The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Calder laughed, actually laughed, though bile scalded the back of his throat and he really believed, in that moment, that he could kill his half brother without compunction. “You’re lying, about all of it,” he said. “My mother died of a fever. And she would never have abandoned me—never. If you’re looking for a way to make my blood boil, brother, you’ll have to do better than that.”

  William made a contemptuous sound. “Fool. They brought Marie home after the accident, and she never regained consciousness. Papa only told you she was suffering from a fever to save your precious feelings—ask old Dr. Blanchard if you don’t believe me. She’d broken every fragile bone in her body in the wreck, and they carried her here to die. The truth was, she’d been whoring with some second cousin of hers. They’d conceived a bastard, Marie and her sweetheart—she lost the poor little creature, of course, only hours before she passed on.” He sighed philosophically. “That was for the best, no doubt.”

  Calder’s knees felt weak. In his mind he heard Marie Holbrook’s lilting voice singing a lullaby, felt her hands tucking the blankets in around him, knew again the brush of her lips across his forehead. “You’re a liar,” he said.

  William went on as though Calder hadn’t spoken. “Personally I’ve always wondered if you weren’t the by-blow of one of Marie’s many admirers,” he said. “Papa was in his late forties when you came along, remember, and he hadn’t sired a second child by my mother or, to my knowledge, any of the paramours that came later.”

  Because William’s assertions challenged some of his most basic beliefs about himself, because he sensed a grain of truth in them, Calder was shattered. “Suppose you’re right,” he said in a low, raw tone of voice. “Let’s assume my mother was indeed a tramp, and I was sired by one of her lovers. Why did you wait until now to say these things, when you’ve obviously hated me for so many years?”

  William indulged in a slow smile, even though he had to know he was about to take a trouncing from a younger, stronger man. “Papa wanted to pretend you were his. You were everything he would have asked for in a son, you see. Isn’t that ironic? You, Calder, were the prodigal, always running off to some far country, or landing yourself in the middle of this damnable war. You tormented him, and he loved you for it, cherished you for it.” He paused, took a deep breath, and tilted his head back to search the azure sky for a few moments. “Obviously I couldn’t tell you the truth. I would have been disinherited for my trouble.”

  Calder ran a hand over his face. The fight had not even begun, and William had already defeated him, already broken him. “Can you prove any of this?”

  “Of course I can—if I hadn’t, you would be able to discount everything I’ve said on grounds of petty jealousy and spite. I have letters addressed to the lovely Marie, as well as some she’d written herself but never had a chance to post.”

  “I want to see them,” Calder said. He was reeling inwardly, fighting for balance. He turned and moved away, toward the house.

  William would not leave matters at that. Instead he came after Calder, grabbed him by one shoulder, whirled him around so that they stood face to face.

  “You’ve already won,” Calder said grimly, shoving a hand through his hair again. “What more do you want?” William didn’t bother to answer, he just flung his right fist at Calder, who saw the blow coming and blocked it by raising one arm. He was baffled, for a few moments at least, by his brother’s insistence on provoking him, for this was truly a fight William couldn’t win. Then, in a blaze of revelation, Calder realized that William wanted the pain, needed it to expunge demons of his own.

  Closing his hand, Calder brought his knuckles up hard under William’s chin. The punch connected; William’s teeth slammed together, and a tiny bubble of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth.

  “Is that enough?” Calder demanded, clenching his teeth. He almost missed the uncontainable anger he’d felt only minutes before; now he was numb. There was no fury inside him, no joy or sorrow. Nothing. “Or do I have to beat you senseless?”

  William threw another punch, and this one was more accurate. He caught Calder square in the center of his solar plexus, forcing the air from his lungs.

  Adrenaline surged through Calder’s system, though his emotions were as dead as the man who had sired him. He hurtled into William headfirst, as he’d done many times as a boy, when his brother had tormented him until he lost control. The difference was, William was no longer bigger and stronger than Calder.

