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 be 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 mustaches, 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 Heloise 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 learned 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 realized she had been gone. In fact, she could stop by Uppington House on the way home and change into fresh clothes, and if Miles inquired, 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 realized 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 shabbi-ness 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 parlor 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 applecarts, shouldering aside innocent passersby, 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 ar-moire as if, for some arcane reason, Henrietta might have crawled in there and gotten 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.

Beneath his message, in Henrietta's graceful, looping letters, it said only, "Gone out, too. Should be back by noon. H." And beneath that, a postscript, in mirror to his own. "Splendid."

Miles had crushed the note in his hand, making promises to any minor deity he could think of, anyone, anything, just so long as he could get Henrietta back, unharmed.

She hadn't been at Uppington House. Penelope hadn't seen her. Nor had Charlotte. Geoff couldn't be found to be questioned, so Miles left a note, marked urgent. One last stop at Loring House, where Henrietta hadn't reappeared — Stwyth didn't know where she had gone — and her very absence screamed out a reproach, announced the worst. She must have been taken. And Miles knew bloody well where to go to get her back.

Fueled by anxiety and rage, cravat askew and jacket begrimed from having spent the day sprinting through the malodorous streets of London, Miles wasted no time in heading straight for the dragon's lair, Lord Vaughn's London residence. And if he didn't have Henrietta…

But he would. There was no point in admitting other possibilities. He would bloody well give her back, and then Miles would make equally bloody sure he would swing for it. Slowly and painfully, until his face turned as black as that thrice-damned tulip he employed as his insignia.

"What have you done with her?" Miles demanded, breath rasping in his throat, as the door creaked and swayed behind him.

Attired in a dressing gown patterned with oriental dragons, Lord Vaughn sat at his ease at one end of a round table made of satiny cherry wood, circumscribed with an inlay of pale woods in a geometrical pattern. At one elbow stood a fluted coffeepot, and he sipped from a cup of the same beverage as he flipped idly through the pages of the morning's paper. He was the very image of a gentleman at leisure.

Waving back the footman who drew up stiffly to attention as if to ward off the intruder, Vaughn treated Miles's precipitate entrance with as little attention as though such scenes were a commonplace of his breakfast routine. Or, thought Miles darkly, as though he had been expecting him.