The Masque of the Black Tulip (9 page)

"Another hand?" Miles repeated.

"I think not." Lord Vaughn pushed back his chair, adding drily, "I shall have to forego that pleasure."

If Miles hadn't been so sure that the man was a deadly French spy, he would have almost been sorry for him about then. But since the man was quite likely a deadly French spy, Miles had no compunction whatsoever about being as annoying as possible, in a performance based on Turnip Fitzhugh at his less endearing moments.

"Oh, are you going to your club? I could—"

"Good night, Dorrington."

Miles bit down on an entirely inappropriate urge to smile, and tried to look suitably rebuffed. "Ah, well," he said, subsiding into his chair with what he hoped was a mournful air. "Some other time."

The cane beat a staccato retreat. Miles waited until the echoes had faded and then, cautiously, rose from the table. He peered out the door of the card room. Vaughn was making a leg to Lady Jersey, Lady Jersey was shaking her finger at him, and… Lord Vaughn was exiting the ballroom. Miles followed.

He followed at a suitable distance, making sure to keep hidden within the door frame as Vaughn climbed into his sedan chair. It was a large chair, and as elegant as everything else about Vaughn. The walls were covered with black lacquer chased in silver that shimmered in the torchlight. Two liveried bearers held the poles at either end.

Most likely Vaughn was just going home, or to his club (Miles didn't take his disclaimer a moment before as reliable; hell, if he'd been Vaughn, he'd have lied, just to get rid of him), or to a bawdy house, or anyplace else one might conceivably go of an evening for purposes that had nothing whatsoever to do with espionage.

But what if he wasn't?

It didn't hurt to follow him. Just in case.

Miles hurried over to a line of sedan chairs for hire sitting in a row on the opposite side of the street. They did a brisk business, since so many areas of London were unsafe to walk after dark, with streets too narrow for even the skinniest of phaetons, much less a regular carriage. The chairmen were chatting desultorily as they waited for custom—recounting the gorier details of yesterday's cockfight, from what Miles could hear.

Miles didn't wait to hear which bird had won. He strode up to the sturdiest-looking of the chairs, a battered box that had once been painted white but was begrimed to gray, and cleared his throat loudly enough to cause a gale in Northumberland. Two men reluctantly detached themselves from the mob of bird-baiters, and came forward.

"You want a ride, gov'ner?"

Vaughn's chair was swaying around a corner. In a moment, it would be out of sight. Miles climbed hastily between the poles, folding his large frame into the small chair.

"Follow that chair!"

"That'll be extra if you want me to run," the bearer in front informed him laconically.

Miles plunked a half crown into his hand. "Go!"

The chairman jerked a finger towards his colleague in the back. "And for me friend."

"If," Miles clipped out, "you get me there on time and unseen, I will give you both double that. Now go!"

The chairmen lifted him and went. Over the chairman's shoulder, Miles thought he could just barely make out a corner of Vaughn's chair as it tilted around a corner, but it was too hard to see. Miles leaned to the side, causing the chair to sway perilously, and earning a muttered epithet from the chairman in back, who grappled with the poles to keep the chair upright.

Miles settled back down into the center of the seat, staring fixedly at the chairman's shoulder blades. It really wasn't much of a view.

Deciding that they were far enough behind that Vaughn's men wouldn't notice, Miles lifted the hinged roof of the sedan chair and peered over the top. Vaughn's chair was so far ahead that he could just make out the glint of the linkboy's lantern, bobbing up and down before Vaughn's chair like a will-o'-the-wisp in the darkness.

Wherever it was going, Vaughn's chair was taking the most circuitous route possible. Miles's bearers twisted down narrow alleys where the houses leaned drunkenly towards one another, past riotous taverns and quiet churches, around abrupt corners, arid through busy thoroughfares. For the most part, Vaughn's bearers chose the less traveled paths, back alleys where the tops of the chairs jostled against lines of laundry and the chairmen had to slow to keep from slipping in the refuse that fouled the ground. They slowed, but they did not falter, picking up the pace to something near a run whenever the terrain permitted.

