The Seduction of the Crimson Rose E-Book

Lauren Willig

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Pink Carnation
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 629

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Determined to secure another London Season without assistance from her new brother-in-law, Mary accepts a secret assignment from Lord Vaughn on behalf of the Pink Carnation: to infiltrate the ranks of the dreaded French spy, the Black Tulip, before he and his master can stage their planned invasion of England. Every spy has a weakness, and for the Black Tulip that weakness is black-haired women - his 'petals' of the Tulip. A natural at the art of seduction, Mary easily catches the attention of the French spy, but Lord Vaughn never anticipates that his own heart will be caught as well. Fighting their growing attraction, impediments from their past and, of course, the French, Mary and Vaughn find themselves lost in the shadows of a treacherous garden of lies. As our modern-day heroine, Eloise Kelly, digs deeper into England's Napoleonic-era espionage, she becomes even more intwined with Colin Selwick, the descendent of her spy subjects.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR LAUREN WILLIG

The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

‘A deftly hilarious, sexy novel’ Eloisa James, author of Taming of the Duke

‘This genre-bending read – a dash of chick lit with a historical twist – has it all: romance, mystery, and adventure. Pure fun!’ Meg Cabot, author of Queen of Babble

‘Swashbuckling … Chock-full of romance, sexual tension, espionage, adventure, and humour’Library Journal

‘Wickedly erudite. Her elegant sentences and droll wit complement her impeccable historical accuracy’Romantic Times

‘Relentlessly effervescent prose … a sexy, smirking, determined-to-charm historical romance debut’Kirkus Reviews

The Masque of the Black Tulip

‘Clever [and] playful … What’s most delicious about Willig’s novels is that the damsels of 1803 bravely put it all on the line for love and country’Detroit Free Press

‘Studded with clever literary and historical nuggets, this charming historical/contemporary romance moves back and forth in time’USA Today

‘Terribly clever and funny … will keep readers guessing until the final un-Masquing’Library Journal

‘Willig has great fun with the conventions of the genre, throwing obstacles between her lovers at every opportunity … a great escape’Boston Globe

The Deception of the Emerald Ring

‘Heaving bodices, embellished history, and witty dialogue: what more could you ask for?’Kirkus Reviews

‘History textbook meets Bridget Jones’Marie Claire

‘Pride and Prejudice lives on in Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation romance-spy series’USA Today

‘A fun and zany time warp full of history, digestible violence and plenty of romance’New York Daily News

‘Filled with mistaken identities, double agents, and high-stakes espionage … The historic action is taut and twisting. Fans of the series will clamour for more’Publishers Weekly

The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

‘Willig’s series gets better with each addition, and her latest is filled with swashbuckling fun, romance, and intrigue’Booklist

‘Fulfils its promise of intrigue and romance’Publishers Weekly

‘There is wit, laughter, secrets, lies, grand schemes, and of course all

The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

LAUREN WILLIG

To Nancy M. Flynn, setting the standard for best friends since 1982

Contents

PraiseTitle PageDedicationPrologueChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenChapter FourteenChapter FifteenChapter SixteenChapter SeventeenChapter EighteenChapter NineteenChapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-OneChapter Twenty-TwoChapter Twenty-ThreeChapter Twenty-FourChapter Twenty-FiveChapter Twenty-SixChapter Twenty-SevenChapter Twenty-EightChapter Twenty-NineChapter ThirtyChapter Thirty-OneChapter Thirty-TwoChapter Thirty-ThreeHistorical NoteAcknowledgementsThe Secret History of the Pink CarnationThe Masque of the Black TulipThe Deception of the Emerald RingThe Temptation of the Night JasmineAbout the AuthorBy the Same AuthorCopyright

Prologue

November, 2003

The Vaughn Collection, London

‘Four pounds,’ demanded the fourteen-foot-high statue of Hercules.

For such a big man, Hercules had a surprisingly high-pitched voice. It took me a moment to realise that it wasn’t actually a piece of classical statuary demanding the contents of my wallet, but a very human-size woman seated at a small desk at its base. When you’re confronted by a twice-larger-than-life statue of Hercules, wielding a club and wearing little more than a strategically draped serpent, you tend not to notice much else.

To be fair, it wasn’t all Hercules’ fault. I had spent the morning in a state of utter uselessness, nearly been run over by a cab on my way to the archives, and given a pair of confused German tourists directions to Westminster Abbey when what they wanted was Kensington Palace.

The cause of all this chaos and confusion? I had a date. A real, live date with a real, live boy.

If this doesn’t seem exactly stop-the-presses sort of stuff, then you’ve clearly never experienced the soul-sucking self-doubt that comes of a year without so much as an attempted grope. And the boy in question … think a blond Hugh Grant without the sketchy past, or Errol Flynn without the tights. Unlike my other exes (and most Robin Hoods), he actually spoke with an English accent. Which made sense, because he was English, born and bred on the scepter’d isle, as British as HP Sauce, crooked teeth, and the Queen Mum’s hat collection. What single Anglophile of a certain age wouldn’t be smitten?

In my own defence, I hadn’t come to England looking for romance. As a fifth-year graduate student with an increasingly angsty dissertation advisor and a research grant that didn’t quite pay my rent, I didn’t have time for men – at least not live ones. Unfortunately, the dead ones could be just as frustrating as the live ones. After three months hunched over a desk in the British Library Manuscript Room, three months of endless train rides to obscure county records offices, three months of assuring my advisor that, yes, everything was going just brilliantly and of course I would have a chapter for him by January, by November I had still been no closer to my goal: the unmasking of the Pink Carnation, the flowery spy whose very existence gave Napoleon an intense allergic reaction.

The fact that a whole legion of intensely interested nineteenth-century French agents, as well as several successive generations of scholars, had also failed ought to have clued me in.

But when has that ever stopped anyone? It’s like the search for the mines of Solomon or the Lost City of Gold; that no one else has found it before just adds to the challenge. I’m sure the men who perished in the jungles of Mexico didn’t say, ‘Oooh, let’s go die on a hopeless quest!’ No, they dreamt of coming home draped in gold and covered with glory. My goal wasn’t gold but footnotes, the coin of the scholarly realm. Otherwise the impetus was the same. The fact that many scholars smugly insisted that the Pink Carnation had never existed in the first place, that he was an imaginary folk hero invented to sell papers, or a sort of shadow puppet invented by the War Office in the hopes of scaring Napoleon, only spurred me on. I’d show them.

