“There is no pleasure in it,” she replies.
“Is that so?” he says. “No pleasure in confronting the beast, in vanquishing the enemy? No pleasure at the sight of me, deprived of my freedom, utterly dependent upon your whims?”
“No,” she says. “Nothing you say is going to make me let you go. You will stay here for as long as I stayed where you kept me, or until you rot. Whichever comes first.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes it is so,” she says. “I want my baby.”
“I’ll tell you where your baby is,” he says.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Who are you?” he asks. “Who are you?”
She opens her mouth. She nearly says, I am yours, but catches herself just in time.
He smiles. “I’ll tell you where your darling baby is, if and only if you let me do to you what I want. You know what I want. You know very well indeed.”
She gets up so abruptly that I have to scurry to hide behind one of the wine racks. Luckily, she doesn’t lock the door upstairs, or I’d have been stuck there with him until Matteo came down with his meal on a tray.
I tell Matteo what I’d just overheard. The truth about Tristan is the only power His Lordship has left. That, and the memories of what made her.
Later that evening, I take His Lordship some books along with his dinner tray. Somehow, I can’t call him Mr. Lincoln any longer, or the earl, or anything else. He retains his air of insufferable superiority, and looks remarkably well for a man of sixty-four who is being held against his will in a dank dungeon. He has no idea where he is, of course; all he does know is that he has altogether too much time to sit and fester and plan what hideous torments he is going to inflict upon her next.
His Lordship is not what I’d call a handsome man, because there is too much cruel authority etched into his features, but I imagine he was once seductive enough for ladies who liked a man with a penchant for inflicting pain. He is of medium height and slender; his fingers are long and thin, and he’s wearing his famous gold ring. His eyes are a muddy dark blue, not sparkling with depth like Guy’s; his nose is fine and thin, and he has surprisingly full lips. He has quite a lot of salt-and-pepper hair growing unkempt, and a slightly receding chin, now covered with a beard. That and the longish hair give him a bit of an air of an absentminded professor, until you look at him closely. There is no humor in his face, no joy. If he stares at you when the light from the lantern is shining, you want to cover your eyes and run away.
He examines the books, then gives a short laugh, like a coyote pouncing on a carcass. A horribly creepy, rasping sound.
“Lives of the Rakes,” he says, reading aloud one of the titles. “How subtle.”
“Yes, they’re fascinating. I’ll bring you all the rest of the volumes eventually. There’s one about the founder of the Club’s namesake, the first Dashwood,” I say, picking up another volume and turning to a passage I’d already marked. I feel like Hogarth for a brief, awful second, always quoting from a book or a Frenchman. “’When a man is born into a great position, is possessed of unbounded wealth and exercises widespread influence, and yet fails to show that he has done anything during a very long life except gratify his own inordinate desires,’” I read, “’one cannot wonder that such a man, in spite of charm of manner and such like, is an encumbrance in any society.’” I close the volume with a dull thud.
“You are perfectly ridiculous, nothing but a fat fool. Even though you may think you’ve done well for yourself. You and your pathetic brother,” His Lordship says with a faint sneer. “And her. To have become encumbered with my son. To have procured such a fortune. Surely the fee I paid for her has long been expended in such a strenuous search.”
I try not to show a reaction: I hate it when anyone calls me fat. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what, you fat fool? Save you from certain death? Or choose her for my pleasure? Why do you think? I thought you were the clever one.”
“Because you could,” I reply. “Because you liked it.”
“Not bad, Tomasino. Close enough.”
“Why didn’t you show up when she was pregnant?”
“Foolish of me, wasn’t it?” he says. “Foolish. I underestimated you.” His face hardens. “Quite an error of judgment. Unfortunately, I was detained abroad as the war progressed.”
“What you mean is, you’d been double-dealing so many Nazis and Allies that you feared for your safety, and you had to hide out someplace very far away from Europe so they wouldn’t find you and hang you for the traitor you are.”
“Perhaps,” he says with a malicious smile, and I know I’ve nailed him on that one at least.
