The Temptation of the Night Jasmine pc-5

by Лорен Уиллиг

  “I — thank you,” she said.

  Oh, hell. “Don’t,” he said bluntly. “It’s nothing more than your due.” Feeling suddenly clumsy, he added awkwardly, “I’m sure the King will say the same. When we find him.”

  Charlotte seized on the change of topic. “If we find him. Do you think he’s really at Wycombe?”

  It gave him an absurd rush of satisfaction to have her looking to him again for answers, for advice, for reassurance, for anything.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted, hating being caught out in an admission of fallibility, but knowing that nothing less than the truth would do. He had already dug enough of a hole for himself with lies and half-truths. A bit of cautious optimism couldn’t hurt, however. “It seems like the most logical place, though.”

  Charlotte turned to look out over the dark expanse of the river. He wondered what she saw reflected on those dark waters. The King? Medmenham? The torches of the Hellfire Club? “It’s not exactly a logical scenario, though, is it? Any of it. Hellfire Clubs and counterfeit kings . . .”

  “Club,” Robert corrected. “Only one. To my knowledge.” Brilliant. Now he had just established himself as a Hellfire expert.

  “And not much of one, at that. I would have thought that the Hellfire Club would have been more . . . well, decadent.” Charlotte glanced back over her shoulder at him. “Not just cassocks and fireworks.”

  Robert sidled a few steps closer. To better hear her. After all, they wouldn’t want to wake the others by speaking too loudly. “I believe the cassocks were originally intended to make an anticlerical statement,” Robert hedged. No need to add that the robes also provided easy access once the prostitutes were brought in, at least for those members bold enough to go bare beneath. “I gather it was very daring in its time.”

  “I suppose it must have been,” said Charlotte, although she sounded less than convinced. “What was all that about the elephant god?”

  “I think,” said Robert, “that it was Wrothan’s attempt to pique the jaded appetites of the Hellfire crowd by offering them something foreign and exotic. He took the basic Hellfire Club framework — ”

  “Cassocks and fireworks,” supplied Charlotte knowledgeably.

  “ — and layered it with a lot of faux-Indian mumbo jumbo, including a man in a very large elephant mask pretending to be an elephant god.”

  Unlike the gentlemen in the caves, Charlotte was not impressed. “But what did he do?”

  Between the drugged smoke and the pure superstitious terror evoked at having a beast half-man, half-animal suddenly coming at one, a performance would have seemed superfluous. “Not terribly much. At least, not that I saw. I left soon after he made his appearance.” That much, at least, was true. “I only joined the Hellfire Club to follow Wrothan. And I didn’t enjoy it,” he added idiotically.

  Charlotte twisted her head to look up at him. He didn’t blame her for looking puzzled. He didn’t quite understand what he was doing himself.

  “I just didn’t want you to think I was the same as those others, Medmenham and Staines and the rest,” Robert tried to explain. “That’s all.”

  It wasn’t nearly all, but he didn’t seem to be doing too well with the English language at the moment.

  “I did wonder,” said Charlotte, not quite looking at him, “why you were spending so much time with Medmenham. I had thought it might be — ”

  “Might be what?” Appropriating the space beside her, Robert angled his head, trying to see her more clearly. It didn’t do any good. With her head bowed, all he could see was a scrap of profile through a mass of tangled hair.

  Charlotte scraped her hair back, keeping her hand there to hold it out of the way. “That you might be lonely,” she said. “I thought you might be looking for an entrée into the ton.”

  “With Medmenham?” Robert sounded as horrified as he felt. “Is that what you really thought of me?”

  Charlotte looked at him steadily. “What else was I supposed to think? I had very little evidence to rely on.”

  You had me, he wanted to say. You should have relied on me.

  But why should she have?

  Because she was Charlotte, that was why. Because she gave new meaning to the term “blind devotion.” Because she was the woman who had announced that it was better to trust and be disappointed than never to have trusted at all. It didn’t matter that he had warned her against all that, that he had taken her to task about her trusting nature and those who might take advantage of it. It was completely different when he was the one who needed to take advantage of it.

