by P. J. Fox
She stopped, and waited for him to say something.
He didn’t.
Minutes passed. She realized that if she wanted to have this conversation, she’d have to be the one to start it. He wasn’t going to give her an opening, waiting instead to see what she said. She resented having to come to him like this, wholly on his terms—as was, undoubtedly, his intention. Whatever she did now, however proudly she presented herself, she couldn’t help feeling like a supplicant. That Isla Cavendish was quite used to being invisible, and undesired, was the only thing that gave her strength to go forward. That, and her determination to save her sister from a lifetime of torment, however brief, with the creature in front of her.
“Your Grace,” she began, hating that her voice shook.
He didn’t respond. He radiated the same aura of terrible, corpse-like stillness that he had at dinner. The edges of his cloak brushed back and forth across the flagstones, the only movement to him. He’d heard her, of course, but he was drawing her out. Did he have a woman in his life? A man, perhaps? Anyone about whom he felt tenderness or, indeed, the least regard? That the duke was contemplating a marriage with her sister in no wise meant that he was single in the conventional sense; a great many men, and women, viewed marriage and love as completely separate entities. Which, given the status of marriage in their culture as a business transaction—at least for people of their general class—made sense.
“I would speak with you,” she continued stiffly.
“Then speak.”
He offered this piece of wisdom without turning, or moving at all. An errant gust of wind ruffled the hem of his cloak, sliding it across the flagstones with a faint rasping sound. His voice, too, had a strangely rasping quality to it: low, unpleasant, and not entirely human. Isla realized now that she’d never really heard him speak. At dinner, his voice had been pitched for Hart alone. Only when they’d first met had he addressed her directly, and she’d been too overwhelmed to notice much other than how loathsome she found him. The details that had escaped her then—his hands, his voice, the strange fire flickering in the depths of his pupils—started coming after she began to understand the purpose of his visit and its meaning for her family.
She’d never spoken to him before, either. She’d only seen him in formal settings and then she’d made no attempt to speak at all. Isla wasn’t quiet by nature, only reserved, and her desire to grasp the full import of her situation made her content to watch. Particularly in the past few days; there had been so much going on beneath the surface that she didn’t understand. For all her reading, where politics were concerned Isla had lived her life in a state of near isolation. No one discussed the broader affairs of the world with a woman, least of all her father. And her servants—the only people who did talk to her unreservedly—didn’t know anything to tell.
She drew a breath and steeled herself, mentally girding her loins for the challenge to come.
“I want you to marry me instead of my sister,” she said.
His laugh was like the rustling of dry leaves, and devoid of humor. Of any feeling at all.
“What a sister you are.”
His implication was clear, and she felt offended. Did he really think he was such a prize to be fighting over? Especially given the fate of his last wife? Or wives?
She resisted the urge to tell him that he was the last man in the world she’d ever find attractive. That she was, she was fairly certain, incapable of finding him even a little bit attractive. That he was a hateful, hateful man. Doing so would, no doubt, given his obvious ego, defeat her purpose. Instead she found herself telling him, “I’m neither so stupid as my sister nor so willfully ignorant as my father.”
As she spoke, rage replaced caution. How dare he put her, put all of them in this situation. Their lives meant nothing to him; he was like a child toying with a bug. “I know what you want, and don’t want, with her. And I know that I’ve not a tenth of her beauty and certainly none of her charm. But I know just as well that Rowena’s beauty and charm mean little to you—if anything at all. By marrying me, you’ll still get what you want.”
He turned, then, the movement slow and somehow ominous. His face was lost in shadow beneath his hood, but she felt the heat of his gaze all the same. “And what,” he asked, a trace of amusement still tingeing his voice, “is in this for you, little starling?”
“Nothing I expect you to understand,” she said archly, bristling at what she took to be condescension.
“Tell me.” His tone was calm, almost inviting, even, but nevertheless carried the distinct weight of command.
She regarded him, feeling the power of his presence. She’d been right the first time: he was evil. There was simply no other word to properly describe the aura that emanated from his strangely motionless form. She fought the urge to turn and run, the strongest urge she’d ever had in her life.
“Rowena,” she told him, “is my best friend. I love her. And she’s in love, with a man who loves her equally in return.” Isla shook her head, an imperceptibly small and bitter gesture that she couldn’t help. “Although I wouldn’t expect my father to mention such a thing—nor you to care,” she added challengingly, “as Rowena’s heart is hardly of concern to anyone save Rowena.”
“And yourself.”
“As I said,” she countered, “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“Sacrificing all for your sister.” He was mocking her. “How noble.”
“If you…reject her, she’ll have a chance to marry Rudolph. I want her to have at least a chance at happiness, not…die to no purpose, when someone is willing to go in her stead. I’m the eldest daughter,” she added, “I inherit more.” If she married, she inherited more; no one, least of all Isla, had expected Isla to marry at this point. Why should they? No one had ever wanted the reserved, thoughtful bookworm.
Isla didn’t even want herself, most of the time.
