The Masque of the Black Tulip (53 page)

Henrietta looked at Miles. "Charlotte, Geoff, my parents… How did everyone know we were going to get married but us?"

"And Richard," corrected Miles ruefully.

Henrietta sobered. She looked anxiously up at Miles. "Do you mind terribly? About Richard, I mean."

All was silent in the marble foyer. Miles looked Henrietta full in the face, and slowly shook his head. "Not nearly as much as I would have minded losing you."

"So that bit about my being nearly as important to you as Richard…"

Miles groaned. "I said a lot of stupid things."

Taking pity on him, Henrietta slid her arms around his waist. "I can think of at least one sensible thing you said."

Miles dropped a kiss on the top of her head. "Pass the ginger biscuits?"

"No."

"Albatross?"

Henrietta poked him. "Not even close."

"Or how about"—Miles's breath feathered the hair next to Henrietta's ear—"I love you?"

Downstairs, in the servants' hall, the word passed around that the master had been seen carrying his wife up the stairs—again.

* * *

Thirty-Eight "Eloise?"

Grayish yellow sunlight slanted in long rectangles across the library carpet, but I scarcely noticed. Somehow, over the course of the past few hours, I had slid from the overstuffed chair on which I had been sitting to the floor beneath. My shoulders were propped against the red-and-blue-upholstered seat, and a Queen Anne ball and claw foot made convenient handrests next to each hip. My back was emitting the sort of warning twinges that betokened pain later, but I didn't care at the moment. On my bent knees, which served as an impromptu writing desk, perched a red leather folio. The folio itself was Victorian in date, with marbled endpapers and the sort of intricate embossing beloved of nineteenth-century leatherworkers, swirls and curlicues painstakingly traced in gold. Inside, however, was something else entirely. Onto the crumbling yellow pages had been pasted older material, which the Victorian compiler had chosen to title "Some Memorials of a Lady of the House of Selwick." There was a much longer subtitle, but since it had no relevance to anyone but the enthusiastic amateur archivist, I'll forbear to transcribe it.

The late-nineteenth-century compiler had made a valiant effort to squelch the juicier bits, striking whole paragraphs out with outraged strokes of the pen. Fortunately for me, Henrietta's ink had proved sturdier stuff. It was a bit like reading a medieval palimpset, those close-written documents where the author wrote literally between the lines to save precious parchment, but with some squinting and cursing, and a bit of turning the pages this way and that, I could still make out the original text under the fading brown ink of the censor's blots.

In their own way, the annotations were hilarious, and I'm sure a cultural historian working on the late nineteenth century could get at least one paper out of them, maybe two. The anonymous archivist—who coyly identified herself as a fellow scion of the house of Selwick and left it at that—seemed to have very little idea of what to do with her adventurous ancestress and kept desperately trying to explain away Henrietta's more outrageous actions. Impromptu marriage? Certainly it couldn't have been that impromptu, anxiously rationalized the editor, if the bishop of London presided over the ceremony. Eavesdropping on a potential spy? It most certainly must have been by accident, since she would never voluntarily lend herself to an activity that must be sure to offend the conscience of any properly bred young lady. Slipping into someone's house disguised as a servant? Of course not. Lady Henrietta was just having her little joke on posterity.

I milked all the amusement I could out of those annotations.

I still had no idea what had happened last night. Zero. Zip. Nada. I'm not referring to those momentary lapses in memory that may attend overindulgence in the bottle (after Thursday's fiasco, I had quite scrupulously limited myself to two glasses of wine), but my utter inability to come up with any clear explanation for what had happened in the cloister. I knew how I would have liked to explain it, but there was an absolute lack of corroborating evidence, at least corroborating evidence that would convince any unbiased third party. And, I don't mean Pammy.

I had basked in my own virtue at not giving in, to the overwhelming desire to ask Sally whether her sarcastic comment arose from Colin's behavior towards me or mine towards him. From there it would only be the merest step to "But do you think he likes me? Like, LIKES likes me?" Instead, I had, with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball, rerouted the subject to monastic ruins.

