The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

Chapter Twenty-Four

"You mean it would have killed him," she said.

"Instantly," agreed the doctor. "Or the next thing to it. As I said, your friend is very fortunate."

He glanced speculatively up at her over Vaughn's body as he pronounced the word "friend."

"My cousin and I," Mary emphasized, "are both very grateful for your prompt assistance."

The surgeon eased the long end of a bandage around Vaughn's side, coaxing it beneath his back. "A curious man," he said conversationally, "might wonder how, if your cousin was watching the recruits, he came to be shot in the back."

"A clever man," returned Mary pointedly, "knows better than to ask profitless questions."

A veteran of countless illegal duels, the surgeon didn't need to be warned twice. Tying off the end of a bandage, he patted Vaughn's side with a professional air. "He'll need the stitches out in a day or so. You'll want to give him cold compresses for the fever."

Mary looked at Vaughn's gray face, his forehead clammy with sweat. "What fever?"

"They all get fever," the surgeon said cheerfully, closing his bag with a distinct click. "The fever kills more than the bullets. You just have to hope it won't be too high."

"How very encouraging." Doctors were such nasty little men, all puffed up with their Latin phrases and useless diagnoses. One would think he could at least offer to do something about the fever, rather than just predict it. "Is there anything one can do to bring the fever down?"

"You could bleed him." The doctor produced a small brass box from his bag. At a touch, the box sprung open, revealing twelve sharp blades, positioned with all the care modern medical science could afford. "Bleeding will release the corrupt blood and lower the fever."

Mary glanced down at the pile of blood-soaked cloth on the floor by the bed, the remnants of Vaughn's shirt and jacket. "He's lost enough blood already."

The surgeon refrained from giving the appropriate medical lecture. It would only be wasted on a woman. Shrugging, he took up his bag. "Hot and cold compresses, then."

Mary looked to the butler, who was waiting by the door. "Your fee will be seen to." She nodded to the butler. "If you would?"

The butler moved smoothly forwards to usher the surgeon from the room.

"If you're quite sure about the bleeding…," the surgeon tossed over his shoulder.

"Quite sure," Mary said firmly.

She stayed sentinel by the side of the bed until the surgeon was safely out of the room. Sprawled on top of the coverlet, Lord Vaughn was by no means an inspiring sight. He looked, in fact, rather as though he had come out the wrong side of a barroom brawl, with his coat and shirt half torn away and the dark stain of opium-enhanced wine snaking down his cheek and onto his chest. Blood streaked his chest below the white bandage the doctor had wound around his shoulder, where red already showed in an ominous circle against the white.

Vaughn's skin showed surprisingly dark against the white band, dusted with dark hair. There was the line of an old scar near the join of his shoulder, a crescent-shaped slash, as though someone had aimed for his heart and missed. Apparently, this wasn't the first time someone had attempted to kill Lord Vaughn. Mary shouldn't have been surprised. A decade ago, London had been more wild, with duels fought by dawn on Hampstead Heath and gangs of toughs ready to prey on inebriated gentlemen. And heaven only knew what he had got up to on the Continent. Vaughn's chest, seamed, scarred, and lightly muscled, suggested that he had been more than equal to any adventures.

It would be too absurd for him to have survived so much only to be felled by one little bullet in the domestic dullness of Hyde Park. It was just the sort of cosmic joke Vaughn would appreciate. Only this time, it was on him.

"Madam." It was several moments before Mary realized that the insistent noise buzzing behind her ear was a voice, and that it was intended for her.

Dragging her gaze away from Vaughn, Mary realized that the butler — what was his name? — had returned and was standing just behind her.

He would be entirely within his rights to suggest that she leave. Aside from thrusting her own way into the house, her position was entirely anomalous. Despite her lies to the surgeon, she wasn't cousin, or ward, or wife. She was a nameless woman — a nameless woman with a tendency for appearing at inappropriate hours of the night, in whose company the master of the house had been severely wounded. And even if she were a proper sort of guest, her presence in the master's bedchamber would be highly improper.

Without turning her head, Mary said briskly, "The surgeon says his temperature will rise. Make sure there are cold cloths ready."

"Yes, madam," said the butler.

"He should probably have port, to thicken the blood. And brandy, for the pain. Not at the same time," Mary added as an afterthought. "I doubt he would like that."

