"I do not think" — the accent was very much in the ascendant, as was the affectionate note of laughter — "that a paragon should speak so."

Vaughn's voice again, quick and impatient. "Are you quite certain there was nothing else there?"

Nothing else where? Henrietta frowned at the uninformative wooden panels of the door, wishing there was some way she could get closer, some way she could see.

There was a swish of fabric, as though someone had just subsided into a chair. "I made the inspection of his belongings with much thoroughness. And most unpleasant it was, too," the woman's voice added tartly.

Richard's belongings, perhaps? Henrietta listened with all her might, willing the conspirators to speak further.

Henrietta heard boots on bare wood as Vaughn strolled across the room, followed by the sound of lips meeting — a hand? Lips? Henrietta couldn't tell. Vaughn spoke, voice heavy with rue and reluctant charm. "Forgive me, Aurelia. I am an ungrateful beast."

Blast. Henrietta scowled at the door. Now he chose to apologize? "I know," replied the other complacently, and equally uninformatively. "But you have your compensations."

"Most of them measured by guineas," Vaughn replied drily.

"If I were any other woman," the accented voice chided gently, "I would take offense at that."

"If you were any other woman," countered Vaughn, "I would not have said it." There was a pregnant pause, a rustle of fabric that might have been an embrace, or merely the woman shifting in her chair — Henrietta cursed her sightless state — before Vaughn resumed, his tone brisk. "I leave for Paris on Tuesday."

"Are you sure that is wise, caro?"

"I would have an end to this business, Aurelia. The game has been played for long enough." Vaughn's voice rang with grim finality, sending a reluctant shiver through Henrietta's thick shawl. So might Beowulf have sounded outside Grendel's den, girding himself for havoc and death. "The time is come to behead the hydra."

"You don't know that it is she." The soft soprano voice made one last attempt.

"Everything points to it." Vaughn's tone brooked no argument.

Everything pointed to what? To whom? Henrietta shifted her weight to the top step to press her ear more firmly against the door frame. The elderly step shifted and groaned, protesting her weight.

Booted feet clipped toward the door, clicking ominously against the bare planking.

"Did you hear that?"

Henrietta froze, one hand on the wall.

"What am I meant to be hearing, caro?"

"Someone. By the door."

"This old building, it is full of the creaks. You are too imaginative, my friend," the lightly accented voice chided affectionately. "You quarrel with shadows."

"My shadows carry swords."

Vaughn punctuated his words with a staccato flurry of footsteps.

Henrietta didn't wait to hear more. She careened down the stairs in reckless haste, clinging to the banister as she all but fell down the last three steps. She flung herself around the turn of the wall just as, at the top of the stairs, a door creaked open.

Pressed against the wall, panting, Henrietta heard Vaughn's muttered curse, and a warm female voice say, "Did I not tell you it would be so? Come, sit by me, and leave the shadows to their rest for an hour."


He couldn't find them there.

Henrietta's mind raced in tandem with her rapidly beating heart. If Vaughn had been searching Richard's study… If the she to whom he had referred was somehow, incomprehensibly, Jane… If — Henrietta mustered the greatest, most alarming if of all — if Vaughn was the Black Tulip, they must get away before he knew they had been there.

Vaughn had said he wasn't leaving till Tuesday. If he were the diabolically clever Black Tulip, he might have been deliberately laying false clues, but Henrietta didn't think his alarm at hearing a footstep outside the door had been feigned. Their best chance was to return to London and inform the War Office of everything that had transpired and allow them to take the appropriate steps.

Tearing into the coffee room, narrowly avoiding a slender man in an immense cravat, wearing a high-crowned black hat pulled low over his ears, Henrietta grabbed Miles by the arm and tugged. "I really think we ought to go now."

Miles looked at her quizzically. "The food only just arrived."

Henrietta cast him a look of urgent appeal. "Please? I'll explain in the carriage."

Miles shrugged, bemused but game. "Righty-ho, then."

Rising, he stretched — Henrietta gave an agitated little hop — snagged his hat and gloves from the chair beside him — "Come on, come on," urged Henrietta under her breath — and tossed a few coins on the table.

"That ought to cover it."

"But — " began Turnip, gesturing inarticulately to the platters and jugs arrayed before them.

