Lauren Willig (18 page)

 

 

There were times when just the thought of crashing china was all that kept her from running screaming down the hallways of Pinchingdale House. The idea of making a scene, causing a fuss, cracking all the codes that had held her all these years, watching her sister’s and brother-in-law’s faces as they came running in…

 

 

Followed by the inevitable clucking. The sideways glances, the concerned conferences, the smothering solicitude.

 

 

The Dresden shepherdess was safe on her perch.

 

 

At least now she had her little agreement with Vaughn to distract her. Whatever else Vaughn’s faults might be, he worked excellently well as a diversion. As long as she took care to remember that a diversion was all he was. As Beatrice had said of the Prince in
Much Ado About Nothing
, he was too costly for daily use.

 

 

Mary reached back to untie the ribbon that held a sapphire cross in place against her neck. The sapphires were glass, of course, like all of her jewelry. An impressive gleam on the outside; worthless within.

 

 

As Mary let the black velvet slide into a small heap on her bedside table, a knock sounded tentatively against the door.

 

 

Servants never knocked, even such ill-trained ones as her sister employed.

 

 

Mary stiffened, fighting a craven desire to slip out through the dressing room and keep going.

 

 

“Mary?” her sister’s voice called. It couldn’t be anyone but her sister. No one else in the household called her by her first name. Even her brother-in-law had retreated into a respectful Miss Alsworthy, as though by that belated formality he could eradicate their embarrassing past.

 

 

Mary retreated hastily to her dressing table, sliding onto the low bench with its embroidered cover. Pitching her voice low, she called out, “Not now, Letty. I’m bathing.”

 

 

The door cracked open, and a gingery head of hair poked through. It was followed by Letty, insufferably tidy in a green wool dress that brought out all of her freckles. “No, you’re not,” she said. “The water hasn’t been heated yet.”

 

 

The maid had gone straight to Letty, then. Ah, well. It was her own fault for being so careless as to neglect to follow up her request with a sixpence. A little bribery always worked wonders.

 

 

Without turning from the dressing table, Mary began taking the pins from her hair, letting the long, dark mass unroll down her back, section by section. “But I will be.”

 

 

Letty rolled her eyes in the mirror. “Don’t worry. I’ll leave when the water arrives. I just wanted to talk to you about—”

 

 

“Lord Vaughn,” Mary finished for her. Lifting her brush, she held it suspended, waiting. Her eyes fixed on her sister’s in the mirror. Letty’s eyes, usually as easy to read as a child’s primer and just as wholesome, shifted uneasily away.

 

 

Letty shrugged uncomfortably. “Well, yes. It’s just that…”

 

 

“You don’t like him,” said Mary flatly.

 

 

Letty flung up her hands. “I am capable of finishing my own sentences, you know.”

 

 

Mary didn’t bother to respond. She simply set the bristles of the brush against her hair, drawing it deliberately through the shining length. One stroke…another…

 

 

In the mirror, Letty made a face of annoyance. “It’s very hard to carry on a conversation by oneself,” she said.

 

 

Mary waited, drawing the brush downwards in long, languid strokes, the only sound in the room the swish of the bristles against her hair. If Letty was set on lecturing, lecture she would, whether she received any encouragement or not.

 

 

Letty shook her head at her in the mirror. “Oh, Mary…”

 

 

There it was again. That “Mary.” That long-suffering, long-drawn-out rendition of her name that made her nails sharpen into claws. When had that begun? Five years ago? Six? Before that, Letty had been such a complaisant child, so easy to entertain with a bit of ribbon or an old doll, beaming all over her freckled face at the chance to play dress-up in her sister’s clothes and have her hair dressed like a big girl’s.

 

 

That had been a very long time ago.

 

 

Letty drew herself up to her full height, just a shade over five feet, her bosom puffing out like a pigeon’s. “I need to talk to you about Vaughn.”

 

 

“Do you?” Mary’s voice dripped acid.

 

 

Letty frowned at Mary in the mirror. “He’s…not trustworthy.”

