"I don't think you can call this a carriage," countered Letty, tilting her head back up toward Geoff. "It's really more of a cart."

Geoff lifted both his eyebrows. "Does it matter?"

Letty lifted herself up on her tiptoes and latched her arms around his neck. "No," she said honestly. "Not in the slightest."

And that was the last either of them said for quite some time.

When they had time to reflect upon it later, the Viscount and Viscountess Pinchingdale were in perfect agreement that, for certain purposes, one wheeled conveyance was quite as good as another.

Chapter Thirty-one

"Leaving?" I craned my neck in an entirely unsubtle way, but the angle of the door blocked the corridor from view. "But we haven't even had dinner yet."

I'd been counting on Colin being logy with large quantities of food before I made my approach. As a veteran of countless Thanksgiving dinners, I knew exactly how much pumpkin pie I could consume before stupor struck. A neophyte, unused to the soporific properties of turkey and stuffing, should be easy prey.

But not if he was leaving.

Blithely insensitive to atmosphere, Mrs. Harrington gave a little wave. "He had some other do to attend, he said. But Serena will be staying with us, won't you, dear?"

"Pammy was very insistent." Had that been a bit of a barb beneath the quiet cadence of Serena's voice? Probably my imagination. In the meantime, her brother was getting away.

I had to go say something to him. I didn't know if everything had been all in my head from the start; I didn't know if he had ever had the slightest bit of interest in me, or if he had realized that I had been snubbing him (even if only because I thought he was snubbing me). But I did know that if I didn't say something I was going to spend the rest of the evening feeling awful in a way that had nothing to do with Thanksgiving bloat.

It wasn't like I was following him to Ireland, or anything.

"Will you excuse me?" I levered myself off my perch on the side of the couch so abruptly that strands of Serena's hair fluttered with the movement, rising and settling like a flock of pigeons in Trafalgar Square. "Be back in a moment."

Propelling myself toward the door, I barreled out into the hallway. It wasn't a long hallway, just a narrow rectangle that spanned the house from the front door on one end to the garden door on the other. I didn't think Colin had gone out the garden way; o'erleaping garden walls went out of fashion several centuries ago, along with lutes and codpieces. I hadn't heard the front door open and close. Although, I warned myself, it was unlikely I would have over the hum of cocktail-lubricated conversation.

There was only one other place he could be. Crossing my fingers for all I was worth, I ventured into the little spur of hallway between dining room and kitchen, a narrow space that had been commandeered as a cloakroom. Sure enough, there was Colin, pawing through a row of identical coats on a portable aluminum rack, a look of intense concentration on his face. I blessed the blandness of raincoat manufacture. Minus identifying factors like that coffee stain on the sleeve or that slightly hairy mint at the bottom of a pocket, one Burberry looks much like another. I usually identified mine by dint of an elderly movie stub in the left-hand pocket, admitting one to a 9:40 showing of Legally Blonde.

Colin glanced up at the click of my heels against the hard-wood floors. "You're not leaving?" he asked politely.

"No, but I heard that you are." Given where we were standing, it wasn't exactly the world's most brilliant observation.

Colin whipped a Burberry off the rack. I hoped it was actually his. "I have other plans."

"Mrs. Harrington said."

This had all seemed much easier back in the living room. Being faced with a living, breathing man intent on putting on his raincoat made matters much harder. In all the conversations I had with him in my head, he generally stayed put and listened, before responding with eloquent lines like "How right you are."

People are so much more agreeable in one's head.

"Listen," I said, taking a step forward. "I just wanted to say I'm sorry."

Colin blinked, one arm halfway into his raincoat. "What for?"

"About your mother's accident. Why didn't you say anything? I would have left right away."

"At midnight?"

"You must have cabs in Sussex. Hotels, even. I could have gone to a hotel. You really didn't have to stick around because of me. I feel awful."

"Don't." Colin's eyes crinkled at the corners, like a polar ice cap cracking. "I wasn't able to find an earlier flight."

"If you had, I hope you would have kicked me out earlier."

"Without a second thought," Colin reassured me.

