by Лорен Уиллиг
Which just went to show that physiognomy was never an exact science.
Take Mary, for example. She had the sort of serene expression generally associated with halos and chubby infants in mangers, but her porcelain calm hid a calculating mind and an indomitable will to make Machiavelli blush.
I should have seen it coming, Letty scolded herself, as she jammed her feet into a pair of inappropriate dancing slippers. The signs had all been there, if only she had been looking for them. They had been there in the reckless glitter in Mary's dark blue eyes, in the increasingly brittle quality of her laugh—and in the way she had pleaded a headache after dinner that night, as an excuse to slip away to her room.
Letty had a fair inkling of what Mary had been thinking. Letty's older sister had passed three Seasons as society's reigning incomparable. Three Seasons of amassing accolades, bouquets, even the odd sonnet, but shockingly few marriage proposals. Of the offers that had come in, three had been from younger sons, four from titles without wealth, and an even larger number from wealth without title. One by one, she had watched her more eligible suitors, the first sons, with coronets on their coaches and country estates to spare, contract matches with the chinless daughters of dukes, or bustling city heiresses. The Alsworthys were an old family—there had been Alsworthys in Hertford-shire when the first bemused Norman had galloped through, demanding to know the way to the nearest vineyard—but by no means a great one. They had never distinguished themselves in battle or ingratiated themselves into a monarch's favor. Instead, they had sat placidly on their estate, overseeing their land and adding extra wings onto the house as fancy and fashion demanded. They were comfortable enough in their own way, but there was no fortune or title to sweeten the marriage settlements or to shield them from the mocking murmurs of the ton.
Surely even Mary must realize the disgrace that a runaway marriage would bring, not only on her, but on the entire family. Heaven only knew, thought Letty grimly, their family didn't need any extra help when it came to making themselves ridiculous.
She would have to prevail upon Lord Pinchingdale's better judgment—assuming he had any. Up until tonight, Letty had always thought he had.
Snagging her cloak from the wardrobe, Letty settled it firmly around her shoulders, yanking the hood down over her flushed face and frazzled braid. There was no time to twist her gingery hair up. Instead, she shoved everything back behind her ears and hoped it would stay there. Although she had no personal experience in the matter, from what Letty had heard of eloping lovers, they were a fairly impatient breed, and she had no confidence that Lord Pinchingdale would wait patiently by his carriage until Mary deigned to come traipsing down. Letty grimaced at the image of Lord Pinchingdale attempting to scale the skinny branches of the tree outside Mary's window in time-honored heroic fashion. That was all they needed, a peer with two broken knees sprawled on the pavement outside their house. Letty couldn't even begin to imagine the captions in the scandal sheets. "Viscount Laid Low by Love" would be the least of it.
Would it be too much to hope that the French would do something truly, truly awful in the next few hours so that there would be no room left in the papers for frivolities?
Dealing with a thwarted lover in a dark alleyway wasn't the sort of escapade that lent luster to a debutante's reputation. But, Letty reasoned, as she picked her way carefully down the back stairs, she didn't see what else she was to do. She couldn't let Mary elope with Lord Pinchingdale and bring down scandal and ruin on all of their heads. Once she had sent Lord Pinchingdale packing, Letty promised herself, she was going straight back to bed. She was going to climb beneath the covers and pull the eiderdown up to her neck, and let her head sink into the pillow….
Letty hastily clamped her hand over a mammoth yawn.
Emerging from the service entrance into the dark little area at the back of the house that substituted for a garden, Letty took stock of the situation. If she squinted, she could make out the dark form of a carriage hulking among the shadows at the end of the narrow alley behind the house, black against black. Drat. She had so hoped that it would all turn out to be a false alarm, a moment of midnight misapprehension. But that carriage was far too large and solid to be a figment of anyone's imagination. Letty cast a quick look up at the neighbors' windows. All were dark, swathed in Sunday calm.
