"Darling Mrs. Alsdale!" Letty was learning to loathe her assumed name. Jane propelled Letty forward with a light push. "Would you do the honors?"

"All right." Yielding to the inevitable, Letty gathered her skirts up. She placed one booted foot on the top step, worn at the middle from generations of feet carrying their funereal burdens. A slight flicker of light lurked in the depths. Picking her way down, Letty was grateful to whomever had thought to keep a torch burning below. There was no rail to cling to, just the uneven stone wall, as slick and damp as any distressed heroine might wish for. Atmospheric, perhaps, but it was wreaking havoc with the palms of Letty's gloves.

Behind her, Letty could hear the slight brush of a slipper against the step, the whisper of fabric on stone, as Jane started down after her, effectively cutting off any retreat.

As the illumination below grew more conspicuous, she asked the curate, "Do you always keep a light lit?"

"A light?" The curate was, from the sound of it, lumbered with Miss Gwen. "I'm afraid the, er, inhabitants have little need for one."

"Unless," pronounced Miss Gwen in sepulchral tones, "they choose to walk."

"I don't believe they have terribly much choice in the matter," said the confused curate. "They're quite stationary."

"Some people have no imagination," snapped Miss Gwen.

Letty was beginning to think she had too much imagination. But that was quite definitely a light ahead of her, no matter what the curate said, and not just reflected light from the opening above. Stepping gratefully down from the last stair onto packed earth, Letty withdrew her stained gloves from the wall and peered forward, into the crypt.

The curate hadn't been dissembling; the vault was just as gloomy as any aficionado of horror novels might have desired. Despite the warm July day, the space beneath the vaulted stone arches was as chill as October, with a curious scent to it, a combination of damp earth, mold, and wet stone that repulsed any whiff of the outside world. Rows of columns supported the heavy stone arches like trees in a strange, subterranean forest.

It was impossible to believe that just above their heads were the clean classical lines of the church. Somewhere directly above them, Lord Pinchingdale was in the sanctuary…doing what? Letty doubted he was indulging in a spot of sacral meditation, unless he was praying for release from their unfortunate marriage—and it was a bit late for that. From her post at the base of the stairs, Letty could just make out the shapes of the promised sepulchers, and she wondered whether one of them did belong to a Lord Edward Fitzgerald, or if Lord Edward, like the rest of the story, had been merely a fabrication to keep her occupied.

Even if it had, there was no getting out of the expedition now—or challenging Jane about it in the presence of the bemused curate.

Reluctantly, Letty moved forward, into the interior of the crypt. The light from the trapdoor, balked by the bodies of Letty's companions, made it no farther than the base of the steps. Letty would have been feeling her way by touch from column to column if not for the torch that someone had stuck through a ring on the wall. For all its size, the massive torchiere provided only a reluctant, smoky light in the heavy atmosphere of the crypt, a small, orange ball of flame, like a demon in an alchemist's furnace, trailing a long tail of black soot behind it. A shadow on the wall, darker than the stone itself, attested to the presence of previous visitors and previous torches.

This torch had a companion. A man stood brooding over a dim slab that could be nothing but a grave, his back to the sullen glow. His dark clothes absorbed the flames, extinguished them, creating a vibrant sphere of dark in the midst of light, as he stood poised over the coffin with a stillness more active than movement. Only the silver head of his cane blazed with reflected fire, held aloft above the grave like a medieval necromancer summoning spirits from the vasty deep.

Chapter Sixteen

The effect, Letty was sure, was quite deliberate.

"Good day," she said tartly, all the more tartly for her momentary descent into superstition. For a moment, she had half expected the lid of the coffin to clank open, and a shrouded form to rise—and do what? she demanded of herself irritably. Recite poetry? Dance a sailor's hornpipe? Surely the dead had better things to do than entertain the living.

If he noticed the asperity of her tone, it had no effect on the cane's owner. Lord Vaughn turned in Letty's direction with an unhurried movement that was nearly an incantation in itself.

"My dear Mrs. Alsdale, you do appear in the most unlikely places."

"I could say the same of you, my lord," replied Letty, deliberately moving forward to block Jane from Lord Vaughn's view. Since Lord Vaughn was nearly six feet tall and Letty just over five, it didn't work quite as effectively as she had intended. "Unless you make a practice of inhabiting crypts."

