The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla

by Lauren Willig

  But she hadn’t been there. As they had reminded her countless times. Not always intentionally, but in little ways—in jokes she didn’t understand and in memories she didn’t share. Sally was used to being the leader of their little trio. It felt very odd to be rendered de trop.

  “—inconvenient diet,” Agnes was saying. “Blood does stain so.”

  Belatedly, Sally pulled her attention back to Agnes. Unlike Sally, Agnes did not seem to be enjoying the cool night air. Her teeth were chattering slightly and her skin was turning a faint shade of blue that matched the color of her gown.

  “Here,” Sally said, and took the light shawl from her own shoulders and wrapped it around Agnes, who hadn’t had the sense to bring her own. “What are you talking about?”

  “The rumors,” said Agnes, blinking innocently at Sally as she absently tucked the corners of the wrap beneath her arms. “Haven’t you heard? They say he’s a vampire.”

  “A vampire? Hardly.” Sally paused to glower in the general direction of the ballroom. There was no love lost between her and their host. Lord Vaughn was not an admirer of Sally’s brother, Turnip, which meant that Sally was not an admirer of Lord Vaughn. No one but Sally was allowed to insult Turnip. Still, even so . . . “Whatever else I may think of the man, Lord Vaughn looks perfectly corporeal to me. Those waistcoats are just an affectation.”

  It would be just like Lord Vaughn to set himself up as an undead creature of the night. He prided himself on being slightly sinister, going about in those black waistcoats with silver serpents, murmuring cryptic comments. It was, reflected Sally critically, all just a little too obvious.

  “Not Lord Vaughn,” said Agnes patiently. “The Duke of Belliston.”

  “The Duke of Who?” Lizzy joined them on the balcony, her bronze curls escaping from a wreath of flowers that had gone askew, like the halo of a naughty angel. There was a healthy glow in her cheeks and her brown eyes were bright.

  “Belliston,” said Agnes, palpably unaware of any social frissons or fissures. “In the house across the garden.”

  She gestured in the other direction, away from the crowded ballroom, past long rows of perfectly trimmed parterres.

  Even in the waning season of the year, Lord Vaughn’s shrubbery didn’t have a leaf out of place. The garden was arranged in the French style, all gravel paths and geometric designs, scorning the more natural wilderness gardens coming into vogue. Above the close-clipped hedges and the marble statues glimmering white in the moonlight, Sally could just make out the outline of the great house across the way.

  Unlike Lord Vaughn’s, that garden had been allowed to run to seed, by either accident or design. Weeping willows trailed ghostly fingers over the dim outline of a pond on which no swans swam, while ivy climbed the walls of the house, dangling from the balconies, obscuring the windows. In the heart of London, the edifice had an eerie air of isolation.

  It was the largest house in the square, larger by far than Lord Vaughn’s. Sally felt a certain satisfaction at that thought. Lord Vaughn could put on all the airs he liked, but he still wasn’t the biggest fish in the square. And by fish, she meant duke. The Duke of Belliston out-housed and outranked Vaughn.

  He was also remarkably elusive. In her two Seasons in society, Sally had never met the man. There was some sort of story about him . . . something to do with a curse and his parents.

  But vampires? Nonsense.

  “Is that Belliston House?” Lizzy shook back her curls as she stared avidly at the house across the way. “I hadn’t realized we were so close to the Lair of the Vampire.”

  Sally rolled her eyes at the idiocy of mankind. “Vampires are a myth. And not a particularly interesting one,” she added repressively.

  “People said the same thing about the Duke of Belliston,” Agnes pointed out. “About his being a myth, I mean. But you can’t deny there are lights in the windows.”

  That much was true. Through the ivy and the dust, a faint but distinct light shone.

  “She has you there,” said Lizzy. There was no denying that someone was in residence at Belliston House. Whoever—or whatever—that someone might be.

  “Yes, but . . .” Sally made an impatient gesture with her hands. “Next you’ll be telling me you saw a bat flying around his belfry.”

