A hush fell over the audience as the full-sized glass coach rolled onto the stage, drawn by six perfect white horses with golden manes and tails. Dense fog tumbled and spun along the floor, rising slowly, encompassing the silent, gilded wheels of the carriage, swirling around the black iron pillars of the old-fashioned streetlamps lining the wings.
Daisy Chandler had been on a stakeout until half an hour before, and she’d arrived in the theater of the new Venetian Hotel just in time for the finale. Even though she’d lived in Las Vegas all her life, and knew more than a little about trickery and sham, she held her breath as the carriage door opened.
The magician stepped out of the coach onto the stage.
Tall and very broad in the shoulders, he stood just behind the fog-dimmed footlights, regarding the audience in imperious silence for a few moments, as though deciding whether or not these particular people were worthy of his presence, let alone his performance. He wore a plain tuxedo, exquisitely tailored, beneath a flowing black velvet cape embroidered with glimmering threads of every conceivable color, and his chestnut hair was thick, slightly too long over his collar, and faintly shaggy. His features were patrician, his complexion pale with a pearlescent glow to it.
Although Daisy could not see his eyes in the darkness, she would have sworn his gaze touched her, passed by, and then returned to cast some subtle spell.
Daisy felt an immediate wrench of sorrow and joy deep within herself, a recollection of great love and even greater tragedy. A fury of faded pastel images fluttered in her mind, like antique valentines…
Memories.
Daisy tried to shake off the fanciful impression. She was a cop, and an especially pragmatic one at that. She didn’t believe in magic, or in memories of things that had never happened to her in the first place. She’d been having spooky dreams, on and off, ever since she was eight years old, but that fell into another category entirely.
She shifted in her seat, wondering why she’d come to see a magic show instead of going home to her apartment for a Lean Cuisine, a hot bath, and some badly needed sleep. Hell, she’d even laid out the seventy-five bucks for a ticket…
Daisy bit her lower lip. She’d heard about the magician, who billed himself simply as Valerian—with no Greats or Magnificents or Incomparables tacked on for purposes of pizzazz—from her friends. They said his tricks were impossible, that other sleight-of-hand specialists were flying in from the world over, hoping to figure out how he did it all, and Daisy had wanted to see the act for herself.
It was as simple as that. Wasn’t it?
She realized she was holding her breath, and ordered herself to take in air, but her hand trembled as she reached for her glass of diet cola. Her gaze never left the commanding figure dominating center stage.
Daisy was enthralled, like all the other spectators, as Valerian raised his arms high in the air, turned his back to the audience, and faced the team and carriage. The metallic threads in his cape seemed to ripple and undulate under the stage lights, and Daisy shook her head, overwhelmed by another flood of footloose, whimsical remembrance.
The magician lifted his hands slowly, gracefully, from his sides, palms up, and as he did so, the fairy-tale coach and all the horses rose a few inches off the floor, then a foot, then several feet.
The silence in the room was explosive, absolute. No one spoke, or coughed, or cleared a throat. The horses seemed unconcerned with the fact that their hooves weren’t touching the floor; they moved in place, as though they were trotting on top of a cloud, and the carriage wheels spun accordingly.
Valerian turned, in a swirl of shimmering color, and glared fiercely at the audience, seeming to challenge them to question the trick. Then the fog dissipated, and Cinderella’s coach-and-six were still jostling along in mid-air, supported by nothing at all.
Daisy scooted to the edge of her chair, frowning, her practical cop’s mind racing even as her emotions wrestled with the lingering sense of poignant recognition. She knew razzle-dazzle when she saw it. No matter how polished the magician, no matter how sophisticated the trick, illusions were illusions. There could be no question that her eyes were fooling her, but she was more than mystified by what she was witnessing—she was unnerved.
The wizard gestured, and a half dozen of the requisite dancing girls pranced onto the stage, three on one side, three on the other. At another silent command from Valerian, a trio of the skimpily clad women moved to sit cross-legged under the suspended coach. One of the three seated beneath the horses glanced upward with a thoughtful expression, then produced an umbrella.
