His eyebrows shot up. “Then send a footman with a list of your requirements. We cannot have the Poor Box neglected, my pretty one.”
Again, the light from the chandeliers illuminated the stained glass window opposite Sophie, throwing splashes of blue and red on the floor.
As Sophie turned her eyes from Émile to that picture of the dominant woman, she felt there was another thing that she must remember connected with this image, something that Mademoiselle Charlotte was urging her to recall in that dream she half remembered. She was suddenly certain it had been Charlotte, communicating from beyond the grave.
When she looked at Émile again, it was compassionately. “Shall you teach me more chess later, Émile?”
“Bien sûr, after dinner I shall show you more tactics.”
“How, my dear one, shall I ever outwit you?”
Sophie left Émile to drink his port in solitary state, or to invite Georges to join him. In the drawing room, she went to the instrument to play a couple of new songs from Mozart.
Suddenly, she was overcome by an urge to see what Émile was doing. He would be outraged, regarding her re-appearance as a sign of intolerable bossiness, even that she was becoming another Harriet. For once, she didn’t care. She hurried back to the dining room.
When she opened the door, Georges had indeed joined Émile.
They had other company, too, in the shape of half formed, shadowy beings grouped about the table.
Émile was in his Vampire State, smiling wolfishly about him. “What do you mean, I don’t want to go doing such things? I ain’t to blame for this. But as they call upon us, it is only manners to make ‘em welcome. A votre Santé!” He raised his glass to the figures.
Georges looked drunk. His lengthening teeth flashed as he shook with laughter, and the glint in his eyes was more reckless than ever. “They can’t even – they can’t –” he was laughing too hard to continue.
Their sinister companions were a group of rough men with a nautical look. There was a low murmur in the background, as of some drinking house. They were sprawled about, lounging against the chairs, and a voice spoke in what Sophie recognised as French. The most dreadful thing was that they were communicating with Émile, or anyway, could see him, for she heard the name, “Gilles Long Legs.”
“Oh, goodness!” she shrieked before she could stop herself.
The others turned about, and hostility flared in Émile’s eyes before he got up with a forced smile. “Le Diable, voici ma petite femme.”
She clung to the door handle, her legs weak. “Oh, my God, Émile!”
“Vraiment, you must not blame me, Sophie. I did not initiate this visit – ”
She turned and scurried away. Though she could hardly run from the situation, still she abandoned all dignity and ran anyway, fighting back sobs.
“Sophie!” She knew, even as she dashed off, that Émile could overtake her in moments, but she had to flee.
It seemed he chose not to pursue her, for as she rushed up the stairs she heard the door below close.
He came up half an hour later, as she sat trying to do something with her swollen eyes. On top of everything else, he appeared in a flash.
She squealed. “Don’t do that, Émile!” It came out sounding testy, like any wife rebuking her husband for a trying habit.
“I am sorry, Sophie. I do it without thinking,. Eager to come to you, I arrived precipitately. You mustn’t be angry with me about that visitation, they came uninvited. You must have seen that unlike you and me in Paris, they were only partly here, as was Tom when he scared you in the hall. Neither were Georges and I pulled through ourselves, though to be sure there is a build up of power such as even Kenrick can see. This begins to make sense to me, but for sure it must terrify you.”
For all his sympathetic tone, his eyes retained their inhuman glint, and she was wary of him. He came up behind her and squeezed her shoulders. She got up and he took her in his arms. She found no comfort in his embrace. Now he did not feel even partly like the Émile she loved, but a sinister replacement.
His hands were caressing her back, his touch alien, his breathing quickening as he began to kiss it. “I cannot resist this soft flesh of yours, and my longing serves our need to protect you from Kenrick’s ménage. It must come to your joining me anyway, ma chère, as I cannot believe you would condemn me to centuries without you, as has to happen, should you stay human.”
