Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  Plenilune

  by Jennifer Freitag

  Cover Design: Carlos Quevedo

  Cover Stock: Katie Litchfield and Cindy Grundsten

  Formatting by Second Sentence Press

  Amazon Kindle Edition

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only; it may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. No part of this work may be reproduced or distributed in any way—with the exception of quoting lines (proper attribution is appreciated), and purchase for birthdays, Christmas, or simply because you feel like giving a loved one a good book to read. If you do, please purchase an additional copy for each person. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This novel is unfortunately a work of fiction. The author acknowledges the influence of multiple persons and personalities upon the characters of this work, but no one character is a representation of any actual person, living or dead. More’s the pity.

  Print ISBN: 978-0-692-27247-3

  Copyright © 2014 Jennifer Freitag

  1 | The Train Carriage

  Margaret Coventry stood on the station platform at Leeds with a rain-speckled umbrella folded in one hand and her carpetbag in the other. Her guts shook inside their panels of corseted bombazine, but whether they shook out of fear or anger she did not know. She hoped it was anger. Anger, like martial music, would stand her in good stead for the task which stretched out complicated and distasteful before her.

  The train was empty. The platform, which had been bare but for the dull tramp of the inspector’s boots and the noiselessly skirling puddles of rain that the wind kicked up, shook beneath Margaret’s feet as people strode up and down, sorting themselves out and calling up their trunks from the baggage carriages. Her own luggage would be going into just such a car soon. She watched the station hands wheeling carts of trunks toward the rear cars…

  “Want a paper, miss?”

  She flinched with surprise and came round, starched skirts hissing angrily, to find a boy standing at her elbow. He was mouse-haired and old-eyed, and he regarded her kindly but frankly from beneath his uncut mane.

  “I beg your pardon?” She looked down at the stack of papers he held under one elbow and the flagship paper he produced in one half-outstretched hand. Something vivid was printed on the front page, something unutterably dull about India.

  He gave the paper a coaxing shake. “Would you like a paper?” The edges of his English sharpened for her benefit. “It will keep you company in the coach. There could be another shooting!” he added helpfully.

  She frowned, her right heel instinctively sliding backward to break herself from contact with him. “No, I’m quite all right, thank you,” she insisted, declining to point out that another assassination attempt on the queen would most certainly have pushed the news of India beneath the fold. She broke away from the boy while he favoured her with an expressive shrug.

  Hefting umbrella and carpetbag, she crossed the platform like one walking off the side of a mutinous galley, chin high and lips set squarely, and came briskly down the line to an empty first-class carriage. There was no one close enough to see she was getting aboard, and she did not desire the help at present. Under her own power she orchestrated her belongings under her arms, clicked the door latch open, and, with a little jump and a breathless second or two of indecision with physics, got her long limbs up into the car.

  The wooden door swung shut after her under its own weight. A kind of mausoleum gloom clapped over the compartment, sepia and greyed with the pine panelling and the rainy light of the October afternoon. She settled into the forward-facing bench, placing her bag beside her and dropping her damp umbrella on the floorboards. It was quiet, warm, scented softly with someone’s perfume and the lingering tendrils of pipe-smoke from earlier passengers, and something knotted beneath her corsets unwound a little.

  The noise from the engine came back to her, humming, salamander-voiced; the carriage vibrated almost imperceptibly beneath her palms.

  Soon, Margaret considered, it will all be behind me. She turned her head and was joined by her reflection in the glass pane of the car. For a moment she regarded it, pale and long, with high cheekbones and eyes that were plunged several shades beneath their ordinary brown colour by the wallwork of the station in the background. She was young, too young to begin resembling her mother, and yet in that muted image she saw the perverse outlines of her mother’s features, grim and angry, glaring back at her. An unpleasant thought stung Margaret—how alike they must have looked in those last moments before she had left home!

  She remembered slamming the lid of her last trunk and jerking at its latch. She had been angry—furious in that swift, hot, smothering sort of anger that she could possess.

  “I’m sorry, Mother.” She had snapped up her bonnet and whirled, thrusting it over her coiffure and yanking at the ribbons. The woman had stood like brickwork in the doorway of her bedroom, mirroring Margaret’s anger. In the teeth of her mother’s squalling derision Margaret had launched back acidly, “I’m sorry that we can’t all be beautiful. I’m sorry that we can’t all be foreign beauties spirited off by handsome young men.”

  Margaret glanced down at the throat of her reflection. She had done damage to her ribbons in her thoughtless tying of the bow. With pursed lips she reached up and began readjusting the knot.

  “I’m sorry that I wasn’t a boy so I could take care of this mess. But you can go on being disappointed, Mother. I don’t care. You can wish I were pretty like Firethorne, and while you’re at it you can be happy I wasn’t loose enough to let myself be run away with and dishonour the whole family in the process!”

  And the real triumph, Margaret considered, looking back on the incident, was that her mother had not flinched as the acid was hurled into her face. There had been no regrets, no wounds inflicted to sour the memory of their last battle. She hoped it would be their last. Wherever she went, Margaret knew that face in her reflection would haunt her—judging, weighing, strangely hating. With a calm resignation Margaret knew very clearly that even if she could secure a good attachment with a man of her distant relations, as she was setting out to do, her mother would still despise her. She only wished she knew why.