Or not. For a while, it was beginning to look like not.

But every now and again, once in a hundred years, despite all the naysaying and the accumulated weight of scholarly truths, someone gets lucky. This time, it was me. I don’t know what it was that made Mrs Selwick-Alderly decide to allow me access to a cache of family papers never before open to the public. Perhaps I reminded her of a long-lost daughter. Or she might simply have taken pity on me for my pathetic and bedraggled air (I’m frequently bedraggled, and after three months of fruitless dissertation research, I was feeling pretty darn pathetic). Whatever the cause, in her cosy sitting room, I had found not only the secret identity of the Pink Carnation, but something more, something that came in a tall, blond, and, at that point in time, very irate package.

That’s where Colin came in.

Ah, Colin. I was staring happily into space, contemplating the wonder that was Colin, when an annoying, squawking noise permeated my reverie.

‘Four pounds,’ the receptionist repeated, clearly taking my blank stare for either a linguistic barrier or just chronic stupidity.

‘Huh?’ I said brilliantly, still mentally wandering hand in hand with Colin in a Technicolor wonderland complete with dancing munchkins. I was wearing a floaty frock that flitted daintily about my knees as Colin swung me in a happy circle beneath the cerulean sky. All that was missing was Dick Van Dyke, although, given the look in Colin’s eye, Dick would have been decidedly superfluous.

Still tap-dancing through my daydream, I favoured the receptionist with a big, beaming smile.

‘Oh, I’m not here for the museum,’ I said brightly, confirming her impression that a village somewhere back in the States was missing its idiot. ‘I’m here for the Vaughn Collection.’

‘This is the Vaughn Collection.’

I knew I should have had that extra cup of coffee before leaving my flat. I thought of pretending that I didn’t speak English, but it was a little too late for that.

‘Sorry,’ I said, with that super-ingratiating smile that works on Americans but falls flat in the British Isles, ‘I didn’t mean the art collection. I meant the documentary collection – the archives. I spoke to your archivist?’

I’m not sure why it came out as a question. After all, if I didn’t know whether I’d spoken to the archivist, she surely wouldn’t know, either. From the look on the receptionist’s face, she seemed to share this opinion.

Trying a different tack, I said, more assertively, ‘I was told the archives were open between one and six on Saturdays.’

Dismissing me as a bad job, the receptionist jerked her head to the right. ‘Straight through down the stairs at the back if you want to see the museum it’ll be four pounds.’ The fact that she said this without pausing to draw breath rendered the performance even more impressive.

‘I’ll be sure to keep my eyes shut as I go.’

This earned me another fishy stare. Deeming it wiser to quit while I was ahead, I hoisted my bag higher on my shoulder and headed in the direction the receptionist had indicated. The caryatids arrayed on either side of the door looked down on my brown wool pants and baggy green Barbour jacket with a decided sneer. I don’t know what they were so supercilious about; their marble draperies were a good two thousand years out of fashion.

Dotted with little glass cases, the room beyond must have been a ballroom or something equally grand once upon a time, when Vaughn House was still inhabited by genuine Vaughns rather than the remnants of their art collection and a scraggle of hardcore art historians and scruffy tourists. You could have fit five of my flat into it and still had room for a good-size coffee shop.

With a fine disregard for atmosphere, the curators had plunked a series of glass and chrome display cases throughout the room, each containing a motley collection of personal effects of long-deceased Vaughns. In the largest case, in the very centre of the room, the curators had displayed the pièce de résistance, an impressive collection of Edwardian underwear, from lace-edged drawers large enough to swathe the backside of a baby elephant to a pair of stays that looked like they might have been used to tow the Queen Mary back into port. Next to them, the curators had helpfully positioned a sepia photograph of a formidable dowager with a waist cinched into nothingness and a bosom that could smother a small city.

With four months of fish and chips weighing heavily on my midriff, I cast a speculative eye over the stays. Unfortunately, I didn’t think they would fit under my going-out pants, which were designed for something a bit lighter in the way of undergarments. I wondered what the curators of museums would be displaying a hundred years hence. Would we have glass cases filled with fire-engine-red thongs and leopard-print bras, along with a carefully printed white card explaining their sociocultural significance?

The gentleman who occupied the better part of one wall seemed to share my qualms. His gaze was fixed upon the underwear display with a decidedly jaundiced air. He had been painted, according to the conceit of the time, in a classical wasteland, with a broken pillar wedged beneath one elbow and vague suggestions of a decaying Roman temple in the background. It was an evening scene, in which the rich black brocade of his coat would have blended with the deep indigo of the night sky if not for the silver threads that ran through the weave like condensed moonlight. The entire ensemble had a supernatural shimmer reminiscent of old-fashioned ghost stories featuring family phantoms.

Even with all the shimmer and silver, it wasn’t the eerie glow of his attire that first caught my eye, but his face. I would be lying if I said it was a handsome face. The nose was too long – the better for looking down at you, I suppose – and the lips were too thin. There were interesting hollows beneath his sharp cheekbones and paunches beneath his eyes, not unlike those one sees in pictures of the Duke of Windsor, the last word in aristocratic dissipation. His thin lips were curved in a cynical half-smile, and the sideways slant of the eyes suggested that he had just noticed something that both appalled and amused him – or amused him because it appalled him. Either way, I wanted to be let in on the joke.

The artist had chosen to colour his eyes nearly the same shade as the silver that ran through his coat. The effect was unusual and arresting. Those silver eyes glinted with a sardonic amusement that even two centuries of hanging on a wall couldn’t dim. He looked as though he had seen it all before, including the undergarments. He probably had. Those slender hands, elegantly poised on the head of an ebony walking stick, seemed more than capable of unlacing a pair of stays in about three minutes flat.

I didn’t need to read the swirly script on the brass plaque affixed to the frame to know who he was.

Sebastian, Lord Vaughn, eighth Earl Vaughn, Baron Vaughn of Vaughn-on-Tweed, and a host of lesser titles, all of which nicely filled up the space of half a page in Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage. A grand Whig aristocrat of the old school, member of organisations as diverse as the Royal Society and the Naughty Hellfire Club, intellectual and wastrel – and quite possibly a French spy.

I had come across Lord Vaughn in a number of highly suspicious circumstances. His name kept popping up in the annals of the Pink Carnation. Wherever he appeared, he brought with him death, destruction, and a devastating way with a quizzing glass.