  Lizzy cocked her head, considering the urns that lined the roof of the house. “I think it’s a crow.”

  “Did you know what a group of crows is called?” Agnes’s voice dropped to a hushed whisper. “The collective term for a group of crows is—”

  “Oh, no,” said Sally.

  “—a murder,” Agnes finished earnestly.

  As an academic appellation it was just a little too atmospheric, especially with the moon silhouetted against the chimney pots, casting strange shadows through the abandoned garden. Sally felt a chill shiver its way down her spine, beneath the thin fabric of her gown and chemise.

  Catching Lizzy’s too-knowing eye, she hastily looked away, wishing she hadn’t parted with her shawl.

  There was no call for Lizzy to look at her that way. Chills were simply what one got when one stood on a balcony in a scoop-necked ball gown in the middle of October. It had nothing at all to do with the black bird flapping about the chimney pots.

  Somewhere in the depths of the garden, an owl voiced its mournful cry.

  “That”—Sally cast about for a suitably dampening adjective—“is absurd.”

  “No, truly,” said Agnes. “It’s a murder of crows and an unkindness of ravens.”

  That last, at least, was appropriate. Sally cast a glance back over her shoulder at the ballroom. “I’d say it’s more an affectation of imbeciles.”

  Lizzy grinned at her. “You sound like my stepmother.” Before Sally could decide whether that was an insult or not, Lizzy turned her attention back to the dark shell of Belliston House. Leaning her elbows on the balustrade, she said with relish, “They say he sucks the blood of unwary maidens.”

  Agnes considered this. “I imagine they’re less trouble than wary ones.”

  “Utter rubbish,” said Sally crisply. Before Agnes could argue with her, she added quickly, “Just because the man scorns society doesn’t mean that he’s an unholy creature of the night.”

  In fact, at the moment she would say it was rather a sign of his good sense.

  “No one has seen him for seven years,” Lizzy pointed out. “Or was it ten? That’s rather a long time for societal scorning unless he had some other motive in mind.”

  “Such as draining the blood of wary or unwary maidens?” Sally gave a delicate sniff. “I think not.”

  Agnes’s face took on the distant look it acquired when she was parsing a difficult academic question. “Seven is a mystical number. . . .”

  “So is three,” said Sally. “Or five hundred and thirty-two.” She had no idea about five hundred and thirty-two, but someone had to show a bit of sense. Sally pushed away from the balcony, her gauze overskirt catching on the carved edge of an acanthus leaf. “Whatever the Duke of Belliston is, he’s just a man.”

  Lizzy’s eyes glinted with mischief. “Prove it,” she said.

  Agnes looked in alarm from Lizzy to Sally and back again. “You don’t mean—”

  Lizzy nodded decisively. “Someone ought to go over there. In the interest of truth, of course.” Her face was a picture of guileless innocence as she added delicately, “Unless, of course, you don’t care to go.”

  They had played this game so many times before, in the safety of Miss Climpson’s Select Seminary. Sally had never yet turned down a challenge, and Lizzy knew it.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Sally made a show of indifference, even though she could feel the thrum of the blood through her veins, sending her pulse racing, making colors crisper and sounds clearer. “What could be more invigorating on a cool evening than a walk across a garden?”r />
  Agnes looked at her in alarm. “Sally, you wouldn’t. . . .”

  Oh, wouldn’t she? Sally caught Lizzy’s grin and knew she understood, even if Agnes didn’t.

  “Don’t worry,” Sally said to Agnes. “I shan’t do anything foolish. Anything else foolish,” she amended. “I’ll just peer through the window and report back. That’s all.”

  Before Agnes could protest, Sally pushed her cameo bracelets up on her wrists and ran lightly down the path.

  “Be—” and behind her, Sally heard Agnes’s voice, soft and worried, on the night breeze. “Careful?”

  Careful was just what she didn’t want to be. She had missed this, the sense of being alive that came only from taking risks, from pushing the edges of the rules—all for good reason, of course. Always for good reason. They were nothing if not civic-minded, Sally told herself virtuously. But, oh, it felt good to be free of the leash of polite society, if only for a few stolen moments.

