Undaunted by her brush with death, the dowager Lady Pinchingdale and her newest relation by marriage, Mrs. Alsworthy, appeared bent on engaging in Britain's Silliest Matron contest. So far, the dowager Lady Pinchingdale was ahead four swoons to three. The only one of the lot who seemed to have two brain cells to rub together was the long-suffering Mr. Alsworthy. He had proved his intelligence by promptly disappearing just after their arrival.

Between the dowager and his fellow guests, Vaughn was considering a spot of decapitation himself. Starting with his own head. It was beginning to ache damnably from the combination of inferior claret and worse conversation.

Nursery parties — for that was what the gathering at Sibley Court felt like — weren't usually in Vaughn's line. He ran with an older, faster set, men who knew the way of the world and women who knew the way of those men. They played deep, they spoke in triple entendres, and they left their bedroom doors open. In contrast, the crowd at Sibley Court was sickeningly unsophisticated. Part of that insipid breed spawned by the new century, Pinchingdale's set uttered words like "King" and "country," and had the poor taste to mean them. No one dueled anymore; they were all too busy gadding about France disguised as flowers. Or named after them, which was nearly as bad. Lord Richard Selwick, currently occupied in propping up the enormous Elizabethan mantelpiece, had only recently been unmasked as the notorious Purple Gentian, a flower as obscure as it was unpronounceable. The youth of England were fast running out of botanical monikers. What would they do next, venture into vegetables? No doubt he would soon be forced to listen to dazzling accounts of the adventures of the Orange Aubergine. It all showed a marked lack of good ton. Vaughn might be less than a decade older than his host, but among this company he felt as ancient as the tapestries lining the walls.

The blame for his presence fell squarely on the woman standing next to him, looking deceptively demure in a high-necked gown of pale blue muslin embroidered with small pink flowers about the neck and hem. With her smooth brown hair threaded with matching ribbons and her gloved hands folded neatly around a glass of ratafia, Miss Jane Wooliston looked more like a prosperous squire's daughter than that many-petaled flower of mystery, the Pink Carnation. It was her summons that had sent Vaughn jolting through the back roads of Gloucestershire clear off the edge of the earth to this godforsaken relic of Bonnie Olde Englande. And he wasn't even sharing her bed.

At the moment, Jane was occupied in examining a dark-haired girl who posed becomingly in front of the light of a twisted branch of candles. Like Jane, the girl was tall, tall enough to carry off the long-lined classical fashions swept across the Channel by the revolution, with the sort of finely boned features that showed to good effect in the uncertain light of the faltering candles. But there the resemblance ended. There was nothing the least bit demure about the girl across the room. The light struck blue glints in the smoothly arranged mass of her black hair and reduced the fine fabric of her muslin gown to little more than a wisp.

"She is lovely," remarked Jane, in a considering sort of tone.

Lovely wasn't precisely the word Vaughn would have chosen. It implied a sweetness that was utterly lacking in the self-possessed stance of the woman in white. Luscious didn't serve, either; it suggested Rubenesque curves and dimpled flesh, whereas the woman by the candles had the perfectly carved lines of a marble statue. Wanton? No. There was a discipline in both her straight-backed posture and the proud set of her head that gave the lie to the suggestive cling of her dress. Whatever her revealing gown might have been meant to convey, to the astute observer she was more Artemis than Aphrodite.

There was one word, however, that Vaughn had no difficulty at all applying: notorious.

Vaughn hadn't followed the Pinchingdale Peccadillo (as the scandal sheets had unimaginatively dubbed it), but it had been impossible to avoid learning the basic outline of the story. It had entirely eclipsed Percy Ponsonby's latest fall from a window as the gossip of choice as the Season lurched to a close. Attempting to elope with the famed beauty, Miss Mary Alsworthy, the besotted young Viscount Pinchingdale had somehow erred and managed to dash off with the wrong sister. Suffering from a foolish adherence to propriety, Pinchingdale had marched up to the altar with the compromised sister, one Laetitia, who was chiefly famed for boasting the largest collection of freckles this side of Edinburgh. It was the sort of absurd bedroom farce that couldn't fail to appeal to the jaded palettes of London's bored elite.

