by Лорен Уиллиг
"I'm so glad our deductions meet with your approval," murmured Geoff.
"Not as a theory, young man." Miss Gwen regarded Geoff haughtily over the top of the coffeepot. "For my novel."
"But who is he?" demanded Letty, before Miss Gwen could expatiate further on her literary endeavors.
Miss Gwen cleared her throat ominously.
"Or she," Letty corrected herself. "The real Black Tulip, I mean."
Something about the phrase the real Black Tulip caught at Letty's memory, but she couldn't quite place it. Not when Geoff was watching her from the other side of the table in a way that brought back memories not best suited to the drawing room.
Letty took a hasty gulp of her coffee before remembering that it was three-quarters sugar.
"Perhaps this might be of some help," suggested Jane, reaching for the small twist of paper that had fallen out of Emily's reticule. "Have you read it yet, Geoffrey?"
"There wasn't an opportunity."
"Wasting good time in dalliance, no doubt," sniffed Miss Gwen.
Avoiding Geoff's eyes, Letty said hastily, "Have you considered Mr. Throtwottle?"
"Mr. Who?" demanded Miss Gwen.
"Throtwottle," Letty repeated. "Emily Gilchrist's guardian. Or, at least, that is what she claimed. If she was an agent, it seems likely that he was one, too."
"No self-respecting agent would adopt so ridiculous a name as Throtwottle," declared the faux Mrs. Grimstone. "It's absurd."
"All the more reason why he might be," Jane said briskly, frowning over the paper. Either the code was proving intractable, or she didn't like what she was reading. "How better to hide your devious purposes than picking a name so outlandish no spy would use it?"
While Miss Gwen considered this new angle, Geoff took up the line of questioning. "What do you know of Mr. Throtwottle?"
"Not terribly much," admitted Letty. "We were all on the packet from London together, but I saw far more of Miss Gilchrist than I did of her guardian. When he did appear, it was usually to misquote bits of Latin." She cast a rueful glance at Geoff. "He was exceedingly tedious."
Geoff's lips turned up at the reference to their earlier conversation, a private link between the two of them. "You were meant to find him tedious," he said.
"It worked," said Letty. "Both of them."
"Yes, and?" broke in Miss Gwen. "Do get on. We don't have all night."
"We do, actually," said Geoff. He glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was only just past one. "Unless you have other plans for the evening."
"I don't know about you, but I intend to spend the rest of the night as the good Lord intended. In slumber," she added pointedly.
"Probably hanging upside down like a bat," Geoff whispered to Letty, who bit down on a shocked giggle, her large blue eyes glowing in a way that reminded him rather forcibly that the good Lord had intended the night for things other than slumber.
They were married, after all.
"All right," Geoff said briskly, suddenly eager to have the meeting over and done with. "Let's get on. Is there anything else you can recall?"
"Ye-es," said Letty. "Tonight, at the theater, Emily leaned over the box and waved at me. I thought she was just—"
"Exhibiting her usual lack of propriety?" put in Miss Gwen.
"Something like that. But she seemed too eager. Desperate, even. Her guardian pulled her back into the box. I thought he was just scolding her for leaning out like that. But when I looked back, they were gone."
"Interesting," pronounced Miss Gwen, forgetting to be snide.
"Do you think she was trying to communicate something to you?" asked Geoff.
"Possibly," said Letty. She stared down at her reddened knuckles, reassembling shards of memory. "I think she had before, too, only I was too thick to see it. She brought up the Pink Carnation and the Purple Gentian a good deal. At the time, I simply put it down as another example of her frivolity."
"She thought you were a spy," said Geoff soberly.
"You were traveling under an alias," pointed out Miss Gwen, looking superior. "Albeit a clumsy one."
"Ironic, isn't it?" Letty said, shaking her head.
"Ironic" wasn't the word Geoff would have used. Bloody terrifying was more like it.
"She must have been trying to sound you out," Geoff said grimly. "Either to elicit information from you, or…"
"Or?" demanded Miss Gwen.
Geoff frowned. "When I overheard the marquise and Lord Vaughn, they were discussing eliminating an unnamed party who had become a liability. I assumed," he added, nodding to the others at the table, "that they were referring to one of you."