  Gravel crunched beneath Sally’s slippers. The cool October breeze lifted the flounces of her dress and set her golden curls dancing. Dimly, Sally was aware of Lizzy, on the bottom step, fidgeting with impatience, all eagerness to run across the garden herself; Agnes behind her, a pale presence leaning over the balustrade, prepared, despite her own doubts, to leap into the fray and fight bloodsucking creatures of the night on Sally’s behalf should the occasion call for it.

  Sally’s heart swelled with affection for them. Sometimes, she wished they could go back to Miss Climpson’s, back to the safety and security of the rambling school in Bath, where they all wore identical white muslin gowns and their greatest worry was who was to play whom in Miss Climpson’s annual Christmas fiasco and whether it might be possible that someone was attempting to elope with the music master. Not that she would ever admit it to anyone. At Miss Climpson’s, she had itched and fretted to be out in the world, but now that she was out, she had to admit that she was finding the world strangely flat.

  But not tonight. Not now, with an adventure before her on the other side of Lord Vaughn’s garden.

  The formal parterres had been cleverly arranged to provide the sense of an endless vista, but, as was always the case with the Vaughns, the sense of spaciousness was an illusion; it was a London garden, and Sally was at the end of it in moments.

  There was no wall separating Lord Vaughn’s property from that of the Duke of Belliston, only a series of cypress trees. Their spindly shapes lent a funereal aspect to the scene, but they had one major benefit: there was plenty of space between them for one slender woman.

  At the cypress border, Sally checked slightly. For all her bravado, there was something more than a little dodgy about willfully trespassing on someone else’s property. It had been quite another thing to slip down to Miss Climpson’s sitting room in the dead of night; the students did that so often it was practically an official extracurricular exercise.

  But she couldn’t turn back now, not with Lizzy watching. And it really couldn’t do any harm just to creep up to the house and back. Admittedly, a white gown wasn’t the best attire for creeping, but, if spotted, she could always raise her hands above her head and pretend to be a statue.

  Which was, Sally realized, a plan worthy of her brother, Turnip.

  With a shrug, she plunged through the cypress border. And came up short as a candle flame flared in front of her face.

  For a moment, she had only a confused image of a dark form, silhouetted against the fronds of a weeping willow. Childhood memories of ghost stories surged through her mind, the horrible tales Nanny used to tell her, of faceless ghouls and headless horsemen and phantom monks in their transparent habits.

  “Who is it?” she demanded, her voice high. But not with fear. It was just shortness of breath—that was all. “Show yourself.”

  A man swept aside the fronds of a weeping willow tree. “Show myself?” The man’s voice was well-bred, and distinctly incredulous. “I should ask the same of you.”

  For a moment Sally froze, wildly recalling all the tales Agnes had recounted. The man’s face was marble pale against the dark leaves, his features chiseled as if from stone, beautiful and stern.

  The only sign of color was the single splotch of blood that marred the snowy whiteness of his cravat.

  Chapter Two

  Not blood. In the space of a heartbeat, Sally saw her own folly. Carmine. Merely red stone, carved with a device or sigil too faint to make out in the uncertain light.

  Sally could feel her breathing return to normal. Just a man. Just a man in a garden. What she had taken to be a gibbering imp behind him revealed itself as nothing more than the marble statue of a satyr, overgrown with moss and cracked with time. The satyr presided over the empty basin of an ornamental pool, flanked by a weather-blasted marble bench, its base tangled with dark weeds.

  Sally felt monumentally foolish. She didn’t like being made to feel foolish.

  “It isn’t polite to creep up on people,” Sally said sharply.

  “Creep?” The man looked at her incredulously. Under the circumstances, Sally wasn’t sure she could blame him. He stepped closer, holding his candle aloft. “I was simply enjoying my own garden.”

  The sudden shock of light made Sally wince. Also, he was holding it on her bad side.

  “Which begs the question . . . ,” the man said, in a tone that made the hairs on Sally’s arms prickle with something other than cold. “What are you doing in my garden?”

