The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla

by Lauren Willig

  “So you’ll stay where you are?” Colin’s collar was up against the wind, giving me an obstructed view of his face.

  “Possibly in a larger apartment,” I said, and grimaced at the needy note in my voice. “Anyway. Here we are. One pub. As promised.”

  Shays was really a business school hangout, rather than a grad school one, but I’d thought Colin would prefer the sticky floor and round beer mats to the beige trendiness of Grafton Street. It was also one of the few places with an outdoor seating section, a tiny little sunken patio right off JFK Street. In a week or two, the unsteady metal chairs and tables would be dragged inside as the world battened down for winter, but right now it was just warm enough to sit outside with a glass of tannic-tasting red wine and enjoy the nip in the air and an arm around the shoulders.

  Most of the tables were already occupied by students celebrating an extended weekend with Thursday-night drinks, including a group that had pulled three tables together. We managed to snag one to ourselves, off to the side, still bearing the dirty glasses and crumpled check of the previous party.

  Colin neatly moved the detritus out of the way. “Gin and tonic?” he said, with the air of a man who knows.

  “Er—red wine, actually,” I said apologetically. “Whatever they have for their house plonk. No, sit. They’ll come to us.”

  Colin sank back down in his chair, and I found myself missing the Heavy Hart, where we had our regular routine, G&T for me, a pint for Colin, order at the bar, and ladies’ room to the back. Maybe it was that Colin was jet-lagged, maybe it was that I was tired, but our reunion felt oddly uneven, one minute comfortable and familiar, the next stiff and awkward, as if we were strangers on a train, forced into the false intimacy of sharing a limited space.

  “How are things at Selwick Hall?” I asked quickly, eager to bring us back onto familiar ground.

  Colin readjusted his cardboard beer mat. “Fine.”

  What is it about the word “fine” that always makes it sound quite the contrary? As if “fine” were a synonym for “altogether crappy and thank you for not inquiring further.”

  I shifted forward, making the iron table rock against the uneven flagstones of the patio. “Is everything okay?”

  “Brilliant.” Colin glanced up. “Where’s that waitress?”

  Serving a rowdy group of business school students, already dressed for Halloween. I counted one witch, one pirate, and at least two slutty vampires, one of whom was already several sheets to the wind.

  “She’ll be here in a minute.” Fighting a sense of impending doom, I asked, “Is Joan Plowden-Plugge still seeing Nigel Dempster?”

  Joan was the girl next door, although anyone less girl-next-door-ish would be hard to imagine. Fortunately, her designs on Colin appeared to have been quenched when she started dating Colin’s sister’s evil ex.

  Our lives were very complicated sometimes. Don’t even get me started on the rest of Colin’s family.

  Colin raised a hand to flag down the waitress. “I assume so. I made it a point not to find out.”

  I nodded vigorously. “As long as they’re keeping each other occupied.”

  My breath made little puffs of air in the evening chill. It was about ten degrees too cold to be sitting outside. But that wasn’t the sole source of the chill. What was going on with Colin? He might just be tired. He might. But all my antennae were quivering, like Miss Clavel in the Madeline books, who woke up in the middle of the night, sure that something was not quite right.

  Something wasn’t quite right here. I just wasn’t sure what it was. It wasn’t that Colin hadn’t seemed glad to see me. He had. He wouldn’t have hauled all the way out here just to break up with me, would he? No.

  At least, I didn’t think so.

  No. Definitely no. Or if he had, he would have done it right away, and then removed himself to a hotel. He wouldn’t have smooched me like we were still a thing and left his suitcase by my bed. That wasn’t Colin. He was honorable to a fault, and, for a male, remarkably straightforward about his feelings. When he bothered to express them.

  Which meant that it was something else.

  I waited while Colin placed our orders, frantically going through our conversation in my mind, trying to isolate the moment when he had pulled his classic hedgehog impression. My dissertation? He’d told me he didn’t mind my putting his family stories out there—not that there was terribly much risk, given that (a) it tended to take a good five years to get from dissertation to book, and another few years on top of that for the academic presses to grind their way to publication, via a slow boat to China, and (b) the circulation would probably be roughly ten academic libraries, four cranky reviewers, and my mother.