“Oh, not again, Émile!” Now she sounded like the same testy wife irritated by her husband’s constant sexual advances. His terrible loss of humanity was becoming a series of wearisome marital tussles. She was unwilling to enter into another argument with him. She found such discussions difficult. Her conviction that it would be wrong to let him make her a vampire was based on intuition, not reason. This awful conflict was the more wearing for her because she felt – she must admit – strange.
She forced herself to speak softly, while he continued to caress her with his own fierce tenderness. “Émile, love you as I do, I cannot join you, though I have thought of how awful it will be if I become old and wrinkled while you stay young. But I have annoyed you before by saying that giving in would amount to despairing of God’s mercy.”
She thought she must sound smug and detestable. Probably he agreed as he snorted: “And I shocked you by saying I despaired of God’s mercy a long time ago, that night in the Château and ever after.”
She put her hands on his, though she was alarmed by the look of his nails, now only long and sharp, but hooked. “Émile, does not the power of these little crosses make you wonder?”
Hostility flared in his eyes. “Has your praying for me done the slightest good? Nonsense, my girl!” He gave a savage laugh – which he may well have meant to be an indulgent chuckle – and bent to take her face in his hands. She dropped her eyes and he hissed, “Look at me, Sophie.”
She still looked down. “If only we knew you could stop yourself I would be happy enough to let you bite me and take some, but you said before that you do not believe that you could limit yourself with me.” She was wondering again if and when her menstrual flow started what its effect would be on him. If it didn’t, his thirsting after her blood must be the more dangerous.
He made a sudden lunge at the chain, moving with such speed that she had no sense of what he intended. Astonishingly, it held as she let out a squeal of pain as the metal jerked against her skin. Cursing, he dropped it as though it was hot.
She dodged backwards. The next moment they were playing out an absurd scene, with him pursuing her round the bed like a caricature of a lecher, saying meanwhile in a tone he probably thought was tender and persuasive – but which was in fact gloating and sinister – “Do not be so foolish, my lovely girl. Come here to Émile, ma petite femme! I do believe the superstitious artefact has cut you. Let me kiss it better.” He even had his tongue ready to lap at her.
In his previous attempts to seduce her into letting him bite her, she’d felt a surge of warmth. Now, as with his other attempt to force her, her entrails seemed to freeze.
“Oh, horrible!” she wailed, as she rounded the bed a second time. “Émile, I will chew garlic for sure!”
“That would make me spew at once, and surely you had more than enough of watching me at that when I had that fever? I cannot believe you would be so unkind to me –” he dodged forward and would have caught her, but tripped over her slippers and fell flat on his face.
She dashed, still wailing, into the dressing room while he got up, swearing, his nose bleeding.
“Miss Sophie!” Agnes was at the dressing room door, her candle held aloft casting looming shadows, astonished enough to address Sophie by her unmarried name.
Sophie’s fingers were trembling so that she could hardly lock the door, sobbing, “Oh, Agnes!”
Émile was at the other side, his voice sounding thick from his bleeding nose. Sophie found time to hope that it hurt him. “Sophie, open the door! You know I can come in anyway.”
Émile, who was mopping at his nose with a handkerchief, moved back while – like Madoc the Magnificent whenever anyone produced a crucifix – he ‘paled visibly’. “Agnes,” he muttered nauseously, “Get out of this and take that foul thing with you. What do you mean by interfering between me and my wife?”
“I suppose you would say as much was you about to murder her, and this ain’t so different. You are becoming a nasty vampire apace and you should be ashamed!”
“Agnes, take that thing away or you can leave my house!”
Sophie let out a wail, but Agnes seemed unperturbed. “I will when you can eat it, as then is your proper self telling me so.” Seeing him swallow some of his own blood and flinch with disgust, she gloated, “Is your own blood you are drinking now.”
Émile’s eyes flashed, which was less impressive with his nose bleeding. He turned away, still mopping at his nose, to stand with his back to them. His form wavered and came back again. Perhaps he was distracted by his bleeding nose. He had to try again before he vanished in an angry fizzling of sparks.
