Dark Garden

by Jennifer Fulton

He came closer. The smell of alcohol clung to him. The hand at his side formed a fist. “I said get her out of here.”

  Mason stepped in front of Vienna. “No.”

  He cuffed her so hard across the face that she staggered and fell. Standing over her, he said, “Take that spawn back where she belongs and don’t ever bring her here again.”

  Vienna shivered at the memory of his rage. She wondered if Laudes Absalom was really as morbid and intimidating as it had seemed that day. Perhaps, with Mason’s father gone, it was a just a big old house that needed renovations. Assuming she won the next skirmish in their ongoing battle, she would soon be in a position to decide its fate. Laudes Absalom would finally belong to the Blakes.

  She sighed. A hundred and forty years had passed since their families first began tearing at each other’s throats, and she was the one who would finally make the Cavenders pay their debt in full. For as long as she could remember, this moment had obsessed her family. Sitting on her father’s knee, she had recited the promise every Blake learned along with the first words they could speak: While Cavenders breathe and prosper, the Blakes cannot rest in their graves.

  The last of the Cavenders was now in front of her, breaking the law, threatening her life, and soon to be led off in handcuffs, or possibly shot by the police. Vienna searched for pleasure in the prospect of her enemy’s humiliation and defeat, but she could only find hollow pity and a sense of dismay.

  Astounding herself, she said, “Go home, Mason. Just walk out of here. I guarantee you will be unmolested.”

  “Do I look like a coward? Do you think I would dishonor myself by running away?”

  Vienna caught a flash of herself standing at the gates of Laudes Absalom two days after that horse ride, face-to-face with Mason, the heavy bars between them. Mason, with her ten-year-old dignity, had informed her they could never be friends. She kept her head down as if she could hide her bruised face and bloody upper lip.

  Vienna had been chastised for their exploit, too. No dessert for a week and her dolls confiscated until she laboriously penned a letter explaining why Blakes did not play with Cavenders. As soon as she’d completed her punishment and apologized to everyone who seemed offended, she’d evaded her nanny and returned to the scene of her disgrace, worried about Mason. The man at the gatehouse had made her promise not to come by again, causing trouble, then he summoned Mason.

  Standing on either side of the gate, they’d solemnly shaken hands, forswearing the possibility of friendship and avowing their status as enemies. Vienna could still see Mason’s black eye and the grimace of pain as she tried to smile when they said good-bye. She’d stopped once as she walked away, looking back for the longest time. Vienna waved, but Mason didn’t respond. It was eight years before they spoke again.

  “I think you’ve suffered a terrible loss,” Vienna said coolly. “You’re not fully in command of yourself.”

  “I see. And you think this temporary softness in the head would induce me to accept pity from a Blake?”

  “Don’t mistake self-interest for pity.” Vienna finally opened the drawer far enough to admit her hand. “Do you seriously imagine defeating you in this condition would give me any satisfaction? It’s hardly a fair fight.”

  Mason barked a harsh laugh. “When did that ever stop you or any of your family?”

  “Don’t judge me by Cavender standards,” Vienna said haughtily. She closed her fingers around her revolver. “There are some things I won’t stoop to, including cold-blooded murder and taking advantage of a person unhinged by grief.”

  “How did you come by these newfound scruples? Obviously they’re not genetic.”

  Vienna contemplated the best way to defuse the present threat from her old foe. Liberating the .38 from the drawer, she lifted it into view. As Mason’s eyes registered the revolver, Vienna said softly, “Yes, we’re both armed. And I could have shot you right then, but I chose not to.”

  “Proving what? You’re a lousy shot and would have missed? Or you don’t want a mess on your carpet?”

  “For the record, I could take you down at a hundred yards, but I don’t have to kill you to destroy you,” Vienna replied sweetly. “Let me explain what I have planned. I’m going to buy the last pieces of the Cavender Corporation, and then I’m going to bankrupt you and buy that ramshackle castle of yours and the land that rightfully belongs to the Blakes. Then I’m going to raze your family’s edifices to the ground, cut down your trees, and sell every animal on that property for slaughter.”