Holding her breath against the stench of a recently emptied chamber pot, Letty ventured tentatively down the alley, following the soft snuffle of equine breath in what she hoped must be the direction of the carriage. Whoever thought a midnight elopement was a glamorous thing? wondered Letty sourly. Perhaps she would feel differently if it were her own elopement, but Letty rather doubted it. Love went only so far. Some smells were too strong to be ignored, even by the most ardent of Juliets.
"Lord Pinchingdale?" Letty stumbled her way to the coach. Bumping up against one of the rear wheels, she felt her way forward. "Lord Pinchingdale?"
There was no response from the shadowy interior.
Which meant, Letty admitted, that he probably wasn't there.
She didn't much like the alternatives. Lord Pinchingdale might have gotten bored and decided to scale the ivy—but wouldn't she have heard the thud? A new and terrifying possibility struck Letty. What if he and Mary had already fled, leaving the carriage standing outside as a decoy? They would lose precious time searching while the lovers were already tearing up the miles to Gretna Green in a well-sprung traveling chaise, smaller and lighter than the cumbersome coach.
Letty groped along the door, looking for the latch. "Lord Pinchingdale?" she whispered sharply. The restless scrape of the horses' hooves on the cobbles and the sound of the coachman shifting on the box above blotted out her words. Letty twisted the latch sharply, stumbling backwards as the stiff door unexpectedly gave. Catching her balance by dint of grabbing on to the door frame, she leaned head and shoulders inside the cavernous interior, which stretched before her like one of the bottomless caves of fairy tale, so dark she couldn't make out the difference between seats and floor, window or wall.
"You aren't here, are you?"
She realized it wasn't quite the done thing to talk to inanimate objects—or to people who weren't there—but if she didn't say something, she was quite likely to kick something instead.
If they were already gone, there was nothing she could do. She could send a groom after them, in the hopes of arresting their flight and hauling Mary back—but she couldn't see much point to it. The odds of not being seen, or of the groom not telling a friend who would tell a friend, were so slim as to pose no temptation to even the most hardened and reckless of gamblers. The story would be all over London by the time the maids opened the curtains and brought in the morning chocolate.
Behind her, a new sound interrupted the rustle of leaves and the snuffle of snores from someone's open window. At the crunch of booted feet on gravel, relief coursed through Letty, heady as strong tea. They hadn't left, then! Who else would be tromping about in their backyard? The servants were all asleep, worn out with a day that began before dawn. It had to be Lord Pinchingdale.
Extricating herself from the maw of the carriage, Letty swiveled to face the newcomer, prepared to tell him exactly what she thought of midnight elopements and those idiotic enough to engage in them. The words stilled in her throat as her gloom-adjusted eyes took in the apparition before her. Instead of a gentleman garbed for travel, a hunched, hulking thing shambled toward her. As Letty instinctively shrank back against the carriage, feeling around behind her for a weapon, her panicked eyes sought the creature's face. He didn't have one. Letty's eyes scanned for the usual appendages—mouth, ears, nose. Nothing. There was only darkness where his face should have been. Darkness and a pair of eerily light eyes that glittered disquietingly out of the surrounding emptiness.
The edge of the carriage floor bit into Letty's back.
Letty clutched tight to the sides, preparing to hitch herself up and flee out the opposite side. Not being prone to flig
hts of fancy, Letty didn't think of faceless specters and the other stock characters of popular novels. They weren't out on the moors or on the grounds of a ruined abbey, but in the heart of London. Letty defied any specter, with the possible exception of those in the Tower, to make a go of haunting amid the grimy bustle of the metropolis. It just couldn't be done.
No, it was clearly a man, a rather large man with appalling posture, wearing something wrapped around his face and a hat pulled low over his ears. Letty's pulse thrummed with more mundane terrors—robbers, bandits, highwaymen.
"What do you want?" she asked sharply, readying herself to bolt.
The muffled man threw his arms into the air in a gesture of disgust. "What do I want?" he demanded, in a voice that even through the folds of cloth savored of John Knox and Robert Burns. "What do I want, she asks me?"
Letty hadn't thought it that unreasonable a question.
"Get along inside. Orders are I'm to take ye to the inn."
"Orders from whom?" asked Letty suspiciously, even though she had a fairly good idea.