"Indeed, madam," agreed the butler. As a door, cleverly cut into the paneling, eased open, the butler added, "I have taken the liberty of calling his lordship's man to make his lordship more comfortable."

"There's little hope of that," said Mary, but she allowed herself to be shepherded away from the bedside to make room for the valet.

The valet limped his way to the position she had just vacated, emitting noises of distress. Whether the clucking was over his master's condition or the state of his boots was largely unclear. Placing a basin of hot water on the nightstand, he set about wiping the dried blood from his master's chest with a care that satisfied even Mary's anxious eye. Over one arm, he had a pile of clean linen cloths, which he used to wipe Vaughn's chest clean. The tattered remnants of Vaughn's coat were eased away, to be replaced with a clean linen nightshirt.

The butler stepped discreetly in front of her before the valet could reach Vaughn's unmentionables.

"If I might be so bold…"

Mary prepared to do battle for her right to stay, regardless of Vaughn's state of undress.

"…perhaps madam would be more comfortable in a fresh garment?"

Of all the things Mary had expected the butler to say, that had not been one of them.

Her dress did itch awfully. Vaughn's blood had seeped straight through the thin muslin to the chemise beneath. The fine lawn was sticky with it. The damp patch chafed unpleasantly against her chest. And then there was the broad stripe across the front of her dress at her knees, where she had knelt beside him, and several lighter streaks in the area of her torso where she cradled him to her in the carriage. There were dark crescents beneath her fingernails and a casual glance in the mirror revealed alarming streaks across her face.

"Thank you," Mary said, in a tone that was almost an apology. "I would like that very much."

The corners of the butler's lips shifted in what, in another man, might have been a smile. For a moment, he looked almost human. "There are garments that might be of service in the countess's chambers."

He tilted his head in the direction of a connecting door Mary hadn't noticed before, set into the paneling on the opposite side of the room, next to the massive marble mantel.

"No." The reaction was instinctual. The notion of wearing her clothes made her skin crawl. "No, thank you — I don't know your name."

"Derby, ma'am. If madam would prefer, there is a dressing gown in his lordship's dressing room that might serve the same purpose while madam's dress is being freshened."

"Thank you, Derby. That will do very nicely."

While Derby took himself off through the door in the paneling, Mary ascended the dais and occupied herself in scaring away Vaughn's valet. It took only a few moments of concentrated glowering before the valet scurried away, ceding his place by Vaughn's side.

He had tucked Vaughn neatly up among the linens, with a blanket pulled all the way up to his chin and a tasseled nightcap perched on his closely shorn head. Given the obvious newness of the nightcap, Mary had no doubt that this was a victory the valet had not achieved while his employer was conscious. In proper deference to Vaughn's feelings, she plucked off the nightcap and tossed it beneath the bed. Then she rolled down the covers at his throat, giving him more room to breathe. She might not know anything of nursing, but smothering the patient surely wasn't the way to go about it.

Behind her, Derby laid a robe of heavy silk brocade neatly across the back of a chair.

One didn't fraternize with servants, but Mary heard herself say, "The surgeon says the wound is a clean one. He should recover quickly."

Derby's stern features relaxed in an expression that was first cousin to a smile. "I am sure madam will ensure that it is so."

And with that, the door clicked shut behind him.

Mary took up the robe he had left her, but she found herself oddly reluctant to leave her post by the bed, as though if she failed to keep proper watch, someone might slip in and steal Vaughn away. Instead, she sat by the bed and watched as the angle of the light through the window slowly shifted across Vaughn's bedspread, moving in tandem with the hands of the clock on the mantel. The fierce orange light of late afternoon lit the edges of the coverlet with a demonic glow before it, too, faded into dusk.

He looked so vulnerable in the large bed, with the ominous red splotch on his bandage showing above the covers. Every time his sleeping face contorted with pain, every time she heard the uneven rasp of his breath in drugged sleep, her heart clenched as though the Black Tulip held it in his fist. It hurt like a dozen bullet wounds to know that she had brought him to this. Oh, there had been times when she would have liked nothing better than to humble Lord Vaughn, to bring him low — and no time more than that afternoon — but not like this. Never like this.