  Having adjusted the ribbons of her bonnet, Margaret sat back into the bench with the feeling of a better ordered mind. Out from the immediate scenery of familial strife and dissension rose the cold truth of her future. The sheer mileage which lay between her and her relatives in Naples yawned vast and cold before her, and even when she arrived, trusting that the Italian winter would be kinder than her fierce Cumbria, she must coax and finagle her way into the heart of an eligible male who would help counteract the disgrace of her cousin’s elopement.

  The distance was necessary. Her relatives would not have heard of Firethorne’s disappearance, and Margaret’s own reputation would remain untainted…

  She glanced back out the window, squinting to see through her own reflection to the platform beyond.

  A man had accosted the mouse-haired boy with the papers. Idly Margaret watched them converse, disproportionately sized as one towered over the other. The man carried no umbrella, and though he was sombrely dressed in black, his clothing appeared unusual. Margaret scooted toward the window and watched as the man took a paper from the boy without any money seeming to pass between them. Her reflection frowned…then started when she realized the man was coming at a long-legged, purposeful walk toward her carriage. She quickly faced forward again and rejoined her carpetbag, rearranging her skirts and wishing other passengers had joined her car. If she had been alone, at least for a leg or two of the trip
, it would have been pleasant. If other female passengers could but climb aboard with her and diminish the awkwardness of her pending company—

  The door latch sounded loud in the little compartment, and the carriage rocked violently as the man ducked his head and climbed up into the interior. Water gushed from his clothing as he moved, pouring over the wooden floor. With a soundless cry Margaret instinctively lifted her boots up onto their toes to avoid the deluge. In perverse contrast, the paper crackled between them, crisp and dry: the bold headlines regarding India flashed their secret mockery at Margaret as she looked up covertly from beneath the rim of her bonnet.

  The man sat down on the rearward bench, giving a soft imperative sniff from the hawkish nose beneath the brim of his Aylesbury; he tipped the thing forward as he unfolded his paper and a runnel of water shot off the brim into his lap, leaving the paper untouched. Margaret stared, despite herself, but the man did not seem to notice the puddle he had dropped onto his trousers.

  An uncomfortable silence fell over the carriage. With the unquestioned instinct of a small animal, Margaret sat quite still, watching the man out of the corner of her eye for any sign of movement. The muffled rumble of feet on the platform and the scarlet chuffing of the engine droned in the background, but within the compartment the silence was as crisp and dry as the paper.

  The man’s mouth twitched, as if humoured. Margaret’s senses jumped to the alert: A young jaw-line: angular, but young. I would feel better if he were an older man.

  A whistle screamed ahead. Beneath Margaret’s rigid body she felt the wheels grind, the engine throw momentum into the whole body of the train, and in a moment she was instinctively slamming her hand round on the front of her carpetbag to keep it from hurling headfirst off the carriage seat and onto the wet floor. The lethargic chunking of the train punctuated the air and the light began to grow, silvered and cold, as the engine slid out from under the station’s overhang into the bleak elements.

  The movement seemed to unlock something. The man turned over a page in the paper—coincidentally sending a new puddle of water oozing from the tails of his outlandish jacket—and with that same sniff he remarked lazily,

  “It is very rude to stare, you know.”

  Margaret coloured slightly. “Good afternoon,” she returned stiffly. She could think of no apology to make for her fascination with his persistent dampness, nor did she dare mention, now that it was too late to change cars, how uncomfortable she felt in his singular presence.

  He lifted the paper as if to block out the pale glare coming in the window, and the movement allowed her a look at his profile. It was as angular as his nose and jaw-line had suggested, with a pair of almost colourless blue eyes so sharp and aware that the sleepy droop of his lids could not stop a shudder from running through her body.

  “Good afternoon,” he purred. Then, stirring swiftly, he snapped the folds of the paper shut and let it fall precipitately out of his hand onto the bench beside him; the puddle seeped through it and spread like the mark of a disease. His head was up, regarding her with those uncanny silver eyes, and she knew that she could no longer escape his notice. “Rupert. Rupert de la Mare. I beg your pardon,” he added. His voice was as sleepy as his lids, but not deceived by either façade. “The news is very interesting.”

  At a sweeping glance, with his voice still tenderly brushing back the tendrils of hair from her ears, she took him for a foreigner. His dress she could not place, and he spoke English as if he were master of it, and not it master of him.

  “Margaret Coventry. How do you do…?” She kept her hands in her lap and tried to keep the defensiveness out of her voice. “And—indeed, is it?” Her eye fell on the paper and her blood chilled. “I had not read anything today.”

  It would not do to risk provoking him by admitting that she took no interest in the affairs of state, enormous and perplexing as their entanglements became, no more than she took interest in the equally treacherous waters of ladies’ societies and social interaction.

  He looked down critically at the paper, the corner of his mouth still smiling faintly. It was a cruel kind of look. “You have a very young queen, I mind,” he said. “I wonder if you have not had better queens in the past.”

