This torch had a companion. A man stood brooding over a dim slab that could be nothing but a grave, his back to the sullen glow. His dark clothes absorbed the flames, extinguished them, creating a vibrant sphere of dark in the midst of light, as he stood poised over the coffin with a stillness more active than movement. Only the silver head of his cane blazed with reflected fire, held aloft above the grave like a medieval necromancer summoning spirits from the vasty deep.
Chapter Sixteen
The effect, Letty was sure, was quite deliberate.
"Good day," she said tartly, all the more tartly for her momentary descent into superstition. For a moment, she had half expected the lid of the coffin to clank open, and a shrouded form to rise—and do what? she demanded of herself irritably. Recite poetry? Dance a sailor's hornpipe? Surely the dead had better things to do than entertain the living.
If he noticed the asperity of her tone, it had no effect on the cane's owner. Lord Vaughn turned in Letty's direction with an unhurried movement that was nearly an incantation in itself.
"My dear Mrs. Alsdale, you do appear in the most unlikely places."
"I could say the same of you, my lord," replied Letty, deliberately moving forward to block Jane from Lord Vaughn's view. Since Lord Vaughn was nearly six feet tall and Letty just over five, it didn't work quite as effectively as she had intended. "Unless you make a practice of inhabiting crypts."
"Delightful places, aren't they?" Lord Vaughn's gesture encompassed the looming stones of the roof, the smoky shadow on the wall, the dark bulk of the coffin in front of him. "So restful."
Letty looked at the coffin and shuddered with a distaste that was entirely unfeigned. "Not precisely the sort of rest I aspire to."
The torchlight lent a demonic aspect to the silver streaks in Lord Vaughn's hair, limning them with infernal fire. "It comes to us all in the end, whether we seek it or no."
No…no…no… echoed the stone arches mournfully.
Letty's voice drowned out the echoes. "There's no need to hasten the process."
"You wouldn't fling yourself into the grave like Juliet?"
"Certainly not for Romeo."
Eo…eo…eo… caroled the echoes in funereal descant.
"For someone else, then," said Lord Vaughn softly.
Letty bristled. "Dying for love is a ridiculous notion. Only a poet would think of it."
"'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, of imagination all compact,'" quoted Vaughn lazily. "You would prefer to die for something else, perhaps? A cause? An ideal?" He paused, holding up his cane so that the silver serpent at its head blazed in the light. "A country?"
"You left out old age," replied Letty.
"How very unambitious of you, Mrs. Alsdale."
"Alexander the Great died in his bed."
"Not so Caesar," countered Lord Vaughn, adding, with peculiar emphasis, "or Brutus."
Rather than bandy Romans, with whom her acquaintance was strictly limited, Letty resorted to changing the subject. "You never told me what brought you down here. Was it merely a philosophical endeavor?"
"Meditations on the meaning of mortality? No." Lord Vaughn's elegant hand rested briefly on the lid of the coffin in a gesture that was almost a caress. "You might call this more of a social call."
Lord Vaughn's rings glinted incongruously against the dark casket, a reminder of earthy vanities against the grim inevitability of the grave.
"You've put it off a bit long, haven't you?" said Letty, regarding the coffin with distaste. There was no plate on the coffin, no insignia, no name, merely a series of lightly incised lines scratched into the surface. Letty could barely make out the marks.
"Five years too long," said Vaughn.
His gloved fingers traced the scratches. One long stroke, followed by three short ones. An E. Followed by another long stroke. Then…
"Alas, poor Edward. I knew him well."
Letty's throat felt very tight as she watched Lord Vaughn trace the final two prongs of the second initial. Edward was a common enough name. But for the last name to begin with an F…
"Edward?" she repeated.
Vaughn gazed meditatively at the coffin, like Hamlet surveying the skull of Yorick. "Lord Edward Fitzgerald."
So that much, at least, of Jane's story had been true.
"This is the coffin of Lord Edward Fitzgerald?" she announced as loudly as she dared, wondering if Jane already knew, or cared.
"Poor Edward. He cared so deeply for his causes," said Lord Vaughn, in the tone of one marveling at a fascinating incomprehensibility.
"Who was he?" asked Letty, trying to angle herself in such a way that Lord Vaughn would have to move away to speak to her, and leave the field clear for Jane. Perhaps if she moved a little to the left…Lord Vaughn remained stubbornly where he was, squarely in front of Lord Edward's coffin.
"My cousin." Lord Vaughn's lips curled in amusement at Letty's involuntary expression of surprise. "You really don't know your Debrett's, do you, Mrs. Alsdale? A lamentable oversight in any debutante."
"I was never terribly good at being a debutante," admitted Letty. "I'm much better at balancing accounts."
Lord Vaughn held up one long-fingered hand. "I shan't ask. For your edification, my ignorant young lady, Edward was the son of Lady Emily Lennox. Lady Emily Lennox married James Fitzgerald, the Earl of Kildare. Lady Emily's father was the Duke of Richmond, who was, in turn, first cousin to my grandmother."
"Which makes you…?" inquired Letty, trying desperately to untangle the mesh of titles.
"Exactly as I am," replied Vaughn, extending an arm. "Shall we rejoin your party? They seem to have strayed."
"Unless," retorted Letty, anxious to divert attention from Jane, who was poking into the foundations of the vault with more antiquarian fervor than one might expect from Miss Gilly Fairley, "we are the ones who have strayed."
"An estimable young lady like yourself?" replied Vaughn, turning her words into something else entirely as he drew her inexorably in the direction of Jane, Miss Gwen, and the beleaguered curate. "Never."
"I was wondering where you had got to!" exclaimed Jane. "Oh, do come look, Mrs. Alsdale, darling, at these wonderful pillars! Can't you just imagine hideous Count Alfonso walling lovely Dulcibelle into just such a crypt as this? I know I shall have nightmares for a week!"
"How lovely," said Letty weakly.
"And a sepulchre!" Jane darted past Lord Vaughn, and stretched out both hands to Lord Edward's humble casket in a gesture of exaggerated rapture.
Within the space of a moment, she had run her hands over the top, peered beneath the base, and come up beaming. Beaming, Letty noticed, and empty-handed. Lord Vaughn's presence precluded a more thorough investigation, but, even to Letty's untrained eyes, the inspection appeared perfunctory. Reflexively, Letty's head tilted back, up to the vaulted roof, above which Lord Pinchingdale was…doing what?
"How gloriously gruesome!" Jane enthused, patting the top of Lord Edward's coffin like a much-beloved pet. "I do prefer the word 'sepulchre' to 'coffin,' don't you? It's just so much more…"
"Dramatic?" supplied Lord Vaughn.
"…horrid!" finished Jane triumphantly, brushing dirt off her gloves.
"Or horridly dramatic," murmured Vaughn.
"My dramatics are never horrid!" protested Jane, batting her eyelashes at Lord Vaughn. She put a finger to her cheek in exaggerated perplexity. "Or do I mean that my horrors are never dramatic?"
"I find it horrifying that we haven't yet been introduced." Lord Vaughn looked to Letty.