The torchlight lent a demonic aspect to the silver streaks in Lord Vaughn's hair, limning them with infernal fire. "It comes to us all in the end, whether we seek it or no."
No no no echoed the stone arches mournfully.
Letty's voice drowned out the echoes. "There's no need to hasten the process."
"You wouldn't fling yourself into the grave like Juliet?"
"Certainly not for Romeo."
Eo eo eo caroled the echoes in funereal descant.
"For someone else, then," said Lord Vaughn softly.
Letty bristled. "Dying for love is a ridiculous notion. Only a poet would think of it."
"'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, of imagination all compact,'" quoted Vaughn lazily. "You would prefer to die for something else, perhaps? A cause? An ideal?" He paused, holding up his cane so that the silver serpent at its head blazed in the light. "A country?"
"You left out old age," replied Letty.
"How very unambitious of you, Mrs. Alsdale."
"Alexander the Great died in his bed."
"Not so Caesar," countered Lord Vaughn, adding, with peculiar emphasis, "or Brutus."
Rather than bandy Romans, with whom her acquaintance was strictly limited, Letty resorted to changing the subject. "You never told me what brought you down here. Was it merely a philosophical endeavor?"
"Meditations on the meaning of mortality? No." Lord Vaughn's elegant hand rested briefly on the lid of the coffin in a gesture that was almost a caress. "You might call this more of a social call."
Lord Vaughn's rings glinted incongruously against the dark casket, a reminder of earthy vanities against the grim inevitability of the grave.
"You've put it off a bit long, haven't you?" said Letty, regarding the coffin with distaste. There was no plate on the coffin, no insignia, no name, merely a series of lightly incised lines scratched into the surface. Letty could barely make out the marks.
"Five years too long," said Vaughn.
His gloved fingers traced the scratches. One long stroke, followed by three short ones. An E. Followed by another long stroke. Then
"Alas, poor Edward. I knew him well."
Letty's throat felt very tight as she watched Lord Vaughn trace the final two prongs of the second initial. Edward was a common enough name. But for the last name to begin with an F
"Edward?" she repeated.
Vaughn gazed meditatively at the coffin, like Hamlet surveying the skull of Yorick. "Lord Edward Fitzgerald."
So that much, at least, of Jane's story had been true.
"This is the coffin of Lord Edward Fitzgerald?" she announced as loudly as she dared, wondering if Jane already knew, or cared.
"Poor Edward. He cared so deeply for his causes," said Lord Vaughn, in the tone of one marveling at a fascinating incomprehensibility.
"Who was he?" asked Letty, trying to angle herself in such a way that Lord Vaughn would have to move away to speak to her, and leave the field clear for Jane. Perhaps if she moved a little to the left Lord Vaughn remained stubbornly where he was, squarely in front of Lord Edward's coffin.
"My cousin." Lord Vaughn's lips curled in amusement at Letty's involuntary expression of surprise. "You really don't know your Debrett's, do you, Mrs. Alsdale? A lamentable oversight in any debutante."
"I was never terribly good at being a debutante," admitted Letty. "I'm much better at balancing accounts."
Lord Vaughn held up one long-fingered hand. "I shan't ask. For your edification, my ignorant young lady, Edward was the son of Lady Emily Lennox. Lady Emily Lennox married James Fitzgerald, the Earl of Kildare. Lady Emily's father was the Duke of Richmond, who was, in turn, first cousin to my grandmother."
"Which makes you ?" inquired Letty, trying desperately to untangle the mesh of titles.
"Exactly as I am," replied Vaughn, extending an arm. "Shall we rejoin your party? They seem to have strayed."
"Unless," retorted Letty, anxious to divert attention from Jane, who was poking into the foundations of the vault with more antiquarian fervor than one might expect from Miss Gilly Fairley, "we are the ones who have strayed."
"An estimable young lady like yourself?" replied Vaughn, turning her words into something else entirely as he drew her inexorably in the direction of Jane, Miss Gwen, and the beleaguered curate. "Never."
"I was wondering where you had got to!" exclaimed Jane. "Oh, do come look, Mrs. Alsdale, darling, at these wonderful pillars! Can't you just imagine hideous Count Alfonso walling lovely Dulcibelle into just such a crypt as this? I know I shall have nightmares for a week!"
"How lovely," said Letty weakly.
"And a sepulchre!" Jane darted past Lord Vaughn, and stretched out both hands to Lord Edward's humble casket in a gesture of exaggerated rapture.
