Lauren Willig - [Pink Carnation 04]

by The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

  Unless someone contrived to exorcise it.

  “Woman,” Mary corrected.

  “Huh?”

  Mary squirmed to a sitting position, ignoring the reverberations the movement sent through her battered skull. “One woman. Singular. You are not allowed any others. Any discomfort or deadly danger is reserved solely for me and me alone. I’m not sharing you. Any bit of you.”

  Eyes bright, Vaughn lifted her hand to his lips.

  “Bossy, aren’t you?” he murmured over her knuckles. “The vows haven’t even been said yet.”

  Mary regarded him challengingly. “Haven’t they?”

  “In more ways than you can imagine,” Vaughn said soberly, thinking back over the past few weeks. “Pledged first in wine, then in blood, and now in ashes. I can’t imagine a more thorough set of vows than that.”

  “More thorough than your first?” asked Mary.

  “You,” said Vaughn, twining his fingers through hers, “are first and last, alpha and omega. I’ve had enough of letting the past rule me.” When Mary still looked uncertain, he added, with deliberate levity, “Think how much I’m giving up for you. Loose women, French spies…”

  “Ha!’ exclaimed Mary. “What about all I’m giving up for you? Adoring suitors, sonnets to my elbows…”

  “I can think of better things to pay tribute to,” said Vaughn, and did.

  It was unclear whose lips were sootier, but neither seemed to mind. The taste of blood and ashes only lent urgency to their kiss, a reminder of all they had nearly lost. With a happy disregard for his bad shoulder and assorted other aches and pains, Vaughn wrapped his arms around Mary and kissed her so thoroughly that most of the grime surrounding his lips transferred itself from his face to hers, like a misplaced beard.

  “What was that about sacrifice?” he asked blandly, once he had got his voice back.

  Mary blinked. “I don’t remember,” she said, “but tell me again.”

  Vaughn was more than happy to oblige.

  They parted to an arm’s length, smiling foolishly at each other. Vaughn noted that Mary’s hair was filmed with ash, matted and tangled into a coiffure that wouldn’t have looked amiss on one of Macbeth’s witches. Despite his best efforts, her bare arms and neck had been scraped by flying bits of debris, and the less said about the remains of her royal robes, the better. Dried blood streaked the left side of her face, and the soot had lent her a rather remarkable mustache.

  He had never seen anything lovelier.

  A bath, however, would not be amiss. Preferably for both of them. At the same time.

  “The devil,” said Vaughn. “I’ve left my carriage in Westminster. We’ll have to prevail upon your sister to take us back.”

  “Once she’s finished with her buckets, you mean,” said Mary, struggling to her feet, and holding out a hand to Vaughn.

  He took it without the sarcastic commentary Mary had half-expected, silently accepting her help and pulling heavily on her arm as he rose. She didn’t like the sallow look of his skin beneath the soot on his face, or the stickiness matting his shirtfront.

  “At least we don’t have to worry about the Black Tulip trying to kill you anymore,” she said, following her own private train of thought, as they started slowly and more than a little unsteadily towards Letty and Geoff.

  “No,” said Vaughn thoughtfully. “Only your brother-in-law. Who will, if I marry you, be my brother, too. A terrifying thought. More terrifying for him than for me, I imagine.”

  Occupied with other matters, Mary brushed Vaughn’s badinage aside. “Do you think he really was the son of Prince Charles Edward?”

  “It doesn’t matter whether he was or not,” said Vaughn matter-of-factly. “The Act of Succession bars that entire line from the throne.”

  Shading her eyes from the glare, Mary squinted at the collapse of Lady Euphemia’s theatre, a monument to the ruins of more than one failed ambition. Whether he might have been king or not, his grave was the same. “I suppose it’s all immaterial now.”

  “Much as he is,” commented Vaughn. “He can congregate on a cloud with his Stuart ancestors and commiserate on how much they were misused. They were an ill-fated line. James I had the Gunpowder Plot, Charles I died on the scaffold, Charles II died childless—”

  “If we don’t get you back to London soon,” Mary broke into his catalogue of royal woes, “the same may be said about you. I’m sure you ripped your wound back open, carrying me.”