  God, he was a rotten apple.

  Robert braced his hands against the rail. “I owe you an explanation, don’t I?”

  It was meant to be rhetorical, but Charlotte didn’t take it that way. Cocking her head to one side, she considered.

  “You did once,” she said, as though she were considering an academic proposition involving something very long ago and far away. It chilled Robert to the bone.

  “I still do,” he said fiercely. “Even if it is long overdue. I was . . . you see, I had a personal score to settle with Wrothan. Not just a personal score,” he hastened to correct himself. “It was more of a pledge.” There, that sounded better. “To a dying man.”

  Was it wrong to bring the Colonel into it? It seemed a bit cheap, to be wooing a woman by trotting out the corpse of a friend. Robert frowned out over the river. He could recall something along those lines in a Shakespeare play he had seen years ago, on leave, a suitor applying to a lady over a hero’s corpse. “Was ever woman in this humor wooed?” had been the line. The man, he remembered, had been Richard III. Robert didn’t much like the comparison.

  In profile, it was hard to tell what Charlotte was thinking, and her voice gave nothing away other than a detached interest in the topic. “So it wasn’t just about the sale of secrets, then?”

  “No.” Would the Colonel have minded? Robert remembered how, after all those years, the gruff Scotsman had still kept a lock of his wife’s hair in his breast pocket, twenty years after her death. When Robert, as a know-it-all sixteen-year-old, had carelessly asked why he didn’t marry again — with the consequent improvements in housekeeping and meals — the Colonel had simply patted his pocket and said that he was married and would be until he died. At the time, Robert had simply rolled his eyes and gone off drinking with a set of long-forgotten mates. But, now. . . . Yes, the Colonel would understand. “I had . . . a sort of mentor in India. More than a mentor, really. He all but adopted me.”

  “I’m glad somebody did.”

  “I badly needed adopting,” Robert admitted. At sixteen, he had been reckless, belligerent, constantly spoiling for a fight. It was a fight that had brought him to the attention of the Colonel, brawling with a fellow lieutenant. The Colonel had decided, like Calvin come to Geneva, that Robert was his cross to bear and, by God, he was going to make an officer and a gentleman out of him if one of them died in the process.

  And so he had died. Robert wondered, as he had wondered before, what would have happened if he had had the foresight to prevent it, if he had gone to the appropriate authorities the night before instead of putting it all off till after the battle.

  “What happened?” asked Charlotte, breaking him out of his reflections.

  “Wrothan shot him in the back. He shot him in the middle of a battle, when he thought no one would know the difference.” And he had almost been right. If Robert hadn’t known of Wrothan’s treachery, he might have supposed the same himself, and the Colonel would have gone down as yet another casualty of war. And Wrothan . . .

  Wrothan would still be dead at the Frenchman’s hand.

  Perhaps it was justice, of a sort. Robert would still have preferred to have administered it himself.

  “I knew Staines from India,” Robert hurried on. “That is, I knew of him. He was part of Wrothan’s set.”

  “So you followed Staines to Girdings,” Charlotte summed up. “That was why you cam
e back.”

  “Yes.” She was too self-contained, too quiet. It made him nervous. “I should have told you before. I just didn’t want you all tangled up in it.” Given that she was now irrevocably tangled, it seemed a singularly inane thing to have said.

  Keeping her eyes on the water, Charlotte asked, as if they were strangers at an Assembly, “Now that your revenge is all done, will you go back to India?”

  Black dread welled up around him, like the river. “Do you want me to? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  Charlotte blinked up at him. “I don’t see why what I want would have anything to do with it.”

  “Don’t you?” Robert braced a hand beside hers on the rail, trapping her between him and the river. It was a hell of a time for a declaration, but he was sick of waiting, of prevaricating. “It has everything to do with it. If you want me to go, I’ll go. If you want me to stay, I’ll stay. Just give me my orders, and I’ll obey.”

  Just so long as she commanded him to stay.