A twitter of nervous laughter rose from the crowd, but that feeling of collective breath-holding remained.
Having proven, ostensibly, that there were no wires supporting the coach-and-six—an idea Daisy had already dismissed as preposterous anyway—the dancing girls scrambled out from under it.
Valerian raised an arm, and the coach door opened again. A glittering gold ladder stretched with soundless grace to the stage floor, and the girls ascended, one by one, into the carriage. The door closed behind them.
There was a sort of psychic drumroll, something felt rather than heard. Then the great deceiver raised his arms again, and the onlookers cried out in wonder, Daisy included, when the team began to move, still suspended, pulling the coach out over all their heads, making a grand and glorious sweep before returning to the stage.
Daisy’s mouth dropped open. She closed her eyes, then opened them again.
The coach-and-six settled gracefully back to the floor of the stage, then rolled out of sight.
The audience soared to its feet, clapping and cheering wildly. The magician bowed deeply, a small, ironic smile lifting just a corner of his mouth, then vanished in the proverbial cloud of smoke.
Daisy sank back into her chair, still in shock. The horde of tourists straggled out, murmuring among themselves, speculating. Soon, the theater was empty, except for a few waiters, and the stage, with its tiered curtain of ivory silk, was dark.
Daisy remained, her heart in her throat, inexplicable tears burning in her eyes, obeying some unspoken command because she could not find the strength to defy it. Waiting.
For Daisy, the show was far from over.
41
Dunnett’s Head, Cornwall
September 1348
“You’ve ruined both of those lads,” Noah Lazarus groused from his position next to the table, mallet in hand. His wife, Seraphina, stood gazing out of the shop window, looking for those scoundrel sons of hers. He spat in an effort to gain her notice, knowing beforehand that he would fail. “The names you gave them, Sera—Krispin, Valerian—names fit for the sons of princes and kings. And me naught but a bootmaker!”
Seraphina turned those extraordinary violet eyes on him at last, and even though they flashed with contempt, Noah was glad of her notice. He knew he was pathetic, but in such moments he couldn’t make himself care.
“They are fine lads,” she said acidly. The late afternoon sun came through the thick, bubbled glass of the window, playing in her rich chestnut hair. Noah marveled that such a creature had bound herself to the likes of him, under the laws of God and man, that she’d lain with him, borne the children he sired.
Just then, Noah caught a glimpse of the boys, returning from the keep overlooking the small seaside village and the wild Irish Sea. Valerian, the elder, was seventeen, tall and straight as a ship’s mast, with powerful shoulders and his mother’s dramatic coloring. He had strong bones, unblemished skin, and straight white teeth, Valerian did, and he was so physically perfect that Noah could hardly believe he was the get of his own loins. It was as though the boy had willfully taken all the best of his parents for himself, leaving little or none for the children who followed.
Krispin, smaller than his brother, fair-haired and as delicate as a girl, came next. He’d managed to survive, at least—that was more than could be said for the others.
Poor little Royal had been born three years after Kris
pin, only to have his mother confer that embarrassment of a name upon him. He’d been a blue and spindly twig of an infant; hadn’t even survived a fortnight. As for the two girls, well, those wretched creatures, twins they’d been, had both given up the ghost before they could be christened.
The door of the shop swept open, and Valerian strode in. He wore the plain garb of a tradesman’s son, leggings and a tunic of the cheapest wool, and yet he looked out of place, as he always did. More like a dandy down from London Town than the pauper he was. He kissed his besotted mother on the forehead, and she glowed as if she’d just been blessed by John the Baptist, or one of the lesser saints.
Valerian’s eyes met Noah’s, and the old knowledge passed between them; they had always despised each other. That day the whelp carried an unbelievably rare and precious item—carelessly, of course—in the curve of one arm. It was a book, bound in leather, and Noah knew without looking that its parchment pages would have been painstakingly inscribed by one monk or a succession of them, and exquisitely illustrated with vivid colors and fragile brush strokes.
