The Masque of the Black Tulip Page 13

  Miles jerked his mind back to the matter at hand before it could stray into dangerous territory.

  Vaughn’s study would be the obvious place to search – which was precisely why he wasn’t going to do so. If Vaughn was the ruthless spy he supposed him, he would have anticipated the possibility of midnight callers, and hidden his papers accordingly, planting false information in the more obvious spots, such as locked desk drawers and hollow globes. Besides, Vaughn had only recently returned from his travels; he would have got in the habit of keeping his most sensitive papers close by him, ready to be packed up and moved along at a moment’s notice. And when a gentleman wanted something kept close at hand, he kept it in his bedroom. The same principle applied for both documents of a sensitive nature and mistresses.

  Even Delaroche, that half-mad fanatic, kept his more sensitive documents under his pillow – or had done, until Richard cleared out the lot.

  Vaughn’s house was a connoisseur’s dream and a spy’s nightmare, filled with tottering vases and unexpected statues. Miles nearly fell back into one of the former as he rounded a corner to encounter a fourteen-foot-high Hercules guarding the front stairs. A very dispirited-looking lion crouched underneath Hercules’s foot, and the club in Hercules’s hand seemed to be pointed directly at Miles.

  ‘Hello, old chap,’ murmured Miles as he placed one foot warily on the first step, balancing on the balls of his feet to keep his heels from clicking tellingly against the marble. Rugs. That was what this house needed, decided Miles crossly. Lots and lots of rugs. It would make creeping about much easier.

  Hercules continued to watch him as he climbed, the stairs circling around the statue. ‘Keep an eye out for the staff for me, would you?’ Miles asked. He had always felt something of a rapport with Hercules ever since that incident with the determined countess. And he shared the man’s dislike for snakes, an antipathy obviously not echoed by Vaughn. They figured prominently in his decorating scheme. Sconces encircled by writhing reptiles reposed at regular intervals along the walls.

  Crossing his fingers for luck, Miles selected a room at random, slipping soundlessly inside, shutting the door again behind him. With the heavy drapes closed, the room was in complete darkness. Rather than blundering about, Miles decided to risk striking a match. In the momentary flare, he saw flowered wallpaper, a dainty writing desk, and an embroidered fire screen.

  Not the earl’s bedchamber – but the countess’s?

  Miles made it to the window just before the match burnt down onto his fingers, and nudged the drapes aside just enough to allow in sufficient moonlight to see by. Everything was a little blurry, but it was safer than another match, and what he saw confirmed his guess. The room was dainty and feminine, and nothing in it dated to later than a decade ago. Dried-up bottles containing cosmetics and perfume still sat on the dressing table, and an old-fashioned sacque was draped along the end of the bed, as though its owner were expected to return and don it at any moment.

  More important, there were doors in both walls, and where there was a countess’s suite, there was bound to be the earl’s. Much easier than blundering around the hallway, poking his head through more doorways. One never knew who might be on the other side.

  The door on the far left yielded what Miles sought. He was in Vaughn’s bedchamber. And quite a bedchamber it was. The room was dominated by an immense bed, placed on a raised dais in the French style, and adorned with innumerable swags of rich blue velvet. Two shapely nymphs held up the headboard, an immense shell that Venus would be proud to call her own. The carvings on the bedposts carried out the aquatic theme; dolphins disported themselves with water nymphs while Triton supervised from above. Miles gave the posts a careful tap – the dolphins’ tails looked like excellent latches for a secret cache – but came away with nothing more than a bruised knuckle.

  The small cabinet beside the bed likewise refused to yield up any vital secrets, containing nothing more exciting than a chamber pot. Determined to be thorough, Miles removed the item. After all, what more devious place to hide secret documents? An exceedingly quick inspection put paid to that theory. Sometimes, a chamber pot was just a chamber pot.

