The Masque of the Black Tulip (51 page)

As always with Vaughn, Henrietta felt her way uncertainly through a verbal maze. This time, however, she was quite sure there were no dragons lurking in its depths.

"Not in that particular circle of inferno," she said firmly, tilting her head towards the marquise. Miles was examining the marquise's necklace, which happened to be resting just above a very impressive display of cleavage. Quashing that line of thought, Henrietta forcibly dragged her attention back to Vaughn. "Whether you linger in other nether regions is, as I told you before, entirely your own affair."

"Dante," commented Vaughn lightly, "had Beatrice to lead him from the depths."

Henrietta resisted the urge to crane her neck around to monitor Miles, and forced herself to smile pleasantly at Vaughn. It was always quite flattering to be compared to literary heroines, even of the more milk-and-water variety. And it was even more flattering to have attached a man of wit and cultivation, even if, like Shakespeare's Beatrice (not to be corn-pared with Dante's), Henrietta found him too costly for workaday use. It would, Henrietta imagined, grow irksome to be perpetually marching through a maze of someone else's devising, to be forever fencing and weighing meanings over the breakfast table and in the bedchamber.

There was nothing subde about Miles. Henrietta lost the battle with herself and peeked. Miles, gratifyingly, was paying very little attention to the marquise's more obvious attributes. Instead, his gaze was fixed upon Henrietta and Vaughn with a scowl that needed very little interpretation.

Henrietta turned back to Vaughn feeling immeasurably cheered.

"I think that you'd be rather bored by a Beatrice," she advised firmly. "What you need is a Boadicea."

"I'll bear that in mind the next time I come upon a band of marauding Britons," said Vaughn dryly. "I've always liked women in blue." Miles's scowl erupted into a loud growling noise. "If I might interrupt?" Henrietta hurried the few paces to his side and peered over his shoulder. "What did you find?"

From the central panel of the large diamond-studded cross that hung about the marquise's neck, Miles had extracted a thin roll of paper. The writing was small, and in French, bits of it reduced to numbers, but the import was still clear.

"My goodness," echoed Henrietta.

"She used to keep love letters in there," said Vaughn, coming up behind them.

"Yours?" asked Miles.

"Among others," said Vaughn. He shrugged. "I consider it a passing phase, like the measles—only sooner cured and with fewer lingering effects."

"The sides also open," Miles told Henrietta, ignoring Vaughn. He opened his fist to reveal a small silver seal. Henrietta plucked it from his palm, turning it over. Incised into the surface, dulled with years of wax, but still legible, was the rounded outline of a small but distinctive flower. A tulip.

"And this," said Miles grimly, opening his other palm to reveal a small vial, fashioned out of glass, and filled with a grainy substance that shifted with the movement of Miles's hand.

"What is it?" asked Henrietta.

"Enough poison to put half of London off their dinners— permanently," supplied Vaughn, assessing the white powder with a practiced eye.

"Enough to see her swing, that's for certain," said Miles, favoring Vaughn with a cprl of his lip that strongly suggested just which Londoner Miles would like to see put permanently off his dinner.

Vaughn turned to Henrietta and executed a practiced obeisance. "Leaving London," he said, face and voice perfectly bland, "free for the fair to reign unhindered."

Henrietta, face streaked with grime and hair in a snarl, rolled her eyes.

Miles reacted somewhat more strongly. He dropped the marquise's necklace and rounded on Vaughn.

"She's taken," gritted out Miles. "So you can just stop looking at her like that."

"Like what?" asked Vaughn, enjoying himself hugely.

"Like you want to take her home and add her to your harem!"

Vaughn considered, "Last I looked, I wasn't in possession of one, but you know, Dorrington, it really is an excellent idea. I shall have to see to it at once."

Henrietta, who had been watching the exchange with hands on hips and mounting incredulity, marched in between the two men.

"In case you forgot, I'm standing right here. Hello!" She executed a sarcastic little wave. "And I'm not," she said with a repressive glower at Vaughn, "being carted off to anyone's harem."

"I can see that," replied Vaughn, the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes deepening. "You would be dreadful for morale. Even if pleasing to the eye. No," he shook his head, "the Chief Eunuch would never agree."

"It's not the eunuch I'm worried about. He"—Miles jabbed a finger at Vaughn, looking fiercely at Henrietta as he did so—"is just a rake."

"Just?" murmured Vaughn. "I prefer to regard it as a way of life."