The first time Vaughn’s name had intruded upon my notes, it was in connection with the death of an operative of the War Office, who had been placed in Vaughn’s household as a footman. No one ever really explained that one. The assumption was that the footman had been murdered by the Marquise de Montval, the deadly French operative who worked for the even deadlier Black Tulip (and by the time you’ve got to two levels of deadly, you’re talking pretty deadly). 

Did I mention that the Marquise had been Vaughn’s mistress? The association might have been purely amorous – or it might not have been. It was Vaughn who had released the Marquise from the custody of the English War Office, and Vaughn in whose company she had travelled to Ireland to foment rebellion on behalf of France. In short, Vaughn was looking pretty darn suspect. Add to that a decidedly sinister manner of dress, an extended stay on the Continent, and rather flippant ideas about the value of King and country, and you had a likely candidate for Traitor of the Year.

I had been thrilled when I discovered that the choice art museum, the Vaughn Collection, had belonged to that Vaughn. I’d heard of the Vaughn Collection – it had been prominently featured in my guidebook as a must-see for the serious student of art along with the Wallace Collection and the Sir John Soane’s Museum – but it took a while for the connection to click. Vaughn, after all, was a fairly common name.

But while Vaughn was a fairly common name, there weren’t all that many Vaughns with family mansions in snooty Belliston Square. In fact, there was only one. By a miracle, Vaughn House had remained in the family, escaping both the Blitz and bankruptcy, until the twelfth earl had left instructions in his will for its conversion into a public museum upon his death, apparently for the sole purpose of irritating his children. From what I was able to make out on the website, the bulk of the Vaughn Collection had been acquired by Sebastian, Lord Vaughn – my Vaughn – who seemed to have made his way across the Continent by buying up everything in his path.

A cover for other activities? Or merely the acquisitive instincts of a born connoisseur? I intended to find out. At least, I hoped to find out. Whether I would or not was another story entirely.

I hadn’t been entirely honest with my new buddy, the receptionist. It hadn’t been the archivist I had spoken with on the phone the day before, but a sort of assistant. He had sounded utterly baffled by my wanting to visit the collection. This did not inspire me with confidence.

The archives, he had informed me around a yawn, were mostly documents establishing provenance of the artwork and all that sort of thing. There were, he allowed, some family papers still floating around. Yes, he thought there might be some from the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. He supposed if I really wanted to come see them … The implication, of course, being that any sane person would rather spend a Saturday afternoon watching a cricket match, or watching paint dry, which amounts to much the same thing, as far as I’ve been able to tell. The whole conversation had been pretty much the professional equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and chanting, ‘Nobody’s home!’

Between the receptionist and the guy I had spoken to on the phone, I got the impression that the Vaughn Collection wasn’t awfully keen on visitors. Which is a little counterproductive when you’re a museum. I was fervently hoping that the archivist’s assistant’s attitude (I dare you to say that three times fast) was born more of laziness than of the fact that there just plain wasn’t anything there.

I did have at least one other option. The Vaughns hadn’t donated their family papers to the British Library, or printed up one of those nineteenth-century compilations with all the good bits expurgated. They did still own a rather impressive family seat up in the wilds of Northumberland, currently operating as a leisure centre for corporate trainings – the sort of retreats that involve dumping people in a lake and giving them points for how efficiently they get out of it again and other such acts of socially sanctioned torture. The family documents might still be housed up there, but even with the miracles of modern transportation, Northumberland was a ways away. Depending on how things went with Colin …

Ah, Colin.

Dodging through the obstacle course of glass display cases, I shook my head at my own foolishness. If I turned into a useless blob of goo every time I thought of him, how was I ever going to maintain a coherent conversation for the duration of dinner?

Every time I relaxed my concentration, there I was again, off in daydream land, in a glorious summer landscape with a man as perfect and plastic as a Ken doll. I knew I was being absurd. Outside, it was late November, bitter cold November, only three days after Thanksgiving. Yet, in my daydreams, we strolled hand in hand beneath a gentle June sun while the birds chirped away in the trees above. In real life, one of them would probably crap on his head. So much for romance.

Logically, I knew that the man was just as imaginary as the scene. The Colin I knew – or, rather, the Colin I had met, since I couldn’t really presume to know him at all, despite a rather intense acquaintance to date – was far from perfect. In fact, he was mercurial to the point of being schizophrenic, warm and flirty one minute, cold and distant the next. When I’d first met him, he’d practically bitten my head off for having the nerve to accept his aunt’s invitation to go through the family archives; the next thing I knew, he was refilling my champagne glass and looking at me in a way that made me go all wobbly (although four glasses of champagne will do that to a girl).

At least he’d had an excellent excuse for his most recent Jekyll and Hyde performance. What I’d thought was a case of Colin simply blowing me off because of, well, me, turned out to be a panicked rush to Italy, where his mother was unconscious in a hospital after a particularly nasty car accident. I hadn’t even realised Colin had a mother.

Naturally, I knew he must have had one at some point (yes, we all took sixth-grade bio class), but in novels, heroes never seem to have parents, at least not living, breathing ones who get sick or have accidents. Occasionally they have parent issues, but the parents are always conveniently off somewhere to stage left, usually dead. Can you imagine Mr Rochester trying to explain to his mother how he burnt the house down? Or Mr Darcy promising his mother he won’t marry that hideous Bingley girl? I rest my case.

Even writing off Colin’s last mood swing, I still hadn’t found out just why he had reacted quite so violently to my excursions into his family’s archives. Most of the hypotheses that occurred to me were far too ridiculous to countenance. Even if Colin’s great-great-grandparents had founded a sort of spy school on the family estate, there was no way that the family could have remained continuously in the spying business since the Napoleonic Wars.

Could they? My notions of modern espionage had a lot to do with James Bond movies, complete with low-slung cars, talking watches, and women in bikinis with breasts like helium balloons. Colin drove a Range Rover and wore a Timex. As for the helium balloons, let’s just say that if that’s what Colin was looking for, he wouldn’t be going out to dinner with me.

Occupied by these fruitful speculations, I managed to make my way through the series of linked rooms that led to the back of the house, which petered out into a narrow corridor. Someone had painted the walls a utilitarian white that somehow managed to look more depressing than an outright grey.