  Charlotte eyed him curiously and came to her own conclusions. “Is this what you wanted to talk about tomorrow?”

  Robert nodded brusquely.

  Charlotte’s lips quirked upwards in a lopsided smile, like a tragic-comic mask. “There’s no need for grand gestures, you know,” she said, “or rash promises to leave the country. I wasn’t planning to make any more scenes or to take you to task for things that shouldn’t have happened and can’t be undone. We can put everything behind us and be friendly again.” She regarded her clasped hands as if they were a book she was weary of reading. “It will make life — easier.”

  “Easier,” Robert repeated flatly. What in the deuce was she talking about?

  “Easier,” she agreed. “Since our paths will, invariably, cross. And I do think we could be friends. As we were. Before. We were friends, weren’t we?”

  Robert’s voice came out harsher than intended. “I wasn’t talking about being friends, Charlotte!”

  “Then what — ?” Her eyes were wide and confused and defensive. “I don’t understand.” Or she didn’t want to understand.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said rapidly, trying to put it as plainly as he could before they went off on cross-purposes yet again. “I want you back.”

  Charlotte held up a hand as though to ward him off, scrunching herself as far back against the rail as it would let her.

  “Back?” she said incredulously, with a breathless laugh that broke in the middle. “You said it yourself. We scarcely know each other. You can’t have back what you’ve never had.”

  “Never had?” Robert demanded, his eyes locking with hers. “Would you swear to that? Can you really, in all honesty, claim that there was never anything between us?”

  Charlotte flushed. With temper, rather than shame, from the looks of it. “You told me it was all an illusion, an enchantment. Those were your words, not mine.”

  “I lied.” That didn’t sound terribly good, did it? Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Every time he opened his mouth, he just stuck his foot farther down it. “I knew I had to stay close to Medmenham and the Hellfire crowd in order to make good my promise. I meant to protect you from them,” he finished lamely. “I didn’t want you hurt.”

  Charlotte made a little snorting noise. Robert had to admit that it probably more accurately summarized the situation than anything else she could have said.

  “I blundered. Badly. Forgive me?” His voice went up hopefully on the last words. Even to his own ears, it sounded a little weak. But it was worth a try. And it had worked before.

  Charlotte stubbornly shook her head. “You told me it was all an illusion, an enchantment. Enchantments don’t last.”

  “Perhaps this one can,” he said tenderly, reaching out to brush a finger against her cheek.

  Charlotte wrenched away from his touch. “Don’t,” she said, and meant it. “Which am I meant to believe? What you said then or what you say now? Or what you might say tomorrow?”

  He knew the answer to that one. “Now,” Robert said firmly. “Definitely now.”

  Apparently, that hadn’t been the right answer.

  “No.” Drawing in a ragged breath, Charlotte braced her elbows against the rail. “How can you define when now is? Now keeps changing. You keep changing. Then was now then, and now will be then soon. You may think you mean it now, but what happens when you change your mind again next week? Another disappearance? Another ‘forgive me’?”

  “I thought you were a forgiving person,” he said. It was a cheap shot, but he was desperate.

  “Not that forgiving.” Unhappiness drew new lines in Charlotte’s face. “I don’t have that many forgive me’s in me. I wish I had. But I don’t.”

  “You won’t need any more,” he promised. “This is the last time.”

  Charlotte made an instinctive move of negation.

  Pretending not to see it, Robert blundered on, “I want things to go back the way they were. Back at Girdings. We can go back, just the two of us. No Medmenham, no Hellfire Club. We’ll send your grandmother off to Bath,” he continued persuasively. He concentrated on weaving a spell with his voice and his words. “We can row on the pond and hunt for unicorns in the garden. I’ll feed you the very choicest bits of my jam tarts. We’ll spend every evening on the roof, counting stars.”

