Bracing her weapon, Letty leveled it at Lord Vaughn.
"Step away from Miss Fairley," Letty commanded, hoping that she made up in firmness of tone what she lacked in weakness of wrist.
Lord Vaughn looked as unimpressed as the marquise. But he did step away, and that, Letty reminded herself, was all that counted. Fragments of china crackled beneath his boot heel, ground to expensive dust against the weft of the carpet.
Vaughn nodded lazily toward Letty's weapon. "It's not loaded, is it?"
Letty concentrated on holding the pistol level. It was considerably harder without Geoff's hands beneath hers. "Would you care to wager your life on that point?"
Vaughn polished his quizzing glass with a corner of his cravat and examined the results. "In this instance? Yes."
Drat. It was going to have to be the sleeping potion.
"Perhaps," suggested Letty, waving the pistol in the direction of a chair suitably far away from Jane, "we should all sit down and discuss this over a nice cup of tea."
Jane glanced back at Letty over her shoulder with a quirk of the lips that suggested she knew exactly what Letty was about.
"I don't think tea will be necessary." Jane flipped her coattails and arranged herself neatly in a chair by the settee, next to the table that must have once borne the Japanese bowl. Her calm post next to the corpse presented a macabre tableau, a tea party straight out of Dante's Inferno.
"Indeed." Vaughn turned his back on Letty and her pistol, moving toward a table set with a decanter and set of glasses. "I could do with something stronger."
Murdering someone could have that effect on a person.
Letty kept the empty pistol trained on Vaughn as he tilted amber liquid into his glass. There was something rather comforting about holding the man at gunpoint. Even if she knew there was nothing in the gun, the weapon still provided a spurious sense of protection.
In a mockery of a toast, Vaughn raised the glass toward the trio ranged around the settee.
"Gentlemen?" Vaughn's voice was as delicately weighted with irony as a well-balanced sword. "Would you care to join me?"
"An explanation would be more to the point. Unless you have more old adages you would care to share with us?" There was an edge to Jane's voice that belied the tranquillity of her expression.
"I believe I can control myself for the moment."
Lifting the rejected glass to his lips, Vaughn drank delicately before proceeding, whether to delay or merely out of a habit of deliberation, Letty could not be sure. It was impossible to be sure of anything where Lord Vaughn was concerned.
"I entered and found the Marquise de Montval as you see her now. That is the sum total of it." Vaughn's eyes flicked almost imperceptibly toward the still form on the settee. "Teresa and I had more subtle means of causing injury to each other. We had no need for knives."
"Even the sharpest of tongues cannot do the office of steel."
Jane, thought Letty, seemed determined to out-Vaughn Lord Vaughn when it came to couching speech in obscurity. It was enough to make Letty yearn for good commonplace words of one syllable. Perhaps she should just hold up two cards, saying "yes" and "no," and demand that Vaughn point to the one that best answered the question "Did you kill the marquise?"
Knowing Lord Vaughn, he would probably find a way to point with ambiguity.
"Credit me with the common sense not to soil my own nest," said Lord Vaughn. Ambiguously.
Jane leaned back in her chair, propping one leg against the other in a studiedly masculine gesture. "That might be all the more reason to do so."
"Not," said Vaughn, "when it entails a stain on the upholstery. That fabric will be devilish hard to replace. It came from France."
Vaughn's eyes met Jane's in a way that suggested far more than a concern for interior decoration.
Letty was sure of it when Jane said, in a much milder tone, "When did you last see her alive?" For whatever reason, the interrogation had been abandoned.
"Half an hour ago?" Vaughn shrugged, as though it were of little matter, but Letty noticed that he avoided looking at the settee. A sign of guilt? Or something else?
"How would someone have entered without the servants hearing?" demanded Letty.
"You did," said Vaughn smoothly. "My cousin—no, Mrs. Alsdale, not that cousin. Nor"—he nodded to the couch—"that cousin."
Letty regarded him with unconcealed distaste. "Your cousins seem to experience considerable ill fortune."
"In being connected to me? In that case, it is an affliction to which a considerable portion of the peerage falls heir. My cousin Kildare, who is, I am sure you shall be relieved to hear, in the pink of health, was kind enough to afford me the use of his home. His staff, however, leaves much to be desired. The cook…But I digress. I returned from an invigorating visit to my tailor to find—I don't need to tell you, do I?"
"If," said Letty, leaning very heavily on the word, "your story is true, wouldn't you have crossed paths with the murderer?"
"My dear girl." Vaughn gestured expansively, snifter in one hand, quizzing glass in the other. "Look about you. The place is riddled with doors."
There was no denying the truth of that. Aside from the door to the front hall, there were doors, cleverly aligned with the plasterwork, leading off to rooms on either side. In addition to the doors, long-sashed windows offered a further means of egress. The room was above ground level, but not by much; a tall man would have no difficulty hoisting himself up on the sill, and exiting again by the same means.
"You have quite the wrong end of the stick," continued Vaughn. "There is someone who has considerably more reason than I to wish to see Teresa permanently silenced."
"And that would be?" Jane tilted her head quizzically.
"I think you know."
"It doesn't necessarily follow. Would a hunter kill his trustiest hound?"
"He would," said Vaughn, "if the hound bit him. Teresa was never good at bowing to the dictates of others." Vaughn swirled the liquid in his glass, watching its progress with as much interest as if it had been the finishing line at Newmarket. "Recently, she had taken umbrage with the activities of a lesser personage in her organization."
"Emily Gilchrist."
Letty didn't realize she had spoken the name aloud until Vaughn's eyes met hers. He looked, she realized, surprisingly tired. Under all the bravado of his manner, fatigue lined the sides of his face and pouched beneath his eyes.
"The very one." The shadows beneath his eyes might betray him, but there was no trace of weakness in the honed cadences of his voice. "Teresa believed she needed to be removed. She broached this with her colleague. Her colleague refused."
"Ah," said Jane.
"Ah, indeed. Such a little point, to cause such a great reckoning."
A little point. Having seen the removal of Emily Gilchrist, Letty wasn't sure she could agree with Lord Vaughn's characterization of the situation. What was it that Geoff had said last night? Something about the marquise not being worthy of her sympathy. Remembering Emily's ravaged face, she found it hard to regret the great reckoning that had been wreaked on the still form on the settee.
"Teresa took it upon herself to remove Miss Gilchrist. The rest"—Vaughn waved a hand in the direction of the settee—"is pure conjecture."
"You believe this was done in retaliation, then."
"Perhaps. It might have been meant as a warning to the others. It was a matter of order. And of power. Uneasy lies the head, and all that. No ruler can brook such a blatant challenge to his authority and expect to remain long on his throne. And so, farewell, Teresa."
For someone who claimed to be uninvolved, Lord Vaughn seemed suspiciously well informed.
"By ruler," Letty asked, "do you mean the Black Tulip?"