There was a door with a big sign on it that read PRIVATE in all capital letters in four languages (presumably, if you didn’t speak English, German, French, or Japanese, this prohibition didn’t apply to you), with a rope strung across the entrance for emphasis. I cleverly deduced that that was not the door I was looking for.

An anaemic red arrow pointed visitors down a narrow flight of stairs with shiny reflective tape beginning to peel back from the treads. Clutching the warped handrail, I picked my way carefully down and came straight up against – the bathrooms. The little stick figures were unmistakable.

Next to them, however, a plain white door had been marked with the word REFERENCE. It was just the tiniest bit ajar, presumably for ventilation rather than hospitality. I pushed the door the rest of the way open and made my way in, the heels of my boots slapping hollowly across the linoleum floor.

In contrast to all the gilt and rosewood upstairs, the reference room wasn’t a very impressive setup. The room was small and square, furnished with two rickety aluminium folding tables, each supplied with four equally rickety folding chairs with hard plastic seats. Padding might have encouraged people to linger. At the far end of the room, a small counter, not unlike those in drugstores, separated the reference room from the archives beyond. Through the gap I caught a tantalizing glimpse of utilitarian metal shelves piled with a variety of acid-free boxes and big black binders.

At the desk, a man in a hot pink T-shirt guarded the gap. I use the word ‘guarded’ loosely. He was so deeply absorbed in whatever he was reading that I could have vaulted over the desk without his noticing me. The thought was tempting, but that kindergarten training dies hard. I didn’t vault. Instead I coughed. When that didn’t work, I coughed again. Loudly. I was afraid I was going to have to resort to more drastic measures – like sneezing – but the third cough finally broke through his literary absorption. As he hoisted himself up, I took a peek at his reading material. It was a copy of Hello! magazine, open to a fine showing of airbrushed celebrities.

Somehow, I didn’t think this was the archivist. In fact, I had a pretty shrewd guess as to who he was.

‘I believe we spoke on the phone,’ I said.

Clearly, he also remembered our conversation fondly. His face went from lascivious to hostile in the space of a second. ‘Oh. You.’

So much for being a goodwill ambassador for America, or whatever else it is that the Fulbright people expect you to do. Fortunately, my grant was a Clive fellowship, not a Fulbright, so I was off the hook. As far as I could tell, Mr Clive had harboured no pretensions about his grantees fostering international amity.

That being the case, I felt no guilt at all about saying crisply, ‘I’m here to see the papers of Sebastian, Lord Vaughn.’

The boy gave me a look as though to say, ‘You would.’ He trudged wearily off into the blazing desert sands, five hundred miles across rugged terrain, to the metal shelves right behind the desk. There, he made a great show of studying the labels on the binders.

‘That’s Vaughn, v-a-u-g-h-n,’ I said helpfully. ‘Sebastian, Lord Vaughn.’

‘Which one?’ asked Pink Shirt dourly.

It had never occurred to me that there might be other Sebastian, Lord Vaughns floating around. ‘There’s more than one?’

‘1768 or 1903?’

It was a bit like ordering a hamburger. ‘1768.’

After a moment, his head popped back around again. ‘Do you want the 1790 box, the 1800 box, or’ – his head ducked back down for a moment – ‘the everything else box?’

Next, he was going to ask me if I wanted fries with that. I made my choice, and the 1800 box was duly shoved into my hands. The tape on one end bore a label that descriptively stated, ‘Seb’n, Ld. Vn., Misc. Docs. 1800–1810.’

I began to wonder if the archivist actually existed, or if they just pretended they had one for the sake of show. Not only was that one of the less convincing classificatory systems I had ever encountered, there had been no effort made to put the contents of the box in any sort of order; small notebooks, loose papers, and packets of letters were all jumbled, one on top of the other. Given that Vaughn had lived well into the reign of Victoria, my hunch was that the everything else box wasn’t so-called because there wasn’t much there for the next forty years of his life, but simply because no one had got around to sorting through it yet.

Settling myself down at the more stable of the two tables, I reached for the first packet in the 1800 box, gingerly unwinding the string that bound the letters. There’s nothing like peering into someone else’s correspondence. You never know what you might find. Coded messages, plotting skulduggery, passionate letters from a foreign amour, invitations to a late assignation … These turned out to fit none of the categories above. They were all from Vaughn’s mother.

What was this with everyone having a mother all of a sudden?

Shoving my hair back behind my ears, I skimmed through the letter on the top of the pile. After one letter, I decided I liked Vaughn’s mother. By the end of three, I really liked Vaughn’s mother, but reading about Vaughn’s spinster cousin Portia who had run off with a footman (‘She might at least have picked a handsome one,’ opined Lady Vaughn) wasn’t getting me any nearer to ascertaining the identity of the Black Tulip, so I reluctantly put the pile aside for future perusal and dug back into the box.

I toyed with the notion of Lady Vaughn herself as the Black Tulip, spinning her webs from the safety of Northumberland as she sent out her minions to do her dirty work. Sadly, it didn’t seem the least bit probable. From her letters, Lady Vaughn was far too busy bullying the vicar and terrifying her family to be bothered with international espionage. Another great opportunity wasted.

I flipped quickly through the usual detritus of a busy life. There were love letters (using that term broadly); invitations to routs and balls and Venetian breakfasts; an extensive correspondence with his bankers (which generally seemed to boil down to ‘send more money’), and, at the very bottom of the box, tucked away where one might never have noticed it, a nondescript black book.

It wasn’t a little black book in the modern sense. There was no list of addresses, conveniently labelled, MEMBERS OF THE LEAGUE OF THE BLACK TULIP (LONDON BRANCH). But the reality was nearly as good. I had found Lord Vaughn’s appointment book. All of Lord Vaughn’s movements, recorded in his own hand. His writing was just like his appearance, elegant, but with a sharp edge to it. I paged rapidly through it until I hit 1803, watching the place-names change from the exotic (Messina, Palermo, Lisbon) to the familiar (Hatchards, Angelo’s, Manton’s). Vaughn, I noted, had had a particularly close and personal relationship with his tailor; he saw him nearly once a week.

I was ruffling lazily through, wondering idly if I could make something out of those tailor appointments (there had, after all, been a round of spies rousted out of a clothiers establishment the year before), when a familiar name struck my eye: Sibley Court.

Sibley Court … I knew I had encountered that name before. After a moment staring into space, it finally clicked. Sibley Court was the family seat of the Viscounts Pinchingdale.