  By the time he had rooted through all the bed linen, inspected Vaughn’s armoire, gone through his collection of silver-headed canes, peered underneath an embroidered footstool and up the chimney, some of Miles’s initial enthusiasm began to fade. He hadn’t been expecting a folio volume to be sitting upon Vaughn’s pillow, helpfully engraved with the legend MY CAREER AS A CUNNING SPY AND OTHER SHORT STORIES, but something would have been useful. A letter in cipher, perhaps. Or a mysterious bit of crumpled paper. There had to be something. Clearly, he just wasn’t looking in the right places.

  Trying to scrub a hand through his hair, but foiled by the bloody bandanna, Miles turned to glare at Vaughn’s bed. What had he missed? There was no room to hide anything in the shell, and the nymphs were completely solid; Miles had checked, with special attention to the fleshier bits. The cabinet beside the bed held nothing but that chamber pot…and a book. How had he overlooked the book?

  Skidding on a small Persian carpet, Miles bounded back up onto the dais and snatched up the book from the top of the cabinet. It was Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and it wasn’t hollow. Damn. But there was a piece of paper folded into it, marking the page.

  It was too big to be the note he had seen change hands last night; Miles noticed that straight off. Sticking a finger in the book, so as not to lose Vaughn’s page, Miles yanked out the folded piece of paper and shook it open. Damn, damn, damn. Nothing but a bloody playbill. No wonder Vaughn was using the thrice-blasted thing as a bookmark.

  Miles started to return it to its place – and froze. Slowly, with a dawning excitement, he held it back up to the meagre moonlight.

  Not just a playbill. A French playbill.

  If he hadn’t been in Vaughn’s house under decidedly suspicious circumstances, Miles would have jumped up and down and hooted. As it was, he gave an involuntary start of excitement that sent the book tumbling. Miles caught it before it could hit the ground and dumped it unceremoniously on the bed. The hell with marking the page – he had his man.

  France! Vaughn had been in France! And, recently, too. The date on the playbill was only a fortnight ago, well after Bonaparte had broken the Peace of Amiens, and booted all Englishmen out of the country as potential enemy agents. Any Englishman found in the city was subject to instant imprisonment. Jane had only slipped beneath the notice of the Ministry of Police because she was a woman, and the first cousin of Edouard de Balcourt, a toadyish hanger-on at the First Consul’s court. Vaughn had been not just in France, but in Paris, heavily patrolled Paris, where the Ministry of Police was all aquiver with anxiety over the Pink Carnation. Vaughn had been in Paris, attending a bloody operatic performance, in plain sight of Bonaparte’s watchdogs. The whole thing reeked to high heaven.

  Miles could have kissed that playbill, but he didn’t want to smudge the ink.

  Bringing it over to the window, he examined the document more closely in the moonlight. It announced the performance of one Madame Aurelia Fiorila, Queen of the Operatic Stage. The name niggled at Miles; he knew he had heard it before, and recently. He could chase down recollection later; right now, something else claimed his attention, an address, scribbled in the lower-right-hand corner of the playbill: 13 rue Niçoise. Their operatives in France would have to follow the lead. It might be innocent, the home of an acquaintance, or a shop that specialised in ebony canes…or it might not be.

  Miles was just folding the paper when he heard the sound. A sound that wasn’t the rustle of leaves in the maple trees, or the faint crackle of embers from the banked fire, or the steady tick of the gilded clock on the mantelpiece. The lilting lines of melody from across the square had long since ceased. In the silence, Miles heard the stealthy slide of feet moving deliberately across the floor behind him.

&nbs
p; That was all the warning Miles had before reflected silver flashed in the window. Acting on instinct, Miles dodged out of the way, and the serpent’s fangs plunged through the glass instead of Miles’s head, spewing shards with a hideous clatter. Miles’s assailant raised the cane to strike again.

  Whirling, Miles grabbed the cane and struck out with one booted foot. He heard something crack, and a high-pitched yelp of pain. His opponent abruptly released his grip on the cane, sending Miles sprawling back into Vaughn’s armoire. By the time Miles had shaken his head clear and sprung back to his feet, his assailant had wrenched open the connecting door to the countess’s chambers and disappeared into the darkness beyond.

