“She’s a bore, Mater,” he said, sideslipping the topic—or trying to. “She’s a bluestocking and a bore. I wrack my brain to tell her amusing stories, and she talks about literature; I try to make love to her, and she asks me about votes for women or politics.”
She frowned. “That is not what I asked. The girl is normal enough. She certainly has a craving for fine feathers, she’s young, and I’m sure you can turn her head with flattery if you exert yourself; she’s not that different from the little trollops you amuse your idle hours with. You ought to be able to charm her without thinking twice about it.”
He couldn’t meet her eyes. Her frown deepened.
“Clearly, you have gotten nowhere. Clearly, you are not even trying,” she stated. “Reggie, this is important. You have to get that girl under your control. You have to win her; it’s imperative to have her your creature.”
“It’s damned hard to flatter someone who isn’t listening,” he muttered, casting a resentful glance at her from under long eyelashes that most women would sell their souls for. Though there seemed to be plenty of women who would sell their souls to have Reggie himself. Just—not the one that mattered, it seemed. “Furthermore,” he continued, “I should think it would make more sense for you to work on that curse of yours. After all, if the little wretch just dies, the problem will be solved.”
If she answered that, she’d be on the defensive—and it was always her policy to be on the offensive, not the defensive. She glared at him, the “it’s all your fault” look. “Try harder,” she ordered. “Put some imagination into it, instead of using all the tricks that work on girls with more sophistication. She might be intelligent, but she is not sophisticated. You might take her somewhere, show her some sight or other. From all I can tell, she never ventured out of that tiny village of hers—take her to Exeter for an excursion!”
Reggie groaned. “Damn, Mater, what the hell is there in Exeter worth looking at?”
“That’s not my business,” she told him, exasperated at his willful lack of imagination. “It’s yours. Find something. A conservatory. Theater—there has to be a music hall, at least. The shops—the cathedral—a concert. Even a pantomime is going to be something she’s never seen before!” Her eyes narrowed. “She’s spending every Wednesday and Friday at the vicarage, and I’m not entirely certain that it’s chess and piety that take her there. That vicar is young and single. Did it ever occur to you that he might be your rival for her affections?” She raised an eyebrow. “He certainly seems to be setting the hearts aflutter in the village.”
“A vicar?” To her great annoyance, Reggie snorted. “Not bloody likely! Not that vicar in particular—he looks like a bag of bones, and he’s all prunes and prisms. Miss Marina may be a bore, but I’ve never seen a bore yet that didn’t have repressed passions seething under the crust. No stick in a dog collar is going to be my rival for her.”
Arachne’s exasperation overflowed. Arrogance was one thing, but this—this was blind stupidity itself. “Then do something about those repressed passions! Rouse her somehow! Go take her slumming and tell her it’s the fashion to do so, I don’t care, as long as you impress her.”
“Yes, you do,” he said sullenly, his eyes smoldering with things he didn’t dare express, at least to her face. “If I were to take her slumming and she managed to slip away from me and back to those artists of hers, you’d have my hide.”
He was right about that, at least. “Yes,” she replied grimly. “I would. And don’t think that you can get out of this by helping her on her way, either. Don’t even give her the chance to acquire a single stamp. Because the moment she gets in communication with them, they’ll tell her enough about me—and you, by extension—that she won’t trust us. No matter how circumspect they are, they can still make the case that Alanna sent her away to hide her from me, and there were six witnesses there to back them up.”
“Even without talking about magic?” he asked skeptically.
“Especially without talking about magic. Elizabeth Hastings can turn black into white if she puts her mind to it, and all they have to do is send the girl to her. Then where will we be? Damn it, boy, all they have to do is smuggle her over to the Continent and hide her there until she’s twenty-one for her to have complete control of her property, unless you manage to get her married to you! Do you want her property or not?”
She did not want to consider what would happen with Marina on the Continent, and it wouldn’t take waiting until she was twenty-one, either. If the curse didn’t take effect by the time Marina was eighteen—and if Arachne herself was not in physical contact to nullify or even cancel it—it not only could backfire against the caster, it would. She had worked that much out, at least. Not that she was going to tell Reggie any of that. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t use for leverage against his mother. He was getting altogether too independent lately.
No, the blasted Tarrants wouldn’t have to hide the girl until she was twenty-one; the eighteenth birthday would suffice. Shuttling her around France in company with a gaggle of schoolgirls would do the trick—she’d never be able to find one schoolgirl tour among all the ones traipsing around Provence and Paris.
“I had intended,” she said smoothly, “to use the girls from the Exeter works to make the curse work again. I tried to do that. The accident put paid to that plan, rather thoroughly. They were too damaged; there wasn’t enough power in them. None of the others are strong enough or ripe enough, nor will they be for at least a year.”
Reggie shrugged, striving to look indifferent, and managing only to look arrogant. He was getting altogether too like his mother for her comfort. Altogether too like. Ambitious, manipulative, sly… “Do what you did to set the curse in the first place. Find me a sacrifice. The proper sort.”
