The Deception of the Emerald Ring (16 page)

"How do I look?" Emily demanded, swishing her pale pink skirts.

"Lovely," answered Letty, submitting to being towed into the drawing room, where women in pale gowns mingled with redcoated officers and dandies in gaudily colored frock coats. For such a butterfly creature, Emily had a surprisingly strong grip. "Really."

"Mere physical appearance," announced Emily's guardian, Mr. Throtwottle, repressively, stalking over the threshold behind them, "is a matter of extreme indifference to those who devote their lives to the cultivation of the mind."

Anyone could see that Mr. Throtwottle practiced what he preached in terms of dress. His clothes were a rusty black, his frock coat outmoded, his linen decidedly musty. The buckles on his shoes were so old that whatever paste jewels might have originally resided within the frames had long since fallen out, leaving only empty prongs in their place. Letty couldn't imagine a more inappropriate guardian for the flibbertigibbet Emily. Neither, apparently, could Mr. Throtwottle, who had gratefully handed Emily off to Letty for the duration of the voyage. By the time they had reached Irish shores, Letty's head rang with exclamation marks and swam with superlatives. Next to Emily's determined girlishness, Letty felt about a hundred years old.

Letty reached to straighten one of the pink flowers Emily had twined into a chaplet on top of her curls. "The flowers are a nice touch."

"Oh, thank you!" Emily beamed. "I wore them in honor of the Pink Carnation. He's so dreadfully romantic, don't you think?"

Letty had to confess that she had never given the matter serious thought. She found the whole topic of spies vaguely silly, at least the sort of spies who had their exploits written up in the illustrated papers and were dubbed romantic by empty-headed girls. Really, some of them were no better than highwaymen, constantly attention-seeking. One would think that a good spy would do his best to remain inconspicuous, rather than indulge in needless dramatics with black cloaks and mocking notes.

"I've read everything there is to read about him," said Emily dreamily, illustrating Letty's point admirably. "They say that he's a dispossessed French nobleman, flung out into the world. But I think he must be English, don't you, Mrs. Alsdale?"

"I haven't the slightest notion," said Letty, who was saved from replying further by the appearance of a middle-aged woman wearing a gown far too young for her years. The white contrasted unfortunately with the high color in her cheeks, and the soft muslin clung unforgivingly to her ample form.

Introducing herself as their hostess, she said eagerly, "I do hope you are enjoying my little party."

"It is as the poet says: 'And to Arcadia I go,'" intoned Mr. Throtwottle solemnly.

"Don't you mean 'et in Arcadia ego'?" Letty asked. Her father had a habit of trotting out Latin aphorisms, largely because it drove her mother, who couldn't understand a word of it, utterly mad.

"Of course." Mr. Throtwottle's arched nostrils quivered briefly in her direction. "Isn't that what I just said? I translate from the Latin, of course," he added, for the benefit of the unenlightened, in which group he generously included Letty.

Mrs. Lanergan clasped her beringed hands to her bosom. "Such a joy it is to have a man of learning by one's side! Mr. Throtwottle, you simply must visit again."

"I certainly shall, my good woman. But now, if I may, I will seek out the solitude of your library."

Mrs. Lanergan's brow furrowed. "There is the colonel's book room ."

"Would it be too much to hope that you possess a copy of the Consolations of Eusebius?"

"Boethius," muttered Letty, who had alphabetized her father's library no fewer than three times before finally giving up.

"Bless you," said Mr. Throtwottle, offering her his handkerchief.

Mr. Throtwottle departed for quieter regions, while Mrs. Lanergan chattered on beside her, pointing out other guests to an enthralled Emily. Et in Arcadia ego seemed an inopportune sort of phrase with which to begin an evening of revelry, signifying, as it did, the presence of death and decay even in the midst of life's pleasures, like the snake twining through the apple-laden leaves in the Garden of Eden. Perhaps, thought Letty, Mr. Throtwottle was tonight's snake in the garden, a grim figure in his rusty black as he stalked among the party guests in their gauzy gowns and bright regimentals. Put a scythe in his hand, and he would look just like the picture of avenging Death in an allegorical woodcut.

