpetual circles of naive wonder. Through the magic of her paint pots, Jane had somehow contrived to make her face appear rounder, her fine-bridged nose broader. The ribbons fluttering about her face and a careful application of shadow along her lids convincingly tinted her eyes with blue, and rendered her entirely unrecognizable, even to those who had known her before. It had taken Geoff several moments before he realized that the gushing creature who descended on him in a welter of ruffles was, in fact, the poised young lady with whom he had plotted to release his best friend from the clutches of the French Ministry of Police a mere two months before.
It was, thought Geoff in sincere admiration, a masterful transformation, all the more impressive for being so understated. Over the past two days, his admiration had only grown. Jane and her chaperone had arrived a week before, and they had already amassed an impressive dossier of treasonous activities.
The previous night, they had all attended the theater, intercepting a basket of oranges with messages stuck beneath the skins. Smelling faintly of citrus, Geoff had followed that up with a clandestine trip of his own down to the rebel depot on Marshall Lane, where he had lurked behind the windows in the guise of a beggar, eavesdropping on a rather uninspiring session of drink and folksong.
What was it about rebel movements that always seemed to demand expression in song? The French had gone for the same, coming up with catchy numbers about the liberty of the common man. Geoff had had that interminable "Зa ira" song stuck in his head for months after infiltrating a group of Jacobins in 1799. It still popped back into his head at inconvenient moments. Geoff caught himself humming "Quand l'aristocrate protestera, le bon citoyen au nez lui rira" under his breath and made himself stop. Wrong country, wrong mission, and it didn't even scan.
"Have you discovered the manufacturer of the weapons?" Jane asked in a breathy voice that managed to convey forbidden trysts and wavering virtue.
Geoff deftly stole her fan, holding it just out of reach as she squealed and made a deliberately abortive grab for it, causing her dйcolletage to swell perilously above her bodice.
"Daniel Muley. He lives at 28 Parliament Street," he whispered into her ear, as her hand joined his on the ivory handle of the fan. "It's unclear whether he's one of them, or just in it for his fee."
"The liaison?" Jane tilted her head back as though brought to the verge of a swoon by his improper suggestions.
"Miles Byrne. He works in a timber yard on New Street. I mean to examine it more closely tomorrow."
"Excellent," murmured Jane. She snatched the fan back from him, exclaiming, in a voice pitched to carry, "La, sir! How you do tease!"
"La?" inquired Geoff under his breath. "La?"
Jane permitted herself a tiny grimace behind the shield of her fan. "Needs must," she murmured.
"There can be no doubt that the devil is driving," acknowledged Geoff, remembering some of the scenes he had witnessed in Paris. The streets hadn't quite run with blood, at least not by the time Geoff and Richard had made it out of there, but severed heads weren't something a man forgot in a hurry.
Miss Gwendolyn Meadows, garbed in the widow's weeds of Mrs. Ernestine Grimstone, devoted and overprotective aunt, scowled disapprovingly at her fellow agent. "Refer to that Corsican upstart as the Prince of Darkness and you'll give him ideas above his station."
"Don't you mean below his station?" inquired Jane delicately, making sure to simper guilelessly at Geoff as she said it.
"Lord of the Underworld is too good for some people," objected Miss Gwen with a sniff.
Geoff and Jane exchanged a look of shared amusement that owed nothing to their theatrical talents.
"At least if he were in Hades he would be less trouble to those of us up here," pointed out Geoff.
Miss Gwen's parasol thumped against the ground dangerously close to Geoff's foot. "Occasionally you make sense, Pinchingdale. But tonight is not one of those occasions."
"I can only strive to improve myself under your tutelage," replied Geoff mildly.
"Hmph," said Miss Gwen, casting a suspicious glance at Geoff from beneath her veils. "Save the compliments for those gullible enough to enjoy them. I know a gammon when I see one."
Geoff prudently removed himself behind Jane before Miss Gwen's parasol could swing once again into action. They had tried to part Miss Gwen from her parasol, as too recognizable an element of her original persona, but Miss Gwen clung stubbornly to her sunshade, insisting that its utility as a weapon outweighed the possible threat of recognition. Geoff suspected she simply couldn't bear to give up poking people. Nonetheless, he and Jane had been forced to accede. It was either that or wrestle the implement from Miss Gwen's bony grasp.
Geoff managed quite a credible leer in the direction of Jane's bodice, patterned on his cousin Jasper at Jasper's most objectionable, as he leaned down and whispered, "Still no sign of Emmet?"
Jane lowered her eyelashes becomingly. "It is early yet. The note didn't assign a time."
"Pity, that." Geoff straightened slightly, using his new vantage point behind Jane to scan the occupants of the room, looking for any sign of Emmet.
