The Deception of the Emerald Ring pc-3

by Лорен Уиллиг

  Serena brushed her already immaculate hair back into place in a habitual gesture. "I'm sorry I missed you in Sussex."

  Sussex. Scene of my ignoble crush. I was glad Serena hadn't been there to witness me making eyes at her brother. For all her timidity—and that perfect hair—I rather liked Serena.

  I just made a face, and said, "I'm sure you had much better things to do in London. I was mostly holed up in the archive all weekend, anyway."

  "Colin felt awful about having to run off like that."

  I shrugged. "Not a biggie. It was very nice of him to let me come at such short notice in the first place."

  "And, of course, he had excellent reason for leaving," put in Mrs. Harrington.

  Did he? I looked at her in surprise. What was I missing?

  "I hope your mother is mending nicely," she said to Serena. "I was so concerned."

  Mending? Concerned?

  Serena nodded earnestly. "Thank you. It was very kind of you to send flowers."

  "It was the least I could do."

  Like a gallumping lummox, I barged into the conversation. "Has your mother been ill?"

  "Didn't Colin tell you?" Serena looked genuinely surprised. "I had thought, when he left…"

  I shook my head in negation and tried to arrange my features into a proper expression of polite concern. I was beginning to wish I had held on to that vodka. Tendrils of apprehension unfolded in my stomach like the vines of a killer jungle plant.

  "Serena's mother was in an auto accident," Mrs. Harrington filled in for her. "In Venice, wasn't it?"

  "Siena."

  "Oh, dear," I said. Anything else seemed entirely inadequate. "I'm so sorry."

  "It was just bruises," Serena hastened to assure me. "And a broken rib."

  "Oh, dear," I repeated numbly. "How awful."

  "Those are the sorts of phone calls," said Mrs. Harrington, her eyes going automatically to Pammy, entertaining a crowd of coworkers across the room, "that one never wants to get."

  "I can't even begin to imagine," I said.

  Only I could.

  We had just come in from that crazy drinks party at Donwell Abbey when Colin's mobile had rung. I remembered the moment distinctly. He had taken one look at the number, wished me an abrupt good-night, and hared off. At the time I had assumed it was simply because he didn't want anything more to do with me.

  "I couldn't go, but Colin caught the first flight he could find. He stayed the week with her." Serena fingered the fringe of her pashmina, her bowed head an eloquent expression of guilt.

  She wasn't the only one feeling guilty.

  It must have been about six hours after the phone call that Colin had found me in the library and asked if I could be ready to leave in fifteen minutes. That intervening time took new shape in my imagination. I could picture Colin hunched over the computer, cell phone crammed against one ear, veering back and forth between making travel plans, keeping tabs on events in the hospital, and updating an anxious Serena. All alone in the middle of the night, with his mother lying injured in a foreign country and the minutes ticking inexorably away, while he was stuck in Sussex with a snippy houseguest.

  I felt like pond scum.

  "I'm sure your mother must have understood." I patted her shoulder clumsily. "That must have given you great peace of mind, to know that Colin was there with her."

  I was the bacteria that lurked beneath pond scum. No self-respecting pond scum would have anything to do with me.

  I'd been so wrapped in my own self-centered mantle of wounded ego that it had never occurred to me that something might be genuinely wrong. Something real, and life-threatening, and frightening. Something that had nothing to do with me, or aborted flirtations, or silly crushes.

  I tried to imagine how I would react if I heard that my mother was injured—possibly badly—in a foreign country. Even the thought of it made me jittery.

  "But she's better now?" I pressed.

  "Much," said Serena resolutely. "And her husband is there with her."

  Not "my father." Just "her husband." It had never occurred to me to ask about Colin's family situation. I suppose if I had thought about it at all, I would have just assumed that he had sprung fully formed out of Selwick Hall, like Minerva from Jove's head.

  "Where is Colin?" I asked, craning my neck toward the bar.

