“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 tiny 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’
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 grey
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’ grasp, returning it to its place of 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...
The
Masque of the Black Tulip
The
Pink Carnation, history's most elusive spy and England's only hope for preventing
a Napoleonic invasion, returns in Lauren Willig's dazzling imaginative new historical
romance. The Masque of the Black Tulip opens with the murder of a courier
from the London War Office, his confidential dispatch for the Pink Carnation stolen.
Meanwhile, the Black Tulip, France's deadliest spy, is in England with instructions
to track down and kill the Pink Carnation. Only Henrietta Selwick and Miles Dorrington
know where the Pink Carnation is stationed. Using a secret code book, Henrietta
has deciphered a message detailing the threat of the Black Tulip. Meanwhile, the
War Office has enlisted Miles to track down the notorious French spy before he
(or she) can finish the deadly mission. But what Henrietta and Miles don't know
is that while they are trying to find the Black Tulip (and possibly falling in
love), the Black Tulip is watching them.
