The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Vaughn went to his assignation doubly armed. He had a sword at his hip and Pinchingdale up a tree.

He hadn't intended either Pinchingdale or the tree. But whether it was for Mary's sake or, as Pinchingdale claimed, because he had as much of an interest in catching the Black Tulip as Vaughn did, Pinchingdale had insisted on following along.

"I should think," Pinchingdale had said, with a brow raised in challenge, "that you would be glad of the extra protection."

"I would," Vaughn had replied, just as dryly, "if I could be sure that you intended your bullets for the Black Tulip, rather than me."

Having ascertained that they understood each other, they had departed for Anne's lodgings in relative harmony — if, by harmony, one meant guarded silence. By prearrangement, they took separate routes, just in case anyone was watching. Vaughn went in his own carriage with the Vaughn crest emblazoned on the doors, rattling conspicuously along, while Pinchingdale took whatever shadowy and circuitous route pleased him best.

Their destination turned out to be a narrow, three-story building constructed of yellowing brick, lying hard by the jumble of medieval structures that made up Parliament. The wrought-iron railings had been painted a teal blue, presumably to complement the bright blue of the door, but the harsh elements of the English climate had already taken their toll. The peeling paint gave the railings a scabrous appearance, as though they were suffering from an acute case of leprosy. The rest of the structure appeared equally neglected. The small panes that made up the sash window were dark with accumulated grime. If Anne was, indeed, working for the Black Tulip, the French government's largesse did not extend to a generous housing allowance.

On the other hand, grimy windows had the benefit of concealing a multitude of illicit activities.

Reaching for the knocker, Vaughn lifted it fastidiously between two fingers and let it fall. The reverberations had scarcely stopped before the door was shoved open and a hand on his sleeve yanked him unceremoniously over the threshold. Behind him, the door slammed definitively into its frame.

The pressure on his bad arm made Vaughn see spots, but his other hand went unerringly to the hilt of his sword.

"There's no need for that!" said a husky voice indignantly.

As Vaughn's eyes adjusted to the gloom of the hallway, the white blur in front of him resolved itself into Anne, wearing a dress cut too low for afternoon, looking decidedly piqued to be facing several inches of cold Spanish steel. Before sheathing his sword, Vaughn took a quick inventory of his surroundings. The hallway was a narrow rectangle, windowless, furnitureless, and devoid of places to hide. A flight of stairs rose steeply to a small landing on the second story. Doors on either side opened onto sparsely furnished rooms, one on each side. They appeared to be empty. Vaughn wasn't prepared to risk his life on appearances.

"No blunt object descending towards my brain?" he queried satirically. "No pistol leveled at my heart? I'm disappointed in you. You might have run me through twice over by now."

"You've got it all wrong, Sebastian." Anne blinked up at him, the image of wounded innocence. "I've been trying to save you."

"An interesting way you have of showing it," said Vaughn mildly, keeping one hand on the hilt of his sword and an eye on the stairs.

"Why else would I have come to the park yesterday?" said Anne sulkily. "I was the one trying to get you away. She was the one who shot you."

Vaughn snapped to the alert. "Lady Hester?"

Anne looked at him blankly. "What has Aunt Hester to do with this?"

"Less than I thought, apparently." So much for Mary's theory about Lady Hester's career as the Black Tulip.

His wife tossed her short blond curls. "I only came to the park to get you away before you got hurt. And you wouldn't have been hurt if you'd only come with me instead of running off after her."

"And how would you happen to know all that?" Vaughn asked silkily.

"He told me."

"He?"

"Come into the drawing room?" Anne tugged on his sleeve, once again unerringly choosing the wrong arm.

Wincing, Vaughn followed her up the narrow flight of stairs. The Black Tulip might have picked his tools more wisely. As a conspirator, Anne was an utter failure. Visibly nervous, she kept glancing back over her shoulder as they climbed the stairs.

"You do realize," said Vaughn conversationally as they arrived at the landing, "that if you precipitate my demise, you don't get anything at all. As far as the lawyers are concerned, you're dead, you know. You'll have a very tricky time proving otherwise."

