Lauren Willig (13 page)

 

 

It was partly penury and partly stubbornness that had reduced Aunt Imogen to her current state. Properly Lady Cranbourne, Aunt Imogen had been an old man’s fancy, second wife to an elderly earl with a large fortune, grown children, and a taste for pretty young things. When Lord Cranbourne cocked up his toes, Aunt Imogen had been left a jointure that made the earl’s children gnash their teeth and mutter darkly about undue influence. They had booted her out of the family mansion forthwith. Returning to London, Aunt Imogen had merrily dissipated her jointure on two decades of lavish entertainments, younger men, and amateur theatricals. Penniless and passé, she had finally been forced to batten on the generosity of friends, making the rounds of a shrinking circle of acquaintances as eccentric as herself. Aunt Imogen made her home with Lady Euphemia McPhee, a distant connection of the royal family via one of Charles II’s many illegitimate children and quite as mad as Aunt Imogen. Mary had only secured her great-aunt’s services as chaperone by promising to take part in Lady Euphemia’s latest production,
A Rhyming Historie of Britain
, although she hadn’t thought it necessary to confide that little detail to Vaughn.

 

 

“Aunt Imogen!” Mary repeated. Decades of sitting too near the orchestra at the opera had wreaked havoc on Aunt Imogen’s hearing, and the angle of her hat rendered lip-reading an impossibility.

 

 

Vaughn regarded the tilted hat without favor. “Are you quite sure she’s still sentient?”

 

 

“Only just barely—but isn’t that the point?”

 

 

“A hit. A palpable hit.” Vaughn sighed. “Bring out your aunt. The proprieties, after all, must be maintained.”

 

 

Grasping what she assumed to be the general vicinity of Aunt Imogen’s shoulder, Mary essayed a gentle shake. Happily dreaming of handsome footmen, Aunt Imogen snored on. Abandoning gentle, Mary shook her again. Aunt Imogen might look fragile, but she had the constitution of a carthorse and was harder to wake than the seven sleepers. Aunt Imogen’s crumpled lids crackled open over bloodshot eyes. From her open mouth came a noise that sounded like, “Wuzzat?”

 

 

A pronounced Whig drawl, the chosen dialect of the previous century’s upper classes, made her all but impossible to understand. When in her heyday Robert Burns had written her an ode, the critics had promptly hailed it as “the unpronounceable in praise of the incomprehensible.”

 

 

“The political meeting, Auntie,” Mary shouted. “Lord Vaughn has escorted us to a meeting of the Common Sense Society. Shall we go in?”

 

 

“Arrr-bar,” pronounced Aunt Imogen imperiously.

 

 

Mary chose to interpret that as, “Do let’s.” It might even have been so. Aunt Imogen, if rumor was to be believed, had harbored quite a weakness for radical politicians in her day, canoodling with the elder Mr. Fox and flirting with the masses at the hustings. She and the late Duchess of Devonshire had scandalized society by trading kisses for votes during the general election of 1784. At least, Aunt Imogen claimed she had been trading kisses for votes; malicious gossip maintained that she hadn’t insisted very hard on securing the latter before bestowing the former.

 

 

Lord Vaughn climbed out first, holding out his arms to Aunt Imogen, who revived sufficiently to bat her eyelashes coquettishly in his general direction. An earl was an earl, after all.

 

 

“My lady,” murmured Vaughn, ushering her forwards.

 

 

Aunt Imogen gurgled appreciatively, although whether in response to Lord Vaughn or at the footman holding the door, whose finely turned calves she was unabashedly ogling, remained unclear.

 

 

Shaking her head, Mary helped herself out of the carriage. If she was to be a bluestocking for the afternoon, in the model of that dreary Wollstonecraft woman, she might as well start acting the part. It wasn’t their message Mary objected to; it was that they dressed so shabbily as they delivered it.

 

 

Pausing on the second step, Mary stared in dismay at the scene before her. She wasn’t quite sure where she had expected a philosophical society to meet, but her imagination had conjured a great white-walled room, ringed with pillars and decorated with the marble busts of great men. Instead of a temple to learning, the building before them was built of brick in the lower story, surmounted by crossed timbers set in plaster above. A sign creaked above the door, displaying a frog with a five-pointed crown on his head, crouching within a ring of feathers.

