He looked so vulnerable in the large bed, with the ominous red splotch on his bandage showing above the covers. Every time his sleeping face contorted with pain, every time she heard the uneven rasp of his breath in drugged sleep, her heart clenched as though the Black Tulip held it in his fist. It hurt like a dozen bullet wounds to know that she had brought him to this. Oh, there had been times when she would have liked nothing better than to humble Lord Vaughn, to bring him lowand no time more than that afternoonbut not like this. Never like this.
The events of the afternoon replayed themselves before her a thousand times, only in the reprise she always managed to thrust aside the Black Tulip’s arm at the crucial moment, so the bullet went wild, or distract him long enough to drive her sunshade into his toe, making him drop the pistol. And at the end, there was always Vaughn bounding up to her, smoothing the hair out of her face, touching her cheek with the back of her hand, as though he had never seen anything so infinitely precious and telling heroh, everything he had told her before his wife’s appearance but a thousand times over. And without the angry snarl.
Mary looked down at the limp hand lying on top of the coverlet, and frowned at her own foolishness. Girlish daydreams were all very well, but they wouldn’t keep Vaughn safe from the Black Tulip. It was sheer luck that the shot had been too high; the Black Tulip couldn’t be trusted to miss the next time.
There had to be some way to get to him before he could get to Vaughn. But how? She didn’t even know that he was indeed a he. That had definitely been a skirt she had felt behind her. She rather doubted that the Black Tulip was stalking Hyde Park dressed in a cassock, despite his clerical appellation. Either he was a woman, or he had chosen to disguise himself as one for the purpose of sowing confusion. Had he been wearing a dress in Vauxhall? Mary would have been willing to swear he hadn’t.
Well. Mary picked at the embroidery on the arms of the chairs as she stared at the sun setting over the bare branches of the trees in Belliston Square. She would just have to tell servants to keep a watch out for anyone suspicious, male
or
female. The butler seemed a sensible sort, he could be enlisted to set up a guard. And a guard would be set, whether Vaughn liked it or not. Mary’s face settled into an expression of raw determination her sister would have recognized in an instant. She knew Vaughn would try to shrug off the danger as soon as he was healed enough to shrug. That was all very well, but she wasn’t going to let him die for a bit of male bravado.
Even so, setting a guard only delayed the problem; it didn’t solve it. The only way to truly solve it was to kill the Black Tulip. And they couldn’t kill the Black Tulip until they knew who he was.
As the purple autumn sunset faded from the tops of the trees in the Square, Mary rose, stretching her cramped legs. In the great bed, Vaughn slept on in drug-induced slumber, his right arm flung up over his head like a little boy’s. His features were softer in sleep, with the dusk casting a soothing veil over the lines drawn by pain and time.
His color seemed better, but Mary wasn’t sure whether that was just an illusion created by the dim light. Mary touched the back of her hand to his forehead, careful not to wake him. The dreadful clamminess was gone. His forehead was warm and dry, and his breathing was easier than it had been. The fever would come next. But, for the moment, he was sleeping peacefully.
Moving stiffly, Mary stepped carefully down off the dais, catching at the balustrade for balance. Her knees objected to the movement. She felt as ancient as Methuselah, her legs and back stiff from sitting, her eyes dry and aching from staring, hour after hour, at the still figure in the bed.
She knew she ought to change, as Derby had advised. She ought to have done it hours ago. The sooner she left her dress to be cleaned and pressed, the sooner she could go home. So far, the only people who knew of her presence at Vaughn House were Derby, who wouldn’t speak; the valet, who didn’t speak; and the surgeon, who had been paid well not to speak. The other servants had seen her only through the dirty window of the sedan chair, not well enough to make out anything other than that she was a woman, a description that undoubtedly applied to many of Vaughn’s acquaintance. But the longer she stayed, the greater the risk became. To stay the night would be ruin.
Wobbling a bit, she padded across the carpet to the door to the hall. Just outside the door, where she couldn’t fail to see them, someone had left two trays. On the first stood two decanters, one filled with a ruby liquid that could only be the requested port, the other a deep amber that marked it as finest smuggled French brandy.
