“Stories?” prompted Henrietta.
“They’re not appropriate for your ears.”
“Oh, but assessing a gentleman’s legs is?” muttered Henrietta.
Lady Uppington pursed her lips. “I don’t know what I did to deserve such impertinent children. You’re as bad as your brothers. Brother,” she corrected herself, since everyone knew Charles was a model of decorum. “But just this once, Henrietta Anne Selwick, I want you to listen to me without an argument.”
“But, Mother — “
“Miles won’t always be around to extricate you from awkward situations.”
Henrietta opened her mouth to make a snide comment about that being Miles's one purpose in life. Lady Uppington cut her off with one raised hand.
"Take your wise old mother's advice, and stay well away from Lord Vaughn. He is not a suitable suitor. Now, aren't you supposed to be dancing with someone?"
"Bleargh," said Henrietta.
Chapter Seven
Cards, Game of: a battle of wits waged against an inscrutable agent of the Ministry of Police. See also under Hazard.
"What say you, Vaughn? Care for another hand?" Miles fanned the deck of cards out temptingly on the tabletop.
He still couldn't quite believe his luck in stumbling across Vaughn at Almack's, of all places. Clearly, someone somewhere was smiling on his efforts. Had Vaughn not been speaking to Henrietta at just that moment…
He would have tracked Vaughn down eventually, anyway. It just would have taken longer. Miles had evolved, over the course of the afternoon, a very logical plan of action for stalking Vaughn, involving finding out which clubs the older man belonged to, at which hours he tended to frequent them, and where he might be best waylaid. This was much easier.
The only problem was, none of Miles's probing questions had obtained the slightest result. Miles had tried commenting casually on the difficulty of finding good footmen nowadays. Lord Vaughn had shrugged. "My man of business takes care of that for me."
No "Dash it all, they're always dying on me!" No "Funny thing, one of my footmen just happened to snuff it this morning." One might expect some reaction — incredulity, annoyance, distress — from an innocent employer whose footman had recently been murdered. There hadn't been any sudden guilty start or any shifting of eyes, either, but
Miles found the absence of reaction just as suspicious as Vaughn's failure to mention the incident.
References to the gallant exploits of our flowery friends, the difficulty of traveling on the Continent in this time of troubles, and the shocking rise of crime in the metropolis (especially murder) over the past few weeks had elicited equally little more than polite murmurs. In fact, the only topic in which Lord Vaughn showed the slighted interest was the Selwick family. Lord Vaughn had asked several questions about the Selwicks. Miles, in his role of tiresome young man, had bombarded him with inconsequentialities, like the color of Richard's curricle, and the fact that the Selwicks' cook made exceptionally good ginger biscuits, none of which seemed to be quite what Vaughn was looking for.
Suspicious, decided Miles. Highly suspicious.
Unfortunately, he had nothing to confirm his suspicions. Almack's, alas, was not ideally suited to spying. There was no strong liquor with which to coax Lord Vaughn into a state of gregarious inebriation, and the stakes allowed in the card room were too low for Miles to contrive to lose enough that Miles would have to give Vaughn his vowels (thus cleverly necessitating a visit to Vaughn's house). So far, Miles had lost precisely two shillings and sixpence. There could be no hope of convincing Lord Vaughn that he didn't have the blunt.
"Another hand?" Miles repeated.
"I think not." Lord Vaughn pushed back his chair, adding drily, "I shall have to forego that pleasure."
If Miles hadn't been so sure that the man was a deadly French spy, he would have almost been sorry for him about then. But since the man was quite likely a deadly French spy, Miles had no compunction whatsoever about being as annoying as possible, in a performance based on Turnip Fitzhugh at his less endearing moments.
"Oh, are you going to your club? I could — "
"Good night, Dorrington."
Miles bit down on an entirely inappropriate urge to smile, and tried to look suitably rebuffed. "Ah, well," he said, subsiding into his chair with what he hoped was a mournful air. "Some other time."
The cane beat a staccato retreat. Miles waited until the echoes had faded and then, cautiously, rose from the table. He peered out the door of the card room. Vaughn was making a leg to Lady Jersey, Lady Jersey was shaking her finger at him, and… Lord Vaughn was exiting the ballroom. Miles followed.
He followed at a suitable distance, making sure to keep hidden within the door frame as Vaughn climbed into his sedan chair. It was a large chair, and as elegant as everything else about Vaughn. The walls were covered with black lacquer chased in silver that shimmered in the torchlight. Two liveried bearers held the poles at either end.
Most likely Vaughn was just going home, or to his club (Miles didn't take his disclaimer a moment before as reliable; hell, if he'd been Vaughn, he'd have lied, just to get rid of him), or to a bawdy house, or anyplace else one might conceivably go of an evening for purposes that had nothing whatsoever to do with espionage.
But what if he wasn't?
It didn't hurt to follow him. Just in case.
Miles hurried over to a line of sedan chairs for hire sitting in a row on the opposite side of the street. They did a brisk business, since so many areas of London were unsafe to walk after dark, with streets too narrow for even the skinniest of phaetons, much less a regular carriage. The chairmen were chatting desultorily as they waited for custom — recounting the gorier details of yesterday's cockfight, from what Miles could hear.
Miles didn't wait to hear which bird had won. He strode up to the sturdiest-looking of the chairs, a battered box that had once been painted white but was begrimed to gray, and cleared his throat loudly enough to cause a gale in Northumberland. Two men reluctantly detached themselves from the mob of bird-baiters, and came forward.
"You want a ride, gov'ner?"
Vaughn's chair was swaying around a corner. In a moment, it would be out of sight. Miles climbed hastily between the poles, folding his large frame into the small chair.
"Follow that chair!"
"That'll be extra if you want me to run," the bearer in front informed him laconically.
Miles plunked a half crown into his hand. "Go!"
The chairman jerked a finger towards his colleague in the back. "And for me friend."
"If," Miles clipped out, "you get me there on time and unseen, I will give you both double that. Now go!"
The chairmen lifted him and went. Over the chairman's shoulder, Miles thought he could just barely make out a corner of Vaughn's chair as it tilted around a corner, but it was too hard to see. Miles leaned to the side, causing the chair to sway perilously, and earning a muttered epithet from the chairman in back, who grappled with the poles to keep the chair upright.
Miles settled back down into the center of the seat, staring fixedly at the chairman's shoulder blades. It really wasn't much of a view.
Deciding that they were far enough behind that Vaughn's men wouldn't notice, Miles lifted the hinged roof of the sedan chair and peered over the top. Vaughn's chair was so far ahead that he could just make out the glint of the linkboy's lantern, bobbing up and down before Vaughn's chair like a will-o'-the-wisp in the darkness.
Wherever it was going, Vaughn's chair was taking the most circuitous route possible. Miles's bearers twisted down narrow alleys where the houses leaned drunkenly towards one another, past riotous taverns and quiet churches, around abrupt corners, arid through busy thoroughfares. For the most part, Vaughn's bearers chose the less traveled paths, back alleys where the tops of the chairs jostled against lines of laundry and the chairmen had to slow to keep from slipping in the refuse that fouled the ground. They slowed, but they did not falter, picking up the pace to something near a run whenever the terrain permitted.