"They won't be rid of me that easily," declared Miss Gwen.
Letty caught her husband's eye. "You think they were talking about Emily Gilchrist."
"It does follow," said Geoff, tactfully refraining from rehashing the details. Letty was grateful for that. Even if Emily Gilchrist had been a hardened spy, it wasn't pleasant to picture her lying in the hallway of the Crow Street Theatre. "My money is on Vaughn."
"Why Vaughn?" asked Letty.
"The sort of wound we saw isn't in the marquise's usual style. She prefers the stiletto."
"But in her current costume," put in Jane, without looking up from the scrap of paper in front of her, "a knife might be more apt."
Letty preferred not to think too deeply about the nature of Emily's wound; it had been bad enough seeing it once. Instead, she devoted herself to chasing down that elusive sliver of memory. Something about a tulip…
"He might be double-crossing you, you know," Geoff was saying.
"There is no real Black Tulip!" exclaimed Letty.
Three sets of eyes fastened on Letty. Even Jane glanced momentarily up from her labors.
"I beg your pardon," said Miss Gwen, in a way that suggested that Letty ought to be begging hers.
"The flower, I mean." Letty had pegged down the elusive scrap of memory that had eluded her before. Triumphantly, she looked around the table. "There is no such flower as a black tulip."
"You are mistaken," declared Miss Gwen. "I'm sure I've seen one."
Letty shook her head. "They don't exist. The only reason I know is that M—my sister"—she couldn't quite bring herself to voice Mary's name in Geoff's presence—"tried to acquire some to set off a white dress."
It was their father who had pointed out that the flower didn't exist—although, in his usual way, he had let them endure several footsore days of searching every flower shop in London before he brought out Jean Paul de Rome d'Ardene's authoritative botanical treatise. They had gone through all fifty listed varieties of tulip before Mary had been ready to admit defeat.
"What if," asked Letty, "they chose a flower that doesn't exist for an agent who doesn't exist? No stem, only petals."
"Wouldn't that make a grand joke on us," mused Geoff. "Fool the English into wasting time and resources hunting down an agent who doesn't exist."
"We don't know that," said Miss Gwen forbiddingly. "Where there are subordinates, there must be a leader to coordinate their actions. Otherwise, all is chaos."
"If they answered directly to the Ministry of Police…" Geoff suggested.
"Fouche's mind doesn't run along those lines. It's a clever idea, though," Jane said regretfully. "I wish I had thought of it."
"A bit late for that," pointed out Miss Gwen.
"Thank you, Auntie Ernie. You are, as ever, a source of comfort to me."
"Bonaparte?" suggested Letty. "As the mastermind?"
Geoff shook his head. "Too straightforward. He prefers artillery to horticulture."
"His wife is a great gardener, according to the papers," argued Letty.
"But not anyone's definition of a mastermind," said Geoff, who had met Josephine Bonaparte several times in the course of his duties for the League of the Purple Gentian. "Talleyrand might pull a scheme like this off—he's clever enough, and tricky enough—but I've never been sure how firmly he sits in Bonaparte's c
amp."
"No," Jane said. "I don't think we are dealing with a practical joke on a grand scale. These lieutenants may act in his name, but, somewhere, there is a Black Tulip. And it's not Talleyrand. Or Bonaparte."
"How can you be so sure?" asked Geoff.
"I've spent a good deal of time studying the Black Tulip's past movements. There is a certain similarity to them that bears the stamp of one driving intelligence."
"Or a very good mimic," countered Geoff.
"As long as it's not a mime," muttered Letty.
"Mimes are very distressing," Geoff agreed.
They grinned at each other in a moment of mutual silliness.
Miss Gwen bridled in preparation for a crushing put-down, but Jane spoke first, in a voice devoid of either amusement or scorn.
"Not as distressing as this."
Jane held up the little scrap of paper, covered with a series of numbers and letters. It made no sense to Letty, but it obviously did to Jane. And whatever it was, Jane didn't like it.
"The French are coming."
"That's not news," said Geoff, relaxing against his chair.
