The Masque of the Black Tulip

by Lauren Willig

  At least she wasn’t wasting her time staring off into the gardens in the hopes of a glimpse of a certain man among the shrubbery! Manuscripts, I reminded myself firmly. I was here for manuscripts, not men.

  With that salutary kick in the pants, I tore my eyes away from the window, and directed them firmly towards the closely written pages of Henrietta’s diary.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Bookshop (n.): a den of espionage, intrigue, and sedition

  – from the Personal Codebook of the Pink Carnation

  ‘There!’ announced Penelope. ‘You just did it again.’

  Browsing among the new stock at Hatchards Bookshop, Henrietta shook herself out of a daydream involving Miles, a white horse, and herself in a charmingly flowing gown. ‘Did what?’

  She glanced from the novels she was examining to her friend, who stood glowering over the display like a wicked stepsister come to life out of the pages. Charlotte was two feet away, immersed in a new import from France that promised to be a dashing tale of love and intrigue. Hmm, love. Intrigue. Miles. Henrietta’s lips curved in a secret smile.

  ‘Ha!’ Penelope jabbed a finger at her, causing her reticule to swing straight at Henrietta like a medieval mace aimed to maim. ‘That…smile. You’ve been smiling like that all morning.’

  ‘Really.’ Henrietta tried to look like she had no idea what Penelope was talking about. She picked up a book at random and began leafing idly through the pages.

  It hadn’t been all morning. She had been perfectly composed through breakfast, and only done one impromptu twirl in the upstairs hallway, which didn’t count, because no one had seen.

  Last night, Henrietta had retired early from the Middlethorpes’ with a torn flounce – how that flounce had come to be torn was a matter of mystery to the matrons in the ladies’ retiring room, who were quite used to seeing young ladies rush in with snagged hems, but seldom ripped sleeves – and an equally ragged temper. There was nothing to do for it but go early to bed and hope the mood went away. If sleep could knit ravelled sleeves of care, it could certainly whisk away a bout of ill temper. She would go to bed, Henrietta told herself, and when she woke up, the world would have readjusted itself along comfortable, familiar lines, and all would be happy again.

  There was only one problem with that plan. She couldn’t sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, there, imprinted on the back of her lids like a garish billboard, stood Miles. Miles grinning, Miles eating biscuits, Miles dancing with Charlotte, Miles spilling lemonade.

  Miles looming close enough to kiss.

  Henrietta experimented with opening her eyes, but that was even worse, because open eyes meant wakefulness, and wakefulness meant thinking, and there were too many things that Henrietta was doing her best not to think about, like Miles driving with the marquise, or, even worse, why on earth it should matter to her that Miles was driving with the marquise. It wasn’t, after all, as though his taking the marquise driving presented a personal inconvenience to Henrietta. She had a lesson with Signor Marconi at six o’clock tomorrow that effectively precluded her afternoon drive with Miles, which meant that she couldn’t have ridden with him even if she’d wanted to.

  But she still didn’t want the marquise there in her place.

  Henrietta groaned and rolled over onto her stomach, inadvertently squishing Bunny in the process. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she whispered urgently, scooting over and yanking Bunny out from underneath her.

  Bunny regarded her reproachfully from under floppy cloth ears. ‘I’m being an idiot,’ Henrietta informed Bunny.

  Bunny didn’t argue. Bunny never argued. That was usually one of Bunny’s great charms as a confidante. Sometimes a girl needed a bit of unconditional agreement.

  ‘It shouldn’t matter to me at all who Miles chooses to take driving,’ Henrietta said firmly. ‘Why should I care who he takes driving? It’s of no matter to me. Well, it isn’t.’

  There was a highly sardonic gleam in Bunny’s black glass eyes.

  ‘Urgh!’

  There was no point in arguing with inanimate objects if they were going to get the better of the argument without even saying anything.

  Henrietta flung off the bedclothes and stomped over to the window, where the full moon silvered the plants in the garden and glinted off the windows of the neighbouring houses. It was a moon for lovers’ trysts, for clandestine kisses in gardens, for murmured endearments. Somewhere, under that same moon, Miles was off…with the marquise? Playing cards with Geoff? Alone in his bachelor quarters? Henrietta left off trying to pretend to herself that it didn’t matter. It did. She wasn’t sure why, but it did.