  Miles cursed fluently. Grabbing up the abandoned cane, he started in pursuit, until a new noise made him still in his tracks.

  Make that lots of noises.

  The broken window had done its work; the household had been awakened, and were after the intruder in full cry. Miles could hear masculine shouts of alarm, the shrill squeals of housemaids, and, far more ominous, the pounding of feet thudding down the hall to the earl’s chambers.

  Miles whirled grimly from the connecting door to the countess’s chambers, through which his assailant had disappeared, to the doorknob of Vaughn’s bedchamber, which was already beginning to rattle. The lock would only hold his unwitting pursuers for so long. There was, unfortunately, only one path to take.

  Praying that his old skills had not entirely deserted him, Miles put one hand on the sill and vaulted out of the window – into a decidedly prickly hedge.

  Some things never changed.

  Assaulted by a hundred tiny stings, Miles crawled through the underbrush, yanking off mask and bandanna as he went. A few more yards and he would emerge from the shrubbery into the square, brush himself off, and stroll calmly out again in his guise of inebriated man about town. The servants would be looking for a footpad, not a bon vivant. Miles was just bracing himself to spring forth from the shrubbery, when, with all the perversity of memory, the answer hit him.

  He knew where he had heard that name before.

  Despite a bruised knee, a twisted wrist, and scratches on parts of his anatomy he didn’t even want to think of, a cocky grin spread across Miles’s unmasked face.

  Tomorrow, he was going to the opera.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘It’s locked,’ said Colin.

  Feeling like a heroine from a gothic novel caught out in some mischief, I pulled away from the padlock I had been examining. The padlock was attached to a very thick oak door, which in its turn was attached to a large stone tower.

  After a morning spent in the library poring over the Selwick archives, even my dedication had begun momentarily to flag. Henrietta’s handwriting was perfectly legible, and Jane’s a historian’s dream, but Miles’s was all but indecipherable. Besides, outside the library window, the sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and the larks were on the thorn.

  Or was it the snails who were supposed to be on the thorn while the larks were on the wing? Either way, it didn’t much matter. I wanted to be out there with them. Good weather in England in November is too rare not to take advantage of it.

  Packing everything neatly away into their little acid-proof cases, I’d returned to my room to don my multipurpose Barbour jacket and the most sensible of my shoes. Unfortunately, given the nature of my shoe collection, they weren’t terribly sensible, a pair of Coach stacked loafers with improbably narrow heels. They worked very well on the streets of London, and looked excellent extending under the hem of a pair of pants, which had been my primary consideration to date. I didn’t think they’d fare all that well in crossing a patch of lawn.

  I looked longingly at the spare pairs of Wellies lying about next to the kitchen door as I let myself out – there were some that didn’t look too far from my size – but since I had already invaded Colin’s home, it seemed like pushing it a bit too far to appropriate his sister’s boots. At least, I assumed they were his sister’s boots. Goodness only knew how many women flitted in and out of Colin’s kitchen. I’d only been there three hours when the first one appeared. That could explain the large number of boots in the entry way.

  Scolding myself for being silly, I made my way out of the kitchen and along a little stone path that someone had conveniently laid out once upon a time. The irregular stones were separated by broad swathes of creeping thyme and other greenery I couldn’t recognise; the effect was too charmingly natural not to be deliberate. I picked my way from stone to stone, my heels and I giving sincere thanks to whoever had had the bright idea of putting something between their feet and the turf.

  The path led around the side of the house, into the gardens. They were, for a modest gentleman’s residence, fairly extensive gardens. I was lost within five minutes. Mind you, I have managed to get lost two blocks away from my own apartment, so that isn’t saying much. In my meagre and not very convincing defence, the gardens were laid out not in the formal French mode, where you can see for miles and even I have trouble losing my way, but in an English wilderness style, designed to lead the hapless wanderer down meandering paths into unexpected cul-de-sacs. Excellent for assignations among the shrubbery. I wondered idly if that was one of the reasons they had caught on in the eighteenth century. It was very hard to sneak out for a surreptitious smooch among flat parterres.