I bolted upright in my uncomfortable chair. Viscount Pinchingdale, at least the Viscount Pinchingdale in possession of the title in 1803, had been second in command of the League of the Purple Gentian, from which he moved on to aiding in the endeavours of the Pink Carnation. He was no fan of Lord Vaughn.

What might the potential Black Tulip be doing at the family seat of a known agent of England?

Well, that was a silly question. Spying, one presumed.

I would never know one way or another unless I read on. The entry was terse, but it was enough for a start. Especially once I recognised the names involved, including that, prominently featured, of Miss Jane Wooliston, otherwise known (although not to many) as the Pink Carnation.

14 Oct., 1803. Sibley Ct., Gloucestershire. Immured in Elizabethan horror in G’shire. Forced to play hunt the slipper with Dorrington and wife. Selwick going on about days of glory in France. Interesting proposition made to me by Miss Wooliston …

Chapter One

Sing in me, Muse, of that man of many turnings …

– Homer, The Odyssey

October, 1803

Sibley Court, Gloucestershire

Sebastian, Lord Vaughn, stood beside a rusting suit of armour, a dusty glass of claret in hand, wondering for the tenth time what evil demon had possessed him to accept an invitation to the house party at Sibley Court. It had to be a demon; Vaughn held no truck with deities.

The house, which had been closed for well over a decade, was a masterpiece of Elizabethan handicraft – in other words, an offence to anyone with classical sensibilities. Vaughn regarded a series of carved panels with distaste. The repetition of Tudor roses had undoubtedly been intended as a heavy-handed compliment to the monarch. The tapestries were even worse than the panelling, lugubrious depictions of the darker moments of the Old Testament, enlivened only by a rather buxom Eve, who seemed to be juggling her apples rather than eating them.

Sibley Court had slumbered among its memories and dust motes since the death of the current Viscount Pinchingdale’s father and had only just been hastily opened for the accommodation of the viscount and his new bride. Vaughn had no doubt that the new viscountess would soon have the ancient flagstones gleaming. She was the managing sort. So far, she had already managed her guests through supper, a game of hunt the slipper, and an abortive attempt at blindman’s buff that had come to an abrupt halt when the hoodsman, one Mr Miles Dorrington, had blundered into a suit of armour under the delusion that it might be his wife, bringing the entire edifice crashing down and nearly decapitating the dowager Lady Pinchingdale in the process.

Undaunted by her brush with death, the dowager Lady Pinchingdale and her newest relation by marriage, Mrs Alsworthy, appeared bent on engaging in Britain’s Silliest Matron contest. So far, the dowager Lady Pinchingdale was ahead four swoons to three. The only one of the lot who seemed to have two brain cells to rub together was the long-suffering Mr Alsworthy. He had proved his intelligence by promptly disappearing just after their arrival.

Between the dowager and his fellow guests, Vaughn was considering a spot of decapitation himself. Starting with his own head. It was beginning to ache damnably from the combination of inferior claret and worse conversation.

Nursery parties – for that was what the gathering at Sibley Court felt like – weren’t usually in Vaughn’s line. He ran with an older, faster set, men who knew the way of the world and women who knew the way of those men. They played deep, they spoke in triple entendres, and they left their bedroom doors open. In contrast, the crowd at Sibley Court was sickeningly unsophisticated. Part of that insipid breed spawned by the new century, Pinchingdale’s set uttered words like ‘King’ and ‘country,’ and had the poor taste to mean them. No one duelled anymore; they were all too busy gadding about France disguised as flowers. Or named after them, which was nearly as bad. Lord Richard Selwick, currently occupied in propping up the enormous Elizabethan mantelpiece, had only recently been unmasked as the notorious Purple Gentian, a flower as obscure as it was unpronounceable. The youth of England were fast running out of botanical monikers. What would they do next, venture into vegetables? No doubt he would soon be forced to listen to dazzling accounts of the adventures of the Orange Aubergine. It all showed a marked lack of good ton. Vaughn might be less than a decade older than his host, but among this company he felt as ancient as the tapestries lining the walls.

The blame for his presence fell squarely on the woman standing next to him, looking deceptively demure in a high-necked gown of pale blue muslin embroidered with small pink flowers about the neck and hem. With her smooth brown hair threaded with matching ribbons and her gloved hands folded neatly around a glass of ratafia, Miss Jane Wooliston looked more like a prosperous squire’s daughter than that many-petalled flower of mystery, the Pink Carnation. It was her summons that had sent Vaughn jolting through the back roads of Gloucestershire clear off the edge of the earth to this godforsaken relic of Bonnie Olde Englande. And he wasn’t even sharing her bed.

At the moment, Jane was occupied in examining a dark-haired girl who posed becomingly in front of the light of a twisted branch of candles. Like Jane, the girl was tall, tall enough to carry off the long-lined classical fashions swept across the Channel by the revolution, with the sort of finely boned features that showed to good effect in the uncertain light of the faltering candles. But there the resemblance ended. There was nothing the least bit demure about the girl across the room. The light struck blue glints in the smoothly arranged mass of her black hair and reduced the fine fabric of her muslin gown to little more than a wisp.

‘She is lovely,’ remarked Jane, in a considering sort of tone.

Lovely wasn’t precisely the word Vaughn would have chosen. It implied a sweetness that was utterly lacking in the self-possessed stance of the woman in white. Luscious didn’t serve, either; it suggested Rubenesque curves and dimpled flesh, whereas the woman by the candles had the perfectly carved lines of a marble statue. Wanton? No. There was a discipline in both her straight-backed posture and the proud set of her head that gave the lie to the suggestive cling of her dress. Whatever her revealing gown might have been meant to convey, to the astute observer she was more Artemis than Aphrodite.

There was one word, however, that Vaughn had no difficulty at all applying: notorious.

Vaughn hadn’t followed the Pinchingdale Peccadillo (as the scandal sheets had unimaginatively dubbed it), but it had been impossible to avoid learning the basic outline of the story. It had entirely eclipsed Percy Ponsonby’s latest fall from a window as the gossip of choice as the Season lurched to a close. Attempting to elope with the famed beauty Miss Mary Alsworthy, the besotted young Viscount Pinchingdale had somehow erred and managed to dash off with the wrong sister. Suffering from a foolish adherence to propriety, Pinchingdale had marched up to the altar with the compromised sister, one Laetitia, who was chiefly famed for boasting the largest collection of freckles this side of Edinburgh. It was the sort of absurd bedroom farce that couldn’t fail to appeal to the jaded palates of London’s bored elite.

