Perilous Pleasures

by Jenny Brown

  Adam snatched the letter from her hand. “Is this another trick? Another forgery? Like the feather MacMinn showed me to gain my trust?”

  “Surely you can’t think that I could have written this?”

  “No, I suppose not. But what of your mother? Or MacMinn?”

  “My mother was never taught how to write. And why would MacMinn, who took such drastic steps to bring our wedding about, forge a letter such as this? He could have no way of knowing that you’d seen through his ruse.”

  Adam’s eyes met hers. “If the letter isn’t a forgery, the Dark Lord still lives.” He shook his head. “I can hardly take it in. I’ve been so used to thinking him gone. But of course, I had only MacMinn’s assurance that he’d died.” He put the letter down. “If he lives, I must go to him.”

  “If he’s lives, you may still receive the Final Teaching.”

  Adam picked up a steel pruning knife that lay on the conservatory table and ran one long finger caressingly along the side of the blade. “How could I? I’ve defiled myself with the touch of iron, I betrayed my vow of chastity, and married the virgin he bid me keep untouched. He can no longer wish me to be his heir.”

  “But without an heir, won’t the ancient tradition come to an end?”

  He tossed the knife back onto the table. “The tradition will continue. Someone will receive the Teaching. The ancient ways are too strong to be destroyed by the weakness of a single heir. Though I have failed, there will be someone to take my place. The Dark Lord’s heritage will pass on—though not through me.”

  He took a deep breath. “But still, I must go to him—to let him know I failed him, so that he may appoint another to take my place before it’s too late.”

  “And after that, will you come back?”

  The look he gave her was bleak as December frost. “Would it matter?”

  And then he left.

  She didn’t see her husband again until the midday meal, and even then, it was as if she dined only with his shadow. In her mother’s presence, he spoke to her with agonizing formality, addressing her only when necessary. His coldness tore into her, all the more unbearable because she couldn’t find a similar coldness within herself with which to counter it.

  It must be his terrible spell that still made her love him—though love had turned out to be exactly as she had feared it would be—fickle, brief, and agonizing. She wished she had a heart as untouched as her mother’s, one that would have let her merely laugh a tinkling laugh when Adam had showered her with affection and feel nothing but contempt for him later, when he changed his tune.

  But she didn’t. She’d let herself believe he really loved her and had dared to imagine a bright future with him. Now she hated herself for the disappointment that overwhelmed her as she realized he hadn’t really loved her at all.

  Her mother, determinedly ignoring the undercurrents swirling around her, chattered on merrily, though Adam made no reply to anything she said to him. As soon as the last remove had been sampled, he excused himself with the explanation that he must prepare for his journey and left them alone.

  At his exit, her mother shrugged one rounded shoulder. “These marriages of the ton are as bad as I had heard. I thank le bon Dieu I need not live in such a way. Such coldness. Such lack of joie de vivre. But you were always a strange girl, Zoe, so perhaps such a way of life pleases you. If so, who am I to judge? But me, I am ready to return home as soon as I have the means to do so. Did you speak to your husband about the small token he might afford me, the trifle that might help me out of my current difficulties?”

  “I had no opportunity to raise the matter with my husband,” Zoe replied. “We had other more pressing concerns to discuss.” Like the end of their regard for each other and the return of Adam’s teacher from the grave.

  “But your husband spoke of going on a journey. You must apply to him for funds before he leaves. Where is he going?”

  “To the Dark Lord’s Island. He just learned that the Dark Lord isn’t dead.”

  “Not dead.” Isabelle’s face grew ashen beneath its coat of white lead and rouge. “But if the Dark Lord finds out you’re married, he’ll be furious.”

  “But wasn’t it your doing, Mama, that I married? Wasn’t it your stratagem that made Lord Ramsay think his teacher had commanded him to marry me?”

