“Yes, my dear?”
“Shall we ring for a bath?”
“Certainly, if you like.” He reached across her for the bell rope next to his bed. “But you had better let me tell them.”
“Very well.” It was best this way: Let the household see that he was restored to himself; let them see her lying in his arms.
With her weight on his leg, he couldn’t quite reach the bell pull. She laughed, and her husband laughed too. “Here, William, let me.” The feel of the crisp hair of his thigh sliding under hers . . . The duchess had gotten what she needed out of Davenant. It was time to let the chancellor go.
She gave the cord a good, sharp pull, imagining it ringing down in the servants’ hall. “And would my lord like some breakfast?”
“Perhaps.” She hadn’t heard him sound so content in what felt like forever. “But you’d better let me tell them.”
“Of course, my love.” Diane smiled down at him. “Do you crave something particularly odd?” There could be aftereffects from the drugs, she realized. Don’t expect him to be everything he has been. But so agreeable! She’d have him back to his role as her spokesman in Council in no time.
“Not really. It’s just that I don’t think my people will feel comfortable taking orders from you.”
Her heart started slamming. But there was still a chance— She kept her voice steady, even light: “Really? Why not?”
“They don’t know you yet,” he said kindly. “Delicious as you are, I’m not sure I do, even, myself.” He cupped one breast. “Though I look forward to learning more.”
“William.” Curse it, her voice was shaking. She had let herself fall into folly, and here was the result. “I am your wife.”
“But that can’t be,” he said reasonably. “My wife died on the road.”
She allowed herself a sliver of hope. “My poor love, you’re still dreaming. I am Diane.” She smiled richly and beautifully at him. “Diane de Tremontaine.”
He peered curiously at her face. “You do look like her. But my Diane died on the journey. Only her maid survived.”
“Her maid?” Diane said icily.
“Poor girl. My wife is dead, you see.”
The duchess rose from the bed to hide her trembling.
“How do you know?”
“The black crow told me.”
The black-robed scholar. Rafe. Of course. He could not possibly know the truth; even the Balam girl would not have told him—she was too clever for that. But Rafe Fenton had done all he could do to poison her William against her. As much as Diane had done with the flower of shadowroot, young Rafe had done as much and more to him, and to their marriage.
She had planned to stay in the City and attend to business for a while, while word of the duke’s malaise began to circulate, so that concerned friends could even come and witness his crumbling reason. But that could not be allowed now. Even his babbling was too dangerous. William must be shipped off to the isolation of Highcombe as soon as possible. She would alert Wickfield to prepare for the journey immediately.
And Rafe Fenton . . . Diane had learned by and large to let revenge pass by; her energies were always better spent on the next victory. But for Rafe Fenton she would make an exception. William was lost to her; she would take his Rafe in exchange, and make of him something his erstwhile lover would not recognize. That would be some comfort.
“Now, my lord duke—shall I make you some chocolate?”
“You said you had tables.” Rafe wanted to shake his friend, but he kept his voice even. Getting mad at Micah never produced good results. “Tables, charts, I don’t know—something that lets you win at cards more than the rest of us. Remember? You told me the night we met. When we went out and you had—when I got you tomato pie for the first time. You said you kept the cards in your head, and you had a way of figuring out what was likely to come up—”
But Micah wasn’t fooled. He was getting that look on his face.
“Come on, Micah . . . we’re friends, right?”
“Not when you’re being like this. I don’t like you right now, Rafe.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to scare you.” Rafe crouched down below where his friend sat on his high stool at the table that doubled as a desk in their rooms, papers spread out before him. “It’s just—I need the money, Micah!”
“What do you need more money for?” Micah said. “I paid the rent. We have food. You don’t have any more school fees, and I’ve paid mine to Doctor Goodell for the quarter. I want to work on my equations now.”
