I toyed with the notion of Lady Vaughn herself as the Black Tulip, spinning her webs from the safety of Northumberland as she sent out her minions to do her dirty work. Sadly, it didn't seem the least bit probable. From her letters, Lady Vaughn was far too busy bullying the vicar and terrifying her family to be bothered with international espionage. Another great opportunity wasted.

I flipped quickly through the usual detritus of a busy life. There were love letters (using that term broadly); invitations to routs and balls and Venetian breakfasts; an extensive correspondence with his bankers (which generally seemed to boil down to "send more money"), and, at the very bottom of the box, tucked away where one might never have noticed it, a nondescript black book.

It wasn't a little black book in the modern sense. There was no list of addresses, conveniently labeled, MEMBERS OF THE LEAGUE OF THE BLACK TULIP (LONDON BRANCH). But the reality was nearly as good. I had found Lord Vaughn's appointment book. All of Lord Vaughn's movements, recorded in his own hand. His writing was just like his appearance, elegant, but with a sharp edge to it. I paged rapidly through it until I hit 1803, watching the place-names change from the exotic (Messina, Palermo, Lisbon) to the familiar (Hatchards, Angelo's, Manton's). Vaughn, I noted, had had a particularly close and personal relationship with his tailor; he saw him nearly once a week.

I was ruffling lazily through, wondering idly if I could make something out of those tailor appointments (there had, after all, been a round of spies rousted out of a clothiers establishment the year before), when a familiar name struck my eye: Sibley Court.