Noah’s heart clenched, and he felt a thin sheen of perspiration dampen his forehead and upper lip. “Where did you get that?” he demanded in a hoarse whisper. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, the manuscript was worth more than the shop and all its contents—more, probably, than the whole village of Dunnett’s Head. If such a treasure were to be damaged, or lost, there would be hell to pay.
And it would be Noah who paid, not his son. It was always Noah.
Valerian—God, how he hated that pretentious name, hated even more that it fit the young rogue so well, in its innate elegance—smiled in that way that made his father want to box his ears. Noah had done exactly that often enough, as it happened, and relished every blow, but Seraphina invariably coddled the rotter afterward and made the rest of them suffer.
“It belongs to the baron,” Valerian said, following a short silence. It was as close as he’d ever come to explaining anything he said or did; he seemed to have some personal rule against giving reasons.
Krispin, that nimble shadow of a boy, spoke at last, in a quavering and earnest voice. “Our tutor told us we could take it,” he burbled. “Just until we go back for our lessons….”
Noah felt the blood pounding under his right temple. Lessons. Books. That had been the start of it, Seraphina’s foolish insistence that her sons be taught to read, to yearn after poetry and art.
The older man fixed his gaze on Valerian. “Take it back to the keep,” he commanded in a tone of coldness and thunder. “Now.”
Valerian’s look, indeed his whole manner, was one of purest insolence. “I will not,” he replied very quietly.
Noah closed one fist—he was a big man, and stronger than his son, and he wanted with all his soul to strike the impudent pup over and over, to force him to his knees, to make him bleed and whimper—but Seraphina was beside her husband in a trice. She gripped Noah’s hard arm in her small hands, their tiny bones fragile as a bird’s skeleton beneath her silken flesh, and looked up at him with both a plea and a warning in her strange purple eyes.
He could bear no more of it, her choosing this whelp over him, her own mate. It was an abomination! “This is still my house, my shop,” Noah said evenly. “And I, God help me, am still your father. I am the master here, and you will do as I tell you or take a hiding the likes of which you’ve never imagined.”
“Noah!” Seraphina whispered, horrified, clutching at him again.
“Enough!” he rasped at her, wrenching his arm free and nearly oversetting her in the process, glowering all the while into Valerian’s magnificent, hateful young face. After a few deep and tremulous breaths, he managed to speak more calmly. “Now. What shall it be?”
Valerian spat onto the rush-covered floor.
His behavior was beyond enduring; Noah wrenched the precious manuscript from the lad’s grasp, shoved it into Seraphina’s, and struck his son with such force that Valerian stumbled backward and collided with a wooden support beam. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, and the fires of deepest hell blazed in his eyes.
He didn’t say that he hated his father, for there was no need to speak of it. Noah knew a moment of torturous despair, and wondered if things would have been different if he’d made Seraphina call the boys by solid, ordinary names, such as Thomas or John, Gideon or Joseph.
Seraphina screamed, but Noah could not stop himself. He cuffed the lad again and entangled a meaty peasant’s hand in that mass of chestnut hair, pulling hard, forcing his firstborn to his knees.
Valerian did not fight back, even though Noah could feel the strength surging inside the youthful, granite-hard body; he endured each blow, each kick, each slap and wrench, all the time gazing upon his father with that ancient, murderous contempt in his eyes. Only when it was too late did Noah realize that this very passivity was Valerian’s greatest weapon; by suffering the punishment without struggle, he had assured his mother’s undying devotion. At the same time he had sealed Noah’s doom, robbed him of the last shreds of Seraphina’s esteem. He, this changeling with the face of an archangel, had at last destroyed that which Noah valued above all else.
He drew back his foot, with a mighty moan of sheer agony, and kicked the crouching Valerian as hard as he could.
Seraphina shrieked, kneeling in the rushes to gather her bleeding and now-unconscious offspring into her arms, cradling his head on her bosom. When she raised her eyes to Noah’s face, his worst fears were confirmed; the hatred he saw in her gaze would outlive them all.
