by Лорен Уиллиг
Medmenham’s voice rang out high and clear through all the corners of the room. “We bring, O Great Lord, a humble novice to your service in pursuit of the elixir of immortality.”
Despite himself, Robert couldn’t help but feel a frisson of superstitious fear as the sightless elephant head swung in his direction. There was something distinctly eerie about that hollow stare. There had to be eyeholes concealed somewhere else in the mask, somewhere one wouldn’t expect, especially when distracted with billowing clouds of blue smoke and a costume that scintillated like a royal fireworks display with every minor movement. Somewhere near the trunk, perhaps, where a viewer would be least likely to look.
From a niche in the wall, the creature produced a two-handled chalice and offered it out to Robert with hooves rather than hands looped through the handles.
Not Indian, that, thought Robert cynically. The bowl was of French enamel, hastily doctored with rough gemstones in an attempt to give it an Oriental air.
“Drink,” intoned the creature.
The word clanged through the corners of the room and seemed to reverberate in the cluttered corners of Robert’s brain.
His hands, he was alarmed to see, were trembling as he reached for the bowl. Good for verisimilitude’s sake, he thought fuzzily. Let them think he went in trembling of their god. It would be nicer, however, if he weren’t trembling quite so much. The scented smoke scraped the inside of his nose, making his eyes swim. All around him the sound of chanting rose from the assemblage, louder this time, more forceful, pounding into his skull with every blunt syllable.
“So-ma!”
“So-ma!”
Wrapping both hands around the baroque curls of the handles, Robert raised the chalice above his head in tribute. The simple action brought beads of sweat to his brow. He found, to his alarm, that his arms were shaking, his muscles fighting him as though the cup were weighted with lead rather than liquid. In front of him, through the corrosive smoke, the elephant mask gave nothing away. Fighting for control, through pure will power, Robert held the chalice suspended in the air. The room tilted around him, rocking from side to side like a boat in a squall. His stomach twisted, fighting a bitter battle with the remains of his supper.
One thing was for sure. It wasn’t claret in the cup. Inch by painful inch, he lowered the cup to his lips. Whatever was inside moved sluggishly as he tilted the chalice, too thick to be wine. It had a golden sheen to it, like mead, and a honeyed smell with a medicinal tang beneath its sweetness. Robert fastened his lips around the rim, made a barrier of his tongue, and tilted the cup.
It was harder than he would ever have thought to try to make it look as though he was swallowing while allowing none of the liquid into his mouth. The effort of swallowing nothing made him want to gag. A few trickles of liquid slipped past his tongue. Even that small amount made his throat tingle and his head swim. Robert tipped the cup farther back. Liquid dribbled down the sides of his lips, trailing in sticky streams down the matted wool of his habit.
At a nod from Medmenham, two of the dancing girls flung themselves on their knees beside him, greedily licking the fallen drops of elixir from his robes, working their way up his body as they went.
In the ever-shifting smoke, they seemed as insubstantial as ghosts but for the very human pressure of their small, plump hands on his thighs. Were they swaying, or was he? Robert found himself rocking like a mast in a high wind, twining his fingers into the disordered hair of his handmaidens, clinging like a sailor to the rigging. They tilted their heads back to stare up at him, eyes glazed, their pupils so dilated that their eyes were nearly as black as the great, empty holes in the elephant mask.
It wasn’t the elixir; he hadn’t had enough of it for it to work so quickly. Nor had they, unless they had been guzzling behind the altar. But they hadn’t looked like that when they first danced in, giggling and posturing. There must be something in the smoke. There was a blankness to their wantonness that chilled Robert to the bone even as his body responded mindlessly to their touch.
Shaking their tangled hair over their shoulders, the dancing girls licked their way up his body, tracing the honeyed path of the elixir up his neck, their bare breasts rubbing against his side as they pressed themselves against him. In automatic reflex, Robert’s arms wrapped around their waists, feeling warm flesh beneath his fingers, the generous curves of waist and hips. They ventured further, following the line of liquid up over his jaw, sucking the last of the sweetness from the corners of his lips. He wasn’t sure who moved first, or who gave way, but with no more thought than a rutting animal, his fingers were tangled in someone’s hair, his lips moving against hers as her tongue sought out the last of the golden potion.