  “Is Jeremy behaving himself?” I asked. Colin’s stepfather had been a source of some drama in the not too distant past. He had designs on Colin’s home. Which he’d claimed he’d abandoned in the spirit of familial entente, but . . .

  “As far as I can tell.” Colin’s stony expression relaxed somewhat. “There haven’t been any more break-ins, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s a relief,” I lied. Jeremy would have been an easy one. We’d dealt with Jeremy before.

  Maybe Colin was just tired. Maybe that was all it was.

  The waitress plunked our drinks down in front of us, making the table rock dangerously. I plucked up my glass of wine before the suspiciously viscous liquid could slosh over the sides.

  “To your visit,” I said, a little too heartily, lifting my glass to Colin.

  “To your meeting tomorrow.” Colin tipped his pint in my direction. There was a crash from the neighboring table as one of the Slutty Vampires caught her feet in the paving and went catapulting over her own chair. “And to vampires.”

  Chapter Nine

  London, 1806

  Honor commanded that Lucien present himself, as promised, at Miss Fitzhugh’s residence the next day.

  Pride, however, dictated that he not do so too promptly.

  It was midafternoon by the time Lucien set off for Brook Street, easily evading the pursuit of a large man whose clumsy attempts at surveillance marked him unmistakably as a Bow Street Runner. The encounter did little to improve Lucien’s mood. Did the authorities really believe that he was a creature of the night who assuaged his bloodlust by supping from the veins of females wearing too much lip rouge? He hadn’t conducted an examination of the body, but he would have been willing to wager that the cause of death was more likely a knife in the back than a tooth in the throat.

  The whole affair stank to high heaven.

  Between the rumors, the note, and the disposition of the body, Lucien had the uneasy sensation that he was the prime actor in a drama whose script was known to everyone but him. He wouldn’t have been surprised to have touched the body to find that the flesh was wax, an elaborate prop in a play being enacted around him for purposes unknown to him.

  And what was Miss Fitzhugh’s role in all this? Last night, there had been no time to do anything but take her at her word; he had been over the balcony before he could question her advice or her motives.

  But the hours had passed and his head had cooled and Lucien found himself reexamining, with increasing disquiet, his brief acquaintance with Miss Sally Fitzhugh.

  If that was even her name. He had only her word for it, after all.

  It was the presumed Miss Fitzhugh who had, by her own admission, appeared in his garden the other night, and it was Miss Fitzhugh who had boldly presented herself to Lucien the night before. Was it mere officiousness or something more, something sinister? Her presence by his side at the exact moment the note was dropped began to seem something more than coincidence.

  Lucien conjured up the image of Miss Fitzhugh’s elegant figure and guinea-gold hair. In her pale gown, with her hair arranged in ringlets, she was the perfect image of a debutante—but for the d
isconcerting directness of her conversation.

  She couldn’t be his mother’s mysterious contact; she was too young. An actress, hired for the occasion? A confederate? The daughter of the original spy?

  No matter how Lucien turned the matter over in his mind, the pieces wouldn’t fit. If Miss Fitzhugh were part of a dastardly scheme designed to implicate him in murder, one would think she would have raised the alarm and drawn half the ballroom to their side, not urged him over the balcony.

  Unless, of course, that was merely a piece of the plot. In the wee hours of the morning, in his gloomy bedchamber in his parents’ abandoned mansion, Lucien’s paranoid imaginings ran rampant. What if the object weren’t his arrest, but this very meeting? The corpse might have been wax, the entire scenario designed to draw him out, to catch him off his guard.

  As he made his way across town, through a mist that drifted across the cobbles and hugged the trees, Lucien wondered just what he was likely to find at Number Twenty-two Brook Street. Miss Fitzhugh? Or a trap of some kind?

  If it was the latter, Lucien thought grimly, let them do their worst. He would welcome the opportunity to meet his adversary face-to-face. He had some questions that wanted answering—and a sword in his cane.