  The conflict continued from there, fairly equal at first, and Calder reveled in it. He got as much pleasure, in fact, from taking punches as he did from throwing them. While the battle raged, he did not have to think about the impossible, fantastical situation with Maeve, the loss of a father he had not known he loved, and now this second, and somehow more wrenching, forfeiture of a mother he had adored.

  Finally, his own face bloody and his knuckles bruised, Calder sent William to the ground with a right cross, and William did not rise. He half lay, half sat, one shoulder braced against the edge of a garden bench, breathing hard and deep. His eyes were blackened and nearly swollen shut, and yet there was an expression of redemptive bliss on his face that made Calder want to tie into him all over again.

  He turned and stumbled toward the house.

  The undertaker and his helpers had brought Bernard’s body downstairs by that time; he was to lie in state until the next morning, when there would be a formal ceremony, followed, of course, by burial.

  Capshaw, the mortician, assessed Calder’s rumpled, grass-stained clothes and bleeding face with undisguised disdain. He and the old man had played poker together, among other things, and there had been a certain grudging friendship between them.

  “You haven’t changed,” the undertaker said, reaching into the fancy mahogany coffin his helpers had brought in to straighten Bernard’s ascot.

  Calder forced himself to the side of the long library table that had been moved into the parlor to support the casket and the sizable man reposing inside. He curled his fingers around the side of the coffin, heedless of the small bloodstains he left on the white satin lining, and stared down into the pale, still face of his father.

  Or the man he had always believed was his father.

  “Was my mother leaving him, the night she died?” he asked, mindful of the words only after they had left his mouth. It was a question Capshaw might well have the answer to, since he was close to the family and had probably prepared Marie Holbrook’s broken body for the grave.

  The undertaker cleared his throat. “This is no time to be discussing—”

  Calder raised his eyes, locked his gaze with the other man’s. “Damn you, just tell me,” he rasped.

  “Yes.” Capshaw sighed the word, sending it out of his mouth on a rush of air. “Yes, Marie was leaving Bernard. And don’t devil me about it, Calder, because that’s all I’m going to say. Perhaps you don’t have any respect for the dead—perhaps you’ve become hardened to it, seeing so much destruction on the battlefields—but I do.

  Bernard was a good friend to me, and I won’t see his death turned into a parlor theatrical!”

  Calder studied his father’s cold, marblelike face, as if expecting to see some answer written there. Then he turned and moved away, walking slowly, like a man entranced, toward the main staircase.

  He took refuge not in his room, but in the nursery where he had slept and played as a child. It had been kept much as it was, in the hope, Calder supposed, that there would be other children after the disastrous loss of Amalie.

  One of her dolls was still seated in a miniature rocker next to the fireplace, as if waiting for the little girl to come back and claim it. Calder touched the toy as reverently as if it were some holy object, a belonging of Saint Paul or even Christ, then wrenched his hand back.

  He’d lost everything, he realized. His life with Maeve—soon, even the memory of her would be gone, thanks to her macabre magic—his child, his father, his illusions t
hat there had been one person in his life—Marie—who had loved him selflessly, even his own identity. Calder no longer knew who he was.

  It would have been a mercy if he’d been able to weep then, or curse the heavens, but he was still without feeling. His was a dead soul, entombed in living flesh.

  Presently Calder returned to his own room.

  He wasn’t surprised to find a packet of letters resting on his bedside table, tied with faded ribbon. Beneath them were a few miscellaneous pages of expensive vellum, still faintly scented with his mother’s perfume, their edges crumbling with age.

  He left them long enough to go to the washstand and cleanse the blood and dirt from his face and hands. Then he carried the letters to a chair near the window and hunched there, stretching out his long legs, to read.

  The loose pages told him all he needed to know; Marie Holbrook had indeed been leaving her husband for a lover, and she made no mention of her son.

  Doubtless, he’d been nothing more to her than an inconvenience, despite the soft lullabies he remembered, the gentle nurturing, the tender words. Had Marie lived, then he, Calder, would have been as bereft as his own child was, years later, when Theresa abandoned her.

