Ravensclaw

by Maggie MacKeever

  The younger woman was eyeing Drogo with trepidation. “Forgive me for asking, Count Revay-Czobar, but is that a wolf?”

  “You have made a common error, Madame Fanchon,” Ravensclaw replied. “Drogo is a rare Carpathian copoi, or sleuthhound.”

  “ ‘Cabbage twice cooked is death’,” muttered Isidore, as he gave Emily a none-too-gentle shove.

  Three pair of eyes turned toward the doorway as Emily tripped over the threshold. Drogo swiveled an ear in her direction, then huffed out what she suspected was the lupine equivalent of a laugh.

  The Count presented Emily to his guests. Lady Alberta Tait was a woman of a certain age, all wrinkles and powder and rouged sharp angles, her short curls blacker than nature had ever devised. Madame Fanchon was fair-haired and plump, impeccably dressed and coiffed. “We are in grave need of your assistance, Madame Fanchon,” he continued. “Miss Dinwiddie requires dressing. There are a number of social events she is under obligation to attend.”

  Madame surveyed Emily and agreed that Mademoiselle was indeed in grave need of assistance. Emily, who had no interest whatsoever in such matters, felt like kicking them both.

  Under obligation, was she? Emily supposed she was. But how dare Ravensclaw presume to dress her?

  Undressing her was another matter. Emily curled her fingers into her palms.

  Lady Alberta swallowed a last mouthful of omelet. “Her coloring! That hair. There is so much of it. She reminds me of a hedgehog. No offense, my dear. But it is such a vulgar shade.”

  “Desordonnée,” agreed Madame Fanchon. “In a word: vulgaire.”

  And you’re no more French than I’m a water kelpie! Emily was tempted to take herself and her vulgar curls right out of the room. Ravensclaw’s voice stopped her. “Leave the hair alone. I like it,” he said.

  “Very well,” Lady Alberta conceded. “Perhaps the spectacles… Remove them, my dear, and let us have a look at you.”

  What next? Would they inspect her teeth as if she was a horse put up for purchase? “I can’t see without my spectacles.”

  Lady Alberta waved her fork. “You don’t need to see, merely to be seen. Is there a dowry, Val?”

  Val, was it? The informal nickname suited Ravensclaw. Since Emily could hardly hover in the doorway indefinitely, she settled into an upholstered chair. Machka jumped up and rearranged Emily’s skirts to her satisfaction. Lady Alberta reached for a treacle scone.

  Ravensclaw nudged the serving plate closer. “Miss Dinwiddie’s financial situation is irrelevant. We’re not trying to find her a husband, merely make her presentable.”

  Emily stiffened at the suggestion she wasn’t ‘presentable.’ “Not that I don’t consider Miss Dinwiddie to already be perfection,” he quickly added. “However, it’s not my interest she wishes to attract.”

  Emily swallowed a snort. Perfection. How absurd. As for attracting Ravensclaw’s interest— Pigs would sooner fly. Today the Count’s broad shoulders and muscular thighs were showcased by a well-cut blue coat and doeskin breeches. Scant wonder Madame Fanchon was staring slack-mouthed.

  He turned his head. A lock of auburn hair tumbled forward on his cheek. The modiste almost dropped her teacup. Emily couldn’t blame her. Shallow though it might be to judge on physical appearance alone, sometimes one couldn’t help oneself.

  Lady Alberta put down her fork. “I do enjoy a challenge! Forgive me for saying so, Miss Dinwiddie, but young ladies should not smell of garlic. Lavender is acceptable. Rosewater. Patchouli.”

  Lady Alberta should count herself grateful that Emily only smelled of garlic. The Japanese believed a raw fish would keep a decedent from the room.

  “You look weary, Miss Dinwiddie,” Ravensclaw remarked. “Did you not rest well last night?”

  I hunger. Let me taste you. Again, Emily felt teeth, or rather fangs, nipping at her throat.

  She bared her own teeth at him. “On the contrary, Count Revay-Czobar. I slept like the dead.”

  “Not pink, with her coloring.” Madame Fanchon’s tones suggested she was less enamored of a challenge than Lady Alberta. “Mademoiselle is too old for missish hues. She will excuse my plain speaking, for it is the truth.”

