The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla

by Lauren Willig

  “Oh,” he said. His tongue felt fuzzy, even though he had imbibed only a few sips of Uncle Henry’s claret. “It’s you.”

  Under the dizzying light of a hundred candles, her hair was even brighter than it had appeared in the garden, the true gold of new-minted guineas.

  The girl was undaunted by his grudging greeting.

  “Sally Fitzhugh. Of the Norfolk Fitzhughs. Not the Hertfordshire Fitzhughs.” She seemed quite insistent about that. Before Lucien could respond, she peered closely at him. “Are you quite all right?”

  “All right?” The very idea was so alien that Lucien didn’t know what to say. He was inclined to laugh, but he was afraid that, once started, he wouldn’t be able to stop.

  What in the devil was in that claret of Uncle Henry’s?

  He shouldn’t blame the claret. It wasn’t the drink that had set him reeling.

  There was no proof; Uncle Henry had been quite clear about that. It was all speculation and inference. But while Lucien didn’t precisely believe his uncle’s accusations, he didn’t precisely disbelieve them either. And that was the problem. He was neither here nor there; he had been stripped of the comfort of his convictions and left entirely at sea.

  Miss Fitzhugh cocked her head. “Let me be more specific. Are you about to swoon? Because, if so, I should like to step out of the way.”

  “Am I about to— Good Lord, no!”

  “You were looking more than a little bit wobbly,” said Miss Fitzhugh importantly. “Should you have need for it, I have a vinaigrette in my reticule.”

  “I assure you, I have no need for a vinaigrette,” said Lucien, with some asperity. “If I were to be . . . wobbly . . . any wobbliness is purely a wobbliness of the spirit.”

  “Would your spirit like my vinaigrette, then? Because you do seem to need something.”

  “A swift blow to the head,” Lucien muttered. Maybe then he’d wake up and find he’d imagined all of this.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing.” His uncle Philippe had warned him that when one went poking around in the past, one might stir up smelly fish. Or something like that. The idiom had been both pungent and in French. Lucien had brushed the words aside, convinced that they didn’t apply to him. He had been so sure of the justice of his cause. He was going to sally off to England, prove his mother’s innocence, and— Well, he hadn’t quite thought what was going to happen after that, but whatever it was involved a certain amount of smug self-satisfaction.

  So much for that.

  Lucien bowed to Miss Fitzhugh, taking refuge in pomposity. “Your concern does you credit, but I can assure you that your tender ministrations are entirely unnecessary.”

  “I never minister unnecessarily,” said Miss Fitzhugh indignantly. “That would be a waste of both your time and mine. You look like death.”

  That was the last thing he needed, more rumors about his supposed career as a creature of the night. “Not that again.”

  Miss Fitzhugh pursed her lips. “What I meant is that you look a bit like you just staggered up from a prolonged illness while still in the weak-tea-and-porridge phase.”

  It was a rather vivid image. Lucien’s lips reluctantly turned up at the corners. “I’m not sure that’s an improvement.”

  “No,” agreed Miss Fitzhugh. “If you tasted my nurse’s porridge, you would agree that death was by far the better option. At least death wouldn’t taste like glue.”

  Her words surprised a laugh out of him. It was a little rusty, but a laugh all the same. “I won’t ask how you know what glue tastes like,” Lucien said.

  Cocking her head, Miss Fitzhugh said with satisfaction, “That’s better. You look quite different when you smile, you know. Much less otherworldly.”

  Lucien regarded her narrowly. “Are you attempting to jolly me?”

  Miss Fitzhugh didn’t seem the least bit offended by the accusation. “Someone needs to. Otherwise those vultures will just go on speculating about your nocturnal habits.” She subjected Lucien to a frank appraisal. “You really aren’t doing yourself any favors by standing alone and scowling.”

  “Perhaps I wanted to stand alone and scowl.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Miss Fitzhugh serenely. “No one wants to stand alone and scowl. It’s simply the last resort of the socially inadept.”

  Lucien found himself without words.

  “You see?” said Miss Fitzhugh blithely. “Someone needs to show you how to get on.”

