Prince of Midnight

by Laura Kinsale

  He carefully rewrapped the bread in a napkin and tied it. “There’s plenty of time for that. If it distresses you.”

  “It doesn’t.” Her voice was flat. “Since you insist on involving yourself, I’d prefer to tell you the whole at once. Perhaps you will reconsider your decision.”

  He looked up at her and shook his head.

  She held his eyes a moment, and then her gaze slid away. Her hands lay still in her lap, clasped tightly. She stared at a little gray and black bunting that hopped from branch to waving branch in a bush beside the road.

  S.T. fiddled with a stem of coarse grass, pulled it loose, and chewed the end. He could see her rocking, a faint motion back and forth like the bushes in the wind, her elbows pressed close to her body as if she wanted to make herself as small as possible.

  “Tell me why,” he said gently, when it seemed she couldn’t bring herself to speak. “Why do you think he hurt your sisters?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t him.” The words came out in a rush. “I don’t say he did it himself.”

  “He has accomplices.”

  She tilted her head back and looked at the sky. “Oh, God. Accomplices.” She drew a deep breath, let it out harshly. “The whole town are his accomplices. All he had to do was stand up in his pulpit and say, ‘She’s fallen, her flesh is weak, she tried to seduce me and I’m a man of God,’ and poor Emily was damned. They all believe him. Or they’re afraid to speak out if they don’t. My mother spoke out, and look what happened.” She lowered her face and stared at her hands. “He made an example of us. And then he cried.” Her mouth curled into a sneer. “The evil beast. He cried at my sister’s grave.”

  S.T. picked another stem of grass and knotted it. “What of the one who actually killed her? You don’t want justice there?”

  She bit her lip. Her face was strained. “I don’t know who killed her. I don’t care. Whoever it was, they weren’t themselves when they did it.” She hesitated, and looked up at him. “That must seem queer to you.”

  He frowned, slowly knotting the next stem onto his chain of grass. “I had a friend once, in Paris… my closest friend out of a pack of schoolboys.” With careful precision, he slitted a stem and strung another piece through it. “The whole parcel of us came across a wounded bird in the street once. Just a pigeon. Broken wing, flapping around on the pavement looking awful and silly and sad. I was going to pick it up, but the biggest fellow started to kick it about. They all laughed. And then the rest of them started to kick it and step on its wings to make it flutter.” His fingers stilled. “Even my best friend.” He stretched out the chain between his hands.

  She looked up. “Did you hate him for it?”

  “I hated myself.”

  “Because you didn’t say anything.”

  He nodded. “They would have laughed. They might have turned on me. I went home and cried on my mother’s lap.” He smiled slightly. “She wasn’t much of a religious scholar. I think it took her four days to find a Bible and another three to get the right page. But she found it.” He dangled the circlet of green grass from his fingers. “‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.’”

  “Platitudes,” she said viciously. “They don’t change anything. My father was always—” She stopped and shuddered. “But that’s of no moment.” With a sudden move she came to her feet. “Chilton came four years ago. He started a religious society. My father held the regular parish living… he was ordained right out of university, you see—he’d never expected to inherit the earldom, and he just kept on with the parish work after he did. He wasn’t a forceful man. He was shy, really. His sermons put everyone to sleep, but he liked to write them. And then this Chilton came into the neighborhood and began to hold evangelical meetings. He started a school and a home for poor girls.”

  She put her fist to her mouth and began to pace. The slender, strong legs passed out of S.T.’s line of vision and came back again. This was the first he’d heard of her being an earl’s daughter. He deliberately didn’t look up, but turned his head to hear better, pretending to gaze beyond her at a silvery-gray mound of wild lavender.

  “What church does Chilton represent?” he asked.