  Vaughn, feeling a little more light-headed than he would have liked to admit, looked debonairly down his nose at her. “Taking care of your investment, are you?”

  “Not as well as I ought,” said Mary, catching his arm as he wobbled. “You’ve gotten rather battered over the past few days.”

  “Worth every wound,” said Vaughn gallantly, but he stumbled as he said it.

  As she steadied him, Mary’s magpie eye was caught by something glinting in the grass. It glittered too nicely to be one of the Lady Euphemia’s pasteboard creations. Mary’s own armlets had been lost somewhere long since, and her gold trim was blackened by smoke. But whatever it was that lay fallen in the grass still gleamed true gold.

  “What do you think that is?” she asked, pointing.

  Holding on to her arm for balance, Vaughn leaned over to scoop it up. “Scrounging for pocket change?” he said lazily as he clapped it into her palm. “I assure you, I’ll make you a better allowance than that.”

  Holding the piece in the air so that the red light of the flames reflected off its surface like a sunset, Mary filed away the promise of an allowance for later.

  “Don’t you recognize it?” she asked, turning the gold piece slowly this way and that for Vaughn to see.

  On one side was a blasted oak, with new shoots beginning to grow out of the burnt and broken trunk. On the other, a warrior drove a spear into the unsuspecting hide of a blurry blob at his feet. There was a hole bored into the top, by means of which someone might attach it to a chain. The lettering around the edge of the medal read, SPES TAMEN EST UNA.

  “‘There is still one hope,’” Mary translated, a line forming between her brows. “That’s what St. George said it meant when he showed it to me.” Holding the coin gingerly between two fingers, she looked anxiously at Vaughn. “Do you think…?”

  Vaughn plucked the medallion out of her fingers and tucked it safely away in his waistcoat pocket.

  “Of course not,” he said, with a surreptitious glance at the smoldering rubble. “It would have been impossible.”

  “Impossible,” Mary echoed, squinting at the flames. “Undoubtedly.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The medallion had lodged in a corner of the box, half-obscured by a packet of letters from Vaughn’s mother. Wiggling the coin free of its cardboard moorings, I balanced it in the palm of my hand. It wasn’t a large object. At a rough guess, it was about the same size as a five-pence coin, but the alloys were purer than the muddy brown five-pence pieces in my pocket. After two hundred years, the Jacobite keep-sake still shone pure gold.

  Turning it over in my hand, I kicked myself for not having figured the answer out myself. After all, hadn’t I done a paper on Jacobite iconography my first year of grad school? I knew the answer to that one. I most definitely had. It had completely ruined my Christmas break, since Harvard adheres to the charming habit of having exams and paper deadlines post-Christmas, thus ensuring a harried holiday, where the mistletoe gets mixed in with the reference books.

  To be fair, spes tamen est una wasn’t one of the better-known Jacobite mottos. It came late, well after the heyday of Jacobite enthusiasm, once the cause had already pretty much petered out. If I remembered correctly, it hadn’t been one of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s mottoes at all. Instead, it had been used as the message on a medallion he had commissioned for his daughter, Charlotte, in the hopes that she would take up the Stuart cause, and one day take her rightful place as Queen of England.

  At least, everyone had alw
ays assumed that it was Charlotte those medals were commissioned for. Maybe some of them even had been.

  But what if Bonnie Prince Charlie really had had a son? It wasn’t impossible. Bonnie Prince Charlie had eventually married a princess with a long German title, but that hadn’t been until the 1770s. According to the less sympathetic biographies, Charles Edward had spent most of his declining years drinking himself senseless to drown out the memory of his failure to attain his throne. His longtime mistress, Clementina Walkshaw, had abandoned him…when? Sometime in the 1750s, I thought, which would put her defection after the disappointment of the failed ’45 rebellion, when his dipsomania was beginning to get a bit much, even for the most devoted of mistresses.