  “What are you talking about? I’m not such a fool as to meddle with the Laird of Iskeny. When he sent Lord Ramsay to fetch you, I gave you to him, much as it pained me, but with the kind of man he is, what choice did I have? You can imagine my surprise when MacMinn told me he had seen you wed. He did it all on his own, and a very foolish thing it was to do, though it worked out so well.”

  “But if you didn’t send him, why did he do it?”

  Her mother shrugged. “He is very fond of you. And he has no love for the Dark Lord. Indeed, he hates him with a passion. If I had listened to MacMinn when we were still in France I wouldn’t have turned to the Dark Lord for help when the Committee was after us. And then where would we be? In the grave without our heads. Pah!”

  “Are you saying that the Dark Lord was the mysterious gentleman who saved our lives all those years ago?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you said your rescuer was an admirer.”

  “So I did. And it was true.”

  “But the Dark Lord must be chaste!” Zoe exclaimed.

  “Your husband doesn’t know everything.” Her mother shrugged. “The Dark Lord was a man as other men.”

  “So the Dark Lord had a tendre for you, and rescued us because he loved you?”

  Her mother seemed to shrink into her chair. “Perhaps tendre is not the word for what the Dark Lord felt for me. It wasn’t a matter of love. He wasn’t capable of loving anyone but himself.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

  Her mother shrugged uneasily. “The truth wasn’t something you could easily explain to a child.”

  “I’m no longer a child. So you can tell me now. Why did the Dark Lord save you?”

  Her mother sighed. “You are a married woman, so I suppose it’s all right to tell you.” She took another deep breath and then began to speak in a tone Zoe remembered from the rare occasions in her childhood when her mother had told her children’s stories.

  “When I was a young girl—a little peasant girl who tended the master’s pigs—I was engaged to be married. But word of my beauty came to the lord of the estate on which we lived and he chose to exercise the droit du seigneur and take my maidenhead before I married. It was not the usual thing to do, by then, but he was a foreigner who cared little what the neighbors thought of him. And he was the lord of the estate, so who could stand up to him? So that was how it went, but after he had ravished me, this foreign lord, he wouldn’t let me return to my fiancé. Instead, he insisted that I give up my marriage and become his mistress.”

  Isabelle paused in her story, her fingers suddenly clenching. “He was a cold and terrible man, ma petite. To be forced to be intimate with such a man—” The look of disgust in her mother’s eyes was real, its authenticity all the more wrenching in contrast to the artifice with which she usually arranged her features.

  “I couldn’t bear it. Even though I had discovered I was carrying his child, I flung his offer in his face and told him I still wished to marry the young man I loved. At that, my master flew into a rage. He told me he had only been fooling with me and had not meant his offer. Then he spread such lies about me in the village that my intended would no longer have me.

  “After that, I lived in fear. What would become of me, shamed as I was, with a fatherless child? That was when MacMinn spirited me off to Paris one night and made sure I had a safe place to live until the child was born. He’d been my master’s coachman, but he’d had enough of his highhanded ways.”

  “But what does all this have to do with the Dark Lord and our rescue?”

  “The lord who took my maidenhead was the Laird of Iskeny. He had left
Scotland and settled in France after hearing of the wealth that had been earned by other powerful magicians who had dazzled the court, like Cagliostro and the Count of Saint-Germain. He hoped to join their number. That was why he began to call himself the Dark Lord.”

  “But if you parted from this man with such bad feelings between you, why did you turn to him when you needed to be rescued from the Terror?”

  “I had no choice. After they chopped off the head of the marquis who had been my protector, the Dark Lord was the only man I knew who had power enough to save me. Even the monsters who filled the tumbrels respected him, fearing he would use his black arts against them if they crossed him. So when I learned that the Committee had put me on their list to have my head cut off, I decided it was better to be alive, even indebted to a man who I hated, than to die on the guillotine. I returned to his village and threw myself on his mercy.”

  “But if he’d been so angry at you when you fled from him years before, why did he bother to help you?”

