Masque of the Black Tulip pc-2

by Lauren Willig

  "Dammit, Richard," yelled Miles, voice ragged with strain, "will you just listen?"

  "There's nothing," Richard panted, twisting his right arm free, "to listen to."

  "I want" — Miles barely dodged a sharp jab to his stomach — "to marry her!"

  "What?" gasped Henrietta.

  "What?" roared Richard, stumbling backwards.

  "That's an excellent idea!" applauded Amy. "That way, no one is compromised, no one shoots anyone at dawn, and everyone is happy."

  The expressions of the other three completely belied the latter part of her statement.

  Ignoring the others, Miles looked searchingly at Henrietta. "Hen?"

  "You don't have to do this," whispered Henrietta.

  "I rather think he does," commented Amy. "It's quite compromising, you know."

  "Hen?" repeated Miles urgently.

  Henrietta stared at him in mute misery, her mind leaping from one imponderable to the next. She could refuse, and watch her brother either tear Miles to death on the spot, or shoot a hole into him on field of honor the following morning. While Miles was undoubtedly the more accomplished sportsman, Henrietta knew, the same way she knew that Miles was proposing because it was the only honorable thing to do in the circumstances, that Miles would never, ever lift a hand against her brother. It wouldn't be an equal contest, with one party crippled with guilt. She didn't think that Richard would, once he had time to reflect, really want to hurt Miles, either, but in the mood he was in… Henrietta didn't trust her brother to aim wide.

  On the one side, death and dishonor. On the other…

  Or she could marry Miles, subsisting the remainder of her days with the knowledge that she had forced him into a match on the point of her brother's pistol.

  Miles slowly turned to face his former best friend, and Henrietta knew, from the set of his shoulders and the expression of unusual gravity on his face, that if she waited a moment longer, the fatal words would be uttered and the two men who mattered most in her life would be irrevocably committed to a course from which there would be no going back. Ever.

  "Yes," Henrietta blurted out. "Yes, I'll marry you."

  Richard turned an alarming shade of puce, rounded on his sister, and barked out, "You're not going to marry that… that…"

  "Man?" provided Amy helpfully.

  Richard glowered at his wife. "Seducer," he finished angrily. "Would you rather I married Reggie Fitzhugh?" asked Henrietta acidly, turning on her brother. Anything rather than look at Miles. "Don't be ridiculous!" snapped Richard.

  "Why aren't I allowed to be ridiculous, if you're being ridiculous?" demanded Henrietta, in her best annoying little sister mode. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Miles slowly retrieving his coat. Would he rather have cleansed his conscience at dawn? "That's not fair."

  "She does have a point there, you know," commented Amy.

  "ARGH!" Richard roared, driven beyond speech. "I am not being — "

  "Ridiculous and loud."

  "Go ahead," Richard clipped. "Marry him. Marry him tomorrow, for all I care. But I don't want to see that" — he jabbed a finger in the direction of Miles — "under my roof ever again."

  Miles shrugged into his coat and stepped forwards. "Fine," he said quietly, but with an edge of steel beneath his voice that made Henrietta instinctively stiffen. "We'll be married tomorrow. If you'll excuse me, I have a special license to acquire."

  With a nod of the head to Amy, and a swift kiss placed somewhere in the vicinity of Henrietta's hand — she could feel the tingle of it all up her arm — Miles turned and strode off towards the stables.

  Richard didn't bother to respond. He didn't say anything to his sister. He didn't follow Miles. He turned on his heel and stalked furiously in the direction of the house. Only the crunch of boots on gravel, receding in opposite directions, invaded the uncomfortable silence that followed. Henrietta stared after Miles's retreating back, grappling with the ramifications of what had just passed.

  Tomorrow. Henrietta pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. A special license. Miles hadn't just said they were to be married tomorrow, had he? He couldn't have meant it.

  Recovering her powers of speech first, Amy smiled reassuringly at Henrietta. "Richard will come around," she said confidently. "You'll see."

  From the house came the ominous sound of a door being slammed. Twice.

  Amy swallowed hard. "Eventually?"

