The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

Chapter Eighteen

It wasn't every day that one had the opportunity of sparring with a ghost.

Crossing his arms across his chest, Vaughn smiled lazily at his dead wife. "Ah, the tender joy of the matrimonial bond. What do you want, Anne?"

She tilted her head at him in that practiced way she had had, eyes growing wide and misty in incipient supplication.

After all these years, it came back to him with a thud of recognition, collapsing the decade in between to the space of days. He knew that expression. Next would come an innocent flutter of the lashes, followed by a charmingly perturbed expression, as though she were searching for the right words. And, finally, the long, drawn-out, wheedling rendition of his name. Sebastian…

Vaughn's voice sharpened, cutting her off before she could get past the first flutter. "How much?"

Anne blinked up at him disingenuously. "It's not money I want, Sebastian," she said, dewy-eyed as a bride "I want to come back."

"Back," Vaughn echoed delicately.

"I want to come home," she repeated artlessly, resting a confiding hand on his sleeve. Against the dark wool, the small white fingers looked like claws, the bright rings like bits of a jackdaw's hoard. "I'm sick of abroad. All those foreigners with their smelly food. And their breath! If I never see another garlic clove again it will be too soon."

She tried to smile up at him, but the bright curve of her lips warred with the watchful tension of her eyes. Beneath the attempt at levity, her expression was as brittle as an eggshell, fine cracks showing in the lines around the corners of her mouth and eyes.

Dropping her eyes to his sleeve, she went on in a voice so low as to be almost inaudible, "I'm sick of it all. It was amusing in the beginning, but now…I've seen what happens to…to women when their looks begin to go."

"So have I," said Vaughn tonelessly. "There is one slight problem with your solution. You're dead, you know. You managed all that yourself, as you might remember."

Anne chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip, a habitual gesture that Vaughn had found seductive a long, long time ago.

"Well, we didn't want you following us," she said, as if it were only logical.

"Don't worry. I built you a lovely monument in the classical style. Persephone pulled down to Hades, I believe, was the theme. It seemed appropriate. In more ways than I knew, apparently."

Anne shrugged aside classical allusions. "Oh, monuments! It's all very well to talk about monuments, but one can't eat marble. Where am I to live, how am I to go on?"

"Who will keep you in jewels?" echoed Vaughn, sotto voce.

Instead of getting angry, she took a deliberate step towards him, tilting her head up in an intimate smile. "You haven't changed a bit, have you, Sebastian?"

Her voice was soft, nostalgic, deliberately drawing him back to shared memories, a shared past. He could see their once-upon-a-times reflected in the slick surface of her china blue eyes, like a rococo painter's fantasy of man and maid.

Everything had been pastel in those halcyon days: the soft shades of her clothes, sashed at the waist and topped with the filmy fichus demanded by sentimental fashion; the long, ash-blond curls tumbling clear to the great bow at the back of her dress; the muted straw of the great, sweeping hats that crowned her curls, shading her expression and masking her eyes. There had been boat rides, with servants to do the rowing; rural picnics, properly supplied with linen and silver; and long strolls in a conservatory where constantly burning stoves and a regiment of gardeners maintained a wilderness of flowers in eternal and artificial summer.

Like all illusions, it had been a very pretty one. Until it crumbled. Afterwards…no, what followed hadn't been pretty. Some of it, he had brought down upon himself, deliberately seeking the low, the dark, the debauched. The Hellfire Club, the stews of St. Giles, anything that would serve to obliterate the cloyingly sweet scent of false flowers from his memory. He wanted the noisome, the foul, the gritty, those seamy subterranean swamps of humanity too ripe to be anything but real.

Some of it had found him, and been almost more than he had bargained for, for all his vaunted sophistication. France. Teresa. Compared with France, the creative perversions of his friends in the Hellfire Club had been nothing but a tawdry pastime, the petty transgressions of bored boys. Sophistication, pitted against real evil, was about as much protection as a fine coating of gold leaf against a hurricane. France had toughened him, hardened him. It wasn't even the mob, crying with mad joy as the heads of their former masters tumbled into the straw. No, that was a good little malice, comprehensible in its own way. It was the Talleyrands, the Teresas, the men who coolly presided over the demise of civilization with an eye to nothing but what they themselves could glean from it, condemning former friends and lovers with no more ear to their cries than a butcher slitting the throat of a bleating sheep. If he had had any belief left in the innate goodness of human nature, it had bled out in France, into the straw beneath the guillotine, among the linens he shared with his lover, his accomplice, his éminence grise.

"I've changed more than you think," Vaughn said flatly.

