The Masque of the Black Tulip Page 14

  Colin laid an affectionate hand on the rough stone of the wall, like a farmer slapping the rump of a prize cow.

  ‘Probably not. Fulke de Selwicke was granted this land by the Conqueror in 1070 or thereabouts, but his original stronghold was most likely built of wood. Most of them were, you know,’ he informed me. I hadn’t known, but I nodded knowledgably, anyway. ‘This keep probably dates to the twelfth century, at best.’

  I shoved my hair out of my eyes. The wind had picked up, and my hair was at that awkward length where it’s not long enough to pull back effectively, but just long enough to be a nuisance.

  ‘Can I go inside?’

  I love old castles. For a while, I had considered studying the Middle Ages, just to have an excuse to clamber through crumbling old keeps. But then I discovered that you needed years of intensive training just to make out the handwriting. Not to mention that my reading Latin was still purely at an eighth-grade level. The eighteenth century was much easier. But I had never quite lost my fascination with castles, the more decrepit the better.

  Colin shook his head. ‘Sorry, no visitors.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The place is falling apart. It’s a huge insurance liability.’

  ‘Oh.’ I must have looked as disappointed as I felt, because Colin took pity.

  ‘There’s not much to see. The upper floors have entirely disintegrated. It’s really nothing but a hollow shell.’

  ‘With arrow slits,’ I said wistfully. Arrow slits always conjure up images of Technicolor extravaganzas with Errol Flynn manning the battlements, and a fighting friar swigging ale somewhere in the background.

  ‘We used it to store farm equipment,’ Colin said ruthlessly, ‘until a piece of coping crushed the back of a tractor.’

  ‘Have you no romance in your soul?’ I demanded.

  ‘There is nothing romantic,’ countered Colin, ‘about good equipment being ruined.’

  ‘Serves you right for putting farm equipment in there. It was probably the ghost of Fulke de Selwicke getting back at you for desecrating his keep.’

  ‘We don’t have any ghosts, remember?’ Colin took my elbow in one hand, and clamped his other arm across my back to steer me away from the tower. I automatically jerked away. Colin dropped his arm. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.

  Relieved. Definitely relieved.

  To hide my momentary confusion, I asked a question that had been idly floating about in my head. ‘If this isn’t the principal seat of the Selwick family’ – that was Uppington Hall in Kent, home to the current Marquis of Uppington, and favourite destination of tourist buses – ‘why is the original tower here?’

  ‘Shouldn’t it be the other way around?’ Colin asked, with an amused sideways glance.

  I threw him an exasperated look. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘There’s nothing mysterious about it,’ said Colin, walking easily, hands in his pockets, as I braced myself against the downwards slope of the hill. I was beginning to be a little sorry I had shaken off his steadying hand. ‘The family wasn’t elevated to the peerage until 1485. We backed the right side on Bosworth Field, against old Crouchback—’

  ‘You mean when Henry Tudor stole the throne from poor, good King Richard? Richard had a much better claim to the throne than Henry.’ I sent him an arch glance that was only somewhat spoilt by my tripping over a malevolent rock. The rock was obviously a Tudor supporter.

  Colin grabbed my arm to steady me, and let go again as soon as it became clear I wasn’t in imminent danger of tumbling down the hill. ‘I wouldn’t go repeating that if I were you. We’re quite fond of good King Henry. He gave Sir William Selwick an estate confiscated from one of Richard’s supporters near a little town called Uppington.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Hence the title.’

  ‘Hence the title,’ Colin agreed. ‘It was only a barony at the time, but after the Restoration, Charles the Second elevated the baron to earl.’

  ‘For his loyal service to the Crown during the Civil Wars?’ I guessed, conjuring up an image of a dashing cavalier in plumed hat.

  ‘That,’ Colin said, with a suggestive lift of his eyebrows, ‘was the official story. The earl also had an exceptionally beautiful daughter.’

  ‘She didn’t!’ I exclaimed, easily caught up in the gossip of several hundred years ago. Charles II had been known for his roaming eye – and for his generosity in handing out titles to those who had warmed his bed.