  She got no further with her dangerous taunts. Mason lifted the rifle, her knuckles white, and for a split second it seemed that she would pull the trigger. Then she let the weapon fall.

  Extending her arms, she invited, “Why waste time plotting and scheming? Just shoot me.” When Vienna didn’t react, she ripped open the front of her shirt and exposed her naked, heaving chest. “Get it over with. Come on, lay waste to another Cavender heart.”

  Vienna didn’t know when she’d ever seen a body more beautiful. Mason’s breasts were like the rest of her, the muscles sheathed in smooth, pale olive skin. Her small, hard nipples were an unlikely shade of Merlot, a deeper hue than her mouth. Her toned torso flinched visibly beneath Vienna’s gaze and her breathing grew more rapid. Vienna fixed her attention on the belt loosely fastened above the rise of her hips. The buckle was silver and ornately carved, a lion and two crescents within the loose coil of a serpent. The Cavender emblem, the same one that decorated the wrought iron gates at Laudes Absalom, supposedly created from an ancient family crest.

  There was talk that a Cavender bride had Romany ancestry, accounting for the dark-haired, dark-eyed look of the entire family and for their unruliness, reckless passions, and legendary superstitions. A penchant for gambling, drinking, brawling, and womanizing had ended the lives of a succession of Cavender males over the past two centuries. The women were no strangers to vice, either. Vienna had heard the stories; the Blakes circulated every sordid detail as evidence of their superior gene pool. If Cavender women didn’t die in childbirth, they took their own lives or vanished in peculiar circumstances, littering the family tree with motherless children. The men were handsome and charming, and known for their violent rages.

  The Blakes were diametric opposites, with their blond or red hair, pale skin, cool nature, and dogged self-discipline. Blakes were conservative, logical, and dispassionate, except for their desire to vanquish the family that had wronged them. But even their quest for revenge was cold and ruthless, tempered by a determination to win by the rules of civilized society. Vienna could not imagine how the two families had ever started out in business together, let alone that their enterprise had thrived and that relations had been so cordial, they’d built their homes on adjoining land. They jointly ran a farm and orchard to provide both households with food. Their children were schooled together. There was even a Blake-Cavender marriage, cementing the alliance.

  Taking in the woman breathing hard in front of her, Vienna suffered a pang of deep regret for the divide between them. Neither could cross that treacherous chasm without reaching out to the other, but their mutual mistrust was too great for either to make the first move. For a brief, crazy instant, Vienna wanted to step around her desk and take Mason in her arms. If anyone needed a hug, her sworn enemy did. She drew a sharp breath and caught a whiff of soap and spice blended with another scent. Mason’s. She hated that she recognized it, that it was imprinted in her sense memory just as indelibly as Mason’s touch.

  “What’s wrong? Can’t stand to besmirch your pretty white hands?” Mason let her arms fall to her sides. Her shirt fell loosely closed. “No, of course not. You’re a Blake. You have lawyers and flunkies to do your dirty work.”

  Lowering her eyes, Vienna tried to distance herself from the physical turmoil she felt. She set her weapon down next to Mason’s and almost laughed when she realized she was looking at an antique rifle. Even if Mason had pulled the trigger, the Winchester probably wouldn’t have
fired. Vienna studied the elaborately engraved silver plate on the walnut rifle butt. Below the Cavender crest, an inscription read, “Presented to Thomas Blake Cavender, 1870.”

  She frowned. The man who had caused the feud between their families was Thomas’s father, Hugo Cavender, who shot Benedict Blake, the family patriarch, in 1870. Was this the murder weapon? Had he bestowed it upon his son, Thomas, to celebrate the crime? Perhaps the same convoluted Cavender logic had made Mason choose this rifle for her vengeance fantasy. Was Vienna supposed to be goaded by this tasteless symbolism?

  The phone on her desk started ringing before she could summon a suitable putdown. “That’s probably the police,” she told Mason. “By now I’m sure they’re in the building.”

  “Then it’s time for you to play the poor, helpless victim terrified for her life. They’ll buy it.”

  Vienna picked up the phone.

  A man said, “Sergeant Joe Pelli, Boston Police Department. Who am I speaking to?”