“I’ve tried,” she admitted, nettled that she’d needed to admit anything. “A single virgin child of Master potential is difficult enough to obtain; it was only a fluke that I managed to get my hands on four and only because they were all from the same family! And if you had any notion how long I waited with that curse heavy on my hands, until Hugh got himself an heir—”
Now it was Reggie’s turn to frown, and his brows knitted in confusion. “Four? You shouldn’t need four, not for enough power to reinstate an existing curse. A single child should do, so long as it’s mage-born and virgin. His Infernal Majesty should—” At her dubious expression, his frown deepened, and he blinked, slowly, as if some entirely new thought had crossed his mind. “Mater, don’t you believe?”
He sounded—shocked. As shocked as any good Christian would have been to learn that she was a Satanist. Well, now it was coming out; her son, whom she had raised and trained to be her helper, had finally grasped the idea that his mother was a skeptic. How had he missed it? How had she raised a believer? “I have never seen anything to make me believe—or disbelieve,” she said reluctantly. “The rites give me power; that was all I have ever cared about. It’s power I take from the weaker creatures that I sacrifice, so far as I can tell, and not from any other source; what odd’s that? It’s still power, it works, and it gives me what I want. Belief doesn’t enter into it, nor does it need to.”
She’d have laughed at the expression on his face, if she hadn’t known that would make him turn against her. What a joke! To think that she, a skeptic above all else, had raised up a pious little Satanist! Could Satanists be pious? A true believer, at any rate, and she wondered how, as careful as she had been with him, she had missed the signs of it developing.
And how far had he gone down that road? Did he go so far as to keep a shrine to the Dark One in his room? Oh, probably not; of all the servants, only Mary Anne and his valet were aware of anything unusual in the household, and Mary Anne only because she had discovered Reggie’s secret when she first became his mistress. She had, in fact, been an actress, and a clever one at that—but not a good one. Good enough to get the secondary parts, but never the leads; graceful enough to ornament the
stage, but nothing else. So she augmented her status and income with gentlemen, and she managed to snare Reggie. But she had plans, she did—plans for a comfortable old age, having seen far too many of her kind tottering around as street whores, without even a room to take a customer to. She was not satisfied with all the accompanying privileges and presents of being Reggie’s regular, for she wanted something more in order to keep her mouth shut. Clever girl; you couldn’t eat a dinner twice, if the man didn’t keep paying for your flat you had to find a way to pay for it yourself or be out in the street. Presents of flowers were worthless—presents of jewelry always pawned for less than they cost. She wasn’t in love with Reggie. It was entirely a mercenary relationship with nothing in it at all of affection.
That something more that Mary Anne wanted was a permanent position—involving no more work than she’d put in on stage, at the same rate of pay as a star turn—in the household, whether or not she was in Reggie’s bed. She was shrewd enough to know that Madam was not about to pay her for doing nothing, but she was perfectly willing to perform something as minimal as assisting Madam’s own maid, for instance. And the other privilege she wanted was her own separate apartment for as long as she stayed with the household.
Things became a little more complicated with the move to Oakhurst, for Reggie insisted on having her along. Well, she kept Reggie satisfied, and that took some imagination and athletic ability, and her presence at Oakhurst was probably the only thing keeping Reggie here at all. The Oakhurst household did not know what Mary Anne’s position was, and Arachne had not wanted them to discover it. In light of Mary Anne’s stage experience, Arachne had decided that playing lady’s maid to the girl fit the criteria of “no more work than she’d put in on stage” and she’d proved herself useful in that regard as well.
But that was beside the point, given this new revelation. That Reggie actually believed and worshipped, now, that was something that Arachne would not have even guessed at until this moment. How had he gotten that way, and what was the cause? Surely there must have been a cause.
Yet so far as she knew, he had never seen anything during a rite that she hadn’t seen. There had never been any manifestations of lesser demons or devils, much less His Infernal Majesty himself at a single Black Mass, however perfectly performed. The only things that had appeared when summoned were the physical manifestations of Elementals—the nastier sort of Elementals, that is; Lamias Incubi, Trolls, Hobgoblins, Manticores, all the inimical fauna of a fabulous bestiary. Never a hint of a devil. Not a single demon in the classical sense of hellspawn. Plenty of things that fed on negative energies, on pain and despair, on sorrow and fear, but not a single creature that was itself despair.
Her eyes narrowed as she regarded him with speculation. Could it be that he had been holding rites on his own? And had gotten unexpected results? Had he accomplished things he had not troubled to tell his mother?
Could he, in fact, have gone so far as to invoke a devil and make a classic pact?
If he had, that put another complexion on this conversation entirely.
“I suppose—” he said finally, and she didn’t much like the expression, or rather, lack of it, in his face and hooded eyes. “—I suppose you’re right. It’s not belief, it’s results that count.”
She countered his mask with one of her own. “And in the realm of results, it would be best to have every option ready to put into motion,” she purred. “I am by no means out of plans, yet. And I am by no means limited to the ones we have already discussed.”
