Vaughn’s brows drew together. “I never thought of you as anyone’s inferior. Least of all mine.”
“Ha!” There was something very satisfying about the short syllable. Mary was so pleased with it that she repeated it. “Would you treat an equal like alike a common doxy?” She stumbled over the vulgar term, but there was no point in mincing words now. How else was there to describe it? He had used her that night in the Chinese chamber as he would any other female who came conveniently to hand, so long as that female was a pretty one. “Good enough to kiss, but never good enough to marry,” she finished bitterly.
Vaughn looked at her in surprise, his brows drawing together over his nose. “That isn’t it.”
“No?” Breathing deeply through her nose, Mary crossed her arms across her chest. She supposed that hadn’t been it for Lord Falconstone or Martin Frobisher or any of the other men who wrote her sonnets and tried to wheedle her out onto to balconies, but somehow lost all their eloquence when it came to the four simple words that made the difference between reputable and ruined. “Then how else would you describe it? It’s all simple enough. The great Lord Vaughn wouldn’t deign to sully his bloodlines with a mere miss. You need the daughter of an earl, at least.”
The shadow of the tree branches above moved darkly across Vaughn’s face. “Enough,” he said sharply, turning away.
“Why?” Mary yanked on his arm, oblivious to the people milling around them, to the bands still playing on the parade ground, to the King trotting up and down along the row of his recruits. The Black Tulip could have been turning handsprings behind them and she would never have noticed. “Why flinch at it? It’s your own choice. Are you too much of a coward to own it?”
“Choice?”
Vaughn took a step back, the head of his cane catching the sunlight, making the arched neck of the silver snake glow like the idol of a pagan cult. “I suppose you could call it that. I chose to marry the daughter of an earl, just as you advise. I made that choice long ago, and I’ve been paying for it ever since.”
That, as far as Mary was concerned, was so much blether.
Mary would have said as much, but Vaughn’s curt voice went relentlessly on, like the lash of a whip. “I made a host of other choices, too. I chose to run away. I chose to ignore what was inconvenient. I chose pleasure over substance. I chose and chose and chose. After a time, Miss Alsworthy, do you know what happens? You run out of choices. There aren’t any left. You’re pinned in a web of your own devising.”
“I don’t believe that,” Mary shot back before he could catch his breath. “You can’t hide behind inclination by calling it compulsion. If you truly wanted matters otherwise, you could make them so. Why can’t you just admit it? It’s just that you don’t want me.”
“I don’t, do I?” Vaughn rolled the head of his cane beneath his fingers. “How terribly kind of you to inform me of that. Otherwise, I might have continued to exist under the exceedingly uncomfortable delusion that I did.”
Mary fought her way out of the tangled web of syntax. “I didn’t mean like that,” she countered. After all, he was male; they wanted as easily as they breathed. Hence the convenient construction of balconies off so many ballrooms.
Vaughn’s fingers tightened on the head of his cane. “Nor did I,” he said.
For a long moment, he held her gaze without speaking, simply letting the impact of his words sink in, before adding rapidly, as though he wished to get it over with as quickly as possible, “I won’t deny that you’re beautiful. No mirror could tell you otherwise. But there are beautiful women for the buying in any brothel in London. Oh yes, and the ballrooms, too, if one has the proper price. It wasn’t your appearance that caught me. It was the way you put me down in the gallery at Sibley Court.” Vaughn’s lips curved in a reminiscent smile. “And the way you tried to bargain with me after.”
“
Successfully
bargained,” Mary corrected.
“That,” replied Lord Vaughn, “is exactly what I mean. Has anyone ever told you that you haggle divinely? That the simple beauty of your self-interest is enough to bring a man to his knees?”
Mary couldn’t in honesty say that anyone had.
Vaughn’s eyes were as hard and bright as silver coins. “Those are the reasons I want you. I want you for your cunning mind and your hard heart, for your indomitable spirit and your scheming soul, for they’re more honest by far than any of the so-called virtues.”