  “This is Vienna Blake. How may I help you, Sergeant?”

  “Just answer my questions yes or no, ma’am. Are you being held against your will?”

  “No.”

  “Is an individual in the room with you?”

  “Yes. Ms Cavender and I are having a meeting.”

  “Are you in any immediate danger?”

  Vienna hesitated. “No.”

  “Is she armed?”

  “There are two weapons lying on the desk in front of me, Sergeant. One of them is my revolver, the other is an old collector’s firearm that is probably not in working order. Ms. Cavender will be leaving shortly.”

  “It’s not that easy,” the sergeant said. “She’s broken the law.”

  Vienna placed her hand over the phone. “He wants to arrest you.”

  Mason wandered to a club chair in one corner and flopped back into it, arms dangling over the padded rests, legs sprawled in front of her. “Send him up.”

  “Are you drunk or just absurdly stubborn?”

  “I don’t drink.” Mason took a silver case from an inside pocket and withdrew a corona and a pair of scissors. “There are more pleasurable vices.”

  “This building has a no-smoking rule.” Vienna hated that she sounded like her mother.

  Mason severed the cigar cap and indolently lit up. “Bite me.”

  Her soft taunt awakened Vienna’s nipples once more and a dart of awareness jarred her spine. She told the sergeant to stand down his men. Studying the woman filling her office with aromatic smoke, she asked, “Why did you come here?”

  “Those vices I mentioned, one of them is pissing off Blakes.” Mason kept the cigar in her mouth as she refastened the few shirt buttons that weren’t torn off. She took another puff, then perched the corona on the edge of the chair arm. Her expression was one of brooding introspection. “I’ve just had the worst two weeks of my life, and now I have to leave without killing you. So I guess I’m procrastinating.”

  “I’ve heard that’s a Cavender trait.” Vienna stood. “Look, I have a lunch date. Security will escort you out of the building.”

  She unloaded the Winchester and the revolver, slid the bullets into her purse, and picked up both weapons so that her unwelcome guest could not take a gun with her. Unable to prevent herself, she glanced at Mason’s face. The dark, unearthly eyes flashed at her and Mason’s smile, though harder, was as sensuous as ever. In another life, Vienna would have found her impossible to resist. But Mason was the last of the Cavenders. The Blakes would settle for nothing less than her annihilation.

  Chapter Two

  “Your hands, Ms. Cavender.”

  Mason unclenched her fists. She couldn’t stop thinking about Vienna Blake and her arrogant threats: I’m going to raze your family’s edifices to the ground, cut down your trees, and sell every animal on that property for slaughter. That stone-cold bitch. Mason could easily believe her capable of such callousness. Yet she’d played right into Vienna’s hands with her hotheaded detour to Blake Industries. Her grandfather had ended up in an insane asylum before he killed himself. Was she losing her mind, too, marching into the enemy’s camp with her Winchester loaded? She should be thankful that Vienna had let her walk away, but the reprieve grated. Vienna had brushed her off like an annoying insect. As always, her patronizing attitude set Mason’s teeth on edge.

  “Observe the facial muscles,” Stanley Ashworth informed his protégée, Havel Kadlec, a delicate youth with a back deformity that corrupted his walk.

  “Yes, master. Very tense.” The young man studied Mason’s face with the embarrassed fascination of a boy seeing more than he should. In the heavily accented English learned after Ashworth plucked him from a sidewalk in Prague, he noted, “The jaw. The mouth. The eyes. The appearance is…angry.”

  “A change of music, perhaps,” the artist suggested.

  Havel replaced the cap on a paint tube and limped over to the CD player. He queried Mason. “Mozart? Shostakovich? Dixie Chicks?”

  “Do I look like a give a damn?” She instantly regretted her churlish reply. There was no need to take out her frustration on someone powerless to respond in kind. Softening her tone, she said, “Classical works for me.”

  She stared out the tall windows. The afternoon light would change soon and she could escape. She had wanted to cancel this appointment and her next one, with the chief financial officer of the Cavender Corporation. But Ashworth was leaving town shortly to paint a U.S. senator and had insisted on completing their final life sitting first. Mason owed him some consideration. He’d already declined a prestigious commission and changed his travel plans several times to accommodate the Cavenders.