  Lest she indulge in some plain-speaking of her own, Emily pressed her lips together. Val said, “Green would suit her. Or azure. However, since she is newly out of mourning, we must restrain ourselves.”

  Emily pushed away a vision of the various ways in which Ravensclaw might restrain her. “Perhaps you should drape me in brown to match my freckles! This is absurd.”

  “Your freckles are hardly brown,” he informed her. “Amber, perhaps. Sun-kissed gold.”

  Emily felt her cheeks redden. She didn’t recall ever blushing before she met Ravensclaw, but now she couldn’t seem to stop. Machka raised a lazy paw to bat at her assorted charms.

  “What an ugly necklace!” tutted Lady Alberta. “It will have to go.”

  Emily extricated Machka’s claws from the brass finger ring. “No.”

  Lady Alberta raised her eyebrows.

  “The necklace is of great sentimental value,” Ravensclaw explained. “It would be cruel to try and part Miss Dinwiddie from it. As well as pointless, I suspect.”

  Dubiously, Lady Alberta eyed the assorted talismans. “I suppose we might set a new style.”

  Emily had no desire to set a new style. All she wanted was to retrieve the items stolen from the Society’s vaults. She sneaked another glance at her host. Well, maybe that wasn’t all she wanted. Fatwit that she was.

  “To set off Miss Dinwiddie’s, er, striking looks,” Madame Fanchon persisted, “Perhaps a robe en caleçons?”

  The Count made several additional suggestions. Emily sat back and let the conversation swirl around her. Did Ravensclaw expect her to chair a meeting of the Dinwiddie Society wearing satin slippers and lavender gloves?

  She wouldn’t be chairing any meetings if she didn’t find the d‘Auvergne athame.

  Ravensclaw certainly knew his way around a woman’s wardrobe. Emily wondered how many females he had dressed, or undressed, during his long non-life. The conversation moved on to a discussion of stays: jean or buckram, long or short, whether the bosom should be pushed up or compressed to achieve an agreeable and graceful shape. The women’s comments were not complimentary. Emily could happily have sunk right through the floor.

  At last, to her relief, Madame Fanchon departed for her shop. Emily pushed Machka off her lap and rose. “You and Lady Alberta will wish to speak privately. I have some matters of my own—”

  Ravensclaw caught her wrist in his strong fingers. “It would be unwise for you to venture out alone into the streets of Edinburgh.”

  Dangerous, he meant. But nothing could be more dangerous to Emily than Ravensclaw himself. No sensation of cool forests overcame her now, but tingles that began at the nape of her neck and tickled their way down to the tips of her toes. As if he’d brushed his fingertips against her bare skin. Or his wicked mouth. Those lips that could tease and tempt and tantalize could with her blessing nibble their way from her earlobes to her throat and from there downward to—

  Botheration! There had been no warning in the literature that being in the presence of a gone-but-not-departed made one start behaving like a bubble-brain. While she stood here swooning over Ravensclaw, Michael could be engaging in heaven knew what manner of mischief with the athame.

  “Most unwise,” tsk’d Lady Alberta, who had been talking all this time. “You could easily get lost in these narrow alleys and wynds. Or worse! Most of the Edinburgh of early times still exists beneath the streets of the Old Town. Cold, dank dirt and stone-lined corridors. Underground chambers with rats and sewage seeping in from above. Not to mention the criminal fraternity. And then there are the ghosts. There must be hundreds of ghosts in the Royal Mile alone.” She tilted her head to one side and studied Emily. “I am not acquainted with any Dinwiddies. Have you connections, my dear?”

  Emily could only be grateful Lady Alberta had
n’t heard of the Professor. “That depends on what you consider connections,” Val interjected. “I am an old friend of Miss Dinwiddie’s family.”

  Very old, thought Emily. There was mention of a Count Revay-Czobar in the Dinwiddie Chronicles as far back as the thirteenth century.

  “Even so,” said Lady Alberta. “The good ladies of Edinburgh would go off in a collective apoplexy were they to discover that you had a young unmarried woman of good family dwelling under your roof. I will be happy to provide whatever assistance you require.”

  “Excuse me!” interrupted Emily. “Is this necessary? I find it difficult to credit that you are not immune to the evils of gossip, my lord.”

