"As you will. That name will do as well as any other. Teresa referred to her colleague only as monseigneur. A quaint touch, don't you think?"
"It needn't have been a literal rank," mused Jane. "In French?"
"Invariably. It is," added Vaughn, "not necessarily an indicator of his place of origin. Teresa had gone native in all things. She even took to calling herself Thйrиse for a time. Or simply 'the marquise,' as if she were a piece on a chessboard with no person beneath it."
"You knew her for a long time, then," said Letty, watching Vaughn closely. A germ of an idea teased at her imagination. Vaughn's explanations all fit a little too well, fell a little too pat.
"A very long time." Vaughn smiled a crooked little smile, before adding, with a studied air of nonchalance, "Odd, isn't it, how these revolutionaries cling to their titles, despite all of their republican pretensions. Bonaparte will be naming himself emperor next."
"Might I ask," inquired Jane delicately, "why you did not see fit to bring the marquise's relations with Miss Gilchrist to my attention prior to this?"
Vaughn bowed in apology. "I was only admitted to her confidence on that score last night. Ought I to have interrupted your chaste slumbers?"
"None of us," said Jane austerely, "shall slumber properly until the matter of the Black Tulip is dealt with."
She had, realized Letty, very neatly avoided either accepting Vaughn's excuse or naming him a liar.
Vaughn turned and looked straight at the figure on the settee. There was very little spare flesh on his form, but a trick of the light made the sharp bones of his face seem even more stark than usual, as though the skin were stretched too tightly over them.
His lips twisted in what might have been mockery, or grief, or both.
"'Sleep no more. Macbeth hath murdered sleep.'"
With an uncharacteristically abrupt gesture, he tossed back the remains of his drink. Setting the glass down heavily on the small gilt table, he said, "She wasn't supposed to be here. She had a meeting tonight, with the leaders of the rebel cause."
"Tonight?" repeated Jane. "Was it at a place called Kilmacud?"
"No. It was the name of some local saint or other. The one with the snakes."
Letty's mouth felt suddenly very dry.
"Patrick?" she asked. "As in Patrick Street?"
"The very one. Teresa had an appointment to view their armory, to make sure it would be up to snuff in time for the invasion. Tedious stuff." Vaughn flipped open a small china box and expertly deposited a smattering of snuff on the side of his wrist.
Against the lace of his sleeve, the grains looked dark as gunpowder.
Jane's face was very still. "When?"
"Six…half past…something of that order. She was to inspect, and then report back to her shadowy colleague later this evening." Conveying the snuff neatly to his nostrils, Vaughn essayed a genteel cough, indicative of extreme boredom. "That is all I know."
As one, Letty and Jane turned to the clock on the mantel. As if it knew it was being watched, the minute hand jerked awkwardly toward the Roman numeral IV, like a malingering sentry scurrying back to his post.
Twenty past six. And Geoff and Miss Gwen would still be there, caught red-handed among the kegs of gunpowder when the rebel leaders reappeared. They couldn't possibly fight their way through that many.
Jane's eyes met Letty's over the marquise's fallen form. "I need to search the marquise's belongings immediately."
She didn't add before someone else does, but the meaning was as clear to Letty as if she had spoken it. Whatever her arrangement with Vaughn, it didn't extend to unconditional trust. What better way to watch a potential suspect than feigning partnership? Letty approved the motivating sentiment, but if Jane wasn't able to warn Geoff, that left only one option.
On the mantel, the minute hand arched another centimeter closer to half past the hour.
"I'll go," said Letty.
"Who're you?"
The whiskey fumes hit Geoff before the words. Propping one hand against the doorjamb of the outbuilding, the watchman took an unsteady step forward, squinting at Geoff.
Geoff curved his back in a casual slouch, doing his best to look harmless. Only a yard from the back door, he had begun to hope that Emmet had left the house completely unattended. There were, after all, several other rebel caches throughout the city, and limited staff on hand to man them all.
When Geoff saw the watchman, he understood why Emmet had left him behind. Graying stubble caked the bottom half of his face, and his hands bore witness to his trade in the faint shadow of indigo that overlay his skin. Dye could be scrubbed off, but over time it left its mark, especially on the careless. McDaniels might have been a good dyer once, but his fondness for the bottle had lost him most of his custom, leaving him with tinted skin and a bellyful of bitterness against anyone he could find to blame.
Of all the members of Emmet's band, McDaniels was the least likely watchdog Geoff could imagine. Emmet must be growing careless as the big day drew nearer. A mistake.
A mistake Geoff could use.
"Byrne sent us," Geoff said confidently, hooking his thumbs in his belt. He jerked his head at Miss Gwen, similarly attired in a coarse shirt, loose vest, and baggy pants.
Despite Geoff's protests that laborers generally didn't carry parasols, Miss Gwen had refused to relinquish her chosen weapon. Geoff could only hope she was holding it discreetly behind her back, otherwise they might have some explaining to do, even to McDaniels.
"I'm Dooney and this is Burke. We're here to work on the fuses." Geoff lowered his voice to an eager whisper that could be heard three houses away. "For the rockets."
Either it sounded plausible to McDaniels, or he had imbibed enough that he just didn't care. With a grunt of assent, he waved Geoff on toward the house.
"Much obliged!" Geoff called back over his shoulder, and was rewarded with the slosh of liquid as McDaniels waved his bottle at him in salute.
Miss Gwen wrinkled her nose in an eloquent expression of distaste.
They slipped through the back door into the barren work-room that occupied the back of the house. There was little in it, only a few benches and some long trestle tables where the bulk of Emmet's experiments with weapon manufacture took place. Shelves lined most of the white-plastered walls, covered with a motley assortment of items, from coarse ceramic plates to a dented kettle. The ashes had been shoveled from the hearth, but not thoroughly enough. Bits of melted metal added an odd luster to the hearthstone, and a clear indicator of illicit activity. The more common smells of old meals and spilled ale were underlain by another, more acrid scent that stung Geoff's nose. The reek of sulfur was hard to hide, unless Emmet intended to pass it off as a basket of bad eggs. The hens in the coop outside would undoubtedly be deeply offended by the slur on their capacities.
Holding up a finger in warning, Geoff slid through the next door to check the front room, which had been fitted up as a sort of rough parlor. Equally empty. There was an empty plate bearing breadcrumbs and a rind of cheese, remnants of someone's hurried meal. The only sign of illicit activity was a hollow grenade shell that had rolled beneath a table, and a scattering of dark grains that were clearly not meant to be ingested, at least not if one didn't intend to fling oneself into the air and scatter body parts over a large area.
A perfunctory check revealed the upper stories to be equally empty of both human inhabitants and extraneous weaponry.
Geoff couldn't have asked for better.
There was, he thought, a basic irony in the fact that Emmet deliberately understaffed his most important depot for fear that excessive activity would draw attention to the building. That very same strategy meant that his biggest arsenal lay open, completely unprotected except for one drunken dyer, who, at this point in his nightly binge, probably couldn't tell a pig from a pike, much less a Royalist from a Republican.