The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla

by Lauren Willig

  “Fitzhugh,” he said.

  “Off your feed, what, old bean?” said Turnip sympathetically. “You don’t look at all the thing.”

  For once Turnip was right. The normally good-humored Hal looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week. His blond hair, usually brushed into a Corinthian crop, was straight and stringy; his cravat was clean and crisply starched, but crookedly tied; and his watch chain boasted only half the usual number of fobs. There were purple circles under his eyes and his fingers beat a nervous tattoo against his thighs.

  If Sally had to guess, she would wager that he had been playing too deeply at the gaming tables. She looked him up and down with an experienced eye. He had the look of a man who had been badly dipped and was trying to figure out which was worse: braving his father or going to the moneylenders.

  Hal Caldicott forced a smile. “I’m quite all right. Mrs. Fitzhugh. Miss Fitzhugh.”

  He bowed over Arabella’s hand, then Sally’s. His gloved hand was cold against Sally’s lace mitt.

  Turnip dealt him a resounding whack on the back in the accepted male gesture of affection. “Come to ask my sister to dance?”

  There were times. . . . After that, the poor man could hardly do otherwise, when it was quite obvious it had never been his object.

  Pointedly ignoring Turnip, Sally turned to Hal Caldicott, intending to afford him an honorable retreat. “Aren’t you opening the dancing with your cousin?”

  The rumor in the ladies’ retiring room was that a betrothal was on the verge of being declared between the Honorable Harold and his cousin, Lady Clarissa.

  Certainly, Hal squired his cousin frequently enough, although Sally had never been able to determine any signs of partiality between the two. Affection, yes. Partiality, no. The two sentiments were quite different. After a Season and a half, Sally considered herself a connoisseur.

  Deep lines formed on either side of Hal’s mouth. He fidgeted with a cameo fob. “I was to have opened the ball with my cousin, but—”

  “—my brother shamelessly waylaid you on your way to her side?” Sally provided, with a pointed glance at Turnip.

  “—but I was cut out.” The words came out a little too loudly against the first scrapings of the musicians’ instruments. In the awkward silence that followed, Hal’s color rose slightly, and he said, a bit indistinctly, “Would you do me the honor of this dance, Miss Fitzhugh? I should be delighted.”

  Turnip opened his mouth to say something. Arabella threaded her arm through his and gently but firmly led him away.

  Thank you, Sally mouthed. Turnip always meant well. It was just the execution that was the problem. Scenting gossip, Sally said soothingly, “There must have been some mistake. If the order was already set . . .”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t heard,” said Hal Caldicott bitterly. “You must be the only one in London who hasn’t.”

  Men were so prone to exaggeration. “Heard what?”

  “There,” Hal said, uttering the word as though it left a bad taste in his mouth. He gestured towards the dance floor, where the first set was starting to form, the lady of the hour at the fore.

  Lady Clarissa Caldicott looked like an ice princess, with her silver blond hair and her black, black eyes, the effect intensified by a white gauze slip frosted with silver embroidery. Something about her reminded Sally of a winter wood, the bare branches dark against the glittering snow.

  There was nothing the least bit frosty about the man standing beside her. Beneath his black jacket, his waistcoat was a deep crimson, like a full-blown rose; the same carnelian stickpin smoldered in the snowy folds of his cravat.

  As he straightened from the ritual bow, Sally caught his eye. For a moment, their eyes locked, his as dark and deep-set as she remembered, the sort of eyes that burned right through you.

  For a moment, Sally thought it was just the ringing in her ears that made the room seem suddenly still. But then the duke rose, and their gazes broke, and Sally realized it wasn’t her ears at all. The room had gone still.

  All the little conversations, all the gossip and greetings going on in clumps around the room, were extinguished as, one by one, everyone turned to stare at the man in the middle of the floor.

  For once, rumor had it right. The Ghoul of Belliston Hall had emerged from his lair.

