The Masque of the Black Tulip (28 page)

There was just one slight problem. Miles didn't appear.

Miles didn't appear Saturday, and he didn't appear Sunday, and he didn't appear Monday, even though Henrietta cleverly spent the entire day out shopping, on the grounds that the moment she happened to be out was the moment he would choose to call. He didn't.

"Are you sure no one called?" Henrietta asked Winthrop, just a little shrilly. It had, after all, been three days at that point. "Perhaps someone could have come up to the door and left again without your seeing? Are you quite sure?"

Winthrop was quite sure.

By Wednesday, there was only one possible solution. Miles had to be ill. In fact, he had better be very, very ill. Henrietta delegated her maid, Annie, who was niece to Miles's Mrs. Migworth, to discover the state of affairs chez Dorrington. Annie, face flushed from running, returned to report that Mr. Dorrington was quite well, in fine form, in fact. Mr. Downey, Annie added, blushing, was also recovering nicely, and looked to be about his duties within the week.

Henrietta suspected that Annie was sweet on Downey. She considered delivering a pithy warning on the perfidy of men, but didn't want to disillusion Annie. Annie would find out on her own soon enough, when Downey kissed her as though he never wanted to let her out of his arms, and then didn't bloody call for five blasted days, while she sat there in emotional agony waiting for a knock on the door that never came and her heart slowly turned to a leaden lump of bleak despair within her chest. Or something like that.

"He may have just been busy," suggested Charlotte.

"He wasn't good enough for you," pronounced Penelope.

"Bleargh," said Henrietta.

Clearly, the kiss had meant far less to him than it had to her. Henrietta could accept that (she told herself, gritting her teeth). But to kiss her and then disappear for an entire week? Did she mean that little to him after eighteen years? One would think that he owed her some sort of explanation, even if it was only one of those hideous speeches that began with "You are a lovely person," and inevitably ended with "Someday, you'll find someone who really loves you." At least that would show that he held her in enough regard to take the time to crush her heart in person. But, no, he couldn't even bother to do that. Even a note would have been preferable.

"Oh, there Miles is!" exclaimed Amy, pointing out the window. A smart curricle and four drew into the little circle of light before the door. As Henrietta watched, Miles handed the reins down to a groom and swung easily off the box. "I'll just go tell Richard. Would you mind playing hostess for a moment?"

Assuming that the answer would be positive—and why, after all, should Amy assume otherwise?—Amy darted off before Henrietta could answer.

The long delay in Croydon had provided Henrietta ample time to resolve how she would behave upon seeing Miles. Cool and distant, Henrietta reminded herself as she rose slowly from the settee. Icy elegance. Impenetrable calm.

She was just making her cool, icy, and dignified way across the threshold of the drawing room, when Miles bounded energetically through the front door.

He saw her, and checked mid-stride. "Uh; Hen," he said, with the trapped look of a fox run to earth. "Hello."

Cool and distant ceased to be a possibility.

Henrietta marched up to Miles and looked him dangerously in the eye. "Do you have something you would like to say to me?"

"Your hair looks nice today?" Miles ventured.

Henrietta's lips clamped together. "That," she snapped, "was not the right answer."

Turning on her heel, she stalked off.

Miles clamped down on the urge to go after her. If he did that, he would defeat the entire purpose of this past week's exercise in absence. At first, he had meant to go see Henrietta. But Downey had been feverish on Saturday, which provided an excellent excuse for inaction. By Sunday, Downey's temperature was down and there was no impediment in the way of Miles's trotting straight over to Uppington House— except that he couldn't figure out what to say. The "You're a lovely person and someday you'll find someone who really loves you" speech just wouldn't work for Henrietta. He thought of sending a note, but what would it say? "Unavoidably detained; sorry about that kiss. Miles." Somehow, he didn't see that being awfully well received, either.

The more he had stayed away, the better an idea it had seemed. After all, if he didn't encounter Henrietta, there was no danger of his libido betraying his brain and engaging in a repeat of Friday night's indiscretion. One kiss was bad enough, but two? He really couldn't explain away two. Hell, he couldn't even explain away the one, which brought him back to his original problem of not knowing what to say to Henrietta.