It was like falling into a dark cavern. He scarcely knew who he was or what he did. It was mindless, meaningless, a matter of pure physical reaction. Behind him, somewhere beyond the cavern of his flesh, he gradually became aware of noises. Catcalls and ribald shouts. Comments on his performance — largely favorable ones. The blood slowly began to return to Robert’s brain.
The hair under his fingers suddenly felt coarse, the touch of it lacerating his palms. It wasn’t Charlotte’s hair; it wasn’t Charlotte’s lips; it wasn’t Charlotte’s breasts or hips or thighs or any of those other bits he had been so mindlessly enjoying. He had one woman twined around his neck, another wrapped around his waist, and his body was convinced that this was a perfectly splendid thing.
Behind him, others felt much the same way. He could hear fabric rending, beads shifting, flesh meeting flesh as the smoke continued to snake down from the braziers and the revelers set to coupling in an orgiastic haze.
Robert stumbled back so quickly that both women went sprawling. Their bells jangled discordantly in protest. He scrubbed the back of his hand against his mouth, but it didn’t do any good; he could still taste them, along the roof of his mouth, coating his tongue, sickly sweet like rot.
“I have to — ” He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth and wobbled a bit. The wobble was exaggerated; the nausea was heart-felt. What in the hell had he just been doing?
The girls backed away with flattering promptness. As they jangled their way over to a group enthusiastically making a beast with three backs, Robert hoisted himself up onto the altar, took the beads in both hands, and hauled himself hastily through the opening.
There was fresh air coming through. For a moment all he could do was stand with his back against the wall, drawing deep, gasping breaths into his laboring lungs, his stomach roiling like a ship on the high seas. Oh Lord. What in the hell had he been about to do? Was he no better than that? No more loyal, no more honorable, no more true? Five more minutes in that smoke . . .
Whatever it was that Medmenham was burning, it was more than mere incense. Even away from the smoke, he felt oddly light-headed, and his eyes showed an annoying disinclination to focus properly.
Focus. He had to focus. He had to remember why he had come here. It was the least that could be salvaged from the whole cursed affair. It was better than thinking of what had happened in that room, or what had almost happened.
Rubbing his eyes, he levered himself away from the wall and took stock of his surroundings. In niches in the wall, two braziers still smoldered slightly — the source of the smoke that had bellowed out in front of the elephant god. Water sloshed about on the bottom. The so-called god must have poured water over the burning coals to create those bursts of smoke that had preceded his entrance.
The god had also left behind his mask, hanging from a peg on the wall. It was an oddly homely thing, that peg, hardly appropriate to a deity, even a minor one. Discarded, the mask was a trumpery thing, nothing more than painted plaster of Paris, garishly decorated to show to good effect in the uneven light. Robert found the eyeholes just where he had suspected, right below the trunk.
Had Wrothan worn it? Or someone else?
A clever man might hand the starring role to someone else while hiding himself in
the anonymity of a brown monk’s robe.
At the end of the cell, a path sloped sharply upwards, leading to the source of the fresh air. Robert took it. His legs weren’t quite so steady as he might have liked and his tongue still felt fuzzy, but his mind appeared to be clearing. It would be like Wrothan to slip away once the festivities were safely under way. Wrothan had little interest in orgies on their own account; his sole ambition was the power he could glean through them. That debilitating smoke that sapped the energy from muscle and mind alike wouldn’t be to his liking at all. But what better time to slip away and conduct a little business? Given the activities in which he had left the others, Robert doubted either he or Wrothan would be missed for some time.