  And she was volunteering herself for the task? Lucien recovered his voice. “I do not need—”

  He staggered as someone bumped against him, hard enough to make him stumble.

  Miss Fitzhugh grabbed his arm. “If you’re going to swoon—”

  “I am not going to swoon.” Three people turned their heads to stare. Lucien lowered his voice. “Someone bumped into me.”

  He turned his head to look, but no one was there. There was, however, a folded piece of paper on the floor at his feet. Written on the side, in bold black lettering, was, simply, BELLISTON.

  “I think that’s for you,” said Miss Fitzhugh helpfully.

  Lucien scooped it up before she could reach for it and shook it open. The cream-colored paper was heavy, of good quality, the ink a rich black, but the handwriting was as shaky as if the author had penned it in the throes of ague, on a ship, in a strong wind.

  I know something you will wish to know. Meet me on the south balcony at midnight.

  There was no signature.

  Lucien glanced behind him. Too late. Three women who had been staring looked away hastily, and one of them pretended to swoon, but short of checking the fingers of all the partygoers for ink, he had no way of telling who had dropped the note.

  Something you will wish to know . . . He hadn’t made any secret of his intentions; he’d spent the years before he left England loudly voicing his plan to exonerate his parents. Someone might have got wind of the inquiries he’d had Patrice making, or overheard him speaking with Clarissa on the dance floor.

  “The balcony? At midnight?” Miss Fitzhugh peered shamelessly over his arm. “How trite. Really, people have no imagination.”

  Lucien crumpled the note in his hand. He felt irritable and edgy, half-anticipation, half-fear. “First my garden and now my correspondence? Haven’t you heard of the term ‘privacy’?”

  “If you leave them lying about . . .”

  “My garden,” said Lucien, “happens to be attached to my house. And my note was in my hand.”

  “Which was right under my nose,” Miss Fitzhugh pointed out.

  Lucien raised a brow. That nose had moved a few judicious inches in the right direction.

  Miss Fitzhugh was undaunted. She trotted along beside him as he made for the balcony. “I could hardly help seeing. And, really, it’s quite a good thing for you that I did.”

  “Oh, really?” It was, if the ornate clock on the mantel was correct, ten minutes to midnight. Miss Fitzhugh was right about one thing: midnight was a rather hackneyed time for an assignation.

  Not that Lucien would give her the satisfaction of telling her so.

  “It’s probably a thrill-seeker who wishes to be able to brag that she spent a few moments alone with the vampire,” Miss Fitzhugh said sagely, keeping pace with him stride for stride. “Either that, or a coronet seeker who wishes to be able to claim that she spent a few moments alone with a duke. You have no idea—no idea—of the lengths to which some women will go. Or the heights,” she added. “Lucy Ponsonby once scaled a wall in an attempt to ensnare a marquess.”

  “A wall,” said Lucien flatly.

  “Admittedly, it wasn’t a very high wall. It was more of a fence, really. But I’m sure you’ll agree that the principle remains the same. And a duke,” she added portentously, “is higher than a marquess.”

  Wouldn’t that
depend on the height of the wall on which he was standing? “Meaning—”

  “That you really must take care not to be compromised,” advised Miss Fitzhugh importantly. “I shouldn’t think that would be the sort of wife you would want.”

  Lucien stopped short in front of the French doors. “I don’t want a wife at all.”

  “Well, then,” said Miss Fitzhugh. She opened her eyes wide, and Lucien could see the glint of satisfaction in them. “You’d best not go out there alone.”

  There was a flaw in her logic the size of a very high wall, but Lucien was sufficiently discombobulated that he couldn’t find it.

  “Isn’t there a rule about young ladies on balconies?” Lucien asked desperately, as Miss Fitzhugh slipped past him.

  Miss Fitzhugh looked back over her shoulder, one long curl bouncing expressively. “It’s all right as long as we’re in sight of the ballroom,” she said airily, so airily that Lucien was reasonably sure she was lying. “Besides, my chaperone is right over there.”

