The Masque of the Black Tulip

by Lauren Willig

  ‘Did I do something wrong?’ asked Henrietta huskily.

  Miles’s eyes had a distinctly wild cast, and his hair was even more disarranged than usual. Henrietta gave in to the impulse to smooth a lock back. Miles shied like a nervous horse. ‘Hell, no – er, I mean, no! That is… Oh, blast it, Hen—’

  Since he didn’t seem to have anything particularly incisive to say, Henrietta decided to put an end to the conversation by the simple expedient of kissing him again. Miles’s arms closed around her with enough force to knock any remaining air out of her lungs, but breathing really seemed quite a minor consideration under the circumstances. Who needed to breathe, anyhow? Lips were much more interesting, especially when they were Miles’s lips, and they were doing such clever things to the sensitive hollow next to her collarbone. Henrietta hadn’t realised before that the hollow was a sensitive one, but she was quite sure she would remember in the future. Miles’s lips drifted even lower, following a slow path along her collarbone, down to the hollow between her breasts, and Henrietta stopped thinking in full sentences altogether, or even recognizable words.

  Miles was dimly aware that his brain had ceased working in concert with his body several moments since, but the worst of it was that he had ceased to care. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew there was a very valid reason that he wasn’t supposed to be undressing Henrietta, but whatever insubstantial objection his conscious mind might urge upon him dissipated beside the far-more-compelling reality of Henrietta herself, warm and glowing in his arms, a thousand forbidden dreams made flesh.

  And what attractive flesh it was.

  Miles made one last effort to restrain his baser desires, one last effort to push Hen away into the little box in his head marked ‘best friend, sister of.’ But her hair whispered wantonly against his arm, and her lips were swollen with kisses – his kisses, thought Miles, with a fierce surge of possessiveness. His, his, his. All his, from the long lashes that curved against her cheeks to the hint of a dimple that only appeared when she smiled or frowned very deeply, to the absolutely irresistible expanse of bosom revealed in agonising detail by her position reclining against his arm.

  Even so, Miles might – it wasn’t likely, but he might – have set her to her feet, tucked back her hair, and given them both a firm talking-to, if, at that very moment, Henrietta hadn’t sighed. It was just a little sigh, hardly louder than the brush of silk against skin, but it carried with it an entire world of amorous innuendo. So might Heloise have sighed in the arms of Abelard or Juliet for her Romeo, begging night to gallop apace and veil their pleasures.

  Miles was undone.

  So was Henrietta’s bodice. One gentle pull drew the fabric down to reveal the rosy areolae, blushing above their fine veil of silk. Miles ran his tongue around first one, then the other, as Henrietta arched in his arms and dug her nails into his back.

  He eased the fabric the rest of the way, enjoying the way Henrietta squirmed in his arms as the silk brushed over her nipples. Miles was just lowering his head to replace the fabric with his mouth, when a voice with an edge like cut glass, a voice from very far away, cut through his consciousness.

  ‘What in the hell is going on here?’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  If there were formal gardens at Donwell Abbey, we weren’t in them.

  Clutching my borrowed pashmina around my shoulders, I stumbled along after Colin through a landscape pitted with potholes and littered with killer twigs. The bulk of the house loomed behind us, craggy and featureless in the dark night. Just the equivalent of a city block away, the noises, voices, and lights from the front of the house were completely obliterated, leaving only a landscape that would not have come amiss in a Bronte novel, or one of the wilder creations of Mary Shelley.

  We were crossing something that I had no doubt Joan would describe as ‘the park,’ conjuring up images of stately oaks and Little Lord Fauntleroy. At the moment, I would have happily traded all the grandeur of the park for the neon grime of Oxford Street, with loud music blasting out of storefronts, chattering pedestrians bustling past, and, most important, firm pavement beneath my feet. My shoes, designed for city wear, did not react well to the ground, softened by yesterday’s rain and today’s thaw. They sank.

  So much for a romantic stroll in the garden by moonlight.