She laid awake in bed most nights, making endless lists of all the things that were wrong with her and all the ways in which she’d embarrassed herself, humiliated herself, and let down everyone she knew by failing to achieve what were, in her mind, the most basic of standards. She wasn’t pretty, she wasn’t fun, she never had any good jokes or topics of conversation and she didn’t play any instruments. Men hated her. She was useless. After all, here she was, arguing to be thought good enough to play the part of sacrificial lamb—and apparently being found wanting, even for that!
Again, that dry rasp of a chuckle as he regarded her across the narrow width of the gallery. “And the fact that I’m rich and handsome has no bearing on your decision, I suppose?” His words might almost have been mistaken for humor, but there was an edge to them.
“Many men are rich, and we both know that I’m hardly proposing to enjoy your riches overlong.” Meaning that the longest a woman had lasted in his household was the better part of three seasons. “Moreover, I do not find you handsome.” Which was the truth.
He moved with silent grace. She stood where she was, rooted to the spot as if by magic. The courage that had momentarily filled her, inspired her to speak out with such foolhardy abandon, trickled out of her like water and left her weak-kneed. She watched him approach, and swallowed.
He stopped before her, looking down at her. Studying her. She could see his face quite well in the moonlight, all planes and shadows. His eyes were the same black she remembered. His expression, as he studied her, was inscrutable. He lifted his hand and traced one thin finger down the side of her face. There was absolutely nothing of tenderness in the gesture; his was the possessive interest of a predator considering his next meal. Isla had seen an expression of similar avidity on her cat’s face, as it hunched in front of a mouse hole waiting for the mouse to come out.
“Your opinion,” he commented, “is instructional but irrelevant.”
She just stared at him.
“Go.” He stepped back, his cloak falling about him in liquid folds as his arm once again disappear
ed.
“But—”
“You’ve overstayed your welcome,” he said, his voice hard with the steel that had been there all along but that he’d effectively disguised when luring her into baring her soul. To, apparently, no purpose. He turned, once again resuming his vigil. She sagged, realizing her defeat. For a few minutes neither of them moved, he doing whatever he was doing and she frozen with indecision and wondering if she should try again. Try to make him understand, herself seem more desirable, something. His blatant dismissal made her feel, not simply impotent but as undesirable as she ever had. Something in how he’d looked at her had been…she’d never felt so easily, utterly, and completely dismissed as either a woman or a human being. She was nothing to him.
“Go,” he said again.
Fighting back a sob, she went.
SEVEN
The two men sat across from each other, an iron-banded chest between them on the oversized desk. This desk had been in Peregrine’s family for generations, five or six at least, and despite a few cracks here and there the wood still shone with dark luster. He loved his desk, and his manor, and his domain.
Enough to sell his soul? He pondered the question uneasily.
Because that, the nobler part of him whispered—the part he’d long ago managed to drown out with wine and cards and a hundred petty problems that were of no import, but that still managed to assert itself now and then—was exactly what he proposed to do.
He was selling his soul to Satan, and Satan was regarding him coolly from where he lounged in the armchair. A cup of mulled wine sat poised, untouched, in one beringed hand. The duke, unlike the earl, was a man who denied himself much. He rarely drank, and never ate to excess. No reports of even so much as a single dalliance with one of the serving girls had reached his ears, although Peregrine found it hard to believe that such a young and obviously virile man was a celibate.
Peregrine would have liked to believe that he’d been such a specimen in his youth but the unfortunate truth was that he’d always been paunchy and weak and so timid as to be frightened of his own shadow. A truth he tried hard now, in his later years, to blot out. He’d married a younger woman in the hopes of recapturing his youth, a catty little thing that all his household thought had bamboozled him utterly.
What a low opinion of him they had, he thought tiredly. He wasn’t under the impression that Apple loved him, had never required nor especially wanted her love. He’d wanted an available cunt, to state matters bluntly, and at his age and general condition that required marriage. He wasn’t like the duke or, indeed, the king, who could woo women into bed with him on the strength of his smoldering gaze and hard cock. And who could, of course, afford to buy them presents that compensated perhaps for…other lacks. Peregrine was too poor to afford a mistress, a fact he resented. He wondered if Mountbatten had a mistress—or a catamite, sometimes they did—and dismissed the thought. It would do him no good now, nor his daughter.
He thought of her with a pang. She was a good girl. It’s not too late, that same voice whispered. He glanced at the fresh-cut quill, which rested by his ink pot. A chunk of heavy glass, another remnant from a better age. With the gold in that chest, he could by another hundred such ink pots. Another thousand.
There was enough in there to satisfy all his debts and run the manor for at least a year besides. Two, if he managed it well. And there’d be twice as much again after the consummation of the marriage. All he had to do was give the duke free reign over Enzie Hall and all its domains…and his daughter. Who would never come home again.
Even if she lived, women traveled seldom. The duke, he’d see again. Now, and for the rest of his life. Peregrine was an old man; children hadn’t come right away to his marriage bed or, indeed, to any of the mistresses he’d had when he was young. Jasmine was the first to bear him a child; Hart was born in the summer before Isla. But because Peregrine had no legitimate heir, Enzie Moor would effectively become the duke’s. He’d come and go as he pleased, with no one to stop him.