In the end, the hubbub had died down, as it always did. London’s elite had trickled away to their country estates, to amuse themselves sneering at the local assemblies and irritating the wildlife (sometimes the two pursuits were nearly indistinguishable), while the new Viscount and Viscountess Pinchingdale wisely removed themselves for an extended wedding journey – or so the story went. The genuine version, to which Vaughn was reluctantly privy, was a good deal more complicated, involving spies, Irish rebels, and exploding masonry, from all of which the new viscount and viscountess had emerged more pleased with each other than otherwise. In fact, they had returned from Ireland rather sickeningly smitten with each other, Lord Pinchingdale’s prior passion for the elder Miss Alsworthy conveniently forgotten.

Vaughn raised his quizzing glass and ran it along the elegant sweep of Miss Alsworthy’s neck, cunningly accentuated by three long curls that fell from hair swept into a knot in the Grecian style. Standing in the light of a branch of candles, her sheer muslin gown left very little of the elegant lines beneath to the imagination.

A woman would have to be either a saint or a fool to harbour a rival beneath her own roof. Especially a rival who looked like that.

‘If I were the current Viscountess Pinchingdale, I would not be overjoyed by Miss Alsworthy’s presence.’

‘Letty’s strength is as the strength of ten,’ replied Jane whimsically.

 ‘Because her heart is pure? Never place your trust in aphorisms, Miss Wooliston. They are more for effect than substance.’

The same, he reflected, could be said of the lovely Miss Mary Alsworthy. Some men had an eye for horses; Vaughn had one for women. No matter how fine a collection of points Mary Alsworthy might have, there was a glint to her eye that foretold an uncomfortable ride. It didn’t take an expert to tell that she was highly strung and all too aware of her own good looks. That sort tended to be damnably expensive – not to mention possessed of an unfortunate tendency to buck the rider. He had encountered her kind before.

‘Well?’ enquired Jane. ‘What do think?’

‘I think,’ he said deliberately, ‘that if you have dragged me out to this inhospitable corner of the earth on nothing more than a bout of romantic whimsy, I shall be entirely unamused.’

‘My dear Lord Vaughn, I never matchmake.’ Jane smiled to herself as though at a private memory. ‘Well, very rarely.’

Vaughn arranged his eyebrows in their most forbidding position, the one that had sent a generation of valets scurrying for cover. ‘Don’t think to number me among your exceptions.’

‘I wouldn’t dare.’

From the woman who had invaded Bonaparte’s bedchamber to leave him a posy of pink carnations, that pledge was singularly unconvincing. ‘I believe there are very few things you wouldn’t dare.’

Jane was too busy scrutinizing Miss Alsworthy to bother to reply. ‘Have you noticed anything particular about her?’

‘Only,’ said Lord Vaughn dryly, ‘what any man would be expected to notice.’

 Jane tilted her head to one side. ‘She doesn’t remind you of anyone? Her skin … her hair?’

He had been doing his best not to notice the resemblance, but it was impossible to ignore. That sweep of ebony hair, the willowy form, the graceful white dress were all too familiar. She had worn white, too. White, to draw attention to her long black hair, straight as silk and just as fine.

It had been more than a decade ago, in a room all lined with glass, from the long doors leading out to the garden to the tall mirrors of Venetian glass that had lined the walls, cold and bright. That was how he had first seen her, sparkling by the light of the candles, flirting, laughing, Galatea remade in ebony and ivory. Every man present had been panting to play Pygmalion. He had been no different. He had been young, bored, running rapidly out of dissipations with which to divert himself. And then she had turned to him, holding out one white hand in greeting – and challenge.

There had been a ruby, that first night, strung on black velvet so that it nestled tightly against the hollow of her throat. Sullen red welling against white, white skin …

Vaughn let his quizzing glass drop to his chest. ‘The resemblance is purely a superficial one. A matter of colouring, nothing more.’

‘That might be enough.’

‘No,’ said Vaughn flatly.

‘If,’ said Jane, ignoring him as only Jane dared, ‘someone were to speak to her; if someone were to suggest …’

‘Ah.’ Vaughn’s lips compressed, as the whole fiasco suddenly fell into place. ‘That’s what you want of me. To play Hermes for you.’

‘We can’t all be Zeus,’ Jane said apologetically.

Prolonged exposure to Jane was enough to make anyone take to Bacchus. ‘I’m afraid I’ve left my winged shoes at home. Forgive me for suggesting the obvious, but why not approach the girl yourself? Why drag me into this fiasco?’

‘Because,’ said Jane very simply, ‘I don’t want her to know who I am.’

Vaughn regarded her with reluctant appreciation. Lulled by the peaceful symmetry of her fine-boned face, it was easy to forget that that pink and white complexion masked a mind for strategy that put Bonaparte to shame. It seemed unlikely in the extreme that Miss Mary Alsworthy was a French agent. Her interests, thus far, had tended more to millinery than politics. But hats – and all those other furbelows that tricked out the willowy forms of society’s beauties – were expensive. The identity of the Pink Carnation was a commodity for which more than one person would be willing to pay dearly.

‘A wise decision,’ Vaughn granted. ‘If you persist in going forward with the plan, I suggest you set one of your entourage to the task. Dorrington, for one, appears in need of occupation.’

Jane gave a slight shake of her head. ‘Unlike Dorrington, you have something Miss Alsworthy wants.’

Jane didn’t need to specify. Her meaning was horrifyingly clear. Vaughn could feel the parson’s noose dangling just shy of his neck.

‘Which,’ replied Vaughn pointedly, just in case Jane had forgotten certain crucial facts, ‘she is not going to get.’

‘No,’ agreed Jane. ‘And yet …’

Vaughn polished the lens of his quizzing glass, squinted critically at it, and swiped at an invisible blemish. ‘Yet, my dear Miss Wooliston, is a treacherous jade. She’ll lead you astray if you let her.’

‘Yet’ kept men gambling when they ought to have thrown in their cards; it outfitted expeditions for cities of gold and fountains of youth; it dulled the critical faculties with false promises, as bright and baseless as the towered palaces of an opium dreamer’s paradise. ‘Yet’ led one into absurd situations such as this.

Jane wagged an admonishing finger. ‘You have a very low opinion of conjunctions.’

‘Of all kinds.’ His brief marriage had been enough to convince him of that.

