A man could smile and smile and still be a villain; he could have a voice resonant with sorrow and still be plotting to murder Jane and overthrow the English throne. But Henrietta was quite convinced that Vaughn was not. Henrietta grimaced; she could imagine what Miles would make of that argument.
If not Vaughn, who? After all, who else had been at the inn to know of their presence? Turnip? The notion was as laughable as Turnip's infamous collection of carnation-colored waistcoats.
But the thought of Turnip reminded her of something else. Or rather, of somebody else.
Henrietta paused with the brush suspended in midair and stared unseeing into the mirror, hazel eyes crinkling around the corners in concentration as the elusive memory that had been teasing her snapped into place. A man in dandified clothes with a thin black mustache, stepping aside to allow her to pass. He had been there, hovering close by their table, when she barreled down the stairs, standing ever so casually by the fireplace. Watching.
Despite the overshadowing hat and the immense folds of the cravat, there had been something familiar about him. Of course, she cautioned herself, she had been quite overset and distracted at the time, first by the tension with Miles, and then by the encounter with Vaughn. None of her senses had been at their sharpest.
And yet… Henrietta put the brush down with a definitive click on the dressing table. It was certainly worth investigating. And if her hunch was mistaken, Miles need never know. She had no grand plans for swooping in and making grand accusations, no aspirations towards daring escapades. Those were more in Amy's style than hers. As Henrietta had learned the previous day, she really had no taste for danger.
But she wouldn't be in any danger, decided Henrietta, sweeping back her hair. She would just snoop about a bit, and return home. What could be safer?
And she knew just how to go about it…
Miles bounded out of his chair and grabbed Wickham by the elbow before he could open the door. "Grave danger?"
"Danger to Lady Henrietta, to the Pink Carnation, and to the whole of our enterprises in France," Wickham said gravely. Removing his elbow from Miles's limp grasp, he opened the door and shouted, "Thomas!"
Miles stared in frozen horror at his superior. "Why?" he demanded. "What danger?"
Wickham frowned at him. "All in good time. Ah, Thomas, arrange for a detail of soldiers to be sent to Uppington House — "
"Loring House," corrected Miles tersely.
That momentarily achieved Wickham's attention. "Loring House?"
"Married," Miles said briefly.
Wickham assimilated that information with a brief flicker of his eyelids. "Indeed." He turned back to his secretary, whose eyes were darting nervously from one man to another. "Send a detail of soldiers to Loring House — "
"Wait," Miles interrupted again.
"Yes?" snapped Wickham.
"Lady Henrietta. No one knows she's at Loring House. Isn't she safer without a troop of soldiers announcing her presence? If I can keep her there quietly, make sure she doesn't leave the house — "
"Thomas!" The secretary snapped to attention. "I want two men guarding Loring House. They are to be dressed as gardeners." Wickham turned to Miles. "Loring House does have a garden, I take it?"
Miles nodded meekly.
"If Lady Henrietta makes any attempt to leave the house, she is to be returned to it. If someone other than Mr. Dorrington, Lady Henrietta, or their staff attempts to enter the house, they are to be prevented. Any suspicious behavior is to be reported to me at once. At once. The safety of the realm depends upon it. Is that understood?"
It was understood.
Wickham's secretary scurried off. Miles intercepted Wickham before he could return to his desk, implicitly dismissing Miles.
"What happened?" Miles demanded.
Wickham freed his arm from Miles's hand, proceeding to his desk at a measured pace that did nothing for Miles's nerves. "Lady Henrietta's contact — "
"Hen has a contact?" muttered Miles.
"Lady Henrietta's contact," Wickham continued, glaring pointedly at Miles to show he would brook no further interruptions, "disappeared late last week from her shop in Bond Street. We found her yesterday. In the Thames."
Miles swallowed hard.
"What has this to do with…" he began, knowing full well what the answer must be, but hoping against hope that there might be some other explanation. An innocuous explanation. And explanation that wouldn't place Henrietta in peril.
"If you do not know the answer to that, Mr. Dorrington, I cannot imagine why we continue to employ you here!" Catching sight of Miles's stricken face, Wickham took a deep breath and modulated his tone as he explained, "We found her yesterday. It took us until this morning to identify her."
Miles blanched. "Torture?" he asked unevenly.
"Undoubtedly."
"Do you think — "
Wickham spread his hands in a gesture of frustration. "We cannot know for certain. But the methods employed were" — Wickham paused, the furrow between his brows deepening — "extreme."
Miles cursed violently.
"Your story," Wickham said wearily, "is distressing, but not surprising. It confirms what we expected."
"Your agent cracked," Miles said bluntly.
Wickham didn't bother to argue with the implied aspersion to his minions.
"Precisely. The Black Tulip knows your wife can lead him to the Pink Carnation."
Chapter Thirty-Three
Magnificent: intensely dangerous, even deadly. See also under Splendid, Superb, and Superlative.
It had all seemed like such a good idea back at Loring House. Henrietta hunched over a grate in the sitting room of a modest townhouse, pretending to rake ashes while her eyes busily searched the interior of the chimney for any suspicious rough patches that might denote a hidden cache of some kind, or the entrance to a priests' hole. Henrietta didn't think the townhouse, a narrow construction in a genteel but hardly fashionable area of town, was of an age to possess a priests' hole, but who was to say that one hadn't been added later for purposes other than priests? There might be a smugglers' hole, or a guilty lovers' hole, or any other manner of hidey-hole tucked away in the bricks of the chimney.
It would have been an inspired course of action, if only the interior of the chimney had not been entirely composed of suspicious rough patches. The soot-caked bricks jutted out at all sorts of angles, any one of which could be the lever that released a hidden door — or simply a soot-caked brick. A subtle peek under the carpet in the guise of sweeping had proved equally fruitless. The panels of the floor marched in faultless order, not a trapdoor among the lot. The walls were lamentably plain, free of ornately carved paneling or gilded moldings that might double as secret mechanisms. In short, Henrietta was feeling quite, quite thwarted.
Back at Loring House, Henrietta had finally chased down the elusive memory that was taunting her to its own hidey-hole, deep in the recesses of her brain. Henrietta would have liked to have claimed it was that mumbled "Pardon me, madam" that had awakened her suspicions, that her trained ear had caught the familiar lilt in that light tenor voice, even through the muffling layers of cravat. It wasn't. The voice had been excellently done, not gruff enough to arouse suspicion, but not high enough to set one thinking about castrati and the breeches roles in Shakespearean comedies. It hadn't even been the breeches themselves; they had been ingeniously padded with buckram, and so many young bucks were eking out their own minor endowments with a little aid from art and padding that, even had the padding been obviously ill-done, no one would have suspected. The fashionable clothes provided an excellent screen. The high points of the collar shaded cheeks too smooth to be masculine, and lent through shadow the specious appearance of reality to the glued-on hairs of a fake mustache. The monstrous cravat shielded a chin too delicately pointed to be male and a throat that was more Eve than Adam. Elaborate waistcoats and stiffened coattails provided better means than binding one's breasts for hiding a female form.