The coachman muttered something generally uncomplimentary about the mental capacities of the other half of the species. "Who d'ye think? Lord Pinchingdale, that's who. Come along now. Himself'll be waiting for ye, and we dinna have all night."
And before Letty had the chance to explain that she wasn't at all the "ye" in question, a pair of large hands closed around her waist and boosted her high into the air.
"Up ye get."
"Put me down!" she hissed, wriggling in his grasp. "You've made a mistake!"
"No mistake," rasped her captor, grappling with her as though she were a particularly slippery fish just off the hook. Sounding aggrieved, he demanded, "Would ye hold still? I'm just tryin' to help ye into the carriage."
Since her arms were pinned uncomfortably to her sides, Letty did the only thing she could. She lashed out with one small, slippered foot, catching her captor squarely in the shin. Unfortunately, it was the same foot she had stubbed earlier. Pain shot up her leg, but it was almost worth it for the resulting grunt of pain from the coachman. But he didn't let go.
"What part of 'put me down' don't you understand?" Letty whispered fiercely, dealing him an elbow to the ribs.
"Women!" grunted the coachman in tones of intense disgust.
With no further ado, he tossed her unceremoniously into the carriage. Letty landed on her backside. Hard. Above the sound of the door slamming shut, she heard the coachman declare, in a voice that packed as much "I told you so" as one could muster through a scarf, "Orders are ye're to go to the inn, and it's to the inn you'll go." He didn't say, "So there," but the words were firmly implied.
Scrambling to her knees, Letty crawled toward the door, hindered by her cloak, which twisted around her legs as she went, pulling her back. "For heaven's sake!" she breathed, yanking her cloak out of the way. Something ripped. Letty didn't care. If she could just get out before the coach began moving…there were so many things she wanted to do that she didn't know where to begin. Lock Mary in an armoire. Give Lord Pinchingdale a piece of her mind about his staff and his morals.
Propping an elbow up on one of the seats, Letty made a grab for the door handle. With a crack like a gunshot, the coachman snapped his whip. Four horses burst into concerted motion, propelling the coach forward. Letty's hand swiped uselessly through empty air as she lurched sideways, banging into the bench. She couldn't scream. Any loud noise would alert the neighbors, bringing down on her head exactly the sort of attention she hadn't wanted. The coach swerved again, sending Letty jolting sideways—right into the other shoulder.
Clutching her wounded arm, Letty glowered helplessly in the direction of the box as the carriage carried her inexorably away toward her sister's assignation.
She knew she should have stayed in bed.
Chapter Two
Geoffrey, Second Viscount Pinchingdale, Eighth Baron Snipe, and impatient bridegroom-to-be stood in the foyer of his family's London mansion and slapped his gloves against his knee in an uncharacteristic gesture of impatience.
"Is there any reason," he asked, deliberately using short and simple words, "that this cannot wait until tomorrow morning?"
The courier from the War Office looked at him, then at the folded piece of paper he held in his hand, and shrugged. "I don't know. I haven't opened it, have I?"
"Let's try this again, shall we?" suggested Geoff, with a quick sideways glance at the clock that hung between two red-veined marble pillars.
Ten minutes till midnight. If he left immediately, he might still make it to the Alsworthys' rented residence before the clock struck the hour.
"If you leave the note with me, your duty will be discharged. I will peruse it at my leisure and send an answer tomorrow morning. Early tomorrow morning."
"Can't," replied the messenger laconically. "Early is as early does, but my orders are I'm to have an answer back quick-like. And that means tonight. My lord," he added belatedly.
"Right," clipped Geoff, as the minute hand on the clock slipped another centimeter closer to midnight. "Tonight."
Why did the War Office have to send for him tonight of all nights? Couldn't they have had whatever crisis they were in the midst of the night before, when he was hunched over the desk in his study, scanning the latest reports from Paris? Even better, they might have timed their intrusion for two nights before, when Geoff was being royally beaten at darts by his old Eton chum Miles Dorrington, who wasn't above crowing over it. And when Miles crowed, he crowed very, very loudly.
