The Dead Travel Fast

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  “Proper? I think we have passed beyond the pale of propriety, Miss Lestrange.” He put his head to the side, and I saw that his eyes were clear and alight with some anticipated pleasure. “You will not do this to please me when I have done so much to please you?”

  “Please me?” I paused and suddenly my bodice felt uncomfortably tight, constricting me. Had he made the improvements in the village at my urging? “The digging of the new well?”

  “And the pasture, and the school, and the church,” he added, numbering them on his fingers.

  “You did not do those things to please me,” I said faintly. I could scarcely hear my own voice over the drumbeat of my pulse in my ears.

  He leaned forward, his lips brushing my ear. “Didn’t I?”

  I closed my eyes at the sensations that assaulted me. “You have owned that you do nothing you do not wish to do. It pleased you to make those improvements.”

  A warm exhalation passed over the flesh of my neck, summoning and warming the blood beneath. “It pleases me to please you,” he murmured.

  A single fingertip stroked downward from jaw to collarbone, tracing the pulse that surged and fluttered there. His other hand came around my waist firmly, possessing, even as his lips coaxed. I ought go, I thought stupidly. It is not too late to turn back. Now, I will push him aside and take my leave. Instead I lifted my chin, exposing my throat to him as he lowered his head. Fear rose within me, choking and hot, but still I stood in the circle of his arms, yielding, trusting. I felt the graze of his teeth against the soft flesh of my throat, and I waited, bracing myself for the pain of the piercing that would follow.

  But it did not come. Instead he covered my mouth with his own and thrust his hands into my hair, wrenching aside the pins and plaits as he pressed me against the worktable.

  His kisses were a revelation, for I had never imagined such things. Rather than frightening me, his abandon challenged my hesitation, and my passion rose with every proof of his.

  He broke off suddenly, his lips so near to mine I could still feel the warmth of them. He put a fingertip to the first of my buttons, twisting it.

  “Your gown buttons in the front, like a maid’s,” he said, his voice low and soft.

  I swallowed hard as his fingertip brushed the bare skin above. “I have no maid. I must dress myself,” I replied.

  “Shall I be your maid?” he asked, sliding his fingers behind the décolletage. My knees failed me then, and he held me firmly against him with one arm as his other hand continued its work at my buttons, sliding intimately under my chemise.

  “What if it were true?” he murmured against my lips. “Everything you hope and everything you fear. Is that what you have come for?”

  “Yes,” I said, opening to him.

  He slipped each button from its hole, and with each another of my doubts slipped away. There was no space for them, crowded as my head was with the feel of him, the scent of him, the taste of him still hanging upon my lips. I had merely sipped of him yet, and I craved the whole.

  “‘What will you say tonight, poor solitary soul, to the kindest, dearest, the fairest of women?’” he murmured. It was Baudelaire, a lingering line from the poems he had given me. “‘There is nothing sweeter than to do her bidding; Her spiritual flesh has the fragrance of Angels, and when she looks upon us we are clothed with light,’” he added.

  He punctuated the poem with kisses, tracing his lips over my skin with every syllable. “‘Be it in the darkness of night, in solitude, or in the city street among the multitude, her image in the air dances like a torch flame.’”

  He drew back, the smile of Mephistopheles touching his lips. “Do you remember the rest?”

  “‘I am your guardian Angel, your Muse and Madonna,’” I said obediently, my breath coming in short gasps.

  “Yes, I think you are my Muse,” he said, clasping me to him and gathering me up as if I were a small child. I had not realised the strength in him. I had looked at his elegant clothes and taken him for a plaything of fashion, but the man who carried me to the little sofa and bore me down into the cushions was no idle creature. He was hard and fit, and when I drew his clothes away with impatient fingers, I could have wept at the beauty of him.