  His own spell had him fast; he could picture it, down to the smell of Charlotte’s hair, the feel of her head pressed against his shoulder, the rough stone of the roof ledge at his back. He could smell the flowers in the garden, the flowers he had only seen as dry twigs wrapped in burlap; he could see them in full bloom, perfuming the whole house with their scent. He could imagine the long dinners in the long dining room, candlelight puddling like molten gold on the polished wood of the table. And then, at the very end of every evening, the walk arm in arm down the marble corridors of the first floor to the curtained opulence of the ducal chamber, where Charlotte’s inevitable pile of books would totter on the night table, her dropped pens would leave blots on the carpet, and that ridiculously large bed could at last be put to some proper use.

  “We’ll spend every night in the ducal chambers, together,” he promised, willing her to see what he saw, the velvet drapes, the crested linen, the glow of the candles. “You can read me poetry. And I can teach you . . . other things.”

  Charlotte’s eyes were as wide as saucers and slightly unfocused, as though she, too, were seeing the ducal chamber at Girdings and other things besides. Whatever it was stained her telltale skin a deep peony red.

  Robert lowered his voice to the merest murmur. “All you have to do is say yes.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Charlotte protested, and he had the feeling she was arguing with herself as much as with him. Good. She looked at him imploringly. “You can’t just turn back the clock like that.”

  “Why not?” He felt like a demon tempting an angel, stringing her along with dark sophistries and forbidden pleasures. Robert drew his voice from deep within his chest, as dark and compelling as the inside of midnight. “Why not if we both agree to it?”

  Charlotte might be half-entranced, but she was entirely stubborn. “We haven’t both agreed. I haven’t agreed.”

  “But you want to.”

  Charlotte’s lips pressed together as she glowered at him in mute frustration. She looked as though she wanted to kick him. “Of course, I do,” she burst out.

  But before Robert could bask in his victory, she hurried on, spitting out the words as though they might contaminate her otherwise, “But don’t you see? That’s not the point. The wanting isn’t enough. Just because I want you — ” Coloring, she bit down hard on her lower lip.

  “Yes?” said Robert encouragingly, smoothing an errant curl back behind her ear. “Just because you want me . . . ?”

  Charlotte stared at him pleadingly, the prey appealing to the predator. “ — doesn’t mean it won’t end badly,” she finished stumblingly.

  He had won. He could tell. O
r, at least, near enough for a kiss to cement the victory.

  “On the other hand,” he murmured, his fingers tangling in her hair, “it doesn’t mean it won’t end well.”

  They were close enough that he could feel the hurried beat of her heart. He could feel Charlotte’s indecision in every word she didn’t say and every move she didn’t make. She was tense with uncertainty, quivering with irresolution. She might not be leaning into him, but she wasn’t pulling away, either.

  Running a gentling hand down her back, he tilted that crucial bit forwards, just as a jarring sweep sent them both tottering sideways.

  Robert swore, catching at the side of the boat with one hand and Charlotte with the other, grabbing at the side of her dress to keep her from going over. Wiping the spray out of his eyes, he could see the vast bulk of Medmenham Abbey looming above them on the bank, like an evil sorcerer’s fortress. Swinging on a wide arc, sending water spraying in its wake, the boat made for the water stairs. They had arrived.

  Damn, damn, damn. Even in absentia, Medmenham contrived to thwart his courtship.

  Charlotte pulled away, shaking off droplets of water and frantically smoothing her hair. From the look on her face, the argument was far from over.

  Robert’s throat constricted with the reminder of how badly he had managed to mangle something that could have been so simple. If he had only explained himself at Girdings, if he had only sent more than a two-word message — but he couldn’t have, back then, he thought wearily. Part of Charlotte’s accusation was fair; he hadn’t known her well enough to be sure how she would have received it. He knew now, but now it was too late. There was a certain Shakespearean irony to it.

  There was no going back, he reminded himself, only forward. The endless night wasn’t over yet. There was the King to be found, and perhaps that might yet be the saving of him, if he could offer up the King to Charlotte as a token of his seriousness of purpose.

  At least it would make a more original gift than flowers or chocolates.

  Fabric rustled and loud yawns could be heard as the inhabitants of the cabin began to stir.