There was such a wealth of meaning in his voice that Mary felt, suddenly, more than a little bit wobbly and oddly unsure of herself. She looked at him uncertainly. “Is it?”
Whatever Vaughn might have said was lost, as a sound like a convulsion of the earth erupted above them. Shifting her gaze hastily up, Mary saw that it wasn’t an earthquake or a reenactment of PompeiiLady Euphemia devoted her energies purely to English scenesbut her sister’s husband, clearing his throat loudly enough to do that organ permanent damage. Similarly smeared with soot, Geoffrey looked tired, and harried, and distinctly put out at Mary’s using Vaughn’s lap as her own private chaise longue.
“Is Letty all right?” Mary asked hoarsely, heading off any comments about her undeniably compromising position.
“Yes.” Geoffrey’s harried expression briefly lightened. “She is organizing the bucket brigade.”
The stiff muscles of Mary’s face involuntarily quirked into an answering smile. “I should have known it wasn’t Lady Euphemia.”
“Letty has matters well in hand,” said Geoffrey proudly, turning to look back at the small figure of his wife, who was bustling up and down the line, making sure everyone had buckets, and understood they were to pour the water on the fire and not on one another.
Unwisely drawing attention to himself, Vaughn broke in, “Has there been any sign of”
“St. George?” said Geoffrey, blessedly misinterpreting Vaughn’s concern. “I don’t see how anyone else might have got out. He was the Black Tulip, I take it?”
Vaughn nodded in assent.
Geoffrey allowed himself a grim smile. “Lady Euphemia is convinced the bomb was set by French agents determined to stymie her patriotic pageant. She’s quite chuffed about it, despite the loss of her theatre.”
“The more reasonable assumption,” countered Vaughn, “would be an enraged poet determined to stop such an execration taking place ever again.”
Geoffrey shrugged. “She’s planning to publish the verse in a memorial volume and present it to his Majesty as a gift.”
“Good God,” shuddered Vaughn. “With allies like these, who needs the French?”
Geoffrey turned a jaundiced eye on Lord Vaughn’s seating arrangement.
“You seem to have adopted certain French manners,” he said pointedly. With the air of a man making a great concession, he added, “Given the events of the afternoon, no more need be said. But you might want to rectify the situation before anyone else notices.”
“I don’t see anything the least bit improper about it,” said Vaughn blandly, as if it were entirely normal to be having a conversation sitting cross-legged on the ground with a woman on one’s lap. He smiled down at Mary. “Do you, my dear?”
Mary narrowed her eyes impartially at both men in a universal condemnation of masculine folly. Neither of them paid the least bit of attention to her.
Geoffrey folded his arms across his chest in the classic pose of offended guardian. “
You
may not see anything wrong with it, Vaughn,” he began darkly, “but as for the rest of civilized society”
“Since,” Vaughn smoothly overrode him, “Miss Alsworthy has done me the honor to agree to be my wife.”
“Mmph,” said Geoffrey, or at least as near as Mary could tell.
“Of course,” Vaughn added, with a devilish glint in his eye that belied the studied indifference of his voice, “we
could
always elope
”
Geoffrey’s soot-smeared countenance went stonier than Lady Euphemia’s fallen columns.
“
but I think St. George’s, Hanover Square, is much nicer, don’t you?”
Geoffrey looked like he wanted to say something decidedly improper. Calling on the reserves of self-control that made him one of the War Office’s more trusted agents, he gritted out, “Have you set a date yet?”
Vaughn waved a dirty hand. “Sometime soon. You can tell your wife to start making the arrangements. Once she’s done with the buckets,” Vaughn added generously.
“Brilliant,” said Geoffrey, and turned on his heel, presumably to report the news to his wife, although from the stiff set of his back, he looked as though he might first seek out a discreet spot where he could punch something in private and pretend it was Vaughn.
Vaughn watched his future relation’s retreating back with unconcealed pleasure. “Poor Pinchingdale. He’s spent months trying to make me out to be the Black Tulip. It must kill him that our offspring will be first cousins.”
“There is one ever so slight problem with your plan,” Mary pointed out.
Vaughn looked quizzically down at her.
“What might that be?” His face darkened as he inclined his head slightly towards the smoldering theatre. “There can be no further impediment.”
The expression on his face made Mary sorry she had spoken, but she shouldered gamely on. “You seem to have forgotten that I can’t have agreed. Since you never asked me.”
Vaughn arched a sooty eyebrow. “Do I need to?” he asked mildly.
Mary had meant to return a lighthearted answer, the sort of sophisticated riposte to which she was accustomed, but the airy words wouldn’t come.
Instead, she found herself saying, with schoolgirl earnestness and a tongue that was suddenly too thick for her mouth, “Are you sure you want to?” Mary’s eyes searched his blackened face. “After”
She inclined her head feebly towards the burning building. The movement made her head ache. A cheer went up among the clustered members of the
ton
as a still-standing section of wall went tumbling down, crashing into the rubble in an explosion of smoke and ash. Mary caught the involuntarily flicker of Vaughn’s eyes in that direction, the fleeting look of pain he couldn’t quite suppress as the stones thudded down, a cairn for his wife’s grave.
Vaughn’s hand tightened around hers. “The real question is, are you? The women in my life seem to have an uncomfortable time of it.”
He might not mourn for the woman who had left him thirteen years ago, but what about the woman who had turned against the Black Tulip for him today and lost her life in doing it? He had turned back for her, in that stony trap of a building. The last word on his lips, before the theatre had exploded, had been
her
name. Whatever he might claim, Anne’s ghost was still there, an impediment in death as well as in life.
Unless someone contrived to exorcise it.
“Woman,” Mary corrected.
“Huh?”