  He laid the letters aside, closing his eyes, willing Maeve to come to him, willing her to be real.

  In her cool, dark burrow, deep beneath the surface of the ground, Maeve stirred in her vampire sleep, but she did not awaken until sunset. She was aware of Calder’s desperate summons the moment she opened her eyes, but she paused before going to him. She and all blood-drinkers were at war, and she could no longer follow every whim.

  Lisette was clever, and she would like nothing better than to take Maeve prisoner. The ancient vampire was mad, but she wasn’t stupid; she surely knew that the rebellion would fall apart without its central players, and she had already taken Valerian.

  So Maeve waited, there in her hidden pit, until full consciousness returned. She felt a terrible thirst and knew that it must be slaked first thing. She could not risk weakness now, any more than she dared take impulsive chances.

  She assembled herself in a faraway field hospital and fed on a dying soldier, obliterating his agony and his fear, making his passing one of ecstasy. Like the others, he mistook her for an angel of mercy, and blessed her, and Maeve wondered who the true monsters were—creatures like herself, or the mortals who orchestrated war.

  After that, Maeve’s head was clear, and she felt strong. Before setting out to search for Valerian, and thus, Lisette, she took herself to Calder’s room in the family mansion.

  He was slouched in a chair, unshaven, his hair and clothes mussed, drunker than a lord. Maeve went to his side, sensing the presence of death in the house, as well as rage and sorrow and, worst of all, hopelessness.

  She touched his hair. “Calder.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her, and even in that very disheveled state he was so beautiful to Maeve that she wondered how she could ever wipe out all memory of the love that had grown between them. She only knew that she must.

  He groped for her, drew her down onto his lap. “I was beginning to think even you were a lie,” he murmured, burying his battered face in her hair, which fell loose around the shoulders of her blue woolen cape.

  “Tell me what’s happened,” Maeve said gently, placing light kisses on each of his bruised cheekbones. “Please.”

  Calder released the story in agonized increments, telling how he’d adored his mother, and believed in her, and found out only today that—”she’d deceived him, that her devotion had been nothing more than pretty pretense. He produced the crumbling pages, penned by her own hand, and Maeve felt his grief move in her spirit, like a child in a womb, as she read the telling words.

  She thought, too, of her own mortal mother, a laughing, beautiful, and completely scatterbrained tavern maid. She’d lived in the eighteenth century, had Callie O’Toole, and gotten herself pregnant during a flirtation with a wealthy English merchant named Tremayne. Maeve and her twin brother, Aidan, had been the result of that liaison.

  Maeve tilted Calder’s head gently back and examined his wounds. “I could find out,” she said, the idea coming to her only as she voiced it.

  “Find out what?” Calder asked. He was more sober now, more focused.

  She smoothed his hair. “About your mother. I could go back to that night, Calder. I cannot change history, that’s entirely too dangerous, but I can find out whether she really meant to leave you. The question is, can you deal with the truth?”

  He considered for a moment, his arms around her waist, drawing her closer. “There’s no need of that, Maeve. I’m a grown man—I’ll learn to accept that I’ve mourned a fantasy mother all these years. God knows, I’ve had enough practice at learning to accept unpleasant realities.”

  Maeve knew that he was right, but she also knew that emotions weren’t governed by logic. Understanding what had happened to him, accepting it, would not spare Calder the pain of disillusionment. And there was always the chance that his suffering was based on a lie.

  She rose from his lap and stood straight and tall. “When did it happen, your mother’s accident?”

  Calder murmured a date, his reactions slowed by the liquor he’d consumed earlier, then thrust himself to his feet, groping for her. “Maeve, wait—”

  She closed her eyes and concentrated, ignoring Calder’s protests, and when she opened them, she was standing on a sidewalk in front of that same house, but it was nearly thirty years earlier.

  A storm was brewing; the wind was high and the sky dark. Maeve wrapped her cloak more closely around her, even though she did not feel the chill. She focused on the woman she sought, and was transported inside the great house, into a nursery.