She was, in fact, perfectly prepared to perform the Great Rite with her own son, if everything fell apart and she needed to do so to protect herself from the backlash of the curse—though she had a notion that she would have to drug or otherwise disconnect Reggie’s mind from his body to accomplish that particular feat. Even her unshockable son might consider that going a bit too far.
Well, that was what she had her own pet doctors and chemists for. A little of this, a smidgen of that, and a glass of that brandy he was so fond of, and he’d be seeing and hearing what she chose, and doing exactly what she wanted.
Yes, and what was more, she was equally prepared to channel that backlash through him if she had to. Especially if he was getting above himself. If she was going to have to eliminate him, she certainly wouldn’t waste his potential. He could be eliminated, and it wasn’t likely that when the body was found, anyone would ever suspect her hand behind the death. Someone else could be trained; the valet, perhaps. She’d done without an Infernal Celebrant before, and she could do so again, awkward though it might be.
And less effective.
That was the problem with the Satanic rituals; so damned misogynistic, so infernally patriarchal.
Perhaps… when all this was sorted, she ought to pay someone to research the rites of the Magna Mater, or the goddess Hecate, or some other goddess of black powers. Perhaps endow three or four scholarships, or even get someone to search the proscribed sections of the Vatican library and abstract the appropriate texts. Then she wouldn’t need any Celebrant but herself.
No time for that now, though. The days and weeks were ticking past; March was half over, and spring would be here too soon. Already the snow was gone, and cold rain had taken its place. Then summer, and the birthday…
“Woo the girl, and win her if you can,” she ordered. “If nothing else, it will make inheritance easier if you’re married to her when the curse takes her. There will be no nonsense about probate courts and dying intestate and a minor; you’ll already have it all, no questions, no hesitation.”
“A good point.” He grimaced, and seemed to revert to his usual indolent self—though having seen the Believer behind the mask, Arachne was never going to trust to that mask again. “All right, Mater, I’ll do what—I’ll do the best that I can.”
“I’m sure you will,” she replied as he rose and walked out of the room. Though at that moment, she was not at all certain that he would.
After all—if she died in the backlash of the curse, he stood to inherit all that she owned. And then, if he chose, he could have his freedom to live his life as he chose, or his pick of heiresses couldn’t he?
For all she knew, if he actually had made a pact, that would be the sum of it.
Treachery, treachery. It might all come to which of them betrayed the other first.
Marina was wracking her brains, trying to come up with a reason, any excuse at all, to get Reggie and Arachne to take her to the pottery at Exeter. She’d considered feigning some mysterious female illness, considered a toothache that would require a visit to a dentist. But both those ploys could involve having her ruse exposed as such, and would involve—particularly in the case of the dentist—a certain amount of pain. If she wanted books, well they could be ordered, and the same for the shoes she actually needed.
She’d even gone so far as to make a handwritten list of plausible approaches last night, but nothing seemed particularly inspired. She was still turning things over in her mind as she followed Mary Anne to breakfast the next morning, trying on this idea, then that, and coming up with nothing.
Still, when she discovered that Madam was not down to breakfast that morning, leaving her alone with Reggie, it seemed as though the opportunity to approach him directly was too good to let slip. So she listened to his interminable boasts and pointless stories with wide-eyed patience, then, after a description of some petty triumph in business, she sighed theatrically.
At least he managed to pick up on that, although he was utterly obtuse to the fact that she was bored silly with him. “Why the sighs, fair cuz?” he asked, with an empty grin. “Do my triumphs on the field of commerce so entrance you? Or is it just that, like a good little feminine creature, you’ve no head for business and would like me to change the subject?”
It was about as good an opening as she was ever likely to get. “Actually, in a peculiar way, it’s partly both. I am fascinated by your enterprises,” she replied, making her eyes
wide, and looking at him with great seriousness. “Since I’m part of your family now, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really ought to see your business, first hand, so I can understand it when you discuss it. Oh, Reggie! Could you take me to the pottery at Exeter?” She made her voice turn wheedling, though she cringed inside to hear herself. “Please? That is the closest one, isn’t it? I should so like to see it, and even more, to see you in charge of all of it! It must be thrilling, like seeing a captain command his warship!” Good gad, am I really saying this tripe?
For a moment, he looked so startled that she had to swallow an entire cup of tea in three gulps to keep from laughing aloud. “Are you serious, cuz?” he said incredulously. “Do you really want to see the pottery and watch me at work?”
“Absolutely,” she replied, looking straight into his eyes. “More than wanting to see it, I feel that I must see it, and that I can never properly understand you or Madam unless I see you in command of it all. Could you take me? Perhaps on your next business trip?” She actually stooped so low as to bat her eyes at him, and tried not to gag.
“By Jove, I not only could, but this will fit in with my plans splendidly!” he exclaimed with such glee that she was startled. “Just yesterday Mater was saying that I ought to take you to some place bigger than Oakhurst and let you see the sights; maybe do a trifle of shopping, I know how you little creatures love to shop—”
She stifled the urge to strangle him and concentrated on looking overjoyed with the prospect of a day away from the house and the village. It wasn’t that hard to do, given the promise of “a little shopping.” Perhaps she could manage to get hold of some money in the process.
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