  “He calls it a Free Church. I don’t know if it’s even real. I doubt it. I never attended his services, but I think he made everything up. He’d try to say it’s the same as a Methodist society, but we had John Wesley to preach, years ago, and my mother said Chilton is nothing like. It’s true that everyone is required to confess openly, in front of the others, and then they all decide on the penance together.” She stopped and turned and looked directly at him. “But if someone doesn’t confess, they decide on a punishment anyway. He takes in these destitute females, and gives them bed and work, and bids them not walk out with any man, nor marry nor think of it. He says women have no souls, and can only hope to be born again as men by submitting to higher authority in this life, like the plow horse submits to its master. In my neighborhood, there hasn’t been a wedding in nigh two years.” She paused, her color high. “Sometimes, when Chilton permits it, there are—arrangements made—to please the men, and instruct the women in obedience.”

  “God,” he said. “I follow your drift.”

  “My mother stood against him. She was always an advocate for the education of women, and she said his views were barbaric. She laughed at him, at first. He called on my father in public to bring her in hand and put a stop to the ‘study of wickedness’ that she imposed on my sisters and me.” Leigh clasped her hands and held them to her mouth. “She tutored us in mathematics and Latin and physicking—that’s what Chilton calls ‘wickedness,’ Monseigneur—and wrote pamphlets refuting his sermons.” She sat down again. There was a rhythmic shudder in her shoulders as she hugged herself. “He began to stand at our gates with a crowd of his followers and demand that my mother give her daughters over him before it was too late. We couldn’t go out freely; he made us prisoners in our own home. My father—” Her body grew tense, her dark brows drawing downward. “He did nothing, just prayed and gave us little gifts and said ’twould pass over. That’s what he always did. ’Twas my mother, you see-all my life, she took the real care of us. She was so good and clever. Everyone admired her. She always knew what to do when my father got muddled.”

  S.T. watched her teeth work savagely at her lower lip.

  He clamped one hand inside the other against the urge to reach out to cradle her. It tore at him, the way her voice stayed cold and steady while her body shook as if the wind had hold of it. He wanted to make it easier for her, and he didn’t know how. ‘What did your mother do about Chilton?” he asked in a flat tone.

  “She had him arrested. We didn’t know then—we never suspected… he frightened my sisters, but Mama and I only thought him an evil nuisance. Papa was the justice of the peace, you see—our family always held that place—but Mama did all that sort of thing for him, kept the county tax rolls and listened at the quarter sessions and wrote Papa notes on how to adjudicate and what the Poor Rate ought to be. Everyone knew she did it, and no one objected. She sent the constable to have Chilton arrested, and the people at our gates disappeared.”

  Suddenly she lowered her face, bending forward into her knees with her hands locked across her head, rocking and rocking. “My papa,” she said in a muffled cry. “My papa said, ‘There, you see, it’s all right now,’ and he went out, and when he was too far away to get back… they stoned him in the street.” She began breathing in frantic gusts, still bent into her knees. “From the houses and behind doors and carts; they were all silent—you could hear him calling out for them to stop. Please stop.” She made an inarticulate sound. “My mother went out; she told us not to go, but I went too—he was already insensible—maybe he was already dead… they didn’t throw stones at us; they threw refuse and horrid stuff…” She lifted her face and looked blindly into space. “Oh, Papa . oh, Papa…”

  She wasn’t crying. She was shaking in every limb. S.T. made a slight move, s
hifting his hand, and she jerked to her feet.

  “Don’t touch me,” she cried. “Oh, God, don’t touch me!” She spun away and went to the donkey, working feverishly at the pack straps, unbuckling them and buckling them without reason.

  S.T. stayed where he was. Nemo walked up behind him and sat down, the wolf’s furry weight resting heavily against his spine. Nemo sniffed at S.T.’s ear and licked it.