He knew he should have stayed in London.

"What the devil did you say to Henrietta?" Richard strode into the front hall, absently rubbing his arm. "She nearly knocked me over on the garden path."

"Something about her hair," Miles hedged.

Richard shrugged. The ways of little sisters were indeed a mystery no grown man could hope to plumb. "How about a glass of claret and something to eat, while you tell me the news from London?"

"Excellent idea," said Miles with relief, matching his stride to his friend's as they moved in the direction of the dining room. A glass of wine, some sustenance, and a soothing conversation about homicidal French agents. It was exactly what he needed to keep his mind off the far more alarming topic of a certain irate female.

Thwack

Both men started at the sound of stone crashing against stone. It had come from the direction of the garden.

Richard frowned at Miles. "What in the blazes did you say about her hair?"

"Owwwwww…"

Henrietta clutched her sore shoulder and glowered at the shattered bust of Achilles. Pieces of his helmet littered the garden path, his nose was wedged up against a hedge, and one large, staring eye had rolled under a rosebush. The pillar on which he had perched lay on its side, having dragged half a rosebush down with it. And just who had decided the edge of the rose garden would be a good place to put a top-heavy bust? Oh, goodness, that hurt. She supposed it could have been worse. It could have fallen on her foot.

Henrietta dropped down on a nearby bench before she could cause more devastation.

"I am a walking disaster," she muttered.

She really hadn't handled that very well, had she? When she saw Miles, she was going to put him in his place by treating him with icy dignity, not storm out like a demented two-year-old on a rampage. Like a destructive two-year-old on a rampage, she amended, glancing at the remains of the bust. She would have to apologize to Richard for the decimation of his garden ornament tomorrow.

He did deserve it, though, no one could deny that. Miles, that was, not Achilles. Of course, if there were a bust of Cupid anywhere within reach, Henrietta might be tempted to do violence to it. It really didn't seem quite fair of Cupid—or Destiny, or Fate, or whoever was in charge of these sorts of things—to place love blissfully, gloriously within her reach and then yank it away, jeering, "Ha, ha, thought you had a chance, did you?"

Henrietta yanked a leaf off a neighboring bush and started to shred it.

Blaming Cupid didn't solve anything. Miles owed her an explanation. Not because he had kissed her—with two older brothers, Henrietta had grown up knowing quite well that a kiss was seldom a promise— but because they were, or at least they had been, friends. Friends didn't kiss friends and then go off for seven days. Friends didn't kiss friends and then try to brush them off with weak compliments. Your hair looks nice today? Ha! Did he really think he could placate her with that?

"What sort of a ninny does he think I am?" Henrietta grumbled to the quiet night air.

Only the crickets answered, with sympathetic clicking noises.

Henrietta didn't have the heart to tell them it was a rhetorical question.

Around her, the garden was dark and still, silent as only the country could be. The scent of the lavender and hyssop that bordered the path hung heavy in the air, warring with the heady aroma of the roses that had been trained over a trellis to form an arch above. Henrietta sat there for a very long time, shredding leaves and brooding, while the marble seat grew cold and clammy under her twill skirt.

She was in the midst of a long and complicated conversation in her head with Miles, and was just up to the point where Miles confessed that he had only stayed away because he was paralyzed with fear by the strength of his own emotions for her (this followed the equally long and complicated conversation in which Miles caddishly declared that kisses were commonplace, and Henrietta blistered his ears with a scathing tirade rivaled in length and eloquence only by a Ciceronian oration), when she heard the sound of a foot stepping on a fallen twig just outside her little bower.

Right. Henrietta sat up straighter on her little bench. If that was Miles come to find her, she was going to tell him exactly what he could do with his meaningless compliments and equally meaningless kisses.

A second footfall followed the first, and a dark shadow paused at the opening of the path.

It was not Miles.

Henrietta instinctively shrank back into her bower as a hooded figure hovered in front of the trellis, a tart rejoinder frozen unuttered on her lips. In profile, the overhang of the hood seemed to encase only empty air; beneath the long robe that fell straight to the ground, sleeves tucked one into the other, there was nothing to suggest a human form. The apparition's coarse woolen robe swept the stone path with a low swishing noise, as the hooded figure swiveled in the direction of the house.

