Lauren Willig - [Pink Carnation 04]

by The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

  Colin looked grim. “She rang him while we were in the store.”

  Since another ouch would be redundant, I said, “Does she want him back?”

  “No. She wants to be friends.”

  “Poor Martin,” I said softly. There’s nothing worse than being strung on by an ex. Not that I would know. When I dumped Grant, I had done it cleanly—if it can be called cleanly to fling a ring in someone’s face and hang up on all his subsequent calls. But at least I left him in no doubts as to my sentiments. Once you’ve called someone lying, cheating scum who belongs under the nearest rock, and called him that loudly and in public, there’s just no going back.

  “So,” said Colin, looking down at me in a way that banished both Martin and the memory of evil exes from the horizon. “Shall we?”

  Absurd as it sounds, we’d been so companionably chatting about his friend’s angst that I’d nearly forgotten we were supposed to be on a first date. And that I was unshowered, untweaked, and otherwise unkempt.

  I looked down at the silly pants, at my computer bag bumping against my hip, and thought of a hundred reasons to say no. I could tell him I wanted to drop my things off at my flat. Even half an hour would buy me enough time to hastily shower, put on a sweater without dyed-in deodorant stains under the arms, and give myself an extra inch with a pair of super-tottery going-out heels. I could make the usual big, predate fuss.

  Or I could just go along with Colin.

  “Sure,” I said, smiling up at him through the tousled strands of my greasy hair. “Let’s.”

  Chapter Six

  Nine coaches waiting—hurry, hurry, hurry.

  Ay, to the devil.

  —Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy

  It had been very clever of Lord Vaughn to wait until she was already ensconced in his carriage before he announced the location of their first foray. Since the alternative was leaping out into traffic, Mary chose to disbelieve him instead. The very idea of her, going to a…well, it was palpably absurd.

  “All right,” she said tolerantly, since nothing needled more than amused forbearance, “you’ve had your joke. Now where are we really going? Or would you prefer to tell me another tall tale?”

  Whatever his valet had used to polish his boots, it had created a mirrorlike sheen that reflected Vaughn’s smug expression with unnerving accuracy. “My dear lady, would I jest?”

  Mary didn’t even need to stop and think about it. “At my expense? Certainly.”

  Mary was surprised the English government hadn’t leased Vaughn out as a secret weapon of torture. They could make a fortune in fees. He needled; he baited; he drawled. His eyebrow rose more regularly than Pauline Bonaparte’s hemline, and he never spoke directly when a means of confusion was to be had. If Vaughn swore the sky was blue, it probably meant it had turned green when no one was looking.

  It made for a refreshing change. After a week of living with Letty and Geoff, Mary welcomed the distraction provided by Lord Vaughn’s mercurial shifts. Having her sister and brother-in-law tiptoe around her made Mary feel as though she were suffering a slow death by cotton wool, smothered in good intentions. They were painfully solicitous of her feelings, with the sort of solicitude that did far more for the giver than the recipient. It wouldn’t sting nearly as much watching them hold hands beneath the breakfast table as it did when they instantly sprang apart as soon as she entered the room, exchanging a look more intimate than any handclasp, a look, that in the private matrimonial lexicon, roughly translated to, “Mustn’t upset Mary.” That upset Mary. It was pure wormwood and gall to be treated as an emotional invalid needing cosseting and special care. For the first time, Mary understood what drove animals to bite the hand that fed them—sheer irritation at being patronized. It made her want to growl and snap.

  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 wor
th 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.

  “Aunt Imogen!” Mary repeated. Decades of sitting too near the orchestra at the opera had wreaked havoc on Aunt Imogen’s hearing, and the angle of her hat rendered lip-reading an impossibility.

  Vaughn regarded the tilted hat without favor. “Are you quite sure she’s still sentient?”

  “Only just barely—but isn’t that the point?”

  “A hit. A palpable hit.” Vaughn sighed. “Bring out your aunt. The proprieties, after all, must be maintained.”

  Grasping what she assumed to be the general vicinity of Aunt Imogen’s shoulder, Mary essayed a gentle shake. Happily dreaming of handsome footmen, Aunt Imogen snored on. Abandoning gentle, Mary shook her again. Aunt Imogen might look fragile, but she had the constitution of a carthorse and was harder to wake than the seven sleepers. Aunt Imogen’s crumpled lids crackled open over bloodshot eyes. From her open mouth came a noise that sounded like, “Wuzzat?”

  A pronounced Whig drawl, the chosen dialect of the previous century’s upper classes, made her all but impossible to understand. When in her heyday Robert Burns had written her an ode, the critics had promptly hailed it as “the unpronounceable in praise of the incomprehensible.”

  “The political meeting, Auntie,” Mary shouted. “Lord Vaughn has escorted us to a meeting of the Common Sense Society. Shall we go in?”

  “Arrr-bar,” pronounced Aunt Imogen imperiously.

  Mary chose to interpret that as, “Do let’s.” It might even have been so. Aunt Imogen, if rumor was to be believed, had harbored quite a weakness for radical politicians in her day, canoodling with the elder Mr. Fox and flirting with the masses at the hustings. She and the late Duchess of Devonshire had scandalized society by trading kisses for votes during the general election of 1784. At least, Aunt Imogen claimed she had been trading kisses for votes; malicious gossip maintained that she hadn’t insisted very hard on securing the latter before bestowing the former.

  Lord Vaughn climbed out first, holding out his arms to Aunt Imogen, who revived sufficiently to bat her eyelashes coquettishly in his general direction. An earl was an earl, after all.

  “My lady,” murmured Vaughn, ushering her forwards.

  Aunt Imogen gurgled appreciatively, although whether in response to Lord Vaughn or at the footman holding the door, whose finely turned calves she was unabashedly ogling, remained unclear.

  Shaking her head, Mary helped herself out of the carriage. If she was to be a bluestocking f
or the afternoon, in the model of that dreary Wollstonecraft woman, she might as well start acting the part. It wasn’t their message Mary objected to; it was that they dressed so shabbily as they delivered it.

  Pausing on the second step, Mary stared in dismay at the scene before her. She wasn’t quite sure where she had expected a philosophical society to meet, but her imagination had conjured a great white-walled room, ringed with pillars and decorated with the marble busts of great men. Instead of a temple to learning, the building before them was built of brick in the lower story, surmounted by crossed timbers set in plaster above. A sign creaked above the door, displaying a frog with a five-pointed crown on his head, crouching within a ring of feathers.

  In short, it was a tavern.

  “Welcome,” said Vaughn, “to the Frog and Feathers.”

  Mary tugged her bonnet down forward over her face, wishing she had worn a cloak and hood instead of a fashionable spencer. The short jacket might display her figure to admiration, but it provided very little extra material for the purpose of hiding her face.

  “A tavern?” she demanded.

  “What did you expect? The Royal Academy?”

  Since that was sufficiently close to the truth, Mary chose not to answer. Putting her nose in the air, she swept grandly down the final steps.

  Vaughn wasn’t fooled for a moment. Holding out his arm directly so that she had no choice but to take it, he said in an undertone, “Such meetings are illegal twice over. Our friends would be fools to hold them in a more noticeable venue. Besides,” he added mockingly, “they have precedent behind them. The tavern has always been the preferred meeting place for illicit activities. Cavaliers, Jacobites, revolutionaries…all of history’s schemers find their way sooner or later to the alehouse.”