The Masque of the Black Tulip Page 37

  ‘Wait,’ Miles interrupted again.

  ‘Yes?’ snapped Wickham.

  ‘Lady Henrietta. No one knows she’s at Loring House. Isn’t she safer without a troop of soldiers announcing her presence? If I can keep her there quietly, make sure she doesn’t leave the house—’

  ‘Thomas!’ The secretary snapped to attention. ‘I want two men guarding Loring House. They are to be dressed as gardeners.’ Wickham turned to Miles. ‘Loring House does have a garden, I take it?’

  Miles nodded meekly.

  ‘If Lady Henrietta makes any attempt to leave the house, she is to be returned to it. If someone other than Mr Dorrington, Lady Henrietta, or their staff attempts to enter the house, they are to be prevented. Any suspicious behaviour is to be reported to me at once. At once. The safety of the realm depends upon it. Is that understood?’

  It was understood.

  Wickham’s secretary scurried off. Miles intercepted Wickham before he could return to his desk, implicitly dismissing Miles.

  ‘What happened?’ Miles demanded.

  Wickham freed his arm from Miles’s hand, proceeding to his desk at a measured pace that did nothing for Miles’s nerves. ‘Lady Henrietta’s contact—’

  ‘Hen has a contact?’ muttered Miles.

  ‘Lady Henrietta’s contact,’ Wickham continued, glaring pointedly at Miles to show he would brook no further interruptions, ‘disappeared late last week from her shop in Bond Street. We found her yesterday. In the Thames.’

  Miles swallowed hard.

  ‘What has this to do with…’ he began, knowing full well what the answer must be, but hoping against hope that there might be some other explanation. An innocuous explanation. An explanation that wouldn’t place Henrietta in peril.

  ‘If you do not know the answer to that, Mr Dorrington, I cannot imagine why we continue to employ you here!’ Catching sight of Miles’s stricken face, Wickham took a deep breath and modulated his tone as he explained, ‘We found her yesterday. It took us until this morning to identify her.’

  Miles blanched. ‘Torture?’ he asked unevenly.

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  ‘Do you think—’

  Wickham spread his hands in a gesture of frustration. ‘We cannot know for certain. But the methods employed were’ – Wickham paused, the furrow between his brows deepening – ‘extreme.’

  Miles cursed violently.

  ‘Your story,’ Wickham said wearily, ‘is distressing, but not surprising. It confirms what we expected.’

  ‘Your agent cracked,’ Miles said bluntly.

  Wickham didn’t bother to argue with the implied aspersion to his minions.

  ‘Precisely. The Black Tulip knows your wife can lead him to the Pink Carnation.’

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Magnificent: intensely dangerous, even deadly. See also under Splendid, Superb, and Superlative

  – from the Personal Codebook of the Pink Carnation

  It had all seemed like such a good idea back at Loring House.

  Henrietta hunched over a grate in the sitting room of a modest townhouse, pretending to rake ashes while her eyes busily searched the interior of the chimney for any suspicious rough patches that might denote a hidden cache of some kind, or the entrance to a priests’ hole. Henrietta didn’t think the townhouse, a narrow construction in a genteel but hardly fashionable area of town, was of an age to possess a priests’ hole, but who was to say that one hadn’t been added later for purposes other than priests? There might be a smugglers’ hole, or a guilty lovers’ hole, or any other manner of hidey-hole tucked away in the bricks of the chimney.

  It would have been an inspired course of action, if only the interior of the chimney had not been entirely composed of suspicious rough patches. The soot-caked bricks jutted out at all sorts of angles, any one of which could be the lever that released a hidden door – or simply a soot-caked brick. A subtle peek under the carpet in the guise of sweeping had proved equally fruitless. The panels of the floor marched in faultless order, not a trapdoor among the lot. The walls were lamentably plain, free of ornately carved panelling or gilded mouldings that might double as secret mechanisms. In short, Henrietta was feeling quite, quite thwarted.