He grasped his own cup, and forced himself to take only a sip instead of the gulp he wanted. His palms were damp. “I love my daughter very much,” he said.
“And yet you’re entrusting her to me,” Mountbatten replied dryly.
“Yes, well….” Peregrine trailed off, unsure of how to proceed. “Her mother,” he began, “was a wonderful woman….”
“To whom, by all accounts,” the duke interposed smoothly, “you were indifferent in the extreme.”
“She came from a good house,” Peregrine said defensively.
“No doubt.”
“Our lineage is a fine one.”
“I’m aware that you think it so.”
Peregrine tried to puzzle out what the duke had meant by this remark, and decided he didn’t much care for his conclusions on the subject. But he didn’t want to offend the man. Mountbatten had an easy aura of command, strange in one so young.
“You’re—”
“Yes?” the duke asked politely. There was a challenge there. No one was going to discuss what the duke might be. He was, after all, brother to the king. A young upstart in his own right, Peregrine thought ruefully. House Mountbatten was old, very old, and more than established, but Piers Mountbatten had managed to come out of nowhere. He’d swept in, taking advantage of the decades-long war between the two then-ruling houses to establish himself. They’d looked up from their endless warring to discover that their place—the place to which both felt divinely entitled, thus sparking the conflict in the first place—had been usurped.
As a sort of sop, the new king had proposed marriage to the slightly less revolting of the two houses. And so King Piers, the First of His Name, had married Celine Jasper, first of her name. Their marriage was, by all accounts, a happy one. Piers notoriously shared his queen with his friends and his queen, if the rumors were to be believed, was more than willing to be shared. On the one occasion he’d seen them together, when he’d gone to the capital to plead for relief of his debts—and been denied—Peregrine had been impressed by the depth of devotion between the two. Piers had smiled at his wife in a way that Peregrine had never smiled at any woman.
Nor, he doubted, had Tristan. He studied the duke now, noting the evidences of his…unusual condition. The duke could kill him where he sat, claws or no claws, and the realization made him feel foolish and impotent and old. He’d made a right balls up of his life, and now he was paying the price. He did love his daughter, very much, but what kind of life could she live if she stayed here? He was, in a sense, doing her a favor: by sending her North, he was rescuing her from the life of hardship and shame that came of sharing his blood. Whatever she might think to the contrary, she had no other prospects.
Better dead than ignominious, and he had debts. Terrible debts, far more terrible than anyone knew. Certainly not his wife, or his daughters. Or his son. Peregrine had, by slight of hand and outright deceit, kept the true extent of his failings hidden for years. But even he knew that he was coming to the end of the time where such subterfuge was possible.
“The king…?” he asked.
“Sends his regards.” Mountbatten’s voice was sibilant, like a snake’s. Peregrine repressed a shiver, and Mountbatten smiled slightly. Peregrine half-expected to see him show fangs, but the duke’s teeth were like any man’s. Better than most, perhaps: white and even. His canines were slightly pointed, but no more than usual. Peregrine himself had such teeth although his had long been stained and discolored with age.
No, in the morning light he looked like any other man. A hard man, and cold, but a man nonetheless. Peregrine clung to that thought. Things would be well. And the gold was…he picked up the quill and, dipping it in the ink, signed his name to the contract with a flourish.
EIGHT
“Daughter, I’d like a word.”
Isla looked up from where she’d been reading by the window to see her father in the door to the women’s gallery. This was, in and of itself, an unusual occurre
nce, as his habit was to avoid the place at all costs. Apple, too, seemed surprised to see her husband but managed to smile pleasantly. Rowena, still sullen, sat hunched in front of the fire. She’d been ignoring them all since breakfast and was ignoring her father now.
Isla pointed to herself, surprised.
The earl nodded.
“Oh,” she said faintly. There was no indication, in her father’s posture, of what this interview might be about. Was he displeased with the progress in the spinning shed? Was he going to berate her again for spending funds on salt? Funds they never seemed to have when it came to the purchase of household goods but that they always seemed to have when it came to the purchase of silks for Apple?
She stood up and, smoothing her skirts down over her hips, came to join him. She was sad to leave the room, if only because she’d only just coaxed sufficient heat out of the fire to make the chill air bearable. The hall outside would be frigid, as the rest of the manor was. A damp, raw wind had been blowing all morning, heavy with the promise of a storm that never broke; a rain they’d needed desperately earlier in the season, but that now would prove nothing but a nuisance. What crops they’d managed to grow would be flattened and the culverts, as absorbent as stone from months of drought, would overflow and flood the humbler of the cottages and perhaps even wash them away.
Replete with these cheery thoughts, Isla went to join her father.
Trailing him first down the broad stone steps of the central staircase and then down the narrower corridor that led to her father’s study, Isla stifled a yawn. She hadn’t slept well after her nocturnal interview. Hadn’t slept barely at all in fact; what minutes of unconsciousness she’d snatched had been troubled with unusually vivid dreams. She’d woken up with anxiety gnawing at her belly. Finally giving the night up for lost, she’d risen before the dawn and washed away the stale sweat in a half-filled tub of nearly frigid water as she contemplated her failure.