The Masque of the Black Tulip (48 page)

"But who knows," the marquise broke into Turnip's spate of similes, "what a mere moment's indiscretion may do?"

Henrietta knew, but declined to volunteer her expertise. The marquise's question had sounded more rhetorical than otherwise.

"One must be so careful in these trying, trying days. One little word, one little slip, can be someone's undoing. Ah, thank you, Jean-Luc."

A heavy silver tray was set down in front of the marquise, its baroque opulence at odds with the faded and snagged upholstery of the settee. Henrietta wondered if she had smuggled it out of France with her; it wasn't the sort of item one could sew discreetly into the hem of one's cloak.

"Coffee, Mr. Fitzhugh?" The marquise gestured towards the tray with a graceful hand. Her voice hardened, stiffer than the heavy silver handle of the coffeepot. "Or should I call you by your real name?"

"The mater and pater call me Reginald," supplied Turnip doubtfully. His voice changed. "I say, what was that doing in the coffeepot?"

"I promised you a coffee you wouldn't be able to refuse," replied the marquise. Her voice was no longer seductive, but so flatly matter-of-fact as to be almost entirely devoid of inflection. Henrietta, who had been massaging the feeling back into a leg gone numb, reapplied herself to the knothole.

In one fine-boned hand, the marquise held a thin pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle. She leveled the pistol at Turnip. "And I always keep my promises."

Henrietta closed her gaping mouth before she could get a splinter on her tongue. She had heard of weddings at gunpoint, but never at the hand of the prospective bride. Potential explanations flashed through Henrietta's mind. A woman scorned? Perhaps the marquise, mad with wounded pride at seeing Henrietta and Turnip together, had decided to emulate Medea and exact her revenge? Turnip had been abroad, and fairly recently, too. He might have conducted a passionate romance with the marquise prior to her return to England and then flung her aside. Turnip, however, wasn't really the flinging type. He was far more likely to be flung.

Far less alarmed than Henrietta, Turnip examined the pistol with a professional eye. "That's a deuced fine piece, but not at all the thing to go waving it about. Could go off, you know."

"That," said the marquise drily, "is generally the idea."

Turnip looked perplexed.

"No more games, Mr. Fitzhugh." The marquise looked Turnip straight in the eye. "I know who you are."

"Deuced odd if you didn't," replied Turnip cheerfully, peering into the coffeepot to see if there might be any liquid in there now that the pistol was gone, "considering you invited me."

There was one last possibility. One incredibly attractive possibility. But why would the Black Tulip waste her time on Turnip Fitzhugh?

Jean-Luc had moved to stand behind Turnip. At least, Henrietta assumed it must be Jean-Luc. All she could see of him was livery heavy with silver buttons and a pair of viciously flexing hands. The marquise forestalled Jean-Luc with an infinitesimal flick of her wrist. Henrietta slid her hand along the crack of the doors, digging her fingernails into the wood, trying to find a way to lift the latch. She wasn't sure just how much use she would be against a burly man and a primed pistol, but if she could divert their attention, even for a moment…

Leaning back against the arm of the settee, the marquise raised an admiring eyebrow. "You are bold, Mr. Fitzhugh. Very bold."

"Faint heart never won fair lady, and all that," beamed Turnip, lifting his chin and doing his best to look bold. "Pride myself on that je ne sais… er…"

"Quoi?" demanded Jean-Luc.

Turnip looked appreciatively back over his shoulder. "Righty-ho! That's the word! Don't know how it came to slip my mind."

"Your mind, Mr. Fitzhugh," gritted out the marquise, rapidly losing patience, "is not all that is going to slip if you persist in this folly."

"Don't know if I'd call it folly," cogitated Turnip. "Foolishness, maybe."

"Jean-Luc," snapped the marquise, out of patience, "bring the chains to bind our stubborn friend."

"But I am in chains, dear lady! Chains of love! Not real chains, of course," Turnip clarified confidingly, "but it's what you'd call a…"

"Argh!"

A hearty masculine yelp echoed through the room. It had not come from Turnip, but from the street outside.

Inside the cupboard, Henrietta went cold with alarm.

"No, not that," said Turnip. "Believe it begins with M. Matador?"

