Лорен Уиллиг - The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

"Then what do you suggest I do about it?" Balancing his snuff box in one hand, Vaughn neatly flicked open the lid, as though the entire discussion were one of merely academic concern. "You are, after all, meant to be the expert on this sort of affair."

If Pinchingdale caught the implied insult, he chose to ignore it. "Keep the assignation," he said briefly. "Keep it, but go armed."

Letty nodded decisively. "I like it. They wouldn't expect you to walk knowingly into a trap."

"That," interjected Mary, "is because no sane person does."

Inhaling his snuff, Vaughn coughed delicately. "Then it ought to be perfect for me."

"Perfect idiocy, you mean. I'll come with you."

"Aren't you forgetting something?" said Letty matter-of-factly.

"And what might that be?" Mary asked icily.

"Lady Euphemia's play."

"Oh," said Mary.

"You are the princess," added Letty apologetically.

"Catch the prince's eye and you might be a real one," drawled Vaughn.

"Isn't there the small matter of his wife?"

"A trifling difficulty."

Mary sighed. "If only."

Vaughn went to his assignation doubly armed. He had a sword at his hip and Pinchingdale up a tree.

He hadn't intended either Pinchingdale or the tree. But whether it was for Mary's sake or, as Pinchingdale claimed, because he had as much of an interest in catching the Black Tulip as Vaughn did, Pinchingdale had insisted on following along.

"I should think," Pinchingdale had said, with a brow raised in challenge, "that you would be glad of the extra protection."

"I would," Vaughn had replied, just as dryly, "if I could be sure that you intended your bullets for the Black Tulip, rather than me."

Having ascertained that they understood each other, they had departed for Anne's lodgings in relative harmony — if, by harmony, one meant guarded silence. By prearrangement, they took separate routes, just in case anyone was watching. Vaughn went in his own carriage with the Vaughn crest emblazoned on the doors, rattling conspicuously along, while Pinchingdale took whatever shadowy and circuitous route pleased him best.

Their destination turned out to be a narrow, three-story building constructed of yellowing brick, lying hard by the jumble of medieval structures that made up Parliament. The wrought-iron railings had been painted a teal blue, presumably to complement the bright blue of the door, but the harsh elements of the English climate had already taken their toll. The peeling paint gave the railings a scabrous appearance, as though they were suffering from an acute case of leprosy. The rest of the structure appeared equally neglected. The small panes that made up the sash window were dark with accumulated grime. If Anne was, indeed, working for the Black Tulip, the French government's largesse did not extend to a generous housing allowance.

On the other hand, grimy windows had the benefit of concealing a multitude of illicit activities.

Reaching for the knocker, Vaughn lifted it fastidiously between two fingers and let it fall. The reverberations had scarcely stopped before the door was shoved open and a hand on his sleeve yanked him unceremoniously over the threshold. Behind him, the door slammed definitively into its frame.

The pressure on his bad arm made Vaughn see spots, but his other hand went unerringly to the hilt of his sword.

"There's no need for that!" said a husky voice indignantly.

As Vaughn's eyes adjusted to the gloom of the hallway, the white blur in front of him resolved itself into Anne, wearing a dress cut too low for afternoon, looking decidedly piqued to be facing several inches of cold Spanish steel. Before sheathing his sword, Vaughn took a quick inventory of his surroundings. The hallway was a narrow rectangle, windowless, furnitureless, and devoid of places to hide. A flight of stairs rose steeply to a small landing on the second story. Doors on either side opened onto sparsely furnished rooms, one on each side. They appeared to be empty. Vaughn wasn't prepared to risk his life on appearances.

"No blunt object descending towards my brain?" he queried satirically. "No pistol leveled at my heart? I'm disappointed in you. You might have run me through twice over by now."

"You've got it all wrong, Sebastian." Anne blinked up at him, the image of wounded innocence. "I've been trying to save you."

"An interesting way you have of showing it," said Vaughn mildly, keeping one hand on the hilt of his sword and an eye on the stairs.

"Why else would I have come to the park yesterday?" said Anne sulkily. "I was the one trying to get you away. She was the one who shot you."