Within the space of a moment, she had run her hands over the top, peered beneath the base, and come up beaming. Beaming, Letty noticed, and empty-handed. Lord Vaughn's presence precluded a more thorough investigation, but, even to Letty's untrained eyes, the inspection appeared perfunctory. Reflexively, Letty's head tilted back, up to the vaulted roof, above which Lord Pinchingdale was doing what?
"How gloriously gruesome!" Jane enthused, patting the top of Lord Edward's coffin like a much-beloved pet. "I do prefer the word 'sepulchre' to 'coffin,' don't you? It's just so much more "
"Dramatic?" supplied Lord Vaughn.
" horrid!" finished Jane triumphantly, brushing dirt off her gloves.
"Or horridly dramatic," murmured Vaughn.
"My dramatics are never horrid!" protested Jane, batting her eyelashes at Lord Vaughn. She put a finger to her cheek in exaggerated perplexity. "Or do I mean that my horrors are never dramatic?"
"I find it horrifying that we haven't yet been introduced." Lord Vaughn looked to Letty.
"Lord Vaughn," said Letty, since there was little else she could do, "allow me to present you to Miss Gilly Fairley."
"Gilly." Lord Vaughn rolled the silver head of his cane meditatively between his fingers. "An unusual name."
"Short for Evangeline, but I do think that's so dreadfully dull and stuffy, don't you agree, my lord?" Jane simpered up at Lord Vaughn from under the brim of her bonnet. "My mother called me her little Gillyflower. Isn't that ever so sweet?"
"A sweet name for a sweet lady." Lord Vaughn offered Jane his arm, pointing her toward the stairs. "Where I grew up, gillyflowers went by another name. We called them 'pinks.'"
"How charming!" Jane scooped up her long skirt to navigate the narrow steps, which Letty took to mean that Jane was quite finished with the crypt. Letty fell in behind the two of them, relieved to be heading back to daylight. "Pink always has looked very well on me."
"Or sometimes," Lord Vaughn said as he took Jane's elbow to guide her up the stairs, "carnations."
"Are they pink?" Jane asked vacantly. "I must confess, my lord, I'm not the least bit botanical."
"Isn't a carnation supposed to be red rather than pink?" Letty barged in, hurrying up the steps behind them. "I seem to remember some line or other about blood turning the seas incarnadine."
"I've never been to Carnadine," fluttered Jane, pausing at the top of the stairs to look back at Letty. "Is it in Scotland?"
"Near enough," said Lord Vaughn dryly, reaching down a hand to help Letty up the final steps. "I believe the line in question comes from the Scottish playMacbeth," he specified for Gilly's benefit. "Yet another case of treason and skullduggery immortalized in verse. Have you noticed, my dear Miss Fairley, that the villains get all the good lines?"
"I'm not very fond of the theater," replied Jane, blinking her eyes woefully beneath her bonnet. Letty's own eyes smarted in the unaccustomed sunlight, but Jane's expression was more design than nature. "All that prating and running about with toy swords. It's quite fatiguing. I much prefer a dance."
"I am sure many men would be delighted to dance to your tune, my dear Miss Fairley."
"Oh, no," averred Jane, falling into pace with Lord Vaughn as they processed around the side of the church. "I play only indifferently."
Lord Vaughn's head bent attentively toward Gilly's. "I would imagine that that depends upon the game."
"I am told," said Jane demurely, "that I play wonderfully well at charades."
"Lord Vaughn!" intervened Letty. The pair turned back to look at her with identical expressions of inquiry. Letty would have loved to ask Jane what she was playing at, but Jane wore Gilly's slightly daft mask, all wide eyes and parted lips.
"How does your cousin?" Letty finished lamely.
Lord Vaughn's eyebrows lifted. "I don't believe his condition has changed."
Flustered, Letty scurried to catch up with them. "I meant the other cousin. Mr. Ormond."
"Augustus occupies himself," Lord Vaughn said blandly. He smiled down at Jane. Since Jane was only a few inches shorter than he, he didn't have far to look. "He, too, enjoys charades."
Letty decided that she didn't enjoy charades. Not one bit. Letty had never liked playing games she couldn't win. Whatever game Jane was playing, it wasn't one to which Letty knew the rules.