‘No one is suggesting you engage in a conjunction of a permanent sort,’ said Jane mildly. ‘I’m sure we could persuade Miss Alsworthy to lend us her talents with less drastic inducements. And she would be perfect for our purposes.’

‘You mean, for your purposes.’

Knowing well the power of judicious silence, Jane chose not to answer. She simply continued to look at him, with an expression of calm conviction designed to persuade most men that they had always agreed with her in the first place and were simply being given time to voice it. Vaughn had to admire her cheek. It was one of the few reasons he tolerated her. Her complete lack of interest in his matrimonial value was another.

So he was to lure Miss Mary Alsworthy into Jane’s schemes with his title as bait, was he? The idea was almost entirely without merit.

And yet …

Ah, there she was again, that treacherous jade, that will-o’-the-wisp, that ‘yet’. Vaughn pondered the monumental boredom of Gloucestershire and decided that will-o’-the-wisps were the lesser evil. One needed to do something to enliven the stifling ennui of the human existence. And one could only beguile so many empty hours by bedevilling one’s valet or seducing the serving girls.

And then there were his own purposes …

‘How could I possibly deny any lady such a simple request?’ With an unhurried gesture, Vaughn shook out the lace of his cuffs before adding, ‘Even a fool’s errand is preferable to being forced into another round of hunt the slipper.’

‘But my dear Lord Vaughn’ – Jane blinked innocently up at him – ‘isn’t that exactly the game you have been playing?’

Mary drew her light gauze shawl more closely around her shoulders, which were beginning to show unbecoming signs of gooseflesh. The wrap, which had been perfectly adequate for London’s overheated ballrooms, did very little to ward off the October chill that pervaded the Great Chamber of Sibley Court. Next to her, a twisted branch of candles did more to cast shadows than spread light. Any attempt at illumination disappeared into the depths of the dusky tapestry on the wall beside her, which appeared to depict one of the gorier episodes from the Bible. At least, Mary hoped it was biblical in origin. Otherwise, that girl really had no business holding aloft that man’s severed head.

Mary might, she told herself, have endured the cold with equanimity. She might have smiled with tolerant condescension upon the antiquated furnishings and dour tapestries, graciously endured the drafty chambers, and equably accepted the lack of any local society – any local society worth knowing, that was – within twenty miles, were it not for one small problem.

Her problem sported dark blue superfine and wore his dark hair cropped close to his head. He was also walking right towards her, moving with a soft stride that seemed to swallow sound rather than create it, a shadowy presence in the dim room. He was Geoffrey, Lord Pinchingdale, Second Viscount Pinchingdale, Eighth Baron Snipe, owner of Sibley Court and all its lands and appurtenances.

Once upon a time, it had been simply Geoffrey.

Once upon a time, he hadn’t been married to her sister.

Pausing in front of her, her new brother-in-law bowed briefly over her hand, their first private contact since the hot days of July, when they had met in the sunshine of Hyde Park while her maid kept lookout three trees away.

In the drizzling gloom of October, it felt a lifetime ago, like a summer flower found pressed between the pages of a book.

‘Miss Alsworthy,’ Geoffrey said softly.

It did seem a tad formal after ‘beloved.’

‘Mary,’ she corrected demurely, retrieving her hand and smiling as prettily as any young girl at her first Assembly. ‘After all, you are my brother now.’

He looked so relieved that Mary almost wished she had said something less conciliatory. She couldn’t have, of course. It would have been bad ton to make a scene. Unlike her sister, she knew what was required of her. But it would have been nice to see even a touch of remorse – or, even better, of regret – rather than pure relief at being so easily released from his former bonds.

Slicing the wound wider, he said, ‘Letty and I were both so pleased that you were able to join us here.’

What was it about married couples that always made them speak for the other person as well? Didn’t he have any thoughts of his own anymore? Or was that not allowed? Letty always did have opinions enough for two.

‘The pleasure is mine,’ Mary lied, making her eyes as limpid as nature would allow. ‘I have always been eager to see Sibley Court.’

That struck home, at least. She could see guilt flicker across his face as the barb struck – or perhaps it was nothing more than the uneven flick of the candle flame, playing tricks with her eyes.

Well, he ought to feel guilty. He had been the one who had promised to bring her home to Sibley Court as its mistress. Over dozens of dances he had spun endless stories of the wonders of the family home: the ghost who stalked the battlements, the trees he had climbed, the scent of the ancient herb garden after a spring rain.

‘Miss Alsworthy …’ Mindless of the company around them, Lord Pinchingdale looked earnestly down at her, groping for words. ‘Mary …’

They had stood that way so often in the past, his dark head bent to hers, a private haven in the midst of a crowded room. Mary lowered her eyes against a sudden pang. Not of the heart, of course. A heart had no business engaging in practical transactions. Half the time, she reminded herself, she hadn’t listened to a word he had said, mentally cataloguing the dances she had already promised and devising new ways to play off her admirers one against the other.

Call it memory, then, or nostalgia. He might have been dull, but he had still been hers. She had got into the habit of him.

‘Mary …’ His voice scraped along the back of his throat, as though he spoke only with difficulty. ‘I’m sorry.’

Sorry, sorry, sorry. She was sick of sorry. Letty had been sorry, too. They were sorry, but she was alone. So much for sorry.

‘Don’t be. It all turned out for the best.’ If her smile was a little sour around the edges, Geoffrey didn’t appear to notice. ‘Practically enough to make one believe in Fate.’ Or just very meddling relations.

‘Not many would be so generous.’

Any more generosity and she would choke on it. Lowering her lashes, Mary took refuge in modestly murmuring, ‘You are too good.’ That much, at least, was true. He and Letty deserved each other; they were both sickeningly virtuous. Their children would probably be born with halos already attached. ‘If you would excuse me? I promised Mama I would roust Papa out of the library before the supper tray is brought in.’

As always, he believed every word. Geoffrey had always believed her, no matter what flummery she spouted. It had been one of his greatest assets as a suitor.

‘Certainly. Do you know your way? Sibley Court can be a bit confusing on a first visit.’ There was no mistaking his pride in the drafty old pile.

‘If I get lost,’ replied Mary lightly, ‘I’ll simply call on one of the family ghosts to show me the way.’

‘Make sure you find your way back, or Letty will worry.’

‘Letty always worries.’

‘I know.’ Geoffrey smiled a private smile that made Mary feel as hollow as the elderly panelling that lined the walls. ‘She told me to make sure you get enough supper.’