  There was no hermit’s cave complete with hermit and tortoise, à la Arcadia, but I did stumble across a faux Roman ruin, featuring larger-than-life-sized heads of miscellaneous emperors, and artistically arranged fallen columns. At least, I assumed it was faux. Had the Romans ever made it to Sussex? They might have; they tended to pop up in the most unexpected places (to fall back on the standard academic disclaimer, it’s not my field), but I rather doubted they’d travelled with their favourite statues. Besides, Marcus Aurelius had a decidedly French look about the nose. I abandoned the classical folly for a pretty summer house entwined with vines, whose glossy dark leaves suggested they might become roses at some more promising point in the year.

  I kept an eye out for a familiar blond head as I made my way along the pathways. I hadn’t seen Colin at all since the previous evening, when I had left him doing the washing up. When I had gone down to the kitchen that morning, there had been a note propped against the sugar bowl, saying, ‘Out. Help yourself. C.’

  One had to admire the economy of language. Hemingway would approve. Dr Johnson wouldn’t.

  Wherever ‘out’ was, it wasn’t in the gardens. The closest I came to a human form was a very smug Apollo playing his lyre above a fountain flanked by fawning naiads, like Elvis surrounded by swooning teenyboppers. I had a nice little chat with Apollo, much to the distress of the naiads, and clambered up on the rim of his fountain to try to get a better vantage point. These ramblings were all very amusing, but I did have a goal, of sorts, and if I was going to get there before the weather changed its mind about not raining, I needed to start being a bit more purposeful about it.

  Ever since the car had pulled up the drive last night, I had been hankering to explore that hunk of stone in the distance. The library window provided an exceptionally fine view; the eye was drawn over the gardens, and straight to the noble monument on the hill, with its jagged outline of crumbling stone. It might merely be another folly, like the charming faux Roman fountain – there had been an eighteenth-century vogue for Gothic ruins as well as classical ones – but it seemed a bit massive and unadorned to be a mere garden decoration. Whatever it was, I wanted to explore.

  An open expanse of field separated the gardens from the little tower mound. It was a longer walk than it looked, mostly uphill. I left a little trail of heel-shaped holes in my wake. More effective than bread crumbs for finding one’s way home, I reassured myself.

  The tower stood at the top of its own little summit. It was larger than it appeared from the house, constructed of massive stones that gave me the same dwarfed feeling I had the first time I’d been taken to the Temple
of Dendur in the Met as a small child. Slowly, I paced the circumference of the structure, running a hand along the rough stone of the wall as I went. It was completely solid, without any apertures for the curious to peer through – or the covetous to besiege. Higher up, there were the thin shadows of arrow slits, but from ground level the place was entirely impermeable. It would have made a fine prison for Rapunzel.

  The only way in was a thick door on the south side of the tower. There were no metal studs or intricate iron bolts or little grille set high in the door, or any of the other trappings of fairy tale. This door was a simple, workmanlike affair, with one purpose: to keep people out. It clearly wasn’t the original door; the old timbers must have rotted long ago. Someone, fairly recently, had put in this sturdy contraption of oak. Just in case intruders – like me – didn’t get the hint, it had been fastened shut with a padlock the size of a small handbag.

  The padlock was very shiny, and very new. And very definitely locked.

  That was where Colin came in. I turned to face him, squinting against the sunlight.

  ‘I can see that it’s locked, but what is it?’

  Colin stood up very straight, locked his hands behind his back, adopted a vacant stare, and said in a credible tour-guide voice, ‘You see before you, miss, the first keep what was built by the Selwick family in the time of William the Conq’ror. That’ll be four pounds fifty for entry.’

  ‘Really?’

  Colin dropped the pose. He was wearing a faded pair of jeans with that soft sheen jeans get when they’re on the verge of disintegrating in the next wash, and a battered green jacket. He looked relaxed. Happy. They were not attributes I associated with Colin. Tense and edgy were usually more like it.

  ‘All right, then, five pounds.’

  ‘Does this really date back to the Conquest?’