  The town house on Brook Street hardly presented a sinister aspect. Light shone in bright patches through the windows, fighting bravely against the gloom of a rainy afternoon. Lucien could see a drawing room through the drapes, with a pianoforte in one corner and some rather appallingly pink upholstery embroidered with carnations. It all looked entirely respectable and reasonably benign, but he kept a tight grip on his cane as he rapped on the door, half expecting a skeleton to tumble out at him, or someone in chains to gibber from the attic.

  “Yeth?” A man in black opened the door, regarding him with what might have been either a squint of suspicion or merely the result of extreme myopia.

  Lucien peered over the man’s shoulder, waiting for an ambush, but saw only a gold-framed mirror and what looked like a child’s fallen toy. The house smelled pleasantly of dried flowers, beeswax candles, and lemon oil. Lucien wasn’t entirely sure what duplicity was meant to smell like, but he doubted it was lemon oil.

  Unless, of course, this was a false address and he would find himself encountering an entirely unknown family rather than the mysterious Miss Fitzhugh.

  In his grandest voice, he said, “Tell Miss Fitzhugh that the Duke of Belliston is here to see her.”

  “Your grathe.” The butler bent low with an audible creaking of bones. “Ith your grathe would be tho kind . . .”

  Lucien stalked into the hallway. “Is Miss Fitzhugh at home?” he asked suspiciously.

  There was the smell of something baking, something involving apples and cinnamon. The scent made his stomach rumble. Lucien sternly silenced it.

  “Mith Thally ith otherwithe occupied,” the butler informed him. He appeared to have a bit of a limp as well as a lisp. “Ith your grathe would be tho good?”

  The butler gestured Lucien into a parlor notably lacking in thugs, armaments, or instruments of torture—unless one counted the tall harp in one corner—assured him that Mith would be with him prethently, and limped off to fetch Lucien refreshment.

  It was all suspiciously unsuspicious.

  A pair of double doors to Lucien’s right opened onto another parlor. “Well, really,” Lucien heard Miss Fitzhugh exclaim, in tones of distinct annoyance.

  Looking through a keyhole would have been undignified. A gap between the doors, however, was quite a different matter.

  Lucien positioned himself comfortably at the gap, through which he could see Miss Fitzhugh gesticulating with considerable vigor, her slender fingers fluttering. There was a man in the room with her. Lucien could make out only a frock coat of a dull brown and close-cropped gray hair, thinning in the back.

  “Really, Sir Matthew,” chirped Miss Fitzhugh. She sounded entirely unlike the decisive woman who had ordered Lucien off the balcony. “I can’t think what I can tell you that I didn’t tell everyone last night.”

  The man drew a notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open. Licking a finger, he thumbed through the papers.

  Lucien froze, transported to another place, another time. Standing in his mother’s greenhouse, as the magistrate in the case licked his finger and flipped through his notes, the susurration of the pages grating against Lucien’s raw nerves.

  The man turned, and Lucien knew there was no doubt as to his identity. The magistrate in charge of his parents’ case had worn a bagwig, while this man was close shorn. That man had been corpulent and red-faced; this man’s jowls had begun to sag. But they were undoubtedly one and the same.

  Lucien should know. He had dogged Sir Matthew’s footsteps, haunted his doorstep. The magistrate had shook him off as he might a flea. Upon hearing that Lucien had discovered his parents’ bodies, Sir Matthew had fired off a series of curt questions at Lucien, and then dismissed him to the schoolroom, refusing to answer his questions, turning a deaf ear to pleas that he be told what was going on. Ask your tutor, he had said curtly.

  But Sherry was already gone, gone the morning after Lucien’s parents died, and there was no one for Lucien to ask. Only Uncle Henry, who had squeezed his shoulder and looked sad and told him to go on, there was a good boy.

  Confused and alone, Lucien had been forced to piece together what had happened, bit by bit, from a patchwork of gossip and half-heard conversations. It would have meant so very much if Sir Matthew had taken half an hour, ten minutes even, to sit down with him and tell him frankly what had happened, what he believed to have happened. Instead, he had left Lucien in an agony of doubt and uncertainty.