  By noon the next day, the Honorable Miles Dorrington and his new bride were well on their way back to London.

  Henrietta glanced surreptitiously down at the ring on her gloved finger. She hadn't asked where Miles had acquired it, or what manner of skullduggery he might have engaged in to procure a special license on such short notice. In fact, they had had no chance to speak at all. By the time Henrietta had awakened that morning, with the vaguely headachy recollection that something of great moment had occurred and it really might be better to just stay under the covers until the world realigned itself, the household was already bustling with wedding preparations, and Henrietta found herself swept towards matrimony with very little notion of how she had gotten there.

  Henrietta had always imagined that she would be attended by Penelope and Charlotte, Charlotte misty-eyed with romance, Penelope grumbling. Instead, Amy helped her to dress, fussing excitedly with flounces and curls, while Mrs. Cathcart calmly rearranged everything as soon as Amy had bustled on to the next task. Amy offered her own wedding dress, but since her sister-in-law was a good four inches shorter than she was, and rather differently proportioned, Henrietta declined with thanks, and donned the evening gown she had worn the night before. There was a fitting irony, considered Henrietta, to being wed in the same gown in which she had been compromised.

  Miles had acquired not only a ring and a license, but the bishop of London, who wore his second-best vestments and the irritable expression of a man who has been dragged out of bed at an hour more commonly used for slumber. A makeshift altar had been constructed in the Long Drawing Room, and chairs set out on either side of the room, which Amy had draped with ribbons and flowers with more enthusiasm than grace. In contrast to their gay decorations, the long rows of chairs looked painfully empty. Instead of the friends and family members who should have filled them sat the two Tholmondelays, looking confused but game, and Mrs. Cathcart, single-handedly doing her best to throw a mantle of respectability over the whole hurried affair.

  It should have been her father beside her, escorting her down the aisle, not a brother poised for murder rather than matrimony. Her mother should have been at the front of the room, sporting an outrageous hat, beaming proudly, and* ordering everyone about. Her parents. Oh, heavens. What would they even think when she told them she was married, and without their presence or consent? Henrietta was quite sure they would have no objections to her marrying Miles, but the manner of her doing so was designed to enrage even the most tolerant of parents. It was something that didn't bear thinking about.

  Henrietta didn't have time to dwell on the absent faces. While Miss Grey plucked out the processional with more precision than passion, Henrietta spent most of her walk down the aisle trying to convince her brother not to murder her bridegroom. After several yards of fruitless argument, she finally succeeded in silencing him by pointing out that he was merely lucky that Amy's brother hadn't been the dueling sort. Since Richard's nuptials had been even more irregular than Henrietta's — performed on a Channel packet by a butler turned pirate — she had him there, and he knew it.

  "I'd still rather skewer him," muttered Richard. "Kindly strive to contain your excessive rapture at my nuptials until after the ceremony," Henrietta hissed back, winning a glower from the bishop and an anxious look from Miles.

  Was he anxious that she wouldn't go through with the wedding — or that she would ? Henrietta filed that thought away as yet another on the steadily mounting list of things that didn't bear thinking on.

  After an undignified tussle when the
bishop asked, "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man" (resolved only by Amy stamping on Richard's foot), the rest of the ceremony passed with unseemly haste. Henrietta suspected the bishop had deliberately truncated the ritual, but in her distracted state, she couldn't be entirely sure. In fact, she couldn't be sure about anything. The entire ceremony flitted past her with nightmare vagueness, colors blurring, voices melding, everything blending in a horrific carnival of unreality. The pronouncement that Miles was man to her wife took her by surprise, and she received her new husband's fleeting kiss, which bore absolutely no resemblance to the passionate embraces of the night before, with a certain amount of doubt as to whether what had passed could possibly be binding.

  If it weren't for the ring on her finger, Henrietta would have been quite convinced that none of it had happened at all.

  After the ceremony, she and Miles fled to his curricle, leaving the Tholmondelays to do justice to the hastily prepared wedding breakfast. "Lobster patties, Fred!" she could hear Ned exclaim enthusiastically to his brother, as Miles handed her up into the carriage. At least someone was enjoying it, thought Henrietta philosophically. Richard looked as though he would rather chew his way through a plate of nettles.

