The Masque of the Black Tulip

by Lauren Willig

  Geoff’s dark head was easy to spot among the crowd; he stood out several inches over the dumpy dowagers and diminutive debutantes (the male population of the room had already begun a steady but inexorable progression to the card room and the refreshment table). But Geoff, Miles noted with a grimace, was otherwise occupied. He had persuaded that peerless jewel in Albion’s crown, otherwise known as Mary Alsworthy, the biggest flirt this side of the English Channel, to partner him for a quadrille, and was gazing down at her dark curls with the devout reverence of a Crusader first sighting the Holy Land.

  Miles stood on the side of the dance floor, and made subtle gestures at Geoff. Geoff’s eyes remained fixed adoringly on the crown of Mary Alsworthy’s head. Miles abandoned subtle. He waved his arms about and jerked his head in the direction of the door. Geoff caught his eye and grimaced. Miles couldn’t tell if that was an ‘I’ll be with you in a minute’ grimace, or a ‘Stop waving your arms about because you’re embarrassing the hell out of me’ grimace. Either way, there wasn’t much more Miles could do, short of bodily dragging Geoff off the dance floor, so he retreated to the side of the room with less than good grace, and leant against the wall with arms crossed.

  ‘You waved?’ commented Geoff ironically, striding over to join him as the set on the dance floor dissolved and a new round of couples took their place for a lively country dance.

  Miles decided to ignore the irony. Springing from his languid pose against the wall, he announced grandiloquently, ‘The time has come!’

  ‘To embarrass me in front of Mary Alsworthy?’

  ‘Oh, for the love of God!’ The lady in question was already surrounded by five other swains. Miles forbore to point that out, not wanting to precipitate Geoff’s departure. ‘There’s a war on, remember? Can we concentrate on that for a moment?’

  ‘Oh. Right.’ Geoff had already sighted Mary’s entourage for himself and was looking that way with a worried line between his brows.

  Witchcraft, Miles concluded. There had to be black arts involved somehow. This, after all, was Geoff, who had spent the past seven years capably taking care of the administrative end of the League of the Purple Gentian while Richard undertook the more daring bits. Nothing short of diabolical intervention could explain it.

  England was long overdue for a good witch burning.

  ‘You know,’ Miles said cunningly, ‘maybe if you avoid her for a few hours, it will pique her interest in you. Hen tells me women respond to that sort of thing.’

  Geoff shook his head. ‘Doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Which is just why it might work,’ Miles said sagely.

  ‘Hmm, there is that.’

  Miles decided he had pressed that ploy as far as he could without raising Geoff’s suspicions. Of course, given his current state, he could probably tell Geoff that King George had just turned into a giant rutabaga, and Geoff would nod and agree.

  ‘The person in question is over there, by the large statue of Zeus throwing thunderbolts,’ said Miles in a conversational tone so that no one walking by would suspect anything clandestine. ‘I need about an hour. If you see him take his leave before then, think of some way to detain him. I’m counting on you, Geoff.’

  ‘An hour?’

  ‘More would be better, but an hour will do.’

  Geoff nodded. ‘Good luck.’

  Miles grinned, executed a fancy little fencing move against the air, just for the hell of it, and turned to go. At the last moment, another thought struck Miles. He poked Geoff in the shoulder. ‘One last thing.’

  ‘What might that be?’ asked Geoff warily.

  It was a sad day when one’s friends turned all suspicious. ‘Just keep an eye on him and Hen, will you? I didn’t like the way he was hovering over her last night.’

  ‘Simple enough,’ agreed Geoff with relief. ‘I can always spirit her off onto the dance floor. Maybe if I could make Mary jealous…’

  ‘Knew I could count on you, old chap!’ Miles whacked Geoff on the shoulder before he could complete the thought, and strode cheerfully out of the ballroom with the comfortable sense of one who has done his duty.

  Loping down the front steps, Miles drew in a deep, restorative breath of night air – and nearly gagged. Miles’s face twisted in disgust. The smell was unmistakable, as were the noises that accompanied it. Someone, coattails sticking up in the air and head in the shrubbery, was casting up his accounts right into the Middlethorpes’ carefully trimmed shrubbery.

