The Deception of the Emerald Ring (38 page)

The clock on the mantel obligingly confirmed his observation by striking two.

Jane rose, her curls, which she had neglected to remove, bobbing coyly around her face. "You'll see Letty home, of course."

"Of course," replied Geoff, at his most bland.

"I'll call for the carriage," said Jane.

"And I," said Miss Gwen, sweeping out in Jane's wake, "shall seek my perch."

Alone once again in the little green parlor, Letty and Geoff exchanged a slightly sheepish look.

"She heard the bat comment, didn't she?" said Letty guiltily, rising to stand next to Geoff.

"She hears everything." Geoff's mind did not appear to be on Miss Gwen. "There is one thing we failed to address."

"Aside from Miss Gwen's sleeping habits?" said Letty, trying to keep her tone light and failing miserably.

Geoff frowned. "I didn't want to alarm you in front of the others, but it might be unwise for you to return to your own lodgings tonight."

"Emily's murderer," said Letty heavily, returning to earth with a thump. With all the talk of mimes and bats, it had been all too easy to forget how deadly the game they played actually was. "We don't know that he recognized me."

Geoff crossed his arms, looking about as malleable as a chunk of granite. "That is not a chance I want to take."

Feeling absurdly gratified, Letty suggested, "I could ask Jane and Miss Gwen if I could stay here, with them."

"With Miss Gwen stalking about in her nightcap? You might be scarred for life."

"Even Miss Gwen's nightcap must be preferable to the Black Tulip."

"I wouldn't wager on it." Clasping his hands behind his back, Geoff strolled to the dresser, examining a scene of Dublin Castle inexpertly painted on a lumpy piece of stoneware. "I have a better suggestion."

"What might that be?" Letty stayed where she was, rooted to the center of the room.

Geoff slowly turned from his contemplation of the domestic arts to face Letty.

"Come home," he said simply. "With me."

Thursday night, wine bottle clutched in the crook of my arm, I trudged right back down Brompton Road.

I hadn't deliberately decided to revisit the site of Tuesday night's humiliation. It was pure ill luck in the form of geography. Pammy's mother lived in the Boltons. Directionally challenged as I am, the only way I knew to get there was via the South Kensington tube station, straight down Brompton Road. I suppose I could have taken a cab, but that smacked of cowardice—not to mention extravagance. A student budget doesn't run to much in the way of extras.

Passing the ill-fated Indian restaurant, I couldn't resist taking a tiny peek through the glass door. The bar area was crowded—it was just about that time of the evening—but there was no familiar tall blond braced against the bar. Not that I had expected there to be. Or that I cared. I had put that all behind me. All the flutters, all the euphoria, all the despair, all the ridiculous overanalyzing had been nothing more than a silly crush, undoubtedly brought on by boredom. As Pammy liked to keep pointing out to me, I'd been long overdue for a romantic peccadillo. Was it any surprise that my restless imagination had seized upon the first reasonably attractive man to come along?

Oh, well, I told myself soothingly. So I had behaved like an idiot. It was all over, and there was no harm done—except to my pride, and no one would ever see that but me, anyway.

Upon my return home from the Indian restaurant Tuesday night, I had plopped down at my little kitchen table in my little basement flat, and painstakingly dissected the entire course of my acquaintance with Colin. Not the bits that happened in my head, not the agonized phone staring or the gooey-eyed naming of our children, but all of the actual interactions, from our first meeting in his aunt's living room just about two weeks ago.

Had it really only been two weeks? It had. I counted, and then I counted again to make sure. Going through those two weeks, I came to the relieved conclusion that while I might know that I'd made an absolute idiot of myself over him, there was no reason for Colin to know. Aside from that slight puckering incident in the old medieval cloister, I had never said or done anything to indicate more than a friendly interest. And it had been very dark out there. He might not even have noticed. I was safe.

And I never, ever had to see him again.

I did intend to call Mrs. Selwick-Alderly. Eventually. But just because I was in contact with his aunt didn't necessarily mean bumping into Colin.