The events of the afternoon replayed themselves before her a thousand times, only in the reprise she always managed to thrust aside the Black Tulip's arm at the crucial moment, so the bullet went wild, or distract him long enough to drive her sunshade into his toe, making him drop the pistol. And at the end, there was always Vaughn bounding up to her, smoothing the hair out of her face, touching her cheek with the back of her hand, as though he had never seen anything so infinitely precious and telling her — oh, everything he had told her before his wife's appearance but a thousand times over. And without the angry snarl.

Mary looked down at the limp hand lying on top of the coverlet, and frowned at her own foolishness. Girlish daydreams were all very well, but they wouldn't keep Vaughn safe from the Black Tulip. It was sheer luck that the shot had been too high; the Black Tulip couldn't be trusted to miss the next time.

There had to be some way to get to him before he could get to Vaughn. But how? She didn't even know that he was indeed a he. That had definitely been a skirt she had felt behind her. She rather doubted that the Black Tulip was stalking Hyde Park dressed in a cassock, despite his clerical appellation. Either he was a woman, or he had chosen to disguise himself as one for the purpose of sowing confusion. Had he been wearing a dress in Vauxhall? Mary would have been willing to swear he hadn't.

Well. Mary picked at the embroidery on the arms of the chairs as she stared at the sun setting over the bare branches of the trees in Belliston Square. She would just have to tell servants to keep a watch out for anyone suspicious, male or female. The butler seemed a sensible sort, he could be enlisted to set up a guard. And a guard would be set, whether Vaughn liked it or not. Mary's face settled into an expression of raw determination her sister would have recognized in an instant. She knew Vaughn would try to shrug off the danger as soon as he was healed enough to shrug. That was all very well, but she wasn't going to let him die for a bit of male bravado.

Even so, setting a guard only delayed the problem; it didn't solve it. The only way to truly solve it was to kill the Black Tulip. And they couldn't kill the Black Tulip until they knew who he was.

As the purple autumn sunset faded from the tops of the trees in the Square, Mary rose, stretching her cramped legs. In the great bed, Vaughn slept on in drug-induced slumber, his right arm flung up over his head like a little boy's. His features were softer in sleep, with the dusk casting a soothing veil over the lines drawn by pain and time.

His color seemed better, but Mary wasn't sure whether that was just an illusion created by the dim light. Mary touched the back of her hand to his forehead, careful not to wake him. The dreadful clamminess was gone. His forehead was warm and dry, and his breathing was easier than it had been. The fever would come next. But, for the moment, he was sleeping peacefully.

Moving stiffly, Mary stepped carefully down off the dais, catching at the balustrade for balance. Her knees objected to the movement. She felt as ancient as Methuselah, her legs and back stiff from sitting, her eyes dry and aching from staring, hour after hour, at the still figure in the bed.

She knew she ought to change, as Derby had advised. She ought to have done it hours ago. The sooner she left her dress to be cleaned and pressed, the sooner she could go home. So far, the only people who knew of her presence at Vaughn House were Derby, who wouldn't speak; the valet, who didn't speak; and the surgeon, who had been paid well not to speak. The other servants had seen her only through the dirty window of the sedan chair, not well enough to make out anything other than that she was a woman, a description that undoubtedly applied to many of Vaughn's acquaintance. But the longer she stayed, the greater the risk became. To stay the night would be ruin.

Wobbling a bit, she padded across the carpet to the door to the hall. Just outside the door, where she couldn't fail to see them, someone had left two trays. On the first stood two decanters, one filled with a ruby liquid that could only be the requested port, the other a deep amber that marked it as finest smuggled French brandy.

The second tray was clearly not intended for the inhabitant of the sickbed. It held two porcelain pots. One pot was short and rounded, accompanied by a silver tea ball and a dish for slops; the other was taller and cylindrical, with a quaint, conical lid. Both the shape and the smell identified it as a chocolate pot. There was one cup to go with each pot, both matched to the same set, a feminine pattern with delicate purple flowers on a fluted background. On a matching plate had been placed several slices of cake and an assortment of biscuits.

Next to the food, more homely but all the more welcome, the same considerate hand had left a basin and ewer. Both the water in the ewer and the tea in the pot were still so hot that steam rose and misted across Mary's face as she bent to pick up the tray. Derby must have returned several times to replace the water as it cooled. It was no more than a well-trained servant would do, but Mary was obscurely cheered by the gesture.

