Letty rounded on her husband, who was watching Miss Fairley with an expression that she could only term grim resignation. Grim resignation, but not the slightest drop of surprise. If Lord Pinchingdale could come to Dublin and pay court to a young lady without revealing his prior marriage in London, couldn't it also work the other way around?

"Is there something I ought to know?" Letty asked sharply.

"The less you know," said Lord Pinchingdale, and although the words were ostensibly addressed to her, Letty knew they were really intended as a warning for the alien beauty sitting at the head of the table, incongruously attired in Gilly Fairley's frills and flounces, "the better."

"The better for whom?" demanded Letty. "For you?"

Lord Pinchingdale's lazy posture didn't change, but something in his face hardened. "Of course. Whom else?"

With the unforgiving light from the windows picking out the rich brocade of his waistcoat, glinting off the sapphire in his cravat, she saw him for what he really was, a pampered aristocrat who thought nothing of running amok through the lives of others in the pursuit of his own pleasure.

Loathing, pure and painful, rose through Letty like lava, bubbling up at the back of her throat, nearly choking her.

"You might try thinking of someone other than yourself for a change. Just for variety."

Lord Pinchingdale raised an indolent eyebrow. "As you do? I'm sure your appearance here last night was arranged entirely for my convenience."

"Why should I think of your convenience when you are so adept at doing so for yourself? How many other women do you have tucked away in far-flung bits of the world? One in Scotland, perhaps, to go with the grouse shooting? A harem in Paris?"

Lord Pinchingdale's lips twisted with amusement at a joke that eluded Letty. "Not of the sort you're imagining."

"I have no interest in hearing the sordid details."

"I do," interrupted Mrs. Grimstone, who had been listening avidly. "A harem would be just the thing."

"Mrs. Grimstone is engaged in writing a sensational novel," explained Lord Pinchingdale in a tone drier than the kindling in the hearth. Turning to Mrs. Grimstone, he added, "Do make sure to change the names. My reputation appears to be black enough already."

"Certainly I shall," sniffed Mrs. Grimstone. "Pinchingdale is an absurd name for a hero."

"I'm sure Mrs. Alsdale will vouch that it works excellently well for a villain."

"You do yourself too much honor," said Letty scathingly. "Villains, at least, have a certain grandeur to them. Reprobates have nothing to recommend them."

"How quickly the pot turns on the kettle."

"If you weren't so entirely debased yourself, you wouldn't be so quick to judge others by your own standards!"

"If you find yourself running short of terms of abuse, I suggest 'degenerate cad' for your next go. Or you can just slap me and get it over with."

"Only if I had a gauntlet to do it with!"

"Are you challenging me to a duel? I'm afraid that's not done, my dear."

"I forgot." Letty drew herself up to her full five feet, enjoying the sensation of being able to look down on Lord Pinchingdale. "You have no honor to defend."

"Well delivered!" exclaimed Mrs. Grimstone. "I couldn't have done it better myself."

"Before we descend any further into absurdity," Miss Fairley broke in calmly, sounding as unruffled as though she were supervising a philosophical discussion at the Bluestocking Society, "someone really ought to provide an explanation to our guest."

"What sort of explanation did you have in mind?" inquired Lord Pinchingdale. His voice was perfectly calm, but there was a bite to it that suggested he wasn't quite so blasй about slights to his honor as he might pretend.

"The truth."

"Fiction is so much more entertaining," mused Mrs. Grimstone. "Especially my fiction."

"But not necessarily conducive to domestic peace," countered Miss Fairley.

Lord Pinchingdale looked rather tight about the lips, in a way that suggested that he found the possibility of domestic peace just as unlikely a goal as Letty did. Not, thought Letty mutinously, that he had any right to look grim. After all, he was the one keeping a harem.

He folded his arms across his chest and nodded toward Miss Fairley. "Since this was your idea, Jane, why don't you do the honors?"

"Who," demanded Letty, rather shrilly, "is Jane?"

Miss Fairley flicked the wig fastidiously aside, and looked Letty straight in the eye. "My name is Jane."

"Not Gilly?" Letty knew there were other things she probably ought to be asking, but that was the first that rose to her lips.

Miss Fairley—Jane—smiled at her kindly. Too kindly. Letty hadn't seen an expression like that since the time the cook had been delegated to tell her that her favorite dog had died. "No, not Gilly."

"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."

Chapter Fourteen

"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 notice—it was impossible not to notice—the 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.