"Good." I beamed at him before remembering that beaming probably wasn't appropriate when a parent was in the hospital. "She is doing better?"

"Much. It wasn't anything life-threatening to begin with, but it was someone from hospital calling, not Mum—she was out cold. All I caught was that there'd been a car accident and she was in hospital, unconscious."

"Scary," I said, making a sympathetic face.

"Her husband was away at a conference, and my Italian is purely rudimentary. Enough to ask for grappa, but when it comes to medical terms—" Colin spread his hands in an endearingly boyish gesture of bafflement.

"But they cleared it up once you got there?"

"With a great deal of pointing at the relevant phrases in an Italian-English dictionary. Once we established that she had neither gangrene nor leprosy, it went swimmingly."

"Surely there must have been someone who spoke English?"

"Probably off on coffee break," said Colin dryly. "Or just enjoying watching the English bloke make a prat of himself."

"You never know, they might have just been on strike," I provided. "I gather that's pretty much the norm over there."

"All English speakers go slow for a day?"

"It gives whole new meaning to the English-Speaking Union! Maybe that's what happened to the mimes. Being French, they went on strike, and have been doomed to communicate through hand signals ever since, like linguistic gypsies."

Don't ask me where the mimes came from. They just popped out, and once out, refused to go back.

"And the painted faces?"

"An attempt to go incognito, so people won't keep shutting them into boxes. Naturally."

"Naturally," agreed Colin, looking rather bemused. "I don't know why I didn't think of it before."

"It takes a superior intelligence. And years of painstaking observation of the mime in its natural habitat." I hoped Colin wouldn't ask what that was, since I had no idea. Every now and again, my mouth detaches from my brain, and horrible things happen. "How did we get on mimes, again?" I asked hastily.

"It all comes back to the French, somehow or other." Cinching the belt of his raincoat closed—tied, not buckled—he asked, "How is the Pink Carnation?"

"Never been better," I said cheerfully, concealing my disappointment at the signs of his imminent departure. Why wouldn't he leave? He had said he had another event to go to, and I was probably making him late as it was. "She just foiled a rebellion in Ireland."

"I had a feeling she might."

"You mean you knew about it already."

"There is that."

"But I know something you don't know."

"If it has to do with mimes, I don't need to know."

I folded my arms across my chest in exaggerated disgust. "We are just not going there again." Having dismissed the mimes, I lowered my voice dramatically. "What would you say if I told you that, rather than just one Black Tulip, there might have been an entire syndicate of them?"

"How do you mean?" Colin leaned back against the creampainted wall as though he had no intention of going anywhere at all.

"I mean, not one, but a series of subagents, all with very pale skin and black hair. The petals of the Tulip."

"It sounds rather fantastic."

"It is," I agreed. "Only not in the way you mean."

I gave him a quick rundown on my week's archival discoveries, starting with the advent of Miss Emily Gilchrist and finishing up with the marquise's mysterious death in the parlor of Lord Vaughn.

"Aren't you a bit short on petals?" asked Colin. "It takes more than two to cover a flower."

I had to stop and count on my fingers. Surely there had to have been more dark-haired agents than just the marquise and Emily Gilchrist…but if there were, I hadn't found them yet.

"Of course, it's all still conjecture at this point," I said hastily. "But wouldn't it be wonderful?"

For a long moment, Colin didn't say anything at all. He just looked at me, until I could feel my damnably fair skin begin to flush under his scrutiny.

"Wonderful," he agreed, just before the pause reached epic proportions. "I'm sure Jay contributed many brilliant insights."

It took me a moment to remember who Jay was. "Don't remind me. I'm trying to blot that evening out of my memory."

"Aren't you…?"

"Oh, God, no." I hastened to disabuse him of the notion. Forget the fact that I was the one who put the notion into his head in the first place. Right now, all I wanted to do was excise the whole ridiculous Jay episode and go back to where we had been a week or so ago. "I only went out with him to placate Grandma. Since he's in England and I'm in England…it's just easier not to argue with Grandma."

"That is a relief."