After Sally showed me around the cloister, I returned to the party with all my antennae on high Colin alert, that sort of super-awareness that signals a crush with the same deadly accuracy as pointlessly dropping that person's name in conversation or surreptitious excursions into his past on Google. Instead, I was cornered by the vicar, who had conceived the ambition to impart to me several lesser-known verses of

Gilbert and Sullivan, without which my life would be immeasurably the poorer (or so he most solemnly swore). Colin reappeared halfway through The Gondoliers and immediately joined a group on the other side of the room. Whether he was avoiding me, or the vicar's piercing tenor, I had no idea. I could fill up an entire diary with "Looks, the interpretation of." Old looks, new looks, lost looks. All half-imagined, none probative of anything at all. Other than wishful thinking.

The ride back to Selwick Hall had been… cordial. There was no other word for it. Colin asked if I had enjoyed myself; I said I had; he expressed his pleasure at that fact. If there was an undertone to those words that suggested more than bland social conventions… well, nothing had occurred to give them substance. In the front hall, as Colin extracted his key and I dithered with my coat, Colin's phone had rung, and he bid me a distracted good night, leaving me to seek my virtuous bed and wonder if Pammy had perhaps been right about that bustier.

Had I imagined it all? I took myself off to bed, but couldn't sleep, mind moving in an endless hamster wheel of Did he? Or didn't he? I contemplated venturing down to the kitchen for a midnight cocoa, in the hopes of a "chance" meeting. But there was only so low one could sink. Besides, I was afraid I would get lost on the way to the kitchen. How pathetic to stumble around a strange house in the dark in the hopes of being compromised!

Compromised—I had been spending too much time in the early nineteenth century. Envisioning Colin in knee breeches didn't help matters, either.

Sleep was clearly an impossibility. Wrapping Serena's pashmina over my tank top as a makeshift shawl, I shuffled barefoot down the hallway to the library. After an hour with Henrietta, the Cloister Incident was only a vague murmur at the back of my mind. After two, I couldn't remember my own name, much less his.

Oh, this was going to make a juicy chapter! France's deadliest counterspy, a woman! The women's history crowd were going to go wild. I envisioned conference panels, grant money raining down like ticker tape, job talks, and articles in Past and Present, the English historian's answer to the New York Times. It was like watching the little windows on a slot machine clink one by one into jackpot.

Forget a mere chapter; this might contain the germ of a second book. I toyed with titles. A Sampler of Sedition: Female Spies in the Napoleonic Wars. I discarded that as too much like a reprise of my dissertation, with a gender slant to make it trendy. I could attempt a micro-history, using the marquise as a case study. The Marquise de Montval: The Maying of a Revolutionary. Now, there was an idea. How did a gendy bred young Englishwoman become a fervent adherent of revolutionary principles and a hired killer for Bonaparte? Even better, I could do a companion study of the Pink Carnation and the Black Tulip, comparing their backgrounds, their allegiances, their methods. There was one slight snag.

"Eloise!" The voice was more insistent now, and, as if from a long way away, I remembered that that was my name, and that it was generally considered a matter of social convention to respond to it.

So I blurted out what was on my mind. "The Black Tulip escaped!" I looked up wildly from the pile of papers on my lap, shoving my tousled hair out of my eyes. "I can't believe they let her escape!"

"Eloise!" There was a snap to Colin's voice that jarred me out of my preoccupations. He hadn't even bothered to come all the way into the library; his disembodied head stuck out around the frame of the door like a French nobleman after a jaunt to the guillotine, sans wig or ruffled cravat.

"Yes?" I sat to attention, suddenly very conscious that I was wearing nothing but an ancient white tank top, washed to invisibility, and a pair of fuzzy pajama bottoms printed with French poodles frolicking next to the Eiffel Tower. Yes, I had packed in a hurry Friday afternoon. I tried to tuck my legs up under me, but Colin wasn't paying any more attention to Fifi the Playful Poodle than he was to the transparency of my tank top.

"Listen," he said tersely. "Something's come up. Can you be ready to leave in fifteen minutes?"

"Fifteen minutes," I repeated blankly. Leave. Fifteen minutes. Leave?

Information did not compute.

"There's a train that leaves at seven thirty-two," Colin continued in that same harried tone. I got the sense that he was already someplace else entirely, the apparition in front of me simply a machine detailed to relay the message. All that was lacking was Thank-you-for-calling-Selwick-Hall-and-have-a-nice-day. "I'm terribly sorry, but it can't be helped."