Any night, in fact, would have been better than this one.
Losing his temper, he counseled himself, would only waste more precious time. It wasn't the messenger's fault any more than it was the War Office's that civilization itself was being menaced by a megalomanaical Corsican with a taste for conquest. If one were to allocate blame, it lay clearly at Bonaparte's door. Which, Geoff reflected, didn't do him terribly much good at the moment. Even if Bonaparte were available to receive complaints, Geoff rather doubted he could be expected to halt his advance across Europe for an insignificant little thing like a wedding.
Geoff's wedding, to be precise.
Or, as it was increasingly looking, Geoff's somewhat delayed wedding. Geoff filed it away as one more grievance to be taken up against Bonaparte, preferably personally, with a small cannon.
With a sigh, Geoff held out his hand.
"'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,'" he muttered.
"My lord?" The courier gave him a hard look.
"Give me the letter and I'll pen a reply," Geoff translated. Signaling to a waiting footman, Geoff instructed in a low voice, "Go to MacTavish and tell him to go on ahead with the carriage as planned. I'll catch him up at the Oxford Arms. Tell him to give the lady my apologies and let her know that I'll be with her as soon as duty permits."
Mary would understand. And if she didn't, he would make it up to her. She had mentioned that Pinchingdale House needed redecorating—he rather liked his study the way it was, but if Mary wanted to drape it in pink silk printed with purple pansies, he wouldn't say a word. Well, maybe not purple pansies. A man had to draw the line somewhere.
Cracking the seal of the paper in his hands, Geoff quickly scanned the contents. They were, as he had suspected, in code, a series of numbers marching alongside Greek letters that had nothing to do with their Roman counterparts. A month ago, a note delivered within London, carried less than a mile by a trusted—if not too intelligent—subordinate of the War Office would never have elicited such elaborate precautions.
Of course, a month ago, England and France had still been observing a precarious peace. That hadn't stopped Bonaparte from flooding the English capital with French spies, but they had grown decidedly bolder since the formal declaration of war. Even Mayfair, heart of England's aristocracy, no longer provided a haven. A mere three weeks ago, one of the Office's more agile agents had been found, a well-placed hole in his back, sprawled on the paving
stones outside of Lord Vaughn's London mansion. Whichever way one looked at it, the new precautions made sense.
They were also a bloody nuisance.
A message in code meant that it would have to be decoded. Even knowing the key, decoding the message and coding an answer in return would take at least half an hour.
As if on cue, the minute hand jerked into the upright position, and a pangent ponging noise rousted out the echoes from their shadowy corners.
Refolding the note, Geoff said in a matter-of-fact voice, "This may take some time. If you'd like to take some refreshment in the kitchen…"
"I'll wait here, my lord."
Geoff nodded in acknowledgment and turned on his heel, setting off through a succession of unused rooms to his study. He knew the route well enough to make the branch of candles in his hand redundant, as his legs, without conscious direction from his mind, skirted small tables and pedestals bearing classical busts.
His boots clattered unevenly on the shiny parquet floor of a ballroom that hadn't seen a ball since Geoff was in the nursery, across the fading Persian carpets of a drawing room whose drapes had been drawn for two decades, through a state dining room glistening with silver and hung with crystal that had seated its last serving back in the days when men affected red heels and women wore skirts that spanned the width of a stair. The Sabine women, painted in mural along the sides of the room, smirked at Geoff as he passed, but he didn't notice them any more than he noticed the lowering portraits of his ancestors or simpering French shepherdesses that graced the walls of the silent music room.
Shutting the door of his study firmly behind him, Geoff crossed to his desk, removing the ormolu ornament on the left-hand leg with one economical movement. From the tiny cavity, he wiggled out a closely written sheet of paper, screwing the fitting back into place with a practiced flick of the wrist. In contrast to the rest of the house, his study showed signs of recent habitation. A half-empty decanter stood on a round table by the long French windows, estate accounts warred for space on the desk with the latest editions of the weekly newssheets, and the broken bindings on the long wall of books provided silent testimony that they served for use rather than ornament.
