"And you may address me as Miss Gwen," announced Mrs. Grimstone, whose Christian name was supposed to be Ernestine, which, as far as Letty could tell, bore no discernible relation to Gwen, by any stretch of linguistic acrobatics. "However, you may do so only in private, when there is no danger of anyone overhearing, or you will jeopardize the entire mission. Do you understand?"
"Mission?"
"We are all," Jane said gently, "agents of the Pink Carnation."
"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Letty. "You can't expect me to believe that."
It wasn't precisely polite, but, then, neither was taking off one's hair at the tea table.
Did they really think she was that naive?
Letty saw her husband throw Jane a quick, shuttered look, and felt her temper rise.
"Next you'll tell me you're all really missionaries, here to convert the heathen, or a troupe of traveling players, or" Letty's imagination failed her. "Spies! It's unthinkable!"
"Well, start thinking it, missy," snapped Miss Gwen, or Mrs. Grimstone, or whatever her name might be. Letty didn't particularly care.
With her usual graceful efficiency, Jane unfastened the ribbon she wore around her neck and passed the bauble across the table to Letty.
"Will this serve to convince you?" she asked.
Acting automatically, Letty reached out to take the locket, wondering, even as she did so, how on earth a piece of jewelry could be expected to make her believe the most absurd sort of absurdity. Letters, perhaps. A signed statement from His Majesty's undersecretary of something or other, vouching for his agents. But a locket?
The metal was still warm from the other woman's skin. It was a commonplace enough trinket, a simple golden oval with a flower inset in enamel on the front. On the back Instead of encountering smooth gold, Letty's fingertips caught on a series of deeply incised lines.
Her breath catching in her throat, Letty flipped the small disk over. On the obverse, where it would be hidden in the hollow of the wearer's throat, was engraved the complex form of a many-petaled flower.
Even Letty, who had no use for spies, recognized it. She had seen it reproduced in half a dozen broadsheets, on fans, on handkerchiefs, even embroidered on gentlemen's stockings.
It was the seal of the Pink Carnation.
"I thought it made a nice change from the traditional ring," commented Jane with a smile.
Letty stared down at the locket, running one finger over the thin line where the two halves joined. On one side, a slight bump identified the presence of a catch .
Miss Gwen reached over and snatched the locket out of Letty's grasp, handing it back to Jane, who tied the ribbon neatly around her neck.
Once again, it was only a young girl's ornament, a pretty bauble to set off the neckline of a dress.
Only, it wasn't.
"It could merely be an ornament," argued Letty, as much for herself as for the three sets of eyes regarding her from around the table.
"It could," agreed Jane mildly, giving the knot a final twist. She seemed entirely unperturbed.
"You might simply like flowers."
"Many people do."
Letty looked from the locket to the wig and back to Jane, calm and businesslike at the head of the table. She couldn't bring herself to look at her husband. But she did noticeit was impossible not to noticethe complete lack of tender attentions to the woman now known as Jane. Where last night, he had hovered over her as though distance would be the death of him, today, he sat calmly apart. It wasn't the sort of distance that betokened a lovers' quarrel. It was the distance of complete indifference. And if they weren't lovers
Letty could still feel the imprint of the deeply incised lines on the pads of her fingers.
"Oh my goodness," muttered Letty.
"It took you long enough," complained Miss Gwen.
"One doesn't encounter such situations every day," countered Jane. "I'd say she's bearing up quite well."
Feeling a bit unsteady, Letty grappled with the implications of this new information. "Then last night "
"Was all part of a cunning ruse to confound the French," announced Miss Gwen, looking cunning.
"So, what you're telling me," said Letty hesitantly, looking from Miss Gwen to Jane, and anywhere but at her husband, whose long fingers were drumming softly against the tabletop, "is that Dublin is full of French spies."
"Not quite full," said Jane, "but enough to create a good deal of bother."
"I think I'm going to sit down now," said Letty, and she did, more heavily than she had intended. "But if this is true, then you shouldn't have told me any of it."
"For once, we agree," murmured her husband.
Letty addressed herself to Jane. "Not that it wasn't very kind of you, but how do you know I won't go babbling about it to half of Dublin?"
