"This is most unusual," murmured Jane.
Letty noticed that Jane readjusted her grip on her cane as she prowled across the hall, every step a measured act.
"Are you sure we have the right house?" Letty asked, lingering by the door. Even the sunlight seemed to shy away from entering the icy room.
"Quite sure."
Jane drew to a halt, her eyes fixed on an invisible spot on the marble floor. Invisible to Letty, at least. With one fluid movement, Jane went down on one knee, touching a gloved finger to the floor. Frowning, she rubbed her thumb and forefinger together, examining the result with all the absorption of a botanist confronted with a rare new specimen.
"Mud. And still damp. Someonesomeone wearing boots," Jane amended, squinting at the marks on the floor, "walked across this hallway not long ago."
"That's not exactly remarkable in a house of this size," Letty pointed out pragmatically, reluctantly shutting the door behind her. "The staff must number in the dozens."
"This wasn't a servant," Jane said decisively, rising to her feet.
She had been about to expound further, but any explanation was cut off by a sudden clatter from a nearby room, the unmistakable sound of something fragile shattering.
"Quick," said Jane, pointing her cane like a baton. "The small salon!"
With her boots squeaking, Letty took off after her. Jane, she deduced, must have visited Lord Vaughn before; there was no way the size of the rooms could be determined from their closed doors, and Jane moved with the unerring surety of someone who knew exactly where she meant to go.
Without checking her stride, Jane flung open a pair of double doors frosted with more gleaming white stuccowork.
"Well, well," said Jane softly, coming to an abrupt halt in the doorway.
Skidding to a stop behind herher boots were new, and the marble hall slipperyLetty leaned sideways to try to see around her. At first, all she saw were fragments of china, scattered across a pastel patterned rug. The china must have been Japanese Imari work, tinted deep red, blue, and black; the fallen fragments looked like flecks of dried blood against the paler shades of the carpet.
There, in the midst of the mess of porcelain shards, a blot stood out against the pale weave. Two blots, arms' width apart. The very pair of boots Jane had predicted in the entryway, smudged about the toe and sides with smears of mud. The boots belonged to Lord Vaughn, who stood among the bits of broken china, his face as pale and set as the plaster frieze lining the walls. Wordlessly, Jane crossed the room toward Vaughn, and Letty finally saw what her companion's body had been blocking.
On a small blue-and-yellow settee, flanked by two low chairs and a small table, reclined Teresa Ballinger, the ci-devant Marquise de Montval.
She was dressed in the stained pantaloons and ill-fitting frock coat of Augustus Ormond, her rough attire an affront to the pristine pastel perfection of the parlor. But it wasn't her clothing that had brought Jane up short.
A thin trickle of blood formed a rusty goatee beneath the marquise's lips, and her eyes were raised to the plasterwork of the ceiling in the unseeing stare of death.
It was altogether too many dead bodies for one week, as far as Letty was concerned.
Jane moved swiftly past Vaughn to kneel next to the recum-bent form on the settee.
"Dead," pronounced Jane, reaching for the woman's wrist with a practiced hand. "And recently, too. Her skin is still warm."
There could be no doubt as to her identity this time. Whatever the means of death had been, it had left her face unmarred. The marquise's head was tilted back, fixed in an obsidian stare of perpetual venom in the direction of her killer. Her unruly wig had tumbled free, revealing a tight coil of black hair pinned close to her head, the severity of the style lending her an oddly chaste appearance. The combination of black hair and colorless skin had the stark simplicity of a nun's habit.
Without the hairpiece, her face looked thinner and older than it had during her appearances as Augustus. Letty could see the violet shadows in the delicate skin under her eyes, the hollows burred beneath her cheeks, the thin indentations incised between nose and lips. Along the corner of her slack lips oozed a dainty trickle of blood, as rust-red as the fragments of porcelain on the rug, and as finely drawn.
There was something repellent about the very delicacy of it. Driven by an impulse she couldn't quite explain, Letty took a corner of the dead woman's cravat and tried to wipe the blood from her face. Already drying, the rusty stain resisted removal.