She might have demurred, but he raised one hand, the great diamond on his finger winking a warning. Her eyes fixed on it with a magpie's fascination for shiny objects. "I believe we can spare ourselves the bourgeois joys of tender reminiscence. There is, after all, so little one would care to recall."

His wife tilted her head softly to one side. "That's not how I remember it…Sebastian."

Vaughn didn't move, but something in his face hardened, became as cold and glittering as the diamond on his finger. If she wanted to stroll down memory lane, there were certain avenues that bore exploring.

He raised a lazy eyebrow. "Whatever happened to — Fernando, was it?"

"Franзois," Anne corrected sharply.

"Forgive me," Vaughn murmured. "Franзois."

The man who had been fascinating enough that young Lady Vaughn had abandoned husband and rank in a precipitate midnight flight, along with the contents of her jewel box and a fair portion of what ancestral silver had survived the Civil Wars. He had been her music teacher. It was an embarrassing cliché, the wife running off with the music master. He supposed it could have been worse. It could have been the dancing master.

Anne's eyes dropped to the pale blues and yellows of the Aubusson rug. "Franзois proved…uninteresting."

"You mean he left you after the money ran out."

Anne tossed her blond curls. "He wasn't what I had thought he was."

"People so seldom are," Vaughn said, with deceptive gentleness. "It is a lesson we all learn sooner or later. And after Franзois?"

Anne looked away, over one shoulder, as though seeing people and places that weren't there. "There was an Austrian gentleman. He took me to Vienna with him. For a time."

"Until he tired of you," Vaughn translated.

She didn't attempt to correct him or deny it, but there were lines of strain around her eyes that hadn't been there before. He had seen that look on the past — but not on Anne. It had been in France, a marquis who had been run from hiding place to hiding place, cutting and weaving, always just evading capture, until at the end he had been caught and dragged forth.

Vaughn had barely known the man, but his eyes had stayed with him for weeks after, the eyes of a hunted thing, scarcely human.

"After that," Anne went on, speaking rapidly, "I moved to Rome. There was a cardinal who was kind to me."

"How fitting," said Vaughn softly. "A Protestant whore for a papist priest. What a charming pair you must have made. Does Babylon mean anything to you, my dear?"

Face twisting with annoyance, Anne made an impatient movement. With her, petulance always had won out over diplomacy in the end. "It wasn't like that!"

"Then what was it like?"

"You wouldn't understand. It's all different over there."

Vaughn ran a languid finger along the contour of his quizzing glass. "Then why don't you go back?"

"I can't — I don't want to," she corrected herself. Nervously working her fingers, the words came rushing out, "It's not just that. My current protector, he frightens me. I can't go on with this any longer. Sebastian…"

The sound of his name on her lips grated on his nerves. In the two years they had been married, she had always begun with his name when she wanted something, in just that tone. A long, drawn-out caress of a salutation, with the emphasis on the second syllable. Gambling debts, jewels…music lessons. Whatever it was, he had given it to her, not out of love — not by then — but out of boredom, because he had it to give, and it was easier to accede than argue.

"Even if I did want you back," he said, with deliberate cruelty, "there are obstacles. Your supposed death, for one."

"We could find a way around that," Anne said eagerly. "We could tell people that I was stunned in the carriage accident and lost my memory. I wandered off and — and was taken in by some kind farmers, who nursed me and treated me as their own. And then…"

"A touching tale, but with one slight hitch. In case you haven't heard, you were supposed to have died of smallpox."

"Oh," said Anne.

"It sounded less damning than the carriage accident," Vaughn said apologetically. "You do understand, I trust. It really isn't the done thing to die while eloping with your music master."

"Oh, yes, of course." Her eyes narrowed as she attempted to work out the problem, another familiar gesture, one he had found charming in the early days of their courtship. At the time, he had accepted it as indicative of deep thought. Later, he came to know it for what it was, the working of concentrated self-interest.

"Perhaps…," she began slowly. "Perhaps you were so mad with grief that you fled from my room believing I was dead."

Lace fluttering, Vaughn raised a graceful hand. "Let me hazard a guess as to what happened next. Wandering through the countryside, you encountered that same ill-used farmer and his wife. They took you in, disposed of all your smallpox scars by means of a cunning folk remedy, and treated you as their own."

Anne regarded him dubiously, her nose wrinkling. "I'm not quite sure…"

Vaughn tapped his quizzing glass against his lower lip, as though in deep cogitation. "Just as they were on the verge of marrying you off to their cretin of a son — undoubtedly named Reuben, as cretinous farm boys invariably are — a fortuitous blow to the head awakened you to the reality of your station. You flung off your humble raiment, said suitably tearful farewells to all your favorite farm animals, and sallied forth into the world to regain your proper place."