  Sally pressed her lips tightly together, refusing to be intimidated. “What are you doing—”

  Sally stopped short. She couldn’t very well ask him what he was doing in his own garden.

  She drew herself up to her full height, letting the moonlight play off the rich gold of the cameo parure that adorned her neck, ears, and brow, and made a quick recovery. “What are you doing addressing me when we haven’t been introduced?”

  The Duke of Belliston—or, at least, Sally assumed it must be the Duke of Belliston—lowered his candle. “I would say,” he said silkily, “that trespass was a good substitute for a formal introduction.”

  His hair had been allowed to grow down over his collar, curling slightly at the edges, the darkness of it contrasting with the pallor of his skin. He was even fairer than she was, which Sally took as a personal affront. She was accustomed to being the fairest of them all.

  He stepped forward, the moonlight silvering his hair, making him look strangely ageless. As though he might have dwelt in this ruined garden for centuries, his eyes as dark and haunted as the night.

  Behind him, the moss-grown satyr on its plinth seemed to leer at Sally.

  “I am not trespassing,” Sally said haughtily. “I was simply admiring your foliage.”

  The Duke of Belliston arched one brow. “Has anyone warned you that strange plants might have thorns?”

  If she had wanted a lesson in horticulture, she would have consulted a gardener. “Has anyone ever told you that it is exceedingly annoying to speak in aphorisms?”

  For a moment, a flicker of something that might have been amusement showed in his dark eyes. Amusement, or merely the reflected light of the candle. “Yes,” he said. “It tends to truncate conversation quite effectively.”

  Sally wasn’t accustomed to allowing herself to be truncated.

  She took her time studying the scraggly shrubbery and empty flower beds. “Your gardener has been neglecting his duties.”

  The duke took a step forward. He was taller than she had realized, and he moved with a controlled grace that managed to be both elegant and slightly menacing. “There are gardens . . . and there are gardens.”

  His voice whirled around her like the slow swirl of a dark potion, conjuring up images of strange rites in midnight gardens, of night-blooming flowers and witches dancing under the full moon. There was a foreign flavor to it, a strange tang that blurred the edges of
his accent, as exotic as a flower from distant shores.

  What manner of man cloistered himself away from the world in a garden such as this?

  A showy one, Sally told herself firmly, and made a pretense of contemplating the bleak remains of what must once have been a rather pretty little pleasure garden. “Your overgrowth is particularly overgrown,” she said brightly. “Have you considered a scythe?”

  The duke’s heavy-lidded black eyes swept from the bottom of her gold-embroidered hem all the way up to the glimmering concoction of gold and coral around her neck.

  At least, she assumed it was the necklace at which he was looking, and not the fine blue veins in her throat.

  The duke stepped forward, fallen leaves rustling beneath his feet. The air in the garden felt suddenly very close, heavy with the scent of dead flowers. “Are you volunteering to wield it?”

  Sally stumbled as she took a half step back, trying to pass it off with an airy gesture. “I toil not, neither do I scythe. But I am assured that they are quite effective at eradicating extraneous foliage.”

  “Perhaps,” said the duke, and Sally found herself unable to look away from the eyes that were so very dark in his pale face, “I like my foliage just as it is.”

  Sally’s voice was somewhat more breathless than she would have liked. “Even when it obstructs your view?”

  “That,” said the duke, “depends on what you wish to see.”

  “Or on what you wish to hide?” said Sally boldly.

  She couldn’t recall stepping forward, but she and the duke were nose to nose. Or nose to chin, as the case might be. His cravat smelled faintly of French perfume, a haunting bouquet of exotic flowers.

  For all the rumors, up close, there was nothing the least bit incorporeal about the duke. There was a faint scar on one side of his brow and a callus on his ungloved hand; she could feel the warmth of his skin through the dark stuff of his jacket. She felt an insane urge to reach out and lay her hand upon his chest, to feel if his heart was beating beneath the antique silver buttons of his waistcoat or whether that was merely the echo of her own elevated pulse.