The Masque of the Black Tulip Page 7

  ‘As well delivered an insult as I’ve ever heard! And I’ve delivered quite a few in my day. You always were a smooth-talking rogue, Vaughn. But I’ll present you to these young chits, anyway.’ The duchess waved her cane dismissively at Charlotte. ‘My granddaughter, Lady Charlotte Lansdowne.’

  Charlotte sank into a dutiful curtsy. Lord Vaughn’s quizzing glass passed over Charlotte’s bowed blond head without interest.

  ‘Miss Penelope Deveraux.’ Pen sketched the merest gesture of a curtsy. The quizzing glass rested on Penelope’s clean-boned face and flaming hair for a moment, then continued its inexorable sweep onward.

  ‘And Lady Henrietta Selwick.’

  ‘Ah, the sister of our gallant adventurer.’ On Lord Vaughn’s lips, the word ‘gallant’ sounded more insult than praise. ‘His fame has reached even the more remote corners of the Continent.’

  ‘I imagine they don’t have much else to talk about,’ Henrietta said tartly, coming up out of her curtsy. ‘Being quite so remote.’

  For the first time, Lord Vaughn looked her full in the face, a flicker of interest in his heavy-lidded eyes. He let the quizzing glass dangle and took a step closer.

  ‘Would you teach them more interesting topics, Lady Henrietta?’ he asked silkily, in a tone meant to make a lady’s heart beat faster and her cheeks flush.

  Henrietta’s pulse picked up – with annoyance. Having grown up with two rakes-in-residence, namely Richard and Miles, she didn’t fluster easily.

  ‘The study of ancient literature is always a worthy pursuit,’ she suggested demurely.

  Vaughn’s quizzing glass dipped in the direction of the neckline of Henrietta’s gown. ‘I prefer natural philosophy myself.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’ Some internal imp prompted Henrietta to say, ‘I could tell just by looking at the adorable serpents on your waistcoat, my lord.’

  Lord Vaughn cocked an eyebrow. ‘Adorable?’

  ‘Um…yes.’ Blast that internal imp. It always got her into trouble. Henrietta cast about for a suitable response. ‘They’re so…slitheringly sinuous.’

  ‘Perhaps your taste in waistcoats runs more to flowers?’ he suggested smoothly.

  Henrietta shook her head. Since she had got herself into this ridiculous conversation, she decided she might as well go on with it. ‘No, they’re too insipid. What a waistcoat needs is a nice mythical beast. I’m particularly partial to gryphons.’

  ‘How unusual.’ Lord Vaughn eyed her with a slightly bemused expression, as though trying to ascertain whether she was exceptionally clever or some sort of entertaining oddity like a parrot who could recite Donne. ‘What are your sentiments regarding dragons?’

  Henrietta cast a pointed look in the direction of the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale. ‘I’m quite fond of some of them.’

  ‘If your fondness extends towards the Oriental varieties, I have a modest collection of Chinese dragons in my possession. They would be, I am sure, quite different from any you have seen.’

  ‘I will admit my experience with dragons has been limited, my lord,’ Henrietta hedged warily. Over Lord Vaughn’s shoulder, she could see her mother bearing purposefully across the room, looking uncommonly irked. ‘One encounters so few. They are nearly as elusive as unicorns.’

  ‘Or the Pink Carnation?’ suggested Lord Vaughn lightly. ‘I’m giving a masked ball at my home in two days’ time. If you would grace the event with your presence, I would be more than pleased to make you known to my dragons.’

  ‘I hope they’re not in the habit of eating tender young maidens,’ Henrietta quipped, hoping to direct the subject back to the general and inconsequential, and away from her putative attendance at Lord Vaughn’s masquerade. ‘I hear dragons have a tendency to do that.’

  ‘My dear young lady’ – Lord Vaughn’s long-fingered hand stroked the serpentine head of his cane – ‘I can give you my best assurance that—’

  ‘Hello!’ Miles rudely burst in on the conversation. ‘Do hope I’m not interrupting. Hen, your lemonade.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Henrietta greeted Miles with some relief and peered dubiously into her cup, which contained about half an inch of yellow liquid. The rest, judging from the stickiness under Henrietta’s fingers, had evidently sloshed over the sides during Miles’s enthusiastic progress from the refreshment table. ‘Lord Vaughn, do you know Mr Dorrington?’