"We might leave out Reuben," suggested Anne. "And the farm animals."

Vaughn let the quizzing glass drop. "Either way, it wouldn't fool a child. Which is not to say that it might not work on the half-wits who make up society…."

Anne's face lit in eager response.

To his own surprise, Vaughn found he couldn't go on. Her naked desperation shamed him.

How inconvenient and unexpected, after all this time, to find himself moved by pity for his own renegade wife. But there it was. There was no sport left in baiting her, no profit in revenge. Instead, he felt nothing but a sickly sort of pity mingled with disgust — although whether the disgust was for him or her, he wouldn't have been able to say.

With an abrupt motion, Vaughn ended the game. "No, Anne. Has it never occurred to you that I might not want you back?"

"But — you have to!"

Turning away from her, Vaughn devoted his attention to the collection of Ming vases above the mantelpiece. His bones felt as old and brittle as the cracked china, silent witnesses of centuries of war and betrayal.

"I will pay you a large enough sum to ensure that there need be no more cardinals in your future. But I will not take you back."

"You can't do that." Anne yanked ineffectually at his arm, her nails scraping over the wool of his sleeve. "You married me. I'm your wife — till death do us part."

Vaughn looked at her coolly over his shoulder. "That could be arranged."

Anne's hand dropped, and she took a step back, her face twisted with inexplicable amusement, a tragicomic mask of humorless mirth. "You wouldn't. But he — " Anne caught herself, shaking her head so violently that her curls frothed about her face. "I'll go to my aunt. She'll make you see reason."

"Lady Hester? She still thinks I murdered you, you know. The poor old witch is half-mad. How do you think she'll feel to hear that you've duped her all these years, too?"

"I don't care." Anne's slippers slapped against the muted patterns of the carpet, weaving an uneven spiral between the door and the mantel. Her voice rose in a note Vaughn recognized well from the short span of their marriage, the shrill insistence of a child on the verge of a temper tantrum. "She'll have to listen to me. She'll back me. And then you — you'll have to take me back, unless you want there to be a scandal. The ton might ignore a woman alone, but they won't ignore Lady Hester Standish."

"Once, perhaps." When Anne had arranged her own precipitate departure, Lady Hester had still been a woman of substance among the ranks of the nobility. After her niece's supposed death, Lady Hester had gone from eccentric to something close to genuinely mad. All the affection she had lavished on her favorite niece, all her formidable mental powers, had instead been channeled into the radical politics that had once been merely a pastime. The ton had been first alarmed, then scornful, and finally, inevitably, bored. Whatever clout Lady Hester had once had, had long since dissipated in a jumble of incoherent speeches and revolutionary politics. "You've been away for a very long time, Anne."

Doubt flickered across the cerulean surface of Anne's eyes. "It hasn't been that long. There will still be those who know me, who recognize me. You can't deny me forever. Sebastian…"

There it was again, that grating repetition of his name, like an incantation meant to summon back the past. Vaughn was reminded of Glendower's boast that he could call spirits from the vasty deep. Why, so can I, or so can any man, Hotspur had responded. But will they come when you do call for them?

Vaughn bent his torso in an impersonal bow. "I suggest you leave before me. We don't want there to be a scandal, after all."

"This isn't the end of it, Sebastian. You must know that." With an attempt at bravado, she squared her fine-boned shoulders and tried to look imperious. "I'll give you a week to think it over."

Vaughn merely inclined his head in response.

She wasn't satisfied with that, he could tell, but some instinct of self-preservation taught her better than to argue. Some instinct or, from her tale, some past protector, less patient with her vagaries than her sometime husband. Her blue eyes narrowed, but she moved docilely enough towards the door, working out, Vaughn had no doubt, her next plan of attack. He doubted she would go to Lady Hester. At least, not yet. Lady Hester was a plan of last resort, the last charge of the cavalry.

In the open doorway, Anne paused, her hand on the gilded latch.

"Do you hate me that much — for leaving you?"

While they reminisced of days gone by, the concert must have ended. Down the length of the hallway, Vaughn could see the clustered groups of guests, waiting for their wraps, discussing the music, exchanging the latest on-dits. And, among them, Miss Mary Alsworthy, smiling disingenuously up at the besotted Mr. St. George.

With unerring instinct, Mary's blue eyes honed in on his, flicking from Anne to him with a look of scorn that burned like ice, before she pointedly returned her attentions to St. George, smiling up at him as though the fate of the kingdom depended on it.

"No," Vaughn said honestly. "Only for coming back."