  If her chaperone was the fair-haired woman with a harried expression who was currently scanning the ballroom with two little furrows between her eyes, then Lucien rather suspected that it was not, in fact, all right.

  “Is that your chaperone?”

  “Shhh!” said Miss Fitzhugh, rapidly grasping the gilded door handle. “She’s probably just looking for—for some more ratafia. Mmm, ratafia.” She held open the door to the balcony. “Don’t you have an assignation to keep?”

  “Assignations are generally better kept alone,” said Lucien repressively, although at this point he had to admit that he would be rather disappointed if Miss Fitzhugh were to decamp. As a means of distraction, she was remarkably effective.

  “Pooh,” said Miss Fitzhugh, and preceded him through the French doors.

  Lucien caught up with her just past a large Vanbrugh urn. “Why are you so eager to leave the ballroom?” Turn and turn about was fair play. “Don’t tell me it’s all altruistic interest in my humble affairs.”

  “Of course not,” said Miss Fitzhugh, entirely unruffled. “Your affairs would never be humble. Now, then, if you had instigated an assignation, where would you wait?”

  Miss Fitzhugh paused halfway down the balcony, surveying the scene with a busy air. On either side of her, red roses bloomed improbably in marble urns, hothouse flowers transplanted for the evening to enliven the unrelieved gray of the long stretch of stone. In the chill of the night, the flowers were already beginning to droop and fall, scattering red petals like drops of blood.

  The urns stretched out at regular intervals along the balcony, into infinity, punctuated only by marble benches, the sides curled and scrolled. They looked, thought Lucien, distinctly uncomfortable.

  There was no sign of life on the balcony.

  “It’s just as likely that there’s no one here at all,” Lucien said, as much for himself as for Miss Fitzhugh.

  His back was tense with a combination of anticipation and trepidation, his ears tuned for the slightest noise.

  I know something you will wish to know.

  Lucien squinted down the length of the balcony. If someone was there, it was just as likely to be Miss Fitzhugh’s hypothetical thrill-seeker, looking for an assignation with the vampire, or that wall-climbing woman, trying her luck with a duke. There was no reason to assume that it had anything to do with . . . anything else.

  Except for the hairs on the back of his neck, which prickled with expectation and cold.

  “There,” said Miss Fitzhugh suddenly, tugging at his arm.

  “Where?”

  Out in the deserted gardens, an owl hooted. Just on the other side of the French doors were light and noise, the thrum of voices and footfalls, but from where he stood, all that was strangely muted, like a voice heard in a dream. Moonlight reflected eerily off the pitted surface of the balustrade, lending an unearthly gleam to the landscape.

  “Don’t you see?” Miss Fitzhugh whispered. “She’s sitting on that bench. Waiting. For you.”

  She pointed all the way down to the right, far away from the reflected light of the ballroom windows. Among the shadows, Lucien caught a hint of white.

  “I’ll just wait here,” she added, pulling her light wrap around her shoulders. “In case you need me.”

  “How generous,” said Lucien drily. He had managed his own affairs before the intervention of Miss Fitzhugh.

  Admittedly, he didn’t seem to be managing them very well.

  There was certainly something at the end of the balcony, although whether or not it was, as Miss Fitzhugh claimed, a seated woman, Lucien couldn’t tell. At first, he thought it might merely be someone’s discarded wrap, a shimmer of spangled fabric against the stark gray stone of the balcony. But no. Miss Fitzhugh was right. As he approached, he saw a foot dangling beneath the fabric, a small foot in an impractical satin slipper, stained with some dark stuff.

  Lucien’s footfalls were heavy against the flagstones, but the woman made no move to rise.

  “Hello?” said Lucien tentatively.

  The woman appeared to have fallen asleep. She lay on the hard marble bench as though it were upholstered in the softest of velvet, her diaphanous white skirts falling gracefully around her legs. Her head had fallen back a little against the scrolled arm of the bench, her long black curls partly obscuring her face.

  In her lightly clasped hands rested a straggling bouquet of pale flowers.

  Like a funeral wreath.