Sophie burst into tears. Agnes put her arms about her. “Is downright mean of him. I am becoming accustomed to this, for Georges jumped out at me from the pantry just now. I had my garlic in my pocket, and will get one for you. Silly in Monsieur Émile not to smell it if They are so sensitive to garlic. I suppose he would had he not that bleeding nose which I hope you gave him with a good clout in the face.”
“Ah! Where has he gone?”
“Doubtless to get Georges to join him in drinking more than they ought.”
“What if he comes to prefer Ceridwen Kenrick? For surely, though he could not endure her before, as he changes, he must find he has more in common with Those People than with me. Oh, Agnes – and I did so love him the way he was.” Sophie blew her nose in a way that would have horrified the Dowager Countess.
Agnes snapped her garlic in half. “Is you he loves, for all his acting the monster. I think you must carry this always.”
Sophie stuffed it into her pocket. “Agnes, it’s awful that Georges pursues you so. I am not speaking in obedience to Monsieur Émile when I say you must safeguard yourself by leaving.”
Agnes’ eyes sparked. “Leaving you here alone, Mistress Sophie, when I bet you have none of them cramps? No, I am not going, that is final. I never thought things like this happen here in our village, Mistress Sophie. Now, if it happened down in Swansea, where folks are about All Sorts of Mischief, I would be less surprised.”
After she had checked her tears, helped by some patting from Agnes, Sophie went down to the sitting room. As she passed the drawing room at the foot of the stairs she sensed Émile was not in there, waiting for her to sing for him as though nothing had happened.
In the sitting room, taking a quick glance at herself in the gilt framed mirror, she thought that she still looked distraught, her eyes pink and swollen despite Agnes’ bathing them in her remedy. The world seemed full of cures which didn’t work.
She took up a baby’s bonnet on which she was working for the Poor Box. She only took stitches in occasional bursts of activity as she sat, thoughts wandering unbidden into her mind like straying cattle, while she used her reason as a cowman to urge them along into a coherent group.
Feeling exhausted, Sophie went to bed early, putting the clove of garlic into the drawer on her bedside table. She slept on and off, waking now and then to sink back into a troubled doze, unhappy that Émile wasn’t with her. Finally, she jerked out of a dream of something fearsome. She took the amulet from under her pillow, and stole through the adjoining doors to his dressing room.
Five minutes later, she sat on her bed in defeat, fighting back tears of jealousy and disappointment accompanied by lingering nausea brought on the smell of the cigar smoke and the burning amulet in Émile’s room.
She preferred not to think about what that sick feeling might mean, but couldn’t avoid thinking about those scratch marks on his ribs, surely evidence enough that Émile had sported with the savage Mistress Kenrick.
Her disappointment over Émile’s destroying the amulet was the more bitter because she knew there only remained the Cure of the Charged Wine.
How could she ever get Émile to agree to being bathed in wine stored in a church? He would have jeered at such an idea even before, when he was desperate to find a cure. Now he revelled in becoming a monster.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Agnes watched Sophie wrinkle her nose at the smell of the hot chocolate. “Nothing yet, Mistress Sophie? When you start feeling sick of a morning you will know for sure, and if so, you aren’t to concern yourself about the baby as well as your other troubles.”
Sophie thought that easy for someone else to say, and sipped the drink, which tasted bitterer than ever. “Agnes, with the excitements of the last days, it makes no wonder if I feel out of sorts.”
Even so, Sophie admitted to herself that her bosom was tingling again. She whispered, “I tried to place the amulet under Monsieur’s pillow, but he woke and burnt it.” She didn’t want to think about being pregnant at the moment. It would make her feel weaker, though for sure it added still more urgency to her quest for a cure, not only for him, but to ensure her developing baby (if she was growing one) would be human.
Agnes clicked her tongue. “Georges found his in his waistcoat pocket, and threw it out of the window. We may yet find it by the terrace.”
“Agnes, how does Mr Kit?”
“For sure he must be getting better, as Mrs Kit smiled once this morning.” Agnes smiled herself.