In the end, the hubbub had died down, as it always did. London's elite had trickled away to their country estates, to amuse themselves sneering at the local assemblies and irritating the wildlife (sometimes the two pursuits were nearly indistinguishable), while the new Viscount and Viscountess Pinchingdale wisely removed themselves for an extended wedding journey — or so the story went. The genuine version, to which Vaughn was reluctantly privy, was a good deal more complicated, involving spies, Irish rebels, and exploding masonry, from all of which the new viscount and viscountess had emerged more pleased with each other than otherwise. In fact, they had returned from Ireland rather sickeningly smitten with each other, Lord Pinchingdale's prior passion for the elder Miss Alsworthy conveniently forgotten.

Vaughn raised his quizzing glass and ran it along the elegant sweep of Miss Alsworthy's neck, cunningly accentuated by three long curls that fell from hair swept into a knot in the Grecian style. Standing in the light of a branch of candles, her sheer muslin gown left very little of the elegant lines beneath to the imagination.

A woman would have to be either a saint or a fool to harbor a rival beneath her own roof. Especially a rival who looked like that.

"If I were the current Viscountess Pinchingdale, I would not be overjoyed by Miss Alsworthy's presence."

"Letty's strength is as the strength of ten," replied Jane whimsically.

"Because her heart is pure? Never place your trust in aphorisms, Miss Wooliston. They are more for effect than substance."

The same, he reflected, could be said of the lovely Miss Mary Alsworthy. Some men had an eye for horses; Vaughn had one for women. No matter how fine a collection of points Mary Alsworthy might have, there was a glint to her eye that foretold an uncomfortable ride. It didn't take an expert to tell that she was highly strung and all too aware of her own good looks. That sort tended to be damnably expensive — not to mention possessed of an unfortunate tendency to buck the rider. He had encountered her kind before.

"Well?" inquired Jane. "What do think?"

"I think," he said deliberately, "that if you have dragged me out to this inhospitable corner of the earth on nothing more than a bout of romantic whimsy, I shall be entirely unamused."

"My dear lord Vaughn, I never matchmake." Jane smiled to herself as though at a private memory. "Well, very rarely."

Vaughn arranged his eyebrows in their most forbidding position, the one that had sent a generation of valets scurrying for cover. "Don't think to number me among your exceptions."

"I wouldn't dare."

From the woman who had invaded Bonaparte's bedchamber to leave him a posy of pink carnations, that pledge was singularly unconvincing. "I believe there are very few things you wouldn't dare."

Jane was too busy scrutinizing Miss Alsworthy to bother to reply. "Have you noticed anything particular about her?"

"Only," said Lord Vaughn dryly, "what any man would be expected to notice."

Jane tilted her head to one side. "She doesn't remind you of anyone? Her skin…her hair?"

He had been doing his best not to notice the resemblance, but it was impossible to ignore. That sweep of ebony hair, the willowy form, the graceful white dress were all too familiar. She had worn white, too. White, to draw attention to her long black hair, straight as silk and just as fine.

It had been more than a decade ago, in a room all lined with glass, from the long doors leading out to the garden to the tall mirrors of Venetian glass that had lined the walls, cold and bright. That was how he had first seen her, sparkling by the light of the candles, flirting, laughing, Galatea remade in ebony and ivory. Every man present had been panting to play Pygmalion. He had been no different. He had been young, bored, running rapidly out of dissipations with which to divert himself. And then she had turned to him, holding out one white hand in greeting — and challenge.

There had been a ruby, that first night, strung on black velvet so that it nestled tightly against the hollow of her throat. Sullen red welling against white, white skin…

Vaughn let his quizzing glass drop to his chest. "The resemblance is purely a superficial one. A matter of coloring, nothing more."

"That might be enough."

"No," said Vaughn flatly.

"If," said Jane, ignoring him as only Jane dared, "someone were to speak to her; if someone were to suggest…"

"Ah." Vaughn's lips compressed, as the whole fiasco suddenly fell into place. "That's what you want of me. To play Hermes for you."

"We can't all be Zeus," Jane said apologetically.

Prolonged exposure to Jane was enough to make anyone take to Bacchus. "I'm afraid I've left my winged shoes at home. Forgive me for suggesting the obvious, but why not approach the girl yourself? Why drag me into this fiasco?"