"Of course," I stammered, staggering to my feet with the aid of the chair. "I'll just—"

"Thanks."

"—get myself together," I finished to the inside of the library door. Colin had already gone. Fifteen minutes. He had said fifteen minutes, hadn't he?

I gathered together the welter of papers and folios I had been looking at and sorted them back into their proper places with a numb efficiency born of confusion. I glanced at the big grandfather clock on the far wall. Four minutes gone already. I grabbed for my notebooks, tucking them under my arm. I could read through my notes on the train.

The train. I would have dwelled on that, but I didn't have time now to figure out why I was being tossed from the house like a Victorian housemaid found to be in the family way. Get ye gone, ye creature of loose morals, and never darken the Squires door again! Only, I hadn't had a chance to display any loose morals, more's the pity. So why was he throwing me out?

Oh, God. I paused with one hand on the doorknob of the library door. Was he regretting his impulses of last night, and trying to dispose of the evidence (i.e., me) before I could fling myself at him again? "I didn't mean to lead her on," I could say him saying to a mate over a pint at the pub. "It was just… she was there. Female, y'know." The friend would nod sagely in return, saying, "Don't know where they get these ideas." And they'd both take a long pull of their beers, shaking their head over desperate women. Then they'd probably top it off with a long belch.

It made me cringe just thinking about it.

Five minutes gone. I tabled that thought for later and sprinted to my borrowed room, flinging clothes haphazardly back into my overnight bag, yanking on the same tweed pants I had worn yesterday with an unworn beige sweater. Cursing, I tore the sweater back off over my head, accidentally sending my glasses flying in the process, added bra, replaced sweater, and fumbled around for my glasses, which had scooted all the way under the bed in that way inanimate objects have when you're in a hurry. Had I put on deodorant? I couldn't remember. I yanked up my sweater and lavishly slathered white goo anywhere but where it was supposed to go, most of it onto dry-clean-only cashmere.

Twelve minutes gone. There was no time to put in my contacts. Wiping my glasses clean on a corner of my much-abused sweater, I made sure the lids on my contact lens case were screwed tight and shoved them, my glasses case, and my bottle of contact lens solution into my bag. Tearing a piece of paper out of the back of my notebook, I fished a pen out of my bag, and scribbled a quick note. "Serena, Thanks for the loan of the clothes! Hope you don't mind. Will be glad to return the favor sometime. Yrs, Eloise."

That was the last of my allotted time. I ran a quick scan over dresser, night tables, bed; rescued my almost-forgotten watch from the dresser top; wriggled into my coat, slung my bag over my shoulder, and bolted for the stairs.

Colin was already in the car, the engine running, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel in an anxious tattoo.

"That was speedy," he said approvingly. The car lurched into action before I heard the comforting click that told me my door had latched.

"Well, you know," I gasped, flinging my satchel into the backseat of the car, and turning around again to yank down my seat belt. "I didn't have much with me."

"Right," said Colin, leaning over the wheel in that strange way men have when they're intent on emulating the Grand Prix, the automotive equivalent of air guitar. As though sensing that might not have been adequate as a response, he added, "Good."

All the tension that had fizzed between us last night had gone as flat as champagne left out overnight.

I subsided back against my seat. It belatedly occurred to me that I'd never brushed my hair, but I couldn't muster up the energy to care. Outside the window, the countryside jounced past, clothed in morning mist. Had I been in a different sort of mood, I might have waxed rapturous about the mysterious quality of the early-morning light. As it was, it just looked grim and faded, as if the tired landscape couldn't muster the energy to clothe itself in its usual colors, but had let itself dim into an indifferent blur.

I glanced at Colin, but he was far away—away with the fairies, as the local idiom goes, only, judging from the worried line between his eyes, these were hobgoblins he was hobnobbing with. No kinder to him than the trees, the gray morning light transformed him into a sepia photo of himself. His healthy tan had gone the sallow taupe of old parchment, and his skin seemed too tightly drawn over his cheekbones. The pouches that bagged beneath his eyes reminded me of old photographs of the Duke of Windsor, who always looked as though he were perpetually recovering from hangover.