In the meantime, I was rather proud of everything I had accomplished over the past week without any Selwick intercession. True, it was their collection that had pointed me in the right direction, but the Alsworthy/Alsdale line of research was entirely my own, and it was paying off in spades.

It was nice to know something that Colin Selwick didn't.

The death of Emily Gilchrist opened all sorts of interesting possibilities. I wondered how many other raven-haired spies were roaming France and London, unremembered by commentators. And why would they? Who would read anything into—what had Geoff called it?—a chance quirk of physiognomy. That wasn't exactly the phrase (I had it in my notes, back in my little flat, backed up on three disks, just in case), but it was the same idea. I know historians aren't supposed to fall in love with their own theories, but I was head over heels about the notion of an entire band of female French agents, like a nineteenth-century Charlie's Angels. Only better.

It made the Pink Carnation's organization look positively humdrum.

Who, then, was the Black Tulip? Mr. Throtwottle was the obvious choice, but given all the women running about dressed as men, I wouldn't put it past Throtwottle to be yet another black-haired woman playing a trouser role. Noses like that didn't just grow naturally.

As for Lord Vaughn Even bearing in mind the precedent of Monsieur d'Eon, there was little chance of his being a woman. But I didn't buy his complicity with Jane, any more than Geoff did. Whatever Lord Vaughn did, he did for himself, not for king or country or even the rare combination of a keen mind and pretty face.

Vaughn as spymaster? The idea had some potential. He had known the marquise for a long time and there was that matter of a missing wife. The marquise? Or another black-haired agent? I had no proof, only hunches. Of all the actors concerned, Vaughn lacked motive. Related to three-quarters of the peerage of the British Isles, he had the most to lose in prestige and cold, hard cash if the French succeeded. There had been French noblemen, including Josephine Bonaparte's first husband, who had espoused the revolutionary cause, weighting ideology above their own self-interest—but that had been before the advent of the guillotine. And it just didn't seem like Vaughn.

For a time, hunched over my favorite desk in the British Library that afternoon, I had toyed with the notion of an elaborate double-fake. It would be a twist worthy of the Black Tulip if the marquise were indeed the mastermind. A truly clever spy might deliberately choose women of her own coloring to set up as decoys, like the scene at the end of The Thomas Crown Affair, with all those men roaming the halls of the Met in identical bowler hats.

Unfortunately, subsequent events made that theory unlikely, to say the least.

It was always disheartening when the historical record failed to comply with my pet theories. Didn't they realize that my way was much more interesting?

The farther down Brompton Road I went, the more deserted it got. It was a cold, damp night, with a chill that bit through to the bone, the sort of night that must have sent the early Britons huddling around the fires in their huts, concluding that blue paint was no substitute for good, strong wool. It made me understand why the Pilgrims had taken ship to the New World. Forget the Lower School textbook stuff about religious freedom; they were probably just yearning for a beach. Tropical sand, some palm trees, sunshine Instead, they got turkeys and Wal-Mart. And religious freedom, so I guess it wasn't a total loss in the end.

Wet leaves caked the ground, plastering themselves damply to the bottom of my shoes. They squelched eerily underfoot, like some watery monster out of the late-late-night movie. In honor of Pammy's mother, I had abandoned my habitual knee-high boots for a pair of pointy-toed pumps. In the flimsy shoes, my feet felt alarmingly open to the elements. But one didn't tread on Pammy's mother's carpets in boots, even if they were Jimmy Choos.

Reaching the end of the road, I turned in to the quiet crescent where Pammy's mother had lived since her remove from New York. It was an exclusive enclave of thirty Victorian mansions, all discreetly tucked away behind high white walls, bristling with enough alarm systems and security cameras to stock Fort Knox.

Pammy's mother had never worked in all the time I had known them, but she had made something of a career out of marrying well. Hubby Number One, the starter husband, had been long gone by the time I arrived on the scene, and therefore of little interest. Hubby Number Two had provided Pammy and a not-inconsiderable chunk of his legendary art collection, the latter in reparation for having had the poor taste to take up with a younger model—before officially initiating divorce proceedings with Pammy's mother. It was Hubby Number Three (after her American adventure, Pammy's mother had switched back to her own countrymen) who had contributed the house in the Boltons, along with a charming little property in Dorset, where Pammy's mother presided in the summer months, much in the manner of Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid at Le Petite Trianon.