  Henrietta sank down onto the chaise longue next to the window, and tucked her feet up under the embroidered hem of her nightdress. Wrapping her arms around her legs, she rested her chin on her knees and thought back over the past couple of days, when the world had begun to fall out of joint.

  She couldn’t blame it on her courses; those had come and gone a week ago, with their attendant stomach pains, spots, and snippiness. That would have been too easy. This was a distemper of the mind rather than the body, and it had begun with the arrival of the marquise. No, Henrietta corrected herself with brutal honesty. Not with the arrival of the marquise. With Miles’s lingering to speak to the marquise.

  Henrietta banged her forehead against her knees. There was really no escaping it, was there? She was jealous. Jealous, jealous, jealous. Miles was supposed to be her escort, her permanent cavalier.

  Where there was jealousy…

  Henrietta jerked her head up so quickly that she nearly tumbled off the chaise. She couldn’t have fallen in love with Miles. The very term, with all of its poetic resonance, conjured up something grand and dramatic. There was nothing whatsoever grand or dramatic in the way Henrietta felt about Miles. It was a very simple concept, really: She just didn’t want to share him with anyone. Ever. She wanted to be the person his eyes sought out in a crowded ballroom, the person he nudged when he had a really smashing joke he just had to tell, the first person he saw when he woke up in the morning, and the last person he spoke to when he went to bed at night. She wanted to be the one whose ear he whispered in at the opera, and the one perched next to him in his alarmingly tottery phaeton when he drove in the park at five.

  Love, Henrietta told herself with a decisiveness she was far from feeling, was something of a different calibre entirely.

  Before their first season, she and Penelope and Charlotte had spent endless hours eating whatever biscuits were left after Miles raided the tray, and discussing Love. Love with a capital letter, that would swoop down with shining wings and carry them away to realms of enchantment hitherto undreamt of. Love, of course, would be properly attired in tight tan buckskins, wear an immaculately tied cravat, and have a vaguely rakish air. His arrival would be heralded by violins in the background, an impressive fireworks display, and the odd clap of thunder, all signalling to her instantly that the love of her life had come to her. And here she was, without a thunderbolt in striking distance, musing over Miles, Miles who had been there nearly all of her life, without any sort of emotional pyrotechnics taking place.

  It was ludicrous. If she did harbour deeper feelings for Miles, wouldn’t she have known sooner? Wouldn’t she have felt odd constrictions of the heart as he snatched biscuits out from in front of her, and turned cartwheels into the duck pond? All the books were quite clear on that point: When one’s true love turned up, one was supposed to know. Immediately.

  Of course, she had been not quite two when Miles first showed up at their door, and her vision of love at the time had a lot to do with warm milk.

  Henrietta turned her head to stare thoughtfully at the moon. By all the classic measures, she couldn’t be in love with Miles. But how did one account for the fact that the very thought of him driving with someone else filled her with bitter wormwood and gall? As for the thought of him marrying someone else…the idea was too harrowing to even contemplate.

  Mil
es. The name tasted right on her tongue.

  Henrietta chuckled in the darkness. Of course it did! She had been uttering it in various tones of assertion, annoyance, and affection for the past eighteen years. Eighteen years. Henrietta let her chin sink back to her knees and thought about eighteen years of Miles. She thought about the way his cravat never stayed tied and his hair never stayed brushed, and the way his smiles always seemed too big for his face.

  Millions of memories of Miles crowded one after the other in glorious chronological disorder. Miles letting her take the reins of his curricle and drive his beloved bays, breathing down her neck all the while – hmph, she had been nowhere near that tree. Miles popping out of her wardrobe as the Phantom Monk of Donwell Abbey, but ruining the effect by yanking the sheet off his head the minute she screamed. The scream had been one of indignation, rather than fear (she wasn’t simpleminded; she’d seen the black shoes poking out under the edge of the habit), but it seemed a shame to inform Miles of that when he was so busy apologising. There was the summer she was thirteen and had climbed too far up the old oak in the back of Uppington Hall. It had seemed a good idea at the time, a floating faerie tower in which to read and daydream, but less of a good idea once she was up there, perched precariously on a tree limb, book tucked into her sash, and the ground a long way away. Henrietta was not a tree-climbing sort of girl. Richard had gone for a ladder, but Miles, grumbling all the way, had scaled the tree trunk and helped her down, branch by shaky branch.

