"That, Mr. Dorrington," said Wickham harshly, "is bad news. Very bad news, indeed."
"Bad news?" Miles was half out of his chair, grasping the edge of Wickham's desk.
Wickham had already levered himself out of his desk chair and was striding towards the door. "It means," he explained, reaching for the door handle, "that Lady Henrietta is in grave danger."
Something sharp was poking Henrietta in the arm.
Making sleepy noises of protest, Henrietta rolled over and buried her face into the fluffy depths of the feather pillow. She flung out an arm, and wiggled deeper into the sheets. But there was an odd, musty smell to the pillow, not like her own lavender-scented linen, and the sheets felt strange against her bare skin.
Henrietta's eyelids flew all the way open, and she sat abruptly up in the bed, clutching at the coverlet as it threatened to fall to her waist. Last night. Her wedding. Miles… It had all really happened, hadn't it? Yes, of course it had, she assured herself. Or else, why would she be unclothed in a strange bed? As to what had transpired in that strange bed… Henrietta turned redder than the opulent crimson counterpane.
The cause for her blush was absent, but in his place perched a hastily folded note. Reaching out, Henrietta unfolded the scrap of paper, and leaned groggily back against the pillows. In Miles's large, untidy handwriting, the note stated, "Went to War Office. Back by noon." It was signed with an exuberant squiggle that might have been an M, a D, or an amateur portrait of Queen Charlotte.
Not precisely an ode to her charm and beauty.
Henrietta shook her head and chuckled. How like Miles it was!
There was a postscript, however, that brought more of a sparkle to her eye than any of the effusions, verse and prose, of her past admirers. At the bottom of the page, Miles had scrawled just one word: "Magnificent."
Henrietta clutched the note to her chest, beaming besottedly. It really had been quite magnificent, hadn't it? Lifting the note, Henrietta read the word again. Magnificent. That did say magnificent, didn't it, not maleficent or malodorous or magnificat? Henrietta peeked again, just to make sure. Yes, it quite definitely said magnificent. Happily crinkling the edges of the paper, Henrietta read the postscript over four more times, until the letters began to unfold into little black squiggles and the word "magnificent" began to disintegrate on her tongue, and she had to remind herself of what it meant.
Resolutely refolding the note (after just one last peek to make sure the word was still there, and not just another iteration of "Miles" that had happened to sprawl over into extra letters), Henrietta settled back against the pillows, the little square of paper balanced on her chest, tucking her chin down along her collarbone to squint at it. It wasn't exactly a love letter, she reasoned, nobly resisting the urge to snatch it open again, but it was a token that Miles intended to go along with his end of the bargain, and do his best to make things work. Bargain. Henrietta struggled up onto her elbows, dislodging the piece of paper. That did take some of the glow out of it. She didn't much relish being a romantic charity case, tossed alms in the form of a spare word.
He was also kind to small children and animals. Ah, but would he write a love letter — oh, fine, a love word — to a discontented puppy? No, Henrietta slowly concluded, but, then, puppies couldn't read, so, to a puppy, a spare bone really might be quite the same thing. And one word was such a little bone…
Henrietta flopped over, whapping her face into the pillow. Hard.
Such thoughts were entirely, whap, entirely, whap, counterproductive. A flushed but resolute Henrietta emerged from the feathers. Pushing her hair back out of her face, and brushing aside a stray feather that had gotten caught in the tangles, she clambered out of bed, winding the bedsheet around her as she went. Enough tormenting herself with silly speculations that couldn't possibly be resolved. She had a house to be organized (Henrietta scrunched her nose, remembering the mustv smell of the pillow; airing the linens was definitely in order), servants to be reviewed (Henrietta turned another color entirely, remembering her first meeting with the staff the night before, while not on her own feet), and a letter to be written to her parents.
Henrietta's hands stilled on the edges of the sheet at the thought of her parents. Servants first, she decided. She could work her way gradually up to dealing with her parents over the course of the afternoon. She would be willing to wager that Richard had already written them, had probably written to them before the thrum of Miles's carriage wheels had echoed away down the drive. Whatever Richard had written was bound to portray the weekend's events — and the morals of the characters concerned — in a less-than-flattering light. Henrietta wasn't sure if what had happened was amenable to flattering lights, but if there was one, she intended to find it. Estrangement from her parents… it just wasn't to be thought of. It would be as dreadful for Miles as it would be for her.
Henrietta reached out her hand to ring for her maid to help her dress. There was one slight flaw to that plan. She didn't have a maid. Nor, for that matter, did she have any clothes.
She eyed yesterday's travel-stained dress with disfavor, picking it up with two fingers. The skirt was liberally streaked with dirt; there were splatters of goodness knew what (Henrietta certainly didn't want to know) on the hem, a tear in the bodice, and — merciful heavens, was that a leaf of cabbage stuck to the sleeve?
"I just don't want to know," muttered Henrietta, shaking the dress by the other arm until the offending vegetation fell off onto the red-and-blue-figured carpet.
Henrietta contemplated raiding the wardrobes of Loring. House, but couldn't help but suspect that she and Miles's mother would have radically different tastes in clothes. And while the classical mode was still in style, going about draped in a sheet struck her as not only risque, but draughty. Yesterday's clothes would have to do, until she could go to Uppington House to fetch more.
Grimacing, Henrietta wiggled into the begrimed garments, managing to reach just enough buttons to prevent the dress from plummeting Drecioitouslv. There was a tarnished silver brush on the dressing table.
and Henrietta used it to attack the knots and snarls that had sprung up all over her head. Henrietta blushed at the recollection of how some of those tangles had developed. She could feel Miles hands running through her hair, his lips on hers, his… er. Henrietta glanced guiltily around.
"Silly," she muttered to herself.
At any rate, she thought, moving onto safer ground, a good number of those tangles dated back to their precipitate flight from the inn. The memory of the faceless black coach behind them was enough to make Henrietta's happy pink glow fade away entirely.
Miles seemed so sure that it was Vaughn.
Frowning, Henrietta pulled the brush slowly through her hair, working her way through the tangles.
Everything pointed to Vaughn. That undue attention he had only displayed upon hearing she was the sister of the Purple Gentian, that strange episode in the Chinese chamber, and his habit of cryptic conversation. He had told her he hadn't been to France for many years. Yet, yesterday, he had spoken of returning to France as if after a brief absence. He was on the trail of a mysterious female, and, most damning of all, was in a position to have followed her and Miles out of the inn.
And yet… something rang a false note, like a song sung slightly flat. Henrietta frowned into the mirror, trying to isolate the source of her discontent, drawing her mind back to the narrow stairwell, the muffled voices heard through the chinks of the door frame.
With her faculty of sight obstructed by the door, Henrietta had been entirely concentrated upon Vaughn's voice, every last timbre and hint of emotion. Voices were something of which Henrietta had made rather a study. Vaughn had been frustrated, he had been irate, but there was no tang of malice in it. Instead, she had heard an ineffable weariness that inspired the sort of sympathy one felt for Lear tossed out upon the heath, a strong and stubborn man brought to the end of his endurance. Henrietta wrinkled her nose, giving her hair an unnecessarily vigorous stroke with the brush. Such flights of fancy were entirely extraneous to a properly ordered investigation.