Standing over the body, Letty could see what she had missed before. The silver knob protruding from the wrinkled brown cloth of the dead woman's coat was not a stickpin, but the head of a stiletto, driven with unerring precision straight into her heart. Vaughn must, realized Letty, have been standing just where she was standing, behind the settee, perfectly poised to hold the marquise still with his left hand while he drove the blade home with his right.
Rising from her position before the settee, Jane confronted Vaughn.
"Why?"
"The more apt question would be who."
Lord Vaughn's fingers trailed lazily around the edge of a small gilt table as he circled it, closing the space between himself and the settee. And Jane.
Sliding a hand casually into her waistcoat, Letty felt for the handle of her gun. Every movement felt painfully obvious, but Vaughn's attention was focused unwaveringly on Jane. Letty's fingers closed carefully around the wooden handle. She had, as Jane recommended, inserted the barrel into the binding wrapped around her waist at a diagonal for easier removal, but the weapon seemed to be caught on somethingthe binding itself, most likely.
Jane met him stare for stare, head tilted back in an age-old expression of challenge. "Not you, then."
"Do you really think it?" asked Vaughn softly, coming to a stop just in front of her. Jane did not shrink back, but from her vantage point behind the settee Letty saw Jane's fingers tighten on the head of her cane.
Letty tugged gently at the pistol and felt the wrappings tighten against her side in response. Drat. Whatever it was snagged on was caught fast. If Jane was armed, she had given no indication of it to Letty.
"The situation tells against you," Jane said, as calmly as though she were discussing the weather.
Vaughn arched an aristocratic eyebrow. "Circumstance is seldom proof."
"Aphorism," said Jane sharply, "is never answer."
"On the contrary"Vaughn spoke softly, but there was an undertone to the simple words that made the fine hairs on Letty's arms prickle with atavistic instinct"sometimes the truest answer lies in tergiversations."
Below her, Letty could see the eyes of the marquise, fixed in an eternal sneer. With one last, desperate pull, Letty yanked the pistol free. The fabric gave with a noise like a hundred cats sharpening their claws, drawing startled glances from the duelists on the other side of the settee.
Bracing her weapon, Letty leveled it at Lord Vaughn.
"Step away from Miss Fairley," Letty commanded, hoping that she made up in firmness of tone what she lacked in weakness of wrist.
Lord Vaughn looked as unimpressed as the marquise. But he did step away, and that, Letty reminded herself, was all that counted. Fragments of china crackled beneath his boot heel, ground to expensive dust against the weft of the carpet.
Vaughn nodded lazily toward Letty's weapon. "It's not loaded, is it?"
Letty concentrated on holding the pistol level. It was considerably harder without Geoff's hands beneath hers. "Would you care to wager your life on that point?"
Vaughn polished his quizzing glass with a corner of his cravat and examined the results. "In this instance? Yes."
Drat. It was going to have to be the sleeping potion.
"Perhaps," suggested Letty, waving the pistol in the direction of a chair suitably far away from Jane, "we should all sit down and discuss this over a nice cup of tea."
Jane glanced back at Letty over her shoulder with a quirk of the lips that suggested she knew exactly what Letty was about.
"I don't think tea will be necessary." Jane flipped her coattails and arranged herself neatly in a chair by the settee, next to the table that must have once borne the Japanese bowl. Her calm post next to the corpse presented a macabre tableau, a tea party straight out of Dante's Inferno.
"Indeed." Vaughn turned his back on Letty and her pistol, moving toward a table set with a decanter and set of glasses. "I could do with something stronger."
Murdering someone could have that effect on a person.
Letty kept the empty pistol trained on Vaughn as he tilted amber liquid into his glass. There was something rather comforting about holding the man at gunpoint. Even if she knew there was nothing in the gun, the weapon still provided a spurious sense of protection.
In a mockery of a toast, Vaughn raised the glass toward the trio ranged around the settee.
"Gentlemen?" Vaughn's voice was as delicately weighted with irony as a well-balanced sword. "Would you care to join me?"
"An explanation would be more to the point. Unless you have more old adages you would care to share with us?" There was an edge to Jane's voice that belied the tranquillity of her expression.
"I believe I can control myself for the moment."
