The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla

by Lauren Willig

  “In that case,” said the duke gently, and she could feel the brush of his breath against her cheek, “surely I wouldn’t tell you.”

  Their gazes locked; the world around them receded to nothing.

  Somewhere, not far away, a church bell tolled. The lonely knell broke over the garden, once, twice, and then again, breaking the spell that held her. Sally counted twelve.

  Midnight.

  She hadn’t realized she had said it aloud until the duke said, “That is the accepted term.”

  He took a step back, and Sally became painfully aware of just how close they had been standing, her head tilted back like some silly ninny waiting to be kissed.

  Sally hastily rearranged the angle of her chin, aiming for maximum hauteur. She was generally quite good at hauteur. It went with her height and the size of her dowry. But tonight she found herself at something of a loss.

  “Forgive me if my hospitality”—the duke gave Sally a pointed look that brought the color into her cheeks—“seems lacking, but I have . . . an appointment. Shall I escort you back to the line of shrubbery, or may I trust you to make your own way?”

  “I made it here without escort,” said Sally tartly, before realizing that that didn’t exactly help her case.

  “I make the offer for your own protection.” Sally caught a glimmer of something that might have been a smile. “Against ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night.”

  Oh, ha-ha. Very funny.

  “Hmph,” said Sally, in her best imitation of Mrs. Reid’s infamous sniff. “The question you should be asking is, who will protect them from me?”

  It was an excellent parting line, and Sally meant to use it to its full advantage. She turned on her heel with an exaggerated sweep of her demi-train. But one thing nagged at her. She knew she should leave it be, but . . .

  Turning, Sally demanded, “Who makes appointments at midnight?”

  The Duke of Belliston was standing just as she had left him, silhouetted against the dark shadows of the empty pool.

  He essayed an ironical bow. “What better time for a creature of the night to travel?”

  Lucien, Duke of Belliston, watched his trespasser as she stalked with great dignity as far as the cypress border, and then ruined it by glancing back over her shoulder.

  To make sure, presumably, that he hadn’t turned into a giant bat.

  Lucien essayed an elegant bow.

  The girl gave a loud and disapproving sniff and disappeared between two twisted trees, and Lucien allowed the grin that he had been repressing to spread across his face. Beasties and ghoulies and things that went bump in the night, indeed. It had been worth it, just to see her eyes widen and then narrow again. He hadn’t been so amused since—

  Since boarding the ship to return to England.

  That thought was enough to wipe the smile off his face. Only a few weeks more, he reminded himself. Just a few weeks to sort through the yellowing papers in his father’s study and the long-abandoned journals in his mother’s workroom, to sift through moldering correspondence and mouse-eaten cards of invitation.

  And then what? Back to New Orleans, to the home of his mother’s sister? Lucien had been happy there, or something close to it, but it wasn’t his home. The broad acres of his uncle’s plantation were well managed by others, and he had no place in the insular society of the French Quarter. An English duke was as out of place there as a Creole in London.

  In New Orleans, he was too English; at home, he was tainted by his mother’s blood, by the tang of something foreign, and exotic, and more than a little bit French. His mother had come from Martinique, with the liquid accent of the islands, hair as dark as his, and pale skin warmed by the sun on distant shores. She had been considerably younger than his father.

  Witchwoman’s brat, the boys at school had taunted him.

  Lucien’s face hardened. Others might flirt with girls in gardens, but he had another task, a task too long delayed. He meant to see justice done, or, at least, some measure of it.

  To his right, he could see the remains of his mother’s greenhouse, the glass panes cracked and blackened with soot and grime, the frame warped by English winter weather. The broken panels gaped like a silent scream, leering like a demon’s smile.

  She had been a botanist, his mother, specializing in the plants of the tropics. Her greenhouse had bloomed with exotic specimens, warmed by braziers through the cold of the English winters. Among Lucien’s earliest memories was his mother in the greenhouses at Hullingden, taking him from bloom to bloom, introducing each by name, warning him away from some, letting him crinkle and sniff others. Lucien had made mud pies in the rich garden loam while his mother had scribbled her notes in a flowing hand in the faintly scented brown ink she favored.

  Lucien’s grandfather had been a botanist too. He had taken Lucien’s mother with him from Martinique to London to give a paper at the Royal Society—and it was there that Lucien’s parents had met. His father had little interest in plants, but he, who had defied all the best matchmaking efforts of London’s matrons, had displayed a great deal of interest in the bluestocking from Martinique. The duke was well past forty, at an age when London had despaired of seeing him married; Lucien’s mother was barely twenty. But something in them had called each to each. They were married a mere three weeks later, with half of London in attendance to speculate and gawp.

  An old man’s fancy, they called her, but Lucien knew otherwise. His mother hadn’t been like that; his parents hadn’t been like that. He could remember them together, teasing and mocking, his mother inquiring after his father’s activities in the government, his father displaying a valiant interest in his mother’s cuttings and sectionings and who had insulted whom in which learned paper. Lucien could remember them sitting together on a bench in the garden at Hullingden, his mother’s unpowdered head on his father’s shoulder, the black curls falling long and free across his silver-brocade waistcoat as little Marie-Clarice batted her hands in a basket by their feet.