  Back at Loring House, Henrietta had finally chased down the elusive memory that was taunting her to its own hidey-hole, deep in the recesses of her brain. Henrietta would have liked to have claimed it was that mumbled ‘Pardon me, madam’ that had awakened her suspicions, that her trained ear had caught the familiar lilt in that light tenor voice, even through the muffling layers of cravat. It wasn’t. The voice had been excellently done, not gruff enough to arouse suspicion, but not high enough to set one thinking about castrati and the breeches roles in Shakespearean comedies. It hadn’t even been the breeches themselves; they had been ingeniously padded with buckram, and so many young bucks were eking out their own minor endowments with a little aid from art and padding that, even had the padding been obviously ill-done, no one would have suspected. The fashionable clothes provided an excellent screen. The high points of the collar shaded cheeks too smooth to be masculine, and lent through shadow the specious appearance of reality to the glued-on hairs of a fake moustache. The monstrous cravat shielded a chin too delicately pointed to be male and a throat that was more Eve than Adam. Elaborate waistcoats and stiffened coattails provided better means than binding one’s breasts for hiding a female form.

  In the end, it was those same clothes that had set Henrietta wondering.

  Why would someone so obviously all up to the crack wear his hair in an old-fashioned queue? A young pink of the ton, like Turnip, would have his hair cut short, fashionably tousled in a Brutus crop, or whichever other classical figure was the model of the moment. Queues were the province of the old, the unaware, or the resolutely stodgy, distinctly at odds with boots by Hoby, and a cravat tortured into the complicated folds of the Frenchman at the Waterfall. A nice touch, that, thought Henrietta, sifting ash into her bucket from the side of the shovel, watching the fine fall of not-quite-dead embers.

  Once Henrietta had recognised the incongruity of the queue, the rest followed. She had only seen that shade of black hair on two people. It wasn’t the rare blue-black of Spain, or the coarse brown-black that so often passed for the colour among the dusty blondes and muddy brunettes who dotted the British Isles, but true, deep black that shimmered silver when the light struck it.

  One was Mary Alsworthy. Her hair was the sort of shining black curtain that poets blunted their pens on, but Henrietta couldn’t see her cavorting about unpopular inns in breeches, even if they were fashionable breeches. Mary Alsworthy might elope in the dead of night, but she would do it in full rig, velvet cloak, and a yippy lapdog on her knee, just to make it easier for her pursuers to follow and stage a grand scene.

  The other was the marquise.

  What vanity, Henrietta wondered, had led her to leave her hair down? Perhaps not vanity, but practicality, Henrietta concluded generously, shovelling ash. To cut off her hair would have undoubtedly occasioned notice – although so many were doing that nowadays, in token of those whose heads had been lopped off in the Terror – and the lush mass was too much to bundle beneath a hat without the shift being immediately obvious.

  The voice, the hair, the height, the form, it all fitted – but nothing else did. Henrietta would have been willing to stake her best pearls that the man in the inn had indeed been the marquise, but to what end? The marquise’s motives all ran in the opposite direction. Estates, title, riches, consequence, husband, all had been stripped from her by the Revolution. Henrietta rather doubted she regretted the loss of that last, for all her pious utterances to the contrary, but consequences and riches were quite another matter. Hadn’t the dowager said little Theresa Ballinger had an eye for the main chance?

  The main chance might have led her to throw in her lot with the new power brokers in Paris, but if so, it hadn’t gained her much. Her townhouse was in an area that was respec
table, but not grand, sparsely furnished rather than the silvered opulence one would have expected of the marquise. The rugs were worn, the walls were bare, and the furnishings badly in need of being recovered.

  None of it added up.

  And she knew, with grim certainty, that if she broached the theory to Miles, he would unerringly poke his finger into each of those logical holes, one by one. And then – Henrietta winced in a way that had nothing to do with the bit of ember that was gnawing a hole in the rough fabric of her skirt and finding it tough going – and then Miles’s face would curve into a great, big smug grin, and he would hoot, ‘You’re jealous!’ He might have the restraint not to hoot; he might manage to force the words out in reasonably nonhooting tones, but the hoot would be there, taunting her. Henrietta’s cheeks burnt at the very thought. And what proof did she have other than one black queue, seen in passing in a crowded coffee room? Certainly nothing that would convince a court of law. M’lud, the girl is obviously love-struck. Makes them unreasonable, you know.