  ‘We’ll never know for sure,’ Colin said tantalisingly, ‘but Lady Panthea bore a very swarthy son just eight months after her father was invested as earl.’

  ‘Lady Panthea was fair?’ I guessed.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Colin.

  We nodded at each other in complete historical complicity. His hazel eyes caught mine. That look was an entire conversation in itself, one of those odd moments of unspoken communication when you know beyond a doubt that you’re on the exact same page.

  My damnable fair skin turned red with a thought that had nothing whatsoever to do with Charles II.

  ‘What about the marquisate?’ I asked awkwardly, pretending great interest in the flagstones beneath my feet. We had started up the little path to the kitchen door, and I made a show of stepping from stone to stone. ‘When did that come in?’

  Colin shrugged. ‘It’s not nearly as engaging a story. The earl at the time had some success as a general in the Wars of the Spanish Succession. Queen Anne raised him to marquis.’

  Colin stopped to open the kitchen door for me, waiting for me to precede him into the house. ‘I’d show you around the house, but I have some paperwork I need to get sorted before tonight.’

  I shook my head, feeling my tousled hair shift around my face. ‘That’s all right. I should be getting back to the library anyway. But, listen, about tonight…if it’s going to be weird for you having me at that party, I don’t mind staying here on my own. I won’t feel left out or anything.’

  Colin grinned. ‘Not looking forward to an evening with the vicar, are you?’

  I bristled at the imputation of faintheartedness. ‘No! It’s not that! I just – thought I might be butting in,’ I finished lamely.

  ‘Trust me,’ said Colin dryly, ‘I don’t resent the intrusion.’

  Now was the time to ask what the story was with Joan, and what the hell he thought he was doing using me as a human shield. ‘But Miss Plowden-Plugge might. I don’t want to be nosy or anything, but—’

  ‘Reading other people’s letters isn’t?’

  ‘Not when they’ve been dead two hundred years,’ I retorted, before realising that I’d just been cleverly rerouted. Damn, was I that easy to manipulate?

  ‘One wonders whether they would agree,’ mused Colin.

  I refused to be drawn in further. ‘About tonight—’

  ‘If you don’t have anything to wear,’ cut in Colin smoothly, ‘you can take a rummage around Serena’s wardrobe.’

  How did he do that? Belligerently, I opened my mouth.

  ‘She won’t mind,’ Colin reassured me. ‘It’s all several years out-of-date, anyway.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I muttered. ‘I think.’

  ‘Splendid! I’ll leave you to it, then, shall I?’ He strolled out, whistling.

  Not surprising that he should whistle, I thought indignantly. He had just assured himself of a walking, talking buffer zone.

  It wasn’t that I minded, I told myself, clomping out of the kitchen and down the red-papered hall to the front stairs. It was just being conscripted without being asked that bothered me. And maybe, just a little, the notion that he wanted me along for something other than my charming company.

  I took the stairs very, very slowly, pondering that thought. If I was to be honest with myself – which is really a highly overrated thing to do – it did rankle, just a little, to know that it wasn’t my sparkling eyes and effervescent wit that had spurred him to press the invitation. I understood quite well that I had only
been asked along to fend off Joan Plowden-Plugge. I made an effort to look at the situation with detached amusement. After all, romantic peccadilloes are always quite entertaining when one isn’t at the centre of them, and I should have been happily snickering into my sleeve at the thought of Colin hiding behind me to escape a predatory blonde. There was plenty of prospect for good old-fashioned slapstick.

  Somehow, it wasn’t quite as funny as it should have been.

  I stopped and glowered at one of Colin’s ancestors, who stared superciliously at me from a heavily gilded frame on the second-floor landing. You, I scolded myself, are refining too much on a look and a smile. So, fine, a moment ago, walking back, there had seemed to be just the tiniest bit of a spark there. And, all right, maybe I had been the tiniest – just the tiniest bit – intrigued. After all, he was handsome, if one liked that clean-cut, fair-haired, Prince William sort of look. He was clever, and amusing, and engaging – when he wanted to be. Not to mention that there are very few men out there who can bandy about English monarchs in conversation. That, to me, was more lethal than any number of washboard abs.