 

 

In short, it was a tavern.

 

 

“Welcome,” said Vaughn, “to the Frog and Feathers.”

 

 

Mary tugged her bonnet down forward over her face, wishing she had worn a cloak and hood instead of a fashionable spencer. The short jacket might display her figure to admiration, but it provided very little extra material for the purpose of hiding her face.

 

 

“A tavern?” she demanded.

 

 

“What did you expect? The Royal Academy?”

 

 

Since that was sufficiently close to the truth, Mary chose not to answer. Putting her nose in the air, she swept grandly down the final steps.

 

 

Vaughn wasn’t fooled for a moment. Holding out his arm directly so that she had no choice but to take it, he said in an undertone, “Such meetings are illegal twice over. Our friends would be fools to hold them in a more noticeable venue. Besides,” he added mockingly, “they have precedent behind them. The tavern has always been the preferred meeting place for illicit activities. Cavaliers, Jacobites, revolutionaries…all of history’s schemers find their way sooner or later to the alehouse.”

 

 

Despite the inclusion of Cavaliers with their dashing taste in haberdashery, Mary wasn’t sure that was a list she wanted to join. “I do hope you know what you’re doing.”

 

 

“Only on alternate Tuesdays.” Wrapping her arm through his, Vaughn guided her through the main room as Aunt Imogen swept unsteadily along in front of them, her trailing skirts picking up dust, crumbs, and a rancid sausage roll. “Ask me again next week.”

 

 

Mary caught a brief glimpse of trestle tables set around a low-ceilinged room before Vaughn turned her sharply to the right. “If I’m still speaking to you next week,” Mary cautioned.

 

 

“Oh, you will be,” said Vaughn confidently, using the head of his cane to push open another door. Ushering her through ahead of him, he added, “If you want to be paid.”

 

 

Mary would dearly have loved to have decimated him with a cutting comment, but it was too late. She was already inside. Revenge would have to come later.

 

 

Preceding her escort into the private parlor, Mary automatically adjusted her posture as several pairs of male eyes swiveled in her direction. She might have saved herself the trouble. The gentlemen milling about the room didn’t seem the sort to be swayed by feminine pulchritude, unless she came bearing a tricolor in one hand and a bloody axe in the other, preferably with one foot planted on a pile of dead aristos. They were just as Vaughn had described, the sort of social detritus one would expect to adhere to an outlandish cause, paunchy, myopic, and with the habitual hunch of men who spent more time in the study than in the saddle. They wore ink-stained waistcoats and carelessly tied cravats. Many still sported the longer hair of the previous decade, scraped back with bits of string or, for the more soigné, black velvet ribbon. No wonder they belonged to a revolutionary society intent on the overthrow of the current regime; most of them would be laughed out of any ballroom in London.

 

 

There was, however, one man who didn’t fit the general mold. It wasn’t that he was taller than the rest, for the room boasted its share of scarecrows. He was only slightly above medium height, perhaps an inch taller than Mary’s escort, but there was something that made him stand out from his fellows. It was, Mary realized, that he looked healthy. His golden brown hair had the sheen of health rather than grease, and his skin had the warm brown tint that marked an outdoorsman rather than the unwholesome white of his fellow disciples. He might be just above medium height, but he held himself well, without the scholarly stoop that hunched the others, and his red-figured waistcoat stretched across a quite respectable expanse of chest. There was something open and friendly about his face, with its straight nose, wide mouth, and broad cheekbones. Compared with the saturnine visage of her escort, it was an endearingly boyish countenance.

 

 

He was also, Mary noted, already taken. As she watched, he bent solicitously over a woman in a dark bonnet who sat in a chair at the far corner of the room. From the distance, it was impossible to make out anything of her features, but given the man’s attentive stance, there had to be something worth seeing to under the voluminous crape that veiled her bonnet. Remembering Vaughn’s comment about reforming gentlemen being easy prey, Mary made a wry face. Someone else had obviously beaten her to it.