“You want to know what I need money for? I’ll tell you!” Rafe lost whatever control he had left. “I need it to bribe guards who wear Tremontaine’s livery, but want to protect him by locking him in his house while that wife of his destroys him! There you go, Micah: That’s what I need money for! And did you understand a word of it? Of course not! I’m sure it makes less sense to you than you think your stupid magic tables make to me! But you know what? Anyone else on this turning globe knows just what I mean! And if you’re really the only one who understands those tables, then I—”
But his words were interrupted by Micah’s shrieks. Not that Rafe stopped shouting; he just couldn’t hear himself any more.
Because Micah was crouched in the corner of the room, hands over his ears, emitting the most horrible sound: high and shrill and rhythmic. Worse than rabbits dying. Worse than a baby crying—the kind you wanted to hold upside down and slap, just to get it to stop.
Rafe stood there helplessly. With the noise, he couldn’t think. But he knew perfectly well what he’d done. And because he was the cause, he couldn’t soothe Micah with square roots. All he could do was stand there hating himself.
He could apologize. Not that Micah would hear him, but he could do that to try to start making amends.
“Micah.” He crouched down by his friend. The screams didn’t stop. “Micah, it’s Rafe. Micah, I’m really, really sorry.” He made the mistake of trying to pat his shoulder. The boy flailed at him, breaking his awful rhythm to shriek, “Get away from me! Don’t touch me!”
“I’m sorry!” Rafe sprang back. “I’m sorry I touched you! I’m sorry I hurt you! I’m sorry I scared you! I— Micah, please stop!”
“Nice try, but not very effective, pigeon.”
It was Joshua, his strong tenor somehow cutting through the shrieking thing on the floor. The door must have opened, unheard. “Whatever it was you did, Rafe, and I’m sure it was supremely stupid, I am possibly even sorrier than you are. Now, make it stop!”
Rafe waved his hands in soundless, hapless explanation.
“I see,” said Joshua. “All right.” He let out a huff and crouched down next to Micah. “Micah. It’s me. Joshua. Micah, Rafe is sorry he was horrible to you. Rafe is a horrible person, and I’m going to make him go away now. I’m going to take Rafe away, all right? You can be by yourself for a while, until you feel better.”
Miraculously, the shrieks got softer; they were almost whimpers by the time Joshua finished speaking.
“Micah—” Rafe began. But Joshua gripped his arm savagely.
“I think,” his friend said, “you’ve said about as much to Micah as we all need for one day, don’t you, pigeon? Now, come on.”
Obediently, Rafe bent over and started pulling on his shoes.
That was when they became aware of the knocking at the door—the loud, insistent knock of someone who had been trying for some time to make his presence known. At the sound, loud, rapid, and aggressive, Micah’s shrieks resumed.
“Master Fenton!” The voice on the other side of the door sounded worried. “Master Fenton, are you at home?”
It was Joshua who opened the door a crack. “Oh yes,” Rafe heard him say. “No, I’m not him. Dear Rafe is busy murdering someone. Can you not hear the screams?”
“What the hell, Fenton?” The shout came from one of the historians across the landing. “Are you skinning a cat in there?”
“Or screwin
g one?”
On the floor above them, someone was pounding on their ceiling. Which did nothing to calm Micah. Or Rafe, for that matter.
Joshua closed the door, and the historians’ wisecracks faded into the background. The pounding—and Micah’s shrieks—did not.
The seal to the paper Joshua handed Rafe bore the swan of Tremontaine; the wax went flying as Rafe tore it open.
Master Fenton: Please come when you can.
That was all. It wasn’t William’s handwriting. “The messenger?”
“Gone,” Joshua said. “Couldn’t leave fast enough.”
And, he reflected, one could say the same for Rafe.
The Duchess Tremontaine received him in her drawing room.
“Master Fenton,” she said gravely. “Thank you for coming.”
Rafe did none of the things that courtesy demanded: He did not bow or thank her or ask how he could help. Instead he wondered: What is she playing at? This was the woman who had barred the gates against him. The one who missed no chance to mock and demean him every minute he had spent at Tremontaine House trying to be Will’s secretary.