  As Miles passed, the retcher stood up, stumbled, landed with one hand under the bushes – Miles winced – and levered himself up again so that the lantern light fell full on his pasty face. Miles stopped dead in his tracks. Here was someone he’d been meaning to speak to. It wasn’t the best of timing, but Miles would rather get this particular interview over with as quickly as possible. The stench only provided extra incentive.

  Taking hold of a mercifully clean part of the man’s cravat, Miles helped haul him upright.

  ‘Frobisher,’ he drawled. ‘I’ve been wanting to speak to you.’

  ‘Honoured, Dorrington.’ Frobisher swayed on his feet as he attempted a bow. He grimaced at the ground as though he suspected it of trying to attack him. ‘Pleasure, don’tcha know.’

  Miles couldn’t echo the sentiment. Miles sidestepped to get out of the way of the blast of brandy fumes that emerged, like flames from a dragon, when Frobisher spoke. The man’s cravat hung askew, his jacket gaped open, revealing streaks of Miles didn’t want to know what on his waistcoat, and his bloodshot eyes narrowed with the sheer difficulty of trying to focus on Miles.

  This inebriated cretin had had the gall to touch Henrietta. Miles’s nostrils flared with distaste – a mistake, since it allowed in more of Frobisher’s disgusting reek. When not in his cups, Frobisher was a perfectly presentable specimen, but any man of his age who would let himself get in such a state didn’t deserve to be in the same room as Hen, much less drag her out onto darkened balconies. The man needed to be taught a little lesson in manners, starting with keeping his scurvy hands off Miles’s best friend’s sister.

  Calm, Miles reminded himself. Just a little man-to-man chat. It didn’t do to pound one’s acquaintances silly – it made social life dashed awkward. He just needed to make sure the man knew that if he so much as looked at Henrietta again, he’d better bloody well start thinking about emigrating to the remoter bits of the Americas.

  Miles crossed his arms over his chest. ‘I hear you had a little difference of opinion with Henrietta Selwick.’

  ‘Damn disagreeable chit,’ slurred Frobisher. ‘Goin’ about, cutting up stiff just because—’ He catapulted back into the bushes.

  Miles grasped the back of his waistcoat and hoisted him out again. If he held him dangling in the air just a moment longer than necessary, Frobisher was foxed enough not to notice. Nor did he suspect that Miles was considering replacing his hand with a boot and testing just how far one drunken degenerate could be kicked.

  Regretfully, Miles dropped Frobisher. He had a message to deliver first. Kicking would have to wait.

  ‘Thanks, Dorrington.’ Frobisher brushed ineffectually at his waistcoat. Some substances did not respond kindly to brushing. Frobisher scowled at the ruin of his gloves. ‘Dashed decent of you.’

  ‘About Lady Henrietta,’ Miles began menacingly, eager to say his piece and be done with it.

  ‘Don’t know what she was so upset about.’ Frobisher shook his head at the vagaries of women. ‘Jus’ a little cuddle. Girl’s in her third season. You’d think she’d be thanking me.’

  ‘She’d what?’

  Did the man have a death wish? Miles concentrated on the possibility he had misheard. The man was drunk; he wasn’t speaking clearly.

  ‘Last prayers, y’know,’ Frobisher elucidated helpfully. ‘On the shelf.’

  Miles’s fragile hold on his temper snapped.

  ‘Would you care to say that again,’ Miles clipped, ‘at dawn?’

  Chapter Tw
elve

  Duel (n.): 1) a desperate struggle in a darkened room; 2) a means of emptying crowded ballrooms

  – from the Personal Codebook of the Pink Carnation, with annotations by the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale

  Martin Frobisher might have been drunk, but he wasn’t stupid. At least, not entirely stupid. He knew enough to be very, very afraid.

  Dorrington’s skill with an épée was unparalleled, his marksmanship legendary, but the prospect of being skewered or shot faded to insignificance before the far more immediate menace of Miles himself. Miles’s hands were flexing in a way that had nothing to do with Queensberry rules. Frobisher backed away, bumped into the shrubbery, and steadied himself with one hand against the wall.

  ‘I say, Dorrington…’

  ‘Yes, Frobisher? What exactly do you have to say?’