The second tray was clearly not intended for the inhabitant of the sickbed. It held two porcelain pots. One pot was short and rounded, accompanied by a silver tea ball and a dish for slops; the other was taller and cylindrical, with a quaint, conical lid. Both the shape and the smell identified it as a chocolate pot. There was one cup to go with each pot, both matched to the same set, a feminine pattern with delicate purple flowers on a fluted background. On a matching plate had been placed several slices of cake and an assortment of biscuits.
Next to the food, more homely but all the more welcome, the same considerate hand had left a basin and ewer. Both the water in the ewer and the tea in the pot were still so hot that steam rose and misted across Mary’s face as she bent to pick up the tray. Derby must have returned several times to replace the water as it cooled. It was no more than a well-trained servant would do, but Mary was obscurely cheered by the gesture.
Setting the tray down on a small table, Mary slopped a generous amount of water into the basin, plunging her hands into the steaming water up to the wrists. It felt like heaven to finally wash the crust of blood off her hands. Once her hands were finally clean, she dipped a cloth directly into the ewer, scrubbing at the smudges on her face.
With Vaughn’s robe still draped over her arm, Mary moved softly across the room, to the door in the wall. Unlike the door that led into the dressing room, there was no attempt to hide its outlines. A grand plaster pediment was mounted above the door frame, the two sides of the triangle broken in the middle to make room for an overflowing basket of flowers borne by two simpering nymphs. The architect might as well have put up a sign announcing, THIS WAY TO OFFICIAL CONSORT: GO FORTH, BE FRUITFUL, AND MULTIPLY.
A fine job Lady Vaughn had done of that, Mary thought scornfully. She hadn’t even produced an heir.
There was a key in the lock, a fanciful key adorned with a series of interlocking curlicues, with a silk tassel fluttering from the end, a key intended more for ornament than use. Vaughn had used it. Trying the handle, Mary found the door to the countess’s chamber barred fast, locking out the past. Taking up a candle, Mary turned the key, hearing the click as as the tiny mechanism shifted. She had to push hard against the door before the stiff hinges gave way, creaking open into the shrouded silence of the long-closed room.
Shouldering the door shut behind her, Mary ventured into the room, her booted feet dark blots against the light pink and yellow Aubusson carpet. The drapes were all drawn and clearly had been for some time, their tasseled edges weighted with a decade’s worth of dust. Mary rubbed the once costly brocade between her fingers. It felt gritty to the touch. Letting the drape fall, Mary dusted her fingers off against her skirt.
Aside from the funereal film of dust, years of darkness had kept the rooms well preserved. In the small circle of light cast by her one candle, the colors stood out as true as they must have ten years ago, without any of the fading that came of sunlight and use. Unlike Vaughn’s chambers, the walls had been painted rather than hung. The long panels depicted a pastoral paradise, largely populated by plump putti, whose purpose appeared to be to hover happily over the humans, dropping wreaths on their heads and garlanding them with flowers. Idealized shepherdesses herded improbably fluffy sheep, while amorous shepherds played ballads on lutes that were always in perfect tune. On the ceiling, in an elaborately scrolled oval, happy lads and lasses danced eternally around a ribbon-decked maypole.
One would have thought an earl’s daughter would have better taste.
Tossing her head, Mary set her candle down on the countess’s dressing table, draping the robe over the back of a chair. Unused to undressing without a maid, she wriggled with difficulty out of her bedraggled walking dress, dragging it up from the hem over her head. Bloodied and begrimed, the fabric was stiff and uncooperative. It stuck halfway over her head, causing Mary to wonder whether there might not have been something she was meant to unfasten first. A few determined tugs and it pulled free, leaving Mary flushed but triumphant.