Anne cast him a wounded look as she ushered him into a small drawing room, meagerly decorated with the sort of drab furnishings one expected to find in hired lodgings. A settee with faded upholstery, two matching chairs, and a small writing desk in the corner. The pictures on the wall were equally generic, cheap etchings and muddy scenes of what looked like they were meant to be Venetian canals, painted by someone who had been no nearer Venice than Cheapside. With one exception.

Propped on the mantel, someone had placed a portrait miniature in a baroque frame so rich and elaborate it stopped just short of being a reliquary. The frame was pure gold, worth more by itself than all the other items in the room, the metal contorted into a complicated pattern of roses and thistles. On top, like a crown, glistened a red rose painstakingly constructed of ruby petals and emerald leaves.

The gentleman in the portrait miniature, while handsome enough, faded into insignificance in contrast with the casing. His head was covered by the closely rolled white curls that Vaughn could remember his own father sporting back in his youth, pulled back into a tight queue at the back with a wide black velvet ribbon. He wore a white stock and a blue sash crosswise over something that looked, if Vaughn wasn't much mistaken, like armor, a symbolic nod to an earlier age. An order of some sort dangled from the sash, detailed in brushstrokes so fine as to be nearly invisible.

Something about the miniature stirred a memory, long buried. Eyes narrowing, Vaughn rummaged through a mental catalogue of acquaintances. He knew he had seen that face before, but where? In Paris, in Rome, in Constantinople?

In Ireland?

"Port?" Anne offered, holding out a glass in a hand that trembled.

Like the miniature, the glasses were at odds with the general air of dust and dereliction. A large rose had been engraved on one side, while a thorny plant wrapped its stem around the bowl. The rich hue of the liquid turned the petals of the rose a deep blackish red.

Holding up the glass, Vaughn sniffed at it delicately. Placing it pointedly back on the table, he flicked fastidiously at the cup. "I believe I'll pass. Drink before dinner can be so injurious to one's health."

Crystal chimed against crystal as Anne clattered the stopper back into the decanter. "I haven't been trying to kill you, Sebastian, really. He thinks I am, but that's all part of the plan. He thinks he's using me, but it's really quite the other way around. I only used him to get back. To get back to you," she clarified.

Vaughn found this newfound devotion rather unconvincing, and said so. "I find this newfound devotion rather unconvincing. You are, after all, the one who bolted."

Anne's thin fingers were playing with the stopper, easing it in and out of the neck of the decanter, as if she could stop up time or release it like the port in the bottle. "I only bolted because of you. You and Henrietta Hervey."

"Who in the blazes was Henrietta Hervey? Did she run off with a dancing master and set a fashion?"

"Music master," corrected Anne. "And you were the one she kept running off with. You had a very irritating habit of consorting with her in gazebos."

Oh, that Henrietta Hervey. "One gazebo. Singular."

"And Harriet Hounslow and Helena Heatherington…" Anne ticked them off on her fingers.

"Aspirates must have been the rage that season."

"I certainly wasn't."

"Was that what it was all about?" Vaughn asked incredulously. "My neglect? You had your own distractions, as I recall. Several of them, in fact."

Anne shrugged. "I was bored. Oh, don't laugh. I know it was idiocy. I know that now. At the time…I wanted someone to be enraptured with me, me and only me. Franзois promised complete devotion. We were going to be like gypsies, frolicking in the meadows and living for love alone."

"I can't see you lasting very long in a meadow."

"I didn't. Neither did he."

"As fascinating as it is to roam the halls of memory, we appear to have strayed somewhat from the matter at hand — your gentleman friend. Your current gentleman friend," Vaughn specified. "The one who wants to see me dead."

"He approached me in Rome, where I was…well, rather at loose ends." Vaughn didn't need any translation to explain what that meant. "I wanted very badly to come back to England. He offered me riches beyond counting, anything I wanted, if only I would come back with him and do whatever it was he wanted me to do to get your attention. It seemed almost too fortuitous."

"Things that seem too fortuitous generally are."