Just thinking about it made Robert’s stomach turn again. He could feel the press of the dancing girls like sores in his flesh. He could still taste them on his lips, feel the slide of their tongues painting lines of shame across his skin. Robert scrubbed a hand against his jaw, as if the mere friction could rub off the taint. It felt like a profanation to have gone from Charlotte to . . . this.
And, yet, he almost had. Five more minutes and he would have had them both on the floor, rutting by instinct, as mindless as an animal. Just like his father.
Good God. That was an even more sick-making thought, to ponder the possibility of his father having sown the same field, so to speak, a generation ago, wearing the same brown robes, mindlessly coupling on the same gritty floor in the same vaulted room. The coarse wool of the monk’s habit scratched at his bare skin like a hair shirt.
How proud his father would be, after all this time, to know that the apple hadn’t fallen that far from the tree after all.
His path came to an abrupt end. Robert found himself facing a sheer chalk wall, but above him, all the way up, he could see the sky, black, practically moonless, and devilish cold, but open sky for all that. He had never been so happy to see it. In front of him, metal bars jutted out from the wall at even intervals, forming a ladder. Hoisting his skirt out of the way, Robert began to climb, resolved of one thing.
He didn’t want Medmenham anywhere near Charlotte. Or Staines or Frobisher or Innes or any of the lot of them. Including himself. He could feel the filthy reek of that subterranean room grinding into his flesh, marking him as surely as a brand.
As he climbed, he could smell jasmine again, the scent of betrayal, as thin as a reed, a phantom, a token, taunting him with all his failures, all the people he had loved and betrayed.
Was it merely his guilty conscience producing the elusive hint of jasmine? Or was it something else? As he left the incense of the lower chambers behind, Robert could still smell jasmine, stronger now in the winter night. No matter what occult powers Medmenham might claim, even he couldn’t make jasmine bloom in the English countryside in January. But there were such things as colognes, trapping the essence of the flower in alcohol. Very few men favored feminine scents like jasmine. But Robert knew of one.
Moving faster, Robert climbed the final few rungs. The ladder let out into a bizarre womblike marble edifice. It took Robert a moment to identify it as the inside of an urn. It seemed a rather Medmenham sort of joke, to house human asps within immense marble jars, just waiting to crawl into some waiting Cleopatra’s breast.
The urn had been cut out on one side, not entirely, just enough of a hole for a man to crawl through. It was as he was contemplating the hole that he heard the voices. Voice, rather. One voice.
It wasn’t the sort of voice one would generally remember. It had a common enough timbre, not too high, not too low, with an over-particularity of pronunciation designed to mask an origin more common than the speaker cared to confess. Robert would have known it anywhere.
Robert crawled very carefully through his hole, the scrape of his robe against the stone sounding, he hoped, like nothing more sinister than the rustle of the wind through the dry winter grass. The massive urn provided the best of all possible screens and there was a wall behind his back, made of rough flint. He was, he realized, in Medmenham’s mausoleum, a vast, open-air edifice scattered with memorial monuments, with urns and arches and ornamental columns, in a macabre pleasure garden for the dead.
The dead weren’t the only ones enjoying it tonight. The wind carried their words as effectively as the acoustics of the Whispering Gallery in St. Paul’s.
“There is the small matter of my payment. . . .” Wrothan’s voice was a touching mix of the obsequious and the importunate.
“Don’t fret yourself.” His companion was unimpressed. Unlike Wrothan’s, his accent was pure, effortless Oxbridge, save for the faint tang of a foreign accent. “You will have your gold. When you fulfill your end of the bargain.”
Robert eased around the side of his urn, but to little effect. An ornamental column blocked his view. All he could make out was the skirt of a monk’s habit, identical to all the others.
Wrothan’s voice took on a wheedling note. “I imagine that the Home Office would pay a pretty penny to know about your activities. They might even pay better than you.”
Fabric rustled and coins clattered together, ringing too true to be anything but gold. “A deposit. There will be nothing more until we see results. And if I find that you have played us false . . .”
“Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?” Now that he had his blunt, Wrothan was all that was jovial. “Not I.”