His eyes slid over her shoulder to where Letty was bustling from group to group, making sure everyone had a good time whether they wanted to or not. Letty might be a viscountess now, but she looked like a prosperous squire’s wife, with her gingery hair frizzing out of its haphazard arrangement of curls and her fichu askew across her ample bosom. As she moved, the candlelight threw her shadow in grotesque parody against the wall, adding chins and lengthening her nose.

It didn’t seem to matter to Geoffrey. His eyes followed his wife as she made her way across the room, his lips tilted up on one side in a smile so intimate that it hurt to observe it. There wasn’t anything lustful about his gaze. Mary had seen enough lust in her time to become inured to its expression. It was something much more personal, that spoke of genuine fondness.

He had never looked at her like that.

‘Must find Papa!’ said Mary brightly, sweeping up her skirts in one hand. ‘Until supper, then.’

For a man who had once haunted her steps and doted on her smiles, he barely seemed to realise she had gone.

Knowing the importance of a good exit, Mary kept her head high and her back straight as she moved deliberately towards the heavily carved door that led out to the gallery that overlooked the Great Hall. She let a slight smile tease the edges of her lips, the sort of smile that always made gentlemen wild to know what she was smiling about. It drove women equally wild for entirely different reasons.

Pausing in her leisurely progress, she stopped to examine a particularly busy portion of tapestry with every sign of antiquarian absorption. Two paces away, she couldn’t remember a single thread of it. All she could see was Geoff’s dark eyes drifting away over her shoulder towards her sister.

A woman scorned had a certain grandeur to it; a woman forgotten was merely pathetic.

 Only when she had achieved the empty space beyond the door did she allow herself the luxury of defeat. Letting her seductive smile melt into blankness, Mary trailed one pale hand along the worn wood of the balustrade that ran along the upper gallery of the hall below. According to Geoffrey, a Pinchingdale bride had flung herself from that balcony rather than submit to a loveless marriage. More fool she, thought Mary. What was it about idiocy that attained veneration through sheer age? Mary had never understood why Juliet refused to marry Count Paris. He was a far better match than that silly young Romeo. And then to drink poison … well, there was just no accounting for some people. Mary would have taken Count Paris and his Veronese palazzo in a heartbeat.

The walls of the upper gallery had been panelled in dark wood, each square carved with a portrait head in profile. Wattle-necked women in stiff headdresses and long-nosed men glowered at Mary from their coffered prisons. The fabric of Sibley Court hadn’t changed much since the Armada. It suited Letty brilliantly. She looked right against the finicky panelling and the musty old tapestries, right in a way that Mary never would have. If Mary had had her way, she would have torn the whole monstrosity down and started all over again in good clean marble.

Lucky for Sibley Court, then, that Geoffrey hadn’t married her. Lucky for Geoffrey, lucky for Letty, lucky for everyone.

If she was being honest, lucky for herself as well. All through the era of his adoration, Pinchingdale had been a crashing bore.

Even a boring husband was better than being left on the shelf, forced to rely on the charity of her relations, pointed at and whispered about by giggling girls fresh in their first Season.

Reaching the end of the upper gallery, Mary slipped beneath an elaborately carved lintel, no proper destination in her head except away. She found herself in a seemingly endless corridor, where the plastered ceiling stabbed down in regular points like pawns suspended upside down. After a moment of disorientation, she realised where she was. Originally constructed during the reign of Henry, before being ‘improved’ during the tenure of his daughter, the house had been built in the shape of an H, in a rather obvious compliment to the monarch. She was in the crossbar of the H, a long and narrow gallery that connected one wing of the house with the other.

On either side of her, narrow-faced Pinchingdales gazed superciliously down on her, their gilded frames spotted with age. There was at least half a mile between the two wings of the house, long enough to display three centuries’ worth of relations and even one or two particularly prized pets. Mary wandered aimlessly among them, absently noting the dull sheen of painted jewels, repeated over and over. There was the large pearl that hung from the waist of an Elizabethan Pinchingdale; the three matched sapphires set into the collar of Spotte, A Faithfull and Lovinge Companyon (there was something decidedly smug about the set of Spotte’s paws); the emeralds that adorned the neckline of a woman with tight curls and a simpering mouth, holding tight to the hand of a cavalier in a plumed hat (one assumed from her grip that he must be the donor of the emeralds); and the famous diamond parure worn by Geoffrey’s grandmother to the coronation of George II, impressive even rendered in oil and dim with dust.

Those diamonds made up for a great deal of boredom.

At the time, it seemed like a fair trade. She got the diamonds and Pinchingdale got her, an ornament for an ornament, each with its price. She knew her price and she set it high.

What else, after all, was there to do? She didn’t have it in her to be a bluestocking and write dour tracts. She had no interest in educating other peoples’ brats. The days when a woman could make a career as a royal mistress had long since passed. Mary had always thought she would make an excellent monarch – the skills required for international diplomacy were much the same as those that Mary used to keep the various members of her entourage in check – but no one had had the consideration to provide her with a kingdom. There was only one game to be played, so Mary played it and, she had always thought, played it well.

Obviously, she had been wrong. Because, in the end, she had lost the game.

She had also come to the end of the gallery. Ahead of her, an immense, mullioned window looked out onto blackness. In the daytime, it was no doubt a pleasant prospect, looking out over the vast sweep of gardens and park that stretched out from the back of the house. At night, the leaded panels glistened like a hundred obsidian eyes. On either side of the window, doorways led off to realms unknown, unlit by either candle or moonlight. A sweeping curtain of red velvet shielded each opening, dragged back on one side like a cavalier’s cloak.

Mary lowered herself slowly onto the matching red velvet that cushioned the window seat. Ordinarily, she never sat at parties. It wrinkled one’s dress. Tonight, she couldn’t bring herself to care. It felt good to relax into the well-worn velvet of the ancient cushion, good to stare into nothingness and not have to smile and pretend that she didn’t mind that her sister had married her best chance at matrimony. Her short, plump, practical, managing little sister. Who had nonetheless learnt the secret to catching a man’s heart and holding it. Mary had failed to master the holding bit.

With the moon obscured by clouds, the prospect in front of her loomed as blank as her future. It didn’t matter that she had been voted Most Likely to Marry an Earl three years running in the betting books at White’s. No earl had proposed. Not marriage, at any rate.