As far as I knew, there was no Number Four on the radar screen just yet, but general wisdom (i.e., Pammy and my mother) held that it was just a matter of time.

Letting myself in through the gate, I waved at the security camera and started up the walk toward the front door, discreetly set back among tastefully landscaped topiaries. In the dark and wet, the shrubs looked like hulking beasts guarding the door, a Cerberus for either side. But the drawing room windows were golden with light, and even through the closed door I could hear the muted residue of bubbly chatter.

American chatter. I felt an unaccustomed swell of fondness for my compatriots. At home, I pined after things English like a parrot for the fjords, but after a few months of England—and Englishmen—there was something rather nice about a cacophony of brash American voices butchering the language as only we know how.

All in all, I was feeling decidedly sanguine as I bounced up the three steps to the front door. Pammy's mother wasn't exactly the warm, motherly sort, but there was the comfort that came of having known her for absolutely ever (or since I was five, which amounted to much the same thing). She was a known quantity. After dealing with strangers, there's a lot to be said for that. Once you've gotten Marshmallow Fluff all over someone's Prada bag, there's not much else that can go wrong.

Relinquishing my raincoat and bottle to the maid who opened the door, I ventured into the drawing room. It wasn't a big room, but it was cleverly arranged to provide the illusion of space, papered in textured pale blue and hung with Pammy's father's guilt offerings: one Degas, two Monets, and a smattering of lesser impressionists. His Renoirs were in the back parlor, which was paneled in Victorian walnut (original to the house) and as darkly traditional as the front room was airy, linked to the decorating scheme by the use of the same shade of blue in the accents on the upholstery.

I could see Mrs. Harrington holding court on a sand-and-blue sofa in the front room, chatting with a couple I didn't know, but whose voices marked them as fellow refugees on foreign shores. We were going to be just shy of twenty for dinner, Pammy had told me, and it looked like the gang was mostly here. The crowd seemed fairly well split between Pammy's friends and her mother's, a nice sample of the American expat community in various stages of development.

Pammy's mother's friends were of the banker-and-wife variety, men in suits or blazers with wives about a third of their bulk and/or age, with shoes even pointier than mine. As for Pammy's friends, only one guy sported a blazer. It was constructed of orange velvet with elaborate piping, and boasted a faux flower in the buttonhole. I had no doubt that, if asked, he would refer to it as ironic.

A bar had been set up in the back room, appropriately located beneath a painting of a frowsy Parisian barmaid, a depiction made acceptable for the drawing room with time and a famous name to sanctify it. I spotted Pammy there, wearing a belted sweater with fur bristling five inches deep from her collar and the hem of her skirt. Knowing Pammy, the animal-skin theme was probably in honor of Thanksgiving. I was just glad she hadn't insisted everyone arrive dressed in tasteful ensembles of wampum and turkey feathers.

Waving at her, I started across the room—and stopped short when I saw just who was standing by the bar next to her.

Oh, no. No, no, no. She wouldn't.

She had.

Next to me, I could hear orange blazer man drawling, "An ironic reconstruction of an iconic representation "

All the I's and R's blurred in my ears into one general buzz. Maybe my ears were going. More to the point, maybe my eyes were going.

No such luck.

Detaching herself from her companions, Pammy bounded across the room, arms flung wide, a miraculous feat of balance considering the nearly full glass in one hand. "Ellie!"

I wasn't hallucinating. What I was, was the victim of an interfering, intermeddling—

"Pammy!" Flinging my arms around her, I muttered, "I could kill you. What is he doing here?"

I have to give Pammy some points; she didn't try to pretend that she had no idea what I meant.

Instead, she smiled a big cat-and-canary grin, glancing over her shoulder at Colin, who was chatting with a couple of Pammy's work friends and looking unfairly dishy. "Well, if Mustafa won't come to the mountain "

"That's Mohammed," I said through clenched teeth.

Pammy waved a hand. "Whatever."

"I'm not interested."

"Sure you're not."

"I'm not!" I insisted.