As she stood in her petticoat, stays, and chemise, her attention was caught by one of the painted panels behind the dressing table, a dark-haired shepherd playing his lute in tribute to a simpering blond shepherdess. Lifting the candle, Mary leaned closer. It was a time-honored compliment to paint one’s patron into a picture. The dark-haired shepherd had something of the look of Vaughn, although it was impossible to imagine Vaughn in a half-draped toga, perched on a rock, playing a lute. His shepherdess was a dainty little thing, with long, blond curls that bounced down below the broad sash at her waist. There was a decidedly hungry gleam in the shepherd’s eye as he watched her.
Had Vaughn looked at Lady Anne like that?
Mary set down her candle again with a thump. She hated that sickly shepherdess with her self-satisfied expression and her greedy little hands. She hated her for her dreadful taste in interior decoration, for her noble pedigree, for her unchallenged right to occupy the chambers that Mary could enter only as guest. How had Vaughn proposed? Had he gone down on one knee and mouthed the appropriate and traditional words of love? Had he meant them? Or had it been a family arrangement, an alliance between two great houses, with documents to sign instead of poetry and property dispositions instead of kisses?
Mary viciously hoped for the latter. She hoped that during the short span of their marriage, the Vaughns had been all that was ŕ la mode, with their separate bedchambers, separate lives, and separate loves, only coming together in their paired portraits to stare down at posterity in a lie of love.
Sinking down into the tufted stool before the countess’s dressing table, Mary rubbed her hands hard over her eyes. She was being absurd! It shouldn’t matter how Vaughn had felt about Lady Anne. All that mattered was that they were married, that Lady Anne had the right to be here and she didn’t. Not Lady Anne, Lady Vaughn. Mary realized she had been unconsciously thinking of the woman by her courtesy title, as if she had never married, never shared Vaughn’s bed, never taken the place Mary wanted to occupy herself.
Mary glanced sideways at the robe draped over a chair. Even now, in her petticoat, stays and chemise, if she wrapped the robe tightly around her undergarments, she could maintain a semblance of respectability.
But what was the purpose of respectability? She had already been nearly ruined once, for a man who meant nothing to her and a title that did. Better now, to be ruined in truth for the sake of the man she wanted, the man sheMary shied away from the word. The man she loved. There. She had admitted it. She loved him. Was that so very strange? She loved him for all the dark and dismal reasons he loved her, for all his vices and inconsistencies, his selfishness and his pride, his inconvenient honesty and his devastating wit.
Reaching back, Mary untied the tapes at her waist. Her petticoat slid down over her hips, crumpling on the floor around her feet. Stepping daintily out of the pile of fabric, Mary kicked it aside. Her stays came next. One tug and the light canvas corset joined her petticoat on the pink and yellow pattern on the ground.
Bending over to tackle her boots, she tugged at the knots in the laces. Without her stays, she felt marvelously free, her unconfined waist bending without the press of whalebone. She kicked off one boot, then the other, flexing her feet in their silk stockings like a dancer at Covent Garden. She was sure her legs were as good as theirs.
Vaughn could be the judge of that.
With a flick of her fingers, Mary undid the bows on her garters, letting the blue ribbons flutter to the ground. With quick, precise movements, she rolled down the silk stockings over her calves, until she stood in Vaughn’s wife’s room in nothing but her chemise. Above the dressing table, her mirrored lips curved in a red, dangerous smile. The fine lawn whispered easily over her head, floating to the carpet like an emblem of fallen virtue.
The silk of Vaughn’s robe slithered sensuously over her skin as she slid both arms into the broad sleeves, cinching the heavy fabric closed with its own broad sash. The brocade was the color of expensive wine, the color of the claret in Vaughn’s glass that night in the Chinese chamber, embroidered with exotic Oriental dragons who swished their golden tails through a burgundy forest and played hide-and-seek in the folds around Mary’s legs. As the fabric washed over her, Mary remembered that night, with the candlelight flickering off the porcelain plaques and the gold thread in the crimson cushions, in that doorless, windowless, jewel box of a room, and Vaughn, more exotic and glittering than any of it by far, his hair disheveled and his shirt open, drinking to her only with his eyeswith his eyes, and lips, and a hundred indecipherable endearments.