  As for Miles… It was very hard to tell what Miles was thinking. Henrietta snuck a glance at Miles, who was tooling the ribbons as if he had no other concern in the world but to negotiate his horses around a large rut in the middle of the road. Ever since they had departed from Selwick Hall, Miles had been treating her with unfailing courtesy. He had spread a lap rug over her legs, apologized for the necessity of conveying her to London in an open vehicle, offered to stop for refreshment, and even gone so far as to comment on the weather.

  Miles was being polite. Too polite. It made Henrietta nervous.

  She darted another lightning look at Miles, only to see his eyes hastily scoot back to the road. Henrietta looked away, but couldn't keep her eyes from slowly sliding back in his direction from under the rim of her bonnet. Miles's scooted the other way, like two characters creeping around walls trying to avoid each other in a Mozartian farce.

  If only they had been given time to speak before the wedding! Henrietta wasn't entirely sure what she would have said. Was there ever a delicate way to phrase, "You don't have to marry me if you don't want to"? Of course, even if she had found a way to say it, she knew as well as he that it was pure nonsense. He did have to marry her. She was compromised, ruined, fallen, sullied, soiled. Henrietta was running out of adjectives, but any one of them would have served the purpose.

  There was an alternative. Henrietta probed the option delicately, like a sufferer of toothache exploring around the rotting tooth. She would only be ruined if the story escaped the confines of Selwick Hall. Richard and Amy surely wouldn't repeat it to anyone, and Mrs. Cathcart could be counted upon to remain discreet, if not for Henrietta's sake, then for her mother's. As for Miss Grey, she never spoke when she could remain silent. The only danger remaining was the Tholmondelays, and while they didn't possess a brain between them, Henrietta had no doubt either Miles or Richard could instill through fear what might be lacking in intelligence.

  Annulment. There, she had said it. They could procure an annulment and then Miles would be free, and no one would ever know what had happened except the parties concerned. Miles could drive in the park with dark beauties, flirt with mysterious marchionesses, and acquire opera singers without the unwanted encumbrance of a wife.

  Henrietta made a wry face to herself. She had lived in society long enough to know there was no possible way to keep scandal a secret; it traveled mysteriously through the air, like bubonic plague. Besides, Henrietta wasn't quite sure exactly how one went about obtaining an annulment, but she had no doubt that the process would be lengthy, and involve lots of paper, which would invariably come to the notice of someone who would inevitably tell someone else, and before she knew it, respectable women would be sweeping their skirts away from her in the streets.

  There was always the nunnery. They were supposed to specialize in fallen women, weren't they?

  By the time they stopped in Croydon to change horses, Henrietta was in such a state of miserable tension that she welcomed the diversion. The courtyard of the Greyhound was already teeming with a variety of equipages, from a crested carriage to a green and gold accommodation coach, and the Swan was scarcely less busy.

  Assessing the mob with an experienced eye, Miles shook his head, and eased his horses along the High Street.

  "We'll try the Potted Hare," he announced. "They might be less crowded."

  Henrietta couldn't decide whether he was talking to himself or to her, but she decided that some response was probably a good thing.

  "That would be nice."

  Under the brim of her bonnet, Henrietta grimaced at the stilted words. How, after eighteen years of fluid bantering and bickering with Miles, had she been reduced to this? She had enjoyed more scintillating exchanges with Turnip Fitzhugh — and Turnip, like the vegetable for which he was named, was not chiefly known for his conversational talents.

  Miles, noticing the grimace, drew another conclusion entirely, and drew the horses up with unnecessary force as he drove into the courtyard of the Potted Hare. Flinging the reins to an ostler, Miles jumped down to hand Henrietta out of the carriage.