  For goodness’ sake! I was clearly letting Henrietta’s mood infect my own. So far, in my limited acquaintance with Colin Selwick, he had been impossibly rude in a letter, followed it up by being even more insufferable in person, and only in the past day or so had thawed into normal human behaviour.

  Besides, even if this warm, friendly, relaxed Colin was the real thing, it was a horrible idea to get involved with someone whose archives I was using, almost as bad as an office romance. What if we started something (I pulled my disobedient mind back before it could go into too-detailed contemplation of what that something might be, complete with dialogue), it ended rapidly, and I still had several thousand pages’ worth of manuscript to read? At best, it would be exceedingly awkward. At worst, it might mean the end of my access to his library. Men come and go; manuscripts remain constant. Or something like that.

  But there were those sideways glances…

  I clumped off down the hall in the direction of the library, as if by creating a clatter I could drown out the irritating hum of my own thoughts. On the verge of taking out the manuscripts, I paused. In this sort of mood, I could stare at the same page for half an hour without reading a word. And communing with Colin’s ancestors was probably not the best way to take my mind off Colin.

  Instead, I fished in my pocket and dug out my mobile. What I needed were voices, nice, modern, human voices. Like my little sister Jillian’s. She would soon set me straight. But – I consulted my watch – it would only be nine-thirty in the morning back in the States, and Jilly wouldn’t appreciate being woken up before noon on a Saturday. Nor, for that matter, would her roommates, who would all be sleeping off their Friday night revels. Last call for brunch in the dining hall wasn’t till one o’clock, so why get up before twelve-forty-five? Ah, college.

  Oh, well, I could always call Pammy. I scrolled through my list of contacts for her number. While she might not be any good at delicate emotional crises, Pammy was excellent at telling me I was behaving like a dimwit.

  Wandering over to the window, I pressed send.

  ‘Ellie!’ squealed Pammy. The diminutives come of having known one another since we were five, along with a revolting wealth of embarrassing personal information. ‘How’s Sussex?’

  ‘I’m being a dimwit,’ I said, one eye on the window.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing…yet.’ Was that a flash of green jacket over there at the edge of the garden? No. It was a plant of some sort. They have those in gardens, I reminded myself. ‘I caught myself considering snogging Colin. Silly, no?’

  ‘Why not?’ yelled Pammy. ‘He’s cute. You’re single. Go for it!’

  ‘You’re supposed to tell me that I’m being ridiculous!’

  ‘When was your last real date?’ asked Pammy pointedly.

  I did some quick mental calculation. That blind date back in March didn’t count, nor did that June dinner with a colleague that was supposed to be platonic until the guy tried to grope me in the cab on the way back. A whack on the offending hand convinced him of the error of his assumptions. The truth was, I just hadn’t met anyone who seemed worth expending the time and effort of dating. As a place to meet eligible men, a university campus (unless you’re an undergrad, in which case it’s like having your own private buffet) ranks just slightly above convents and concerts of folk music. And since I’d moved to London…well, there’s always an excuse, isn’t there?

  ‘Last December,’ I muttered. The date of my highly publicised and messy break-up with Grant.

  ‘That’s pathetic!’

  ‘I love you, too, Pams.’

  ‘Listen, there was an article in this month’s Cosmo’ – a rustle of papers in the background as Pammy shuffled through her extensive magazine collection – ‘here it is! “Ten Easy Ways to Seduce the Pants off Him.”’

  ‘But I don’t want—’

  Pammy kept going full steam ahead. ‘Wear something sexy tonight. No tweed. Do you have a bustier?’

  ‘No!’ I yelped.

  ‘Oh, I’d loan you mine, but the Sussex thing is kind of a problem. How about—’

  ‘Don’t even think of it,’ I said grimly. Pammy occupied the fringes of the fashion world. Combine that with an absolute lack of a) taste, and b) shame, and you had the red leather bustier, the dress made out of multicoloured feathers, and the hot pink snakeskin pants. Thursday night she had tried to persuade me into an outfit constructed entirely out of two handkerchiefs.

