Lauren Willig - Masque of the Black Tulip

After all, Henrietta thought, writing busily, she was really doing the War Office a favor, providing them with an extra agent at no additional cost. Goodness only knew whom the War Office might assign to the task if left to themselves.

"You sent for me?" The Honorable Miles Dorrington, heir to the Viscount of Loring and general rake about town, poked his blond head around the door of William Wickham's office.

"Ah, Dorrington." Wickham didn't look up from the pile of papers he had been perusing as he gestured to a seat on the opposite side of his cluttered desk. "Just the man I wanted to see."

Miles refrained from pointing out that sending a note bearing the words "Come at once" did tend to radically increase the odds of seeing someone. One simply didn't make that sort of comment to England's chief spymaster.

Miles maneuvered his tall frame into the small chair Wickham had indicated, propping his discarded gloves and hat against one knee, and stretching out his long legs as far as the tiny chair would allow. He waited until Wickham had finished, sanded, and folded the message he was writing, before uttering a breezy, "Good morning, sir."

Wickham nodded in reply. "One moment, Dorrington." Inserting the end of a wafer of sealing wax into the candle on his desk, he expertly dripped several drops of red wax onto the folded paper, stamping it efficiently with his personal seal. Moving briskly from desk to door, he handed it to a waiting sentry with a few softly spoken words. All Miles caught was "by noon tomorrow."

Returning to his desk, Wickham eased several pieces of paper out of the organized chaos, tilting them towards himself. Miles resisted the urge to crane his head to read what was on the first page.

"I hope I haven't come at a bad time," Miles hedged, with an eye on the paper. Unfortunately, the paper was of good quality; despite the candle guttering nearby, there was no way of reading through the page, even if Miles had ever mastered the art of reading words backwards, which he hadn't.

Wickham cast Miles a mildly sardonic look over the edge of what he was reading. "There hasn't been a good time since the French went mad. And it has been getting steadily worse."

Miles leaned forward like a spaniel scenting a fallen pheasant. "Is there more word on Bonaparte's plans for an invasion?"

Wickham didn't bother to answer. Instead, he continued perusing the paper he held in his hand. "That was good work you did uncovering that ring of spies on Bond Street."

The unexpected praise took Miles off guard. Usually, his meetings with England's spymaster ran more to orders than commendations.

"Thank you, sir. All it took was a careful eye for detail."

And his valet's complaints about the poor quality of cravats the new merchants were selling. Downey noticed things like that. His suspicions piqued, Miles had done some "shopping" of his own in the back room of the establishment, uncovering a half dozen carrier pigeons and a pile of miniscule reports.

Wickham thumbed abstractedly through the sheaf of papers. "And the War Office is not unaware of your role in the Pink Carnation's late successes in France."

"It was a very minor role," Miles said modestly. "All I did was bash in the heads of a few French soldiers and — "

"Nonetheless," Wickham cut him off, "the War Office has taken note. Which is why we have summoned you here today."

Despite himself, Miles sat up straighter in his chair hands tightening around his discarded gloves. This was it. The summons. The summons he had been waiting for for years.

Seven years, to be precise.

France had been at war with England for eleven years; Miles had been employed by the War Office for seven. Yet, for all his long tenure at the War Office, for all the time he spent going to and from the offices on Crown Street, delivering reports and receiving assignments, Miles could count the number of active missions he'd been assigned on the fingers of one hand.

That was one normal-sized hand with five measly fingers.

Mostly, the War Office had looked to Miles to provide them a link with the Purple Gentian. Given that Miles was Richard's oldest and closest friend, and spent even more time at Uppington House than he did at his club (and he spent far more time at his club than he did at his own uninspiring bachelor lodgings), this was not a surprising choice on the part of the War Office.

During Richard's tenure as the Purple Gentian, the two of them had worked out a system. Richard gleaned intelligence in France, and relayed it back to the War Office via meetings with Miles. Miles, for his part, would then pass along any messages the War Office might have back to Richard. Along the way, Miles picked up the odd assignment or two, but his primary role was as liaison with the Purple Gentian. Nothing more, nothing less. Miles knew it was an important role. He knew that without his participation, it was quite likely that the French would have suspected Richard's dual identity years before Amy's involvement had precipitated the matter. But, at the same time, he couldn't help but feel that his talents might be put to better — and more exciting — use. He and Richard had, after all, apprenticed for this sort of thing together. They had snuck down the same back stairs at Eton, read the same dashing tales of heroism and valor, shared the same archery butts, and made daring escapes from the same overcrowded society ballrooms, pursued by the same matchmaking mamas.

When Richard had discovered that his next-door neighbor, Sir Percy Blakeney, was running the most daring intelligence effort since Odysseus asked Agamemnon whether he thought the Trojans might like a large, wooden horse, Richard and Miles had gone together to beg Percy for admittance into his league. After considerable pleading, Percy had relented in Richard's case, but he still refused Miles. He tried to fob Miles off with, "You'll be of more use to me at home." Miles pointed out that the French were, by definition, in France, and if he wanted to rescue French aristocrats from the guillotine, there was really only one place to do it. Percy, with the air of a man facing a tooth extraction, had poured two tumblers of port, passed the larger of the two to Miles, and said, "Sink me, if I wouldn't like to have you along, lad, but you're just too demmed conspicuous."

