The Masque of the Black Tulip Read online

  But this, he reminded himself selflessly, was supposed to be about Henrietta and what she would like, which also unfortunately ruled out boxing matches, trips to Tattersall’s, and – Miles’s personal favourite – the removal of clothing. From what he knew of females, they were generally more intrigued by the acquisition of clothing than the removal of it. Miles shook his head at the waste of time and fabric. Fig leaves. Now, there was a form of fashion he could support. Of course, some of those dresses of Henrietta’s weren’t half bad, the ones with the filmy skirts that outlined the length of her legs as she walked, and the scooped bodices that – Ergh. Miles cast a guilty glance around the room and placed his hat on his lap with exaggerated nonchalance, wishing that current fashion didn’t mandate breeches that were quite so damnably formfitting.

  Miles resolutely turned his mind to safer topics. He did vaguely remember hearing someone going on at a ball once about flowers speaking the language of love. Miles dubiously regarded the squished posy of primroses, already turning slightly brownish around the edges. They didn’t say anything to him other than ‘Water me!’ He supposed there might be a metaphor in there somewhere – love needing nourishment, and all that sort of drivel, but from what he knew about gardening, nourishing flowers involved a great deal of compost, which even Miles was quite sure was about as far from romance as one could get. ‘Oh my love is like a dung heap’ was far more likely to get a chamber pot flung at his head than cries of rapture.

  Miles shook his head. He briefly considered nipping out of the War Office and running over to Hatchards for one of those romantic novels Henrietta seemed to find so engrossing, but rapidly rejected the idea. After all, even if he managed to find an appropriate book, how would he know where to look? He doubted they had an appropriate index, with entries like ‘Wives, for the wooing of,’ or convenient chapter headings, such as ‘How to Deliver a Declaration of Love in Ten Easy Lessons.’ Miles cringed, imagining the derisive laughter sure to follow his possession of such a publication.

  A dinner à deux, Miles decided. That was the ticket. There would be champagne, and oysters, and chocolate – not all at once, he concluded, after some consideration. Miles adjusted his mental image slightly and added some grapes, for the peeling. He could feed them to Henrietta one by one, and if one, or two, or ten just happened to slip into her bodice and need retrieving, well, they were slippery things, peeled grapes. Those Romans certainly knew what they were doing, thought Miles happily. Peeled grapes…a couch big enough for two…maybe some custard…

  Wickham’s aide reappeared, loudly clearing his throat. Miles rose with a start, spilling an entire bucket of mental grapes, none of them, unfortunately, anywhere near Henrietta’s bodice.

  ‘He’ll see you now,’ the aide said in harried tones, chivvying Miles towards the office. ‘But make it quick.’

  Miles nodded in acknowledgment and bounded through the door into Wickham’s office. Someone had replaced the map on the wall since his last visit, evidently employing a stronger pin. The map quivered a bit as the door slammed shut behind him, but remained in its place.

  Miles dragged his accustomed chair in front of Wickham’s desk. ‘Good morning, sir!’

  Wickham’s shrewd eyes travelled from Miles’s beaming countenance to the somewhat wilted primroses. ‘I can see that you think it is,’ he replied, adding, ‘For me, are they?’

  Confused, Miles looked down at his hand, started, flushed, opened his mouth, closed it again, and looked as flustered as a strapping man of sporting tendencies can contrive to look.

  ‘Er, no,’ he said, shifting the primroses hastily behind his back. ‘I’ve just been married!’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Wickham dryly. ‘I wish you both very happy. I take it you did not come to see me simply to inform me of your recent nuptials?’

  ‘No.’ Miles’s expression took on a more serious cast as he scooted his chair closer to Wickham’s desk. ‘I have reason to believe the Black Tulip is Lord Vaughn.’

  The spymaster eyed him dispassionately. ‘Do you?’

  Miles nodded grimly, and proceeded to start at the beginning. ‘Someone crept into Selwick Hall this weekend disguised as the Phantom Monk of Donwell Abbey.’

  Wickham cast Miles a faintly quizzical glance.