  There could be worse things than falling in love with one’s oldest friend.

  A slow smile began to spread across Henrietta’s face. It lingered there while she slept, returned when she woke, and crept back at intervals throughout the morning.

  Penelope yanked down the book Henrietta was holding in front of her face. ‘Do stop trying to hide. Why all the smiling?’

  ‘It’s Miles.’

  ‘What has the big oaf done now?’

  ‘Miles isn’t an oaf,’ Henrietta replied tolerantly. They had been through this before.

  ‘No, he’s a big oaf.’

  An unexpected chuckle rose from behind Charlotte’s book. ‘Have you ever heard of a little oaf?’

  Henrietta decided to intervene before they wandered irreversibly off on that fascinating tangent. ‘I have,’ she said, running her finger along the spine of the book, ‘developed a bit of a tendre for Miles.’

  ‘You’ve developed a what?’ yelped Penelope.

  ‘I think she said tendre,’ filled in Charlotte helpfully.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ argued Penelope. ‘It’s Miles.’

  Henrietta assumed the sort of beatific expression more commonly associated with wings, halos, and Renaissance altar paintings. ‘Miles,’ she agreed.

  Penelope stared at her closest friend in horrified disbelief. In desperation, Penelope flung out a hand to Charlotte. ‘You say something to her!’

  Lowering her book, Charlotte shook her head, a small smile flitting about her lips. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised. I had wondered…’

  ‘Wondered what?’ enquired Henrietta eagerly.

  Charlotte lowered her voice confidingly. ‘Has it never struck you as odd that the minute you walk into a ballroom, the first person you gravitate towards is Miles?’

  ‘She likes the lemonade?’ suggested Penelope.

  ‘I don’t think it’s the lemonade.’ Charlotte turned back to Henrietta. ‘It’s always been you and Miles. It just took a long time for you to notice.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ countered Penelope crossly. ‘This isn’t one of your silly romantic novels. Just because Miles is always loafing about doesn’t mean that he’s…that they’re…you know!’

  Henrietta ignored her. ‘When you say it’s always been me and Miles, do you mean it’s always been me following along after Miles, or something else?’

  Charlotte considered. ‘He does seek you out,’ she said after a pause that lasted several agonising years. Henrietta felt her spine relax. Then Charlotte had to spoil it by adding, ‘I don’t think there’s anything romantic about it, though. At least, not yet.’

  ‘Blast.’ It was nothing Henrietta hadn’t considered herself, but it still wasn’t pleasant hearing it. ‘How do I get him to stop thinking of me as a little sister?’

  ‘Never speak to him again?’

  ‘Pen! I’m serious about this!’

  ‘You’re sure there’s not someone—’

  ‘Quite sure,’ Henrietta cut her off. ‘Ouch!’

  She staggered as someone squeezed past her along the narrow aisle, treading on her toes and jerking her reticule loose in the process. The little bag tipped sideways, spilling coins, several new hair ribbons, and a spare handkerchief across the floor.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Henrietta dropped to the floor, pouncing on an adventurous coin before it could spin merrily away underneath the table. Charlotte ran for another, which, in the miraculous way of fallen currency, had already managed to bounce several yards away. Henrietta spared a moment to be thankful that she had dropped off her latest report at the ribbon shop before joining her friends at Hatchards. Somehow, she didn’t think Jane would approve of it drifting about the floor of the bookstore, even properly swathed in code.

  Penelope plunked to her knees on the floor next to Henrietta, as Henrietta shoved her belongings back into her bag.

  ‘All right,’ Penelope muttered, lunging under the table to grab one last shilling that had tried to make its escape and poking it into Henrietta’s reticule. ‘I’ll help. But I still think he’s an oaf.’

  ‘A big oaf?’ Henrietta used the tabletop to lever herself to her feet, and pressed a kiss to her best friend’s cheek. The offer might have been graceless, but she knew how long Penelope had disliked Miles and how hard-won that small concession had been. Yanking open her reticule just wide enough for Charlotte to slide one last coin through, Henrietta wound her bag tightly around her wrist. ‘Thank you, Pen. Now, ideas?’