  I had a vague notion of…I don't know. Expressing my sympathies? Apologizing? It was nothing that coherent, more a generalized sense of wanting to make amends, although for precisely what, I couldn't say. After all, I couldn't very well apologize to Colin for being pissy with him because I thought he had snubbed me if a) he hadn't realized that I was being pissy, and b) he had no idea that I'd thought he had snubbed me. It was all a huge muddle.

  He wasn't at the bar anymore, and I didn't see him in any of the small knots of people clustered around the front room. It didn't matter; I would have plenty of time over the multicourse Thanksgiving dinner to make up for past behavior by being punctiliously pleasant. I would be a model of grace and charm. Well, charm at least.

  "There he is!" Serena, who had been scanning the room, looking for her brother, nodded toward the arched doorway that led into the front hall. As I watched, Colin's broad back disappeared into the hallway that had been conscripted as a cloakroom. "He's just leaving."

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Come home with me.

  Geoff's words hung suspended in the air between them, as real a presence as the pattern of green vines twining beneath their feet, and just as knotty. Letty would have liked to know just what he meant by "with." Such a simple little preposition, and yet so fraught with possible meaning. At least, it might be fraught. Or it might not. And there was the problem in a nutshell. They were friends again, certainly, after their little spat a mere two hours before. But whether they were anything more…

  "I don't even know where home is. Your home, I mean."

  Geoff's long fingers rested comfortably against the edge of the dresser, but his eyes were fixed quite steadily on her. Unreadable, as always. There were distinct disadvantages to being married to a master spy.

  "At present, a place on loan from a chap who's in London for the Season. You'll be quite safe there."

  "But what about Lord Vaughn? If he knows we're married…"

  Geoff's cheeks creased with sudden amusement. "All the more reason that he wouldn't look for you there."

  "True."

  "Then we're agreed?"

  She hadn't moved and Geoff's hand still rested casually against the dresser, but the space between them suddenly felt a great deal smaller.

  "Geoffrey?" Jane's curls poked around the edge of the door, hovering about five and a half feet up the doorjamb, as though the door had suddenly sprouted a beard. The rest of Jane followed more slowly.

  "The carriage is waiting downstairs," she said, standing just within the doorway. "Letty, you do know that you are welcome to stay here?"

  "That's quite all right." Letty kept her voice carefully neutral, and didn't look at Geoff. "I've made other arrangements."

  Jane's eyes crinkled. "I rather thought you might." Gesturing them to the stairs with the poise of a well-practiced hostess, she added, "I will expect you here tomorrow at half-three. We can discuss costuming then."

  "Costuming?" Letty couldn't quite keep the trepidation out of her voice.

  "We can't very well call on Lord Vaughn as ourselves," Jane said matter-of-factly. "People might talk."

  "Which selves?" asked Letty.

  "Either," replied Geoff. His hand lingered on the small of her back as he helped her into the carriage, burning into her back like a brand. His voice was warm and amused beside her ear. "Unless you've developed some others recently you haven't mentioned yet?"

  "I'm considering it," Letty said, and felt, more than heard, his faint chuckle as he boosted her into her seat.

  "Tomorrow," said Jane cheerfully, retreating to the front steps and waving as the carriage door clicked closed. />
  Settling down into the seat next to her, Geoff spread out across it with the ineffable ability of the male to occupy as much space as possible, legs stretched out in front of him and one arm spanning the back of the seat.

  Letty's shoulder blades prickled from proximity. Trying not to be too obvious about it, she glanced sideways to where his fingers rested just past her shoulder. Not touching her. Not trying to touch her. Just there, with nothing to indicate whether it was an intentional arm or an accidental arm.

  She was being ridiculous. An arm wasn't accidental; it was an appendage, and it had to go somewhere. That somewhere just happened to be right behind her back. Short of folding his hands in his lap like a convent schoolgirl, where else was he supposed to put it?

  "—urm-grmm?"

  "I beg your pardon?" Letty realized that her husband had been speaking and she hadn't heard a word of it.

  "I asked what it is you dislike about costuming." Geoff raised his favorite eyebrow. "Or is it the playacting you object to?"

  His sleeve brushed her hair, sending a little chill down her spine. Letty spoke hastily to cover her inadvertent reaction. "It's not the playacting itself that I object to. It's the being bad at it."