The frivolous young couple just in front of him rounded out the morality tale beautifully, decided Letty. Aside from their more modern costume, they looked exactly like a Renaissance painter's image of an amorous shepherd and his lass in the classic pose of seducer and seduced, her head tilted up toward him, his hand on the back of her chair as he leaned to whisper in her ear behind the fragile screen of her fan, his dark head bent close to her fair one.

Whatever he whispered must have pressed the bounds of propriety, because the girl with the silver-gilt curls furled her fan and rapped her suitor sternly on the shoulder. Stepping neatly out of range, he captured the hand with the fan—and Letty caught her first full view of his face.

The room felt very close, and the band that fastened beneath her breasts very, very tight. The other guests pressed around her like birds of prey, too loud, too shrill, too near. The room was too hot, the scents too oppressive, and her eyes ached with the smoke of the candles. She wanted, desperately, to be back in London. Anywhere but here. Even tea with Mrs. Ponsonby would be preferable. Anything would be preferable to watching her husband kiss the hand of another woman.

All of Letty's daydreams charred and shriveled, like a posy fallen too near the fire.

If only there were an innocent explanation! Letty toyed with the stock characters of fiction, the unexpected double, the long-departed twin. For a moment, the latter almost seemed believable. The features might be the same, but this man, with his too-knowing eyes and his leering lips, had nothing in common with the contemplative man who had so tenderly paid court to her sister. But Lord Pinchingdale was an only child. She knew that, because she had overheard him telling Mary about it once, what seemed like a very long time ago, in a London ballroom. His father, older brother, and two younger siblings had all been carried away by the same virulent attack of smallpox when he was eight.

The girl couldn't be a long-lost sister or an Irish cousin. One didn't lean that close to whisper into the ear of a cousin, or smile at a long-lost sister in that slumberous, heavy-lidded way. Every movement screamed seduction. He had never looked at her like that, or even at Mary. With Mary, he had always been respectful, almost reverent, never with that challenging sexuality simmering just near the surface. It made Letty squirm with embarrassment, and something else, something that she didn't care to analyze.

Across the breadth of the drawing room, her husband was lifting the blond girl's hand to his lips. He paused in that pose, toying with the circumference of the sapphire bracelet that circled her wrist, running one finger around the jeweled length.

Letty's own hands clenched into fists. She could feel the Pinchingdale betrothal ring, the only concrete proof of her marriage, boring into her palm. On the boat, she had turned it around on her finger, wondering about the man who had given it to her, and what it would mean to make a true marriage with him. She had been naively, blindly optimistic, taking the ugly ring as a tangible token of things to come. Of promises given and meant. Oh, she knew that he didn't want to be married to her—it was hard to miss—but she had thought him an honorable man, not the sort to dishonor his vows a week after the wedding. Vows were vows, after all.

How could she have been such a fool? Spinning pretty daydreams while her husband of less than a week chased after the first skirt that caught his fancy.

Letty writhed in an agony of wounded pride. She remembered the endless conversations she had rehearsed in her head on the voyage over, the apologies she had made to him, the way his handsome face turned from condemnation to respect as she explained what had really happened that fateful night. Shaking his head with self-reproach, he would apologize for having misjudged her, and apologize again for having run off (in Letty's daydreams, he did a great deal of apologizing), pressing her hand between his and declaring that if he had known what she really was, he would have stayed. Sometimes, when Emily was fast asleep in the next bunk, and the ship rocked gently on the tide, and anything seemed possible, he would even lift her hand to his lips for a gentle kiss.

As Letty watched, Lord Pinchingdale kissed, not the woman's hand, but one gloved finger, turning the simple gesture into an act of homage so erotically charged that Letty blushed just to witness it, and more than one woman in the vicinity resorted to her fan. The blonde wagged her head and simpered in a way that was more invitation than discouragement.

Letty felt ill in a way that had nothing to do with the over-spiced mutton she had eaten for dinner.

"Who is that?" she asked Mrs. Lanergan, doing her best to imbue her voice with nothing more than polite interest. "The girl with the blond hair."

Always delighted to assist where gossip might be had, Mrs. Lanergan leaned forward, her bosom straining precariously against her décolletage as she peered past Letty.