Mary squirmed to a sitting position, ignoring the reverberations the movement sent through her battered skull. “One woman. Singular. You are not allowed any others. Any discomfort or deadly danger is reserved solely for me and me alone. I’m not sharing you. Any bit of you.”
Eyes bright, Vaughn lifted her hand to his lips.
“Bossy, aren’t you?” he murmured over her knuckles. “The vows haven’t even been said yet.”
Mary regarded him challengingly. “Haven’t they?”
“In more ways than you can imagine,” Vaughn said soberly, thinking back over the past few weeks. “Pledged first in wine, then in blood, and now in ashes. I can’t imagine a more thorough set of vows than that.”
“More thorough than your first?” asked Mary.
“You,” said Vaughn, twining his fingers through hers, “are first and last, alpha and omega. I’ve had enough of letting the past rule me.” When Mary still looked uncertain, he added, with deliberate levity, “Think how much I’m giving up for you. Loose women, French spies
”
“Ha!’ exclaimed Mary. “What about all
I’m
giving up for you? Adoring suitors, sonnets to my elbows
”
“I can think of better things to pay tribute to,” said Vaughn, and did.
It was unclear whose lips were sootier, but neither seemed to mind. The taste of blood and ashes only lent urgency to their kiss, a reminder of all they had nearly lost. With a happy disregard for his bad shoulder and assorted other aches and pains, Vaughn wrapped his arms around Mary and kissed her so thoroughly that most of the grime surrounding his lips transferred itself from his face to hers, like a misplaced beard.
“What was that about sacrifice?” he asked blandly, once he had got his voice back.
Mary blinked. “I don’t remember,” she said, “but tell me again.”
Vaughn was more than happy to oblige.
They parted to an arm’s length, smiling foolishly at each other. Vaughn noted that Mary’s hair was filmed with ash, matted and tangled into a coiffure that wouldn’t have looked amiss on one of Macbeth’s witches. Despite his best efforts, her bare arms and neck had been scraped by flying bits of debris, and the less said about the remains of her royal robes, the better. Dried blood streaked the left side of her face, and the soot had lent her a rather remarkable mustache.
He had never seen anything lovelier.
A bath, however, would not be amiss. Preferably for both of them. At the same time.
“The devil,” said Vaughn. “I’ve left my carriage in Westminster. We’ll have to prevail upon your sister to take us back.”
“Once she’s finished with her buckets, you mean,” said Mary, struggling to her feet, and holding out a hand to Vaughn.
He took it without the sarcastic commentary Mary had half-expected, silently accepting her help and pulling heavily on her arm as he rose. She didn’t like the sallow look of his skin beneath the soot on his face, or the stickiness matting his shirtfront.
“At least we don’t have to worry about the Black Tulip trying to kill you anymore,” she said, following her own private train of thought, as they started slowly and more than a little unsteadily towards Letty and Geoff.
“No,” said Vaughn thoughtfully. “Only your brother-in-law. Who will, if I marry you, be my brother, too. A terrifying thought. More terrifying for him than for me, I imagine.”
Occupied with other matters, Mary brushed Vaughn’s badinage aside. “Do you think he really was the son of Prince Charles Edward?”
“It doesn’t matter whether he was or not,” said Vaughn matter-of-factly. “The Act of Succession bars that entire line from the throne.”
Shading her eyes from the glare, Mary squinted at the collapse of Lady Euphemia’s theatre, a monument to the ruins of more than one failed ambition. Whether he might have been king or not, his grave was the same. “I suppose it’s all immaterial now.”
“Much as he is,” commented Vaughn. “He can congregate on a cloud with his Stuart ancestors and commiserate on how much they were misused. They were an ill-fated line. James I had the Gunpowder Plot, Charles I died on the scaffold, Charles II died childless”
“If we don’t get you back to London soon,” Mary broke into his catalogue of royal woes, “the same may be said about you. I’m sure you ripped your wound back open, carrying me.”
Vaughn, feeling a little more light-headed than he would have liked to admit, looked debonairly down his nose at her. “Taking care of your investment, are you?”
“Not as well as I ought,” said Mary, catching his arm as he wobbled. “You’ve gotten rather battered over the past few days.”
“Worth every wound,” said Vaughn gallantly, but he stumbled as he said it.
As she steadied him, Mary’s magpie eye was caught by something glinting in the grass. It glittered too nicely to be one of the Lady Euphemia’s pasteboard creations. Mary’s own armlets had been lost somewhere long since, and her gold trim was blackened by smoke. But whatever it was that lay fallen in the grass still gleamed true gold.
“What do you think that is?” she asked, pointing.
Holding on to her arm for balance, Vaughn leaned over to scoop it up. “Scrounging for pocket change?” he said lazily as he clapped it into her palm. “I assure you, I’ll make you a better allowance than that.”
Holding the piece in the air so that the red light of the flames reflected off its surface like a sunset, Mary filed away the promise of an allowance for later.
“Don’t you recognize it?” she asked, turning the gold piece slowly this way and that for Vaughn to see.
On one side was a blasted oak, with new shoots beginning to grow out of the burnt and broken trunk. On the other, a warrior drove a spear into the unsuspecting hide of a blurry blob at his feet. There was a hole bored into the top, by means of which someone might attach it to a chain. The lettering around the edge of the medal read, SPES TAMEN EST UNA.
“‘There is still one hope,’” Mary translated, a line forming between her brows. “That’s what St. George said it meant when he showed it to me.” Holding the coin gingerly between two fingers, she looked anxiously at Vaughn. “Do you think
?”
Vaughn plucked the medallion out of her fingers and tucked it safely away in his waistcoat pocket.
“Of course not,” he said, with a surreptitious glance at the smoldering rubble. “It would have been impossible.”
“Impossible,” Mary echoed, squinting at the flames. “Undoubtedly.”