The worst part of any mission was always the waiting. Waiting for their quarry to appear. Waiting for the quarry to say something useful. Hoping like the devil that the quarry wouldn't feel the need to sing.
The orange they had intercepted at the opera last night had been entirely clear on one point at least; Emmet was to meet with his French contact at Mrs. Lanergan's annual soiree. It made, Geoff had to admit, perfect sense from the conspirators' point of view. Mrs. Lanergan's party was always a crush, crammed with the soldiers from her husband's regiment and those of the Anglo-Irish community who could be found in town during the summer months. As long as one sounded and looked like a gentleman, nearly anyone could achieve admittance, blending in with the crowd. From where he stood, Geoff could barely hear the pianoforte in the far corner of the room, where a young lady was singing a plaintive air, surrounded by three admiring second lieutenants and one none too sober captain.
There was something particularly cheeky about staging a treasonous assignation right under the noses of a quarter of the Crown's Dublin garrison. Not that any of the garrison would recognize treason if it stomped on their toes and ran back and forth, waggling its ears and singing, "Death to the tyrannous usurpers!"
In the guise of a foppish aristocrat fearing for his own safety, Geoff had broached the topic of rebellion with Colonel Lanergan earlier that evening. "Nothing to worry about," snorted the colonel, his broad, red fingers stretched comfortably across his waistcoat. "Demmed nonsense! Safer than Bond Street, Dublin is. The Irishers wouldn't think of rising, not after what happened in the 'ninety-eight. They've learned their lesson."
If they had learned any lesson, it was that it was damnably easy to conduct a full-blown conspiracy straight under the noses of the meager British force headquartered in the castle. It was quite exceptionally well-chosen timing. Most of the great Anglo-Irish nobles who might have sniffed out the whiff of treason among their tenants were off in London for the Season, their mansions shuttered and manned by skeleton staffs. The officials at the castle, missing the gaiety of home, were either doing their damnedest to reconstruct it in the bottom of a cask of claret, or had hared off for a spot of sport elsewhere, leaving Dublin for the rebels to bustle in. Even General Fox, commander in chief of His Majesty's forces in Ireland, was talking of leaving Dublin for a jaunt to the west.
Not far from him, Geoff could hear the shrill voice of Lanergan's wife, elevating his income by ten thousand pounds a year for the benefit of her audience. It made him feel a bit like one of the animals in the Tower menagerie. This sceptr'd isle, Geoff reminded himself. Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George—or, in this case, King George. If his ancestors could shed their blood on the field of Agincourt, he could bloody well endure being eyed like a pig at market by a wi
llowy miss and a comfortable-looking sort of widow in a gown that showed the signs of recent dyeing.
There was something familiar about that particular widow, something about the set of her shoulders and the tilt of her head that plucked at his memory. The lighting in the room was too dim to discern her hair color, and her face was entirely hidden from view. But there it was again, that twinge of recognition. Could she be Emmet's French contact? Geoff began to mentally run down his list of female spies he had known. Absent recent amputation, she was too petite to be the Marquise de Montval. She certainly wasn't that harridan who had gone for his eyes at the Sign of the Scratching Cat in Le Havre; she would have to have lost four stone, at the least. Fat Mimi, they had called her, none too imaginatively. The woman next to Mrs. Lanergan was pleasantly rounded, but Fat Mimi would have made four of her.
As Geoff's eyes narrowed on the little group, the woman tilted her head back to say something to the black-haired girl next to her, unwittingly positioning herself full in the glow of the sconce on the wall behind her. The candlelight struck amber glints in her exuberant mass of marmalade-colored hair, outlining with faithful precision a pair of wide blue eyes, a tip-tilted nose, and a mouth too generous for fashion. As he watched, she lifted her left hand to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and the ring on her third finger caught the light, the dark stone in the middle shining greasily in its heavy, almost barbaric, setting.
Geoff's stomach hit the gaily patterned carpet and kept on going.
"Oh, no," said Geoff, shaking his head. "It can't be."
"I assure you it can," replied Miss Gwen, looking affronted. "I decoded the message myself."
Geoff ignored her.
There might be hundreds of girls who might, at a distance, in an unevenly lit room, be taken for Letty Alsworthy, but there was only one Pinchingdale betrothal ring. The thing was so hideously ugly that no one would ever bother to fashion another. His grandmother, a pithy woman who delighted in scandalizing her vaporish daughter-in-law, had described it as a carbuncle masquerading as a jewel. It was a cabochon-cut monstrosity dating back to a medieval ancestor, a thrifty Norman warrior, who, rather than invest in unnecessary feminine baubles, had simply pried the jewel out of his sword to present to his bride—reportedly over the body of several of her recently slain relatives, who had just fallen prey to that selfsame sword. The last was just the sort of story his grandmother liked to tell, and was probably untrue, but it was too vivid an image to entirely banish.