“The truest poetry is the most feigning?” Mary quoted back his own words to him.
“And the most feigning is the most true. Now tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I’m lying. Tell me what I really want.”
“I can’t.” Mary waited just long enough for Vaughn’s silver eyes to light with triumph, before adding, “Because you didn’t pause long enough to give me a chance.”
Reaching for her as though to embrace her, Vaughn stopped himself just in time. His hands closing over her upper arms, he shook her lightly instead. “Do you know what it’s been these past few weeks to constantly see you and know I couldn’t have you?”
“It’s no more than I’ve had to bear,” Mary shot back, and only realized too late just how she had exposed herself. The look of satisfaction on Vaughn’s face was all that was needed to show her that she had said too much. Seeking to distract him, she blustered, “You’re just trying to evade my question, aren’t you? If you had the choice”
Vaughn’s hands tightened on her shoulders. “Choice, again, is it? Let me assure you, once and for all. If I had my choice, there would be no need for any of this. If I had my choice, you would be buying your bloody bridal clothes. If I had
my
choice, Monday night would never have ended with a kiss.”
“Bridal clothes?” echoed Mary.
“I would crown you with coronets and deck you with ancestral jewels.
If
I had my choice. But I don’t.” Vaughn’s grip loosened so suddenly that Mary stumbled back against the tree. His face was hard and ugly in the unforgiving noon light. “I don’t have that right.”
Mary had to swallow hard before she could speak. Her throat was dry, and her tongue felt too thick for her mouth. “Why not?”
She had her answer. But not from Vaughn. Before he had time to answer, a shadow fell across the space between them.
“Because,” said the newcomer, twining her arm possessively through Vaughn’s, “he already has a wife.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Phi: Look where she comes again, credit thy Eyes, Which did persuade thee that they saw her dead.
Er: You cannot think, Alcander, there be Ghosts. No, give me your hand, and prove mine flesh and blood.
Aphra Behn,
The Forc’d Marriage
T
he newcomer planted herself firmly in the space by Lord Vaughn’s side. She came no higher than his shoulder, her blond curls bobbing against the black superfine of his coat like boats on a midnight sea. The broad-brimmed bonnet she wore cast a deep shadow across her face, leaving her as little more than a walking fashion doll, in a walking dress of fine burgundy wool, far more suited for the crisp autumn air than Mary’s twice-turned muslin. Her kid gloves had been dyed to match her dress. The deep burgundy looked like streaks of blood against Vaughn’s arm.
Or maybe it was merely that Mary’s thoughts were bloody. Who was this ridiculous interloper? Mary waited for Vaughn to make short work of her with one of his cutting remarks, but Vaughn, for a wonder, said nothing at all. He appeared to be in the grip of an emotion too strong for words.
Instead, the bonnet brim lifted and fell as the lady in red raked Mary up and down with a distinctly appraising stare.
“I am Lady Vaughn,” she announced. “And you are?”
“You,” said Mary flatly, feeling her command of the English language escape her. “Are Lady Vaughn.”
There must be other Lady Vaughns. Cousins, perhaps. Wives of minor peers or cadet branches of the family, preferably distinguished by alternate spellings, like Vaughan or Voyan or other Elizabethan execrations.
“Yes, that’s right,” said the little blond woman, in the tone of one speaking to the mentally impaired. “I’m so delighted to see that my husband has been entertaining you in my absence.”
Her “husband” looked as though he would rather be entertaining himself with a good, hearty throttling. His hands flexed around the head of his cane hard enough to bend the silver, as he breathed heavily through his nose, in the manner of dragons and other fire-breathing creatures.
But he didn’t say anything to deny it. Not a word.
“Haven’t you anything to say?” Mary demanded. “Anything at all?”
The self-professed Lady Vaughn smiled with sickening sweetness beneath her broad-brimmed bonnet. “Knowing Sebastian, he’s probably said quite enough already, haven’t you, Sebastian? He never could seem to help himself. You really must forgive him, Missoh dear. I’m afraid I still don’t know who you are.”