 

 

“Is that all?” Mary laughed derisively. “I’ve known that for ages. It’s hardly news.”

 

 

Letty plunked both her hands on her hips. “Mary, you must see—”

 

 

Dropping the brush, Mary swung around on the bench. “I don’t see that I
must
see anything. Must I?”

 

 

Letty shook her head. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just…”

 

 

“What? That you’re older and wiser?”

 

 

Letty had the grace to flush, but she soldiered stubbornly on. “When I was in Ireland,” she blurted out, “Vaughn was there, too.”

 

 

“A hanging offense, to be sure,” Mary drawled, in her very best imitation of Vaughn.

 

 

The furrows in Letty’s brow dug a little deeper, but she didn’t allow herself to be deterred. “There was a woman…”

 

 

“With Vaughn, I imagine there would be,” replied Mary thoughtfully, abandoning the drawl. “He’s that sort of a man.”

 

 

“You almost sound as though you admire him for it.”

 

 

“I do,” said Mary coolly, and was surprised to realize she meant it. He was a man who knew what he wanted and took it. She had had enough of poets and moralists, the sort who sighed and yearned and never had the backbone to act. It had taken months to coax, wheedle, and maneuver Geoffrey into taking the final steps towards elopement, and even then he had done so with a heavy conscience and an inauspicious eye. A conscience, Mary decided, was a damnably unattractive trait in a man.

 

 

Letty was determined to make her see sense. “Vaughn won’t…that is, he isn’t…”

 

 

Mary’s lips twisted into a crooked smile. “The marrying kind? He’s never made any misrepresentations on that score.”

 

 

“You don’t want to be compromised. Or worse.” Letty bit down on the last two words, her teeth digging into her lower lip as though she feared she had already said too much.

 

 

Mary’s eyes narrowed. “Why not? It works remarkably well for some.”

 

 

Letty backed up a step, stumbling over the hem of her own skirt. “That’s not fair,” she protested.

 

 

“But true,” countered Mary pleasantly. Flexing her hand, Mary languidly examined the perfect curve of her fingernails. “After all,
you
were compromised. And everything you do is always right. Ergo…”

 

 

Letty shoved her hair haphazardly behind her ears. “It wasn’t like that. You know I never meant any of this to happen. Mary…”

 

 

Watching Letty’s lips move, her hands twisted in the folds of her skirt, Mary felt a surge of impatient pity for her little sister. If only Letty wasn’t so damnably earnest. She could have her Geoffrey and good riddance to him. Just so long as she stopped talking about it.

 

 

“This woman Vaughn was with,” Mary interrupted abruptly. “Was her name Teresa?”

 

 

“What?” Caught midsentence, Letty blinked several times at the abrupt change of subject.

 

 

“Her name,” Mary repeated, as though to a very slow child. “What was it?”

 

 

“I don’t remember her Christian name,” Letty said distractedly. “I’m not sure I even heard it. I knew her only as the Marquise de Montval. That is, I knew
of
her. I didn’t actually know her. Not as such.”

 

 

“French?” Mary tucked that bit of information away for future use. The name meant nothing to her, but it might be of use in conversation with Vaughn.

 

 

“No, English. At least, she
was
English.” Letty raked her hair back from her face with both hands. “But that’s not the point. The thing I wanted to tell you—that is, the Marquise de Montval—she—”

 

 

“So she married a Frenchman, then.” Teresa wasn’t exactly the most common name for an Englishwoman. It certainly wasn’t as popular as Charlotte or Caroline or even Mary, but it wasn’t unknown. They could be one and the same.

 

 

“Ye-es, but—” Letty stumbled to a halt, scuffing one sensible shoe against the pastel flowers of the Axminster carpet.

 

 

Mary raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Surely a married woman shouldn’t be so miss-ish? I assure you, I shan’t swoon at the mention of a mistress. I have heard of such things, you know, despite my spinster state. Are you trying to tell me that she and Vaughn were lovers?”

 

 

Letty’s honest face was a study in consternation. “I wish that were all, really, I do. But the Marquise—”

 

 

Letty broke off as a scuffling noise at the door attracted her attention. Looking almost relieved, she called, “Yes?”