Though she might lie beside him every night, and even suffer his gropings and groans in the darkness, though she might sit across the board from him for a hundred meals, nay, a thousand, Seraphina was eternally lost to him.
Noah felt tears burning in his eyes, for he loved his wife the way a saint loves God, with fevered and unutterable devotion. He held out one hand to her, unable to speak, and she stared at the twisted, calloused fingers for a long moment, then turned her head away. She buried her face in Valerian’s hair and spoke not to Noah, but to their second son.
“Take your brother to his bed,” she told Krispin in a bleak, distracted tone. “I’ll get a cloth and some water.”
Only then could Noah manage one desperate word. Her name.
She rose, helping Krispin lift an insensate Valerian to his feet. She did not look at her husband, and her words sliced through him like a reaper’s scythe honed for harvest. “May God curse you, Noah Lazarus,” she murmured. “May all His angels despise your name, now and on the Day of Judgment.
Valerian
I remember clearly, even after six hundred years, that I awakened sometime after sunset, in the dark, cramped little cell I shared with my brother, feeling as though I’d been trampled by the baron’s horses. The straw in my pallet rustled when I moved, and I heard Krispin breathing softly in his own bed, against the opposite wall, but there was another noise tugging at the edges of my mind. It was several moments before I realized what else I was hearing—the sound of my father’s drunken, disconsolate weeping.
I closed my eyes, as if to block it out, for although I had never loved Noah, I was not immune to his suffering. I did not revel in his injuries as he did in mine.
“Do you think she’s left him at last?” Krispin asked.
“No,” I replied, unable to withhold a small groan as I shifted on my bed, disturbing bruised muscles and broken skin. “She’ll never leave him. Where would she go?”
There was a brief silence, within the room at least. Without, Father’s wails grew louder and more desolate, like the cries of a wounded wolf, and I wondered if his agony would drive him to come after me again. Although he was not a cruel man in any other respect, there could be no denying that he enjoyed taking off strips of my hide.
“You’re not his get,” Krispin speculated, with no emotion whatsoever coming forth in his voice. “That’s why he hates you so much.”
The words wounded me sorely, althoug
h they shouldn’t have. Certainly I’d had the same thought myself more than once, and I’d often pretended, when I was small, that I had sprung from the loins of someone far more interesting than Noah Lazarus, bootmaker, of Dunnett’s Head, Cornwall. A smuggler, for example. Or a poet. Or one of the pirates who plagued the coasts of both England and France.
Alas, I had the boot-maker’s broad shoulders and powerful, long-fingered hands; I had his temper and his oddly aristocratic nose, though he probably hadn’t noticed the similarities. Oh, I was Noah’s seed all right, but he couldn’t have despised me more if I’d been begotten by the devil’s great-uncle. And rather than try to make peace with him, to win his affection, I had always mocked him instead. Even now, after all these centuries, I’m not sure why I had to defy my father, to constantly rouse his ire; I only know that I could sooner have ceased breathing and stilled my own heart than begged him to love me.
“Valerian?” Krispin sounded slightly irritated; it always annoyed him when he spoke to me and I failed to reply straight away. “What do you think? Are you his son, or are you a bastard?”
I smiled in the fetid gloom, even though I ached in every conceivable part of my anatomy, even though I wanted, on some level of my being, to weep and weep until my body was dry as sun-parched straw. “I am his son,” I replied, “and I am most assuredly a bastard.” Krispin did not laugh at my jest, and I was sorry for that. It would have been a comfort to me, his amusement.
Things began to crash against the walls and floors in the outer part of the house where Father kept his shop. He was overturning cherished possessions now, flinging them in rage, and I shuddered inwardly, praying he would not remember me.
“He might have loved us,” Krispin said at length, “if we’d wanted to be bootmakers.”
I was weeping silently by then, and I didn’t want my brother to know, so I didn’t speak. But I knew it wasn’t our rebellion that made our sire hate us, most especially me. It was the fact that our mother had always taken our part against him.
The Black Rose Chronicles Page 61