  The pleasures we took upon that little sofa I could never have anticipated. He was neither tender nor rough, for although he coaxed responses from me, he had his own joys of me as well, and I was glad of it. The thought of playing the student to his tutor would have been unbearable. But we were equals, demanding of and rendering to each other the fullest of physical pleasures, and I realised how fortunate my choice had been. Had I surrendered myself in the marriage bed, my own satisfaction would have been illicit, a thing to be stolen from my husband. With a lover, it was a holy thing, a sacrament to the act itself, celebrated by the ordained. This liberty to do and choose whatever I liked made me bold, and my boldness pleased him and there, upon his grandfather’s velvet sofa, he engulfed and consumed me and burnt me to ash to be reborn.

  The act itself I cannot remember, not clearly, for the pieces have broken and fitted themselves together again like tumbling shards of kaleidoscope glass. I remember the feel of his back, the long silken muscles sleek beneath my fingers. I remember the little cries and the sweetly whispered words, those that urged and those that begged, and above it all, the astonishing duality of the act itself. The physical was so much more primitive than I had expected, and yet the emotions were exalted. I had expected release and relief and pleasure, but not tenderness. I had not expected to care for him.

  And when it was over and his head rested upon my breast came the rush of sweetness. I knotted my fingers in his hair, thinking of Samson, and how a man is never so vulnerable as when he sleeps in a woman’s arms. And I kissed him then, as I had not kissed him before. I had always waited for him to press his lips to mine, but as he drowsed, sated and entwined, I put my lips to his brow, as if to mark him for my own.

  After a little while, he roused and stretched and poured out brandy for us both. “A restorative,” he said, with only a trace of mischief.

  I had wrapped myself in the length of dress fabric, preserving the vestiges of my modesty.

  “You oughtn’t cover yourself,” he told me. “It is a crime against nature.” He tugged at the cloth and I pushed his hand away.

  “Stop,” I said, but the word carried no force.

  He regarded me thoughtfully. “You do not see yourself as I do, Theodora. There is much to admire. You are a woman of quiet charms, but charms nonetheless.”

  I sipped at the brandy, steeling myself against the fiery sting of it. I said nothing, but he did not seem to require a reply.

  “Ah, you are looking sceptical again,” he said lightly. “You think me a poor connoisseur, but I assure you, I speak with a master’s eye.” He put a hand to my hair, stroking it and twining a lock about his palm. “Your hair is lovely, almost as black as the wing of a raven. And your eyes are most arresting, so wide and so bright. Those eyes see everything, do they not? Sometimes when we are at table and your gaze is fixed on your plate, I imagine you still see everything that passes. Tell me, can you look into the heart of a man with those eyes?” he asked suddenly, his tone lightly mocking.

  “I am no more perceptive than any other woman, and I daresay less than most,” I replied.

  “What do you perceive in me?” He dropped his eyes to the glass he turned in his hands, studying the ebb and flow of the brandy.

  I hesitated, casting about for the right words. “A wounded thing. I think you have been hurt much in your life, and you do not want people to know it.”

  He lifted his brows in surprise, but did not speak and I went on.

  “I think you are kinder than you would own to yourself, and I think your spirit is gentler than you pretend. You have taken up a carapace of coldness and sophistry to protect what you do not wish to expose.”

  “And what is that?” he asked, his tone a shade less jovial than before.

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bsp; “Your most secret hope,” I said, dropping my voice to a whisper. “Restoration.”

  “What a pretty picture you paint of me,” he said softly, tracing the length of my neck with his thumb. “Everyone else sees me as a man to be envied, but you see the worst of me.”

  “Not the worst of you,” I hastened to say. “Only the most vulnerable. A wolf in a trap will snap and snarl at whoever comes near to him out of fear he cannot protect himself.”

  “And I am a wounded wolf,” he finished with a mocking smile.

  “You may laugh at the metaphor, but I find it apt.”

  “As do I,” he capitulated. “But I ought to warn you that what you have seen thus far is the merest sheep compared to the truth of me.”

  “Do you think so little of yourself that you wish me to share your low opinion?”