As if to complete Letty's discomfiture, Lord Pinchingdale chose that moment to stride down the steps of the church, looking more self-assured than anyone had a right to be. Every fold of his cravat was neatly in place; his cane swung from his hand at an angle Letty was sure was as geometrically correct as the latest mathematics could make it; and his hat sat just so on his brow, casting just enough of his face into shadow to eliminate any hope of reading his expression.
There wasn't so much as a look exchanged between Miss Gwen and Jane, but, within seconds, Miss Gwen had Lord Vaughn by the arm, while Jane moved smoothly toward Lord Pinchingdale, waving and trilling his name.
"You must help us settle this dispute, my lord," Miss Gwen said imperiously. She jerked her head in the direction of the curate, who was looking mournfully after Jane. Catching the curate by the arm, she dragged him ruthlessly into the discussion, leaving Jane and Lord Pinchingdale to their privacy, like any good matchmaking chaperone. "He claims the Lord chose to smite the Ammonites with fire and sword. Sheer nonsense. Why would our Lord wield a sword when there were plagues to be had?"
Letty didn't wait to hear Lord Vaughn's opinions on the proper procedure for obliterating one's enemies. Instead, she drifted as insouciantly as she could after Jane, pretending to be absorbed by the impressive facade of the church.
As she let her eyes roam unseeingly up the massive Ionic pilasters toward the tower, she heard Jane ask, with the merest breath of sound, "And?"
Lord Pinchingdale's eyes flicked to Letty before he answered, equally softly, "Yes."
And that was all.
It was enough to make Letty wonder why they bothered to lower their voices at all. What did they think she was going to discern from a simple, muttered "yes"? Yes, it's a lovely day? Yes, please pass the mutton? Yes, we still don't trust that Letty creature?
Jane leaned closer, murmuring something meant for Lord Pinchingdale's ears alone. Both pairs of eyes flicked to Letty, and she knew, with hideous surety, that they were talking about her. Whatever Jane was saying to Lord Pinchingdale, he didn't like it. Letty looked miserably away, feigning an interest in the emblems carved above the door. She would have been willing to hazard a guess as to the nature of the conversation. Jane, in her sensible Jane voice, would be urging Lord Pinchingdale to swallow his personal revulsion for the good of the country.
As for Lord Pinchingdale well, his feelings were clear enough. There was no need to humiliate herself further by putting them into words.
Oh, she wanted to be home! Not her hired lodgings in Dublin, not the stuffy ballrooms of London, but real home, where she belonged, where she was useful and needed and always knew exactly what she was meant to be doing. Letty would have given anything to run howling back to Hertfordshire like a homesick child.
But she didn't belong there anymore, either. Married women didn't return to their parents' homes and pick up where they had left off. It just wasn't done. And even if she did go home, in defiance of all the conventions, it wouldn't be the same. Miss Letty could sit in a tenant's kitchen, with butter dripping off a fresh crumpet, and discuss crops and cows; Viscountess Pinchingdale couldn't. She would be curtsied straight back to the manor house, condemned to a sterile life of genteel uselessness.
Letty swallowed hard, fighting back a sudden wave of tears. Images of her future, without a real home, without a real purpose, eternally on the fringes, danced about her like goblins, jabbing and jeering at her. She could remain in Dublin, on the fringes of a conspiracy she didn't understand, with people who didn't want her there anyway. Or she could return to London, to hover on the edges of her family's existence. Whichever way she chose, she would be a superfluity, like an extra woman at a dinner party where there weren't enough men to make up the numbers.
"Italianate classicism at its best," said Lord Pinchingdale's voice, just above her shoulder.
Letty started. "I beg your pardon?"
"The facade," he clarified.
"Um, yes," agreed Letty, who had received nothing more than a blurry impression of stone. Her voice sounded suspiciously coarse to her ears, thickened with the residue of unshed tears. Taking care to pronounce each word clearly, she added, "It's quite lovely. Not as grand as St. Paul's, but very, um, symmetrical."
"It certainly is that."
Letty waited for the sting, but Lord Pinchingdale's countenance revealed nothing more damning than pleasant interest. Letty wondered if this meant their truce had begun. Weren't they supposed to shake hands, or sign terms, or some such thing?
"Did you see anything interesting inside?" she asked awkwardly, doubting she would ever get the knack of holding an ordinary conversation with a double meaning. He and Jane did it so easily. As for Lord Vaughn, he had elevated the practice to a positive art. But the double-weighted words felt uncomfortable and clumsy on Letty's tongue. "Anything of note, I mean?"