  ‘Vaughn, did you say?’ Miles perked up inexplicably; then his face relaxed into a big grin. ‘Vaughn, old chap!’ Miles pounded Lord Vaughn on the back. ‘Care for a hand of cards?’

  Henrietta hadn’t known that Miles was acquainted with Lord Vaughn. Clearly, neither had Lord Vaughn, who was regarding Miles as though he were a strange stick insect who had crawled out of his ratafia.

  ‘Cards,’ he repeated delicately.

  ‘Excellent!’ enthused Miles. ‘Nothing like a good game of cards, eh, Vaughn? Why don’t you tell me about your travels on the Continent…?’ Taking the earl by the arm, he propelled him in the direction of the card room, passing Lady Uppington on the way.

  ‘That was well done of Miles,’ commented Lady Uppington with approval. ‘Your father would have done the same.’

  ‘Well done?’ repeated Henrietta incredulously. ‘He all but kidnapped the man.’

  ‘He did just as he should. Lord Vaughn,’ pronounced Lady Uppington, in her best ‘I am your mama and therefore know everything’ voice, ‘is a rake.’

  ‘Isn’t Miles?’ countered Henrietta, remembering several tales she wasn’t supposed to have heard.

  Lady Uppington smiled fondly at her daughter. ‘No, darling. Miles is a dear make-believe rake. Lord Vaughn,’ she added disapprovingly, ‘is the real thing.’

  ‘He is an earl,’ teased Henrietta.

  ‘Darling, if I ever turn into one of those sorts of mothers, you have my permission to elope with the first bounder who comes your way. Provided he’s a good-hearted sort of bounder,’ Lady Uppington added as an afterthought. ‘Not that I wouldn’t mind your marrying an earl, but the most important thing is that you find—’

  ‘I know,’ Henrietta broke in, in her best wearisome-youngest-child voice, ‘someone who loves me.’

  ‘Whoever said anything about love?’ countered Lady Uppington, herself the rare possessor of one of the ton’s few love matches, a marriage so sickeningly happy that it had led to decades of raised eyebrows and envious stares. ‘No, darling, what you want to look for is a good leg.’

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘So easy to shock,’ murmured Lady Uppington, before saying seriously, ‘Be on your guard around Vaughn. There are stories…’ Lady Uppington stared in the direction of the card room, a distinct furrow appearing between her elegantly arched brows.

  ‘Stories?’ prompted Henrietta.

  ‘They’re not appropriate for your ears.’

  ‘Oh, but assessing a gentleman’s legs is?’ muttered Henrietta.

  Lady Uppington pursed her lips. ‘I don’t know what I did to deserve such impertinent children. You’re as bad as your brothers. Brother,’ she corrected herself, since everyone knew Charles was a model of decorum. ‘But just this once, Henrietta Anne Selwick, I want you to listen to me without an argument.’

  ‘But, Mother—’

  ‘Miles won’t always be around to extricate you from awkward situations.’

  Henrietta opened her mouth to make a snide comment about that being Miles’s one purpose in life. Lady Uppington cut her off with one raised hand.

  ‘Take your wise old mother’s advice, and stay well away from Lord Vaughn. He is not a suitable suitor. Now, aren’t you supposed to be dancing with someone?’

  ‘Bleargh,’ said Henrietta.

  Chapter Seven

  Cards, game of: a battle of wits waged against an inscrutable agent of the Ministry of Police. See also under Hazard

  – from the Personal Codebook of the Pink Carnation

  ‘What say you, Vaughn? Care for another hand?’ Miles fanned the deck of cards
out temptingly on the tabletop.

  He still couldn’t quite believe his luck in stumbling across Vaughn at Almack’s, of all places. Clearly, someone somewhere was smiling on his efforts. Had Vaughn not been speaking to Henrietta at just that moment…

  He would have tracked Vaughn down eventually, anyway. It just would have taken longer. Miles had evolved, over the course of the afternoon, a very logical plan of action for stalking Vaughn, involving finding out which clubs the older man belonged to, at which hours he tended to frequent them, and where he might be best waylaid. This was much easier.

  The only problem was, none of Miles’s probing questions had obtained the slightest result. Miles had tried commenting casually on the difficulty of finding good footmen nowadays. Lord Vaughn had shrugged. ‘My man of business takes care of that for me.’

