by Michele Hauf
“Not sure.” At sight of his wondering stare, Roxane elaborated. “They are very strong, and can, most likely, leap great distances so as to appear as if they have flown. I wager it was not difficult for your attacker to leap two stories.”
“Why have the vampires of Paris suddenly developed a compulsion to torment me?”
“Most likely this minion was sent by Monsieur Anjou.”
“A minion?” Another one of those evil words that tasted macabre on his tongue.
“He’s likely aware you did not die and wants to take out his enemy before his enemy takes him out.”
“Splendid. It has been my luck that I attract such ill fortune,” he began, staring up at the oculus.
“Poor, pitiful swish.”
At that mocking statement, he eyed the woman across the room. She shrugged as if to say, ‘Well, it is true’’.
“You think so poorly of me?”
He wanted to know. He needed to know. Certainly he had his favorable points. Women did admire the vicomte Renan’s sexual prowess. He could make a woman think very highly of his prowess. Rather, he once could. That was until the insipid Leo had flounced onto Gabriel’s territory.
But of a sudden it mattered what this woman thought of him. Outside the bed chamber. Even, in a nonsexual manner, despite the fact she’d kissed him last night.
“You are simply feeling sorry for yourself.” She sighed. “The poor swish was attacked by a vampire. Pity, he cannot take care of himself—”
“I take very good care of myself, I’ll have you know. I’ve this house, a full staff, and immense fortune.” A fortune he was trying desperately to dispense, for he could not bear to benefit from the rewards of his parents’ illicit booty.
“But your horrid luck?”
“What can one expect? A man cannot have the good without the bad. And what in your life has been so horrible? Did you send out your lace to be cleaned and have it returned in tatters?”
Oh, but the woman deserved a fine pummeling. Of the between-the-sheets sort. She wanted to know about his life? Memory painted a dreary veil over the past.
“It isn’t important,” he whispered. To think of his parents and their comfort dredged up miserable emotions. “This swish has gotten everything he has ever deserved. On the other hand, I don’t know what it is I have done to deserve such a fresh breath of air as you. Thank you for saving my hide from that minion, Roxane.”
“No man deserves what you are going through right now.”
She approached him, and he felt his blood rise, as it had the other night when she’d kissed him of her own volition. Drawing her palm across his hair, she brushed the strands over his ear. A tingle of erotic expectation shot through him. Be damned the monsters, he wanted to think of nothing but softness.
He captured her wrists and pulled her against his body. Before he could suggest, or intimate, she kissed him. It wasn’t a tentative, consoling kiss. `Twas heated, rushed, and a bit angry. Intent in what she wanted, she threaded her fingers through his hair, her fingernails drawing skittering thrills across his skull. Did the woman realize what she was doing?
She must feel his want for her.
Deepening the kiss, he moaned as the taste of her sweetened his tongue.
“I could take you right now,” he said into her mouth, as he slipped a hand beneath her skirts. The textured wool stockings she wore served a delicious tactile sensation against his surfing palm. The scent of—of something horrible disturbed him. “But I won’t.”
He tugged down her skirts to cover her legs, surprising himself.
A tilt of his head, regretful, spied the stain on the floor. Cursed by a revolting ability to scent blood, he left the embrace, clamping his arms over his chest and paced beneath the oculus.
“Will you leave me, please?”
“You shouldn’t stay in this room tonight, Leo. Not with the blood—”“
“I know that,” he snapped. “I’ll sleep elsewhere. But will you leave? Now.”
“I’m sorry.” He caught her by the waist and spun her beneath the rainbow. Vibrant orange cut a line across her face. “You wanted me to leave?”
“Yes, but not because I don’t want you right here, in my arms. I want to make love to you, Roxane.”
“I…I’m—yes.” She touched his mouth, drawing her forefinger across his bottom lip. “I wish us to make love as well.”
He nipped her finger and then sucked it into his mouth, teasing his tongue along the narrow digit. “Why, Roxane? Do you fancy me? Or is it merely that you feel sorry for this wretched swish?”
“Perhaps a bit of the two.” And with that she withdrew her finger from his mouth and sashayed from the room. “But mostly,” she called as she walked off, “because I wish it.”
The door closed, leaving him alone and feeling much better about himself than he had moments earlier. The woman wanted him. Pitiful as he was, she wanted him. And he wanted her. But.
Hell, must there be a but?
“There should be,” he muttered.
Striding from the room, he trailed his fingers down the mirrored wall, pressing his palm to Roxane’s door as he passed. Yes, there was a but. He had begun to care what the woman thought about him. She was not a meaningless midnight tup. He enjoyed her company. He wanted to sit with her, to talk with her, and spend time with her.
I wish us to make love…
Yes, but so much more. Why, he could allow his imagination to place him by her side, standing in a cathedral nave.
Marry her?
You’ve abandoned domestic bliss, as everyone else has abandoned you. Besides, creatures don’t marry. Or could they?
And should the worst occur…
What woman desired a husband who roomed in the lunatic asylum?
EIGHT
The next morning before the cock announced the day, Roxane mounted a gelding she had borrowed from Leo’s stable and set south for Bicêtre. The asylum sat on a hill just out of Paris, paralleled between Ville-Juif and Gentilly.