  Even the moonlight wasn’t obliging. Forget the trope of the moon as chaste goddess. A hopeless flirt, she was too busy playing peek-a-boo with the clouds to attend to illuminating the landscape. Instead of the scent of flowers, we were surrounded by the forlorn tang of November, compounded of decaying leaves and damp earth. A graveyard sort of smell. I cut that thought off before it could burgeon into the territory of grade-B horror movies, complete with zombie hands poking through the crumbling earth and vampires on the lookout for a midnight snack.

  It was all Henrietta’s and Miles’s fault, I ruminated darkly as I pried my heel out of the mud and hopped after Colin. I had been forced to leave off reading just as Henrietta and Miles kissed in the moon-silvered garden, and had dressed for Joan’s party pursued by hopelessly romantic images of trellises and patterned garden paths, the song of the nightingale and the sigh of the gentle summer breeze. If the characters in that perfumed garden tended to assume features other than those of Henrietta and Miles…who was to know but me and the mirror in Colin’s guest bedroom?

  I had neglected to take into account that that had been June and this was November.

  And then there was the fact that Miles had been rather madly attracted to Henrietta, while Colin… I snuck a glance at the shadowy figure next to me. I don’t know why I even bothered with the sneaking; there was no way he could make out my expression any more than I could discern his, even if he were one of those annoying people with a cat’s ability to see in the dark. Both his eyes and his flashlight were trained firmly forward, not at me.

  He hadn’t said anything since that comment about chaperonage.

  Of course, neither had I, but that was immaterial.

  It wasn’t that the silence was uncomfortable. Quite the contrary. It was the peaceful sort of silence that attends long acquaintance, the comfort that comes of knowing you don’t need to say anything at all. And that very lack of discomfort made me profoundly uncomfortable.

  I pinned down that thought, and followed it, writhing and slippery, to its source. It was the sham of instant coupledom. That was the problem. That indefinable aura of being with someone when you know you’re not. It’s something that anyone who’s been single for a time will recognise, the pretence of intimacy that comes of being the only two singles at a couple-y dinner party, or, in this case, sharing a house for a weekend. It’s an intensely seductive illusion – but only an illusion.

  I wondered if Colin had picked up on that, too; if he had been as besieged with ‘So…you and that American girl?’ as I had with ‘So…you and Colin?’ The arriving together; the knowledge that we’d be leaving together; the little checking-up glances across the room, all lending themselves to the fiction of togetherness.

  A fiction, I reminded myself, maintained for Joan’s benefit.

  Was he trying to warn me off, remind me that I was only a guest under sufferance? I cast my mind anxiously back over the day, totting up points on both sides of the ledger. The walk in the garden could just have been to get me away from the tower. In fact, Colin had shown no interest in accompanying me anywhere until I started to lurk around potentially actionable bits of his property. I winced at the memory of that terse note on the kitchen table. ‘Out.’ That lent itself so well to other curt phrases, such as ‘stay out’ and ‘keep away.’

  As for agreeing to walk with me to the cloisters… I grimaced as the obvious explanation hit me. Of course. Joan. It wasn’t that he wanted to stroll through the moonlight – or what would have been moonlight if the moon had been a little more cooperative – with me. He just needed a pretext to flee his hostess’s predatory grasp, and I had provided him with an ideal excuse. The v
isiting historian (in my mind’s eye, I sprouted tweeds, brogues, and bifocals) needed to be taken to see local objects of historical interest. There was no other type of interest involved.

  The white wine I had drunk to keep the vicar company tasted sour on my tongue.

  Right. I gathered the tattered shreds of my ego around myself, even though they afforded even less shelter for my lacerated pride than Serena’s pashmina did for my frozen arms. Well, I wasn’t here to flirt with him, either. So there.

  I was beginning to regret the whole ill-conceived adventure. I should have behaved like a good little academic, and stayed back at the house, hunched over a table full of documents in the meagre light of the desk lamp, rather than letting myself be drawn in by the echoes of long-dead romances and a strong dose of wishful thinking.

  I wasn’t turning into one of those desperate singles who fancied that every man she met was flirting with her, was I? The very thought was horrifying. Soon, I’d start reading great meaning into the way the counter guy at the convenience store across the way from my flat counted out my change, or imagine a hungry gleam in my landlord’s eye as he descended into my basement bower to empty the electricity meter.