His companion was less effusive. “See that you don’t. Or else your goose will be — how do you say? — cooked.” His tone was perfectly matter-of-fact, and all the more chilling for being so.
“General Perron never had any complaints,” countered Wrothan.
In his hollow, Robert’s brows drew together. Perron was Wrothan’s employer? When the Colonel had told him Wrothan was selling secrets to the Mahratta, he had never specified to whom. Perron might be nominally employed by one of the Mahratta leaders, but he took his real orders from France.
“Names, Monsieur le Jasmine, names,” said the Frenchman, in suffering tones. Monsieur le Who? Robert wondered, and cautiously lifted his head away from the stone in an attempt to hear more clearly. “If this is how you carried on in India, I am surprised indeed that Monsieur le Marigold kept you on.”
“The Marigold” — Wrothan seemed to have some small difficulty emitting the word — “had no cause for complaint of me. And nor shall you. If I succeed in this . . .”
“It will be a cause for great rejoicing,” said the Frenchman politely, squelching Wrothan as neatly as a society hostess speeding a parting guest. “Then. Good night, Jasmine.”
He really had said Jasmine, hadn’t he? As in the flower. It took Robert a moment to realize that the Jasmine in question was Wrothan, but he didn’t have time to muse on the Frenchman’s pet name for his favorite traitor. Grass crackled underfoot as the man strode away from Wrothan — straight towards Robert’s urn.
Robert hastily ducked around the other side, grateful for the all-concealing robe that blended so well with both winter-dry grass and granite walls. Hood up, huddled against the base of the urn, he played at being a rock, thankful for the lack of moon that swathed him in darkness. The anonymous monk with the accent disappeared into the urn and down the secret passage.
By the time Robert deemed it safe to look up, both Wrothan and the Frenchman had gone. Only the scent of jasmine lingered in the damp night air.
Robert hunkered back on his haunches, drawing his fingers through his sweat-sodden hair. His head still pounded with the aftereffects of the drug, whatever the drug had been, and he lifted his face gratefully to the night air, letting the damp air buffet his aching head.
Jasmine. What in the blazes were they playing at? Robert wished his mental faculties were in better working order, or that Tommy had been there, too, to hear and judge. The Frenchman had said Jasmine.
Robert wondered, for the first time, if that conspicuous sprig of jasmine Wrothan had affected in India had been more than just a dandy’s foolish nod to fashion. It was a pi
ty, thought Robert grimly, that he had spent so much time concertedly not noticing Wrothan. It made it that much harder remembering his habits. But he did remember joking with Tommy about the migration of the flower, one day on Wrothan’s hat, the next day in his lapel. They had put it down to experiments in fashion. But what if it had been something else? What if it had been a signal, a message? It might have been a call to an assignation, a symbol that he had news to share, any number of things. All of them entirely sinister.
Wrothan wasn’t just raising a little extra blunt selling secrets to the Mahratta. He was playing for higher stakes than that. He was playing with the French.
There had been rumblings about revolutionaries while Robert was in India, whispers of French plots and schemes, but for the most part, those, like Robert, who had been many years away from England had shrugged it off. Everyone knew the Governor-General, Marquess Wellesley, was practically potty on the topic of French threats; he saw Frenchmen under the bed the way small children imagined monsters. There had been a brief stir the year before when Bonaparte had sent a ship of men and arms to India at the request of General Perron, but Wellesley had sent them packing. And Robert had always believed that was that. One failed attempt. They were five months from England by sea. How much interest could they have in the affairs of England and France, or England and France in them? He had assumed that Wrothan’s treachery was a local affair, with purely local consequences.
The damp was seeping through the wool of Robert’s robe, but it wasn’t just his nether regions that were feeling the chill. He might have found Wrothan, but the victory was a Pyrrhic one. There would be no nice, tidy revenge, no easy dispatch of a retired traitor. Instead, he had stumbled upon a hydra, that beast of classical fiction that sported new heads whenever the one was lopped off.
And all the heads were shaped like flowers.