With Lord Vaughn, she could growl and snap as much as she liked. He might mock — in fact, he invariably did mock — but he never said, "Oh, Mary," or suggested that a nice cup of hot milk would make her feel just the thing. She could be just as beastly as she liked in the comfort that he would be beastly right back.

Across from her, Lord Vaughn spread out his hands, palms up. "Today, I am all honesty."

Mary waded comfortably into the fray. "And I am all amazement. I doubt there is such a place as this Common Sense Society."

"Until recently, there wasn't. It was called the Paine Society until some perspicacious soul pointed out that the original title came too close to the actuality. Paine's writings are bad enough. His disciples elevate dullness to a new order."

"If such an organization exists, why subject us to it?" If Vaughn was telling the truth, she was to be making her intellectual debut at the heart of London's most rabid disciples of political philosophy, mingling with rough, desperate men who read John Locke for fun and wallowed hedonistically in the illicit pleasures of Rousseau and Thomas Paine. It sounded about as exciting as eggs on toast.

"Because, dull though most of these philosophers may be, there are always some few bold enough to translate idea into action. In the nineties — before your time, my dear — there were quite a few such groups, all scrabbling away for liberté, egalité, and fraternité. Corresponding Societies, they called themselves."

"I've heard of the Corresponding Societies," Mary interjected. Before her time, indeed! The nineties hadn't been all that very long ago, and she was rather older than the usual run of debutante, although that latter was something she generally deemed it wiser not to bring to the attention of men searching for a nubile young wife. "My father belonged to one."

"Radical tendencies in the family, Miss Alsworthy? Tsk, tsk." On Vaughn's tongue, the syllable became a caress. A caress with a sting in its tail. "I had no idea I was clasping a revolutionary to my bosom."

"I thought we agreed that there would be no clasping of any kind," Mary countered crisply, earning a light chuckle.

"Fair enough." Across from her, Vaughn raised a sardonic eyebrow. It was always the same sardonic eyebrow. Given its repeated use over their short acquaintance, she was surprised he hadn't suffered a strain.

It would have been flattering if he could have contrived to look just a little disappointed. But he didn't. He never did. One moment, his heavy lidded eyes would burn with seductive promise and the next they would be as amused and detached as any bored young buck in his box at the theatre. It was both infuriating and intriguing.

Carrying calmly on with their previous topic as though clasping and bosoms had never entered into it, Vaughn said, "The Common Sense Society is the last gasp of the old Revolution and Constitution Societies. They're a fairly bloodless lot, but rumor has it that they still retain some ties with the agents of the French Republic. And if they do…" Vaughn cast her a glance pregnant with meaning.

"You do realize," said Mary darkly, "that this will be nearly as bad for my reputation as being compromised. No man wants to marry a bluestocking."

"Cheer up. Perhaps you'll meet a gentleman of a reforming nature. Idealists generally make easy prey."

"I take it you know this from personal experience?"

Vaughn leaned back lazily against the black velvet squabs. No dull beige for Lord Vaughn in his custom coach; the appointments were all that money and imagination could devise, complete with silver tassels dangling from the hangings at the windows and a trompe l'oeil painting of a stormy sky decorating the ceiling. The painter had arranged it so that a bolt of lightning angled straight at Lord Vaughn's irreverent head. Another case, thought Mary, of art imitating life. If anyone deserved to be skewered by a bolt from above, it was undoubtedly her companion, who was doing his best to live up to his rakish reputation as he drawled, "I never waste my time on the easily won. The sooner had, the sooner bored."

Mary toyed with a tassel, twining the silver thread around the finger of her glove. "How do you know you will be bored?"

"Anything one can acquire is seldom worth having. Wine. Horses. Women."

The ranking was so deliberately intended to outrage that Mary couldn't do anything but chuckle at it. "I suppose I ought to be grateful that our association is purely of a business nature. Lest it otherwise go flat."

"Yes." Vaughn's pale eyes settled on her face, his expression unreadable. "Quite."

Breaking eye contact first, Mary glanced out the window, asking casually, "Whom should I expect to see at this afternoon's gathering?"

Odd how not looking could increase one's other senses, the rasp of fabric, the masculine scents of starch, cognac, and cologne. In comparison, the vista of identical white houses, gray from coal smoke, seemed distant and insubstantial. She could hear the rub of wool against velvet as Vaughn shrugged. "The usual mix of bored dilettantes and wild-eyed reformers."