  No ‘Dash it all, they’re always dying on me!’ No ‘Funny thing, one of my footmen just happened to snuff it this morning.’ One might expect some reaction – incredulity, annoyance, distress – from an innocent employer whose footman had recently been murdered. There hadn’t been any sudden guilty start or any shifting of eyes, either, but Miles found the absence of reaction just as suspicious as Vaughn’s failure to mention the incident.

  References to the gallant exploits of our flowery friends, the difficulty of travelling on the Continent in this time of troubles, and the shocking rise of crime in the metropolis (especially murder) over the past few weeks had elicited equally little more than polite murmurs. In fact, the only topic in which Lord Vaughn showed the slighted interest was the Selwick family. Lord Vaughn had asked several questions about the Selwicks. Miles, in his role of tiresome young man, had bombarded him with inconsequentialities, like the colour of Richard’s curricle, and the fact that the Selwicks’ cook made exceptionally good ginger biscuits, none of which seemed to be quite what Vaughn was looking for.

  Suspicious, decided Miles. Highly suspicious.

  Unfortunately, he had nothing to confirm his suspicions. Almack’s, alas, was not ideally suited to spying. There was no strong liquor with which to coax Lord Vaughn into a state of gregarious inebriation, and the stakes allowed in the card room were too low for Miles to contrive to lose enough that Miles would have to give Vaughn his vowels (thus cleverly necessitating a visit to Vaughn’s house). So far, Miles had lost precisely two shillings and sixpence. There could be no hope of convincing Lord Vaughn that he didn’t have the blunt.

  ‘Another hand?’ Miles repeated.

  ‘I think not.’ Lord Vaughn pushed back his chair, adding dryly, ‘I shall have to forgo that pleasure.’

  If Miles hadn’t been so sure that the man was a deadly French spy, he would have almost been sorry for him about then. But since the man was quite likely a deadly French spy, Miles had no compunction whatsoever about being as annoying as possible, in a performance based on Turnip Fitzhugh at his less endearing moments.

  ‘Oh, are you going to your club? I could—’

  ‘Good night, Dorrington.’

  Miles bit down on an entirely inappropriate urge to smile, and tried to look suitably rebuffed. ‘Ah, well,’ he said, subsiding into his chair with what he hoped was a mournful air. ‘Some other time.’

  The cane beat a staccato retreat. Miles waited until the echoes had faded and then, cautiously, rose from the table. He peered out the door of the card room. Vaughn was making a leg to Lady Jersey, Lady Jersey was shaking her finger at him, and…Lord Vaughn was exiting the ballroom.

  Miles followed.

  He followed at a suitable distance, making sure to keep hidden within the doorframe as Vaughn climbed into his sedan chair. It was a large chair, and as elegant as everything else about Vaughn. The walls were covered with black lacquer chased in silver that shimmered in the torchlight. Two liveried bearers held the poles at either end.

  Most likely Vaughn was just going home, or to his club (Miles didn’t take his disclaimer a moment before as reliable; hell, if he’d been Vaughn, he’d have lied, just to get rid of him), or to a bawdy house, or anyplace else one might conceivably go of an evening for purposes that had nothing whatsoever to do with espionage.

  But what if he wasn’t?

  It didn’t hurt to follow him. Just in case.

  Miles hurried over to a line of sedan chairs for hire sitting in a row on the opposite side of the street. They did a brisk business, since so many areas of London were unsafe to walk after dark, with streets too narrow for even the skinniest of phaetons, much less a regular carriage. The chairmen were chatting desultorily as they waited for custom – recounting the gorier details of yesterday’s cockfight, from what Miles could hear.

  Miles didn’t wait to hear which bird had won. He strode up to the sturdiest-looking of the chairs, a battered box that had once been painted white but was begrimed to grey, and cleared his throat loudly enough to cause a gale in Northumberland. Two men reluctantly detached themselves from the mob of bird-baiters, and came forward.

  ‘You want a ride, gov’ner?’

  Vaughn’s chair was swaying around a corner. In a moment, it would be out of sight. Miles climbed hastily between the poles, folding his large frame into the small chair.

  ‘Follow that chair!’

  ‘That’ll be extra if you want me to run,’ the bearer in front informed him laconically.

  Miles plunked a half crown into his hand. ‘Go!’

  The chairman jerked a finger towards his colleague in the back. ‘And for me friend.’

