"I'm not her brother," snapped Miles, watching the coffee room door. How long could it possibly take for one woman to go to the necessary and back? The young fop in the immense cravat was still standing by the fire, so he didn't have to worry about her being abducted by force, but… Hen wouldn't have bolted out a window. Would she?
"Just what I was saying," agreed Turnip, looking relieved that Miles had grasped the crux of the problem so readily. "Don't mean to be Mrs. Grundy, you know, but…"
"Trust me," said Miles, frowning at the grandfather clock in the corner of the room, "it is a role for which you are singularly unsuited."
"Oh, you mean not being female?" Turnip considered. "Dare say I would look deuced odd in skirts, though some of those sprigged muslin rig outs ain't half-bad. Little flowers, you know. But what I meant to say" — Turnip abandoned the fascinating subject of haberdashery to drag himself doggedly back to the topic at hand — "is, that is to say…"
Miles dragged his attention away from the door and fixed Turnip with a quelling look. "There is nothing havey-cavey going on between me and Henrietta." Miles twisted in his seat to look anxiously at the coffee room door. "But where is she?"
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Havey-Cavey (adj.): highly suspect, clandestine, illicit; behavior generally indicative of some nefarious purpose. To be strictly monitored by the conscientious agent.
Tucking her shawl more securely around her shoulders, Henrietta started up the narrow flight of stairs to which she had been directed by a busy maidservant. With only the meager illumination to be had from a window on the landing above, the stairwell was dim, and the well-worn treads dipped in the middle. Henrietta picked her way gingerly up the stairs, but her mind was back downstairs in the coffee room, on a pair of anxious brown eyes.
What had Miles really been about to say? No one, not even Miles, could contrive to look that earnest over a beverage. Henrietta mulled through possible endings to that plaintive "Hen — " She didn't like any of them.
Henrietta sighed and shook her head at herself. She was driving herself to distraction with these futile speculations. Playing a game of "What can Miles be thinking?" was not only fruitless, it was absolutely…
"… maddening!" someone exclaimed.
Henrietta paused, one foot on the landing, one on the penultimate step. It wasn't just that the word exactly encapsulated her own sentiments. She knew that voice. The last time she had heard it, it had been employed in a slumberous murmur of seduction rather than an expression of agitation, but the tones were as unmistakable as they were misplaced.
"You must be patient," counseled another voice, a woman's voice with a light foreign accent. Even the wooden barrier of the door couldn't quite detract from the fluid charm of it; although she spoke softly, every tone was as finely hued as a delicately painted piece of porcelain. "You do no good to yourself by this, Sebastian."
Henrietta was so surprised that Lord Vaughn was in possession of a first name that she nearly missed hearing what came next.
"Ten years." Lord Vaughn's cultured voice thrummed with frustration through the chinks in the door. "It has been ten years, Aurelia. What sort of paragon would you have me be, to practice patience for that long?"
Henrietta engaged in rapid mental mathematics. A decade… 1793. The little gossip she had managed to glean about Vaughn had been maddeningly imprecise, but the year might coincide with his precipitate departure from England.
It was also, recalled Henrietta, the year the French king had been dragged beneath the blade of the guillotine. Which one was it? Or were they related?
"If so long, why not a little longer?" replied the other.
Lord Vaughn — Henrietta really couldn't think of him as Sebastian, whatever the mysterious woman might call him — drawled something in a low tone that was lost somewhere between the door and Henrietta's ear. Whatever it was, it elicited an intimate chuckle from his companion.
"I do not think" — the accent was very much in the ascendant, as was the affectionate note of laughter — "that a paragon should speak so."
Vaughn's voice again, quick and impatient. "Are you quite certain there was nothing else there?"
Nothing else where? Henrietta frowned at the uninformative wooden panels of the door, wishing there was some way she could get closer, some way she could see.
There was a swish of fabric, as though someone had just subsided into a chair. "I made the inspection of his belongings with much thoroughness. And most unpleasant it was, too," the woman's voice added tartly.
Richard's belongings, perhaps? Henrietta listened with all her might, willing the conspirators to speak further.
Henrietta heard boots on bare wood as Vaughn strolled across the room, followed by the sound of lips meeting — a hand? Lips? Henrietta couldn't tell. Vaughn spoke, voice heavy with rue and reluctant charm. "Forgive me, Aurelia. I am an ungrateful beast."
Blast. Henrietta scowled at the door. Now he chose to apologize? "I know," replied the other complacently, and equally uninformatively. "But you have your compensations."
"Most of them measured by guineas," Vaughn replied drily.
"If I were any other woman," the accented voice chided gently, "I would take offense at that."
"If you were any other woman," countered Vaughn, "I would not have said it." There was a pregnant pause, a rustle of fabric that might have been an embrace, or merely the woman shifting in her chair — Henrietta cursed her sightless state — before Vaughn resumed, his tone brisk. "I leave for Paris on Tuesday."
"Are you sure that is wise, caro?"
"I would have an end to this business, Aurelia. The game has been played for long enough." Vaughn's voice rang with grim finality, sending a reluctant shiver through Henrietta's thick shawl. So might Beowulf have sounded outside Grendel's den, girding himself for havoc and death. "The time is come to behead the hydra."
"You don't know that it is she." The soft soprano voice made one last attempt.
"Everything points to it." Vaughn's tone brooked no argument.
Everything pointed to what? To whom? Henrietta shifted her weight to the top step to press her ear more firmly against the door frame. The elderly step shifted and groaned, protesting her weight.
Booted feet clipped toward the door, clicking ominously against the bare planking.
"Did you hear that?"
Henrietta froze, one hand on the wall.
"What am I meant to be hearing, caro?"
"Someone. By the door."
"This old building, it is full of the creaks. You are too imaginative, my friend," the lightly accented voice chided affectionately. "You quarrel with shadows."
"My shadows carry swords."
Vaughn punctuated his words with a staccato flurry of footsteps.
Henrietta didn't wait to hear more. She careened down the stairs in reckless haste, clinging to the banister as she all but fell down the last three steps. She flung herself around the turn of the wall just as, at the top of the stairs, a door creaked open.
Pressed against the wall, panting, Henrietta heard Vaughn's muttered curse, and a warm female voice say, "Did I not tell you it would be so? Come, sit by me, and leave the shadows to their rest for an hour."
He couldn't find them there.
Henrietta's mind raced in tandem with her rapidly beating heart. If Vaughn had been searching Richard's study… If the she to whom he had referred was somehow, incomprehensibly, Jane… If — Henrietta mustered the greatest, most alarming if of all — if Vaughn was the Black Tulip, they must get away before he knew they had been there.