"Delightful places, aren't they?" Lord Vaughn's gesture encompassed the looming stones of the roof, the smoky shadow on the wall, the dark bulk of the coffin in front of him. "So restful."

Letty looked at the coffin and shuddered with a distaste that was entirely unfeigned. "Not precisely the sort of rest I aspire to."

The torchlight lent a demonic aspect to the silver streaks in Lord Vaughn's hair, limning them with infernal fire. "It comes to us all in the end, whether we seek it or no."

No…no…no… echoed the stone arches mournfully.

Letty's voice drowned out the echoes. "There's no need to hasten the process."

"You wouldn't fling yourself into the grave like Juliet?"

"Certainly not for Romeo."

Eo…eo…eo… caroled the echoes in funereal descant.

"For someone else, then," said Lord Vaughn softly.

Letty bristled. "Dying for love is a ridiculous notion. Only a poet would think of it."

"'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, of imagination all compact,'" quoted Vaughn lazily. "You would prefer to die for something else, perhaps? A cause? An ideal?" He paused, holding up his cane so that the silver serpent at its head blazed in the light. "A country?"

"You left out old age," replied Letty.

"How very unambitious of you, Mrs. Alsdale."

"Alexander the Great died in his bed."

"Not so Caesar," countered Lord Vaughn, adding, with peculiar emphasis, "or Brutus."

Rather than bandy Romans, with whom her acquaintance was strictly limited, Letty resorted to changing the subject. "You never told me what brought you down here. Was it merely a philosophical endeavor?"

"Meditations on the meaning of mortality? No." Lord Vaughn's elegant hand rested briefly on the lid of the coffin in a gesture that was almost a caress. "You might call this more of a social call."

Lord Vaughn's rings glinted incongruously against the dark casket, a reminder of earthy vanities against the grim inevitability of the grave.

"You've put it off a bit long, haven't you?" said Letty, regarding the coffin with distaste. There was no plate on the coffin, no insignia, no name, merely a series of lightly incised lines scratched into the surface. Letty could barely make out the marks.

"Five years too long," said Vaughn.

His gloved fingers traced the scratches. One long stroke, followed by three short ones. An E. Followed by another long stroke. Then…

"Alas, poor Edward. I knew him well."

Letty's throat felt very tight as she watched Lord Vaughn trace the final two prongs of the second initial. Edward was a common enough name. But for the last name to begin with an F…

"Edward?" she repeated.

Vaughn gazed meditatively at the coffin, like Hamlet surveying the skull of Yorick. "Lord Edward Fitzgerald."

So that much, at least, of Jane's story had been true.

"This is the coffin of Lord Edward Fitzgerald?" she announced as loudly as she dared, wondering if Jane already knew, or cared.

"Poor Edward. He cared so deeply for his causes," said Lord Vaughn, in the tone of one marveling at a fascinating incomprehensibility.

"Who was he?" asked Letty, trying to angle herself in such a way that Lord Vaughn would have to move away to speak to her, and leave the field clear for Jane. Perhaps if she moved a little to the left…Lord Vaughn remained stubbornly where he was, squarely in front of Lord Edward's coffin.

"My cousin." Lord Vaughn's lips curled in amusement at Letty's involuntary expression of surprise. "You really don't know your Debrett's, do you, Mrs. Alsdale? A lamentable oversight in any debutante."

"I was never terribly good at being a debutante," admitted Letty. "I'm much better at balancing accounts."

Lord Vaughn held up one long-fingered hand. "I shan't ask. For your edification, my ignorant young lady, Edward was the son of Lady Emily Lennox. Lady Emily Lennox married James Fitzgerald, the Earl of Kildare. Lady Emily's father was the Duke of Richmond, who was, in turn, first cousin to my grandmother."

"Which makes you…?" inquired Letty, trying desperately to untangle the mesh of titles.

"Exactly as I am," replied Vaughn, extending an arm. "Shall we rejoin your party? They seem to have strayed."

"Unless," retorted Letty, anxious to divert attention from Jane, who was poking into the foundations of the vault with more antiquarian fervor than one might expect from Miss Gilly Fairley, "we are the ones who have strayed."

"An estimable young lady like yourself?" replied Vaughn, turning her words into something else entirely as he drew her inexorably in the direction of Jane, Miss Gwen, and the beleaguered curate. "Never."