Лорен Уиллиг - The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

"Weren't we going to get dinner?" I asked breathlessly, shoving my hands into my pockets just to make sure I didn't do something stupid like fling them around his neck. "I mean, if you're hungry, that is."

"I'm always hungry," said Colin cheerfully, taking the change of subject in stride. "What do you fancy?"

Him, but that was beside the point. "There's a little Greek place near my flat if you don't mind a bit of a walk."

I wondered if he'd notice that crucial detail, "near my flat." Not that I was necessarily planning anything, but…just in case.

"Lead the way," he said.

"I would," I hedged. "Only I'm not quite sure where we are."

Colin gave me one of those "you've got to be kidding" looks. "We're three blocks from Bond Street."

"Which way is Bond Street?"

Colin pointed.

"I have no sense of direction," I confessed. "If it were up to me, we'd probably wind up in Edinburgh by accident."

"That's a long walk," said Colin, completely deadpan, except for the flicker of a dimple in one cheek that gave him away.

"Trust me, I've done worse. Actually, I got lost in Edinburgh once. It's a good thing it's not a large city."

"Where were you trying to go?"

"I meant to go to Holyrood House, but somehow I wound up by Arthur's Seat."

"You didn't climb Arthur's Seat, did you?" Colin was watching with amused fascination.

"Noooo. Not then, anyway. That was another night." I wafted that aside. "On the plus side, I find all sorts of interesting things that way. I stumbled on the Tollgate Museum when I was looking for the National Library."

"Aren't those in opposite directions?"

"It depends on where you're coming from," I lied cheerfully. In fact, they had been in opposite directions from the dorm where I'd been staying in Edinburgh. I'd just gotten entirely turned around and gone the wrong way. But, as I'd said, the Tollgate Museum had been more than worth it.

"Right." Colin settled back in the classic pose of the lecturer, weight evenly balanced on both feet, hands up and slightly parted. "This" — he pointed to the right — "is the way to Bond Street. If we walked that way" — he pointed straight up — "we would land on Oxford Street."

I rather liked the sound of that we.

"And there," he finished up, pointing left, "is Belliston Square. Grosvenor Square is just one over from that. If we keep going this way, we'll be at Hyde Park."

He'd lost me well before Hyde Park, partly because I was too busy admiring the strong shape of his hands as he gesticulated. They were awfully nice hands, broad without being beefy, permanently tanned from a lifetime spent in outdoor pursuits. I'd bet he was a brilliant skier. I already knew he was a rider; I'd seen a picture of him with a horse on his great-aunt's mantelpiece, looking sunburned, wind-blown, and utterly at ease. It was all my knight-in-shining-armor fantasies rolled into one very human package, minus the armor.

In order to hide the fact that I'd been so busy drooling over him that I'd paid no attention at all to what he'd been saying, I seized on the bit I did know.

"Belliston Square!" I exclaimed, with far more enthusiasm than the location warranted. "I was just there today. For the Vaughn Collection," I explained, pointing it out as we strolled into the square. "Have you been there?"

"Not for years," Colin admitted. "I seem to recall being dragged there by my mother as a small child, but I haven't been since. Serena tried to get me to go last year, but — " His lips closed very tightly over whatever it is he had been about to say.

"But what?" I asked, genuinely curious. Museums seldom elicit such violent reactions, unless they're the sort of museums that have installations of crosses suspended upside down in jars of urine, or photos of men in unnatural poses, which the Vaughn Collection decidedly was not. Gainsborough tended not to go in for that sort of thing.

Colin shook his head dismissively. "There was a chap — " he began, but before he could get any further into it, his attention was distracted by a man popping up out of the service entrance of the Vaughn Collection, practically under our noses.

The man was coming up the stairs of the sunken entrance known in the nineteenth century as "the area," the short flight of stairs that led down to the kitchen, scullery, and servants' hall. Or, in these days, the bathrooms, the reference room, and assorted offices and storage areas. He was a tall man, with an umbrella clamped beneath one arm and a briefcase in his hand, looking more like a City stockbroker than an employee of an art museum.