Lifting the rejected glass to his lips, Vaughn drank delicately before proceeding, whether to delay or merely out of a habit of deliberation, Letty could not be sure. It was impossible to be sure of anything where Lord Vaughn was concerned.
"I entered and found the Marquise de Montval as you see her now. That is the sum total of it." Vaughn's eyes flicked almost imperceptibly toward the still form on the settee. "Teresa and I had more subtle means of causing injury to each other. We had no need for knives."
"Even the sharpest of tongues cannot do the office of steel."
Jane, thought Letty, seemed determined to out-Vaughn Lord Vaughn when it came to couching speech in obscurity. It was enough to make Letty yearn for good commonplace words of one syllable. Perhaps she should just hold up two cards, saying "yes" and "no," and demand that Vaughn point to the one that best answered the question "Did you kill the marquise?"
Knowing Lord Vaughn, he would probably find a way to point with ambiguity.
"Credit me with the common sense not to soil my own nest," said Lord Vaughn. Ambiguously.
Jane leaned back in her chair, propping one leg against the other in a studiedly masculine gesture. "That might be all the more reason to do so."
"Not," said Vaughn, "when it entails a stain on the upholstery. That fabric will be devilish hard to replace. It came from France."
Vaughn's eyes met Jane's in a way that suggested far more than a concern for interior decoration.
Letty was sure of it when Jane said, in a much milder tone, "When did you last see her alive?" For whatever reason, the interrogation had been abandoned.
"Half an hour ago?" Vaughn shrugged, as though it were of little matter, but Letty noticed that he avoided looking at the settee. A sign of guilt? Or something else?
"How would someone have entered without the servants hearing?" demanded Letty.
"You did," said Vaughn smoothly. "My cousinno, Mrs. Alsdale, not that cousin. Nor"he nodded to the couch"that cousin."
Letty regarded him with unconcealed distaste. "Your cousins seem to experience considerable ill fortune."
"In being connected to me? In that case, it is an affliction to which a considerable portion of the peerage falls heir. My cousin Kildare, who is, I am sure you shall be relieved to hear, in the pink of health, was kind enough to afford me the use of his home. His staff, however, leaves much to be desired. The cook But I digress. I returned from an invigorating visit to my tailor to findI don't need to tell you, do I?"
"If," said Letty, leaning very heavily on the word, "your story is true, wouldn't you have crossed paths with the murderer?"
"My dear girl." Vaughn gestured expansively, snifter in one hand, quizzing glass in the other. "Look about you. The place is riddled with doors."
There was no denying the truth of that. Aside from the door to the front hall, there were doors, cleverly aligned with the plasterwork, leading off to rooms on either side. In addition to the doors, long-sashed windows offered a further means of egress. The room was above ground level, but not by much; a tall man would have no difficulty hoisting himself up on the sill, and exiting again by the same means.
"You have quite the wrong end of the stick," continued Vaughn. "There is someone who has considerably more reason than I to wish to see Teresa permanently silenced."
"And that would be?" Jane tilted her head quizzically.
"I think you know."
"It doesn't necessarily follow. Would a hunter kill his trustiest hound?"
"He would," said Vaughn, "if the hound bit him. Teresa was never good at bowing to the dictates of others." Vaughn swirled the liquid in his glass, watching its progress with as much interest as if it had been the finishing line at Newmarket. "Recently, she had taken umbrage with the activities of a lesser personage in her organization."
"Emily Gilchrist."
Letty didn't realize she had spoken the name aloud until Vaughn's eyes met hers. He looked, she realized, surprisingly tired. Under all the bravado of his manner, fatigue lined the sides of his face and pouched beneath his eyes.
"The very one." The shadows beneath his eyes might betray him, but there was no trace of weakness in the honed cadences of his voice. "Teresa believed she needed to be removed. She broached this with her colleague. Her colleague refused."
"Ah," said Jane.
"Ah, indeed. Such a little point, to cause such a great reckoning."
A little point. Having seen the removal of Emily Gilchrist, Letty wasn't sure she could agree with Lord Vaughn's characterization of the situation. What was it that Geoff had said last night? Something about the marquise not being worthy of her sympathy. Remembering Emily's ravaged face, she found it hard to regret the great reckoning that had been wreaked on the still form on the settee.