 

 

Abandoning the couple in the corner, Mary scanned the rest of the scene. Someone had gone to some effort to decorate the room for the occasion. Colorful—and most likely treasonous—bunting in red, white, and blue draped the edges of a table, on which rested the Society’s seal, a battered gavel, and a signed engraving that could only be of Thomas Paine himself. He wore a suitably grave expression and toted a pamphlet on which the words “Common Sense” could be seen emblazoned in flowing script. In one corner of the engraving, the enterprising artist had added several illustrative emblems, including a pair of stays. Mary could only assume the corset was meant to convey an abstruse allegorical meaning.

 

 

Nudging Vaughn’s arm, Mary nodded at the engraving and murmured, “The underpinnings of state?”

 

 

Vaughn’s lips quirked. “Or simply underpinnings. Before he started peddling revolutionary ideals, Mr. Paine’s trade was corsets. To wit, the construction thereof.”

 

 

From what Mary could make out of the stays, either the engraver had never seen a woman’s undergarments or Paine had made a very poor job of his original profession. “I hope he is more adept with his pen than his needle.”

 

 

Vaughn answered with a droll expression that made Mary smother an inappropriate chuckle. “Why do you think women’s fashion in France changed so dramatically after Paine descended upon them?” He shook his head in mock regret. “A whole revolution just to do away with a set of stays.”

 

 

“I don’t think that’s
common sense
,” protested Mary, casting a watchful eye around them.

 

 

“Certainly not,” rejoined Vaughn, with a private smile. “I could think of far simpler ways to remove stays.”

 

 

“I’m sure you could,” said Mary repressively. “But now is not the time.”

 

 

Vaughn raised an eyebrow. “Is that an invitation?”

 

 

“Don’t,” Mary whispered. Two men had abandoned the cluster in front of the engraving and were heading their way. They did not look hospitable. One was tall and gaunt, his nose curved in an arrogant arc like the beak of a bird of prey. With his spare frame and too-bright eyes, he reminded Mary of an El Greco painting of a saint on the verge of martyrdom, half-mad and more than a little smug. Next to him, his friend faded into insignificance, a blur of round cheeks and thinning hair. Mary rapidly arranged her face into a dewy-eyed simper. “You’ll have us booted out before we’ve begun.”

 

 

“I’ll take that as a no.” Without missing a beat, Vaughn extended a graceful hand to the two gentlemen approaching. “Gentlemen! How delightful.”

 

 

“May we help you?” asked the taller man forbiddingly. With that nose, Mary reflected, he couldn’t help but look forbidding, no matter how benign his intentions might be. Up close, he looked even more like a saint returned from forty days in the wilderness. Rather than the closely tailored coats in fashion, he wore a long frock coat in a rusty black that bore an uncanny resemblance to a cassock. Hollows beneath his cheekbones gouged triangular gashes in his long face.

 

 

“We do find ourselves among the distinguished members of the Common Sense Society, do we not?” Vaughn drawled, deploying his quizzing glass in a way that suggested he hoped the answer would be not.

 

 

The thin man regarded him warily. “You do. And since you appear to have the advantage of us…”

 

 

Vaughn made an elegant leg, lace fluttering and jewels glinting. He was as out of place in the rough-hewn room as a tiger in Hyde Park.

 

 

“I am Vaughn,” he announced, with the unconscious arrogance of three hundred years of being able to introduce oneself by one name alone. “I had the pleasure of meeting your estimable Mr. Paine many years ago through the good auspices of my cousin, Lord Edward Fitzgerald. It was…an unforgettable experience.”

 

 

The hawk-nosed man inclined his head, his dark eyes never leaving Vaughn. “I am Mr. Rathbone. This”—he indicated the shorter man—”is Mr. Farnham, who acts as chairman for our Society.”

 

 

The round-faced man bobbed and mumbled his pleasure at the introduction. It seemed, thought Mary, a rather curious disposition of roles. Mr. Rathbone, with his automatic habit of command, appeared unlikely to take second chair to anyone, much less so insignificant a figure as the pink-cheeked Mr. Farnham, who was beaming welcome and goodwill through his chipped teeth. Either there was some title higher than chairman in their little Society, or Mr. Farnham possessed unexpected talents beneath his humdrum façade.

 

 

Vaughn must have entertained similar questions, because he trained his quizzing glass lazily on the taller man, in a way that made the hollows beneath Rathbone’s cheekbones go even hollower. “And you, Mr. Rathbone? What role do you play?”