"Oh, that's Miss Gilly Fairley. Quite an heiress, they say—and a beauty, too! The woman with her is her aunt, Mrs. Ernestine Grimstone." Mrs. Lanergan indicated a dark-garbed woman who sported a ferocious scowl. The scowl, Letty was pleased to see, was trained directly on Lord Pinchingdale. At least someone in the room showed some sense. Lowering her voice slightly, Mrs. Lanergan added, "Between the three of us, she's a cold fish, that one. Or do I mean a sour grape?"

"Don't tease, Mrs. Lanergan!" protested Emily, sweeping aside Mrs. Lanergan's culinary metaphors with a shake of her dark curls. "Who is the gentleman?"

Under the circumstances, Letty found the use of the word "gentleman" decidedly inapt.

"That," said Mrs. Lanergan importantly, "is Lord Pinchingdale, newly come from London. And to my little soiree!"

"I take it that Lord Pinchingdale is, as yet, unwed?" The words cracked off Letty's tongue like buckshot. She wondered fleetingly what the penalties for bigamy might be. Mrs. Grimstone didn't seem the sort to let her charge settle for anything less than matrimony.

Unsuited to nuance, Mrs. Lanergan answered the question but ignored the tone. "Oh, quite! And a most eligible gentleman, too. I hear he has a splendid estate in Gloucestershire, and an income of no less than forty thousand a year. Although, from the looks of it, he'll not remain a bachelor long," she added, with a smiling nod at Miss Fairley, who was fluttering her unfairly long lashes with enough determination to set up a squall in the Irish Sea.

Letty set her chin and tried to convince herself that her husband's blatant defection didn't matter to her in the slightest. How could it, when he had never been hers to lose? The only hold she had on him was words spoken under duress. From what she had witnessed, she didn't want any hold on him, under duress or otherwise. Miss Fairley was welcome to him, infidelities, betrothal ring, and all. A pity there wasn't some way Letty could just sign Lord Pinchingdale over to her, as one might any other kind of property for which one no longer had any use, like a piece of barren land, or a horse with a tendency to buck.

"Don't despair, my dear," said Mrs. Lanergan, patting Emily reassuringly on the arm. "We have another unmarried peer present. He came over on his own private yacht. Just fancy! He's a bit older than Lord Pinchingdale, but still a very handsome man for all that."

Letty resolutely turned her attention back to her companions, away from Lord Pinchingdale's "handsome" face. He was a rake, a scoundrel, a cad, a bounder—there weren't enough words in the English language to plumb the depths of his vileness. And she didn't care. Not one bit.

But no matter how hard she tried not to look, all she could see was her husband, breathing amorous accolades into another woman's ear.

* * *

"THEY HAVE FIVE HUNDRED MUSKETS being stored at the depot on Marshal Lane," the notorious Lord Pinchingdale murmured seductively to the beauty simpering beside him. "And they've ordered one hundred pairs of pocket pistols and three hundred blunderbusses."

Miss Gilly Fairley plied her fan so that her silver-gilt curls wafted in the resulting breeze, the shining strands glittering like a web of diamonds in the candlelight. Beneath the cunningly contrived blond wig, not a strand of Miss Jane Wooliston's own stick-straight brown hair slipped out. In the flighty creature arrayed on a low settee next to Geoff, no trace remained of the chilly beauty who had excited the admiration of the dandies at Mme. Bonaparte's salons little more than a week before. Diana, they had called her, paying tribute to her reserve and her classical features alike, as the poets among them composed odes to the symmetry of her face and the gravity in her gray eyes.

There was nothing the least bit antique about Miss Gilly Fairley, whose cheeks were pink with the excitement of a party, and whose eyes were rounded in perpetual circles of naive wonder. Through the magic of her paint pots, Jane had somehow contrived to make her face appear rounder, her fine-bridged nose broader. The ribbons fluttering about her face and a careful application of shadow along her lids convincingly tinted her eyes with blue, and rendered her entirely unrecognizable, even to those who had known her before. It had taken Geoff several moments before he realized that the gushing creature who descended on him in a welter of ruffles was, in fact, the poised young lady with whom he had plotted to release his best friend from the clutches of the French Ministry of Police a mere two months before.

It was, thought Geoff in sincere admiration, a masterful transformation, all the more impressive for being so understated. Over the past two days, his admiration had only grown. Jane and her chaperone had arrived a week before, and they had already amassed an impressive dossier of treasonous activities.