  Miles waved his hand dismissively, realised he was still holding the despised posy, and hastily stuck it under his chair. ‘A local tale. It doesn’t signify, sir.’ He leant forward in his chair. ‘At first, I thought our phantom was only after Selwick’s papers—’

  ‘A reasonable assumption,’ murmured Wickham.

  ‘Thank you, sir. The evidence appeared to bear that out. We found the papers in Selwick’s desk disarranged, but nothing else in the house had been disturbed, and there were no signs of activity anywhere on the grounds.’ Miles paused slightly, remembering exactly what sort of activities had been occurring on the grounds.

  Wickham’s keen eyes narrowed. ‘And in Selwick’s desk?’

  ‘Only estate papers, sir. Selwick has always been quite careful not to leave sensitive documents lying about.’

  ‘I assume that isn’t the extent of your tale.’ Wickham glanced at the clock on his desk, Atlas supporting not the world, but the time.

  ‘Right.’ Miles took the hint and hurried rapidly through the rest. ‘We stopped at an inn, where my companion overheard Lord Vaughn in conversation with the opera singer Mme. Fiorila – at least, I’m fairly certain it was Mme. Fiorila,’ Miles corrected himself. ‘Upon leaving the inn, we noticed we were being followed. Since the London-to-Brighton road is a popular one, I initially thought nothing of it, until their coachman drew a gun. We evaded pursuit and returned to London. So you see’ – Miles thumped enthusiastically on the desk, making Atlas jump – ‘it must have been Vaughn! Who else would have known to follow us from the inn?’

  ‘One point requires clarification, Mr Dorrington. Who is “we”?’ enquired Wickham. ‘Were you with Selwick at the time?’

  Miles flushed. ‘Er, no. At least, not with that Selwick. I was with his sister, Lady Henrietta.’

  Wickham responded to that extraneous detail with an attention he had failed to display to anything else Miles had said thus far. He sat bolt-upright in his chair, fixing Miles with the stare that had been known to make French agents leap out third-story windows and hardened English operatives slink beneath their capes.

  ‘Lady Henrietta Selwick?’ he repeated sharply.

  ‘Ye-es,’ affirmed Miles, regarding his superior with some confusion. ‘You know, Selwick’s younger sister?’ It didn’t seem quite the time to impart the news that she now bore another title; Wickham’s expression was more funereal than bridal.

  ‘That, Mr Dorrington,’ said Wickham harshly, ‘is bad news. Very bad news, indeed.’

  ‘Bad news?’ Miles was half out of his chair, grasping the edge of Wickham’s desk.

  Wickham had already levered himself out of his desk chair and was striding towards the door. ‘It means,’ he explained, reaching for the door handle, ‘that Lady Henrietta is in grave danger.’

  Something sharp was poking Henrietta in the arm.

  Making sleepy noises of protest, Henrietta rolled over and buried her face into the fluffy depths of the feather pillow. She flung out an arm and wiggled deeper into the sheets. But there was an odd, musty smell to the pillow, not like her own lavender-scented linen, and the sheets felt strange against her bare skin.

  Henrietta’s eyelids flew all the way open, and she sat abruptly up in the bed, clutching at the coverlet as it threatened to fall to her waist. Last night. Her wedding. Miles… It had all really happened, hadn’t it? Yes, of course it had, she assured herself. Or else, why would she be unclothed in a strange bed? As to what had transpired in that strange bed…Henrietta turned redder than the opulent crimson counterpane.

  The cause for her blush was absent, but in his place perched a hastily folded note. Reaching out, Henrietta unfolded the scrap of paper, and leant groggily ba
ck against the pillows. In Miles’s large, untidy handwriting, the note stated, ‘Went to War Office. Back by noon.’ It was signed with an exuberant squiggle that might have been an M, a D, or an amateur portrait of Queen Charlotte.

  Not precisely an ode to her charm and beauty.

  Henrietta shook her head and chuckled. How like Miles it was! There was a postscript, however, that brought more of a sparkle to her eye than any of the effusions, verse and prose, of her past admirers. At the bottom of the page, Miles had scrawled just one word: ‘Magnificent.’