Henrietta's hands clenched around the marble seat of the bench, little goose prickles running up her arm. In the darkness, the breeze that had seemed so pleasant before turned chill, the clammy chill of the grave.

Swish, brush. Swish, brush.

Slowly, deliberately, the dark figure paced up the path towards the house, its tasseled belt swinging with each measured movement. It glided smoothly up the three shallow steps to the veranda, pausing once again before the French doors to take stock of the terrain, before lifting one robed arm to the door handle. Quietly, seamlessly, the hooded figure slid into the empty drawing room, drawing the door soundlessly shut behind.

Henrietta sat frozen on her bench, eyes fixed on empty veranda.

The Phantom Monk of Don well Abbey had just stolen into her brother's house.

* * *

"Is there really a Phantom Monk of Donwell Abbey?"

The vicar grinned at me as he dumped a very unclerical portion of gin into his glass. "Has someone been bending your ear with that old yarn?"

I waved a hand in the direction of Colin Selwick, who stood several little groups of people away in the heavily Victorian drawing room of Donwell Abbey, eyes glazing over under the conversational onslaught of Joan Plowden-Plugge. He must have sensed he was being talked about, because his head turned in our direction, and he lifted his wine glass in an infinitesimal salute.

I looked hastily away.

The vicar, bless him, seemed not to notice. He was on his second drink ("Hazard rations, my dear," he had informed me, as he went for the second), and over the past twenty minutes we had become great chums. Joan had pounced the moment I entered the room. "You'll want to talk to the vicar," she announced with a tug on the arm, towing me in the direction of the drinks table. With me safely deposited, she had marched back off to the doorway to reclaim her spoil of war, i.e., Colin.

I didn't mind terribly much. For one thing, there was a certain amusement in watching an ambushed Colin glance distractedly around the room for means of escape. For another, the vicar was the most delightfully un-vicar-like vicar I had ever met.

Admittedly, I hadn't encountered a wide range, but anyone raised on a steady diet of British literature has a pretty good idea of what a village vicar is supposed to be like. I had expected someone spare and white-haired, with pale veined hands, and a saintly aspect. The sort of vicar who putters through old village records, writes long treatises on the local flora and fauna, and spends his spare time in gentle labor in his garden, contemplating God's purpose as revealed through His creation.

Instead, I found myself shaking hands with a rangy man in his late thirties, with a crooked nose and equally crooked smile. He had, he explained, played rugby for Durham University until a dodgy knee forced him to abandon sport. Nothing daunted, he had presented himself to a talent agency in the hopes of a career in film. Two commercials and several stints as an extra in given up acting, acquired an M.Phil, in History of Architecture at Cambridge, tried his hand at journalism, written for a gossip column, and taken up skydiving. It was that last, he informed me, which had led him to theology, since, "There's nothing like plummeting towards the ground to make a man reconsider his relationship with his Maker." His predecessor, he assured me, had served the parish since 1948, and been the very model of an aged village vicar. "They're still getting used to me," he informed me with an unregenerate grin.

It took us most of his first gin and tonic—heavy on the gin, light on the tonic—to make our way through his life story. The preparation of the second provided a breathing space for me to ask what I really wanted to know: just what the story was with the Phantom Monk of Donwell Abbey.

Of course, I didn't really think that Henrietta had seen a ghost flit into her brother's house. Among other things, drawing on the immense supernatural knowledge gained by several informative evenings with History Channel specials on the subject (after all, if it's the History Channel, it counts as career development), why would a ghost use the door? Shouldn't it be able to drift through walls?

I sensed a human agency at work.

I sensed a human agency with an interest in Selwick Hall, the Purple Gentian, Miles, Henrietta, or all of the above. A human agency that worked for the French. Any spy who chose a name like the Black Tulip wouldn't scruple at playing a bit of dress-up. What better costume than that of a phantom monk? The habit provided complete concealment, and if anyone spotted the dark figure drifting through the grounds, as Henrietta had, they would simply chalk it up to the unquiet spirit of the Phantom Monk, endlessly searching for his lost love.