"Kind!" Miss Gwen looked appalled.
"It isn't kind," said Jane briskly. "It's just good sense. You could cause us far more bother bumbling about under false impressions."
None of them said "like last night," but Letty could feel the words hanging over them all. Her color deepened as she remembered the way she had made Lord Pinchingdale all but drag her across the room, into the quiet of the window embrasure.
"As for your propensity to babble," Jane's cool voice intruded on Letty's fevered recollections, "you had half a dozen opportunities last night to identify Geoffrey as your husband. And yet you chose not to. Not the actions of a woman who can't hold her tongue. Coffee?"
Jane elevated the fluted china pot with the air of a woman who considers she has proved her point beyond dispute. Letty could think of half a dozen objections to that logic. And if she could, she was sure Lord Pinchingdale could, too.
"Yes, please," said Letty, extending her cup so that Jane could pour the dark liquid into it.
"Geoffrey?" Jane tilted the pot, and Letty's eyes followed, creeping like a thief in his direction, but never making it as far as his face.
Mechanically, Letty lifted her cup to her lips. The coffee tasted flat and slightly acidic on her tongue, tepid from too long in the pot. If everything Jane said was true, it meant her husband wasn't a philandering cad, or even the weak-willed sort of man who would run off on his wedding night for no better reason than disinclination. Those men, she could have dealt with.
This new Lord Pinchingdale was something else entirely. In the space of the removal of a wig, he had gone from reprobate to hero, and she had gone from wronged wife to what did that make her? Letty grimaced into her coffee. Not the heroine, that much was sure.
"I'll book passage back to London tomorrow," said Letty abruptly, placing her cup firmly back into its saucer. "It will be easiest that way."
Across the table, Jane had donned her most enigmatic expression. "Perhaps not."
Unused to Jane's peculiar rhetorical habits, Letty shook her head. "I shouldn't have any trouble finding passage."
"What Jane means," put in Geoff, deciding to end the exercise before it turned into a full-blown Platonic dialogue, "is that your departure at this juncture might arouse conjecture."
Miss Gwen wagged a bony finger. "I say we use this to our advantage. If Mrs. Alsdale disappears, the French will be convinced she's involved in something havey-cavey. They go looking for her, while we deal with them."
"And if they catch her?" inquired Geoff.
As Geoff knew from long experience, the Black Tulip had a nasty way with a stiletto. Not content with sealing wax, she had amused herself, in the early days of the war, by carving her symbol into the flesh of captured English agents. It had been some time, but that didn't mean the Black Tulip had grown any more merciful, merely more subtle in her means of torture. If she got her hands on Letty
He might have his own reasons for wanting to throttle her, but she didn't deserve that.
"Tempting," said Geoff, "but no."
"I'm sorry," Letty said, a furrow forming between her brows. "If I had known "
"You weren't supposed to know," replied Geoff, looking pointedly at Jane.
Jane gazed guilelessly back at him over her coffee cup.
Geoff raised his eyebrows just enough to show her that he knew exactly what she was doing. After last night's shenanigansand that missed rendezvous between Emmet and his French contactit was clear that Jane had arrived at the conclusion that the best possible way to neutralize the problem posed by Letty was to bring her into the conspiracy. Not fully, of course. Just enough to make Letty feel committed to the cause. With Letty in their corner, rather than outraged wife at large, they could keep to their original pose as a courting couple.
Jane, thought Geoff irritably, was altogether too sure of herself sometimes.
Not to mention that she didn't know Letty Alsworthy. Not like he did. She didn't know that Letty's wide blue eyes hid a mind as cunning as Bonaparte's, that her self-effacing air masked a will stronger than Caesar's, and that her modest black dress cloaked a bust that would put Cleopatra's to shame. Geoff realized that his gaze was most improperly fastened on that last-mentioned attribute and hastily rearranged his features into their accustomed blandness. The larger the bosom, he reminded himself, the more room for asps to nest there. Or something along those lines. At worst, the addition of Letty Alsworthy spelled trouble. At best Geoff was having a great deal of difficulty thinking of a best.