Now she looked up at him from the chair she sat in, looking almost boneless with fatigue. A small and delicate woman, her fair hair caught back in a simple knot. Her dress was dove-gray, fine linen, but crossed in front with a fichu of the kind a merchant’s wife might wear. In fact, she looked like his mother, when she stayed up all night when the children were sick, because no hired help, no matter how skilled or loyal, could possibly care about my family as much as I do.
“How is he?” Rafe asked.
“Ill,” the duchess said. The bright western light was not kind to her. The skin around her eyes looked thin, and he could see little lines at their corners and at the corners of her mouth. “He slept the night before last. All the night through, and into the day.” She met his eyes with her clear gray ones. “I know you came to the gates. And were denied. I just wanted him to sleep. I wanted to sleep myself. . . .” She turned her head away, but he saw the tears glinting in her eyes.
He said, “Why are you telling me this?”
The duchess looked down at her hands, bare of any ornament but her wedding rings. “Because you have the right.” Her voice was so low, he had to strain to hear it.
“As his secretary? I am still, you know. He hasn’t dismissed me. They should have let me in.”
“I let no one in that day.” The duchess rose and walked to the high double windows, which led onto the terrace over the garden, and looked out at the glory that was the early summer there. “I know you love him,” she said.
Rafe was silent. He had been prepared for a fight, for sarcasm, for a careful and brutal tearing down of himself and everything he and Will were to each other. This, he was not prepared for.
“And I know you think that I do not,” the duchess said. She turned back to him, her back flawlessly straight, her face in shadow. “I am not willing to argue that point with you, Master Fenton.”
In that moment, Rafe saw himself as she must see him: a man, young and full of promise, nothing behind him but youth, who had walked into her safe and secure marriage, carried her true husband off into a world of promise and romance, without a thought for the woman who had given herself to him for life, borne his children, minded his household (and all his other considerable properties), and maybe even—in her own way—loved him too. A woman who might have been in considerable pain for the past few months while he and Will had found each other, though pride and position demanded she show the world nothing of it.
“However,” the duchess went on, “I am hoping that you will accept my request to help him now, if you can.”
“Of course!” Rafe said, before he could stop himself. “I will do anything I can. Where is he? May I see him?”
“Of course,” the duchess said in turn. “I will tell them to prepare him for visitors.” What did that mean, “prepare him”? Was his Will wallowing in his own filth? Painting himself like an Uruk? Or did he merely need a shave and change of neckcloth? “Meanwhile, I hope you will take chocolate with me.”
Rafe sat in the chair she indicated, a velvet bergère across the low table from her. This was a woman’s parlor; he’d never been in it before.
He watched in a trance of fascination as Diane’s tapered, elegant hands lifted the chocolate with a set of silver tongs, scraped a generous amount into a swan-shaped pitcher, added hot water from a pot over a small burner, and whipped it all with a silver whisk. Into one cup she measured a tiny spoon’s worth of reddish-brown powder from a tin.
“I have come to enjoy the Kinwiinik spices,” she said. “This is my own particular blend. Would you like to try some? I warn you—it is rather strong.”
“Yes,” Rafe answered. How could he not? But he noticed that she gave him far less than she had given herself. And even so, the first sip went up his nose and down his throat like fire.
He felt his face flush with the heat. Politely, the duchess made no indication that she had noticed. Rafe wiped his brow with the kerchief he fortunately had in one pocket.
“Cream?” she asked with perfect civility. “I’m so turned around, I forgot to offer it before.”
“Please.”
The cream did something to temper the burn. But still, Rafe felt that fierce rush of tingling vigor when he drank. It was followed by a sense of well-being—of stimulation, even—like coming indoors after being caught in a rainstorm and being briskly rubbed down with a warm, dry towel. The duchess’s spiced chocolate was both like and unlike the stuff he’d drunk at Kaab’s family welcome banquet—oh how many hundreds of years ago? The Balams must have toned it down for their local guests. This was probably closer to what Kaab drank herself. No wonder she loved the stuff! It was like a hit of strong spirits. And here was the Duchess Tremontaine, relishing a double dose, far more than Rafe could tolerate—and, no doubt, enjoying her superiority. Well, let her, poor thing.