"I know that," said Anne defensively. "I did realize that once I'd done what he asked, I was more likely to get a knife in my ribs than riches beyond counting."

"So you decided you were better off with me than him."

"I always intended to use him to get to you," Anne insisted. "That was the plan from the very beginning."

"Hmm," said Vaughn. He had his doubts about that.

"His promises were utterly improbable. Titles, lands, jewels…He kept saying that when he became King — "

"King?" Vaughn said sharply. "We are speaking of the same person, aren't we? Chap who works for the French? Likes to call himself the Black Tulip?"

"Oh yes," said Anne airily, as though it weren't the very person the English secret service had been seeking for well over a decade. Anne had always been brilliant at ignoring anything that didn't concern her personally. "But he isn't really a republican, you know. He only threw in his lot with them out of a personal grudge. That's what he told me."

Vaughn began to wonder if he were still asleep, drifting through a particularly realistic opium dream. But if he were going to dream under the influence of opium, it would be of Mary, preferably without clothing, not of a barren parlor in an unfashionable neighborhood where his unwanted spouse fed him absurd tales.

"That must have been quite a large grudge," he commented, "to countenance the overthrow of a kingdom."

Anne donned her thoughtful look. "He said something about an eye for an eye, that the French King had refused to help his father regain his kingdom, so he had made sure Louis lost his."

Outside, a tree branch creaked, undoubtedly Pinchingdale trying to hear better. Glancing towards the window, Vaughn's eye fell on the portrait miniature, surmounted by its crimson rose, interlaced with roses and thistles. In his golden casing, the bewigged man smiled benevolently over the room, regal as a king.

His father's kingdom. Roses and thistles. The images whirled and settled, falling together into a new, unsettling, and nearly impossible pattern.

With a sudden swift movement, Vaughn seized on the glass of port, upending the contents onto the ground, where the dark liquid seeped into the warped boards of wood that covered the floor.

"Sebastian!" protested Anne. "It's not poisoned, really."

Whether the brew was poisoned or not was immaterial. He had seen what he needed to see.

Empty, he could make out the words engraved below the rose and thistle. Entwined in an elaborate monogram were the initials CR, followed by the word "fiat," the common Latin command for "let it be done."

CR stood for Carolus Rex, the Latin name for Charles the King — or, in this case, a Charles who never was king. Prince Charles Edward Stuart, Jacobite Pretender to the English throne, had tried once to regain his kingdom by the sword and seen his hopes brutally crushed on the battlefields of Scotland. He had died years ago, while Vaughn was still a boy. He had died a ruined man, crushed by the weight of his failed hopes, abandoned by his wife, practically pickled in alcohol. That was the man in the portrait, painted before disappointment and drink had taken their toll, wearing armor in token of his eventual reconquest of the kingdom he believed to be his.

He ought to have recognized the rose and the thistle, the most common of Jacobite symbols. But why would he have? The last Jacobite rebellion had been crushed half a century ago, and all the Pretender's attempts couldn't put an army together again. There had been talk of another invasion in Vaughn's youth — but the French King, already depleted by his efforts in the Americas, had refused to bankroll it.

It couldn't be Charles Edward who waved the Jacobite standard this time. That would be a far more impressive resurrection than Anne's. If he had lived, he would be well over eighty.

But Vaughn knew now who that portrait reminded him of. The resemblance wasn't immediately apparent. One had to mentally remove the old-fashioned white wig, broaden the cheekbones, lower the forehead.

He had always assumed that the Black Tulip was, like Teresa, a confirmed idealogue, a madman with a cause. And so he was. Only the cause wasn't at all what Vaughn had assumed it would be.

"What is his name?" Vaughn demanded harshly. "His real name?"

"J-Jamie. Jamie Stuart. But he prefers to be called Your Highness."

Vaughn grabbed Anne by both shoulders. "Where is he?"

"At — at Lady Euphemia's estate in Richmond. For the play. When he heard the royal family were going to be attending the theatricals tonight…"

Vaughn didn't wait to hear more.