Jane smiled apologetically at Letty. "I am afraid you will have to be Mrs. Alsdale for some little bit longer."
"I don't mind," said Letty.
"I do," muttered Geoff.
"In fact," said Jane to Letty, "you might even be of some use to us."
"I would be glad to," said Letty, just as Geoff demanded, "What sort of use?"
Miss Gwen, watching both of them, emitted the harsh chuckle that served her for a laugh. Geoff saw nothing at all humorous about the situation. But, then, he had always suspected that Miss Gwen's sense of humor ran to watching matadors gored by bulls.
"Nothing like that," said Jane soothingly.
Geoff remained unconvinced. He wouldn't have put it past Jane to hand Letty an armful of explosives if she thought it would best serve her purposes at the time. As for Letty he didn't like to think what she might do with an armful of explosives. She was dangerous enough armed with adjectives.
"This isn't a game," he said flatly.
"Of course not!" harrumphed Miss Gwen. "Games are for amateurs."
"Nor," added Geoff, with a quelling look at Letty, "is this a church fete."
"I didn't think it was," said Letty.
"What I mean"Geoff drummed his fingers against the polished tabletop, wishing the War Office provided guidelines for situations such as this, with handy subheadings like "Unwanted wives, for the removal of""is that you can't just pitch in and help. It's not as though you're lending a hand with flower arrangements. The situation is deadly serious. Do you know anything of what is happening in Ireland?"
Letty looked like she wanted to claim that she did. Her head tilted, her mouth openedand then closed again.
"No," she admitted.
"My point exactly." Geoff turned to Jane. "The idea is ridiculous."
"How much does she need to know?" demanded Miss Gwen, whom Geoff was quite sure was championing Letty's cause merely to be contrary. It was, she had informed Geoff in an unusually mellow moment after their successful raid on the opera house, one of her great pleasures in life.
As for her other great pleasure, Geoff could only be glad her parasol was safely tucked away in a corner of the room, well out of reach.
Miss Gwen turned to Letty. "The Irish are revolting and the French are invading. We're here to stop them. There," she said triumphantly to Geoff. "She knows all she needs to know."
Geoff didn't groan out loud. But he wanted to.
Working alone, that was the way to do it. There was a reason that Beowulf had gone into Grendel's cave alone. Otherwise, you wound up with too many cooks throwing unwanted impediments who happened to be married to you into the broth.
"That's only the very tip of it," he told Letty, whose eyes had gone round at the mention of revolt, and even rounder at invasion. Her eyes were a paler blue than her sister's, with a peculiar depth to them, like the sky after a rain, or the endless expanse of a sunlit sea.
"Rebellion?" Letty swallowed hard. "Here?"
Her gesture encompassed the peaceful parlor, the square patches of sunshine on the carpet, the leaves of a tree brushing against the windowpanes.
"Here," Geoff confirmed. "The United Irishmen have been planning rebellion ever since their last attempt failed in 'ninety-eight. They've had five years to figure out what went wrong last time and to try to fix it. Last time, they mustered fifty thousand menno small numberand their French friends arrived with eleven hundred troops. We were lucky that they arrived late. It gave us time to mop up the local rebellion first. That was last time."
"And this time?"
"This time"Geoff didn't need to exaggerate; the facts alone were grim enough"our garrison has been reduced from seventy-five thousand to thirty thousand. Less than half."
"We are all acquainted with basic mathematics," interrupted Miss Gwen.
"This time," Geoff raised his voice, "Bonaparte is in a more generous frame of mind. We know his minister of war recently met with the United Irishmen's agent in Paris. They are talking of a full-scale invasion before the end of the summer. We don't have the men to fight them off. We don't even have enough men to counter a well-organized local rebellion. Within weeks, Ireland could blow up like a powder keg."
"Oh," said Letty. It was, she realized, an inadequate response, but she didn't know what else to say. Given where her tongue had led her before, it was probably safer not to say much of anything at all. For a very long time.
"If Ireland goes"Lord Pinchingdale's tone was calm, almost conversational, but something about its very stillness made the hairs stand up on Letty's arms"the way to England lies open."
"You mean "
"Invasion."