  There candlelight flickered, and a low fire burned on the hearth. A slender dark-haired woman sat on the side of a child’s small bed, her narrow shoulders slumped. She was dressed in traveling garb, a simple dress, bonnet, and cloak, and as Maeve drew nearer, she realized that Marie Holbrook was weeping.

  It was the sight of the child, however, that stunned Maeve to the core of her being. This was Calder, her love, the one man she would have considered spending all eternity with, as a little boy.

  He was sound asleep, his dark hair tumbled over his forehead, his thick lashes brushing cheeks still plump with youth and innocence.

  As Maeve watched, Marie bent and kissed the boy Calder’s forehead lightly. He stirred and murmured something, but did not awaken.

  “My baby,” Marie whispered brokenly. She rose from the edge of the mattress with reluctance, and Maeve saw her in profile, saw the gleam of tears on her cheek, catching the light of the struggling fire. “Good-bye.”

  No, Maeve thought, closing her eyes for a moment. Don’t let it have happened this way, please.

  Lightning blazed beyond the leaded windows of Calder’s room, and thunder threatened to burst the sky, but still he did not awaken.

  Marie turned, half-blinded by obvious grief, unaware of Maeve’s presence because Maeve had willed it so.

  Maeve was confused; the woman didn’t appear to be leaving her child willingly, and yet she did not bundle him up and carry him away with her, as a thousand, nay a million, other women would have done in a like situation.

  She followed Marie into the hallway, where a young, thin, eager-looking lad awaited. Maeve guessed accurately that this was William, the difficult half brother Calder had mentioned, and she felt a surge of fury even before the youth spoke.

  He flung himself away from the wainscoted wall to stand behind Marie, and his very being seemed to bristle with hatred. “Leaving so soon, Marie? Why don’t you take your brat with you?”

  She whirled, the fiery Marie, and slapped William hard across the face. “You know,” she whispered. “Damn you, you know why I have to leave him—because no matter where we went, your father would hunt us down and tear Calder from my arms. I would die before I’d see that happen!”

  Strangely prop
hetic words, Maeve thought sadly, watching from a little distance away. Marie Holbrook would indeed die, and soon; her accident was probably only minutes away.

  It was a mercy, then, that the doomed woman had been forced to abandon her child. If she hadn’t, Calder would surely have been killed, too, or at least crippled.

  Maeve was still dealing with the mental images that idea produced when suddenly William grabbed at Marie, wild-eyed, shaking with some unholy passion. “Why did you waste yourself on that old man?” he rasped, speaking, no doubt, of his own father. “What do you see in this lover, this cousin of yours? Don’t you understand that I can love you as no one else ever could?”

  Marie struggled in the youth’s grasp, her eyes bright with fury, despair, and fear. “William, let me go! This instant!”

  At that moment a door closed heavily downstairs, and then a younger Bernard Holbrook started up the stairs. His handsome face was contorted with angry confusion.

  “What in the name of hell and all its demons is going on here?” he demanded.

  Marie was still fighting to free herself, and it was all Maeve could do to keep from interceding. No matter what transpired this night, she must not meddle, for the ramifications would creep into the years ahead like vines, dividing and dividing again, changing the future in myriad unpredictable ways.

  William raised his voice to an unnaturally high, thin pitch, and his fingers bit into Marie’s shoulders as he tightened his grip on her. “She was leaving you, Papa!” he cried. “Your wife was running away, but I stopped her!”

  The expression on the elder Holbrook’s face was one of wounded bewilderment. “Release your stepmother, William,” he ordered, hurrying up the stairs. “Have you taken leave of your senses?”

  “Bitch,” William whispered, and then he flung Marie from him. She struggled to regain her balance, a look of startled horror on her face, and then tumbled not down the stairs, but over the railing that edged the uppermost landing. She did not scream as she fell, and there was no sound after her body struck the marble floor below, except for William’s rapid breathing and the tick of the long-case clock on the first landing.