  “You see?” In the silence, Hal’s voice sounded unnaturally harsh. “Break out the fatted calf. My cousin, the duke, has come home.”

  The prodigal wasn’t having a very pleasant time of it.

  If there was any fatted calf, it had long since grown cold. The gossipmongers might have exulted in his appearance, but Lucien’s own family was treating him with a mixture of resentment (Hal), forbearance (Aunt Winifred), and chilly civility (his sister). The only one who appeared genuinely pleased to have him back was Uncle Henry, but even his bonhomie was rendered thin by his all too obvious attempts to allay the behavior of the others.

  Lucien couldn’t tell whether his relations were more furious with him for leaving or for coming back.

  One woman made the sign against the evil eye; another swooned as he crossed her path. Yes, his valet, Patrice, had told him that there were silly rumors circulating about his being some sort of bloodsucking creature of the night, but Lucien had assumed it was—largely—a joke.

  Apparently not.

  The only person who looked him in the eye was the blond girl who had invaded his garden two nights ago. Lucien saw her giving him a frank examination as he came up from his bow.

  “Who is the woman in pink?” he asked abruptly.

  Clarissa placed a hand correctly on his arm as he led her to the front of the line for the dance. “Which one?”

  Lucien decided not to attempt describing the shade. As he watched, the girl and her partner took their place farther down the line. Drily, he said, “The one dancing with Hal.”

  Clarissa looked and shrugged. “I don’t know. I only came down from Hullingden two weeks ago.”

  Clarissa dropped into a deep curtsy, and the rest of the women followed her lead, one by one, all down the line. It was a distinctly dizzying effect.

  The blond girl said something across the line to Hal. Lucien found himself wondering what it was.

  The musicians struck up the first chords of the dance. It was, mercifully, one that Lucien knew. “Were you happy there? At Hullingden?”

  The familiar name sat uneasily on his tongue. For so very long, he had avoided speaking or thinking of his home. Except in dreams. One couldn’t help one’s dreams.

  Clarissa looked straight ahead as they stepped forward and then back. “Why wouldn’t I have been?”

  Because their world had been torn out from around them in the space of a day.

  Perhaps Clarissa had felt it less. Her life at Hullingden hadn’t changed as much as his; she had seen less of their parents, still wrapped in the protective cocoon of the nursery. Lucien’s father had been heard to opine that a child didn’t become interesting until he had attained the age of reason. It wasn’t until Lucien was seven or eight that their father had begun to take an interest, to coach Lucien in the ways of the world with witty stories and dry asides.

  Even so. Even away in the nursery, Clarissa must have felt the difference, the howling void left by their parents’ deaths, and, even more so, by the manner of their dying.

  Lucien felt a wave of remorse. “I should have taken you with me when I left.”

  Even as he said it, he knew it for the flummery it was. Marie-Clarice had been all of nine when he had run off. At the time, he’d had no clear idea where he was going, other than away. Away from the cold dorms of Eton, away from Uncle Henry’s well-meaning but fumbling attempts to take his father’s place, away from memories that had turned to nightmares.

  Bolting in the dead of night, with one portmanteau and ten guineas to his name,
Lucien had harbored vague notions of finding his mother’s family in Martinique. It had been nearly two years before he had made his way by circuitous routes to his mother’s sister in New Orleans.

  If he were being honest, Lucien would have to admit that he had enjoyed those two years. He’d wandered from port to port, seeing curious and strange sights, learning a smattering of languages—the foul bits—and generally going to all the sorts of places a young gentleman wasn’t supposed to see on his Grand Tour.

  He had arrived in New Orleans intending to stay a month; instead, he had stayed close to seven years. Tante Berthe wasn’t at all like his mother. He remembered his mother as a combination of intense pragmatism and quicksilver wit, someone out of the ordinary, wry and wise. Tante Berthe had the pragmatism, but not that quicksilver quality. She made up for it with a streak of strong sentimentalism that covered a genuine warmth. She had gathered Lucien to her bosom, both literally and figuratively, making him free of her home, showering him with sugared cakes and strong coffee, pressing him to consider himself a sibling to his cousins.

