The Masque of the Black Tulip (49 page)
"Perhaps," commented the marquise. "But I have known of you much longer, Mr. Fitzhugh. Or should I say… the Pink Carnation?"
"Oh, you shouldn't," muttered Miles, "you really shouldn't."
Henrietta frowned fiercely at him, or as fiercely as she could frown with a pistol indenting one cheek. Miles nodded slightly, to show he understood. If the marquise thought the Turnip was the Pink Carnation, it was safer to let her go on thinking that for the present. Turnip was obdurately dense enough to baffle even the most accomplished of spies. Eyes still locked with Henrietta's, Miles tilted his head slightly to the side. Henrietta narrowed her eyes at him, indicating lack of comprehension. Miles took a deep breath. Trying not to look at the deadly muzzle boring into Henrietta's face, Miles let his eyes shift sideways, his head tilt, and his shoulders sag. Lifting his head, he peered anxiously at her, silently asking if she had understood. Henrietta's eyes widened with understanding; it was all the reassurance Miles needed. He held a finger to his nose to indicate silence. Henrietta compressed her lips in an expression that said, clear as words, "I know, I know." Despite himself, Miles felt his own lips quirk into a crooked grin.
Intent on her prize, the marquise missed the entire exchange. Turnip's face went through the muscle contractions that substituted for cogitation in the Fitzhugh family. After much painstaking thought, his wrinkled brow smoothed and his face lit with comprehension.
"You think I'm—oh, I say! That is deuced flattering. Wish I could oblige, but haven't the brains for it, you see, just the waistcoats." Turnip indicated his flower-embroidered clothes, looking up at the marquise like a dog who has just fetched a particularly charming bone for the delectation of his master.
His eager face fell slightly at the lack of answering amusement. Nothing if not eager to please, Turnip tried again. "D'you see?" he urged, gesturing again at his torso. "The waistcoats?"
The marquise didn't see. But Miles saw his moment. Distracted by Turnip, the marquise's grip on Henrietta had loosened; the marquise's fingers barely creased the fabric of Henrietta's sleeve, and the gun hovered an inch from Henrietta's face. A better moment might arise, but they couldn't count on it.
Miles inclined his head sharply at Henrietta. Henrietta bit her lip and gave an infinitesimal nod.
Pressing her eyes briefly closed, Henrietta flung herself sharply to the side, just as Miles lunged at the marquise. The weight of Henrietta's body threw the marquise off balance, causing her to stagger wildly as Henrietta plummeted towards the floor. Miles grabbed the arm in which the marquise held the gun, wrenching it upwards into the air. The pistol went off, the shot nicking chips of plaster from the ceiling. Henrietta instinctively ducked, rolling out of the way of a large chunk of falling plaster.
"You won't," Miles panted, twisting the marquise's wrist as he struggled with her for the gun, "be needing that any more."
Too breathless for words, the marquise merely snarled. An inadvertent gasp of pain hissed through her lips as Miles applied extra pressure. At the back of the room, the marquise's minions staggered and stumbled back into action, lumbering to the aid of their mistress. The emptied gun popped out of the marquise's hand and into Miles's.
Turning, Miles tossed the gun to Turnip. "Hold this!" he demanded, bracing himself to face the marquise's henchmen, their battered faces incongruous under their formal white wigs, livery torn and stained from their prior brawl.
Catching the gun, Turnip regarded it with bewilderment for a moment, as if unsure what to do with it, and then turned and tossed it to Jean-Luc, just as Miles repelled the first of his attackers with a stiff fist to the jaw.
"The idea is not to give the weapons to the other side!" exclaimed Miles in exasperation, jabbing at another attacker with his left fist.
"Oh, right." Turnip shook his head self-deprecatingly and advanced on Jean-Luc, who responded by muttering something very uncomplimentary in French and ramming a ball into the pistol. "I say, would you mind handing that back? Wasn't supposed to give it to you."
Miles muttered something equally uncomplimentary in English, and lunged at Jean-Luc. Behind him, the marquise reached up, and yanked one of the glittering pins from her hair, revealing a slim but lethal blade. Her shining dark hair tumbled down behind her as she levered the stiletto at Miles's back.
"Oh, no, you don't!"