His eyes went instantly to where I stood with Colin, the streetlamp lighting my hair like a flaming brand. It's hard to inconspicuous when you're one of the few true redheads in a city of blondes and brunettes.

"Eloise!" Dempster exclaimed expansively. Umbrella sticking out from under his arm like a duck's tail, he advanced on me with his free hand outstretched in greeting. "Is there any way I can be assistance? Did you leave something — "

And then he saw who was standing beside me.

Colin hadn't said a word. He had just grown stiffer and stiffer until it was a bit like standing next to a barbershop Indian, a wooden cutout of a man painted to imitate life. His eyes were fixed on Nigel Dempster with a hostility that could only come from actual acquaintance.

The light from the streetlamp glinted wetly off Dempster's parted lips as he bared a full set of teeth in a broad smile.

"Not only Eloise — but Colin Selwick! What a perfectly lovely surprise…."

Mary lounged like Cleopatra in the back of Lord Vaughn's private barge. Reflected light from the lanterns hung on either side of the canopy unfurled across the dark waters of the Thames like silk ribbons as the prow pulled through the water, propelled by the efforts of half a dozen liveried oarsmen.

In front of her, Letty perched uncomfortably on the edge of her own seat, looking as out of place in her warm red cloak as a plump red hen at a court fete. She and Geoffrey had come along as chaperones, having firmly refused to countenance the notion of Vauxhall without their own protective presence. Aunt Imogen, Letty had declared, would just not do. Mary had accepted their escort with a good grace that caused her sister and brother-in-law to exchange a surprised glance.

Vaughn had added two others to the party, a widow and her daughter, both attired in shocking shades of purple that warred with the smooth black and silver of the barge. Between Miss Fustian's exuberant lace flounces and the large, ruffled parasol that Mrs. Fustian inexplicably insisted on carrying, the small cabin felt inordinately crowded.

The party was crammed beneath the tilt, or canopy, a half-cabin that the whimsy of Vaughn's craftsmen had shaped in the form of a small Greek temple, with a triangular pediment and two long Corinthian columns fronting either side, their complex pattern of icanthus leaves chased with beaten silver. Above Mary's head, the underside of the canopy had been painted in faithful reproduction of the night sky, the constellations reproduced in such painstaking detail that one could scarcely tell what was roof and what open sky, nature and artifice blended in brilliant illusion until the reproduction seemed the reality and the reality mere shadow. Rather, thought Mary, like Vaughn himself.

Along the open sides of the tilt waved long banners of rich black silk, embroidered in silver with Vaughn's own devise, a serpent contorted in an impossible spiral as it chased its own tail. Below it, on a curling sigil, rang out Vaughn's chosen motto: Sic Semper Serpentibus.

It wasn't, Mary knew, the family crest of the Vaughns. That, immortalized in print in Debrett's Peerage and in stone along the frontage of Vaughn House, consisted of a modified version of the lion of Scotland (a nice nod to their origins, another of the hangers-on who had followed James I from Scotland to England and been granted an earldom for their pains), demurely licking its paw among a field of gold balls, that the unkind claimed were meant to represent the coins that had come their way through the royal monopolies granted by the intemperate monarch. James I had always had a taste for handsome young men, and by all accounts, the first Lord Vaughn had been possessed of a particularly well-turned calf. The Vaughn motto was something equally mundane, the usual rot about perseverance and plenty, glorified by translation into Latin.

The silver serpent was Lord Vaughn's own private device, echoed in the livery of the oarsmen and rearing figure of a reptile at the prow, every scale outlined with painstaking artistry.

Vaughn had sensibly elected not to cram in with the others beneath the tilt. Standing just beyond the canopy, one jeweled hand resting against a Corinthian column, Vaughn looked every inch the Elizabethan grandee, lord of all he surveyed. While the fashion for swords had ended well over a decade ago, Lord Vaughn still carried himself as though he felt the weight of a hilt on his hip. He stood with a swordsman's stance, balanced and alert beneath his carefully cultivated air of languor.