  For nearly seven years, Lucien had lived in the Francophone society of Louisiana, relishing the strangeness of it, the burned taste of the coffee, the strange spices in the food, the flamboyant wardrobes and even more flamboyant manners. He had danced at their balls and fenced in their salons.

  Would Clarissa have come if he had sent for her? In retrospect, Lucien knew it had been impossible. Uncle Henry was her guardian. Which meant, in practice, that Aunt Winifred was her guardian. She would never have allowed it.

  But he might at least have tried.

  Clarissa afforded him a wintry smile. “How very kind of you. It’s a bit late for that, don’t you think?”

  It was a bit late for many things. Month by month, year by year, Lucien had promised himself that he would return to England to seek justice for their parents—but it was easy enough to drag it out and put it off, letting himself be seduced by the easy life of the bayou.

  Lucien fumbled for the words. “When I left—I was a fifteen-year-old boy.” Burning with a sense of injustice and anger at the world. No one listened to a fifteen-year-old boy, not even if that boy was a duke. They nodded, and smiled, and patted him on the head, and packed him away to school, while his parents’ blood still cried out for justice. “I never meant to stay away for as long as I have.”

  Clarissa turned her face away. “There’s no need to explain.”

  In profile, her face was eerily like their father’s, the lean, fine-boned lines, the aquiline nose. A feminine version, but with the same blade-keen elegance, refined over the centuries.

  “But there is.” He had never thought of what it meant to her, left behind. A little girl in a nursery was nothing to a boy of fifteen. “I was remiss in my duty to you. And, most of all, I failed them. Our parents.”

  “I try not to think of them.” The pattern of the dance parted them and brought them together again. Clarissa’s eyes were fixed on the far reaches of the ballroom, searching—for what?

  A portrait of Aunt Winifred, pug-faced in puce, smirked down at them from above the mantel.

  If their parents were alive, this dance would be at Belliston House, with the paired portraits of their parents looking down from the wall, his father in his powdered wig and silver-embroidered ice blue waistcoat, his mother laughing down at them, her dark hair, unpowdered, in long curls hanging over her shoulders, one elbow leaning on a marble pedestal, a scroll unrolling from her hand, the frame of her greenhouse behind her.

  Those portraits were dull with dust, hanging behind tattered curtains in the empty ballroom of Belliston House, his father’s sharp-edged smile and his mother’s laughter filmed by the haze of memory.

  “Do you remember any of it?” Lucien asked. His hand touched hers, palm to palm, and then parted again. They had danced together when she was a chubby-legged toddler, clap in and clap out and ring around the rosy, under Nurse’s approving eye. “Do you remember Maman teaching you your letters? She drew a book for you, with a garland of flowers around each letter. A is for apple-blossom—”

  Clarissa swept her skirts away, twisting around the next person down the line.

  “And the smell of papa’s powder,” Lucien persisted. “What was it?”

  “Violet.” Clarissa shut her lips tightly on the word, but it was too late. Lucien could see the cracks in the ice, the memories that she had claimed to have shut away.

  “And there was the song that Maman always sang to us. About a shepherd, searching for his sheep in the rain.” He could remember it, painfully and vividly, their mother, when he was very young, or ill, laying a cool hand against his cheek, singing softly. “Il pleut, il pleut, bergere. . . .”

  “Stop.” There was a faint flush on Clarissa’s pale cheeks. She modulated her tone, forcing a smile for the benefit of their audience. “It’s all past. Over.”

  “Not for me.” The dance had drawn to a close. Lucien halted in front of his sister. “Not until we find out who killed them.”

  Clarissa looked at him as though he were an idiot. “Our mother killed our father and then herself,” she said flatly. “What more do you wish to know?”

  Chapter Four

  It had been a very long time since anyone had said that to Lucien’s face.