Henrietta flung herself at the marquise's back, grabbing at the arm with the stiletto, only to be sent staggering back as the marquise deftly elbowed her üi the stomach. Gasping for air, Henrietta stumbled backwards in a half-crouch as the marquise swirled to face her in a swish of filmy fabric, brandishing the stiletto like a sword.
The marquise advanced on Henrietta, blade extended. Holding her skirts with one trembling hand, Henrietta took a corresponding step back, feeling her way blindly backwards.
The marquise's black eyes narrowed, focused on Henrietta like a snake marking out a mouse. "You, my dear, have outlived your usefulness. Just like your friend at the ribbon shop."
"My friend at the ribbon shop?" Henrietta refused to allow her attention to be diverted from the glittering blade in the marquise's hand as she picked her careful way backwards.
"Would you like to know what I did to her?"
"No," broke in Miles, sending the fallen gun ricocheting across the uncarpeted floor with one swift, sideways kick. Jean-Luc and Turnip both dove for it, like two dogs after the same bone. "She wouldn't."
Miles delivered a sharp uppercut to one attacker's jaw, before ducking a punch from the other.
"Your friend didn't want to talk at first, either, but," purred the marquise, "I convinced her. With this." Striking out with the stiletto, she raised a stinging welt on Henrietta's hand. Henrietta gasped with pain.
Angling instinctively towards Henrietta, Miles's next punch went wide. With an irritated grunt, he disappeared under four flailing Frenchmen.
"What did you do to her?" demanded Henrietta.
"She told me"—the marquise jabbed again, but this time Henrietta was prepared, and jerked out of the way in time to avoid the narrow point—"some very interesting things about you, Lady Henrietta."
The first slash had been meant to admonish, the second had been aimed straight for the heart. Henrietta would have shivered if all her energies hadn't been focused so narrowly elsewhere.
"Did she?" The marquise seemed less dangerous speaking than silent, with part of her energies directed away from her prey. If only she could get close enough to trip the marquise without exposing herself to that deadly blade! Henrietta scooted herself behind a small table, but the marquise slid gracefully around it, her draperies providing no more impediment than the mist that they resembled.
"She told me"—the marquise stalked Henrietta inexorably backwards, but Henrietta didn't dare take her eyes off the blade in her hand long enough to see where she was driving her—"that you were in communication with the Pink Carnation. All I had to do"—the marquise snagged a hole in Henrietta's borrowed bodice, but the thick cloth foiled incursions as effectively as chain mail—"was follow you."
"Not far enough," muttered Henrietta, just as her foot struck something, sending her reeling backwards just in time to evade another thrust to the heart. Flailing, her back slammed into the wall, stunning her. "So clumsy," tsked the marquise, moving in for the kill. The best swordsman fears the worst, Henrietta reminded herself, letting herself slide down the wall, as the marquise drove her weapon into the ancient wallpaper where Henrietta had been leaning a moment before. The blade bent with the force of the thrust.
Scuttling on hands and knees, Henrietta ducked around the marquise's legs as the marquise flung aside the blunted blade and reached up with a swift, vicious movement to draw another from the dark mass of her hair. Another section of hair came unmoored, slithering down the marquise's back like snakes crawling from their basket.
As if from a long way away, Henrietta could hear the thuds and grunts that betokened men in the thick of a fray. There would be no help from that quarter.
"Hen!" shouted Miles, blond head popping up momentarily from the confused mass of bodies. "You"—wham!—"all right?"
Henrietta rolled as the marquise stabbed downwards, spitting her own hair out of her mouth as she careened sideways. Through the screen of brown strands she could see the blade descending again and desperately propelled herself back in the other direction, rolling once, twice, three times, until her movement was arrested with a jarring thud, as she whammed hip-first into something hard and unstable. It rocked slightly, before settling back into place, ashes shifting and settling.
She had been tripped by her own blasted disguise. Next time, if there was a next time, she was bloody well disguising herself as a duelist. Breeches, a sword, pistols. Not a bloody, inconvenient, underfoot, why-don't-you-just-help-the-enemy bloody metal bucket and shovel, thought Henrietta hysterically as the marquise's new, and, if possible, even pointier stiletto descended in a deadly arc.
A shovel. It wasn't a pistol, or even a sword, but it was there, which counted for far more.