Miles tried to rein in his rising excitement. Vaughn might just be eager to meet a mistress… but what man kept a mistress in this part of town? Although the streets were unfamiliar to Miles, his internal compass was spinning merrily away, and had landed unerringly on southeast; they were heading, in their roundabout way, away from Mayfair, away from Piccadilly, towards the river and the more rough-and-tumble areas to the east. Clearly, they were not making for Vaughn's townhouse in Belliston Square.

On a street of shuttered shops and seedy taverns, Vaughn's chair began to slow. His chairmen obediently trotted around a corner, and paused in front of an alehouse whose sign creaked idly in the evening breeze.

Miles jabbed the chairman between the shoulder blades. "Stop here!"

The chairman skidded to a rib-crushing halt just before the turn. At least, Miles's ribs felt like they had been crushed. They had whacked right into the chairman's head. Wheezing, Miles vaulted out of the chair, clapped some coins into the chairman's hand without stopping to count them, and flattened himself against the corner of the building.

Miles watched as Vaughn waved away the hand offered him by one of his bearers, and climbed out of his chair. At least, Miles assumed it was Vaughn. The figure who emerged from the chair was entirely swathed in a large black cloak. Only the serpent-headed cane marked the phantom figure as the same man whose footsteps Miles had dogged. Pausing to arrange something with his chairmen—most likely the time at which he wished to be collected, as the neighborhood was not one in which a gentleman would wish to go on foot—Vaughn disappeared into the tavern.

Miles squinted at the faded sign above the door. Depicted below a ducal coronet were a pair of broad-topped boots of the type worn by the cavaliers of a century ago. Miles could just barely make out the faded legend, THE DUKE'S KNEES.

The entire place had a seedy aspect, an air of long decay compounded by drooping shutters and peeling paint. Despite its rundown aspect, it seemed popular enough. A trio of men, swaying together in song, had just staggered out the door, unleashing a hint of the hubbub within—and a strong reek of spilled ale—before the door teetered closed again.

As an afterthought, Miles leaned down and undipped the jeweled buckles from his shoes, slipping them into his waistcoat pocket. In this neighborhood, they shone like a beacon, if not to his quarry, then to the thieves and footpads who waited to prey on inebriated gentlemen after dark. If Miles could have also stripped himself of his white silk stockings and knee breeches, he would have, but somehow, he thought he'd arouse more attention striding in there buck-naked than he would clad as though for a court audience.

What he needed was a cloak, one of those big, all-enveloping sorts that Vaughn had been sporting. Damn! Keeping to the shadows, Miles cursed himself for not having thought of it. Of course, he hadn't realized that he was going to be playing the intrepid spy tonight as well as the bored escort; had he known, he would have dressed accordingly. Not in black—since no one wore unrelieved black except spies and parsons, and Miles had no desire to be taken for either—but various dull shades of brown that would blend into the scenery and render him eminently unremarkable.

As luck would have it, there was a brown cloak of exactly the type required walking Miles's way. Unfortunately, it was attached to a very large individual, with a crooked nose and scars on his face that proclaimed he wouldn't look amiss at a brawl. There was a female creature in dirty flowered cotton and tattered lace clinging to his arm—secondhand goods by the look of them, both the clothing and the woman.

Miles stepped out in front of the pair. "Hello," he said, with a winning smile. "I'd like to purchase your cloak."

"My cloak?" The man looked like he'd sooner punch him than negotiate with him. "What do you want with me cloak?"

"It's chilly, don't you think?" Miles improvised. He rubbed his arms and feigned a shudder. "Brrrrrr!"

"Awww, gi' it to 'im, Freddy," cooed the little doxy, hanging on his arm like a squirrel off the branch of a tree. "I'll keep ye warm."

"A charming sentiment," Miles applauded. "And now for the price…"

The mention of money had its desired effect. Miles walked away several shillings the poorer, proud possessor of a smelly piece of brown wool. A voluminous, hooded, smelly piece of brown wool. Never again would he leave home without one, he vowed.

No time to muse on the functionality of cloaks. He had wasted too much time already. How long had Vaughn been in there? Swirling the cloak about him, Miles strode rapidly towards the Duke's Knees. Miles gingerly pushed open the door, which lolled drunkenly off its frame, held in place by a makeshift hinge at the top. From the splintering in the wood of the frame, it looked like the door had been broken off its hinges, and more than once. Charming clientele this place boasted.