  Henrietta had no idea why the opposing counsel in her head sounded quite so much like Turnip Fitzhugh, but, then, Turnip was always popping up where one least expected him.

  Banishing Turnip, Henrietta rested her shovel against the grate and stretched her tired arms, where muscles she hadn’t realised she possessed were engaged in vociferous protest. A hot bath, that was what she wanted, with lots of lavender-scented bath salts and enough steam to make the room go hazy.

  Hands on her hips, Henrietta took one last look around the sparsely furnished room. She might as well have that bath sooner rather than later. So far, her mission had been fruitless in the extreme, unless one counted finding half a dried apple under one of the settees. It showed no sign of being poisoned, or being anything else of interest, other than old, withered, and thoroughly disgusting.

  Taking one of Amy’s suggestions, Henrietta had garbed herself as a maidservant, borrowing a coarse brown wool dress from one of the baffled underservants at Loring House. Henrietta had gabbled a hastily contrived story about a fancy dress party (the maidservant had appeared entirely unconvinced) and slunk sheepishly back up to the upper reaches to don her prize, which, for all its plainness, had the advantage of being far cleaner than Henrietta’s own clothes from the day before, and entirely cabbage-free. Henrietta resolved to give all the servants at Loring House a respectable raise in the very near future. They might think her a madwoman, but she would rather they think her a generous madwoman.

  Thus attired, Henrietta had slipped out of the house. Amy had been entirely right; with her plain dress on, and a simple white cap over neatly braided hair, no one gave her a second glance. Her entrance through the kitchen of the marquise’s townhouse occasioned no comment; the cook was bent over the fire, and a kitchen maid was too busy chopping and telling the cook about that girl what had been done wrong by the groom’s second cousin once removed to pay any notice.

  Once inside, Henrietta had first gone upstairs, making for the marquise’s boudoir. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking for – a series of signed instructions from Paris would have been most helpful – but anything of a suspicious nature would do to get the attention of the War Office, and wipe the hoot out of Miles’s voice. The clothing worn by the mysterious gentleman at the inn, wigs, false moustaches, a cache of correspondence in code. Any of those would provide assurance that she wasn’t just – Henrietta grimaced at the possibility – acting out of pure, rank, baseless jealousy.

  Unfortunately – Henrietta plunged her shovel back into the fireplace – so far, jealousy was looking more and more like the only explanation. She had only moments in the marquise’s boudoir before the click of heels heralded the arrival of the marquise’s lady’s maid, but there was nothing there that wouldn’t be found in Henrietta’s own. Even the little pots of face paint seemed no more than one would expect to find on the dressing table of a sophisticated lady of the world. Henrietta toyed with the notion of notes slipped into the base of the hares’-foot brushes used to apply cosmetics, but the idea seemed too wild, and certainly nothing to be heeded by the War Office. Besides, they hadn’t made a crinkling noise when she squeezed them.

  Bucket and shovel serving as a screen, Henrietta had made her way through the other bedrooms, but they were all clearly untenanted. The rooms were painfully bare, carpeted only with dust, the feather ticks sagging dispiritedly on their elderly frames. Henrietta had peeked into one armoire, for form’s sake, and found it entirely empty, except for an adventurous spider that mistook Henrietta’s shoulder for a tuffet. Remembering her position as an emissary of the War Office, Henrietta didn’t scream. She squished it instead, rather more vindictively than necessary.

  The barrenness in itself, Henrietta mused, was more interesting than otherwise. Even the marquise’s bedchamber, with hangings on the bedposts and gowns in the clothes press, had a starkly temporary air, like the room of a wayside inn. The marquise’s belongings formed a fine film over the furniture, hastily unpacked and as easily swept away again.

  Of course, Henrietta reminded herself, that could have more to do with poverty than nefarious circumstances.