  The full moon lent an uncanny clarity to the scene. Or maybe that was some long-buried, atavistic reaction, sharpening his senses. Lucien took a step forward, his own footfall echoing in his ears.

  The fabric of the woman’s dress was pathetically thin for the weather, the neckline cut low, but she betrayed no signs of cold. She lay entirely still, as still as the empty fountains and deserted paths of the garden. Her eyes were closed, her lips ever so slightly parted.

  Lucien didn’t need to hold a mirror to those lips to know that there was no breath between them, but he held out a hand all the same. Just because.

  “What is it?” There was a series of light footfalls on the flagstones. Miss Fitzhugh came to a stop behind him, her shadow touching the other woman’s tousled skirts. “Why are you—”

  She broke off, her eyes widening, her mouth rounding into a silent “Oh.”

  In the silence, Lucien could hear the rustle of fabric as Miss Fitzhugh’s chest rose and fell, and the small, damp noise as she swallowed. Hard. “Is that . . . Are those . . .”

  “Yes,” said Lucien.

  In the hollow between the lace ruffle of her dress and the dark fall of her hair, the woman’s skin was a clear, pale white.

  Aside from the two red marks at the side of her throat.

  Chapter Seven

  “Is she . . .” Sally’s throat felt tight.

  She stared at the woman on the marble bench, her flowing draperies arranged so carefully around her. So peaceful. So still.

  The duke drew his hand back. Sally watched as he rubbed the palm against his waistcoat. “Yes.”

  “Oh.” For once in her life, Sally didn’t know what to say. All she could do was stare and stare.

  Dead. She had never seen a dead person before. Well, unless one counted her great-aunt Adelaide, and one hardly did, because she had been properly in a coffin and not just lying there on a slab of marble like a princess out of a storybook waiting to be awakened by true love’s kiss. But nothing was going to wake this woman. That chest would never rise and fall; those eyes would never open. She would never wiggle herself upright on that marble bench and shake out those long skirts.

  Sally found her eye caught by the flowing folds of fabric, by the long, dark stripes and blotches that made an eccentric pattern down the sides and along the hem. She caught herself staring at it, trying to make sense of it. Any
thing but look at that cold, still face. And those two red marks on her neck. It was an odd sort of pattern, with no symmetry or order to it.

  Only it wasn’t a pattern at all. That was blood. Lots of blood. Long ribbons of blood, staining the woman’s dress and marking her shoes, twisting down her sides and caking her hem.

  There was bile at the back of Sally’s throat and a ringing in her ears; her hands felt cold and damp, but she couldn’t look away. All she could see was those long ribbons of blood, twisting and twining towards her. . . .

  The duke caught Sally around the shoulders. “Where’s that vinaigrette?” he said roughly.

  Sally wiggled in his grasp. “I’m not swooning.” She wasn’t really. The world had just gone a bit hazy for a moment. “I just—tripped on my own hem.”

  The duke looked skeptical, but he removed his arm all the same. Sally rather wished he hadn’t. Without the warmth of his body, the night air crawled along her bare arms like a cold, dead hand.

  Like the hand of the woman, dangling by her side, the fingers small, smaller than Sally’s, fine-boned and white.

  “I had never—,” Sally said wonderingly, and then caught herself. “She looks asleep.” Asleep and peaceful.

  But for the blood staining her skirt.

  Sally swallowed, hard.

  “I should get you inside,” said the duke.

  Sally drew herself up. “No. No. I’m quite all right. Really.”

  She wasn’t going to swoon, not in front of the duke. She could feel her nails making sharp half circles in her palms and forced herself to relax her hands, finger by finger.

  Didn’t she pride herself on her cool head in a crisis? Of course, in the past, her crises had been limited to propping up falling scenery in amateur theatricals and talking her way out of French exercises. For all that she thought herself a woman of the world, she had really lived a rather sheltered existence.

  Someone had placed flowers in the woman’s hands. It wasn’t an elegant bouquet. The stems were uneven, bound untidily in a trailing yellow ribbon. The flowers themselves were simple white flowers with a yellow dot in the center.