“I wonder how does poor Miss Morwenna?”
Sophie suddenly remembered what it was about Émile she had noticed in the small hours as subtly different (apart from the scratch on his side). For once, this change wasn’t sinister. Surely, the freckles across his nose were more strongly marked this morning?
Émile was already in the breakfast room as Sophie entered and greeted her with only a slight edge to his punctilio. She wondered what was going on under his wavy fair hair, carefully disarranged as ever. His eyes, inhuman as they were, showed sadness mixed with the savagery and cunning.
Again, he didn’t dismiss the footmen.
His coffee smelt even stronger to her than her hot chocolate earlier and she wrinkled her nose. Her own tea tasted as odd as the hot chocolate, and she only drank half a cup with her pound cake.
As Émile attacked his ham and eggs Sophie remembered how everyone had commented on his lack of appetite at Plas Uchaf at the time he was brooding over her supposed rejection. It was typical of his insensitivity as a half human that he ate his breakfast now with appetite. Besides, now she was his wife – enjoyed many times – and possibly coldness between them disturbed him less.
Sophie gazed out at the view over the garden leading to the fields and mountains beyond. It was a beautiful day with the wind sweeping clouds over a bright blue sky; every minute the mountains darkened to a purple tinge and then suddenly lightened with sunshine again.
She wondered how she would answer the letter from her friend – too far away now, up in Scotland to have been able to attend the wedding – suggesting a stay at Plas Planwydden.
Émile glanced up irritably. “What the Devil?” He strode to the door.
Then Sophie heard raised voices further down the passage. Lucien rushed in, breathing hard. “Monster!”
“Have you run mad?” Guto started towards him.
Émile smiled. “I take it you wish to leave us, Lucien? a pity; Mrs Kit will arrange things. Madame and I did enjoy your food.”
Lucien, eyes almost starting from his head in his rage, pointed at him. “Food? You sate your filthy appetite in a different way – Monster! She has been bewitched –” He raised his arm to throw something. Émile was on him, seizing it.
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The man struggled as Émile bundled him easily from the room, smiling amiably the while. “Lucien, you are a good fellow, but I cannot allow you to act out scenes from a Gothic novel in front of my wife, least of all at our petite déjuner.”
Sophie thought that unreasonable in one who had played out enough such scenes himself.
Lucien, bundled along in an iron grip, tried to free his hand to thrust the garlic into Émile’s mouth. Émile cursed in French and kept Lucien’s arm back easily, while Lucien struggled and ranted wildly, speaking too fast for Sophie to make out a word. They went out into the hallway in a sort of grotesque dance.
Even as Guto and Sophie rushed out, his eye temporarily caught hers in embarrassment. Meanwhile the other gawky footman – whom Sophie always thought looked even more uncomfortable than Guto in his livery – stood in ginger amazement.
Émile yelled, “Open the door!” Guto charged ahead of Émile and Lucien as they tripped down the hall. Near the door they fell over some item of furniture and it accompanied them as they fell through the door and rolled down the steps, smashing with a tearing sound as they landed on the bottom step.
Sophie winced. Émile leaped up cursing. He bent down to help up Lucien, who had landed underneath him, losing the piece of garlic. “Come back and settle matters when you have calmed down.”
Lucian wrenched away his arm. “Monster!” he pulled away and limped away up the drive.
Émile limped slightly himself as he came back into the house. “These dietary recommendations thrust upon me become tiresome. Sophie, we must see about a replacement.”
“Émile, I do hope you didn’t hurt yourselves badly!” Even as she spoke, Sophie thought she sounded idiotic.
Mrs Kit, Agnes and Katarina appeared from somewhere. Sharp eyed Agnes shrugged and went down the steps to pick up the broken piece of garlic lodged under the boot scraper.
She smiled grimly, looking up at Émile. “No sense in wasting this. Is good riddance to him. He was a sneaky one.”
That Scoundrel Émile Dubois Page 33