  The sitting room, with the weary air inherent to hired lodgings, had been Henrietta’s last hope. It, like the bedroom, seemed at least to be somewhat lived in. There were the remains of a fire in the grate – which Henrietta quickly set about demolishing to justify her presence in the room – and a scattering of books on a spindly legged table by the settee. Henrietta had flipped through them, but found no secret caches containing pistols or vials of poison, no faint marks over letters indicating a code, no filmy sheets of paper wedged between the pages, bearing messages beginning with ‘Meet me at midnight under the old oak in Belliston Square…’ The books themselves clearly belonged to a former tenant. La Nouvelle Héloïse might be in the marquise’s style – Rousseau’s sentimental novels had enjoyed a great vogue in France a few years back – but his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality was decidedly not light reading, nor was the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos. It was in French, rather than the original Latin, but still not the sort of work Henrietta imagined the marquise leafing through for pleasure.

  In short, Henrietta’s mission had been an utter waste. All she had learnt was that the previous owner of the house had serious-minded taste in reading material and that housework was harder than it looked. Miles, she thought grimly, would hoot if he knew.

  Well, there was no reason for him to know. Henrietta dropped the despised shovel into the bucket with a little puff of ashes. With any luck, he would have stopped off at White’s for a round of darts with Geoff before returning to Loring House, and she could slip back and into normal clothes before he even realised she had been gone. In fact, she could stop by Uppington House on the way home and change into fresh clothes, and if Miles enquired, she had spent the whole morning arranging for her clothes and books – and Bunny, of course – to be sent over to Loring House. It was, she decided airily, straightening and brushing her grimy hands off against an already blotchy apron, an entirely plausible course of action.

  Or it would have been, had not a footstep in the hall sent Henrietta flying back into place over the fireplace. As the door to the sitting room opened, Henrietta realised she was holding the shovel by the pointy bit, and rapidly reversed it, hoping the marquise hadn’t noticed.

  The marquise’s attire was at distinct odds with the hopeless shabbiness of her hired house. She wore a diaphanous gown of lilac muslin that floated around her in a fine film, more like mist than fabric, and her black hair, that lush, silver-black hair, had been twined into a complicated arrangement of curls, threaded with shimmering lilac ribbon, and winking with diamond-headed pins. There was nothing stark about her attire, but Henrietta was put irresistibly in mind of the warrior goddesses so beloved of the Romans, Minerva in her chariot, or Diana in her glade, both entirely devoid of human weakness.

  Crossing to the window that overlooked the street, the marquise flicked an
impatient hand at Henrietta, and said in a voice as flat and hard as Minerva’s breastplate, ‘You may go.’

  Keeping her head down, Henrietta bobbed a clumsy curtsy, and began to gather the accoutrements of her disguise. She was just hefting the bucket of ashes, mentally rehearsing the tale she intended to tell Miles, when the marquise looked at her again, sharply. Henrietta’s shovel handle rattled against the side of the bucket.

  ‘You. Girl.’

  Henrietta stilled, shoulders hunched, head bowed, her cessation of movement, she hoped, answer enough.

  The marquise spoke again, her voice sharp with impatience, and something else. ‘Yes, you. Come here.’

  Bucket in hand, Henrietta shuffled slowly forward.

  ‘Where do you have her?’

  The door of Lord Vaughn’s breakfast parlour slammed into the silk-hung wall, driving a long snag into the fragile hangings.

  The door itself held to its hinges, but only just.

  After Wickham’s revelation, Miles had covered the space between the War Office and Grosvenor Square in record time, heedlessly upsetting apple carts, shouldering aside innocent passers-by, and stepping on small animals, all the while assuring himself that Henrietta was a notoriously late sleeper, that she would never have left the house, that the Black Tulip couldn’t have possibly traced them to Loring House yet. He had held the image of Henrietta, brown hair fanned across the crimson counterpane, peacefully slumbering, to him like a talisman.

  Seeing that empty bed had been one of the worst moments of his life. The worst. Worse than the scene in the garden, worse than the loss of Richard’s friendship. Wild with disbelief, Miles had tossed aside the bedcovers, crawled under the bed, even thrown open the doors of the armoire as if, for some arcane reason, Henrietta might have crawled in there and become stuck. It wasn’t until after he had charged through both dressing rooms, turned the old wooden bathtub upside down, and yanked down the bed hangings that he’d seen the note lying there among the discarded bedclothes. He’d snatched it up, hoping – well, he wasn’t even sure what he was hoping for. His mind hadn’t been working along orderly lines.