  “ ‘What you don’t view with your eyes don’t witness with your mouth’,” he told her. “As Isidore would say.”

  Emily bit her lip. She’d been so anxious to reach Edinburgh that she hadn’t stopped to think what would happen after she arrived. “I never meant—”

  “To put yourself under my protection? But that’s exactly what you’ve done. Consequently, you must trust me to act in your best interests, in this instance recruiting Lady Alberta to your cause. I will leave the two of you to become better acquainted.”

  Nor had Emily any desire to become better acquainted with Lady Alberta. She didn’t want Ravensclaw to leave off tracing lazy circles with his thumb on the inside of her wrist.

  He smiled. She blinked. Lord, she was a fatwit. Emily turned her back on him and remained in that position until he left the room.

  Drogo went with him, and Machka. The door closed behind them. Lady Alberta said, “I believe Val said you make your home in London, Miss Dinwiddie. Is it true that poor Prinny has got so fat he’s afraid to mount a horse?”

  In point of fact, the headquarters of the Society was located some distance outside the City, but Emily saw no reason to acquaint Lady Alberta with that fact. She busied herself brushing cat hair off her skirt. “So I have heard.”

  “You have had a Season, waltzed at Almack’s, been presented to the Queen? Forgive my impertinence, but one needs to know what one is working with.”

  “Yes to all your questions. I am also familiar with the British Museum and the Horticultural Society. I assure you, Lady Alberta, that I know how I am expected to behave.” Knowing and doing were two different things, alas. Emily believed in her heart of hearts that her disastrous London debut had hastened her poor mama’s death.

  Lady Alberta propped her elbows on the table and with one finger trapped an errant biscuit morsel. “Frankly, Miss Dinwiddie, I don’t care.”

  Emily blinked at her. “You don’t?”

  “I would prefer that you refrain from embarrassing me, but beyond that…” Lady Alberta popped the crumb into her mouth. “Ravensclaw will pay me handsomely to lend my aid to your endeavors, whatever they may be. To say the truth, my dear, I will be delighted to dwell under a roof that doesn’t leak.”

  Emily quickly dismissed the suspicion that Lady Alberta was one of the supersensible. Nor was the older woman likely to possess so excellent a constitution that she could eat everything in sight and remain painfully slim. Her simple gown was so many years out of fashion that even Emily had noticed, and Emily was hardly au courant with such things. Ravensclaw was doing a kindness in offering employment to a gentlewoman fallen on hard times.

  Ravensclaw was full of surprises. “If you don’t mind me asking, how well do you know Count Revay-Czobar?”

  “How well does anyone know Ravensclaw? We females all run mad for him. But you know how that is.” Before Emily could ask further questions, Lady Alberta sat up straighter in her chair. “Am I to understand that this is your first visit to our fair city? Edinburgh is most progressive, for all we’re considerably smaller than London. We have the University, the acknowledged world leader in medical instruction, and the Edinburgh Review; John Dalton and his atomic chemistry, George Stephenson’s steam locomotive that pulls a passenger car on wheels. Edinburgh leads the world in medicine and law, architecture and philosophy. Not for nothing are we called the Athens of the North.”

  Edinburgh also led the world in incidents of bodysnatching, reflected Emily, but didn’t deem it prudent to state that fact.

  “I like to read aloud of an evening,” Lady Alberta continued. “Are you familiar with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? A man destroyed by the monster he created. There are many lessons to be found in literature, don’t you think?”

  Dissertation on the Physical Traits of Bloodsucking Cadavers. Historical and Philosophical Dissertation on the Gnawing Dead. “Many lessons indeed, Lady Alberta. Are you familiar with Mr. Polidori’s The Vampyre?”

  Chapter Six

  Fair is not fair, but that which pleases.

  (Romanian proverb)

  Edinburgh’s Old Town was a bewildering wilderness of narrow streets and lofty irregular tenement houses known as ‘lands,’ some as many as eight stories high, built higgledy-piggledy like a child’s city of playing cards, the rooftops an ocean of chimneys arranged at dizzying heights under an external pall of fog and smoke, many twisted and angled instead of standing straight up and down. Between the lands, which formed a continuous wall from one end of a street to the other, passages ran down the sides of the ridge on which the city was built and gave access to the properties behind, frequently small open areas with tall buildings peering down.