  “Is it not obvious, Zoe? Use your head! He helped me because I told him you were his daughter. That’s why he saved us, though first he made me sign all those papers to make his bargain with me.”

  The Dark Lord was her father? He and not the courageous and resourceful duke?

  Shock resonated through her, as strong as if someone she’d loved had died.

  But, still. Adam revered the Dark Lord. He’d devoted his life to him. How could he have been as cruel as her mother claimed? Perhaps this story of her mother’s was no truer than her earlier claim that Zoe’s father was a duke, though the very ugliness of the tale argued against that. Why would her mother have made up a story that portrayed her in a role so different from that of the sophisticated La Belle Isabelle she had worked so hard to create?

  Her story might be true, and if it were, it would explain why her mother had kept Zoe’s origin so secret. But whatever the whole truth might be, if the Dark Lord was her father, it would explain, too, his insistence that she be kept a virgin. What father wouldn’t wish to protect his daughter in that way, whatever his feelings for her mother?

  And even if Iskeny’s laird had been cruel to her mother in her youth, people changed. Perhaps he’d mellowed with age or come to regret his sins as he lay on his sickbed contemplating his end. Maybe that was why he had commanded Adam to bring his daughter to him on his deathbed, because he yearned to see her before he died.

  She must tell Adam! She raced toward his chamber. But when she reached it, it was empty. Nor was he in the hall. If only he hadn’t already left for Iskeny. But to her great relief, she found him in the courtyard lashing a small traveling box to the gig. A groom was almost done harnessing to it his fastest horse.

  She ran toward him, heedless that her long skirts were dragging in the mud. But by the time she had reached him, he’d already climbed into the gig’s seat and picked up his whip.

  She shouted, “Adam. Stop!”

  Something flickered over his face, and for only a moment she caught a glimpse of the man who had loved her. Then just as quickly, she saw it go, replaced by the impassive mask.

  “I can’t.” His tone was harsh.

  “You must! There’s something I have to tell you. Something important.”

  “There isn’t time. And besides, we’re past the point where words could change anything. Whatever it is, it must keep until I return.” He flicked the whip over the horses’ heads and set them cantering on their way.

  She fought back tears as the gig disappeared over the brow of the hill. He’d spoken the truth, indeed. No words could change her feelings for him—even when he’d made it crystal clear he could feel nothing for her but disdain.

  Why did she still keep on loving him, when he’d been able to stop loving her so easily? It must be that damnable spell. Why else would she still love this man who’d just left her without a single backward glance?

  She turned back to the house and began trudging toward it. The future stretched out, bleak. How would she survive it? She’d lost so much, and now, after her mother’s revelation, she couldn’t even turn for comfort to her imaginary conversations with her father, the duke. For he’d never been her father. The Dark Lord was.

  But then it struck her. If the Dark Lord lived, he could undo the spell. It had only been because they thought him dead that they’d believed she was trapped by it forever. The Dark Lord could free her from this burdensome love. She need no longer feel helpless when pain jolted through her at the memory of how cold Adam had been as he’d driven off without a word of kindness.

  The spell could be lifted. It must be lifted! And the Dark Lord—the father she’d yearned to meet her whole life long—was the very man to do it.

  Chapter 19

  It had been a grueling three days’ ride. Adam’s body cried out for rest, but he pressed on. He had tapped back into the iron self-control he’d abandoned while living in the fool’s paradise of his marriage and rejoiced once again in his ability to withstand cold and hunger and go for days without sleep. Only by subduing his body in this way could he drown out that other hunger: his longing for Zoe’s body and the warmth and forgiveness he’d thought he’d found in her arms.

  He turned his thoughts back to the road. A few more miles would take him to the harbor village of Stanraer. There he should be able to find a fisherman to ferry him across the miles of water that separated the Dark Lord’s domain from the shore. In only a few more hours he’d be reunited with his teacher, who awaited his arrival so eagerly, unaware of how unfit Adam had made himself to receive the powers he once craved.