And didn’t much care, if her tone was anything to go by. Mary might as well have been a weed in the garden, a misplaced chair in the morning room, a broken biscuit on the tea tray.
I married an earl’s daughter,
Vaughn had said, not ten minutes ago. The faded blonde in front of her held herself with the careless imperiousness of one born to the peerage. It wasn’t, as Mary well knew, the sort of demeanor that could be learned, no matter how hard one tried to imitate it.
But Lady Vaughn, the former Lady Anne Standish, youngest daughter of an earl, was dead. Everyone knew that.
Mary looked frantically at Vaughn, but there was no surprise on his face, no indignation, no denial. Just a venomous, killing ragethe rage of a cornered creature, knowing himself caught, with no recourse but to sting.
Mary’s stomach twisted.
“You are?” prompted the alarmingly corporeal Lady Vaughn.
“No one who need concern you,” Mary said in a brittle voice. “Isn’t that right, my lord? I was nothing more than this month’s entertainment.”
Lady Vaughn’s gloved fingers left dents in Vaughn’s sleeve. “Men will have their little amusements.”
“No one would know better than you, would they, Anne?”
Lord Vaughn spoke at last, but the words weren’t anything like what Mary had hoped to hear. The intimacy of that single word, that “Anne,” hit Mary like an arrow to the gut, ripping through any last hope she might have had of its all being a hoax, a mistake, anything but what it was.
Her back arrow straight, Mary looked up over the blonde’s bonnet, straight at Vaughn. “It’s true, isn’t it? You are married. To her.”
Vaughn’s eyes shifted briefly downwards to the bonneted head. “Such as it is.”
Pain sharpened Mary’s diction, lending her words an icy edge. “There isn’t much room for doubt. Either you are or you aren’t. It’s as simple as that.”
“Just what I’ve been telling him,” chimed in Lady Vaughn. “Only with Sebastian, nothing is ever simple, is it, my dear? He delights in complication.”
“Not this complication,” clipped out Lord Vaughn.
Mary looked from one to the other, Lady Vaughn smug, Lord Vaughn looking daggers, and suddenly felt like the servant wench in a French farce, a side character used by the author to create complications in the midst of the main action. The operative word being “used,” as Vaughn had used her. What for, she wasn’t entirely sure, but it seemed to have something to do with the battle of wills being played out around her, between Lord and Lady Vaughn, earl and countess, linked by blood, by birth, by marriage bonds, leaving no place at all for her. Even in the richness of their attire, they were a match for each other.
It would make a brilliant woodcut, thought Mary with the flippancy of despair. Something by Gillray, clever and cruel. He could call it
The Wife’s Return
.
“When you told me I was to be a pawn,” said Mary, in a hard little voice, “I hadn’t realized that this was to be the game.”
“It wasn’t,” said Lord Vaughn tersely. “Believe me.”
Mary smiled sweetly up at him. “I would sooner place faith in Signor Machiavelli. At least he was an honest rogue. Good day, Lord Vaughn.
Lady
Vaughn.” Taking up her sunshade, she shook it ostentatiously open, using it as a barrier between them. “I shan’t intrude upon you any longer. Good day.”
She didn’t look back.
Behind her, she could hear Lord Vaughn’s voice, calling her name. Mary ignored it.
She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, heel to toe. Step after step she walked, head held high, looking neither left nor right, consciously deaf to the sounds of a minor scuffle between Vaughn and Vaughn’s wife. Oh, but that voice was hard to blot out, an insistent buzz at the back of her ears, droning the word “wife” over and over, like a worm boring its way into her brain.
A wife. Mary’s legs carried her forwards without destination through the fringes of the crowd, past the gaily covered booths that had done a brisk business earlier in the day selling pies and gingerbread and commemorative programs. This was one day she didn’t want to commemorate. If she could, she would wrap it up in a little ball, along with the entire past month, wadded up like last month’s washing, and fling it all into the Thames, to be drowned and forgotten.