 

 

Around the corner of the door appeared an undersized figure in a neat gray dress and a white cap, the same maid Mary had neglected to bribe. She was holding out a heavy sheet of cream-colored paper, the fine stationery an incongruous contrast against her work-reddened hand. On the reverse of the paper, Mary’s name had been scrawled in a bold, black hand. There was no direction, no frank, just
Miss Mary Alsworthy
in thick black ink. The bottom of the
y
snaked back under the whole like a sea serpent twining around a hapless ship.

 

 

“This just came for you, miss,” the maid murmured, lowering her eyes under Mary’s unblinking stare. “Under the door, like.”

 

 

Mary and Letty both moved forwards at the same time. There were some advantages to having longer legs. Mary crossed the room and plucked the letter out of the maid’s hands before Letty could get to it.

 

 

“I believe this is meant to be mine,” she said, looking pointedly at her sister’s outstretched hand.

 

 

The pads of her fingers tingled with anticipation against the textured surface of the paper. Through the thick stationery, it was impossible to see what was written within. The hand was an unfamiliar one.

 

 

To the maid, Mary added, “You may go.”

 

 

She would have liked to have said the same to her sister, but she doubted it would have any effect. The maid looked to Letty for confirmation. Letty motioned for the maid to stay.

 

 

“Under the door?” Letty asked, wrinkling her nose. “What do you mean, Agnes?”

 

 

As Letty quizzed the maid, Mary smuggled her prize to the far side of the room, standing beneath the shelter of the curved fall of the drapes as she cracked the black wax that sealed the paper shut. There had been a signet of some sort pressed to the wax, but the die had slipped as it was applied, smudging the imprint and rendering it unrecognizable. She could make out a snippet of a curve at the bottom. It might have been anything from the bottom of St. George’s shield to one of the serpents of which Vaughn was so fond. Or the ornamental sweep at the bottom of a large
R
, for Rathbone. Did revolutionaries patronize such expensive stationers?

 

 

Knowing that her time was limited, Mary hastily cracked the seal, impatiently brushing aside the broken bits of dried wax that scattered across her skirt. The missive was only one page, seeming thicker only due to the quality of the paper. And that one page contained only three words, scrawled dead across the center of the page, between the two lines made by the folds.

 

 

Vauxhall. Tomorrow. Midnight.

 

 

And that was all. There was no salutation, no signature, no explanation, only that abrupt summons—for summons it must be. But from whom? And why? She doubted St. George would be capable of couching a simple request in anything less than a paragraph. Rathbone, perhaps. But Vauxhall, pleasure palace of the idle rich, hunting ground for the amorous, all flimsy fantasy and decaying decadence hardly seemed to be Rathbone’s métier.

 

 

Vaughn, on the other hand…Oh, yes, Vaughn was a creature of Vauxhall if ever there was one. And the peremptory nature of the summons smacked of his oratorical style. Vaughn lifted a finger and the rest of the world obeyed. Or so he liked to think. It was all of a piece with the way he had invited her to the park the following afternoon. Anticipation tingled through her like heady wine thinking of Vauxhall, with its dark walks and even shadier inhabitants, dusted over with fireworks that dazzled rather than illuminated.

 

 

Mary snuck a sideways glance towards her sister, still deep in conversation with the maid, who was spinning a complicated tale of under-footmen and misplaced correspondence. Letty would be sure to disapprove.

 

 

Letty would not have to be told.

 

 

She might even, Mary thought, her head spinning with possibilities, be able to do away with the indifferent chaperonage of Aunt Imogen. At Vauxhall, hooded, masked, who was there to recognize her and go tattling back to society? She could be free for a few precious hours.

 

 

But why hadn’t Vaughn mentioned anything a mere hour ago, when he had all but ordered her to the park with him? And why fail to sign the note? He might be arrogant enough—no, Mary corrected herself, he
was
arrogant enough—to assume that he would need no introduction, but she would have expected at least a V, sprawled at the bottom of the page in seigneurial splendor.