Settling myself down at the more stable of the two tables, I reached for the first packet in the 1800 box, gingerly unwinding the string that bound the letters. There's nothing like peering into someone else's correspondence. You never know what you might find. Coded messages, plotting skullduggery, passionate letters from a foreign amour, invitations to a late assignation…These turned out to fit none of the categories above. They were all from Vaughn's mother.
What was this with everyone having a mother all of a sudden?
Shoving my hair back behind my ears, I skimmed through the letter on the top of the pile. After one letter, I decided I liked Vaughn's mother. By the end of three, I really liked Vaughn's mother, but reading about Vaughn's spinster cousin Portia who had run off with a footman ("She might at least have picked a handsome one," opined Lady Vaughn) wasn't getting me any nearer to ascertaining the identity of the Black Tulip, so I reluctantly put the pile aside for future perusal and dug back into the box.
I toyed with the notion of Lady Vaughn herself as the Black Tulip, spinning her webs from the safety of Northumberland as she sent out her minions to do her dirty work. Sadly, it didn't seem the least bit probable. From her letters, Lady Vaughn was far too busy bullying the vicar and terrifying her family to be bothered with international espionage. Another great opportunity wasted.
I flipped quickly through the usual detritus of a busy life. There were love letters (using that term broadly); invitations to routs and balls and Venetian breakfasts; an extensive correspondence with his bankers (which generally seemed to boil down to "send more money"), and, at the very bottom of the box, tucked away where one might never have noticed it, a nondescript black book.
It wasn't a little black book in the modern sense. There was no list of addresses, conveniently labeled, MEMBERS OF THE LEAGUE OF THE BLACK TULIP (LONDON BRANCH). But the reality was nearly as good. I had found Lord Vaughn's appointment book. All of Lord Vaughn's movements, recorded in his own hand. His writing was just like his appearance, elegant, but with a sharp edge to it. I paged rapidly through it until I hit 1803, watching the place-names change from the exotic (Messina, Palermo, Lisbon) to the familiar (Hatchards, Angelo's, Manton's). Vaughn, I noted, had had a particularly close and personal relationship with his tailor; he saw him nearly once a week.
I was ruffling lazily through, wondering idly if I could make something out of those tailor appointments (there had, after all, been a round of spies rousted out of a clothiers establishment the year before), when a familiar name struck my eye: Sibley Court.
Sibley Court…I knew I had encountered that name before. After a moment staring into space, it finally clicked. Sibley Court was the family seat of the Viscounts Pinchingdale.
I bolted upright in my uncomfortable chair. Viscount Pinchingdale, at least the Viscount Pinchingdale in possession of the title in 1803, had been second in command of the League of the Purple Gentian, from which he moved on to aiding in the endeavors of the Pink Carnation. He was no fan of Lord Vaughn.
What might the potential Black Tulip be doing at the family seat of a known agent of England?
Well, that was a silly question. Spying, one presumed.
I would never know one way or another unless I read on. The entry was terse, but it was enough for a start. Especially once I recognized the names involved, including that, prominently featured, of Miss Jane Wooliston, otherwise known (although not to many) as the Pink Carnation.
14 Oct., 1803. Sibley Ct., Gloucestershire. Immured in Elizabethan horror in G'shire. Forced to play hunt the slipper with Dorrington and wife. Selwick going on about days of glory in France. Interesting proposition made to me by Miss Wooliston…
Chapter One
Sing in me, Muse, of that man of many turnings…
October, 1803
Sibley Court, Gloucestershire
Sebastian, Lord Vaughn, stood beside a rusting suit of armor, a dusty glass of claret in hand, wondering for the tenth time what evil demon had possessed him to accept an invitation to the house party at Sibley Court. It had to be a demon; Vaughn held no truck with deities.
The house, which had been closed for well over a decade, was a masterpiece of Elizabethan handicraft — in other words, an offense to anyone with classical sensibilities. Vaughn regarded a series of carved panels with distaste. The repetition of Tudor roses had undoubtedly been intended as a heavy-handed compliment to the monarch. The tapestries were even worse than the paneling, lugubrious depictions of the darker moments of the Old Testament, enlivened only by a rather buxom Eve, who seemed to be juggling her apples rather than eating them.
Sibley Court had slumbered among its memories and dust motes since the death of the current Viscount Pinchingdale's father and had only just been hastily opened for the accommodation of the viscount and his new bride. Vaughn had no doubt that the new viscountess would soon have the ancient flagstones gleaming. She was the managing sort. So far, she had already managed her guests through supper, a game of hunt the slipper, and an abortive attempt at blindman's buff that had come to an abrupt halt when the hoodsman, one Mr. Miles Dorrington, had blundered into a suit of armor under the delusion that it might be his wife, bringing the entire edifice crashing down and nearly decapitating the dowager Lady Pinchingdale in the process.
Undaunted by her brush with death, the dowager Lady Pinchingdale and her newest relation by marriage, Mrs. Alsworthy, appeared bent on engaging in Britain's Silliest Matron contest. So far, the dowager Lady Pinchingdale was ahead four swoons to three. The only one of the lot who seemed to have two brain cells to rub together was the long-suffering Mr. Alsworthy. He had proved his intelligence by promptly disappearing just after their arrival.
Between the dowager and his fellow guests, Vaughn was considering a spot of decapitation himself. Starting with his own head. It was beginning to ache damnably from the combination of inferior claret and worse conversation.
Nursery parties — for that was what the gathering at Sibley Court felt like — weren't usually in Vaughn's line. He ran with an older, faster set, men who knew the way of the world and women who knew the way of those men. They played deep, they spoke in triple entendres, and they left their bedroom doors open. In contrast, the crowd at Sibley Court was sickeningly unsophisticated. Part of that insipid breed spawned by the new century, Pinchingdale's set uttered words like "King" and "country," and had the poor taste to mean them. No one dueled anymore; they were all too busy gadding about France disguised as flowers. Or named after them, which was nearly as bad. Lord Richard Selwick, currently occupied in propping up the enormous Elizabethan mantelpiece, had only recently been unmasked as the notorious Purple Gentian, a flower as obscure as it was unpronounceable. The youth of England were fast running out of botanical monikers. What would they do next, venture into vegetables? No doubt he would soon be forced to listen to dazzling accounts of the adventures of the Orange Aubergine. It all showed a marked lack of good ton. Vaughn might be less than a decade older than his host, but among this company he felt as ancient as the tapestries lining the walls.
The blame for his presence fell squarely on the woman standing next to him, looking deceptively demure in a high-necked gown of pale blue muslin embroidered with small pink flowers about the neck and hem. With her smooth brown hair threaded with matching ribbons and her gloved hands folded neatly around a glass of ratafia, Miss Jane Wooliston looked more like a prosperous squire's daughter than that many-petaled flower of mystery, the Pink Carnation. It was her summons that had sent Vaughn jolting through the back roads of Gloucestershire clear off the edge of the earth to this godforsaken relic of Bonnie Olde Englande. And he wasn't even sharing her bed.