Passing an egg-man balancing a pyramid of eggs that blocked his view, she marveled that his path took him around a stack of faggots and safely to his cart, not a single cracked shell.
The pine board barrier at the St. Victor gate was closed up and a smaller door in the large gate was open to emit single-file a herd of bone-thin cattle. Fortunately she arrived as the last beast hobbled through.
Roxane had passed through these gates half a dozen times in the past few months. The bearded guard recognized her and nodded her through with a forced smile. He knew her destination.
Besides jailing thieves, debtors and beggars, the asylum also housed the sick, those the Hotel Dieu had passed on, for they either had not sufficient room or the expertise to handle those too far gone from the pox.
As well, Bicêtre was a holding cell for the insane, a last vestige for families who could not—did not have the skill to—care for those they loved.
Roxane bit her lip hard to prevent a teardrop. She had tried to tend Damian for all of a se’nnight before she realized she could not contain his madness within the small rue Vivienne apartment they had moved into months earlier. Since the attack her brother did not sleep, instead prancing the floor through the night, admonishing and taunting the moon to come out and duel with him. And when the moon surrendered to the sun, Damian would sit for hours and pound his fists against the stone hearth, leaving bloody runnels behind as he dashed, mad-eyed and raging, from one side of the room to the other.
It had been Ninon who’d finally convinced her to bring Damian to Bicêtre. Google-eyed moon hunter. Ninon had blurted out the cruel moniker the night they’d coaxed him inside from the windowsill where he had perched staring up into the darkness.
Just until he regained control of his sanity, Roxane said to herself now as the horse cantered down the pounded dirt road.
He will get back his sanity. He must.
She had only herself to blame for her brother’s condition.
“Fifty livres?”
Gabriel looked up from the notes and bills. It was the first time he had heard protest from Toussaint regarding his philanthropic investments.
“Well, I just…” Toussaint tried to hold Gabriel’s stare but with a huff and a sigh he accepted the coin and tucked it in his left waistcoat pocket.
“See it is delivered anonymously,” Gabriel cautioned.
“I know the scenario.” Toussaint hefted the full leather plackets containing notes of promise and land documents and mumbled the words Gabriel had said so often before, “Discretion is paramount for a man of such kidney.”
Gabriel preferred anonymity, though a few were aware of his contributions by default. Those few were close-lipped—save Madame de Marmonte. But Gabriel kept her in check with twice-weekly visits to her pathetic salon. Of course she could never know his true identity, which also gave her knowledge little meaning.
It seemed he could not dispose of his money fast enough without the interest compounding and seeming to literally double his holdings. His inheritance, his father had explained on the eve of his departure. Gabriel had not been of age, merely eighteen, but the count had emancipated his son so that he could inherit.
A wretched inheritance it was. For it was not family money from the land holdings or the stipend the count and countess received annually. Gabriel’s inheritance had been formed solely from his parents’ sordid business transactions. He’d initially balked at accepting the money he viewed as unclean and vile, but he had accepted it to maintain the lifestyle he had grown accustomed to, aiming to distribute the wealth to those less fortunate.
He wondered now what the future would bring should this crazy wait for moonlight dramatically alter him. His affairs were in order, the entire sum of his legitimate wealth being divided into various hospitals and charity. Might the children’s ward he had planned for Hotel Dieu, a shelter for the orphans and the abandoned to go and to be loved, become reality?
Really, man, why have you not simply built the thing? You have the funds.
So many political rings to jump through. The count and countess Renan had not left for the Americas in good standing with the king. The Renan name was shunned and spat upon. An appointment at court was unthinkable. A meeting with the King’s financial secretary proved an impossible dream. Better to tread lightly, to work anonymously under Leo’s moniker.
Never would she fully accustom herself to the stench that sweatered the pounded dirt courtyard preceding Bicêtre. From the beauty of a surrounding heather field to a festering milieu.
“Mademoiselle Desrues,” the kindly clerk behind the main desk always called to her as she tentatively stepped inside.
Cracked marble tiles stretched wall to wall in the massive foyer. High above, dusty chandeliers caked with sooted candle wax held court, rarely used, far too massive and dirty to warrant care.
Skirts clutched tightly at her thighs, Roxane took a moment to adjust to the surroundings. Common stable smells, she always tried to convince herself. However stables were frequently cleaned and mucked. She dared not guess how rarely the cells and chambers within this hellhole were tended. The upper floors, she had been told, were quite clean; that was where the stable patients resided alongside the laboratories with glass-paned ceilings to let in light.
The courtyard out back provided fresh air, but Damian had not earned permission to go outside. Too unstable, the administrator had stated. Damian’s humors would not accept the air so easily and may send him into fits. Can’t have a wild man running about attempting escape.
Roxane had argued that surely the facility was secure. The administrator merely rolled his eyes beneath a crooked gray periwig and led her to her brother’s room.
“I’ll have Jean-Paul show you back,” the clerk said.
“Merci.”
She forced herself to follow the bow-legged clerk with the grass-stained breeches. He was friendly enough, smiling and signaling she follow. He never spoke, for she had learned he had no tongue.