  Henrietta clutched the note to her chest, beaming besottedly. It really had been quite magnificent, hadn’t it? Lifting the note, Henrietta read the word again. Magnificent. That did say ‘magnificent,’ didn’t it, not ‘maleficent’ or ‘malodorous’ or ‘magnificat’? Henrietta peeked again, just to make sure. Yes, it quite definitely said ‘magnificent.’ Happily crinkling the edges of the paper, Henrietta read the postscript over four more times, until the letters began to unfold into little black squiggles and the word ‘magnificent’ began to disintegrate on her tongue, and she had to remind herself of what it meant.

  Resolutely refolding the note (after just one last peek to make sure the word was still there, and not just another iteration of ‘Miles’ that had happened to sprawl over into extra letters), Henrietta settled back against the pillows, the little square of paper balanced on her chest, tucking her chin down along her collarbone to squint at it. It wasn’t exactly a love letter, she reasoned, nobly resisting the urge to snatch it open again, but it was a token that Miles intended to go along with his end of the bargain, and do his best to make things work. Bargain. Henrietta struggled up onto her elbows, dislodging the piece of paper. That did take some of the glow out of it. She didn’t much relish being a romantic charity case, tossed alms in the form of a spare word.

  He was also kind to small children and animals. Ah, but would he write a love letter – oh, fine, a love word – to a discontented puppy? No, Henrietta slowly concluded, but, then, puppies couldn’t read, so, to a puppy, a spare bone really might be quite the same thing. And one word was such a little bone…

  Henrietta flopped over, whapping her face into the pillow. Hard.

  Such thoughts were entirely, whap, entirely, whap, counterproductive. A flushed but resolute Henrietta emerged from the feathers. Pushing her hair back out of her face, and brushing aside a stray feather that had become caught in the tangles, she clambered out of bed, winding the bedsheet around her as she went. Enough tormenting herself with silly speculations that couldn’t possibly be resolved. She had a house to be organised (Henrietta scrunched her nose, remembering the musty smell of the pillow; airing the linens was definitely in order), servants to be reviewed (Henrietta turned another colour entirely, remembering her first meeting with the staff the night before, while not on her own feet), and a letter to be written to her parents.

  Henrietta’s hands stilled on the edges of the sheet at the thought of her parents. Servants first, she decided. She could work her way gradually up to dealing with her parents over the course of the afternoon. She would be willing to wager that Richard had already written them, had probably written to them before the thrum of Miles’s carriage wheels had echoed away down the drive. Whatever Richard had written was bound to portray the weekend’s events – and the morals of the characters concerned – in a less-than-flattering light. Henrietta wasn’t sure if what had happened was amenable to flattering lights, but if there was one, she intended to find it. Estrangement from her parents…it just wasn’t to be thought of. It would be as dreadful for Miles as it would be for her.

  Henrietta reached out her hand to ring for her maid to help her dress. There was one slight flaw to that plan. She didn’t have a maid. Nor, for that matter, did she have any clothes.

  She eyed yesterday’s travel-stained dress with disfavour, picking it up with two fingers. The skirt was liberally streaked with dirt; there were splatters of goodness knew what (Henrietta certainly didn’t want to know) on the hem, a tear in the bodice, and – merciful heavens, was that a leaf of cabbage stuck to the sleeve?

  ‘I just don’t want to know,’ muttered Henrietta, shaking the dress by the other arm until the offending vegetation fell off onto the red-and-blue-figured carpet.

  Henrietta contemplated raiding the wardrobes of Loring House, but couldn’t help but suspect that she and Miles’s mother would have radically different tastes in clothes. And while the classical mode was still in style, going about draped in a sheet struck her as not only risqué, but draughty. Yesterday’s clothes would have to do, until she could go to Uppington House to fetch more.

  Grimacing, Henrietta wiggled into the begrimed garments, managing to reach just enough buttons to prevent the dress from plummeting precipitously. There was a tarnished silver brush on the dressing table, and Henrietta used it to attack the knots and snarls that had sprung up all over her head. Henrietta blushed at the recollection of how some of those tangles had developed. She could feel Miles’s hands running through her hair, his lips on hers, his…er. Henrietta glanced guiltily around.

  ‘Silly,’ she muttered to herself.