  ‘If,’ Miles clipped out, ‘you get me there on time and unseen, I will give you both double that. Now go!’

  The chairmen lifted him and went. Over the chairman’s shoulder, Miles thought he could just barely make out a corner of Vaughn’s chair as it tilted around a corner, but it was too hard to see. Miles leant to the side, causing the chair to sway perilously, and earning a muttered epithet from the chairman in back, who grappled with the poles to keep the chair upright.

  Miles settled back down into the centre of the seat, staring fixedly at the chairman’s shoulder blades. It really wasn’t much of a view.

  Deciding that they were far enough behind that Vaughn’s men wouldn’t notice, Miles lifted the hinged roof of the sedan chair and peered over the top. Vaughn’s chair was so far ahead that he could just make out the glint of the linkboy’s lantern, bobbing up and down before Vaughn’s chair like a will-o’-the-wisp in the darkness.

  Wherever it was going, Vaughn’s chair was taking the most circuitous route possible. Miles’s bearers twisted down narrow alleys where the houses leant drunkenly towards one another, past riotous taverns and quiet churches, around abrupt corners, and through busy thoroughfares. For the most part, Vaughn’s bearers chose the less travelled paths, back alleys where the tops of the chairs jostled against lines of laundry and the chairmen had to slow to keep from slipping in the refuse that fouled the ground. They slowed, but they did not falter, picking up the pace to something near a run whenever the terrain permitted.

  Miles tried to rein in his rising excitement. Vaughn might just be eager to meet a mistress…but what man kept a mistress in this part of town? Although the streets were unfamiliar to Miles, his internal compass was spinning merrily away, and had landed unerringly on southeast; they were heading, in their roundabout way, away from Mayfair, away from Piccadilly, towards the river and the more rough-and-tumble areas to the east. Clearly, they were not making for Vaughn’s townhouse in Belliston Square.

  On a street of shuttered shops and seedy taverns, Vaughn’s chair began to slow. His chairmen obediently trotted around a corner, and paused in front of an alehouse whose sign creaked idly in the evening breeze.

  Miles jabbed the chairman between the shoulder blades. ‘Stop here!’

  The chairman skidded to a rib-crushing halt just before the turn. At least, Miles’s ribs felt like they had been crushed. They had whacked right into the chairman’s head. Wheezing, Miles vaulted out of the chair, clapped some coins into the chairman’s hand wit
hout stopping to count them, and flattened himself against the corner of the building.

  Miles watched as Vaughn waved away the hand offered him by one of his bearers, and climbed out of his chair. At least, Miles assumed it was Vaughn. The figure who emerged from the chair was entirely swathed in a large black cloak. Only the serpent-headed cane marked the phantom figure as the same man whose footsteps Miles had dogged. Pausing to arrange something with his chairmen – most likely the time at which he wished to be collected, as the neighbourhood was not one in which a gentleman would wish to go on foot – Vaughn disappeared into the tavern.

  Miles squinted at the faded sign above the door. Depicted below a ducal coronet were a pair of broad-topped boots of the type worn by the cavaliers of a century ago. Miles could just barely make out the faded legend. THE DUKE’S KNEES.

  The entire place had a seedy aspect, an air of long decay compounded by drooping shutters and peeling paint. Despite its run-down aspect, it seemed popular enough. A trio of men, swaying together in song, had just staggered out the door, unleashing a hint of the hubbub within – and a strong reek of spilt ale – before the door teetered closed again.

  As an afterthought, Miles leant down and unclipped the jewelled buckles from his shoes, slipping them into his waistcoat pocket. In this neighbourhood, they shone like a beacon, if not to his quarry, then to the thieves and footpads who waited to prey on inebriated gentlemen after dark. If Miles could have also stripped himself of his white silk stockings and knee breeches, he would have, but somehow, he thought he’d arouse more attention striding in there buck-naked than he would clad as though for a court audience.

  What he needed was a cloak, one of those big, all-enveloping sorts that Vaughn had been sporting. Damn! Keeping to the shadows, Miles cursed himself for not having thought of it. Of course, he hadn’t realised that he was going to be playing the intrepid spy tonight as well as the bored escort; had he known, he would have dressed accordingly. Not in black – since no one wore unrelieved black except spies and parsons, and Miles had no desire to be taken for either – but various dull shades of brown that would blend into the scenery and render him eminently unremarkable.