  "You haven't done too badly so far."

  Letty matched his eyebrow and raised him one, radiating skepticism.

  "What made you decide to travel as Mrs. Alsdale?"

  His arm had definitely moved; Letty was quite sure of it. She was so busy tracking the progress of his fingers in relation to her shoulder that it took her a moment to recall herself.

  "Pride," she said, wincing at the memory. "Pure, unadulterated pride."

  "Pride?" Geoff shifted to look her full in the face, his knee brushing her skirts.

  "It goeth before a fall," provided Letty brightly, smoothing down her skirts.

  Geoff eyed her keenly, the sway of the carriage lamp sending light shifting back and forth across the clean lines of his face.

  "Why pride?"

  Letty wriggled a bit to avoid an imaginary lump in the seat cushion. "I didn't want anyone to know we were traveling separately. There had been enough talk about our marriage already…. I didn't want to provide more grist for the gossipmills."

  "So you became Mrs. Alsdale."

  "Not exactly the most inventive of aliases," she said, in a tone designed to repel further discussion.

  "The more effective ones seldom are," replied Geoff, accepting the implicit rebuff. "The closer to your own name, the more likely you are to remember to answer to it."

  "How do you explain Mr. Throtwottle, then?" said Letty, leaping gratefully on the change of subject.

  Geoff sighed. "There are exceptions to every rule. Of course, we may yet find that there is a large and thriving family of Throtwottles somewhere."

  Letty had an image of a large flock of geese cackling their way across Salisbury Plain. "But you don't think so."

  "No."

  "You still believe Lord Vaughn is working for them, don't you?"

  "I believe the only person Vaughn works for is Vaughn," Geoff countered. "He could be playing a double game, serving both sides as it pleases him."

  "But why?" asked Letty. "What does he get out of it?"

  "Power," said Geoff simply. "An escape from ennui. An intellectual challenge. Any number of reasons. And Vaughn, I suspect, isn't overly troubled by the dictates of conscience."

  Letty's memory conjured the image of Vaughn, standing above his cousin's coffin. Like the silver he favored, he was cold logic and pure will, unalloyed by pesky questions of morality. Her father's library ran to such books, abjurations to men to fling aside the toils of religion and superstition and let pure reason reign, but never before had Letty seen that philosophy so neatly encapsulated in human form. She didn't like it.

  Letty glanced at her husband, who was gazing abstractedly out the window, caught in his own reverie of tulips and treachery. There was certainly no lack of science there, no dearth of reason or logic, but in Geoff, they were tempered by something else, some leavening instinct of humanity. Responsibility, maybe. Conscience. A recognition of human frailty, including his own. It wasn't the sort of quality her father's books could parse or quantify; it couldn't be broken down into its component parts and twisted into a theorem; it just was. It was the sort of rock-deep decency that had made him honor his obligation to marry a girl of no fortune or family because the circumstance required it—even when he thought she had manufactured that circumstance herself. It was the very quality Mary had been depending on when she persuaded him into eloping.

  Letty couldn't imagine Vaughn acting similarly in a comparable circumstance; his view would most likely be that any girl fool enough to find herself in such a damning situation deserved anything society chose to throw at her.

  The sound of the horses' hooves changed as the carriage rattled from Capel Street onto the bridge that spanned the Liffey. In the water below, the reflection of the carriage lamps looked like the watchtowers of a drowned city.

  Letty shivered with a chill that was only partly caused by the nippy night air. Something about the sight of the still water, frosted with lamplight, sent a wash of cold straight through to her bones. Reaching automatically for her wrap, Letty realized it wasn't there. In her precipitous departure, she had left it in their box in the theater. At the time, she had been quite uncomfortably warm, largely with rage.

  Next to her, Geoff shifted in his seat. "Are you cold?"

  Letty rubbed her hands over her arms, feeling gooseflesh against her fingertips. "A bit."

  "Here." That was quite definitely an intentional arm reaching across her back, drawing her closer. Even through the material of his coat, she could feel the heat radiating from his skin, better than a hearth on a winter's day.