Vaughn snapped to the alert. "Lady Hester?"

Anne looked at him blankly. "What has Aunt Hester to do with this?"

"Less than I thought, apparently." So much for Mary's theory about Lady Hester's career as the Black Tulip.

His wife tossed her short blond curls. "I only came to the park to get you away before you got hurt. And you wouldn't have been hurt if you'd only come with me instead of running off after her."

"And how would you happen to know all that?" Vaughn asked silkily.

"He told me."

"He?"

"Come into the drawing room?" Anne tugged on his sleeve, once again unerringly choosing the wrong arm.

Wincing, Vaughn followed her up the narrow flight of stairs. The Black Tulip might have picked his tools more wisely. As a conspirator, Anne was an utter failure. Visibly nervous, she kept glancing back over her shoulder as they climbed the stairs.

"You do realize," said Vaughn conversationally as they arrived at the landing, "that if you precipitate my demise, you don't get anything at all. As far as the lawyers are concerned, you're dead, you know. You'll have a very tricky time proving otherwise."

Anne cast him a wounded look as she ushered him into a small drawing room, meagerly decorated with the sort of drab furnishings one expected to find in hired lodgings. A settee with faded upholstery, two matching chairs, and a small writing desk in the corner. The pictures on the wall were equally generic, cheap etchings and muddy scenes of what looked like they were meant to be Venetian canals, painted by someone who had been no nearer Venice than Cheapside. With one exception.

Propped on the mantel, someone had placed a portrait miniature in a baroque frame so rich and elaborate it stopped just short of being a reliquary. The frame was pure gold, worth more by itself than all the other items in the room, the metal contorted into a complicated pattern of roses and thistles. On top, like a crown, glistened a red rose painstakingly constructed of ruby petals and emerald leaves.

The gentleman in the portrait miniature, while handsome enough, faded into insignificance in contrast with the casing. His head was covered by the closely rolled white curls that Vaughn could remember his own father sporting back in his youth, pulled back into a tight queue at the back with a wide black velvet ribbon. He wore a white stock and a blue sash crosswise over something that looked, if Vaughn wasn't much mistaken, like armor, a symbolic nod to an earlier age. An order of some sort dangled from the sash, detailed in brushstrokes so fine as to be nearly invisible.

Something about the miniature stirred a memory, long buried. Eyes narrowing, Vaughn rummaged through a mental catalogue of acquaintances. He knew he had seen that face before, but where? In Paris, in Rome, in Constantinople?

In Ireland?

"Port?" Anne offered, holding out a glass in a hand that trembled.

Like the miniature, the glasses were at odds with the general air of dust and dereliction. A large rose had been engraved on one side, while a thorny plant wrapped its stem around the bowl. The rich hue of the liquid turned the petals of the rose a deep blackish red.

Holding up the glass, Vaughn sniffed at it delicately. Placing it pointedly back on the table, he flicked fastidiously at the cup. "I believe I'll pass. Drink before dinner can be so injurious to one's health."

Crystal chimed against crystal as Anne clattered the stopper back into the decanter. "I haven't been trying to kill you, Sebastian, really. He thinks I am, but that's all part of the plan. He thinks he's using me, but it's really quite the other way around. I only used him to get back. To get back to you," she clarified.

Vaughn found this newfound devotion rather unconvincing, and said so. "I find this newfound devotion rather unconvincing. You are, after all, the one who bolted."

Anne's thin fingers were playing with the stopper, easing it in and out of the neck of the decanter, as if she could stop up time or release it like the port in the bottle. "I only bolted because of you. You and Henrietta Hervey."

"Who in the blazes was Henrietta Hervey? Did she run off with a dancing master and set a fashion?"

"Music master," corrected Anne. "And you were the one she kept running off with. You had a very irritating habit of consorting with her in gazebos."

Oh, that Henrietta Hervey. "One gazebo. Singular."

"And Harriet Hounslow and Helena Heatherington…" Anne ticked them off on her fingers.

"Aspirates must have been the rage that season."

"I certainly wasn't."

"Was that what it was all about?" Vaughn asked incredulously. "My neglect? You had your own distractions, as I recall. Several of them, in fact."