"Including your Tulip?" Mary asked delicately. Vaughn had only told her where they were going; he hadn't bothered to specify why.

"Good God, no. No sensible spy would waste his time with this lot. They're a bunch of prosy bores and half-mad fanatics. It's only the latter who make the former bearable."

"Into which category do you fall?"

"I? I am but a humble spectator of the human comedy."

Mary refrained from making the obvious comment about his humility or lack thereof. "You seem remarkably well-informed for a mere bystander."

Vaughn's lips curved in the bland smile that Mary had already learned meant he had no intention of answering her question. His countenance was as polished and unyielding as a well-cut piece of marble. "My dear girl, at my age there's very little with which I'm not familiar. Regrettably."

"Your age?" Mary mimicked. For all his world-weary airs, Lord Vaughn was no more than thirty-five. So said Debrett's Peerage, and Debrett's never lied. One could set one's clock by it — if it had anything to do with clocks. "Prior to the flood, I'm sure. I can just picture you frolicking about in your antediluvian idyll."

Vaughn looked down the length of his slightly crooked nose. "I assure you, the ark was highly overrated. Full of livestock and not a decent claret to be had." He looked just a little too pleased with himself as he added, "Not unlike Almack's."

"It isn't any more pleasant for the cattle," retorted Mary acidly. It was one thing to talk about the marriage market, quite another to be taken for a cow.

"I would have thought that your devoted swains would have contrived to keep you better entertained." It was quite obvious that Lord Vaughn was not referring to poetry readings.

Mary's lips twisted cynically. "They tried."

Lord Vaughn's voice unfurled smoothly as black velvet. "Clearly not hard enough."

Mary caught the edge of the seat as the carriage jolted to a stop. "If you meant to offer to remedy the defect, it's too late," she said, somewhat more tartly than she had intended. "We appear to have arrived."

"Pity," yawned Vaughn, as if the prospect couldn't have interested him less. Which it probably couldn't, Mary reminded herself. Vaughn flirted as naturally as he breathed; the mistake would be to take any of it seriously.

"Quite." Mary pointedly diverted her attention to the seat next to her and her remarkably silent chaperone. "Aunt Imogen? Aunt Imogen!"

Aunt Imogen might not be quite deaf, dumb, and blind, but with her broad-brimmed hat dipping low over her eyes and her utter refusal to employ an ear trumpet, she was as close as could be found. The expression on Vaughn's face when Mary had propelled Aunt Imogen into the entryway that afternoon had made up for a week's worth of sarcastic remarks. For one glorious moment, the great Lord Vaughn had been rendered genuinely speechless. Mary considered Aunt Imogen one of her better inspirations.

The famous profile that had once entranced Gainsborough was all but hidden beneath a picture hat that had been all the crack when Mary was a toddler, and the broad-skirted dresses that had once emphasized her stately figure hung loosely from her reduced frame, the formerly rich brocades beginning to fray and fade. Despite the passage of time, Aunt Imogen clung to the fashions of her heyday, either from nostalgia or because she couldn't afford to replace them. Aunt Imogen, Mary had been told, had been one of the great beauties of her day, an intimate of the Duchesses of Gordon and Devonshire, painted by Gainsborough, and ogled by the aging George II. It was a chilling thought.

It was partly penury and partly stubbornness that had reduced Aunt Imogen to her current state. Properly Lady Cranbourne, Aunt Imogen had been an old man's fancy, second wife to an elderly earl with a large fortune, grown children, and a taste for pretty young things. When Lord Cranbourne cocked up his toes, Aunt Imogen had been left a jointure that made the earl's children gnash their teeth and mutter darkly about undue influence. They had booted her out of the family mansion forthwith. Returning to London, Aunt Imogen had merrily dissipated her jointure on two decades of lavish entertainments, younger men, and amateur theatricals. Penniless and passé, she had finally been forced to batten on the generosity of friends, making the rounds of a shrinking circle of acquaintances as eccentric as herself. Aunt Imogen made her home with Lady Euphemia McPhee, a distant connection of the royal family via one of Charles II's many illegitimate children and quite as mad as Aunt Imogen. Mary had only secured her great-aunt's services as chaperone by promising to take part in Lady Euphemia's latest production, A Rhyming Historie of Britain, although she hadn't thought it necessary to confide that little detail to Vaughn.