Letty peered tentatively through the door like a turtle considering an outing from its shell, clearly looking for a way to descend without requesting his aid.
Geoff impatiently held out a hand. There was no reason for her to treat him like a leper. She was the one who had been so unnaturally eager for a closer union, after all.
"We can at least observe the usual courtesies, if nothing else."
Framed in the doorway of the coach, Letty regarded him warily. "Are you quite sure?"
"I believe I control my baser urges."
Letty flushed, a red stain spreading from the bodice of her muslin dress straight up to her hairline. "Those weren't the ones I was worried about."
Nor had Geoff, until she mentioned it. But their situation was eerily reminiscent of another night, another coach. A moonless midnight in High Holborn with a well-rounded figure in his arms and a pair of lips warm and eager against his. If he propped a foot on the bottom step; if she leaned forward just a little bit more
They would both be better placed to scratch each other's eyes out.
Geoff offered his hand, palm up. "You can take my arm, or you can stay in the carriage. The choice is yours."
"Choice?" To Letty, it seemed about as much of a genuine choice as the others she had been presented with lately. Marriage or ruin. Silence or the fall of the British Empire. For a moment, she was tempted to elect to stay in the carriage, just to see the look on his facebut she didn't particularly want to twiddle her thumbs alone in a musty carriage.
"Oh, fine," capitulated Letty, none too graciously, and took the offered hand.
Once she was on the ground, the hand didn't let go. Letty gave a slight tug. When that had no effect, she tugged harder. Looking up, primed for acerbic commentary, she found her husband regarding her with a furrow between his dark brows.
"We can't go on like this," he said.
"That," replied Letty, freeing her hand, "is the most sensible thing I have heard all day."
"All this bickering does neither of us any good."
Letty nobly refrained from pointing out that he had started it. She, after all, had been perfectly pleasantperfectlyuntil he had made that crack about her skill at deception in that supercilious, drawling way he had. "What are you proposing?"
Lord Pinchingdale's lip curled, as though at a private and particularly unpleasant joke. "Marriage would be redundant."
Supercilious didn't cover the half of it.
"An annulment might be more to the point."
"But difficult to obtain. For now, I suggest a truce."
Letty wasn't quite sure which to regard with more suspicion, the ominous qualification "for now," or the offer of a truce.
"If you won't do it for my sake," continued Geoff, with a fine edge of sarcasm, "do it for England."
"Far be it from me to resist a patriotic appeal," replied Letty, matching the edge in his voice with her own. "So we let bygones be from this point on? No recriminations, no ill will?"
"Something like that."
It wasn't exactly a wholehearted endorsement.
"Oh, Mrs. Alsdale! Mrs. Alllllsdale!" Jane descended on them like a whole horde of banshees, everything that could flutter fluttering.
This time, Letty just managed not to look over her shoulder before responding, "Yes?"
Jane grabbed Letty's arm and dragged her away from Lord Pinchingdale, toward the steps of the church and a towheaded man in the sober, dark suit of a clergyman.
"You must come and meet the ever-so-charming curate of this ever-so-lovely church!"
As Jane propelled her ever so rapidly forward, Letty thought that she saw Jane's head jerk infinitesimally to the left. Given the constant motion of her curls, it was impossible to tell, but she was sure of it when, behind them, Lord Pinchingdale moved softly to the left, up the stairs to the sanctuary. If Letty hadn't been so preternaturally aware of his presence, she would never have noticed.
The curate clearly didn't. He was a very young clergyman, with a round, open face, his white stock slightly wrinkled, as though he were accustomed to tugging on it; Jane's hand on his arm caused his Adam's apple to bob up and down in an ecstasy of incoherent admiration.
Letty glanced sideways at Jane suspiciously, wondering if her tales of rebel correspondence in the crypt had been just thatfairy stories, designed to distract an unwanted third party while the real activity went on above. Letty reconsidered Jane's request for aid in the coach. There was something quite clever in the notion of distracting an inconvenient observer by enlisting her to distract someone else.
"Lovely Mr. Haverford is going to show us the crypt!" Jane's rapturous exclamation, combined with a sharp pinch, drew Letty's attention back to the blushing curate.