  “No one would act after that,” Leigh said, staring down at the packsaddle. “Chilton preached in the street about the wages of sin. My mother couldn’t even form a grand jury for my father’s murder—the gentlemen refused to hand down an indictment. They said ’twas a mob had done it; no one could be singled out for blame and she was overstepping her bounds to demand more, as if she was a justice herself. They said—” Her jaw worked sharply. “They said perhaps Mr. Chilton was right, and women in our county should study their proper place.” Leigh made a sound of anger and despair. She tugged at the pack strap over and over. “Mama wrote to the lord lieutenant, but never had an answer. I doubt the letter ever got past Hexham. That was when Emily was—punished. But of course there was no proof, no way to show Chilton had made it happen. Oh, he knows how to frighten them. He knew how to keep them from speaking out. Mama thought if she could just make them see—she went to all the magistrates and tried to convince them to act against Chilton. Then Anna was found, and people looked at us as if we carried the plague. The servants left. The jury met, and called it another suicide. The next we heard, ’twas Chilton’s name on the list, to be appointed a clerical magistrate in my father’s place.”

  She lifted her face to the wind. S.T. watched her pure profile.

  “’Twas too much for my mother,” she said quietly. “Even Mama wasn’t strong enough to take it all on herself. She told me to pack for my cousin’s in London. She shut up the house. She put the horses to the chaise herself—we didn’t even have a coachman! I sat inside while she drove.” Her voice drifted as she looked around at the sky and the hills. “She really wasn’t in her right mind. I suppose I wasn’t either, or I would have stopped her. I don’t think Mama had ever handled a team. They bolted before we reached the bridge.” She shrugged and said, “My mother fell off the box.”

  He put his arm around Nemo and stroked the wolf’s thick fur.

  “You see, Seigneur,” she said bitterly, “if you come with a price on your head to England and take a stand against Chilton, you’ll have every hand against you from the Crown down to the parishioners. It’s not one man alone who will try to destroy you.”

  S.T. stood up, steadying himself with his hand in Nemo’s deep mane. A certain black elation had begun to uncurl in him, the potential of a gamble still too distant and elusive to chance. There was the little glimmer of menace that fanned the flame, the sharpening of thought and emotion, the keen sensation of coming alive.

  He wanted it; ah, he wanted it again. He felt as if he’d been asleep for three years.

  “I’ll come,” he said. “I’ll do anything for you.”

  She looked at him, off guard, as if it startled her, and then her face grew indifferent and her mouth set in calm irony. “They’ll eat you alive, monsieur.”

  “They’ll not even get close.”

  She gave him one of those infuriating little smiles, composed again, cool—rejecting everything he offered.

  “Damn you,” he said under his breath. He took a step too quickly, brushed his leg against Nemo, lost his balance, and landed on his knees with that sudden blur and rush of the world tilting around his head.

  She stood looking down at him, expressionless. “I’ve warned you,” she said.

  Nemo held steady, the way he’d been taught. S.T. gripped the dark fur. He felt himself coming apart, pride and shame and anger and all the things he wanted wrenching him in different directions.

  The wolf licked his hand and leaned against his leg. S.T. took a deep breath and pushed himself to his feet. “I’m coming,” he said stubbornly. “You need me. I’m in love with you.”

  The words had a power of their own. His limitations vanished and his old world opened up as he said them-the excitement and glory of it, the passion. To be alive that way, to hazard fortune for the sake of love… he wanted it again. He wanted all of it.

  “You’re a fool,” she said, and turned away.

  Chapter Eight

  The Seigneur began to ask after a horse and vehicle in the town of Digne. Leigh watched him inquire at every village and crossroads, but it was ten more days of walking beside the donkey, with the mistral driving them ahead in cold fury, before any such thing could be discovered.

  Then it was only an old two-wheeled cabriolet, in a dusty street that felt hot after the sudden lapse in the north wind. The blessed end of the mistral came as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the atmosphere to settle to crystal clarity and the colors to brighten into intense blue and dusky green, with the limestone houses shining white against the shade in the narrow street. In two weeks they had walked into the heart of Provence, from alpine foothills into a land that might have been Spain or Italy from its aspect: a land of olives and fruit trees, warm and baking beneath a cloudless sky.

  Leigh leaned on a wall in the sun and listened to the Seigneur haggle over the chaise. She couldn’t follow the rapid argument, half in French and half in Provençal, but there was a hint of angry desperation in his voice as he bartered.