  He drew away from me a little then, and I felt the coolness of it. Neither our minds nor our bodies touched, and though I had felt the connection between us, it was lost.

  “I put no value upon my stock,” he said, his tone dropping a little. “I see myself as I am, and you would do well to lose your illusions.”

  “Will you take them from me?” I teased, thinking to draw him in with good humour.

  But he did not smile, and the eyes that had looked upon me with warmth and approbation had turned cool and appraising. “I ought to. For your own good. I gave you the measure of my character early on in our acquaintance, but I have found it is a peculiar affliction of women that they will believe what they want of a man and ignore what he is, no matter how base, how vicious. A woman sees in a man only what she wishes to make of him,” he added bitterly.

  “Perhaps it is rather that we see what you might make of yourselves. You had no inclination to better the lives of your vassals, and yet you have done so. Does that not make you improved upon what you were?”

  Something stirred in his eyes then, some flicker of cruelty that ought to have warned me.

  “You think me caring and disingenuous? Even after I told you what I am? Shall I tell you again? I am a seducer of women, child. I take what I want, where I want, and I will employ any stratagem to secure it.” He moved forward, gripping me by the shoulders. “Look at me, Theodora, and without wishing me to be other than I am. See me, and be warned.”

  “You do not frighten me,” I told him, the trembling of my hands belying my words.

  “Then why do you shiver? Am I not a horror story to frighten the stoutest heart?” he asked, dropping his head to my neck once more. He put his lips to the pulse at my throat and I felt the pressure of his teeth, poised above my heartbeat.

  “Yes,” I whispered into his hair, “and for that I pity you.”

  Instantly, he reared back, his hands still gripping my shoulders, his complexion dark with fury.

  “You pity me?” he rasped.

  “I do. There are stouter walls built round your heart than round this mountain. You take women for pleasure but not companionship, and any intimacy besides the physical causes you pain. Oh, I do see you for what you are. You are a man who wants to be understood, to be taken for all his flaws and all his failures and loved in spite of them. You despise my sex for our follies, and yet yours is the greater for at least we will take love where we can. You would throw it back and scorn the gift of it.”

  “You do not love me,” he said, his colour fading to paleness. “You came here for the purpose of being seduced. Do not lie. I smelled willingness upon you the moment you entered the room. Do you think I have been blind to your sighs, your trembling, your longing glances? You are curious and passionate and you will use this night as fodder for your imagination, but do not mask it with the veil of love and think yourself better for it,” he said. “We are cut of the same cloth, Theodora.”

  I felt a chill at his words, abashed that he had taken the measure of me so keenly. “At least I do not plate my heart with the cynic’s armour. I believe I will love, and I will be loved, but you dismiss it out of hand as so much foolishness with your taxonomy of women and your scientific seductions. You reduce us all to playthings and formulae, to be won with calculation and guile. That is the real foolishness, for if no woman ever sees you, how can she begin to love you?”

  “I do not require love,” he said stonily.

  “We all of us require love,” I replied. “You think me childish and silly for clinging to the promise of it, but it is human to want happiness, and if there is happiness without love I am not convinced of it.”

  I paused then, watching the play of emotion across his face. I could not decipher it, but I knew he warred with himself, as if something I had said had thawed some part of him long-frozen and removed from the rest.

  After a moment he put his hands to his temples. “I shall wake from this and find you are a pipe dream, sent to torment me for my past sins.”

  I put my hands over his. “I am no dream.” I kissed him then, offering him my warmth. “I am here. I am real,” I said, kissing him again. He embraced me, returning my kisses feverishly for a moment, until he wrenched himself away. He brought my clothes and dressed me, tenderly as any mother will dress a newborn child. I knew it was dismissal, and I felt only tired and much older than I had when I entered the room in search of my own destruction.

  At the door, he cupped my face in his hands. “Do not bombard my defences, little one. They are all I have, and I find myself in danger of growing too fond of you. Believe me when I tell you it would be fatal for us both.”