Mary was at Richmond

"Don't you see?" Anne's voice rang with satisfaction. "I've kept you clear of it. I saved you. Sebastian? Sebastian! Where are you going?"

Vaughn took the stairs two at a time. Behind him, he could hear Anne panting as she trotted down the stairs after him, but her breathless commentary didn't make a dent in the hideous scenarios unraveling through his mind. He knew what the Black Tulip was capable of; he had seen it before. But not Mary. It couldn't be allowed to happen to Mary.

"For goodness' sake, Sebastian…," Anne demanded breathlessly behind him.

Vaughn slammed out of the front door as though a dozen demons were at his back. The water stairs, he decided. A boat would be far faster than trying to go overland, and they were hard by the Thames and the dock that served Parliament. As he pounded down the front steps, a figure dropped lightly from a tree, to land on the ground beside him.

"He's in Richmond," Vaughn said tersely, never breaking stride or looking at the man beside him. "With Mary."

Pinchingdale didn't need to be told twice. "A boat will be fastest."

"My thoughts precisely."

A flurry of white muslin caught up to them just short of the water stairs, and tugged on Vaughn's arm. Vaughn shook the restraining hand off.

"Him — tree!" gasped Anne, waving an arm at Pinchingdale.

"I'll perform the introductions later." Since it didn't seem like he would be able to get rid of her, Vaughn boosted her hastily into the boat. Perhaps she could be used to distract the Tulip. If she didn't decide to turn coat again, that was.

Pinchingdale hopped lightly down beside her, eyeing his shipmate in a way that suggested his wife was going to get a full account later on.

Swinging his sword out of his way, Vaughn swung down beside them, slapping two coins into the palm of the waiting boatman.

"Richmond. As fast as you can."

Mary stood shivering in the wings of Lady Euphemia McPhee's personal theatre. Built to rival Garrick's temple of Shakespeare, the marble edifice was certainly impressive. It was also cold. While Lady Euphemia had blithely installed trapdoors for Hamlet (should she ever want to play Hamlet) and all sorts of complicated machinery for manipulating scenery or dropping Greek gods from the sky, she had neglected to include any fireplaces.

As a princess of Briton, Mary was draped in flowing white samite edged with cloth of gold. That translated to white muslin hung with yellow tassels that looked like they had recently come off someone's drapes, presumably Lady Euphemia's. Her long black hair, falling free to her waist, had been adorned with a filet of purest gold. In other words, painted pasteboard, to go with the equally "golden" armlets that encircled her bare arms just below and above the elbow, detailed with what Lady Euphemia and Aunt Imogen fondly believed to be ancient Druidic runes. What the Druids had to do with St. George, Mary wasn't quite sure. But, then, neither was Lady Euphemia. It was, she had explained airily, poetic license.

Onstage, A Rhyming Historie of Britain had only just begun, and the shuffling of feet was already louder than the voice of the narrator.

From the front row, Mary could hear her mother's voice, with more carrying quality than anything on the stage, announcing, "Such a clever woman, Lady Euphemia! And connected to the royal family, you know…. My daughter is playing a princess. Not my daughter who's a Viscountess, but the other one."

Rubbing the gooseflesh on her arms, Mary wondered how Vaughn was getting on with the Black Tulip. She would have given anything — well, nearly anything — to be out of her ridiculous draperies and in a carriage to Westminster, crouched next to a window with a pistol in her hand. Even the sight of Turnip Fitzhugh being tugged across the stage in a large rowboat failed to divert her.

Mary irritably shoved her hair back over her shoulder, twitching at the prickle of the ends against her bare arms. She wasn't sure what she was more afraid of: the vengeance of the Tulip or Vaughn being left alone with his wife.

The Tulip, she concluded after some reflection. Definitely the Tulip.

Onstage, Turnip's bearers had dropped their tow ropes with more than a little relief, depositing Turnip right in the center of the stage.

Funny that she had never noticed before just how much Turnip sounded like Tulip. All that wanted changing was the middle.

