With a fine disregard for atmosphere, the curators had plunked a series of glass and chrome display cases throughout the room, each containing a motley collection of personal effects of long-deceased Vaughns. In the largest case, in the very center of the room, the curators had displayed the pièce de résistance, an impressive collection of Edwardian underwear, from lace-edged drawers large enough to swathe the backside of a baby elephant to a pair of stays that looked like they might have been used to tow the Queen Mary back into port. Next to them, the curators had helpfully positioned a sepia photograph of a formidable dowager with a waist cinched into nothingness and a bosom that could smother a small city.
With four months of fish and chips weighing heavily on my midriff, I cast a speculative eye over the stays. Unfortunately, I didn't think they would fit under my going-out pants, which were designed for something a bit lighter in the way of undergarments. I wondered what the curators of museums would be displaying a hundred years hence. Would we have glass cases filled with fire-engine-red thongs and leopard-print bras, along with a carefully printed white card explaining their sociocultural significance?
The gentleman who occupied the better part of one wall seemed to share my qualms. His gaze was fixed upon the underwear display with a decidedly jaundiced air. He had been painted, according to the conceit of the time, in a classical wasteland, with a broken pillar wedged beneath one elbow and vague suggestions of a decaying Roman temple in the background. It was an evening scene, in which the rich black brocade of his coat would have blended with the deep indigo of the night sky if not for the silver threads that ran through the weave like condensed moonlight. The entire ensemble had a supernatural shimmer reminiscent of old-fashioned ghost stories featuring family phantoms.
Even with all the shimmer and silver, it wasn't the eerie glow of his attire that first caught my eye, but his face. I would be lying if I said it was a handsome face. The nose was too long — the better for looking down at you, I suppose — and the lips were too thin. There were interesting hollows beneath his sharp cheekbones and paunches beneath his eyes, not unlike those one sees in pictures of the Duke of Windsor, the last word in aristocratic dissipation. His thin lips were curved in a cynical half-smile, and the sideways slant of the eyes suggested that he had just noticed something that both appalled and amused him — or amused him because it appalled him. Either way, I wanted to be let in on the joke.
The artist had chosen to color his eyes nearly the same shade as the silver that ran through his coat. The effect was unusual and arresting. Those silver eyes glinted with a sardonic amusement that even two centuries of hanging on a wall couldn't dim. He looked as though he had seen it all before, including the undergarments. He probably had. Those slender hands, elegantly poised on the head of an ebony walking stick, seemed more than capable of unlacing a pair of stays in about three minutes flat.
I didn't need to read the swirly script on the brass plaque affixed to the frame to know who he was.
Sebastian, Lord Vaughn, eighth Earl Vaughn, Baron Vaughn of Vaughn-on-Tweed, and a host of lesser titles, all of which nicely filled up the space of half a page in Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage. A grand Whig aristocrat of the old school, member of organizations as diverse as the Royal Society and the Naughty Hellfire Club, intellectual and wastrel — and quite possibly a French spy.
I had come across Lord Vaughn in a number of highly suspicious circumstances. His name kept popping up in the annals of the Pink Carnation. Wherever he appeared, he brought with him death, destruction, and a devastating way with a quizzing glass.
The first time Vaughn's name had intruded upon my notes, it was in connection with the death of an operative of the War Office, who had been placed in Vaughn's household as a footman. No one ever really explained that one. The assumption was that the footman had been murdered by the Marquise de Montval, the deadly French operative who worked for the even deadlier Black Tulip (and by the time you've gotten to two levels of deadly, you're talking pretty deadly).
Did I mention that the Marquise had been Vaughn's mistress? The association might have been purely amorous — or it might not have been. It was Vaughn who had released the Marquise from the custody of the English War Office, and Vaughn in whose company she had traveled to Ireland to foment rebellion on behalf of France. In short, Vaughn was looking pretty darn suspect. Add to that a decidedly sinister manner of dress, an extended stay on the Continent, and rather flippant ideas about the value of King and country, and you had a likely candidate for Traitor of the Year.
I had been thrilled when I discovered that the choice art museum, the Vaughn Collection, had belonged to that Vaughn. I'd heard of the Vaughn Collection — it had been prominently featured in my guidebook as a must-see for the serious student of art along with the Wallace Collection and the Sir John Soane's Museum — but it took a while for the connection to click. Vaughn, after all, was a fairly common name.
But while Vaughn was a fairly common name, there weren't all that many Vaughns with family mansions in snooty Belliston Square. In fact, there was only one. By a miracle, Vaughn House had remained in the family, escaping both the Blitz and bankruptcy, until the twelfth earl had left instructions in his will for its conversion into a public museum upon his death, apparently for the sole purpose of irritating his children. From what I was able to make out on the Web site, the bulk of the Vaughn Collection had been acquired by Sebastian, Lord Vaughn — my Vaughn — who seemed to have made his way across the Continent by buying up everything in his path.
A cover for other activities? Or merely the acquisitive instincts of a born connoisseur? I intended to find out. At least, I hoped to find out. Whether I would or not was another story entirely.
I hadn't been entirely honest with my new buddy, the receptionist. It hadn't been the archivist I had spoken with on the phone the day before, but a sort of assistant. He had sounded utterly baffled by my wanting to visit the collection. This did not inspire me with confidence.
The archives, he had informed me, around a yawn, were mostly documents establishing provenance of the artwork and all that sort of thing. There were, he allowed, some family papers still floating around. Yes, he thought there might be some from the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. He supposed if I really wanted to come see them…The implication, of course, being that any sane person would rather spend a Saturday afternoon watching a cricket match, or watching paint dry, which amounts to much the same thing, as far as I've been able to tell. The whole conversation had been pretty much the professional equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and chanting, "Nobody's home!"
Between the receptionist and the guy I had spoken to on the phone, I got the impression that the Vaughn Collection wasn't awfully keen on visitors. Which is a little counterproductive when you're a museum. I was fervently hoping that the archivist's assistant's attitude (I dare you to say that three times fast) was born more of laziness than of the fact that there just plain wasn't anything there.
I did have at least one other option. The Vaughns hadn't donated their family papers to the British Library, or printed up one of those nineteenth-century compilations with all the good bits expurgated. They did still own a rather impressive family seat up in the wilds of Northumberland, currently operating as a leisure center for corporate trainings — the sort of retreats that involve dumping people in a lake and giving them points for how efficiently they get out of it again and other such acts of socially sanctioned torture. The family documents might still be housed up there, but even with the miracles of modern transportation, Northumberland was a ways away. Depending on how things went with Colin…