  Have I mentioned that my landlord is fifty-something and paunchy?

  I twisted to look back at the house, wondering if I should suggest we go back. I could leave Colin to the tender ministrations of Joan, and as for me…there was always the bar. And the vicar. Not that I thought the vicar was interested in me, of course. He was just someone to talk to. At the bar.

  ‘You know,’ commented Colin, grabbing my arm as I stumbled, ‘you would probably fall less if you walked forward instead of backwards.’

  I could feel the warmth of Colin’s hand through the thin rayon of Serena’s dress, seeping through the fabric, combating the November cold.

  I removed my elbow from Colin’s grasp. ‘Are these cloisters of yours much farther?’ My voice sounded sharp, strained, and stridently American. ‘I wouldn’t want to keep you out here too long.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Someone else might.’

  ‘The vicar? You and he did seem to be getting on.’ Before I could respond to that, Colin’s flashlight beam shifted abruptly to the left, catching on an object several yards ahead of us. ‘There are the cloisters.’

  ‘Where?’ I said dumbly.

  No, it wasn’t because I was looking at Colin rather than the tiny circle of light. I was just looking in the wrong place. I had expected…well, a building, at least. Stone walls around a courtyard, maybe even a small church of some kind. I didn’t expect them to be intact, but some sort of structure was to be expected. Was this all an elaborate practical joke that they played on visiting historians? Perhaps Joan was in on it, too, and the vicar. I dimly remembered some sort of sci-fi movie along those lines, where everyone in town belonged to the same alien race except the unwitting heroine, although I did have to admit that feigning the existence of medieval buildings was quite different from being able to pull off one’s skin and transform into a reptile creature.

  ‘There,’ repeated Colin patiently, lowering the beam a bit, and this time my eyes picked out the lumps in the landscape that were nothing to do with nature.

  ‘This is it?’

  ‘Sad, isn’t it?’ agreed Colin, flashlight beam drifting across a window that had been rendered redundant by the absence of walls. ‘Half the buildings nearby were built of Donwell stone.’

  ‘I suppose you could look at it as recycling,’ I said, surveying the depleted ruins, ‘but it still seems like a waste.’

  There wasn’t much left to the old monastery. I’m sure what there was must have been picturesque in summer, with greenery creeping over the tumbled masonry, but in the autumn dark, the bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang were more forbidding than quaint. Once, a series of arches must have marked off the peripheries of a courtyard. Now, only half-buried stones and the occasional vestige of a pillar remained. Knee-high walls preserved the memory rather than the reality of rooms, and occasionally, among the wilted weeds, one could see the outline of something that might once have been a paving stone in a past life.

  As we grew closer, and the area encompassed by the flashlight expanded, I could see that the walls grew higher as we went on, rising shoulder high in some places, higher than my head in others, peaking and falling again. Only one room, all the way at one end of the cloister, maintained the majority of its original walls. There was even a bit of ceiling remaining, made of heavy stone that sloped inwards like the hull of a ship turned upside down.

  It was into that remaining room that I followed Colin, picking my way gingerly across the floor. It was more intact than those farther along the cloister, the majority of the floor stones still in place, but they were weathered and uneven, cracked in unexpected places. In other words, hell on heels.

  ‘Get me to a nunnery,’ I said lightly, just to say something, and felt like an idiot as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Get me to a nunnery? That was nearly as bad as the ‘I carried a watermelon’ line in Dirty Dancing. And it had been a monastery. Not a nunnery. Not the same thing. My medieval history professor would have been having palpitations. I had once confused the Carthusians with the Cistercians and had been afraid we were going to have to rush him to Harvard University Health Services for emergency care.

  ‘Not much of a nunnery these days,’ replied Colin with amusement, though it was hard to tell whether he was amused with me or at me. The beam of the flashlight swooped in a circle along the floor, picking out signs of recent habitation. An empty Coke can, a discarded packet of cheese-and-onion-flavoured crisps. ‘It’s quite popular with the local youth.’