Grabbing the shovel out of the bucket, rocking backwards with the force of the movement, Henrietta swung it wildly upwards, knocking aside the marquise's blade, the heavy iron of the fire tool sending the slim silver blade cartwheeling through the air. From the amorphous mob of men on the other end of the room, she heard a shocked yelp of pain and a truly filthy French curse.
"Sorry!" she called out automatically.
"You, Lady Henrietta," announced the marquise, breathing heavily and looking decidedly miffed, "are proving something of a problem."
"I try," croaked Henrietta, trying to scuttle backwards and stand up all at once, a course of action that made up in desperation what it lacked in coordination.
Above her, the marquise was reaching into her hair with a practiced movement, drawing forth yet another diamond-headed implement of destruction. How many of those did the woman have? Henrietta wondered desperately. Her memory conjured an image of the marquise's elaborate coiffure, studded with diamond-headed pins. If each pin contained a stiletto—she could pin Henrietta to the wall like a butterfly on a naturalist's worktable and still have enough left to adorn her coiffure.
Unless she got close enough to the marquise to whack her over the head with the shovel, the deadly onslaught would continue unabated. She needed something else, something that would put the marquise out of commission long enough for her to do something terribly brave like run to the other side of the room and hide behind Miles.
"By Jove!" shouted Turnip gleefully from the other side of the room. "I've finally got it!"
The marquise's head shifted sharply to the side. Her face contorted with annoyance as she saw the mob of men exchanging fisticuffs with Miles, while Turnip sat triumphandy on top of Jean-Luc, waving the retrieved pistol in the air.
"Idiots!" cried the marquise in tones that could have shattered glass, flinging her arms in the air in a magisterial gesture reminiscent of Morgana Le Fey's calling down demons. "Secure the Pink Carnation!"
Two of Miles's assailants abruptly switched course and rushed at Turnip. Turnip looked alarmed and dove for the floor, trying to crawl underneath the settee. The settee bucked and shook alarmingly. Left with only two attackers, Miles took care of the problem by slamming their heads together with a truly unpleasant cracking noise.
That moment's hesitation was all Henrietta needed.
With strength fueled by desperation, Henrietta grabbed up the bucket of ashes and flung its contents flush into the marquise's face. At least, that was what she intended to do. Staggering under the weight of the heavy bucket, Henrietta's aim was anything but controlled. Propelled by its own weight, the bucket tore out of Henrietta's hands. Instead of the ashes flying upwards into the marquise's eyes, the whole bucket slammed into the marquise's elegantly garbed stomach. With a satisfying oomph, the marquise toppled backwards. Having dealt with his own attackers, Miles bounded across the room, staggered back a step, and caught the marquise before she hit the ground.
"Got her!" he exclaimed triumphantly, twisting the marquise's arms behind her back.
Shaking a floppy lock of blond hair out of his eyes, Miles looked over the marquise's head (a wise decision, since the marquise's face, had he chosen to look at it, was contorted into a Medusa's mask of pure rage) at Henrietta.
Dried blood streaked his face, much of it his own; one eye was already dangerously swollen; and a long scratch marred one cheek. Henrietta thought he looked wonderful.
Their eyes met over the kicking, spitting form of the marquise.
"Sorry I took so long," said Miles, the expression on his face belying the banality of his words.
"Well, four men," said Henrietta in much the same tone, but her cheeks were glowing and her eyes bright. "It's understandable."
The marquise glowered, and tried to kick Miles in the shin. Miles instinctively sidestepped and retaliated with a swift stomp to the marquise's foot without ever taking his eyes from Henrietta.
"I wanted to rescue you," he said softly.
"You did," Henrietta reassured him. She considered, her lips curving into a smile. "It just took you a while."
The marquise went limp.
Tugging the marquise upright by dint of pulling on her arms, Miles drank in the sight of Henrietta, eyes roving over every tangled snarl of hair, every scratch, every bruise. "I tore the house apart when I got home, and you weren't there."
The marquise rolled her eyes. "If I had wanted to hear romantic drivel, I would have gone to Drury Lane," she snapped.
Henrietta cast her a quelling look. "Nobody asked you." She turned back to Miles, lifting eager eyes to his battered face. "Go on. You were worried?" Henrietta knew it was petty and immature to fish for crumbs of affection, but she was past caring.
"Frantic," Miles admitted.