  Margaret coloured again with formless outrage, but before she could say anything reprehensible, Rupert de la Mare was looking at her again, something soft and something cutting in his face.

  “You yourself might be a better queen.”

  Before she could stop herself, panicked humour and cumulative stress overtook her, and she broke out in a sharp, ringing laugh over some swift, bizarrely distorted image of herself as Her Majesty—Her Majesty Queen Margaret! “Perhaps,” she heard her own voice saying—coming, it seemed to her, from a long way off and a little too highly pitched—”perhaps if I were Danish, but I would have to be—oh!“

  She gave a great leap as the man, without warning, sprang up from his bench and clapped a hand over her mouth. Mingled rage and panic surged through her veins, but he had one hand firmly on her mouth, the other on her shoulder with the power of a solid bar of iron, and his feet seemed to be pinning down the voluminous hem of her skirt so that she could not worm out from under him.

  The Aylesbury had come off. The face above her was sharp and bare like a sabre, and seemed to hover coldly against her skin. She could feel her pulse banging in the hollow of her shoulder beneath his grip.

  Her nostrils flared: she drew no air. A smothered whimper of terror beat like a dying bird in her throat.

  “No need for that, darling.”

  He was laughing at her. The realization made her heart pound a little faster, but her anger was extinguishing: she did not have enough air to fuel it.

  One hand moved to her throat. She could still feel the barred pressure of his fingers on her mouth but knew, dimly, in the airless chambers of her brain, that he had uncovered her mouth but that she could not drag it open to take a breath. He slipped his other arm round her body and lifted her, with her starched skirts and her hand-bag trailing from her wrist, off the wooden bench.

  The carriage rocked steadily to its own movement beneath them.

  What are you doing to me! Where are you taking me! Who do you think you are? Let me go!

  She imagined that she was resisting, as one tries to resist in a dream, but her limbs lifted with his arms and her head fell useless upon his black, damp shoulder. The last ordinary English image she had before she squeezed her eyes shut was her carpetbag, jigging slightly to the train’s rhythm, warm and prosaic on the wooden bench…

  “When you are ready,” said the gentleman—and did not seem to be speaking to her.

  In the next instant there was a sensation of things rushing over her, things like feathers and thin bits of chicken-skin that made her own skin crawl. The air was ripped from around her, punching her ears with the thunder of a sudden vacuum. If she had her eyes open, she could not tell. The darkness around her was profound and hollow and lifeless. Was the man there too? She tried to move her body against the nauseating sensation which lifted her stomach from her middle into her throat. As one in a dream she saw without vision: black feathers, darkness, teeth, a sense of longing after blood—

  Then mercifully the darkness snapped away into shreds and she saw a confused, faded image of sunlight and something like green lawn. Naples…?

  She fainted.

  2 | The Englishwoman

  When Margaret awoke, her first instinct was to call for Amy to help her dress. Then she remembered that she was on her way to Newhaven to embark for Naples, and that she had left her maidservant in Aylesward—but that that was all wrong too. Images of a man’s beautiful, angular face returned, images of blue eyes so pale they were almost silver, images of a nightmare and a sensation of being strangled without hands. As though surfacing out of a pond of molasses, Margaret forced herself out of bed.

  She was in a wide suite that was plunged into shadow. The curtains were pulled across the windows, but s
he saw enough light peeking around the edges to surmise that it was full daylight outside. If she listened carefully through the ringing in her ears, she could hear birdsong. The bed she occupied was spacious, luxurious; the room was no less opulent. Everything purred in a kind of half-sleeping splendour around her. Her hand gripped the blanket and touched silk. Her cheek remembered the press of velvet pillows.

  “Where am I?” she asked aloud, slipping off the side of the bed. Then, just to hear the sound of her voice, “Where am I?” She padded on bare feet to the window and pulled a curtain back a fraction.

  She was looking down on the vine-twisted roof of a garden walk, a roof full of huge green leaves and massive clusters of rich red grapes. On either hand spread lawns and walkways, gardens and paddocks, swallowed up in the distance by a wood. She shivered and felt ill. How long had she been asleep? Where had the monster taken her? Where, she wondered, glancing at the door behind her, was the monster now? She touched the foreign nightgown that draped from her shoulders and wished for something more substantial. With another look out the window she saw the sun was shining brilliantly, more brilliantly than she could ever remember it shining before. The air outside looked crisper and cleaner than any air she could remember breathing. The colours, too, were sharper and deeper.

  She made the mistake of glancing upward to the colourless sky, and there she had her greatest shock. Hanging high above the horizon, huge and colourful, the only colourful thing in that empty sky, was the earth.

  With a despairing cry Margaret crumpled, kneeling on the floor, her fingers digging into the casement of the window as she stared unblinkingly at that blue-and-white disk in the sky. How could it—how dare it! As if to wrench it back under her feet she shook the casement, rattling the pane in its track. But it did no good, and for a long while Margaret sat on the cool floor, trying to regain her breath, forcing herself to gaze unwaveringly at the hideous thing above her. She stared like a cat, and it stared back, and slowly, slowly, her heart began to beat its normal tune.