At the moment, Jane was occupied in examining a dark-haired girl who posed becomingly in front of the light of a twisted branch of candles. Like Jane, the girl was tall, tall enough to carry off the long-lined classical fashions swept across the Channel by the revolution, with the sort of finely boned features that showed to good effect in the uncertain light of the faltering candles. But there the resemblance ended. There was nothing the least bit demure about the girl across the room. The light struck blue glints in the smoothly arranged mass of her black hair and reduced the fine fabric of her muslin gown to little more than a wisp.
"She is lovely," remarked Jane, in a considering sort of tone.
Lovely wasn't precisely the word Vaughn would have chosen. It implied a sweetness that was utterly lacking in the self-possessed stance of the woman in white. Luscious didn't serve, either; it suggested Rubenesque curves and dimpled flesh, whereas the woman by the candles had the perfectly carved lines of a marble statue. Wanton? No. There was a discipline in both her straight-backed posture and the proud set of her head that gave the lie to the suggestive cling of her dress. Whatever her revealing gown might have been meant to convey, to the astute observer she was more Artemis than Aphrodite.
There was one word, however, that Vaughn had no difficulty at all applying: notorious.
Vaughn hadn't followed the Pinchingdale Peccadillo (as the scandal sheets had unimaginatively dubbed it), but it had been impossible to avoid learning the basic outline of the story. It had entirely eclipsed Percy Ponsonby's latest fall from a window as the gossip of choice as the Season lurched to a close. Attempting to elope with the famed beauty, Miss Mary Alsworthy, the besotted young Viscount Pinchingdale had somehow erred and managed to dash off with the wrong sister. Suffering from a foolish adherence to propriety, Pinchingdale had marched up to the altar with the compromised sister, one Laetitia, who was chiefly famed for boasting the largest collection of freckles this side of Edinburgh. It was the sort of absurd bedroom farce that couldn't fail to appeal to the jaded palettes of London's bored elite.
In the end, the hubbub had died down, as it always did. London's elite had trickled away to their country estates, to amuse themselves sneering at the local assemblies and irritating the wildlife (sometimes the two pursuits were nearly indistinguishable), while the new Viscount and Viscountess Pinchingdale wisely removed themselves for an extended wedding journey — or so the story went. The genuine version, to which Vaughn was reluctantly privy, was a good deal more complicated, involving spies, Irish rebels, and exploding masonry, from all of which the new viscount and viscountess had emerged more pleased with each other than otherwise. In fact, they had returned from Ireland rather sickeningly smitten with each other, Lord Pinchingdale's prior passion for the elder Miss Alsworthy conveniently forgotten.
Vaughn raised his quizzing glass and ran it along the elegant sweep of Miss Alsworthy's neck, cunningly accentuated by three long curls that fell from hair swept into a knot in the Grecian style. Standing in the light of a branch of candles, her sheer muslin gown left very little of the elegant lines beneath to the imagination.
A woman would have to be either a saint or a fool to harbor a rival beneath her own roof. Especially a rival who looked like that.
"If I were the current Viscountess Pinchingdale, I would not be overjoyed by Miss Alsworthy's presence."
"Letty's strength is as the strength of ten," replied Jane whimsically.
"Because her heart is pure? Never place your trust in aphorisms, Miss Wooliston. They are more for effect than substance."
The same, he reflected, could be said of the lovely Miss Mary Alsworthy. Some men had an eye for horses; Vaughn had one for women. No matter how fine a collection of points Mary Alsworthy might have, there was a glint to her eye that foretold an uncomfortable ride. It didn't take an expert to tell that she was highly strung and all too aware of her own good looks. That sort tended to be damnably expensive — not to mention possessed of an unfortunate tendency to buck the rider. He had encountered her kind before.
"Well?" inquired Jane. "What do think?"
"I think," he said deliberately, "that if you have dragged me out to this inhospitable corner of the earth on nothing more than a bout of romantic whimsy, I shall be entirely unamused."
"My dear lord Vaughn, I never matchmake." Jane smiled to herself as though at a private memory. "Well, very rarely."
Vaughn arranged his eyebrows in their most forbidding position, the one that had sent a generation of valets scurrying for cover. "Don't think to number me among your exceptions."
"I wouldn't dare."
From the woman who had invaded Bonaparte's bedchamber to leave him a posy of pink carnations, that pledge was singularly unconvincing. "I believe there are very few things you wouldn't dare."
Jane was too busy scrutinizing Miss Alsworthy to bother to reply. "Have you noticed anything particular about her?"
"Only," said Lord Vaughn dryly, "what any man would be expected to notice."
Jane tilted her head to one side. "She doesn't remind you of anyone? Her skin…her hair?"
He had been doing his best not to notice the resemblance, but it was impossible to ignore. That sweep of ebony hair, the willowy form, the graceful white dress were all too familiar. She had worn white, too. White, to draw attention to her long black hair, straight as silk and just as fine.
It had been more than a decade ago, in a room all lined with glass, from the long doors leading out to the garden to the tall mirrors of Venetian glass that had lined the walls, cold and bright. That was how he had first seen her, sparkling by the light of the candles, flirting, laughing, Galatea remade in ebony and ivory. Every man present had been panting to play Pygmalion. He had been no different. He had been young, bored, running rapidly out of dissipations with which to divert himself. And then she had turned to him, holding out one white hand in greeting — and challenge.
There had been a ruby, that first night, strung on black velvet so that it nestled tightly against the hollow of her throat. Sullen red welling against white, white skin…
Vaughn let his quizzing glass drop to his chest. "The resemblance is purely a superficial one. A matter of coloring, nothing more."
"That might be enough."
"No," said Vaughn flatly.
"If," said Jane, ignoring him as only Jane dared, "someone were to speak to her; if someone were to suggest…"
"Ah." Vaughn's lips compressed, as the whole fiasco suddenly fell into place. "That's what you want of me. To play Hermes for you."
"We can't all be Zeus," Jane said apologetically.
Prolonged exposure to Jane was enough to make anyone take to Bacchus. "I'm afraid I've left my winged shoes at home. Forgive me for suggesting the obvious, but why not approach the girl yourself? Why drag me into this fiasco?"
"Because," said Jane very simply, "I don't want her to know who I am."
Vaughn regarded her with reluctant appreciation. Lulled by the peaceful symmetry of her fine-boned face, it was easy to forget that that pink and white complexion masked a mind for strategy that put Bonaparte to shame. It seemed unlikely in the extreme that Miss Mary Alsworthy was a French agent. Her interests, thus far, had tended more to millinery than politics. But hats — and all those other furbelows that tricked out the willowy forms of society's beauties — were expensive. The identity of the Pink Carnation was a commodity for which more than one person would be willing to pay dearly.