Miles ignored him. "He may be able to turn a clever phrase, and do that… thing with his cravat—"

"A design of my own devising," interjected Vaughn blandly. He subsided with a slight gurgling noise as Henrietta's foot descended heavily on his.

Miles saw the interplay but misread the significance.

"Dammit, Hen, how can you let yourself be so taken in? All those flowery compliments—they're just what rakes do. It's pure flummery. It's not real. No matter what he says, he doesn't love you like—er—" Miles broke off, face frozen in an expression of hopeless horror.

A shocked silence descended over the room. Turnip's head poked curiously out from under the settee.

"Like? " prompted Henrietta in a voice that didn't sound like her own.

Miles blinked rapidly, mouth opening and closing in soundless alarm, looking like a condemned man brought face to face with the headsman's axe for the first time. Concluding there was no escape, Miles climbed the scaffold with dignity. "Like I do," he said heavily.

"Love? Me? You?" squeaked Henrietta, both vocabulary and vocal range deserting her. She thought a moment, and added, "Really?"

"That wasn't how I was going to say it," burst out Miles, looking at her entreatingly. "I had it all planned out."

Henrietta's face dissolved into a dizzying smile. Shaking back her hair, she announced giddily, "I don't care how you said it as long as you don't take it back."

Miles was still mourning the loss of his Romantic Plan. "There was be going to be champagne, and oysters, and you"—he held out both hands as though shifting a piece of furniture—"were going to be sitting there, and I was going to get down on one knee, and… and…"

Words failed Miles. He waved his arms about in mute distress.

Words seldom failed Henrietta.

"You great idiot," she said in such loving tones that Vaughn discreetly removed himself several paces, and Turnip climbed all the way out from under the settee to attain a better view.

Holding out both hands to Miles, Henrietta lifted shining eyes to his battered face. "I never expected grand declarations of love or romantic gestures."

"But you deserved them," Miles said stubbornly. "You deserved flowers and chocolates and…" He paused, scrabbling around in his memory. He didn't think it was precisely the moment to bring up the peeled grapes. "Poetry," he finished with grim triumph.

"I think we can contrive to muddle by without it," Henrietta said with mock solemnity. "Of course, if you could see your way to the occasional ode…"

"You deserved better," Miles insisted. "Not a hurried marriage, and a hurried wedding night and—"

Henrietta dimpled. "I have no complaints on that score. Do you?"

"Don't be absurd," he said gruffly.

"There you have it, then," she said firmly.

Miles opened his mouth to argue. Henrietta stopped him by the simple expedient of placing a finger on his lips. The gentle touch silenced

Miles more abruptly than being tackled by a horde of rampaging Frenchmen. Henrietta resolved to remember that for future arguments. She just hoped the French never figured it out.

"I don't want better," she said simply, eyes eloquent on his. "I want you."

Miles made a strange choking noise that sounded like it wanted to be a laugh when it grew up. "Thanks, Hen," he said tenderly.

"You know what I mean."

"Yes." Miles lifted the hand she had help to his lips and kissed the palm, in a gesture of such reverence, it made Henrietta's throat tight. "I do."

"I love you, you know," she said, around the strange obstruction in her throat.

"I didn't know, actually," Miles said, looking at her wonderingly, like a voyager viewing his home after a long journey, putting together all the old familiar places again in a new and beloved way.

"How could you not?" demanded Henrietta, "with me following after you like a lovesick duck?"

"A duck?" echoed Miles, face creasing into an incredulous grin. His shoulders shook with suppressed laughter. "Trust me, Hen, you never looked like a duck. A hen, maybe." Miles wiggled his eyebrows. Henrietta groaned. "But never a duck."

Henrietta whacked him on the chest. "It's not funny. It was dreadful. And then when you were forced to marry me…"

Miles coughed, his amusement fading. "I'm not sure 'forced' is exactly the right word."

"What else would you call it when someone threatens to call you out?"

"There's one slight problem with that logic." Miles paused, looking slightly sheepish. "In case you didn't notice, Richard didn't exactly want us to marry."

Henrietta's eyes narrowed as she digested this information. She looked closely at Miles. "You mean…"

"Mm-hmm." Miles scrubbed his hand through his hair. "I was afraid that if I gave you time to think it through, you would recover your senses and agree with him. It could have been hushed up, you know. Richard's staff is inhumanly discreet, and as for the Tholmondelays…" Miles shrugged.