Setting the tray down on a small table, Mary slopped a generous amount of water into the basin, plunging her hands into the steaming water up to the wrists. It felt like heaven to finally wash the crust of blood off her hands. Once her hands were finally clean, she dipped a cloth directly into the ewer, scrubbing at the smudges on her face.

With Vaughn's robe still draped over her arm, Mary moved softly across the room, to the door in the wall. Unlike the door that led into the dressing room, there was no attempt to hide its outlines. A grand plaster pediment was mounted above the door frame, the two sides of the triangle broken in the middle to make room for an overflowing basket of flowers borne by two simpering nymphs. The architect might as well have put up a sign announcing, THIS WAY TO OFFICIAL CONSORT: GO FORTH, BE FRUITFUL, AND MULTIPLY.

A fine job Lady Vaughn had done of that, Mary thought scornfully. She hadn't even produced an heir.

There was a key in the lock, a fanciful key adorned with a series of interlocking curlicues, with a silk tassel fluttering from the end, a key intended more for ornament than use. Vaughn had used it. Trying the handle, Mary found the door to the countess's chamber barred fast, locking out the past. Taking up a candle, Mary turned the key, hearing the click as as the tiny mechanism shifted. She had to push hard against the door before the stiff hinges gave way, creaking open into the shrouded silence of the long-closed room.

Shouldering the door shut behind her, Mary ventured into the room, her booted feet dark blots against the light pink and yellow Aubusson carpet. The drapes were all drawn and clearly had been for some time, their tasseled edges weighted with a decade's worth of dust. Mary rubbed the once costly brocade between her fingers. It felt gritty to the touch. Letting the drape fall, Mary dusted her fingers off against her skirt.

Aside from the funereal film of dust, years of darkness had kept the rooms well preserved. In the small circle of light cast by her one candle, the colors stood out as true as they must have ten years ago, without any of the fading that came of sunlight and use. Unlike Vaughn's chambers, the walls had been painted rather than hung. The long panels depicted a pastoral paradise, largely populated by plump putti, whose purpose appeared to be to hover happily over the humans, dropping wreaths on their heads and garlanding them with flowers. Idealized shepherdesses herded improbably fluffy sheep, while amorous shepherds played ballads on lutes that were always in perfect tune. On the ceiling, in an elaborately scrolled oval, happy lads and lasses danced eternally around a ribbon-decked maypole.

One would have thought an earl's daughter would have better taste.

Tossing her head, Mary set her candle down on the countess's dressing table, draping the robe over the back of a chair. Unused to undressing without a maid, she wriggled with difficulty out of her bedraggled walking dress, dragging it up from the hem over her head. Bloodied and begrimed, the fabric was stiff and uncooperative. It stuck halfway over her head, causing Mary to wonder whether there might not have been something she was meant to unfasten first. A few determined tugs and it pulled free, leaving Mary flushed but triumphant.

As she stood in her petticoat, stays, and chemise, her attention was caught by one of the painted panels behind the dressing table, a dark-haired shepherd playing his lute in tribute to a simpering blond shepherdess. Lifting the candle, Mary leaned closer. It was a time-honored compliment to paint one's patron into a picture. The dark-haired shepherd had something of the look of Vaughn, although it was impossible to imagine Vaughn in a half-draped toga, perched on a rock, playing a lute. His shepherdess was a dainty little thing, with long, blond curls that bounced down below the broad sash at her waist. There was a decidedly hungry gleam in the shepherd's eye as he watched her.

Had Vaughn looked at Lady Anne like that?

Mary set down her candle again with a thump. She hated that sickly shepherdess with her self-satisfied expression and her greedy little hands. She hated her for her dreadful taste in interior decoration, for her noble pedigree, for her unchallenged right to occupy the chambers that Mary could enter only as guest. How had Vaughn proposed? Had he gone down on one knee and mouthed the appropriate and traditional words of love? Had he meant them? Or had it been a family arrangement, an alliance between two great houses, with documents to sign instead of poetry and property dispositions instead of kisses?

Mary viciously hoped for the latter. She hoped that during the short span of their marriage, the Vaughns had been all that was а la mode, with their separate bedchambers, separate lives, and separate loves, only coming together in their paired portraits to stare down at posterity in a lie of love.