It was the right initial, even if the wrong name. Henrietta knew that yelp, a hearty bellow compounded of annoyance and indignation. Henrietta whammed her shoulder against the doors. Through the wooden walls of her prison, she could hear the sounds of a struggle. Something shattered a long way off. A series of curses and crashes followed, most of the former in French, attesting to the fact that Miles was more than holding his own. Closer by, the marquise had risen to her feet, face rigid with alarm and displeasure. Turnip, too, stood up, his broad brow wrinkled with confusion.

"I say," he began, "that sounds like—"

An explosion sounded somewhere in the distance, followed by a loud curse and a heavy thud.

"Dorrington," finished Turnip, in the sudden silence.

Henrietta flung herself desperately against the doors of the cupboard. The beleaguered latch at long last gave way. The doors burst open, sending Henrietta sprawling untidily onto the sitting room carpet.

"Miles!" screamed Henrietta.

"Lady Henrietta?" exclaimed Turnip.

"Guards!" called the marquise.

Stunned by her fall, Henrietta twisted sharply towards the door. In the hallway outside, she heard a familiar voice saying something exceedingly impolite; deep inside her chest, her heart resumed its proper business. Miles was alive. And—glass shattered against plaster—still fighting. Whoever had fallen, it hadn't been he.

But what on earth was he doing here?

"Didn't know you were here, Lady Hen," commented Turnip affably. "Have some coffee."

"Yes," said the marquise, leveling the pistol at Henrietta. "Do."

"I say"—Turnip tapped the marquise on the arm—"don't know what the custom is in France, but not at all the done thing to point firearms at guests."

The marquise ignored him, continuing to point the mother-of-pearl pistol at Henrietta.

"Kindly hand me the pistol in your belt and the knife strapped to your calf," instructed the marquise.

Henrietta looked at her quizzically. "What makes you think I have either of those things?"

"All amateur spies have pistols in their belts and knives strapped to their calves," replied the marquise acidly. "It is a tedious commonplace of the profession."

Both had been listed in Amy's helpful pamphlet, So You Want to Be a Spy, but Miles's dueling pistols were back in his old lodgings, and the staff of Loring House already thought she was crazy enough without her waltzing into the kitchen and asking to view their knife collection. There had been a dusty old pair of fencing foils propped above the mantelpiece in what might once have been Miles's father's study, but neither was the sort of piece a girl could inconspicuously pop down her bodice.

"Ah," said Henrietta, in the hopes that the marquise might be distracted until Miles could subdue her henchmen in the hallway. "But I am not an amateur spy."

She wasn't, really, she assured herself. She was more of a liaison.

"You begin to bore me, Lady Henrietta." In the sort of casual gesture with which she might have applied rouge or flipped through a program at the opera, the marquise flicked the lever that cocked the pistol.

"I don't think you want to do that," said Henrietta, slowly raising herself up on her elbows, and wishing she had had the forethought to bring a pistol of her own.

"Why not?" asked the marquise, sounding thoroughly bored.

"Because," ventured Henrietta, cautiously pushing herself up onto her knees and trying to look mysterious, "I'm more use to you alive than dead."

"Whatever might have given you that idea?" inquired the marquise, her voice as level as her gun.

Down the hall, assorted thuds and grunts suggested that Miles was still keeping the marquise's guards busy. How long would he be able to hold them off if the marquise added her pistol to the fray? Henrietta made a desperate shooing motion at Turnip. Turnip, misinterpreting, started trying to fill one of the cups from the empty coffeepot.

Seeing no aid from that quarter, she made a desperate bid to hold both the marquise's attention and her pistol point.

"I," said Henrietta very slowly, "have information for which your government"—she looked closely at the marquise, but the marquise's face revealed nothing but thinly veiled boredom—"would pay dearly."

"Do you?" the marquise's smile was dry, uninterested.

"Dead women tell no tales, you know." Henrietta warmed to her theme.

"But you, Lady Henrietta," said the marquise, "have already revealed everything I needed to know."

"I have?" Henrietta cast her mind anxiously back over the past few days. She couldn't have led the marquise to Jane—could she?

"Are you quite sure about that?" she asked desperately. "I mean, you really wouldn't want to go back to your superiors with possibly incomplete information. Think how angry they would be if you could have found out more. And what if you're mistaken? Just think about that. Are you sure? Are you quite, quite sure?"