  Lucien looked across the garden, at the dark bulk of Belliston House. For a moment, he could see it as it had been, the statues solid on their plinths, lithe goldfish swimming in the clear water of the fountain, hedges neatly trimmed, windows blazing with light. All gone now. Gone these past twelve years.

  Lucien had been only twelve. He had been shunted off to school, left to stew and brood and avenge his honor with his fists as best he could on and off the playing fields of Eton. Those hadn’t been pleasant years. He had been numb with shock and grief, and the concerted malice of his peers had caught him on the raw. He had escaped as soon as he could, first for the family seat, and then, when Uncle Henry had sent him back, where all the Uncle Henrys in the world couldn’t reach him, all the way to his mother’s family in America.

  “Your grace.” A rough voice pulled him back to the present, the guttural accents turning the title from an honorific into a grunt.

  It was Jamison, who had served as caretaker of the house these past twelve years, and now, for want of a better option, butler and general factotum. His wife, once an under-housemaid, made a pretense of keeping the house, and served Lucien meals so consistently inedible that he was forced to conclude that either her taste buds had long since atrophied or she was engaged in a plot to slowly poison him with rancid pie.

  Despite their inadequacies, there had been no call to go to the bother of hiring staff, the sort of staff the house had once boasted, the legions of maids and footmen, the well-starched butler and chattering scullions. He didn’t intend to stay long.

  Besides, it wasn’t as though Lucien would be receiving callers. The only guests he was entertaining were long since dead.

  With the exception of that girl in the garden.

  “Your grace.” As always, Jamison’s weather-beaten face revealed nothing of his feelings. His loose-lipped visage and stooped should
ers suggested ancestry of the simian variety, but he had been head gardener in Lucien’s parents’ day. More importantly, he was the only one of the staff to stay on, after—

  After.

  Lucien’s life was divided into two halves: before and after. There was no need to specify the event.

  Never one to waste time on niceties, Jamison got right to the point. “You have callers.”

  He spat on the last word, which might have been an opinion as to their guests or merely his habitual form of communication.

  “At midnight?” Lucien heard himself echoing the girl in the garden. But she was right. Midnight was a deuced odd time for anyone to come calling.

  Jamison merely directed another wad of spittle towards a spot just to the left of Lucien’s right shoe.

  “All right, then,” said Lucien. “I suppose it’s too much to ask whether you showed them in?”

  But Jamison had already departed. Buttling was not among his core competencies.

  Curious despite himself, Lucien retraced his steps along the crumbling flagstone path and let himself in by a little door in the side of the house, a door once meant for the comings and goings of servants, but which, in their absence, had proved a convenient means of ingress for the master of the house. Especially when he wished to enter without being seen.

  For a moment, he wondered if the girl with the golden hair had chosen to essay another approach, having been banned from the garden. Was it was a weakness in himself that he rather hoped she had? His self-appointed task might be a noble one, but that didn’t make it any less lonely.

  Jamison had left the callers standing in the hall, which, Lucien supposed, was rather what one got when one visited, unheralded, at midnight. There were four of them: a young man in high shirt points, an older man with his hair clubbed back in the old style, a matron in the finest stare of style, egret feathers bristling from a turban of Nile green satin.

  And a young woman, a fillet of filigree shining in her gently curling hair.

  “—disgraceful!” the older woman was saying. But Lucien had eyes only for the young woman.

  He felt that dislocation again, that curious overlay of past and present. In place of the slender woman in the hall, he saw a little girl in a white dress with a sash embroidered with posies, her chubby hands grasping a bouquet of dandelions.

  Lucien stepped out from behind the suit of armor. “Marie-Clarice,” he said.

  All four turned to stare at him as though the suit of armor had suddenly taken to its legs and staggered forward to greet them.

  Marie-Clarice stared at him, with eyes that were too dark for her pale face. She had inherited their father’s fair coloring, but their mother’s eyes, deep-set and black, the same eyes that Lucien saw in the mirror every morning.

  “So it is true,” she said distantly. Her eyes narrowed and her voice hardened. “It is you.”

  There seemed very little to say to that except, “Yes.”

  How else did one fill nine missing years?

  “Well!” said Aunt Winifred, her stays creaking ominously beneath her satin gown as she drew in an indignant breath. “One would think you might have allowed your own family to hear of your return from your own hand, rather than leaving it to the mouths of common gossips—”

  “We’re delighted,” Uncle Henry intervened, shooting his wife a hard look. A little too heartily, he said, “Welcome home, my boy. Welcome home.”

  Lucien’s cousin, Hal, his hair the same silver-gilt that Uncle Henry’s had once been, did nothing but stare, his jaw dropping until it connected with the top fold of his elaborately tied cravat.

  They were all fair. The Caldicotts had been breeding fair-haired, light-eyed, and pink-cheeked since time immemorial, a testament to their Saxon forebears. Next to them, Lucien felt, as he always had, a cuckoo in the nest. It was an unfortunate mischance that he was the cuckoo who bore the title.