She offered him more, because it was rude to suggest that you begrudged a guest anything, but he politely (and honestly) refused. He was ready to see Will.
“Come, then,” she said.
Rafe followed her rustling skirts through the painted corridors and up the grand staircase to the richly carpeted second story. Door after door—some of them he’d been behind, some he’d no idea what they led to. . . .
Will’s room was still Will’s room. It was locked from the outside, now. The guard—Rafe supposed it was a guard—opened it for them to pass through.
For a moment, Rafe just stood in the doorway, staring. How could he have forgotten exactly how beautiful Will was? There was no one on this earth with skin so fine, stretched over bones so perfectly articulated. His ears, his nose, the way his shoulders extended from the column of his neck . . . Rafe’s body filled with a love so sharp and all consuming that it barely left room for his own breath.
Will sat in a high-backed carved wooden chair, looking out the window. He was dressed and clean-shaven, though his hair was a little long. Rafe saw that Will’s lips were moving—his sweet and supple, curved lips—muttering something over and over as if his life depended on it. He did not turn to look at them but gripped the chair’s arms with white, tight knuckles.
The last time Rafe had seen Will, holding him in the sweet sweat of his bed, Will had been afraid of going mad. He said Rafe helped bring him back to himself—
Rafe stepped forward a little. “Will?”
Still the man in the chair did not turn. But Rafe could hear what he was muttering fiercely to himself, over and over:
“Red rose, black rose . . . Black rose, red rose . . . White crow, black crow . . . Black crow, white crow . . . Red rose, black rose . . . Black rose, red rose . . .”
The pain in Rafe’s center turned to a chilly calm. He was a man of reason. And his love, at heart, was too, and would be so again.
Slowly he approached the man in the chair. “Will, darling. It’s me. It’s Rafe.”
Fi
nally the duke turned and looked at him. The muttering didn’t stop—but Rafe saw recognition in his eyes.
“Will, I’m here to help. Can you tell me what is wrong?”
Will shook his head frantically, waved Rafe away with his hand, while his lips moved, unceasing. Rafe squatted beside the chair, looking up at him steadily.
“Let me help you, Will.”
Will stared at him, desperate, but did not stop: “Black rose, red rose . . . White crow, black crow . . .” As if he were ensorcelled, like some young king in a wizard’s tale. Will’s eyes were wild, now; Rafe could see the man in there, terrified and begging for help.
“Black crow, white crow . . . Red rose, black rose . . .”
It was intolerable. He had to make it stop. He’d go mad himself if he had to keep hearing those words over and over: “Red rose, black rose . . . Black rose, red rose . . .”
He stood and reached out one hand to take Will’s shoulder, and then the other to bring him to his feet. Will clung to the arms of his chair, unwilling to rise from it. “It’s all right,” Rafe said softly. “Never mind.” He knew the way to break the spell. He bent down himself and kissed Will on the mouth.
Will’s mumbling continued under Rafe’s lips, a strange and terrible sensation. Still, Rafe’s blood pulsed with inconvenient desire—and communicated itself to Will. The mumbling slowed; Will’s lips grew soft and conformed to his. He could feel Will’s shoulders relax.
That’s right, Rafe thought, come to me. Will’s mouth pressed his, more and more insistent, and Rafe let his lips open—yes, let Will be the one to come forward, there—let Will’s mouth open and the familiar taste come with it, let Will slide his tongue between them and begin to explore—
For a moment, Rafe did not understand what he was doing on the floor, his head ringing. Will stood above him, his arm still raised to strike again, shouting: “Traitor! Traitor! The rat child was right! Betrayed by everything I ever loved, just as it told me!”
“No.” Rafe shook his head, lifting his arm against another attack. But the duke just went on shouting: “You stink of her! I can taste her on your mouth!”
Tremontaine Season 1 Saga Omnibus Page 56