  ‘Never meant it like that,’ he stammered, sliding down the wall to sit heavily in a puddle of his own making. ‘Damn fine girl. Anyone would want ‘er. Tits like – urgh…’

  Frobisher’s head snapped back with the force of the blow. His eyes bugged out in horror as Miles seized him by the cravat and hauled him upright.

  ‘You will not touch Lady Henrietta Selwick ever again. You will not dance with her. You will not kiss her hand. You will not cuddle, fondle, or otherwise defile any part of her anatomy. Is that clear?’

  ‘Won’t touch her,’ Frobisher dutifully gurgled. Struck by a sudden inspiration, he looked anxiously at Miles. ‘Won’t even talk to her!’

  ‘Even better,’ said Miles grimly. Opening his hand, he let Frobisher drop – right back into the pile of his own filth. Frobisher sprawled half under the bushes, clasping his throat and panting with relief. ‘Frobisher!’

  ‘Yes?’ a cracked voice said from the bushes.

  ‘If I were you, I’d refrain from mentioning any of this to any of your little friends. Speak Lady Henrietta’s name with anything but respect, and I’ll thrash you within an inch of your miserable life and sell you to the press gangs. If they’ll have you,’ added Miles with a disparaging glance at the crumpled pile of soiled fabric curled up under the bushes. ‘Good night, Frobisher.’

  A faint moan followed Miles as he clumped purposefully off down the street.

  The triumphal hero was feeling less than pleased with himself. He had, he knew, massively overreacted. Massively. The man had been drunk, he’d been in no condition for a fair fight, and, to be just, he hadn’t even meant to be offensive; he just was. All Miles had to do was calmly and coolly deliver a warning, gentleman to gentleman, to alert Frobisher that Henrietta wasn’t unprotected and she wasn’t fair game. Simple enough. Instead, he had lost his head, flexed his muscles, mouthed threats like some thick-headed numbskull fresh from the countryside. It was sheer dumb luck that no one had been watching.

  But there was something about Frobisher, about the thought of him pressing his attentions on Hen, that made Miles want to stomp back and finish what he’d started. How dared he refer to Henrietta in those terms?

  Miles scowled. Frobisher’s careless words had brought back a memory that Miles had been doing his best to repress for the past month. He’d nearly managed, too. There had been an incident. An incident involving Henrietta and a nightdress. A bloody indecent nightdress. Weren’t innocent young virgins supposed to be bundled up in yards of woolly fabric to prevent shocking the sensibilities of any bachelors who might happen by? If they weren’t, they should be.

  Henrietta had come running down the stairs in a nightdress that gave whole new meaning to the word ‘diaphanous.’ To be fair, Miles wouldn’t have noticed if Lady Uppington hadn’t made a sharp comment and ordered Henrietta upstairs to change, but once he’d started noticing, it had been hard to stop. When in the hell had she grown breasts like that? The candlelight through the thin lawn of her nightdress had left very little to the imagination, and Miles rather doubted even imagination could improve upon…

  Miles clamped down on the memory before it could go any farther. As far as he was concerned, Henrietta wasn’t supposed to have a body. She was a head on legs. Hmm, those had been very nice legs he’d seen outlined through… No. There were rules about lusting after your best friend’s sister. Hell, forget rules, more like immutable laws of nature. If he broke them, there would be strange eclipses of the moon, and the sheeted dead would rise and gibber in the streets. It was unnatural – that was what it was. Unnatural and wrong.

  But so well shaped, for something so wrong.

  Devil take it! Miles picked up his pace, striding furiously in the direction of Belliston Square. He had a house to burgle, and, thanks to that idiot Frobisher, he had already lost another ten minutes of his allotted hour. Fortunately, Vaughn’s residence was a scant five blocks from the Middlethorpes’; Miles’s long legs covered the distance in minutes.

  Just outside Belliston Square, he forced himself to slow and reconnoitre. This was, after all, where the operative had been murdered, and Miles wanted to take a look around outside as well as in. Staggering a bit, a gentleman well in his cups making his way home after one too many social events, Miles swaggered slowly into the square, looking keenly about under the guise of an idly lolling head.