"It's really no place for ladies," said the curate hesitantly, looking at the elaborate flounces at the hem of Jane's dress, and the ribbons fluttering from the brim of her bonnet. His voice was a soft tenor, more Oxbridge than Ireland. "It's very damp."
Just over the cleric's shoulder, the blue-painted panels of the church door settled silently shut.
Releasing Letty, Jane clapped her gloved hands together in girlish glee.
"Oh, how splendid! Just like The Castle of Otranto! Or was it The Children of the Abbey? Oh, never mind, whichever it was, the crypt was positively drippy. Oh, please, do tell me that there are bones scattered about the floor!"
The curate cleared his throat uncomfortably, and tugged at his clerical collar as Jane fluttered her lashes at him. "I'm afraid all our bones are properly put away in their, er, respective coffers."
"Oh, well." Jane did a marvelous impression of someone nobly striving to overcome a grave disappointment. "We will contrive to manage, I suppose, as long as it is very, very damp and gloomy."
"Oh, very damp and gloomy!" replied the curate, his head bobbing up and down, grateful to be able to please in something.
"Excellent!" Miss Gwen took command of the curate's arm. "You shall escort us. Now, where is this crypt of yours?"
"It's not mine, precisely ."
"Sirrah!" A sharp rap of the parasol indicated that Miss Gwen would brook no shilly-shallying, even from a man of the cloth.
Suitably chastened, the curate said meekly, "It's around the south side of the church. If you will come this way "
With Miss Gwen's arm so firmly latched onto his that it was hard to discern whether he was leading or being dragged, the curate led the way around the sanctuary, leaving Letty and Jane to follow in his wake. The curate did attempt to glance longingly back at Jane, but a sharp poke from Miss Gwen's parasol reclaimed his attention, and made a deep reddish stain spread between his collar and the downy fringe of hair on the back of his neck.
As they rounded the side of the church, picking their way along the uneven passage, Miss Gwen's imperious voice floated back. "You, I take it, are a student of scripture. How do you reconcile 'Blessed are the meek' with 'God helps those who help themselves'?"
"I'm afraid the latter isn't actually in the scriptures, Mrs. Grimstone," said the curate very apologetically.
"Nonsense! You must not have been looking hard enough." Miss Gwen glanced impatiently around her as the party drew to a halt beneath two arched windows covered with grilles. "Why are we stopping?"
"This is the vault, Mrs. Grimstone."
"Where?" demanded Miss Gwen, craning her neck as though a mausoleum might magically materialize for her convenience.
"I believe he means this," said Letty, pointing down. The entrance was little more than a hole in the ground, covered by a sturdy wooden trapdoor with an iron ring set in one end.
Inserting the point of her parasol through the ring, Miss Gwen tugged. The trapdoor opened easily; either, thought Letty, the wood was much lighter or Miss Gwen much stronger than she had thought. Letty suspected the latter. In the resulting gap, Letty could just make out the top of a flight of stone stairs.
Miss Gwen peered disdainfully into the depths. "That is your crypt?"
"I did say it was no place for ladies," hedged the curate, falling back a step beneath the force of Miss Gwen's formidable glower, and even more formidable parasol.
Jane fluttered into action. "How romantic!" she breathed, with a warning look at her chaperone. "Why, it's just like the subterranean passageway in The Horrors of Alfonso!"
"I'm afraid I haven't read that work," admitted the curate.
"Nor the Bible, either, apparently," sniffed Miss Gwen.
Letty wondered what Lord Pinchingdale was doing back in the sanctuary, and whether her companions would notice if she abandoned them to slip back inside. She glanced briefly back over her shoulder at the narrow alleyway they had just walked down, little tufts of grass sprouting along the sides of trodden dirt. The stone of the sanctuary walls blotted any sound from within.
"Darling Mrs. Alsdale!" Letty was learning to loathe her assumed name. Jane propelled Letty forward with a light push. "Would you do the honors?"
"All right." Yielding to the inevitable, Letty gathered her skirts up. She placed one booted foot on the top step, worn at the middle from generations of feet carrying their funereal burdens. A slight flicker of light lurked in the depths. Picking her way down, Letty was grateful to whomever had thought to keep a torch burning below. There was no rail to cling to, just the uneven stone wall, as slick and damp as any distressed heroine might wish for. Atmospheric, perhaps, but it was wreaking havoc with the palms of Letty's gloves.