  His brush poised, he regarded her dispassionately. “Relax. Smooth brow. Keep your position.”

  “When can I see it?” Mason asked.

  “When it’s unveiled.”

  Havel closed the CD player and the poignant opening strains of Elgar’s “Nimrod” plunged the studio into heroic despair. Mason’s chest constricted. The famous classic was one of the pieces played at her brother’s funeral nine days earlier. Ashworth obviously remembered. He glared at his protégée and slid a finger across his throat.

  “Oh, pardon me,” Havel stammered. “Please, I am very sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Mason said dryly, “At least it’s not ‘Agnus Dei.’”

  Looking pained, Havel switched to the serenity of Fauré’s “Pavane,” and painting resumed. Mason worked on keeping her face composed. Her thoughts drifted with the haunting melody. Only a month ago she’d been standing here with her hand resting on Lynden’s shoulder as he lolled in the armchair in front of her, posing for their portrait. The photos taken during their sittings were the last she had of him. She was thankful he’d insisted they pose together instead of having separate portraits done for the gallery at Laudes Absalom. He’d also come up with the concept for the painting, a snapshot of a typical Sunday: Lynden slouched in his favorite chair recovering from a hangover and Mason back from a long horse ride, her Winchester under her arm, symbolizing—Ashworth claimed—her protective nature.

  She and her brother were opposites in temperament. Mason was a solitary animal, lacking the charm that made Lynden a fixture on the elite party scene, a bachelor profiled in GQ as the last in a long line of handsome bad boys, the man destined to reverse the Cavender family fortunes via a glittering marriage and smart investments. From all accounts he’d been well on his way to accomplishing both before the plane crash. According to the Boston Globe, the so-called “tragic accident” two weeks earlier signaled “the final throes of the colorful but ill-fated house of Cavender.”

  Once more, Mason considered Vienna Blake’s indignant claims of innocence. The denial was laughable. Maybe she didn’t sabotage the plane in person, but the Blakes had been conniving to destroy the Cavenders for well over a century. With talk of Lynden’s engagement to a billionaire’s daughter, Vienna must have seen their chances of victory slipping away. The marriage w
ould have saved the Cavender Corporation, and the Blakes couldn’t allow that to happen. So they’d somehow sabotaged Lynden’s plane.

  Vienna was too smart to get caught in a murder conspiracy. She must have hired someone who knew how to keep his mouth shut. Fear uncoiled in Mason’s gut and she fought off the oily nausea that had bothered her since the crash. She harbored the dark belief that Vienna wouldn’t stop until the job was done. The thought frayed her nerves. She could take care of herself, and she could hardly summon the will to care whether she lived or died anyway. But what about the people and animals who depended on her? She couldn’t wait to get back to Laudes Absalom and make sure her dog and her horses were safe.

  Calming herself, Mason watched a mourning dove bob and weave along the window ledge. It peered into the studio and tapped a glass pane. From the guilty look on Havel’s face, Mason guessed he usually left breadcrumbs out but hadn’t today. She studied the dove more closely and realized it was missing a foot.

  “Excuse me.” She dropped her pose and crossed to the window. Unfastening the catch, she asked, “Do you have any food for it?”

  Havel hurried over with a bag of sunflower seeds, and Mason scooped a handful and offered her open palm to the dove. It examined her for a few seconds, then took the seeds from her hand.

  Havel seemed surprised. “Usually, she does not come to me. I place the seeds and she eats.”

  “Birds seem to like me,” Mason said. “And I guess she’s extra hungry today.”

  Ashworth tapped a jar of brushes against his studio table like a gavel. “When you’re both ready…we have thirty minutes of light and I would like to use it.”

  Havel snapped to and hurried back across the room. Mason spilled the remaining seeds onto the ledge and closed the window. The dove continued snacking. Maimed, it got about the business of survival despite life’s crippling blows.

  *

  “That’s outrageous.” Marjorie Blake daintily deconstructed her watercress salad, sidelining the cucumber slices. “Why didn’t you have her thrown in jail?”