Free Lauren Willig by The Seduction of the Crimson Rose Page B

stomach. It was the same feeling she had had in the gallery before Vaughn appeared, only ten times worse. In the space of three months, she had become superfluous. The grand match she had intended to make had been made by Letty; the benefits she had intended to graciously bestow upon her family were already being bestowed—by Letty. What was there left for her? Nothing but to sit and wait and be an object of charity, fed on Letty’s leavings.
     
     
As if she had read her mind, Letty spotted Mary and their mother and began to bear down on them. In her hands, she held a plate piled high with food, and her face bore its most determined housewife expression. Someone was going to be fed, and they were going to be fed now.
     
     
It wasn’t going to be Mary. Without a qualm, Mary tossed her mother to the wolves. “Look!” she called out cheerfully, giving her mother a little shove in the direction of her sister. “Isn’t Letty lovely? She’s prepared a plate for you.”
     
     
“Darling!” Mrs. Alsworthy exclaimed, and made for Letty with both arms outstretched, although whether to embrace her or to snatch up the plate was largely unclear.
     
     
Mary didn’t wait to find out.
     
     
Leaving her relations to it, Mary hastily made her exit stage left, back into the relative quiet of the upper gallery. It should take Letty some time to extricate herself from the maternal embrace. Well, it was only fair, Mary decided. If Letty wanted to be a two-darling daughter, there was a price to be paid.
     
     
Mary had her mind set on a very different sort of price. Lifting her skirts clear of the dusty floor, she made straight across the upper hall into the Long Gallery. The painted Pinchingdales held no fascination for her this time. She strode rapidly past them, seeking the living rather than the dead. There was no one standing between the torches, no one sitting on the window seat. The gallery was empty, deserted.
     
     
Mary reached the window and turned, thwarted. Where was he? She would have seen him had he returned to the Great Chamber. There had been no sign of movement downstairs in the hall. Of course, he might have retired to his room or gone out to the gardens or climbed up to the battlements to howl at the moon. He could be anywhere in the vast old pile. He might even have left—really, truly left.
     
     
That was too dreadful a prospect to be thought of. She had to find him. Because anything, anything at all was better than spending the winter hearing her mother sing an endless chorus of the wonders of her sister, while she herself faded into something not quite alive. She would see just what sort of price Lord Vaughn’s theoretical flowery friend was willing to pay. And if Vaughn himself was the Black Tulip…well, then, surely the government must provide rewards for that sort of discovery.
     
     
But where had he got to? She couldn’t very well seek him out in his bedchamber. That would spell ruin, and Vaughn, Mary could tell, was not the marrying kind.
     
     
Not like Geoffrey.
     
     
Of course, even being truly ruined would be more interesting than another evening of game pie.
     
     
Hands on her hips, Mary stalked over to the red velvet curtain by which Vaughn had posed when he first appeared earlier that evening—and stopped, her eye caught by a glimmer of light where there had been none before. The archway half-concealed by the curtain led off into the western half of the wing that fronted the garden, the bottom half of the second long stroke of the H. Earlier that evening, both corridors leading off the gallery had been dark and still. Now, lamplight seeped across the floor, coming from a partially open door just a little way down the corridor.
     
     
A superstitious shiver snaked down Mary’s spine. Framed in red velvet, the deserted hallway might have been a stage set for Don Giovanni , black as a scoundrel’s heart except for the reddish tint of hellfire to come. She could, of course, go back