  He awaited the swell of bitterness he should feel when remembering how he’d forfeited his chance to attain those powers, but he couldn’t find it. Something within him had changed. His yearning for the superhuman powers the Dark Lord had offered him had been replaced by something else—something shameful—an equally strong yearning that he’d never met the man.

  Upon that wish followed others even more shameful: the wish that he’d never written to Isabelle and that the Dark Lord had truly been dead so that he could have lived on at Strathrimmon with his wife, deluded but content, his life filled with the simple but intoxicating joys that he’d tasted over the past months. It was an ignoble yearning, as ignoble as the longing for his wife’s arms that washed over him any time he let his mental guard down.

  When he reached the village, he found it more difficult than he’d expected to find a fisherman willing to take him to the island. As soon as he pronounced its name, a wary look came over the faces of men who had been cordial a moment before, and he saw more than one spit to avert the evil eye. But eventually he found a boatman whose need for the silver he offered was stronger than his dread of the mysterious Laird of Iskeny.

  An hour later, after an unremarkable passage across the water and a long hike up a steep hill, he found himself at last at his long-sought destination, the Dark Lord’s keep, Torr Druidh. Dwarfed by the stark granite tower that reared up against the cloudy sky, Adam drank in the heavy silence that was broken only by a curlew’s lonely call, feeling as if he were dreaming. He’d imagined this moment so often during the past nine years, but now that it had arrived, how different it had turned out to be.

  Two large, muscular men, armed in the ancient fashion, admitted him to the keep. Their accents proclaimed them Frenchmen. Their deference suggested they knew the reason for his visit. Greeting him with reverence, they ushered him into a small chamber whose stone walls and high ceiling gave it the feeling of a chapel. A window barely bigger than a slit let in only enough light to reveal the altar standing in the farthest corner of the room. On it stood a goblet glowing with a dull bronze sheen. An old man knelt before it. His teacher.

  On hearing Adam enter, the Dark Lord rose slowly to his feet. He was wearing a long robe bedizened with the dragon emblem. He was thinner than Adam remembered, and his form was bent in a way that betrayed his advancing years. When he became aware of Adam’s entry he lifted up his arms
in blessing. His long purple sleeves fell back, revealing the serpents that twisted around his withered arms. Seeing them, Adam felt his own serpents wake from their long slumber. A pulse of energy surged through his body, bringing with it the treacherous memory of Zoe’s long, slender fingers tracing their path up his arm. Desire jolted through him.

  There would be no need to explain anything now. With his great power, the Dark Lord must have just seen into his heart and learned how totally Adam had unfit himself to receive the inheritance the Dark Lord had intended for him. He must know, too, how shamefully Adam yearned for the woman with whom he had squandered the energy he should have saved up for the Final Teaching. But if the old man saw into the depths of Adam’s spirit, he gave no sign of it.

  As the Dark Lord hobbled toward him, a faint scent of putrefaction rose from his body and when he embraced Adam, his hold was weak. The old man could not, in truth, have much time left on earth.

  The Dark Lord released him. “Thanks be to the Powers, you’ve come! I’d despaired of ever seeing you again. Why did you delay, my son, when I summoned you in the ancient manner? Had you forgotten the feather code?”

  “I forgot nothing. I hastened to come as soon as I received your summons. But events intervened—” He didn’t look forward to explaining the nature of those events, but the faster he did so, the better. At least, when he was done, the old man’s wrinkled face would no longer be filled with the joy and expectation that reproached him now.

  But the Dark Lord gave him no chance to explain. “Tell me your story later. You’re here. That’s all that matters. The time was growing short, and I feared you’d gone astray. If you had, all might have been lost. But you’ve come, at last, though tell me, where is the virgin? You received the instructions that I sent you about her, didn’t you?”

  “I did.” Adam kept his voice low. “But I haven’t brought her.”

  “You didn’t bring her?” The welcoming tone had fled. “Didn’t I write that you must bring her? There can be no Teaching without her.”