  The square was shadowed on one side by the shuttered bulk of Belliston House, a grand mansion in the Palladian style erected early in the previous century. The current duke was an avid sportsman who seldom came to London. There would be a skeleton staff in residence, to maintain the premises and guard its priceless collections, but the odds of anyone in Belliston House taking notice of dubious goings-on in the square (including Miles’s) were slim. The other three sides were identical; each boasted a large house in the centre flanked by two smaller houses on either side, rather in the manner of a triumphal arch. Vaughn’s was one of the former, nestled on the south side of the square. An immense triangular pediment supported by three Doric columns dominated the facade, lending the structure a fashionable air of the antique. More important, all the lights were out.

  There was a party in progress in one of the houses, a musical evening, from the liquid syllables that spilt out the window. In front of another, a footman was teasing a little maid, who giggled and coloured under his attentions. Miles stopped and stretched; he leant against a gate, gazed at the moon, fiddled with his stickpin. No one took the slightest notice. Miles continued on his way, his theory confirmed. The maples planted in the middle of the square meant anyone standing in front of Vaughn’s house would be blocked from the view of the houses opposite; as for the other houses, as long as the murderer looked like he belonged in the square, and moved quickly enough, he could be almost sure of escaping detection.

  Ducking around the back of the square and into an alley, Miles donned the concealing garments he had brought along for just this occasion. They weren’t elaborate, nothing like the complicated costume Richard used to wear for his escapades as the Purple Gentian, but there was only so much Miles could stuff into his pockets. Unfastening his diamond stickpin, Miles yanked off his white cravat, bundled his equally white gloves into it, and stuck the lot beneath a convenient bush. Downey would be none too pleased, but what was a scrap of linen more or less in a good cause? Replacing the white gloves with thin black ones, Miles drew out of his pocket a square of black cloth. Miles eyed it with disfavour. He really wasn’t looking forward to this part.

  England, he reminded himself. Rule Britannia and God Save the King, and all that.

  His jaw fixed in an expression of extreme stoicism, Miles knotted the black cloth bandanna-style around his head, hiding his fair hair, and covering a good chunk of his forehead as well. Miles caught a glimpse of himself in a dark window and grimaced. Hell, put an earring in his ear, and he’d look like a bloody pirate. All he needed was a tattoo on his arm and a wisecracking parrot.

  There was worse yet to come. Over the bandanna, Miles tied a thin black silk mask, the sort worn by ladies who wished to preserve their reputations and the roués who preyed on them. Now he looked like a pirate wit
h a yen for anonymity. Miles the Bashful Pirate, Scourge of the High Seas. If Hen ever saw him in this getup, he’d never hear the end of it.

  Ah, well. Miles shook his head at himself. At least if anyone discovered him, he could claim he had been on his way to a fancy dress party, and had wandered into Vaughn’s garden in pursuit of his runaway parrot.

  Feeling like a prize dimwit, Miles slipped unnoticed through Vaughn’s garden gate. The windows on the first floor were all dark. Inching through the midnight garden, the air heavy with the scents of roses and lavender, Miles could see a faint glint of light from below stairs. Vaughn’s valet would, naturally, be waiting up for his master. From the sounds of merriment emerging from the open window, he had company. Good, thought Miles, the more they were entertaining themselves, the less likely they were to hear the dark shadow who slipped soundlessly into the house.

  Ouch! He had whacked right into an ornamental bench that some diabolical mastermind had placed right up against the wall. Miles swallowed a bellow of pain, cursing silently, which wasn’t nearly as satisfying as cursing noisily.

  Rubbing his shin, the black shadow limped along, examining his options. Up three shallow steps stood a balcony, with French doors that gave onto the garden. The steps, of course, were right in the centre of the garden, in plain view of anyone in the house. The ornamental shrubs that marked out the patterns of the parterre would provide no concealment; they came to Miles’s knee at best.

  Easily enough remedied, thought Miles with a roguish grin. Placing one black-gloved hand on the corner of the stone balustrade, he vaulted over the railing, landing in a supple crouch on the balcony. Standing, Miles flexed his arms smugly.

  Back against the wall, he edged his way to the French doors, and with one cautious, gloved hand, tried the handle. It turned smoothly. Once inside, Miles didn’t let himself stop to gloat; he had worked out a plan of action last night, and intended to stick to it. He had already wasted enough time giving that revolting reprobate Frobisher the what-for.