Wickham cast Miles a mildly sardonic look over the edge of what he was reading. "There hasn't been a good time since the French went mad. And it has been getting steadily worse."
Miles leaned forward like a spaniel scenting a fallen pheasant. "Is there more word on Bonaparte's plans for an invasion?"
Wickham didn't bother to answer. Instead, he continued perusing the paper he held in his hand. "That was good work you did uncovering that ring of spies on Bond Street."
The unexpected praise took Miles off guard. Usually, his meetings with England's spymaster ran more to orders than commendations.
"Thank you, sir. All it took was a careful eye for detail."
And his valet's complaints about the poor quality of cravats the new merchants were selling. Downey noticed things like that. His suspicions piqued, Miles had done some "shopping" of his own in the back room of the establishment, uncovering a half dozen carrier pigeons and a pile of miniscule reports.
Wickham thumbed abstractedly through the sheaf of papers. "And the War Office is not unaware of your role in the Pink Carnation's late successes in France."
"It was a very minor role," Miles said modestly. "All I did was bash in the heads of a few French soldiers and — "
"Nonetheless," Wickham cut him off, "the War Office has taken note. Which is why we have summoned you here today."
Despite himself, Miles sat up straighter in his chair hands tightening around his discarded gloves. This was it. The summons. The summons he had been waiting for for years.
Seven years, to be precise.
France had been at war with England for eleven years; Miles had been employed by the War Office for seven. Yet, for all his long tenure at the War Office, for all the time he spent going to and from the offices on Crown Street, delivering reports and receiving assignments, Miles could count the number of active missions he'd been assigned on the fingers of one hand.
That was one normal-sized hand with five measly fingers.
Mostly, the War Office had looked to Miles to provide them a link with the Purple Gentian. Given that Miles was Richard's oldest and closest friend, and spent even more time at Uppington House than he did at his club (and he spent far more time at his club than he did at his own uninspiring bachelor lodgings), this was not a surprising choice on the part of the War Office.
During Richard's tenure as the Purple Gentian, the two of them had worked out a system. Richard gleaned intelligence in France, and relayed it back to the War Office via meetings with Miles. Miles, for his part, would then pass along any messages the War Office might have back to Richard. Along the way, Miles picked up the odd assignment or two, but his primary role was as liaison with the Purple Gentian. Nothing more, nothing less. Miles knew it was an important role. He knew that without his participation, it was quite likely that the French would have suspected Richard's dual identity years before Amy's involvement had precipitated the matter. But, at the same time, he couldn't help but feel that his talents might be put to better — and more exciting — use. He and Richard had, after all, apprenticed for this sort of thing together. They had snuck down the same back stairs at Eton, read the same dashing tales of heroism and valor, shared the same archery butts, and made daring escapes from the same overcrowded society ballrooms, pursued by the same matchmaking mamas.
When Richard had discovered that his next-door neighbor, Sir Percy Blakeney, was running the most daring intelligence effort since Odysseus asked Agamemnon whether he thought the Trojans might like a large, wooden horse, Richard and Miles had gone together to beg Percy for admittance into his league. After considerable pleading, Percy had relented in Richard's case, but he still refused Miles. He tried to fob Miles off with, "You'll be of more use to me at home." Miles pointed out that the French were, by definition, in France, and if he wanted to rescue French aristocrats from the guillotine, there was really only one place to do it. Percy, with the air of a man facing a tooth extraction, had poured two tumblers of port, passed the larger of the two to Miles, and said, "Sink me, if I wouldn't like to have you along, lad, but you're just too demmed conspicuous."
And there was the problem. Miles stood six feet three inches in his bare feet. Between afternoons boxing at Gentleman Jackson's and fencing at Angelo's, he had acquired the kind of musculature usually seen in Renaissance statuary. As one countess had squealed upon Miles's first appearance on the London scene, "Ooooh! Put him in a lion skin and he'll look just like Hercules!" Miles had declined the lion skin and other more intimate offers from the lady, but there was no escaping it. He had the sort of physique designed to send impressionable women into palpitations and Michelangelo running for his chisel. Miles would have traded it all in a minute to be small, skinny, and inconspicuous.
"What if I hunch over a lot?" he suggested to Percy.
Percy had just sighed and poured him an extra portion of port. The next day, Miles had offered his services to the War Office, in whatever capacity they could find. Until now, that capacity had usually involved a desk and a quill rather than black cloaks and dashing midnight escapades.
"How may I be of service?" Miles asked, trying to sound as though he were called in for important assignments at least once a week.
"We have a problem," began Wickham.
A problem sounded promising, ruminated Miles. Just so long as it wasn't a problem to do with the supply of boots for the army, or carbines for their rifles, or something like that. Miles had fallen for that once before, and had spent long weeks adding even longer sums. At a desk. With a quill.
"A footman was found murdered this morning in Mayfair."
Miles rested one booted leg against the opposite knee, trying not to look disappointed. He had been hoping for something more along the lines of "Bonaparte is poised to invade England, and we need you to stop him!" Ah, well, a man could dream.
"Surely that's a matter for the Bow Street Runners?"
Wickham fished a worn scrap of paper from the debris on his desk. "Do you recognize this?"
Miles peered down at the fragment. On closer inspection, it wasn't even anything so grand as a fragment; it was more of a fleck, a tiny triangle of paper with a jagged end on one side, where it had been torn from something larger. "No," he said.
"Look again," said Wickham. "We found it snagged on a pin on the inside of the murdered man's coat."
It was no wonder the murderer had overlooked the lost portion; it was scarcely a centimeter long, and no writing remained. At least, no writing that was discernable as such. Along the tear, a thick black stroke swept down and then off to the side. It might be the lower half of an uppercase script I, or a particularly elaborate T.
Miles was just about to admit ignorance for a second time — in the hopes that Wickham wouldn't ask him a third — when recognition struck. Not the lower half of an I, but the stem of a flower. A very particular, stylized flower. A flower Miles hadn't seen in a very long time, and had hoped never to see again.
"The Black Tulip." The name tasted like hemlock on Miles's tongue. He repeated it, testing it for weight after years of disuse. "It can't be the Black Tulip. I don't believe it. It's been too long."
"The Black Tulip," countered Wickham, "is always most deadly after a silence."
Miles couldn't argue with that. The English in France had been most on edge not when the Black Tulip acted, but when he didn't. Like the gray calm before thunder, the Black Tulip's silence generally presaged some new and awful ill. Austrian operatives had been found dead, minor members of the royal family captured, English spies eliminated, all without fuss or fanfare. For the past two years, the Black Tulip had maintained a hermetic silence. Miles grimaced.