It was hard to imagine anyone who looked less like a deadly spy than Turnip Fitzhugh. According to the script, Turnip was meant to be Brutus, founder of Britain, who had fled the rack of Troy to found a mighty kingdom in a new land. With his toga falling off one shoulder (much to the appreciation of some of the older women in the audience, including Aunt Imogen), and his face screwed up in a squint as he tried to read Lady Euphemia's lips as she mouthed his lines at him, Turnip looked more like one of Shakespeare's rude mechanicals than a mythic hero.

Hitching up his toga, Turnip proclaimed, "I am bravest Brutus. From funny Troy I flee."

"Sunny Troy!" hissed Lady Euphemia.

Turnip nodded vigorously. "From funny, sunny Troy I flee," he declaimed proudly. "Go I now to a new place, where King I shall see — er, be."

"Heaven help England," muttered someone in the audience.

From the look on Lady Euphemia's face, Turnip's dynasty was destined to be a short-lived one.

In the wings behind him, Mary could see the other actors queuing up and servants who had been pressed into service as stagehands bustling about with scenery and props for the coming scenes. It was an eclectic collection of props, ranging from a very large ham haunch (for Henry VIII), to a scaffold (for King Charles), and finally an immense bust of George III (for George III), garlanded with flowers and balanced on a wheeled plinth. If the royal family did put in their promised appearance, the bust was due to be ceremonially rolled out, accompanied by fireworks and the entire cast singing "God Save the King" in three-part harmony.

Despite the absence of the royal family, George III was already on the move. Over Turnip's artistically bared shoulder, Mary saw His Majesty's head go past, nose first, making for the back of the stage with a speed that resulted in a near collision with a miniature version of the Spanish Armada.

The servant wheeling him was bent nearly double with the effort. That was curious in itself, since the statue was made of plaster, hollow inside. Lady Euphemia had originally intended to fill it with doves, which would burst out and flap picturesquely around His Majesty. At least, that had been the plan until St. George had pointed out that if the doves didn't expire from their captivity and make a nasty stench inside the sculpture, one was likely to soil the royal shoulders. Lady Euphemia had regretfully reconsidered, and the bust remained empty.

Or it should have been. Then why was the man having such trouble? His neck was pulled so far into the neck of his livery that it looked like his stock was eating his chin and a white wig with rolled curls on the side effectively shielded the rest of his face. But in his efforts, the wig had slipped, revealing a sliver of close-cropped black hair, a gaunt cheek, and a long aquiline nose.

Creeping as close to the stage as she dared, Mary squinted across the way. The man had moved into the shadows, bearing the King's bust along with him, but his profile was unmistakable. The sallow skin, the long nose, the oddly sunken cheeks that made her think of John the Baptist in the wilderness…

What in the blazes was Mr. Rathbone, vice-chairman of the Common Sense Society, doing in the wings of Lady Euphemia McPhee's pet theatre, dressed in the McPhee livery, making off with the head of George III?

Mary rather doubted that he'd had an abrupt reversal of fortune and decided to go into service.

He might, of course, be indulging in a bit of amateur espionage, gathering information to send off to his sister society in France, that society with the long name that Vaughn had reeled off with such nonchalance.

As Vaughn did everything.

Mary hastily recalled her mind from the recollection of Vaughn's other talents, and back to Rathbone, not nearly so pleasant a subject, but far more pressing. The cast of Lady Euphemia's fiasco was replete with the sisters, daughters, and wives of men of influence, the scape-grace younger brothers of members of Parliament, the cousins of the King's advisors. Any one of them might let something slip in the casual chatter as he waited in the wings, any one might have information he wasn't supposed to have.

But why make off with the King's head? Was he using it as a shield? An excuse for his presence? An act of petty sabotage? The last seemed the most likely. It would be just like Rathbone and his group of petty revolutionaries to expend their energies in symbolic statements, like replacing the King's bust with one of Bonaparte, or sticking a large red, white, and blue cockade in the royal wig.

No matter what he was doing, it couldn't be good. Mary took quick inventory of events on the stage. At the rate Turnip was blundering along, she had a good ten minutes at least, as long as Lady Euphemia didn't bludgeon Turnip to death with the script before he got to the end of his part.