The marquise sighed in a manner indicating the extreme ennui of one who has heard prisoners pleading for their lives before, and finds it a tedious, if necessary, corollary of her chosen profession.

"Quite"—the marquise's finger tightened on the trigger—"sure."

* * *

Coffee, the taking of: a situation of extreme peril, frequently requiring urgent assistance. See also under Milk, Addition of. —from the Personal Codebook of the Pink Carnation

"Hen!"

The marquise's head swiveled to the left as Miles burst into the room, trailing four ruffians dressed as footmen. Two clung to his arms, one trailed from Miles's legs, and the fourth was ineffectually trying to leap onto his back.

Miles disposed of the last with a hearty butt of his head, whacked the man hanging onto his right arm out of the way by dint of flinging up a stiff arm to knock him backwards into the wall, used his newly freed hand to punch the guard on his left in the stomach, and dispatched the one clinging to his legs with a single well-placed kick to the head.

Four groaning Frenchmen clutched various parts of their anatomy as Miles rushed precipitously towards Henrietta, eyes for no one but her. "Dammit, Hen, are you all right?"

The marquise recovered before her minions. In one fluid movement, she hauled Henrietta up off the floor, pulled the smaller woman back against her, and shoved the point of her pistol against Henrietta's temple.

"Not so fast, Mr. Dorrington."

Miles skidded to a stop, nearly overbalancing in his haste. He had, he realized, missed a minor detail. The gun that the marquise was in the process of pointing at Henrietta. Damn.

The marquise dragged Henrietta back a step, black eyes flashing from Miles to Turnip and back again. "Neither of you gentlemen move. If you do, the lovely Lady Henrietta will no longer be quite so lovely. Do I make myself understood?"

"Perfectly," said Miles tersely, holding himself absolutely still. Henrietta's face was grimed with dust, and he could see what looked like a nasty scrape on one cheek, but there didn't seem to be any bullet holes, open gashes, or other serious wounds anywhere on her person. Yet. Miles looked directly at the marquise. "What do you want?"

The marquise tilted her dark head, drawing out the moment. "You, Mr. Dorrington, are not in any position to bargain."

"Let her go, and we'll see you safely out of the country," Miles offered recklessly, squelching any thought of what his superiors at the War Office might say to such an offer. He made an effort to keep his posture relaxed, but his eyes were intent as he scanned the marquise for the slightest sign of an opening. If her hand wavered, even for a second…

Henrietta shook her head at him, causing the marquise's hand to tighten on the trigger.

Miles stiffened in alarm. "Don't move, Hen," he begged. "Just don't move." He turned back to the marquise. "Well?"

"What are you willing to do to have her back unharmed?"

"Miles, don't!" burst out Henrietta. "You can't let her escape. And I"—her voice faltered, but she went resolutely on, chin set in a stubborn line—"I'm expendable."

"Not to me," Miles said harshly.

"How sweet," said the marquise, in a tone that implied she thought it anything but. "Are you quite finished?"

The marquise jammed the muzzle of the pistol harder against Henrietta's cheek. Henrietta squeaked. Miles tensed.

"Do go on," continued the marquise sarcastically. "Don't allow me to interrupt your little interlude. After all, it may be the last one you have."

"Havey-cavey," muttered Turnip, shaking his head. "Deuced havey-cavey."

Henrietta looked at him in exasperation, stubbing her nose against the pistol for her pains. "Now you find the situation havey-cavey?"

"I would remain quiet, if I were you, Lady Henrietta," cautioned the marquise. "And if you think I can be induced to display mercy upon a plea of true love"—on the marquise's lips, the words plummeted to something lower than myth—"you are distinctly mistaken."

"Not mercy," Miles swiftly interpolated, "but common sense. As you can see, Henrietta and I have other things to occupy ourselves, and Turnip is no harm to anyone but his horseflesh. We'll turn our backs and count to ten, and you can just go."

"Not without what I came for."

The marquise looked pointedly at Turnip Fitzhugh.

So did everyone else.

Turnip toyed with the edge of his cravat and looked bashful. "Flattered, I'm sure."

"You can drop the act now, Mr. Fitzhugh," said the marquise, digging her fingers cruelly into the flesh of Henrietta's left arm. "I've been waiting a long time for this moment."

"It can't have been that long," put in Turnip. "I've only known you this past fortnight."