Not far from him, Geoff could hear the shrill voice of Lanergan's wife, elevating his income by ten thousand pounds a year for the benefit of her audience. It made him feel a bit like one of the animals in the Tower menagerie. This sceptr'd isle, Geoff reminded himself. Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George—or, in this case, King George. If his ancestors could shed their blood on the field of Agincourt, he could bloody well endure being eyed like a pig at market by a willowy miss and a comfortable-looking sort of widow in a gown that showed the signs of recent dyeing.
There was something familiar about that particular widow, something about the set of her shoulders and the tilt of her head that plucked at his memory. The lighting in the room was too dim to discern her hair color, and her face was entirely hidden from view. But there it was again, that twinge of recognition. Could she be Emmet's French contact? Geoff began to mentally run down his list of female spies he had known. Absent recent amputation, she was too petite to be the Marquise de Montval. She certainly wasn't that harridan who had gone for his eyes at the Sign of the Scratching Cat in Le Havre; she would have to have lost four stone, at the least. Fat Mimi, they had called her, none too imaginatively. The woman next to Mrs. Lanergan was pleasantly rounded, but Fat Mimi would have made four of her.
As Geoff's eyes narrowed on the little group, the woman tilted her head back to say something to the black-haired girl next to her, unwittingly positioning herself full in the glow of the sconce on the wall behind her. The candlelight struck amber glints in her exuberant mass of marmalade-colored hair, outlining with faithful precision a pair of wide blue eyes, a tip-tilted nose, and a mouth too generous for fashion. As he watched, she lifted her left hand to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and the ring on her third finger caught the light, the dark stone in the middle shining greasily in its heavy, almost barbaric, setting.
Geoff's stomach hit the gaily patterned carpet and kept on going.
"Oh, no," said Geoff, shaking his head. "It can't be."
"I assure you it can," replied Miss Gwen, looking affronted. "I decoded the message myself."
Geoff ignored her.
There might be hundreds of girls who might, at a distance, in an unevenly lit room, be taken for Letty Alsworthy, but there was only one Pinchingdale betrothal ring. The thing was so hideously ugly that no one would ever bother to fashion another. His grandmother, a pithy woman who delighted in scandalizing her vaporish daughter-in-law, had described it as a carbuncle masquerading as a jewel. It was a cabochon-cut monstrosity dating back to a medieval ancestor, a thrifty Norman warrior, who, rather than invest in unnecessary feminine baubles, had simply pried the jewel out of his sword to present to his bride—reportedly over the body of several of her recently slain relatives, who had just fallen prey to that selfsame sword. The last was just the sort of story his grandmother liked to tell, and was probably untrue, but it was too vivid an image to entirely banish.
And he, Geoff realized in disgust, was rambling. He was rambling to himself, which made it even worse. At least, in the context of a conversation, one could excuse rambling as part of a social exercise. But to ramble to oneself surely had to be a first step on the perilous path to madness.
"Lord Pinchingdale!" Miss Gwen's sharp voice called him to account, along with a nudge in the ribs.
Geoff blinked a few times to clear his vision. Perhaps he was mad already. How could one of sane mind possibly explain the appearance of his unwanted bride—and the Pinchingdale betrothal ring—both of which he had last seen five days before in the ballroom of his London town house? True, the passage from London to Dublin sometimes took as little as two days, but how would she even know he was going to Ireland? He had only told…
Miles.
Geoff's mind lurched back into place, and the world righted itself again. He wasn't mad; he wasn't hallucinating; he was just the victim of a critical error of judgment. Madness might have been preferable.
At the time, informing Miles of his travel plans had seemed a perfectly logical thing to do. He needed information about the Black Tulip, of which Miles possessed more than anyone else in London, having recently had a close and personal run-in with the woman. Miles, being an agent of the War Office himself, wasn't likely to go blabbing about Geoff's whereabouts, not unless he wanted to be one friend short.
He had failed to take into account the Henrietta factor.
Damn.
He should have foreseen that anything that he told Miles would be automatically passed along to Henrietta. And with Henrietta intent upon bridging what she perceived as a senseless rift between Geoff and his new bride…It was enough to make Paris during the Terror look like an interlude of halcyon peace. Aside from the small matter of the guillotine, of course.
"Oh, dear!" Jane's voice, deliberately shrill, sliced into Geoff's reverie as something thumped onto the floor just in front of Geoff's booted feet. "Lord Pinchingdale, I seem to have dropped my fan. Would you be so good as to retrieve it for me?"
Automatically, Geoff swept down to his knees, extending the fallen fan to Jane with a courtly gesture meant to recall Sir Walter Raleigh.
"We have a problem. A very large problem," he said.
"We?" cackled Miss Gwen, bestowing her gimlet eye on Geoff.
"We," affirmed Geoff, trying not to flinch as Jane batted him playfully about the head with her fan. A concussion was the least of his worries.
"Don't try to go foisting off your problems on us, young man."
Jane waved her to silence. "What sort of problem, Geoffrey?"
"Not what," replied Geoff hoarsely, grabbing the edge of Jane's chair for balance as he wove unsteadily to his feet. He felt a bit as he had the first time he had drunk too much brandy, from a flask smuggled between him and Richard and Miles, hiding from their housemaster in an unheated back corridor at Eton. There had been that same sickening lurch in the pit of his stomach, and the vague feeling of something very wrong with the world. "Who."
"Isn't that what she just asked?" Miss Gwen tapped her parasol impatiently. "Don't waste time shilly-shallying over semantics. Who is it, Pinchingdale?"
"My…" Geoff choked on the relevant word. How could he admit to the presence of a hitherto undisclosed wife, when the integrity of their mission depended upon the continued pretense of his bachelorhood?
"Spit it out! We haven't all night."
Geoff made sure his back was turned to the room, grateful that they had chosen a corner that abutted a wall, not a window. "My wife."
That silenced even Miss Gwen.
Unfortunately, it didn't silence her for long.
"How could you be so irresponsible as to acquire a wife at this critical juncture?" demanded Miss Gwen.
"It was not a considered course of action," replied Geoff tightly.
"Clearly," sniffed Miss Gwen. "Was she a youthful indiscretion? A childhood betrothal?"
"There's no need to go into the details now," said Jane, effectively forestalling Miss Gwen. "Necessities first. Is she going to make a scene?"
Geoff glanced back at the small group next to a crude reproduction of a red-lacquer Chinese cabinet. His wife was frowning at the carpet in a way that suggested that she had spotted him—or, more precisely, that she had spotted him with Jane. But she hadn't said anything. At least, not yet.
"I don't know. I don't think so."
It was infuriating not to be able to give a more definite answer, but what, after all, did he know of her? Nothing. Other than that she had a damnable habit of turning up where she wasn't wanted.
Jane nodded, content in that answer. "If she does, we'll deal with it then."
"I'll think of something to tell her," said Geoff grimly. He could think of several things. Most of them involved putting her right back on the next ship bound for England.