Oh, well. If that happened, it should take them some time to clean the blood off the stage.

Setting her pasteboard circlet more firmly on her brow, Mary slipped quietly through the wings, weaving her way past Charles II's spaniels, who nipped at her heels, and a pillow-stuffed Henry VIII, who attempted to nip at something else entirely. Mary gave him the sort of look reserved by princesses of Briton for impertinent mortals.

There were plenty of men in the McPhee livery scuttling about, but no large plaster head. Casting a glance over her shoulder to make sure no one noticed her departure, Mary slid into the narrow space behind the backdrop, where spare scenery was propped against the wall and props laid out on a long, wooden table.

Rathbone was there, bent over the plaster head, running a long piece of string out of the royal nostrils.

Mary paused at the very edge of the backdrop, considering her next move. Despite his gaunt frame, Rathbone was still considerably taller than she was; she still hadn't forgotten the discomfort of being backed into a corner by him at the Common Sense Society. And there they had been surrounded by people. Revolutionaries, but people, nonetheless.

He might not be too happy to be surprised at his task. And if he were the Black Tulip…Mary surreptitiously rubbed her hands along her arms. She still bore the bruises.

Glancing quickly around, her gaze fell on the table of props. The swords were all pasteboard, flimsy things that would bend at a touch, and Robin Hood's bow had a broken string. But in the midst of it all hulked Henry VIII's ham haunch.

Mary crept closer, resting one hand on the bony end. Beneath its pink and red paint, the ham haunch was solid wood. The narrow end made a convenient handle. Closing her hands around it, Mary hefted it experimentally in the air. Muttering to himself at his task, Rathbone never turned around. Adjusting her grip, Mary raised the ham haunch over her head, and swung it down.

The haunch connected with Rathbone's head with a satisfying crunch, bowling him over sideways. He thudded against the bare boards of the floor and was still.

Gathering up her draperies, Mary leaned forward to inspect him for signs of sentience. He seemed most convincingly inert. Still alive — she could tell that from the uneven rasp of his breath — but his closed lids and the darkening bruise on his temple suggested that he wouldn't be a bother to her for quite some time. Laying the ham haunch within easy reach, just in case she needed it again, Mary knelt down beside the fallen man and used two fingers to peel back one eyelid. The pupil stared straight ahead, devoid of recognition.

Feeling rather smug, Mary rose, brushing her hands on her skirt. If she'd only had a ham haunch to hand the other day when the Black Tulip appeared…Ah, well, one couldn't be expected to foresee every eventuality.

Bending over, Mary lifted the string that had fallen from Rathbone's hand when he toppled over. The waxed twine was oddly gritty to the touch, dotted with dark flecks like bits of sand.

Grimacing, Mary rubbed her fingers together to dislodge the residue. Dirt? Or something else? Either way, she didn't like the feel of it on her fingers.

For whatever reason, Rathbone had threaded the string through the enlarged nostrils of the larger-than-life-size bust. Twisting sideways, Mary peered into the royal nose. There was something inside, several somethings, in fact.

Straightening her aching back, Mary eyed the bust. There had to be some other way to get to the inside. Whatever was in there was too large to have been shoved in by the nose. And Lady Euphemia's doves would have needed an outlet, too, short of striking the King's head with a mallet. That would hardly be a spectacle calculated to please the King, seeing his head broken open in effigy.

Of course! Shoving her own hair hastily out of the way, Mary reached for the tail of the King's wig. The headpiece lifted easily off, revealing the cavity below. Inside, in the large, empty space between the King's ears, someone had packed a curious contraption contrived of three small wooden barrels, banded together with metal strips, nestled in against four cylindrical flasks sealed with wax. The whole had been padded around with shreds of paper and cloth, like the nest of a very peculiar bird. The string Rathbone had been unrolling with such care had its origin in the barrel in the middle.

Utterly baffled, Mary frowned down at the King's head. Whatever the contraption was, it was clearly not meant to be in there. But what was it?

"That is," said a voice behind her conversationally, "what is commonly known as an infernal machine."