Lauren Willig - Masque of the Black Tulip

"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. And 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."

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 paneling or gilded moldings 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 mustache. 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 recognized 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 color among the dusty blondes and muddy brunettes that 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 se,e 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, shoveling 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 fit — 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 respectable, 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 non-hooting tones, but the hoot would be there, taunting her. Henrietta's cheeks burned 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 lovestruck. 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 realized 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 Lor ing 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.