"Sorry, Fitzhugh" — Miles paused in the doorway to wave his hat in the Girection of his friend — "must be going."

Miles abruptly staggered out of view from the door frame as Henrietta applied pressure to his arm.

"Havey-cavey," muttered Turnip, shaking his head after them. He speared a piece of mutton and regarded it fiercely. "Deuced havey-cavey!" Henrietta chivvied Miles out into the yard, glancing anxiously behind them as Miles sent for the curricle. There was no sign of Vaughn in the doorway, or lurking around the sides of the building (Henrietta hadn't discounted the possibility of other exits) or at the windows above their heads. Only the dandy in the absurd cravat had strolled out behind them, yawning in the afternoon sunlight as he waited for his carriage and team to be brought about. There was something vaguely familiar about the man, but Henrietta didn't have time to waste chasing memory to its lair. Undoubtedly one of the many chinless wonders with whom she had stood up at the series of endless events that comprised her two and a half Seasons on the marriage market.

"You seem to have acquired an admirer," Miles commented shortly, boosting her into the curricle. He paused to glower at the man in the doorway, who continued to admire his own stickpin, supremely unconcerned. "Hurry," urged Henrietta. As if to back her up, the horses, a new team, pranced restlessly in their harness as the ostler handed off the reins to Miles.

Miles slapped the horses into motion. "Do you care to explain what's going on?"

Henrietta flapped an agitated hand at him, twisting to stare over the folding back of the curricle at the rapidly receding inn yard. "Later!"

Since it took Miles several moments to get the measure of the new team, and Henrietta seemed more inclined to squirm in her seat and cast anguished glances behind them than speak, it was several moments before Miles broached the topic again.

"Not that I mind being bereft of Turnip's company," said Miles, steering his way expertly around two hens that had decided to cross the road, "but why the sudden desire to leave? Dare I hope it was a passionate desire to be alone with me?" His eyebrows drew together. "Was that man bothering you? If he was, I — "

"No, nothing like that." Henrietta cast a haunted look back over her shoulder. A black post chaise, clearly a private vehicle, although a well-worn one, tooled along the road behind them, but it was far enough away to ensure them a modicum of privacy. Nonetheless, just to be safe, Henrietta hunched towards Miles and lowered her voice for greater secrecy. "There was something suspicious going on back there."

Miles grimaced. "Something about a propitious dancing bear?"

Maybe her voice hadn't needed to be quite that low.

Henrietta started again. "When I went upstairs, I overhead Lord Vaughn in the private parlor."

Miles shot up in his seat. "What!"

Since Henrietta had been speaking quite clearly that time, she correctly assumed that Miles's exclamation had more to do with surprise than lack of comprehension. "He was speaking with a woman with a foreign accent — it was a very light accent, but still noticeable."

Miles smacked one gloved hand against the side of the curricle. "Fiorila!"

"Flowers?" said Henrietta, perplexed.

"Poisonous ones." Miles hauled on the reins, preparing to bring the carriage about. "Why didn't you tell me before we left?"

"Shhh!" exclaimed Henrietta, glancing anxiously behind them. The other carriage had also checked.

"I don't think they can hear us." Reluctantly, Miles slapped the reins, signaling the horses to go forwards. "It's probably too late to go back," he said, more to himself than to her. "Vaughn and his companion will have flown the coop by now. Damnation! If I'd known — "

"That's exactly why I didn't tell you. It just didn't seem like a good idea." Henrietta struggled to rationalize her impulse. "We don't know who he had with him — "

"Oh, I have a very good idea of that," Miles muttered.

" — or if he was armed," continued Henrietta pointedly. "If he is the Black Tulip, doesn't it make far more sense to apprehend him in London, with all the might of the War Office at your disposal, rather than out in the middle of nowhere. For all we know, the inn might have been swarming with his men! Or he might not even be the Black Tulip," she added as an afterthought. "Something didn't sound quite right."

"Ungh" was what Miles thought of that reservation, but he grudgingly admitted the validity of the former. "I'll go see Wickham tomorrow morning."

"Why not tonight?" asked Henrietta.

"Because tonight" — Miles raised a pair of sandy eyebrows — "is my wedding night."