  Instead of moving aside to let her precede him, he stood, frowning down at her. A black traveling chaise scraped to a stop behind them, nearly clipping Miles in passing, and disgorging a dandy in the latest cut of coat, who paused to rearrange his already immaculate cravat. A busy coaching inn, Miles admitted to himself, wasn't the best place to conduct a conversation of a private nature. But something had to be said, and soon, because all the uncharacteristic silence was destined to drive him straight to Bedlam. Pygmalion had contrived to turn a statue into a living, breathing female. He, thought Miles glumly, had somehow managed to turn a living, breathing female into a statue.

  "Hen — " he began earnestly, taking her by the shoulders.

  "I say! Dorrington!" Whatever Miles had been about to say was lost, as a familiar voice hailed them. Without waiting for his coachman to bring his carriage to a full stop, Turnip Fitzhugh tumbled out of his chaise. "I say! This is a spot of luck, finding you here. Would have gone on to the Greyhound, but I saw your curricle in the yard, and thought, I'll dine with Dorrington. Can't abide to dine alone, you know."

  Clearly, the powers that be took very negative views of a man seducing his best friend's sister, and had wasted no time in exacting punishment. Miles tried to catch Henrietta's eye to share a glance of commiseration, but what little could be seen of her face beneath her bonnet was flung as deeply into shadow as though she had been wearing a veil.

  "Fitzhugh," groaned Miles, dropping his hands and turning to face his old schoolmate.

  Turnip gave a start as he noticed Henrietta for the first time, a state of affairs not altogether surprising, as Miles's large form had blocked her from his view.

  "Lady Henrietta?" He glanced from Henrietta to Miles with a puzzled expression on his good-natured face. "Didn't see you there! Devil of a fine day for a drive, ain't it?"

  Miles held out his arm to Hen, wishing the amiable Turnip to perdition. "Shall we see if we can secure a parlor?" he asked resignedly.

  "Capital idea!" enthused Turnip. He turned courteously towards Henrietta's bonnet. "What brings you here, Lady Hen?"

  "We were just — " began Miles.

  " — in Sussex. With Richard," Henrietta broke in, the tone of her voice forbidding further elaboration.

  Miles looked sharply down at Henrietta, but received a poke in the eye from an impudent feather for his pains. He could learn to hate that bonnet.

  "What are you doing here?" he asked Turnip with no good grace, as their small group progressed through the door of the inn. Behind them, a steady stream of vehicles, pausing on the journey from Brighton to London, continued to crowd into the yard of the coaching inn, in search of fresh horses
and a respite from the rigors of the road.

  Turnip beamed and waved his carnation-hemmed handkerchief. "Been in Brighton. With Prinny, you know. Devil of a crush at the Pavilion this weekend."

  "When isn't there?" asked Miles, gesturing expansively at the innkeeper, in the hopes that the sooner Turnip was fed, the sooner Turnip would leave. Behind them, a queue of cranky travelers was beginning to form, headed by the slender man who had nearly run Miles down in the yard. Judging from the width of his lapels and height of his shirt collar, he was clearly another one of Prinny's hangers-on, fresh from Brighton. That consideration added extra force to Miles's voice as he grumbled, "I don't know why you subject yourself to it."

  "You're joking, right, Dorrington? Can't say I care much for the sea, but the prince's entertainments are all up to the crack. Even had an opera singer perform this weekend! Accompanied by some Italian chap, name that sounded like a noodle. Deuced fine — er." Turnip glanced uneasily at Henrietta and broke off. "Er, singer," he finished with relief. "Deuced fine singer."

  Even Turnip looked relieved at the intrusion of the innkeeper.

  Wiping his hands on the large white cloth tied about his waist, that worthy waxed exceedingly apologetic, explaining that his private parlor was already spoken for; as they could see, his inn was full to overflowing due to the prince's entertainments that weekend in Brighton; if the lady and gentlemen did not object, there were still places in the coffee room… ?

  No one objected: Miles, because he didn't care where they sat, so long as they eventually left; Turnip, because he was still talking; and Henrietta, because she wasn't saying anything at all. Miles was very tempted to tap on the top of that confounded bonnet to inquire if anyone was home, but decided that in her present frame of mind, Henrietta; was highly unlikely to respond favorably.