Behind her, Letty could hear the slight brush of a slipper against the step, the whisper of fabric on stone, as Jane started down after her, effectively cutting off any retreat.
As the illumination below grew more conspicuous, she asked the curate, "Do you always keep a light lit?"
"A light?" The curate was, from the sound of it, lumbered with Miss Gwen. "I'm afraid the, er, inhabitants have little need for one."
"Unless," pronounced Miss Gwen in sepulchral tones, "they choose to walk."
"I don't believe they have terribly much choice in the matter," said the confused curate. "They're quite stationary."
"Some people have no imagination," snapped Miss Gwen.
Letty was beginning to think she had too much imagination. But that was quite definitely a light ahead of her, no matter what the curate said, and not just reflected light from the opening above. Stepping gratefully down from the last stair onto packed earth, Letty withdrew her stained gloves from the wall and peered forward, into the crypt.
The curate hadn't been dissembling; the vault was just as gloomy as any aficionado of horror novels might have desired. Despite the warm July day, the space beneath the vaulted stone arches was as chill as October, with a curious scent to it, a combination of damp earth, mold, and wet stone that repulsed any whiff of the outside world. Rows of columns supported the heavy stone arches like trees in a strange, subterranean forest.
It was impossible to believe that just above their heads were the clean classical lines of the church. Somewhere directly above them, Lord Pinchingdale was in the sanctuary doing what? Letty doubted he was indulging in a spot of sacral meditation, unless he was praying for release from their unfortunate marriageand it was a bit late for that. From her post at the base of the stairs, Letty could just make out the shapes of the promised sepulchers, and she wondered whether one of them did belong to a Lord Edward Fitzgerald, or if Lord Edward, like the rest of the story, had been merely a fabrication to keep her occupied.
Even if it had, there was no getting out of the expedition nowor challenging Jane about it in the presence of the bemused curate.
Reluctantly, Letty moved forward, into the interior of the crypt. The light from the trapdoor, balked by the bodies of Letty's companions, made it no farther than the base of the steps. Letty would have been feeling her way by touch from column to column if not for the torch that someone had stuck through a ring on the wall. For all its size, the massive torchiere provided only a reluctant, smoky light in the heavy atmosphere of the crypt, a small, orange ball of flame, like a demon in an alchemist's furnace, trailing a long tail of black soot behind it. A shadow on the wall, darker than the stone itself, attested to the presence of previous visitors and previous torches.
This torch had a companion. A man stood brooding over a dim slab that could be nothing but a grave, his back to the sullen glow. His dark clothes absorbed the flames, extinguished them, creating a vibrant sphere of dark in the midst of light, as he stood poised over the coffin with a stillness more active than movement. Only the silver head of his cane blazed with reflected fire, held aloft above the grave like a medieval necromancer summoning spirits from the vasty deep.
The effect, Letty was sure, was quite deliberate.
"Good day," she said tartly, all the more tartly for her momentary descent into superstition. For a moment, she had half expected the lid of the coffin to clank open, and a shrouded form to riseand do what? she demanded of herself irritably. Recite poetry? Dance a sailor's hornpipe? Surely the dead had better things to do than entertain the living.
If he noticed the asperity of her tone, it had no effect on the cane's owner. Lord Vaughn turned in Letty's direction with an unhurried movement that was nearly an incantation in itself.
"My dear Mrs. Alsdale, you do appear in the most unlikely places."
"I could say the same of you, my lord," replied Letty, deliberately moving forward to block Jane from Lord Vaughn's view. Since Lord Vaughn was nearly six feet tall and Letty just over five, it didn't work quite as effectively as she had intended. "Unless you make a practice of inhabiting crypts."
"Delightful places, aren't they?" Lord Vaughn's gesture encompassed the looming stones of the roof, the smoky shadow on the wall, the dark bulk of the coffin in front of him. "So restful."
Letty looked at the coffin and shuddered with a distaste that was entirely unfeigned. "Not precisely the sort of rest I aspire to."