  At any rate, she thought, moving onto safer ground, a good number of those tangles dated back to their precipitate flight from the inn. The memory of the faceless black coach behind them was enough to make Henrietta’s happy pink glow fade away entirely.

  Miles seemed so sure that it was Vaughn.

  Frowning, Henrietta pulled the brush slowly through her hair, working her way through the tangles.

  Everything pointed to Vaughn. That undue attention he had only displayed upon hearing she was the sister of the Purple Gentian, that strange episode in the Chinese chamber, and his habit of cryptic conversation. He had told her he hadn’t been to France for many years. Yet, yesterday, he had spoken of returning to France as if after a brief absence. He was on the trail of a mysterious female, and, most damning of all, he was in a position to have followed her and Miles out of the inn.

  And yet…something rang a false note, like a song sung slightly flat. Henrietta frowned into the mirror, trying to isolate the source of her discontent, drawing her mind back to the narrow stairwell, the muffled voices heard through the chinks of the doorframe.

  With her faculty of sight obstructed by the door, Henrietta had been entirely concentrated upon Vaughn’s voice, every last timbre and hint of emotion. Voices were something of which Henrietta had made rather a study. Vaughn had been frustrated, he had been irate, but there was no tang of malice in it. Instead, she had heard an ineffable weariness that inspired the sort of sympathy one felt for Lear tossed out upon the heath, a strong and stubborn man brought to the end of his endurance. Henrietta wrinkled her nose, giving her hair an unnecessarily vigorous stroke with the brush. Such flights of fancy were entirely extraneous to a properly ordered investigation.

  A man could smile and smile and still be a villain; he could have a voice resonant with sorrow and still be plotting to murder Jane and overthrow the English throne. But Henrietta was quite convinced that Vaughn was not. Henrietta grimaced; she could imagine what Miles would make of that argument.

  If not Vaughn, who? After all, who else had been at the inn to know of their presence? Turnip? The notion was as laughable as Turnip’s infamous collection of carnation-coloured waistcoats.

  But the thought of Turnip reminded her of something else. Or rather, of somebody else.

  Henrietta paused with the brush suspended in midair and stared unseeing into the mirror, hazel eyes crinkling around the corners in concentration as the elusive memory that had been teasing her snapped into place. A man in dandified clothes with a thin black moustache, stepping aside to allow her to pass. He had been there, hovering close by their table, when she barrelled down the stairs, standing ever so casually by the fireplace. Watching.

  Despite the overshadowing hat and the immense folds of the cravat, there had been something familiar about him. Of course, she cautioned herse
lf, she had been quite overset and distracted at the time, first by the tension with Miles, and then by the encounter with Vaughn. None of her senses had been at their sharpest.

  And yet…Henrietta put the brush down with a definitive click on the dressing table. It was certainly worth investigating. And if her hunch was mistaken, Miles need never know. She had no grand plans for swooping in and making grand accusations, no aspirations towards daring escapades. Those were more in Amy’s style than hers. As Henrietta had learnt the previous day, she really had no taste for danger.

  But she wouldn’t be in any danger, decided Henrietta, sweeping back her hair. She would just snoop about a bit, and return home. What could be safer?

  And she knew just how to go about it…

  Miles bounded out of his chair and grabbed Wickham by the elbow before he could open the door. ‘Grave danger?’

  ‘Danger to Lady Henrietta, to the Pink Carnation, and to the whole of our enterprises in France,’ Wickham said gravely. Removing his elbow from Miles’s limp grasp, he opened the door and shouted, ‘Thomas!’

  Miles stared in frozen horror at his superior. ‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘What danger?’

  Wickham frowned at him. ‘All in good time. Ah, Thomas, arrange for a detail of soldiers to be sent to Uppington House—’

  ‘Loring House,’ corrected Miles tersely.

  That momentarily achieved Wickham’s attention. ‘Loring House?’

  ‘Married,’ Miles said briefly.

  Wickham assimilated that information with a brief flicker of his eyelids. ‘Indeed.’ He turned back to his secretary, whose eyes were darting nervously from one man to the other. ‘Send a detail of soldiers to Loring House—’