  The fixed social smile on his sister’s face only made the impact worse.

  “Do you wish to refine upon that?” Clarissa was still smiling, smiling. It was a smile of teeth, not eyes. “I don’t.”

  Lucien felt as though someone had just reached into his chest and squeezed.

  “Can you really believe it?” he asked softly. It seemed macabre that all around them the musicians were still playing and people were still dancing and laughing, while old corpses were being exhumed, brutally and painfully. “Yes, I know that was what people said, but . . .”

  They claimed she had killed him, that his mother had taken a tincture made from the fruit of the manzanilla plant and fed it to his father in his tea. Fatal for him and for her as well, when she drank from the same pot.

  It had been politely papered over, of course. One didn’t openly accuse a duchess of murder. Not even a dead duchess of questionable extraction. “Accident” was the official verdict. But society knew and society judged and society found the duchess guilty.

  Marie-Clarice had been younger than he when their parents had died, her memories fewer, but surely there must be some lingering trace of affection, some loyalty.

  There was no trace of warmth in his sister’s eyes. “What reason have I to believe otherwise?” Flippantly, she added, “We are a cursed race. We have the seeds of evil within us. Haven’t you heard?”

  “That’s nonsense. Who told you that?” Lucien didn’t need to wait for the answer. “Aunt Winifred? I suppose she told you some faradiddle about dark arts and foreign charms.”

  Clarissa turned her head away. “I don’t want to talk about it.” The figures of the dance separated them and brought them together again. “Aunt Winifred never said a word.”

  No, she didn’t need to. Not directly. She might not have said a hard word, but she had never said a kind one either.

  “I won’t leave it at this,” Lucien said conversationally. If his sister could play at that game, so could he. He smiled, lazily, baring his teeth for the delectation of the watching crowd. Let them see how pointy they could be. “I intend to prove her innocence.”

  “Oh?” Clarissa made no effort to hide her disbelief. “How?”

  Hands joined, they stepped towards each other, then away again.

  “That’s my affair,” Lucien prevaricated.

  The truth of the matter was that after a fortnight of searching, he hadn’t stumbled upon anything worth reporting. Just the artifacts of a life ended too soon. Poignant, but not probative.

  “I am already on the trail of the real killer,�
�� Lucien said glibly. It was just a little lie, after all. He was on the trail. He just didn’t quite know where that trail led.

  “You would do better to leave.” The musicians played the final chord, and his sister sank neatly into a curtsy. She looked up at him with shadowed eyes. “While you still can.”

  Whatever else Aunt Winifred had done, she clearly hadn’t censored his sister’s reading material. Clarissa had been reading far too many horrid novels.

  “While I still can?” echoed Lucien, with a faint edge of exasperation in his voice. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  This wasn’t that blasted book everyone was talking about; this was their parents. And it was all very real. There was no need for dramatic flourishes and enigmatic utterances.

  His sister ignored him. She held out a hand to the man to Lucien’s right. “Ah, Mr. Tholmondelay,” she said. “I believe I owe you this dance.”

  She smiled sweetly at the newcomer, as if she hadn’t just been croaking warnings like a wizened crone two minutes past. The next set was a lively country dance. Lucien left his sister skipping and hopping with the enthusiastic Mr. Tholmondelay. Short of dragging her out of the line and demanding answers, there was nothing else he could do.

  He suspected she didn’t have any. Answers, that was. Just more nonsense straight out of the pages of The Convent of Whatever It Was. Vampires, enigmatic warnings . . . Had everyone in London gone mad in the years he’d been away?

  He had been amused when Patrice told him of the rumors generated by his reclusiveness, amused and slightly scornful. People would believe anything. Now, in the light of Clarissa’s chilling words, Lucien found his scorn tinged with a genuine edge of concern. Cursed race? Seeds of evil? What manner of nonsense had they been feeding her?

  From his long-ago school days, he could hear the echo. Witchwoman’s brat. Murderess’s brat.