And there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing, except to go on, in a staid and sensible manner, taking what pleasure she could from their companionship and camaraderie.

Much like "be careful," camaraderie made a very poor substitute for love.

"Why didn't you knock?" A pale hand reached out and whisked Letty through the door, putting a pointed period to her unproductive reverie.

"Let's get you costumed, shall we?" said Jane.

Two painful hours later, Letty stood outside Lord Vaughn's Dublin residence, tugging at her cravat.

Like the other great houses that ranged around St. Stephen's Green, Vaughn's Dublin residence was an immense edifice of stone that shone whitely in the sun, new enough that soot had not yet dimmed the luster of the facade. It might not be quite so large as the neighboring Clanwilliam House, or the Whaley mansion, but it would have made at least ten of the little brick house on Henrietta Street.

Letty wondered how Geoff was faring and whether Miss Gwen was as adept with explosive devices as she seemed to think. Sometime after six, he had said, since Emmet was supposed to be dining out, along with his senior staff, at a house in Kilmacud. They would wait till the house was largely empty, and then slip in and detonate the rockets. All perfectly simple. Unless it wasn't.

Letty went back to abusing her cravat.

"Don't fuss with it," said Jane, managing her own hat and cane with the air of one born to them. Her stride was authoritative, her demeanor lordly, and her shirt points would have made Brummell choke with envy. In short, she was the very image of a pink of the ton, setting out for a late-afternoon stroll prior to the evening's dissipations.

Letty glanced down at her own pantaloons. Brummell might choke, but it would be with horror, not envy. Her short, plump figure took to men's fashion about as well as Miss Gwen to humility. Her hips might be suited marvelously well to childbearing but they did nothing for the fit of her pantaloons. Her coat, cut fashionably short at waist and hip before extending behind, did little to cloak the problem. As for other unmanly protuberances, Jane had used lengths of linen to flatten her breasts and thicken her waist, lending Letty's upper half the appearance of an animated barrel of ale.

Beneath her shirt, waistcoat, and coat, she could feel the binding rubbing uncomfortably against her chest, sticky with perspiration. Although the day was mild for mid-July, Letty sweltered beneath her unaccustomed layers and thought longingly of her wardrobe full of light muslin gowns and soft kid half-boots. The stiff leather boots Jane had forced onto her legs cramped her calves and bit into the skin just above her knee every time she ventured a step.

No wonder so many gentlemen preferred to pose nonchalantly against the mantelpiece if it was this painful to move.

"Just keep your chin down," Jane advised, fluffing up Letty's cravat and straightening her shirt points. "And if anyone speaks to you, grunt."

"Grunt?"

"Like this." Jane produced a noise straight from the diaphragm, somewhere between a grumble and a growl. "It is the common masculine coin of communication."

Attempting to emulate her, Letty managed something between a squeak and a cough.

Jane sighed. "Just keep your chin down," she repeated.

"Mmph," said Letty, surreptitiously rubbing her side, where the binding was biting into her flesh.

"Not quite," said Jane, "but an improvement. A marked improvement."

Rolling her eyes, Letty clambered stiff-legged up the front steps after her, wondering how she got herself into these things. Hers was an ensemble better suited to storming a castle than a peaceful afternoon call. In addition to the boots, binding, and shirt points so starched they could be used to patch the roof, the gun tucked into her waistcoat knocked against her ribs as she moved, and the vial of potion formed a lump just inside her sleeve. The paper of pins and paperweight had remained behind, but the tin whistle was attached to her watch chain and the point of the embroidery scissors teased her palm. Fortunately, the formfitting nature of her pantaloons didn't allow for a knife strapped to her thigh, or she was sure Jane would have handed her one of those, too.

Letty was only surprised that no one had given her a small cannon to take along, just in case. She could have disguised it as a dog and wheeled it on a leash.

At the top of the steps, Jane took the knocker and let it fall with an emphatic rattle. Through the plate glass windows on either side, Letty couldn't discern the slightest sign of movement. In a house of such size, there ought to be a footman watching for visitors, ready to pop open the door. The echoes of the knock faded off across the green, unmatched by any answering noise from within.

Frowning, Jane pushed gently against the door with the head of her walking stick. The door fell easily open, revealing a polished expanse of white marble floor, and a staircase that seemed to stretch up forever, patterned on the underside with white stucco-work on a pale blue background. Following Jane, Letty ventured into the vast hall, feeling suddenly chilled. It wasn't just the eerie silence; it was the celestial cool of the endless motif of pale blue and white, like Olympus in the midst of a frost. The walls and ceiling had all been tinted the same pale blue, frosted with a design of urns and stylized acanthus leaves. The marble floor gleamed as pristinely pale as an untrodden field of snow.

"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. Someone—someone 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 her—her boots were new, and the marble hall slippery—Letty 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.

Chapter Twenty-seven

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 something—the 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.