  Charlotte stared dreamily off into space. ‘In Evelina, she wins Lord Orville through her innate sweetness and good nature.’

  Pen vented some of her thwarted irritation by sending Charlotte a withering look.

  ‘Well, she asked if I had any ideas!’ protested Charlotte.

  ‘How does one portray innate sweetness and good nature?’ enquired Hen.

  ‘If you have to think about it, you probably don’t have it,’ said Charlotte thoughtfully.

  Henrietta grimaced. ‘Thanks, Charlotte.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Charlotte dropped her book in her distress. ‘I didn’t mean it that way! You’re one of the sweetest people I know.’

  ‘Here.’ Penelope dragged both of them over to a rack of magazines in the corner of the store. ‘None of this inner sweetness rot. You need to take a more practical approach.’

  She yanked down a copy of the Cosmopolitan Lady’s Book and began leafing through.

  Henrietta pointed to one of the headlines. ‘You might want to take a look at that one, Pen.’

  Penelope turned it over to see ‘Humiliation on a Balcony! The Five Minutes That Ruined My Life.’

  ‘Oh, ha, ha. Hmm, that’s not a bad idea, though…if you got Miles out on a balcony, and arranged for a witness – that would be me – to burst indignantly onto the scene, you could be married within the week.’

  Henrietta shook her head decisively. ‘I don’t want to trap him. If he marries me, I want it to be because he loves me, not because he’s forced into it.’

  Charlotte nodded furiously in agreement.

  Penelope rolled her eyes. ‘All right, if you want to go about it the hard way.’

  Huddled in a corner of Hatchards they went through ‘Use Your Eyes to Tell Him He’s the One’ (Henrietta went cross-eyed trying to gaze meaningfully into Penelope’s eyes); ‘Ten Tricks for a More Flirtatious Fan’ (three books tumbled to the floor); and ‘Ravish Him with Roses,’ which wasn’t nearly as titillating as it sounded, having to do mostly wi
th flower arrangements.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Hen disgustedly. ‘I can stun him into immobility by going cross-eyed, knock him senseless with my fan, and stick a rose in his teeth while he’s unconscious. Nothing says “I love you” quite like a mouthful of thorns.’

  ‘Maybe if you held your wrist just a little lower while flicking open the fan?’ suggested Charlotte.

  ‘It’s no good,’ said Henrietta, rubbing the offending joint. ‘I’m not going to turn into a ravishing seductress overnight. Besides, that role has already been filled.’

  Penelope looked perplexed.

  Charlotte grimaced in comprehension. ‘The Marquise de Montval.’

  ‘The very one,’ said Henrietta.

  ‘Oh, no,’ breathed Charlotte.

  ‘I know.’ Henrietta grimaced. ‘It’s hopeless, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ Charlotte hissed, flapping her hands in agitation. ‘It’s not that. She’s right there. To your left. Don’t…’

  Henrietta and Penelope both swivelled sharply to the left.

  ‘…look,’ Charlotte finished weakly.

  The marquise bent a casual glance on Henrietta and her companions, then continued on her way to the till, book in hand.

  ‘Who knew she could read?’ muttered Henrietta.

  ‘Shhhh…’ Charlotte cast an anxious glance back at the marquise, shepherding Henrietta and Penelope towards the back of the store, out of earshot.

  ‘She all but propositioned Miles last night.’ Henrietta fumed, glowering around the bookshelves in the general direction of the marquise. ‘In front of me!’

  ‘But did he accept?’ asked Charlotte quietly.

  ‘Maybe you should just leave him to her,’ broke in Penelope. ‘If he’s the sort of man who’d succumb to a woman like that, why would you want him?’

  ‘What man wouldn’t succumb to a woman like that?’ returned Henrietta wryly. Even in profile, across the length of the store, the marquise’s flawless complexion shone like the legendary beacon at Alexandria.

  Usually, Henrietta was quite pleased with her own appearance. She knew she’d never set off a flotilla of ships, but she liked the oval face reflected in the mirror. She liked her thick brown hair with its reddish glints; she liked her high cheekbones and her small nose; and she was especially fond of the almond-shaped eyes that tilted at the corners in a way that Charlotte had fondly assured her lent her an exotic air.