  During that gap between Clementina and Louise von Something- or-Other, a clever woman might have maneuvered him to the altar. If St. George had been just about forty in 1803, that would place his birth in the early 1760s, the perfect timing for a hypothetical secret marriage. And if that was the case…

  We would never know. Or maybe, someday, someone might go back and track it all down, but it wasn’t going to be me. At least, not until I got the dissertation done. The Black Tulip’s true identity didn’t quite fit into my dissertation, which was, after all, supposed to be on the structure, methods, and cultural implications of English spying organizations, but it would make a very juicy article. I could think of several scholars who would turn a very satisfying chartreuse at the sight of it.

  Who would have ever thought that the Pink Carnation’s deadliest enemy wasn’t a hardened revolutionary, but a thwarted Pretender? Now that I knew the answer, I realized I had missed all sorts of clues. Even St. George’s assumed name was a private joke. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s father, James III, had been styled the Chevalier de St. George. An obvious alias for his grandson and namesake.

  If the Black Tulip really was James III’s grandson.

  I had all sorts of other questions, too. Had he really died in that fire? One assumed he must have. How would St. George, directly under the dome, have made his way out again? It was only in fiction that the villain, hideously scarred, returned to wreak revenge. But then how on earth did that coin make it onto the grass outside the burning pavilion and into Vaughn’s pocket?

  “Ah, Eloise!”

  I hastily tucked the medallion away, not into my pocket, as Vaughn had, but back into the corner of the box, hoping my body had blocked the glint of gold.

  Turning my chair with a hideous screech of metal against linoleum, I smiled at Dempster. It took some effort to make that smile convincing. Ever since hearing the Serena story the previous Saturday, Dempster hadn’t been high on my list of favorite people.

  Once again, Dempster was almost too nattily attired, in a blazer bearing the emblem of a famous prep school—or, at least, that was what it was meant to suggest. I had no idea if it did or not.

  “How goes the research?” he asked fulsomely, like the lady of the manor visiting the small garden of a tenant farmer to see how the peas and potatoes were getting on. Don’t ask why the image was lady of the manor rather than lord of the manor; it just was.

  “I can’t make heads or tails of most of this,” I said cheerfully, with a wave at the box of documents, sounding as American as I knew how. “It’s just so much paper!” I was tempted to add a “like, you know?” but decided that would be overdoing it.

  Dempster smiled tolerantly. “Perhaps I might help you understand it better. Over a coffee?”

  I clapped my hand to my mouth in false distress. “Oh, dear! I can’t. My boyfriend is picking me up at—” I made a show of checking my watch. “Six. So just about now.”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  I blinked disingenuously up at Dempster. “Yes. We have dinner plans with a friend of mine. I think you might know her.”

  Dempster rose to the bait like a trout breaking the water. It was beautiful to behold. He was one of those people who can never resist trying to prove he knows as many people as you do. I had been counting on that.

  “Who?” he asked, visibly cycling through his mental Rolodex of useful connections.

  “She was actually a school friend of a very good friend of mine,” I said, rambling happily on, while Dempster looked benignly on. It wasn’t an expression that sat well on him. It made him look mildly bilious. “But we’ve gotten to know each other since I came to London. You know how these friend-of-a-friend things are. And then you have to go back and trace the friendship web to figure out how you got to know each other in the first place.”

  Dempster looked so muddled that I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  “Which one was the old school friend?”

  Hmph, if he couldn’t handle a simple friendship genealogy, how could he be expected to master the complex interrelationships of historical personages? “My old school friend is Pammy Harrington. She’s the one who introduced me to the friend I’m meeting up with tonight. The one I understand you know. Rather well, in fact.”

  “Oh?” The man was too dense to even realize what was up. No, “dense” isn’t the right word. It just never occurred to him that any report could be less than favorable. He preened in anticipation of a second-hand compliment.

  “Yes,” I said sweetly, bringing the game to a close. “I believe you two might even have dated. Serena Selwick.”