“Is that when you went to Marrakesh?”
“Do you honestly believe I’m about to disclose anything of importance to such a fat fool as yourself?” he says smugly.
“No,” I say, “but I figure you first went to Malaysia, after the war, someplace where you already had your oil wells and connections and pots of money stashed away, and could bribe enough of the locals to keep their mouths shut when so many important people were looking for you. That way, when Hogarth’s message finally got to you, you were so far away you couldn’t get back in time for the blessed event. Quite an error of judgment, yes, I would say. Quite.”
His smile has faded. Shoot steady, I tell myself. Aim for his heart.
“And then,” I go on, “by the time you were finally able to wind your wicked way back to Belgium, you were greeted by a most unpleasant surprise. You hurried to the Swiss Consolidated Bank Limited, only to be told that account number one one six dash six one four had been closed a short while before and the trail had gone cold. You could do nothing but stay in your very particular kind of touch with the other members of the Club, hoping that your threat of blackmail would keep them wary, and that they’d alert you should they suspect anyone was looking for them. They, of course, would have no idea that your most beloved, prized possession had managed to escape.”
I look away from him; I am afraid of the expression on his face, even though he is chained up and cannot place his hands around my neck to throttle it.
“Eventually,” I add, “you decided Morocco was a suitable venue for your favorite pastime of abducting and torturing women. Baksheesh does wonders there, doesn’t it? So do thick high walls and willing servants. Am I right? Or close enough?”
He says nothing.
“Don’t you feel anything, knowing your own son is upstairs?” I press on.
“Why should I?” His Lordship answers eventually, hissing. He can’t resist a dig about Guy. “He’s a spineless fool like the rest of you. He always was a mama’s boy, moping about.”
I think for a minute about the boy in London who helped us. Arundel Gibson, the Pritch said his name was. That he gave up his father to protect his mother and his sister. I wonder if I’ll ever get a chance to meet Arundel to tell him what a splendid thing he’d done for us. I doubt it. He’s too far away, and I am having a hard time seeing anyone past the mist around my head. There is only this man with the muddy blue eyes sprawled as nonchalantly in his cell as if it were a drawing room in Eaton Square.
Who are you? Why are you here?
“Did you not wonder why you were caught?” His Lordship is saying to me. “Who it was who betrayed you?”
“Not really,” I reply. “It was a long time ago. I can’t undo the damage done.”
“No, you can’t, can you? The damage done to your precious manhood,” he says, then barks his horrible raspy laugh. “But I know who betrayed you. Don’t you want to know?”
“No,” I say, but I hear my voice trembling.
“They told me who it was, when I was buying your freedom,” he goes on. “If not for me, you’d not be standing here now, lording it over your precious captive. I shall tell you anyway. You need to know.”
There is a short, uncomfortable silence. I am willing myself not to respond to him, but I can’t help myself from askin
g who it was. The words somehow slip out before I have a chance to stop them, even though I know he is taunting me because he cannot bear to have me best him in a conversation. Now they are hanging in the air like a foul spray, a vague memory of what Moritz smelled like when he came back from his nightly patrol, shotgun tucked under his arm.
Who was it? Who are you? Why are you here?
He’s laughing again. He sounds almost happy. The sound of his cackle is reverberating off the dingy brick walls.
“It was your own brother, you fat fool,” he says. “Matteo betrayed you. Why do you think they cut out his tongue? So he couldn’t tell you what he’d done. But they were incompetent, as usual, those Italians. Hopelessly incompetent.” He is still laughing. “Not very nice, your dearest twin. Not nice indeed to have been so consumed by jealousy that he wanted you dead.”
I feel a tremor start somewhere near my ankle and travel all the way up to my heart, where it is constricting me in a tight band, encircling me like a corset, its laces pulled so tight I start gasping for breath.
“Go ahead, ask him,” His Lordship says. “I grant you permission.”