  I was saved by the agitated bling of Pammy’s landline.

  ‘Uh-oh! Gotta go. Good luck tonight! I want all the juicy details tomorrow, and I mean all! Mwah!’

  ‘There won’t be any – grrr.’ The line had gone dead.

  So much for Pammy setting me straight. Oh, the hell with it all! I jammed my phone back into my pocket. I was going back to the nineteenth century, where at least no one printed articles about seducing the pants off idiot men one didn’t want to seduce, anyway, even if one owned a bustier, which one didn’t.

  Maybe I should take Colin up on that offer to raid Serena’s wardrobe. She was a little skinner than me, and a little taller, but in a cocktail dress, surely that didn’t matter that much, did it? And if it were a little tighter and shorter than it was supposed to be, well…

  Urgh! Dammit, I wasn’t going to tart myself up, and I wasn’t going to seduce anyone, and I wasn’t going to go all weak-kneed over high cheekbones and an opportune reference to Charles II. That way madness lay, complete with huge signs warning, ‘Here be dragons.’ One dragon in particular. Prone to sudden flares. Probably gobbled up the odd village maiden in his spare time, leaving only the Wellies behind.

  Dragging out the collection I had been working with before, I unlooped the string holding the box together, and forced my mind back to more important problems, like long-dead French spies.

  If the drinks party from hell wasn’t starting until seven-thirty, and it was only two-thirty now, I should still be able to get several hours of work in. It wouldn’t, I told myself firmly, take me that long to dress. There was no reason to make any special effort, and there was every reason to stay longer in the library. I still had no inkling as to the identity of the Black Tulip, although for Henrietta’s sake, I wouldn’t have minded if it turned out to be the Marquise de Montval.

  Of course, there was still Vaughn’s mysterious behaviour to be reckoned with, and Miles’s midnight assailant. I had gone over his letter to Richard describing the incident three times, hoping to find something I’d missed, an asterisk or a postscript giving some inkling as to the appearance of the figure who had swung at him with the cane, but there was none. Either he hadn’t caught much of a glimpse, or he hadn’t thought what he saw worth noting.

  Unlike that playbill, about which he had gone on for several paragraphs in tones of increasing excitement. Personally, I thought he was refining too much on a bo
okmark – goodness only knows I’m prone to grabbing up whatever piece of paper is lying nearest at hand – old movie tickets, the phone bill, postcards – and wedging it between the pages. Vaughn’s being in France was interesting, but not necessarily damning.

  As for the opera singer…like Miles, the reference niggled at my memory. I knew I’d come across something similar before, during my early pre-England days of dissertation research, when I was reading whatever I could get my hands on in Harvard’s libraries, from old periodicals preserved on microfilm to whatever contemporary correspondence had made it into scholarly editions. There had been something about an opera singer, I recalled with mounting excitement. Rumours of a connection with Napoleon. Accusations of espionage. And her name had ended with A.

  Just like every other opera singer in existence, I reminded myself dryly.

  Damn. I could practically see the page in my head, scrolling across the grimy screen of the microfilm reader in the basement of Lamont. It had been a gossip column of some sort – and had it been the opera singer who was accused of being a spy, or her husband? Of course, this could all be made quite simple by opening my laptop and using the find feature on my notes, but, no, that would make it all too easy. I was embarked on a personal grudge match with my memory.

  Catalani. That was her name. Fine, so it didn’t end with an A. It was a vowel, wasn’t it? And there were two As in the name, so, really, it was a more than reasonable mistake.

  Damn. It would have been so convenient if the opera singer in question had been Mme. Fiorila.

  Come to think of it, the entire incident had been much later, too, not until…1807? 1808?

  Maybe, I thought wildly, there was a whole spy network out there, composed entirely of opera singers!

  Maybe I was being entirely ridiculous.

  Definitely the latter.

  With a little grimace at my own folly, I retreated to my favourite chair, and unwound the string from the acid-free box that contained Henrietta’s diary and correspondence for the year 1803. Hopefully Henrietta’s meditations were proving more fruitful than mine.