And there was the problem. Miles stood six feet three inches in his bare feet. Between afternoons boxing at Gentleman Jackson's and fencing at Angelo's, he had acquired the kind of musculature usually seen in Renaissance statuary. As one countess had squealed upon Miles's first appearance on the London scene, "Ooooh! Put him in a lion skin and he'll look just like Hercules!" Miles had declined the lion skin and other more intimate offers from the lady, but there was no escaping it. He had the sort of physique designed to send impressionable women into palpitations and Michelangelo running for his chisel. Miles would have traded it all in a minute to be small, skinny, and inconspicuous.

"What if I hunch over a lot?" he suggested to Percy.

Percy had just sighed and poured him an extra portion of port. The next day, Miles had offered his services to the War Office, in whatever capacity they could find. Until now, that capacity had usually involved a desk and a quill rather than black cloaks and dashing midnight escapades.

"How may I be of service?" Miles asked, trying to sound as though he were called in for important assignments at least once a week.

"We have a problem," began Wickham.

A problem sounded promising, ruminated Miles. Just so long as it wasn't a problem to do with the supply of boots for the army, or carbines for their rifles, or something like that. Miles had fallen for that once before, and had spent long weeks adding even longer sums. At a desk. With a quill.

"A footman was found murdered this morning in Mayfair."

Miles rested one booted leg against the opposite knee, trying not to look disappointed. He had been hoping for something more along the lines of "Bonaparte is poised to invade England, and we need you to stop him!" Ah, well, a man could dream.

"Surely that's a matter for the Bow Street Runners?"

Wickham fished a worn scrap of paper from the debris on his desk. "Do you recognize this?"

Miles peered down at the fragment. On closer inspection, it wasn't even anything so grand as a fragment; it was more of a fleck, a tiny triangle of paper with a jagged end on one side, where it had been torn from something larger. "No," he said.

"Look again," said Wickham. "We found it snagged on a pin on the inside of the murdered man's coat."

It was no wonder the murderer had overlooked the lost portion; it was scarcely a centimeter long, and no writing remained. At least, no writing that was discernable as such. Along the tear, a thick black stroke swept down and then off to the side. It might be the lower half of an uppercase script I, or a particularly elaborate T.

Miles was just about to admit ignorance for a second time — in the hopes that Wickham wouldn't ask him a third — when recognition struck. Not the lower half of an I, but the stem of a flower. A very particular, stylized flower. A flower Miles hadn't seen in a very long time, and had hoped never to see again.

"The Black Tulip." The name tasted like hemlock on Miles's tongue. He repeated it, testing it for weight after years of disuse. "It can't be the Black Tulip. I don't believe it. It's been too long."

"The Black Tulip," countered Wickham, "is always most deadly after a silence."

Miles couldn't argue with that. The English in France had been most on edge not when the Black Tulip acted, but when he didn't. Like the gray calm before thunder, the Black Tulip's silence generally presaged some new and awful ill. Austrian operatives had been found dead, minor members of the royal family captured, English spies eliminated, all without fuss or fanfare. For the past two years, the Black Tulip had maintained a hermetic silence. Miles grimaced.

"Precisely," said Wickham. He extricated the scrap of paper from Miles's grasp, returning it to its place on his desk. "The murdered man was one of our operatives. We had inserted him into the household of a gentleman known for his itinerant tendencies."

Miles rocked forward in his chair. "Who found him?"

Wickham dismissed the question with a shake of his head. "A

scullery maid from the kitchen of a neighboring house; she had no part in it."

"Had she witnessed anything out of the ordinary ?"

"Aside from a dead body?" Wickham smiled grimly. "No. Think of it, Dorrington. Ten houses — at one of which, by the way, a card party was in progress — several dozen servants coming and going, and not one of them heard anything out of the ordinary. What does that suggest to you?"

Miles thought hard. "There can't have been a struggle, or someone in one of the neighboring houses would have noticed. He can't have called out, or someone would have heard. I'd say our man knew his killer." A hideous possibility occurred to Miles. "Could our chap have been a double agent? If the French thought he had outlived his usefulness…"

The bags under Wickham's eyes seemed to grow deeper. "That," he said wearily, "is always a possibility. Anyone can turn traitor given the right circumstances — or the right price. Either way, we find ourselves with our old enemy in the heart of London. We need to know more. Which is where you come in, Dorrington."

"At your disposal."

Ah, the time had come. Now Wickham would ask him to find the footman's murderer, and he could make suave assurances about delivering the Black Tulip's head on a platter, and…

"Do you know Lord Vaughn?" asked Wickham abruptly.

"Lord Vaughn." Taken off guard, Miles wracked his memory. "I don't believe I know the chap."

"There's no reason you should. He only recently returned from the Continent. He is, however, acquainted with your parents."

Wickham's gaze rested piercingly on Miles. Miles shrugged, lounging back in his chair. "My parents have a wide and varied acquaintance."

"Have you spoken to your parents recently?"

"No," Miles replied shortly. Well, he hadn't. That was all there was to it.