  “Hello,” Lucien said inadequately.

  His sister took a step forward. Their mother had been petite, but Marie-Clarice had inherited the Caldicott height, as well as the family’s famed silver-gilt hair. Only her eyes belonged to their mother.

  “Did you mean to call?” she inquired dangerously. “Or were we not to be privileged with the pleasure of your company?”

  Every word stung like the lash of a whip, all the more so for being—Lucien had to admit—deserved.

  “I had thought you would have been at Hullingden,” he ventured.

  Hullingden was the primary family seat. Lucien had grown up there, had roamed those woods and explored those secret passageways. It had been, for the bulk of his childhood, his entire world; Belliston House, in London, was a faraway place he knew of only from his parents’ conversation.

  The estate had been passed into the stewardship of Uncle Henry until such time as Lucien came of age.

  By the time Lucien came of age, he was already halfway across the world.

  He ought, he knew, to have presented himself at Hullingden first. It wasn’t much good for the prodigal to return without making his presence known. But the idea of passing through those portals again had filled him with a fine sweat of fear. Belliston House was different. It was bland. It was safe.

  “It’s your sister’s first Season.” Aunt Winifred sailed into the fray, her feathers bobbing ominously. “Naturally, we are in London. As you would have known had you shown any of the consideration due as the Head of the House.”

  Lucien could hear the capital letters as she pronounced it and the bite of venom behind it.

  “But what,” Aunt Winifred added, addressing herself to the suit of armor, “can one expect?”

  From the witchwoman’s brat.

  The boys at Eton weren’t the only ones to have cast slurs on Lucien’s parentage; Aunt Winifred had been more subtle, but no less vicious. It was one of the reasons that Lucien had bolted when he had. Without his parents in it, Hullingden hadn’t been home; with Aunt Winifred in it, it had become a form of prison. Aunt Winifred had made it quite clear that she thought it a sad mistake on the part of Fate to allow the dukedom to fall to so unworthy a creature as Lucien, the debased product of a sad mésalliance.

  One would think she might be a bit more pleased that Lucien had obliged her by removing himself.

  “We would have consulted you,” said Uncle Henry mildly, “but we supposed you abroad.”

  The gentle reproach in Uncle Henry’s voice was worse than the vitriol in Aunt Winifred’s.

  Lucien looked from one hostile face to the next, at a loss as to what to say. Yes, it had been a childish trick to bolt, as he had, all those years ago. He could see that now. But he had never imagined his presence being missed. In fact, quite the contrary. Uncle Henry had the care of Hullingden and of Marie-Clarice; if Lucien had thought of it, he had imagined it all meandering on just as it had. He had never thought of himself as having any part of it, or as shirking by being away. He had never thought of Marie-Clarice as growing older; in his head, she was eternally a child of six, in the nursery with her governess.

  Lucien took a tentative step towards her. “Marie-Clarice—”

  “Clarissa,” she corrected him sharply, her accent very proper, very correct. Very English.

  “Clarissa,” he amended. “You are . . . well?”

  He didn’t know her, this woman with the proud face and the narrow, angry eyes. But, then, he’d never known her. Not well. She had been a child when he left, too much younger to be of much interest to a boy of fifteen, and particularly a boy so occupied with his own wrongs as he had been. She had seemed happy enough at Hullingden.

  Hullingden, a paradise in Lucien’s memory, turned so suddenly and unexpectedly into a nightmare.

  Had he been wrong? Lucien had told himself he was obliging them all by staying away, by failing to inflict upon them his unwanted presence. He had assumed th
at Marie-Clarice would be happy enough without him.

  She didn’t look particularly happy right now.

  “Very well,” she said, in clipped tones.

  “Her ball is in two days’ time,” said Aunt Winifred. Her hard round eyes swept the dusty hall. “It ought to have been at Belliston House.”

  From far away, Lucien could hear the echo of his mother’s voice, a half-remembered snippet of conversation.

  Winifred will never forgive Henry for not being the duke.

  And his father, responding in his own, dry way. No, my love. Winifred will never forgive you for being my duchess.

  They had spoken in French. They always spoke in French at home, his father’s the elegant accents of Versailles, his mother’s the rolling cadences of her island home.

  “I have no desire for a ball at Belliston House,” said Marie-Clarice—Clarissa—flatly.

  Lucien felt himself the center of a circle of censorious eyes. “The house isn’t really in any condition to hold an entertainment,” he said mildly. “From what I’ve seen of such things.”

  It seemed like a sacrilege to invite a herd of strangers to trample through the ashes of his past. He was too busy doing that himself.

  “Nonsense,” said Aunt Winifred, her bosom swelling to new and impossible proportions. She was a tall, thin woman, but, like a toad, she could inflate to several times her own size when the occasion called for it. “What do men know of such things? It’s no large matter to have the servants soap the chandeliers and shake out the rugs. It’s a scandal for the daughter of the duke not to have her ball in her own family home.”

  She made Lucien feel as though he were personally responsible for trampling on a litter of particularly adorable puppies.

  “I have no desire for a ball at Belliston House,” repeated Clarissa, in a tight, hard voice.