  Night had settled on the Old Town. With it had come a thick mist that obscured vision, distorted sound. Fog wreathed the streetlamps, the picturesque shops, their exteriors painted with pictures of the merchants’ wares. Each story from top to bottom was chequered with different forms and bright glaring colors — red, yellow and black on blue — until the whole resembled the stalls of a fair.

  Those few honest wayfarers abroad at this late hour peered nervously over their shoulders and hastened their steps. Had that shuffling noise been caused by a stray dog rummaging through garbage, or a footpad creeping along behind a person, or worse? Impossible to anticipate what manner of apparition might burst forth from the murk.

  A slender man walked along the High Street. None would dare accost him, not ghost, monster or footpad. Not so long as he was in possession of the d’Auvergne athame.

  Marie d’Auvergne’s athame.

  He felt it, resting in its special sheathe, hidden underneath his shirt.

  Light glimmered from the windows of a tall stone-faced building. A knock, a nod, and he was granted entrance. No door in Edinburgh was closed to him, not opera house or oyster bar, New Town mansion or Old Town gaming hell.

  A suite of rooms on the first floor had been given over to various games of chance. Against one wall of the front room stood a buffet bearing food, liquor, and wine. In the middle of that same chamber was the rouge et noir table, on each side a croupier with a green shade over his eyes and a rake in his hand.

  His entrance did not go unnoticed. A buxom brown-haired woman quickly made her way to his side. She murmured a welcome. He replied in kind.

  He noted her drawn features, the shadows around her amber eyes. No more than eighteen, she was already weary of nights spent working these stifling rooms in a gown cut so low it showed a goodly portion of her plump breasts.

  He felt no sympathy for her. This was the life she’d chosen, having abandoned a husband and babe to take up with a Captain Sharp, and so it was the life she was stuck with, and there was no use in crying over spilt milk.

  “I’m for deep basset tonight,” he said.

  “A bon chat, bon rat,” she murmured, and beckoned a passing waiter, and took a glass of wine from his tray.

  The slender man did not. He no longer had a taste for spirits of any kind.

  “ ‘To a good cat, a good rat’,” she’d said. An appropriate remark, in view of the character of this establishment. Pigeons ripe for the plucking. Flats waiting to be fleeced. Elbow shakers playing with loaded dice.

  None of the gamblers paid him any heed as he passed through the crowd.

  B
asset was a sort of lottery, said to have been invented by a noble Venetian, whose creativity led to his exile. The banker, or talliere, had the sole disposal of the first and last cards. He also had a much greater prospect of winning than those who merely played. Nonetheless, the game was of so beguiling a nature, because of the several multiplications and advantages it seemed to offer an unwary player, that it was vastly popular despite the fact that the odds were hugely in favor of the bank.

  The punters sat around a table, the talliere in their midst with the bank of gold before him. Each player held a book of thirteen cards and lay down the number that he pleased, with stakes. The talliere picked up the deck and turned up the bottom card or fasse, and paid half the value of the stakes wagered on any card of that sort.

  The slender man took his seat, lay down his cards, placed his stakes. “King wins, ten loses.” “Ace wins, five loses.” “Knave wins, seven loses.” He paid little attention to the game.

  Across the table from him sat a fair-haired young gentleman. It took no preternatural abilities to read the panic in his pale eyes. The high points of his crisp shirt collar had wilted like lettuce during the excitement of the play.

  The young gentleman was not destined to win tonight. The talliere had decided, and the talliere had the power to let a player have as many winnings as he found convenient, and no more.

  It was one of the slender man’s small vanities to influence such matters. He considered it in the nature of the cat giving the rat a sporting chance. As a result, when several shocking strokes of fortune brought the young gentleman’s stake to sois-sante-et-le-va, thereby breaking the bank, the dealer was even more shocked than the young gentleman himself.

  The slender man rose from the table a couple hundred pounds richer, it being impossible for him to sit down to play and lose.

  The brown-haired woman was standing where he’d left her, empty wineglass in her hand. The gambling hell would be hard pressed to cover the losses suffered this eve. Later, when the hell had closed, her Captain Sharp would add new bruises to those already hidden by her gown.