  She waited. The street was empty of life, except for the donkey standing patiently under their baggage, its eyes closed. The wall rose above her to a great height, ascending to the crown of the village: a grand, crumbling Renaissance chateau that towered over the tiny town huddled around its flanks. In the warming air, the scent of lavender enveloped her, drifting from the wild bushes that grew along the edges of the street and up the decaying wall.

  The Seigneur’s hair burned in the sun, gold and shadow, like the bright walls shining against the charcoal depths of the shade. Next to the somber little villager he was a flash of sunlight itself, an exasperated Apollo, his voice ringing fluently in the vacant street.

  Leigh caught herself staring at him, lowered her eyes, and looked away.

  She thought again that she ought to walk on and leave him here, as she’d thought it a thousand times since La Paire. He’d be no help to her; he wasn’t the champion she’d come searching for; she should go on alone and do what she must herself.

  But she didn’t. She lingered, uneasy and sullen, finding no logic in it and tarrying still.

  He turned away with the villager and glanced over his shoulder at her. “Wait here,” he snapped in English, an order that elicited a sulfurous glare from her as he walked off still contesting vocally with the other man. The worst of it was, she did wait; she and the donkey, equally docile, standing as if they were tied in the street the same way that Nemo had settled, whining unhappily, under a bush outside the town—all of them bound by some implausible magic, some strange inertia that would only dissipate when he returned with a soft word and a caress, a handful of forage and a whisper in a furry ear… and for Leigh, that smile slanted from beneath his devilish eyebrows.

  He’d embrace the animals, put his arm around the donkey’s neck and scratch it under the chin, tussle with Nemo on the ground, sleep with the wolf curled at his back. He never touched Leigh. She thought that if he had, she would have felt it like a shock of light all through her.

  She wished he would never come back. Implausible, romantical, air-dreaming idiot.

  When he had disappeared around the corner, she sat down against the wall and pulled the little book out of her pocket, the one with the English words the Marquis de Sade had not been sure of. Leigh was not perfectly certain of some of them herself, but if she hadn’t understood a syllable of the text, the detailed illustrations would have made the point quite clear.

  She wondered, archly, if the Seigneur would look exactly so undressed. Men looked more or less the same—all of them, one presumed, although these pictu
res appeared to somewhat exaggerate the matter. She examined them critically. Her mother would have said any knowledge was valuable, even such stuff as Aristotle’s Masterpiece. It was rather mortifying to Leigh to find just how little she did know of the subject.

  She scanned slowly through the book. Some of the plates seemed ludicrous; some made her wrinkle her nose and some increased the sense of disquietude in her, bringing an unwelcome warmth as she studied them. She stared at the erotic illustrations and thought of the ruined temple in the mountains… and the Seigneur.

  She’d had only one man before him; one boy, who’d been clumsy with excitement and pledged eternal love, who’d seemed infinitely younger than herself, even though he’d been seventeen years to her sixteen. He had wished to elope. She had not. Their short affair had ended when Leigh desired to end it.

  That had been a sinking moment—when her mother discovered what Leigh had done. All of Leigh’s explanations had seemed to come out as defenses; all her grand theories of seeking knowledge wilted before her mother’s grave stare. She knew better, Mama said. She knew that what was between a man and a woman was blessed, or ought to be—Mama had hoped that Leigh could observe her own parents and understand that.

  And Leigh had been ashamed, and felt very young and careless, because she’d lost something her mother thought precious.

  She was older now. Even the shame seemed innocent, remembering. How scandalous she’d felt, how stained and tarnished by an adolescent mistake, how chagrined and utterly humiliated by the lessons Mama had decreed from the local midwife on things Leigh had not comprehended.

  She’d always been the strongest, the oldest and most clever, growing up capable and admired like her mother. She’d given away her virginity because she’d wished to do it, because she was curious, because there was a part of her that sometimes, fitfully, rebelled against the narrow course of her breeding and life and consequence. At sixteen, she’d not realized the risk of such an experiment.