  ‘Popular?’

  ‘I came here a time or two myself,’ he added with a reminiscent grin.

  ‘Ugh,’ I said, wrinkling my nose at the cold stone floor. ‘That can’t be very comfortable. Or sanitary.’

  Colin lounged back against one of the remaining walls in a position of supreme masculine smugness. Thinking of conquests past, no doubt. ‘You’d be surprised. A few blankets, a bottle of wine…’

  ‘Spare me the tales of your depraved youth,’ I said repressively, turning away and tracing a hand along the embrasure of the window, running a finger over the chips and chinks in an elaborate fleur-de-lis.

  ‘Yours wasn’t?’ His voice was warm, teasing.

  I glanced back over my shoulder. ‘I don’t kiss and tell.’

  ‘Or just not in cloisters?’

  ‘I don’t see the appeal.’ I dug among my collection of misremembered quotations for ammunition. ‘“The grave’s a fine and quiet place/But none I think do there embrace.”’

  ‘Ah,’ said Colin, setting the flashlight down on one of the recessed benches so that the light fanned out against the wall, ‘but this is a cloister, not a grave.’

  ‘It is a sort of a grave, isn’t it?’ I argued, licking my lips and taking a little step back. It had been so long since I’d flirted with anyone, I’d practically forgotten how. We were flirting, weren’t we? ‘It’s a grave of lost hopes and ambitions. You wonder how they must have felt when the monasteries were dissolved, suddenly seeing their whole way of life go the way of…well, the grave.’

  I had no idea what I was saying. I was vaguely aware of my mouth moving, and words coming out, but I couldn’t have made any guarantees as to content.

  ‘Besides, it’s a monastery’ I said stubbornly. ‘Can you think of anyplace less appropriate for romantic dalliance?’

  Colin laughed. ‘Haven’t you read your Chaucer?’

  ‘You can’t believe everything you read in Chaucer,’ I protested, but it didn’t come out very forcefully, because Colin had ever so casually leant a hand against the stone wall behind my head.

  I made a valiant effort to pull myself together and pay attention to what he was saying, instead of just staring in the general direction of his lips and wondering…well, we don’t need to go into what I
was wondering. History, I reminded myself firmly. That was what I was here for. Spies. Monks. Spies dressed as monks.

  Right now, I couldn’t have cared less if someone had waltzed across the room in a large flower costume with a sign saying GER YOUR BLACK TULIPS HERE. Every nerve in my body was on man-alert, screaming, ‘Incoming!’ I could feel the warmth radiating from his chest, smell the clean, detergent-y smell that clung to his collar, and my lips prickled with that peculiar sixth sense that only clicks into gear as a man leans too close for plausible rationalization.

  My eyes drifted shut.

  BRRRRING!

  Something emitted a jarring screeching noise, like five fire alarms going off all at once. I froze, eyes still closed and face lifted. I must have looked like a mole caught out of its tunnel by daylight. Above me, I could sense Colin, equally arrested by that dreadful jarring sound. It wasn’t an air raid. It wasn’t even Joan, come to take her revenge. It was my phone. Bleeping.

  Damn.

  I kept my eyes closed, in the futile hope that if I stayed very, very still and prayed very, very hard, the sound would go away, and Colin and I could pick up where we’d left off as if nothing else had happened.

  BRRRRING! BRRRRING!

  My phone bleeped again. Insistently.

  The pleasant mix of detergent and aftershave wafted away, to be replaced with cold air. I wrenched open my eyes and peeled myself away from the wall, my pashmina slipping drunkenly down my arms.

  ‘Would you excuse me for a moment?’ I asked in an agony of mortification, fishing in my bag for my vibrating mobile. Thanks to its untimely interruption, it was the only thing left vibrating – other than my lacerated nerves. ‘I mean…it’s just…in case there’s an emergency,’ I finished lamely.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Colin blandly, so blandly that I had to wonder if I had imagined the whole episode. Like the Cheshire cat, he had managed to rematerialise several feet down the wall. With an elbow resting against the ruined window frame, he looked as unruffled as if he had been standing there the whole time.