Sinking down into the tufted stool before the countess's dressing table, Mary rubbed her hands hard over her eyes. She was being absurd! It shouldn't matter how Vaughn had felt about Lady Anne. All that mattered was that they were married, that Lady Anne had the right to be here and she didn't. Not Lady Anne, Lady Vaughn. Mary realized she had been unconsciously thinking of the woman by her courtesy title, as if she had never married, never shared Vaughn's bed, never taken the place Mary wanted to occupy herself.

Mary glanced sideways at the robe draped over a chair. Even now, in her petticoat, stays and chemise, if she wrapped the robe tightly around her undergarments, she could maintain a semblance of respectability.

But what was the purpose of respectability? She had already been nearly ruined once, for a man who meant nothing to her and a title that did. Better now, to be ruined in truth for the sake of the man she wanted, the man she — Mary shied away from the word. The man she loved. There. She had admitted it. She loved him. Was that so very strange? She loved him for all the dark and dismal reasons he loved her, for all his vices and inconsistencies, his selfishness and his pride, his inconvenient honesty and his devastating wit.

Reaching back, Mary untied the tapes at her waist. Her petticoat slid down over her hips, crumpling on the floor around her feet. Stepping daintily out of the pile of fabric, Mary kicked it aside. Her stays came next. One tug and the light canvas corset joined her petticoat on the pink and yellow pattern on the ground.

Bending over to tackle her boots, she tugged at the knots in the laces. Without her stays, she felt marvelously free, her unconfined waist bending without the press of whalebone. She kicked off one boot, then the other, flexing her feet in their silk stockings like a dancer at Covent Garden. She was sure her legs were as good as theirs.

Vaughn could be the judge of that.

With a flick of her fingers, Mary undid the bows on her garters, letting the blue ribbons flutter to the ground. With quick, precise movements, she rolled down the silk stockings over her calves, until she stood in Vaughn's wife's room in nothing but her chemise. Above the dressing table, her mirrored lips curved in a red, dangerous smile. The fine lawn whispered easily over her head, floating to the carpet like an emblem of fallen virtue.

The silk of Vaughn's robe slithered sensuously over her skin as she slid both arms into the broad sleeves, cinching the heavy fabric closed with its own broad sash. The brocade was the color of expensive wine, the color of the claret in Vaughn's glass that night in the Chinese chamber, embroidered with exotic Oriental dragons who swished their golden tails through a burgundy forest and played hide-and-seek in the folds around Mary's legs. As the fabric washed over her, Mary remembered that night, with the candlelight flickering off the porcelain plaques and the gold thread in the crimson cushions, in that doorless, windowless, jewel box of a room, and Vaughn, more exotic and glittering than any of it by far, his hair disheveled and his shirt open, drinking to her only with his eyes — with his eyes, and lips, and a hundred indecipherable endearments.

On an impulse, Mary reached up and drew the pins from her hair, letting it tumble down around her shoulders. She had been too vain of her hair to succumb to the current fashion for short curls. Loosed, it fell nearly to her waist, heavy and straight. Rather than use the countess's brush, with its telltale blond hairs still caught in the bristles, she combed her fingers through the tangles, feeling the heavy mass shift across her shoulder blades, black on crimson.

She rubbed her cheek against her right shoulder, enjoying the sleekness of the silk. The fabric smelled like Vaughn, with the tang of claret and sandalwood, exotic and familiar all at once.

She scarcely recognized herself in the mirror, with the dressing gown open at the neck and her hair falling free around her shoulders. The girl reflected in the candlelight was exotic and wanton, with the crimson of the robe casting an echoing color in her cheeks and lips, contrasting with the pale skin of her throat and hinting at more interesting valleys below. She had worn ballgowns cut far lower, and yet she had never felt so bare.

She had never worn silk next to her skin before, without layers of linen and lawn, cambric and canvas forming a barrier in between. The fabric slid fascinatingly around her legs as she walked towards the door, every ripple a caress. The girl in the crimson silk didn't stride; she swayed, as the heavy fabric nipped at her heels and played peek-a-boo with her calves. The fibers of the carpet tickled the soles of her bare feet.

As she slipped through to the earl's chamber, leaving behind a decade's dust and decay, she wondered what Vaughn would say when he saw her. And what she would say to him.

Or perhaps there would be no need for words at all.