This is how he does it, I realize. This is how he ruled them, the members of the Club. Why the servants were so cowed by him. Why we were; why we stayed in Belgium. He finds the weak spot and zeroes in for the kill.
Was Leandro ever that ruthless with his rivals? I wonder. Leandro would have been a worthy adversary. He would have known what to do, how to defuse this bomb before the explosion brings down the building with a catastrophic crash.
“I knew you were going to say that, but I don’t believe you,” I say eventually, trying to keep my voice neutral. I am not going to give him the satisfaction of knowing how much he hurt me. “The only power you have left is in your own tongue. And it’s much more pitiful than you think.”
I leave him, still cackling, and go outside to find Matteo. He’s in the pool, swimming laps, perfectly rhythmical, back and forth, back and forth. I sit there watching until he pulls himself out of the water, shaking his curls like a dog’s. Botheration. It’s not fair that he has more hair than I. Marriage must be a hair tonic.
I’ll never know about that.
“You’re going gray,” I tell him as he towels off.
“Likewise, fratello mio,” he says. His Lordship is having a bad effect on us. We feel like we’re back in Belgium. “What’s wrong? He’s been saying things to you, hasn’t he?”
“How did you know?”
“Because he’s been saying things to me.”
The heaviness around my heart starts lessening, bit by bit. “Let me guess,” I say. We smile. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wanted to see if he’d do the same thing to you,” Matteo replies.
“Thanks a lot, fratello mio,” I say.
“Age before beauty.”
I kick my feet idly in the warm water of the pool. “What are we going to do?” I ask. “On the one hand, you want him to be trapped where he can suffer for years and years, but as long as he’s here and alive then we’ll be stuck, too, locked in torment with him.”
“Leandro said that if we didn’t know what to do, then we were not ready to do it,” Matteo says.
Planning and plotting, he means. Plotting and planning.
“But this will help,” he adds, picking up the leather-bound copy of A Tale of Two Cities I’ve noticed him reading, then opening it. Inside is stashed a tattered copy of a book I haven’t seen since a cold winter’s day in a house in Belgium: The Connoisseur’s Guide to Poison.
“We really need to stop abusing the insides of books, you know,” I say.
“I thought about making some more botulism, but it’s too risky with all the people in the house,” Matteo says, his voice so nonchalant that we could have been talking about picking Bryony up from school.
“I’m not doing that, or the crocus again,” I say. “Not ever. I just can’t do it.”
“I understand,” Matteo says. He closes the Dickens and we sit for a while, dragging our feet in the pool. Then he laughs. “What are we worried about?” he says. “It’s right here at our feet.”
“You mean chlorine?” I ask.
“No, drogato. In the garden. In the Hellfire Garden.”
It takes a while to realize what he means, and when it finally dawns on me, I smile broadly for the first time in a long time.
“My darling big brother, you sly dog, you,” I tell him, beaming. “What an absolutely wonderful idea. It did in that revolting ostrich.”
“The dreadful Fluffy.”
“Yes, the dreadful Fluffy. And it will certainly do in His Lordship.”
Mandragora officinarum, he means. The divine mandrake, preferred talisman of spell-casters. Venerated root, symbol of manhood, gnawing its way through the earth as it twists into the very shape of sex itself. Growing here in her very own Hellfire Garden.
“Dig it up only at sunset,” Caterina had said. “Do not tug violently on it or it will scream. Wrap it in a shroud and keep it in the dark.”
“How will we find out exactly how to use it?” I ask Matteo.
“Pompadour must have had a gardening book with a reference to mandrake,” he says. “If it’s in Latin I’ll ask Mother Hubbard to translate it.”
“I’m going right now to look.”
“Don’t let Belladonna see you,” he says.
Hubbard is only too happy to translate the section of the book I find, its vellum pages yellow and spotted with age but its message not diluted by time. “According to Madame de Lespinasse, the venerated author and sage of gardening of the mid-eighteenth century, the mandrake has two valuable uses,” he tells me, his voice bland although he must be bursting with curiosity. Once again, I bless Jack for his sagacious judgment in the hiring of our employees. “As an aphrodisiac and as a poison. In other words, for arousal and for death. Madame de Lespinasse gives several different and fearfully explicit formulas for both these uses. Shall I write them down for you?”