  The wattage of Dempster’s smile visibly dimmed.

  “Oh,” he said. “You know Serena. She’s a lovely girl.”

  “Yes, she is,” I agreed.

  The silence crept in and expanded between us, like the Blob. I could tell Dempster was dying to find out just what and how much I knew. Serena wasn’t the sort to go around complaining about old grievances, but still…you never knew. A guilty conscience makes for an overactive imagination.

  I smiled, gently.

  It had the desired effect of making him even more nervous. Dempter fiddled with a corner of his pocket handkerchief. “Have you known Serena long?”

  “Not terribly long,” I said, and watched as the tension in his well-tailored shoulders lightened. “But it’s hard not to feel protective of her. She’s so delicate. And defenseless. One of life’s innocents.”

  “That’s very noble of you,” said Dempster, unsuccessfully trying to reroute the conversation.

  “Not really,” I said cheerfully. “It’s not entirely disinterested on my part.”

  I gave him just a moment to let that sink in. Naturally, he judged my motives by his own. The color came back into his cheeks as he leapt to the obvious assumption that I must just be using my friendship with Serena to get to her family papers. After all, wouldn’t anyone?

  I could see his opinion of me going up by leaps and bounds.

  “You see,” I added, before he could say “archives,” “I’ve just started dating Serena’s brother, Colin.”

  “Did I hear my name?” drawled a familiar voice.

  Lounging against the doorjamb, looking dubiously at the worn linoleum and weak tracking lighting, was none other than the man himself, managing to make the rest of the room look small and stuffy.

  I’m not sure how long he had been standing there—I had been too busy tormenting Dempster—but from the suppressed smirk on Colin’s face, it had been more than long enough. He did a fairly good job of suppressing his smirk. His one dimple, the one in his left cheek, wasn’t even in evidence. But I knew it was there.

  He also managed the drawl very well, almost up to Vaughn’s standard. He must have been practicing before he came.

  “Ready?” he asked, smiling at me and pointedly ignoring his sister’s flummoxed ex-boyfriend, who was doing an excellent guppy imitation, his lips going in and out with little bubbles of air.

  “Just about,” I said brightly, jumbling my notebooks and papers back into my bag. I held out a hand to Dempster. “Thank you so much for the use of the archive. I really appreciate it.”

  Dempster looked from me to Colin. One had to give him points for persistence. He rallied val
iantly. “Will I see you here again next Saturday?”

  Traipsing across the room, I slid an arm confidingly through Colin’s. “I don’t think so,” I said breezily. “I can’t think of anything more here that I would need. But thanks. And good luck with your projects!”

  “You know where to find me,” Dempster called out manfully behind us. “If you need any help, that is.”

  I turned around just enough to waggle my fingers good-bye as Colin nudged the door closed behind us, effectively cutting off any further farewells.

  My bag, as it is wont to do, thumped down my arm into the crook of my elbow. Without breaking stride or saying a word, Colin reached out and appropriated it, shifting it to his far side. He held it that way boys do, not using the strap, but grasping it by the top, so no one can suspect they might be wearing it.

  I beamed at him in gratitude. No matter how used to carrying your own bags you get, it’s still nice to have someone else do it for you. Of their own accord, without your having to ask.

  He was, as a friend of mine would say, good people.

  “So,” I asked, smiling up at him as we climbed the stairs from Dempster’s archival dungeon, “do you feel spiritually cleansed?”

  “That’s not quite how I would have put it,” he said dryly, sauntering along beside me through the long drawing rooms, under Vaughn’s knowing eye. Our footsteps clumped pleasingly against the parquet, two pairs in perfect tandem. Well, not quite perfect tandem. Colin’s stride was much longer than mine, and his shoes thumped while mine clicked, but our steps still made a pleasant rhythm together, nonetheless.

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  The smirk Colin had been so successfully repressing all that time escaped and spread across his face, complete with dimple. “The look on Dempster’s face when you told him you were friends with Serena—I wouldn’t have missed that for the world. Excellently done, by the way.”