  Lucien had been to hell and back; Sir Matthew didn’t look as if he had missed a hot dinner.

  A wave of blinding anger assaulted Lucien, enough to make his knees shake.

  Consulting his notes, Sir Matthew recited, “‘Dreadful, just dreadful. Oh, heavens, it was dreadful.’” He looked up at Miss Fitzhugh over his spectacles. “Do you have anything to add to that statement, Miss Fitzhugh?”

  Miss Fitzhugh lifted her chin imperiously. “It was a frightful experience. And I cannot believe you are being so unkind as to ask me to revisit it.” She clasped her hands to her chest in a manner reminiscent of Mrs. Siddons. “Have you no finer feelings, sir?”

  The magistrate looked pained. “What I have, Miss Fitzhugh, is a woman murdered.”

  And, from the looks of it, a massive headache.

  Lucien’s own head wasn’t feeling too clever. Sir Matthew was the magistrate they’d summoned to deal with the matter of the murdered girl? He supposed it made a certain amount of sense; Uncle Henry would have been familiar with him from Lucien’s parents’ case all those years ago. All the same, it filled Lucien with a deep sense of foreboding.

  Sir Matthew, as he recalled, had preferred to judge first, investigate later.

  If he knew that Lucien had been there on that balcony . . .

  “Well, it isn’t my fault I happened to discover her,” declared Miss Fitzhugh, managing to sound quite as empty-headed as any debutante could wish. “It might just as well have been anyone!”

  “But it wasn’t anyone, Miss Fitzhugh,” said Sir Matthew, with exaggerated patience. “It was you. And—”

  “I do call it most unfair.”

  Sir Matthew made himself heard over her by dint of main force. “—And yours is the only testimony we have as to the killer.”

  “Well, really.” Miss Fitzhugh gave a theatrical shiver. “Whoever it was, I am quite sure he had a hunch. And a limp. And possibly a harelip.”

  What the devil? Taking care not to jar the doors, Lucien pressed his eye to the gap.

  The harelip proved too much for Sir Matthew. “Are these attributes the evidence of your own eyes or the products of speculation?”

  Miss Fitzhugh open
ed her eyes wide. “Shouldn’t a villain look like a villain, Sir Matthew?”

  “Sadly,” said Sir Matthew drily, “most of them do not.” He looked at Miss Fitzhugh sternly over the pages of his notebook. “Do you know the Duke of Belliston?”

  Lucien tensed, waiting.

  “Oh, but of course!” Miss Fitzhugh gave a little hop of excitement. “Who doesn’t know about the Duke of Belliston?”

  Sir Matthew’s pen, which had begun to move, paused again. “That wasn’t precisely what I—”

  “Everyone was talking about him last night. Everyone. You do know that he was kept chained in an attic until he broke free? It’s all on account of the Gypsy curse, you know.”

  “The—” Sir Matthew appeared to be having difficulty speaking.

  “The Gypsy curse,” repeated Miss Fitzhugh, checking to see if he was writing it down. “That’s G-Y, not G-I. I do respect a good Gypsy curse, don’t you? There’s no sense in having a curse by halves. It was all over the ballroom last night, how the duke had been cursed in his cradle. Or maybe it was the duke’s mother who had been cursed in her cradle? And, then”—Miss Fitzhugh lowered her voice confidingly—“there are all those dead chickens.”

  Sir Matthew appeared to be in the early stage of apoplexy. His jowls quivered alarmingly. “Dead chickens?”

  “I don’t like to talk about the chickens,” said Miss Fitzhugh darkly.

  It was almost enough to make Lucien feel sorry for Sir Matthew. Almost. Through the gap in the door, Lucien eyed Miss Fitzhugh speculatively, trying to figure out just what she was playing at.

  Sir Matthew appeared to be having similar thoughts.

  “Miss Fitzhugh,” the magistrate said severely, “you do realize that obstructing the prosecution of a crime is a serious charge?”