"That," said Henrietta meltingly, looking like someone who had just been handed a decade's worth of Christmas presents all at once, "is better than poetry."

"Good," said Miles, taking her into his arms. "Because," he added, his lips a whisper away from hers, "I'm not writing you any."

Their lips met with a purity of emotion that was ode, sonnet, and ses-tina all in one. No rhymes had ever been smoother, no meter more perfect, no metaphors more harmonious than the melding of mouths and arms, the press of her body against his, as they leaned against each other in an enchanted golden circle where there were no French spies, no sardonic ex -suitors, no importunate schoolmates, nothing but the two of them meandering languorously through their own personal pastoral idyll.

"Devil take it, I knew there was something havey-cavey going on," said Turnip, who had climbed entirely out from under the settee, and was looking as censorious as someone in a carnation pink coat can contrive to look. "It's not havey-cavey," tossed back Miles, eyes never leaving Henrietta, who looked delightfully flushed and even more delightfully befuddled. "We're married."

Turnip considered. "Don't know if that makes it better or worse. Secret marriages, not at all the thing, you know."

"They will be now," prophesied Miles. "So why don't you just go find yourself one, before everyone else starts contracting them, too."

Vaughn coughed discreetly. That eliciting no reaction, he coughed somewhat less discreetly.

"As charming as this is," he said in a tone that caused a flush to rise to Miles's cheeks, "I suggest you postpone your raptures until the Black Tulip is in the possession of the proper authorities. I assume you do know those proper authorities, Dorrington?"

Miles reluctantly relinquished his grasp on Henrietta's shoulders and turned to face Vaughn, keeping one hand protectively on her waist, just in case Vaughn still cherished any notions about harem girls.

"I do," he said, adding, with just a hint of malicious satisfaction, "They're the ones who set me on to you."

Vaughn sighed, brushing an imaginary speck of dust from the ruffles of his sleeve. "I don't understand. I lead such a quiet life."

"Like Covent Garden at sunset," muttered Miles. "Ow!"

"That's what shins are for," explained Henrietta benignly.

"If that's what you think, remind me to wear thicker pantaloons," said Miles, rubbing his aching appendage. "Potentially armored ones."

"I'll make them for you myself," said Henrietta.

"I'd rather you remove them yourself," Miles whispered in her ear.

The two exchanged a look of such smoldering intimacy that Vaughn found it necessary to cough again, and Turnip burst out with, "Discussing a gentleman's nether garments—not at all the thing in mixed company, you know!"

"We're married," chorused Henrietta and Miles.

"Sickening, isn't it?" commented Vaughn to no one in particular. "Remind me never to be a newlywed. It is an insufferable state."

A sarcastic voice rose from the floor. "Could you please get on with deciding my fate? This floor is exceedingly uncomfortable, and the conversation even worse."

Henrietta glanced down. "You don't seem unduly perturbed."

"Why should I be?" said the marquise, in tones that suggested she saw this as merely a temporary setback. "You have a most amateur organization."

"Who managed," pointed out Henrietta, "to catch you."

"A mere technicality," snapped the marquise.

"We'll have to take her to the War Office," Miles interrupted. "And then"—he exchanged another look with Henrietta that made her go pink to the tips of her ears—"we are going home."

Home. It was such a lovely word.

"I find myself again moved to gallantry," said Vaughn in tones of intense weariness. "If you wish, I will undertake to deliver our mutual friend to—the War Office, you said?"

Miles visibly hesitated.

"Or," said Vaughn smoothly, angling his head towards Turnip, "you could have him do it."

Miles handed Vaughn the ends of the rope. "You're a good chap, Vaughn. And if she escapes, I know where to look."

"You have a rare jewel, Dorrington. See that you take good care of her."

Miles had no difficulty whatsoever in promising to do so.

As dusk settled on the city, Miles and Henrietta wandered hand in hand through the tangled streets of London to Loring House. Strains of red and gold flared in the sky like heraldic banners signaling triumph. Henrietta and Miles didn't even notice. They meandered through the gloaming in their own rosy glow, eyes for no one but each other. The special providence that looks out for fools and lovers guarded their path. If refuse grimed the ground underfoot, neither noticed; if footpads plied their sinister trade, they did it elsewhere. And if, from time to time, the couple took advantage of the lengthening shadows to exchange something more than whispers, spying eyes and wagging tongues held no fear for them.