  He kissed me one last time, and I felt the finality of it in his lips. “We will not speak of this again,” he said as he opened the door. “It would doubtless improve my reputation, but it would ruin yours, and I am still gentleman enough to care,” he finished. He closed the door, but gently, and I returned to my room, a more experienced and much more confused woman than I had been when I left it.

  14

  To my surprise, I slept deeply and dreamlessly that night—whether from the brandy or my physical exertions, I could not say—and I rose the next morning feeling much clearer in the mind. I had gone to the count’s room deliberately, and although he was the experienced seducer, it was I who had gone to him. My courage had failed me once or twice, yet when the moment came, I had seized it. I was fully a woman now, and I felt the difference of it. So many things that had been veiled from me were now revealed, and although my experience must remain secret, I knew I should never be the same. I had gone boldly to claim that which I wanted, and in doing so, I had thrown down the barriers of my diffidence. It seemed astonishing to me that I had ever considered making a home with my sister or a life with Charles Beecroft. I was another person then, a child; I had existed only as a possibility. But now I truly lived; I was creating the life I intended to have for myself and I was filled with the power of it all.

  Perhaps I should have left the castle that morning. I wonder how much of what followed would have come to pass had I not remained. But I felt the pull of the place and of the man himself, even if our parting had not been a romantic one. It was my own fault, I decided. No man likes to have his weaknesses prodded, and I had been ruthless in my examination of his. I believed what I told him, but I also realised that he might never rise equal to the task of reclamation. So much at the castle had been left to fall to ruin, so much beauty wasted and decayed. Little wonder the master of the place should prove the same, I reflected. But how I longed to try. I had seen the satisfaction to be had in restoring the village; how much greater the satisfaction in restoring a soul! I romanticised him, but it was to be expected. I was young and foolish, and he was my first lover. I could no more have left him then than I could have cut out my own heart.

  Besides, as I reminded myself stoutly, I had promised Cosmina to stay. Guilt pawed at my stomach over the question of Cosmina. I knew she did not want the count for her own; she harboured no secret passions, nursed no girlish dreams. She was repulsed by marriage, and I strongly suspected would have been horrified by the act I had embraced so fully.
There was something cool and untouched about Cosmina, and it occurred to me that even if she were to marry and bear a dozen sons, she would always remind me of the Madonna, remote and beautiful and above the squalid and the mundane. I was grieved to find that the little necklace of blue beads that Cosmina had presented to me was gone, lost somewhere in the workroom, and I determined to find it as quickly as possible.

  I meant to visit the workroom during the day, but my book intruded. I wrote for hours in the library, Tycho resting at my feet as I scribbled, and when I emerged, it was to find I was very nearly late for the evening meal. I hurried through my ablutions and joined the company in the great hall, surprised to find the countess holding court.

  “Good evening, my dear,” she said, inclining her head slowly.

  “Good evening, madame. How nice to see you,” I returned, rather breathlessly.

  Frau Amsel stood at the countess’s shoulder, hovering protectively and refusing to look directly at me, as if I were a basilisk. I did not mind; if she were as vile as the count suggested, then I should prefer to keep my distance. Florian looked exhausted from his efforts in the village. His hair was newly slicked with water and he rocked a little on his heels from fatigue. Cosmina was still a trifle paler than I would have liked, but she greeted me with a warm smile. I did not dare look directly at the count, but I fancied he was regarding me thoughtfully, and I felt the heat rise in my cheeks at the memory of what we had done together.

  The meal was rather more formal in view of the countess’s presence, and when it was concluded we repaired to the library for an evening of piquet and music. It was a pleasant enough time, or would have been, were it not for the things that went unspoken. There was much we might have said to each other, and much that we concealed.

  But the evening passed and when the clock struck eleven, we rose to retire. Just as we reached the great hall, a tremendous thud echoed throughout the room. Cosmina gave a little gasp, and the countess’s hand flew to her heart.