"But the timing is. Bonaparte has promised troops for the first of August." Jane looked away, her usually serene face twisted with frustration. "I thought I had put them off."
"How many?"
"There are six French warships already stationed in Brest, with the promise of more to come."
"And our garrison," said Geoff, "is down to just over thirty thousand."
Jane regarded the coded report with extreme disfavor. "They should not have warships ready to put to sea. For the past two weeks, I've been replacing the marquise's dispatches with false reports, minimizing the extent of local preparations and discouraging any immediate action."
"'Local rebellion not ready yet; don't send troops till further word'?" Geoff supplied.
"It seemed to be working. The Ministry of War naturally discounted more optimistic reports that Emmet sent to his brother in Paris and believed those of their agent. Unfortunately, someone—someone senior to the marquise—appears to have gotten the correct information through."
"The Black Tulip," groaned Letty, who was beginning to loathe the very name.
"What matters now," said Geoff, "is not so much who summoned the troops as how we stop them."
"If," said Jane grimly, "we could ferret out our flowery foe, we might be able to reverse what he set in motion."
The expression on Jane's face did not bode well for the Black Tulip. She looked like the illustration of Athena in one of Letty's childhood books, just before the goddess turned an impertinent mortal into a spider. Letty had the impression that Jane was no more accustomed to being thwarted than Athena had been.
"The time has come," said Jane, "to have a little chat with the Marquise de Montval."
Geoff pushed back his chair and paced to the window, staring unseeingly at their reflections in the glass.
"I have another idea. We don't try to delay, but precipitate. Think of it," he said, before Miss Gwen could muster her counterarguments. "In 'ninety-eight, the local rebellion went off prematurely. By the time the French got here, we had already mopped up the native insurgency."
"And were able to turn every resource to rounding up the French," Jane said thoughtfully. "I see. A species of 'divide and conquer.'"
Geoff prowled back toward the table, formulating his plan as he paced. "Emmet has caches of arms scattered all over the city, but his biggest depot is on Patrick Street."
"Gunpowder?" asked Jane, a comprehending gleam lighting her eye.
"Better. Emmet has been stockpiling rockets."
All three women looked blank.
With the boundless enthusiasm of the male for any sort of explosive device, Geoff went on, "They haven't made much headway with them here or on the Continent, but Wellesley's troops were nearly routed by rockets in India a few years back. Emmet found an old Indian hand to manufacture them for him. They're not terribly accurate in battle, but they make a big bang. Set those alight, and Emmet's storehouse will go up like fireworks on the king's birthday."
Geoff looked as though he rather enjoyed the prospect.
"That could be hard to explain to the neighbors," said Letty.
"And to the night watchmen, and to the guards quartered at the castle. It might even draw General Fox back from his trip to the West Country." Geoff's eyes met hers, burning like an entire rocket fusillade in his enthusiasm. "Emmet will have to act quickly to salvage his plans. He'll have to go it without the French."
"What if he doesn't?" asked Letty.
"He has too much invested in this not to. He has a choice. He can act at once or abandon five years' worth of preparations. He has weapons scattered throughout the city, a volunteer army who will get bored and drift away if doesn't employ them soon, and enough incriminating documents floating about to hang twelve of him. He will act."
"When you put it that way…," said Letty.
Geoff grinned at her. "Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!"
"I," said Miss Gwen grandly, "will blow up the depot."
"Ever since she fired on that boot manufactory in Calais, Miss Gwen has had difficulty controlling her incendiary impulses," commented Geoff, strolling round the table to rest his hand on the back of Letty's chair.
"That was you?" exclaimed Letty, very conscious of the hand resting next to her back. The back of her neck prickled with the knowledge that he was standing behind her, just out of her view. "I read about that in the papers! Weren't there pink petals scattered among the ashes?"
Miss Gwen looked pleased. "It is attention to detail that makes all the difference."
"No pink petals this time," said Geoff, from somewhere just above Letty's head. "Our best chance is to make it look like an accident. Otherwise they might go to ground, rather than bringing the rebellion forward."
"May I help?" asked Letty, tilting her head back and getting an excellent view of the underside of his chin. For a dark-haired man, he was quite well shaved; she couldn't find any spot he had missed.