Thinking she might manage the shock when the guard at the door opened it into the inner bowels, she impulsively reached for the handkerchief tucked up her sleeve. The door closed behind her and the world evaporated, only to leap at her with maniacal screams and a hair-wilting miasma.
Drawing deeply of the rosemary oil, she wandered forward, following the light from the narrow windows set high into the walls. Rows of iron bars laddered but an arm’s reach from her. Fortunately the spaces between the criss-crossed iron bars were too small to emit more than a finger or a—
Roxane jumped as a mangled piece of bone and fur popped out into her path. “Losh!”
Jean-Paul reassured with a shrug that said Roxane should be grateful and not horrified.
She skipped over the tangled offering and quickened her pace to walk down a slope. Here in the bowels of Bicêtre the noise lessened, though never completely ceased. She hated that Damian was kept so far from sunlight.
Tears rolled down her cheeks and Roxane stopped. Hearing her sniffles Jean-Paul turned back. He lifted the untied length of his jabot, silently offering a clean corner.
“Jean-Paul, you are too kind.”
He shrugged and beckoned her to continue.
A wide cell housing, at any given time, from half a dozen to well over a dozen was faced with a stretch of iron bars. Roxane wondered if an emaciated man could slip through the widely spaced bars.
Jean-Paul sauntered off, his expression saying he would remain close, but at a discreet distance.
Drawing in a breath of courage, she nodded and turned to the cell.
The little hunch-backed man who wore but a loincloth and who was ever in motion paced the middle of the cell frantically. At sight of her he rushed the bars.
“I want to sit in the spinning chair!” he demanded. And with a spin he began to emulate past rides. “The spinning chair,” he sang in wobbly tenor.
He sang the same lament every time. During her last visit Roxane had asked the administrator what, exactly, he’d meant by the spinning chair. It was actually a chair that spun—patients were strapped on for the ride—in hopes of jarring their brains back into proper order.
“The spinning—” The man spun face-first into the wall and staggered backward.
She winced and instinctively reached out. There was nothing she could do. Not physically. Nor dare she get too close. He didn’t fall. Strange equilibrium tottered him across the room, a wide smile affixed to his face. Horrifically pleased with the results, he again made a run for the wall and landed with a loud slap. Totter and wobble. Slap.
Abhorrence was always difficult to conceal, but Roxane reined it in and searched the darkness.
There at the back wall, beating a flat palm against the stone stood a tall, slender man with long brown hair and loose damask breeches that had not seen a ball of laundering soap in weeks. His fingernails were dark half moons.
“Damian?” she called.
A scuffle of activity frightened her so she stepped back as two men scrambled to the bars and reached for her. Hungry eyes screamed silent pleads.
“Company!” the spinning man recited grandly, without losing step. “Have you come to take me to the spinning chair? Pretty swirls and dancing brains?”
Damian did not turn around. Tears rolled from her eyes at sight of the filthy breeches hanging from his narrow hips. He did not appear thinner than normal, for he had always been a slender man—Oh! But he needed to eat and to breathe fresh air and—to get back his mind.
Could she make that happen? He did have his lucid moments.
“Pretty lace,” one of the long-eyed men clinging to the bars hissed. His fingers, dirtied with filth, beckoned. He darted out his tongue like a lizard in search of a fly. “She smells of fancy, she does!”
“Damian, please!” she pleaded.
“I want to sit in the spinning chair!”
“Damian.”
“My liege!” One of the men pushed from the wall and swa
ggered toward the back wall. “My—”
Damian spun around, cutting the man’s tirade with a slice of his hand before his throat.
Once tall, lithe, and ever the charmer—he would have given Leo a challenge—Damian Desrues retained a look of suave removal. Dark eyes saw nothing. Or had they seen too much? A spittle-laced mouth formed a moue.
He stared at Roxane for a long time. She could not read his expression. Did he see through her? Or did his vision stop at the bars? Always she knew her brother’s moods by the merest curl of lip or a tiny crease at the corner of his eye that would signal oncoming mirth. Not a single line marred his flesh, not a hint at emotion.
Then he stepped forward, pushing aside the spinning man, who was merely diverted from his east/west course to a northeast/southwest twirl.
“I want to spin!”
“Stand back from the foyer!” Damian announced grandly, as if a palace guard.
“Yes, my liege,” one of the men murmured, and scuffled into a dark corner, a spider for the shadows.
The one who wished to swirl his brains stood five paces behind her brother, his attention keen and maniacal.
“Roxane,” Damian said in a tone that sounded so normal.
“Damian, I love you.” She reached for him. His hands were warm but the right was slippery with his own blood. She lifted her skirt and pressed it to his bruised knuckles. “You should not harm yourself so. You’ve such pretty hands. Don’t you want to wear fine gloves and peel them slowly from your fingers to catch a lady’s eye?”
“I have caught your eye, lovely lady.” He dipped his head. Thick clumps of greasy hair swept his face. Lifting her hand to his mouth he kissed it, so gently—she might swoon were he a lover—then held it against his lips. “You taste of the meadows. Of a time I cannot recall.”