“Oh yes, please,” I reply, my voice equally bland, although I am practically trembling with excitement. “If you don’t mind.”
Hubbard’s comments have helped me figure out what to do. An aphrodisiac, and a poison. For arousal and for death.
A whiff of a killer is a potent aphrodisiac.
We’re going to make an aphrodisiac all right, a white cream in a little jar, smelling faintly of cinnamon, which we’ll hide until it’s needed. Matteo and I will sneak out one night when we know she’s fallen into an exhausted sleep, and we’ll dig up the mandrake root she’s cultivated for years with honey water and whispered spells Caterina had taught her.
We will wait for it to scream, but will hear nothing but the screech of an owl, the squeal of a mouse, and the noises of the night.
We will wrap it in a shroud and then grate it fine and dry it to a powder. It will have the oddest, most pungent smell, and I’ll be afraid someone will catch a whiff of it on our fingers even though we’ll use fine leather gloves to protect ourselves. But we’ll apply gallons of hand lotion every day, and no one will ever know.
And if things get worse, we’re going to make a poison, slow-acting and irrevocably fatal. His Lordship will never know it’s in his food. We’ll keep feeding it to him until he starts to show symptoms, but the effects will be so gradual that it’ll seem like nothing out of the ordinary and Belladonna won’t get suspicious. And then when he takes a turn for the worse and can no longer spew his hatred, Matteo and I will whisper in his ear so he’ll know what we’ve done to him. That he’s been poisoned by the sorcerer’s most potent symbol of manhood and there’s nothing he can do about it. There is no antidote. We’ll carefully regulate the dose, oh ho, how carefully we’ll plan it down to the last scraping so he’s choked by his own venom. And he is going to suffer in screaming, drawn-out agony until death will seem like a blessing, with no one to attend to his pain but the ghosts of his slaves.
I didn’t say we were nice, did I?
Belladonna watch you die.
The only problem is in the testing. There’s no one here we can ask to do that.
And on and on and on it goes.
“Where’s my baby?” she asks him, and he taunts her.
Weeks go by, months. Belladonna’s skin is as deathly ashen as His Lordship’s. Inside her, the little worm is snaking, gnawing at her distress and gorging itself on poisonous thoughts. She is finding it hard to talk to anyone, even Bryony, and it’s as if we are watching her become a living wraith before our very eyes.
The vengeance will conquer you if you do not conquer it.
Matteo and I can stand it no longer, so one day when Guy is out riding and she climbs slowly up the steps from the wine cellar, we are waiting for her in the kitchen.
“He’s winning, you know,” Matteo says. “You can’t let him win.”
“Is this all you want to say to me?” she says coldly after clearing her throat.
“No,” I tell her. “We merely want to remind you that you have something, here, of great value. Something that he doesn’t.”
“Is that so? Are you referring to my freedom?” she asks with deep bitterness.
“Not only that. Something else.”
She looks at me, her eyes blank and unfathomable.
“Well, not a thing really,” I go on. “A person.”
“No,” she says.
“Yes.” I dare to plow ahead. “And I would venture a guess that His Lordship has a rather intense rivalry with this person, although he’ll never admit it. In fact, I’d go so far as to speculate that the one thing guaranteed to torment His Lordship is the thought of you having any sort of personal anything with his much-detested offspring.”
“I can’t do that,” she says after an uncomfortable pause.
“How would you know?” I ask. “Have you ever tried?”
She turns to me, her eyes suddenly blazing. She doesn’t understand that I am trying to get her so riled up that she’ll do something, anything, besides sit near His Lordship on her little stool in the blackness below us.
“I think Guy loves you so much that he won’t expect you to do much of anything,” Matteo hastens to add. “Don’t you think His Lordship will have a fit if he sees a certain kind of ring upon your finger?”
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