Jane and Geoff exchanged a long look.
"I'll need you with me," said Jane. "You can entertain Lord Vaughn while I have a little chat with the marquise."
"I don't think Lord Vaughn finds me terribly entertaining."
"Well, do your best," said Miss Gwen dismissively. She looked pointedly at Geoff. "Wear a low bodice. Men are so easily diverted."
"Well," said Geoff, looking as innocent as a man who has just been caught staring down his wife's bodice can contrive to look. "That covers about everything, doesn't it? Given the lateness of the hour, I suggest we all seek our beds." He raised an eyebrow at Miss Gwen. "As the good Lord intended."
The clock on the mantel obligingly confirmed his observation by striking two.
Jane rose, her curls, which she had neglected to remove, bobbing coyly around her face. "You'll see Letty home, of course."
"Of course," replied Geoff, at his most bland.
"I'll call for the carriage," said Jane.
"And I," said Miss Gwen, sweeping out in Jane's wake, "shall seek my perch."
Alone once again in the little green parlor, Letty and Geoff exchanged a slightly sheepish look.
"She heard the bat comment, didn't she?" said Letty guiltily, rising to stand next to Geoff.
"She hears everything." Geoff's mind did not appear to be on Miss Gwen. "There is one thing we failed to address."
"Aside from Miss Gwen's sleeping habits?" said Letty, trying to keep her tone light and failing miserably.
Geoff frowned. "I didn't want to alarm you in front of the others, but it might be unwise for you to return to your own lodgings tonight."
"Emily's murderer," said Letty heavily, returning to earth with a thump. With all the talk of mimes and bats, it had been all too easy to forget how deadly the game they played actually was. "We don't know that he recognized me."
Geoff crossed his arms, looking about as malleable as a ch
unk of granite. "That is not a chance I want to take."
Feeling absurdly gratified, Letty suggested, "I could ask Jane and Miss Gwen if I could stay here, with them."
"With Miss Gwen stalking about in her nightcap? You might be scarred for life."
"Even Miss Gwen's nightcap must be preferable to the Black Tulip."
"I wouldn't wager on it." Clasping his hands behind his back, Geoff strolled to the dresser, examining a scene of Dublin Castle inexpertly painted on a lumpy piece of stoneware. "I have a better suggestion."
"What might that be?" Letty stayed where she was, rooted to the center of the room.
Geoff slowly turned from his contemplation of the domestic arts to face Letty.
"Come home," he said simply. "With me."
Chapter Twenty-three
Thursday night, wine bottle clutched in the crook of my arm, I trudged right back down Brompton Road.
I hadn't deliberately decided to revisit the site of Tuesday night's humiliation. It was pure ill luck in the form of geography. Pammy's mother lived in the Boltons. Directionally challenged as I am, the only way I knew to get there was via the South Kensington tube station, straight down Brompton Road. I suppose I could have taken a cab, but that smacked of cowardice—not to mention extravagance. A student budget doesn't run to much in the way of extras.
Passing the ill-fated Indian restaurant, I couldn't resist taking a tiny peek through the glass door. The bar area was crowded—it was just about that time of the evening—but there was no familiar tall blond braced against the bar. Not that I had expected there to be. Or that I cared. I had put that all behind me. All the flutters, all the euphoria, all the despair, all the ridiculous overanalyzing had been nothing more than a silly crush, undoubtedly brought on by boredom. As Pammy liked to keep pointing out to me, I'd been long overdue for a romantic peccadillo. Was it any surprise that my restless imagination had seized upon the first reasonably attractive man to come along?
Oh, well, I told myself soothingly. So I had behaved like an idiot. It was all over, and there was no harm done—except to my pride, and no one would ever see that but me, anyway.
Upon my return home from the Indian restaurant Tuesday night, I had plopped down at my little kitchen table in my little basement flat, and painstakingly dissected the entire course of my acquaintance with Colin. Not the bits that happened in my head, not the agonized phone staring or the gooey-eyed naming of our children, but all of the actual interactions, from our first meeting in his aunt's living room just about two weeks ago.