Holding his cloak close about him to hide his telltale white stockings and knee breeches, Miles kept his back hunched and his head low. The taproom was full. Uncertain light wavered over the proceedings from the hearth in the left-hand wall and the battered pewter sconces on the wall. A gang of rowdies in rough shirts and unkempt hair was playing a complicated game with a knife in one corner of the room, the object of which seemed to be not getting one's fingers sliced off.

Miles could safely say Vaughn was not of their company.

In another corner, men were dicing, flinging ivory cubes from a battered tin container. A busty barmaid squirmed on the lap of a red-nosed patron, slapping at his hands and squealing protests with more form than force. Definitely not Vaughn. A steep flight of stairs in one corner led out of the taproom, to private rooms upstairs, no doubt, the sort of rooms designed for clandestine meetings of the amorous kind. Or of the treasonous kind.

Miles started towards the stairs. But there was another corner of the room left. His eyes had initially skirted over it because the little nook sat entirely in shadow, too far from the hearth for any light to reach. The candle on the wall had gone out—or been blown out, by someone aiming to discourage prying eyes.

Tucked away behind the curve of the bar, wedged in the far right-hand corner, there was room for just one small table. At that table were seated two men.

Vaughn. There could be no question. Although the hood was pulled down as far as it would go, covering his forehead and shadowing his eyes, there was no mistaking that aquiline nose, or the elegant aesthete's hands that sat so incongruously on the scarred wood of the table. Those were not the hands of a laborer.

Miles sidled closer, under pretext of getting a drink from the bar.

His companion, too, was cloaked and hooded. Hoods, thought Miles with a wry twist of the lips, appeared to be popular this season. The two were seated on a slight diagonal, with Vaughn nearer the bar, slightly turned away from the main room, and the stranger wedged in the crook between the join of the walls. With the second man's face turned out, Miles should have been able to make out his features, but the lack of light transformed his visage into something out of one of the novels Hen was so fond of, a hooded horror with nothing but emptiness where the face ought to have been. Dramatic rubbish, thought Miles, inching nearer.

There was a slightly darker shadow that might have been a mustache… Miles bumped into the corner of the bar, and bit back a startled oomph.

Since he was there, Miles seated himself on a stool. He hunched over the bar, yanking his hood farther down over his brow, and proceeded to listen.

"Do you have it with you?" Vaughn was asking tersely.

"So hasty!" The other man's voice was lightly accented, with a familiar lilt. It might have been French; Miles was too far away to tell, and while the cloak did wonderful things for hiding his features, it had a distinctly annoying tendency to muffle sound. "While we are here, a drink perhaps?"

"What'd ye like?"

The voice was not Vaughn's. It was high-pitched, feminine, and came from a region roughly in the vicinity of Miles's left ear.

"Hunh?" Miles jerked his head around to encounter a truly alarming quantity of flesh overflowing a low-laced bodice.

The barmaid heaved a long-suffering sigh, making the mounds of flesh swell to perilous proportions. "What'd ye like? I ain't got all night. Though for you, sweet'eart," her voice lowered suggestively, as her bosom lurched an insistent inch closer to Miles's nose, bringing with it an odor of sweat and cheap scent, "I might be persuaded to change me mind."

"Uh…" Choking on the reek—that would be something to explain to his friends and relations, asphyxiation by bosom—Miles scooted back as far as the stool would allow. What did they drink in places like this? Not claret, that much he remembered. It had been so long since Miles had explored the seedier side of London.

"Gin," he said decisively, pitching his voice gruff and low, just in case Vaughn was listening. Vaughn seemed quite involved in his own conversation, speaking in a low, authoritative tone, but one never knew. Miles turned his attention back to his quarry, assuming the barmaid would hare herself off to riper regions.

No such luck. The barmaid waved a hand at the barkeep. "Oy, Jim! A glass of blue ruin for our friend 'ere!"

"What was 'at, Molly?" Jim cupped a hand over his ear. "I can't 'ear ye!"

"Blue ruin!" bellowed the barmaid, loud enough to be heard clear across the Thames. "For this 'andsome 'unk of man 'ere."

So much for being inconspicuous.

Miles could only be glad that his back was to Vaughn and his companion. Even if they turned to stare, all they would see would be an expanse of brown wool.