  "It's not fair," murmured Letty, succumbing to the warmth of him. "You get so many more layers."

  Geoff sneezed on a strand of her hair. Brushing it aside, he settled her more comfortably against his side. "Talk to me of unfair at noon, when you are comfortable and cool in your muslin, and I am broiling among my layers."

  "You can borrow my sunshade," Letty offered, pressing the back of her hand against a yawn. "And fan."

  "That will do wonders for my reputation." Geoff's chest shifted under her ear as he spoke; Letty could feel the vibration of it before she heard the words.

  "Mm-hmm," agreed Letty absently, more interested in his warmth than his words. His jacket was softer than she would have thought against her cheek, not scratchy at all. There were no fobs or stickpins or buttons to poke at her, no lumpy braid or other ornament, just the ends of his cravat tickling the base of her nose.

  Letty burrowed farther into Geoff's sleeve, away from the starched linen, curiously content and overwhelmingly sleepy.

  "Comfortable?" Geoff asked.

  "Mm-hmm." Letty fought gravity in the matter of her eyelids, and lost miserably.

  Between the rocking motion of the carriage and the welcoming warmth of Geoff's body, Letty's mind drifted off among the jumbled events of the past few days. Black tulips and gilded railings and Emily lying crumpled on the ground…Vaughn, exchanging meaningful looks with Jane in the crypt of Saint Werburgh's. What if Jane were wrong? What if Vaughn had been the one to murder Emily? All that black hair, black like Mary's, spread around her on the ground. Mary drifted wraith-like through Letty's memory. Who asked you to interfere?

  Letty's hands were cold, and bloody as Lady Macbeth's. She had interfered because she wanted to, and the worst of it was that she wasn't sorry. Letty snuggled closer to Geoff, watching bemusedly as Mary turned into Vaughn, who danced a gavotte with Mrs. Ponsonby through an echoing hall composed of giant flowers, all carved of stone. The flowers were singing, a soft, humming song that rocked back and forth, back and forth….

  Though he was caught up in his own plots and plans for the following day, Geoff wasn't so distracted that he didn't notice when Letty's breath lapsed into the slow exhalations of slumber. He
was, he realized, disturbingly aware when it came to her. He could have pinpointed the exact moment that she drifted off to sleep, recited from memory the location of each of her freckles, and repeated, verbatim, the bulk of their earlier conversation. Especially the bit about pride.

  Glancing down, Geoff couldn't see her face at all, just a confusion of hair, lightly limned by the carriage lamp, punctuated by the hint of a freckled nose. Against the dark fabric of her skirts, something green gleamed greasily in the uneven light, like a murky pond with sunlight skating over it.

  Geoff touched a finger lightly to the central stone, remembering, as through a glass darkly, the resentment that had roiled through him when he had placed it on her finger nearly a month ago. It seemed a very long time ago, a tale told about someone else. A very rash, selfish, and decidedly blind someone else, Geoff thought, resting his chin on the top of her head. Her hair smelled pleasantly of chamomile, like the old herb garden at Sibley Court in summer.

  They would have to find something more appropriate for her when they returned to London. Aside from being ugly in itself, the Pinchingdale betrothal ring was far too heavy for Letty's hand. The stone spanned all the way from the base of her finger to the knuckle, too large for the delicate bones of her finger. A smattering of freckles testified that someone had been out without her gloves, and the paler mark of an old scar showed along the side of her thumb. Instead of the fashionable oval, her palm was nearly square. The sturdy shape was belied by the fineness of the bones that composed it, vulnerability masked beneath a shield of capability. Beneath the weight of the emerald ring, her hand seemed disconcertingly delicate.

  He had never thought of her as particularly young or small before, but sleeping, she seemed smaller, softer. The top of her head rested just against his breastbone, nestled against him as trustingly as a child's.

  The rest of her, however, did not feel the least bit childlike. If he hadn't feared waking her, Geoff would have squirmed as far to the other side of the carriage as possible. Instead, he nobly gritted his teeth and tried to recall the personal dossiers of every French spy currently resident in London. In alphabetical order.