The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla

by Lauren Willig

  “Her dressing room.” Sally nearly tripped over the folds of the duke’s cloak. “Is it still as it was?”

  “You can look at it if you like,” offered Mr. Quentin doubtfully.

  “We like,” said Sally promptly, and took the duke by the arm, dragging him forward before Mr. Quentin could change his mind. “Show us the way.”

  Perversely, Sally found herself hoping that their woman wasn’t Miss Logan after all, that there would be something in her dressing room to corroborate Mr. Quentin’s claim that she had simply left, of her own volition. She wasn’t quite sure what that something would be: it was too much to hope that the woman would have left a signed affidavit stating that she had left, thank you very much, and wasn’t at all lying dead in the morgue with fang marks on her neck.

  Would that take the wounded look from the duke’s eyes? Probably not. But it might go some way towards helping.

  Mr. Quentin led them through a door in the side of the stage, down a short corridor, and through an unmarked door. Unlike the front of the stage, which was gaudily decorated, the back regions were dusty and unadorned. Inside the dressing room was another matter entirely. The windowless room was crammed with fashionable furniture, all just a little shabby, the upholstery just a little worn, the giltwork just a little chipped. The dressing table was cluttered with paint pots. Paste jewelry glittered in the light of Mr. Quentin’s lantern, hanging off the side of the mirror, fallen on the floor, decorating the hems of gowns and the heels of shoes. Great bouquets filled the vases at various places throughout the room, enveloping the small space with the sickly sweet smell of half-dead flowers.

  Pinned roughly to the wall was a series of engravings, the sort one saw in stationers’ shops with the faces of the current beauties on them. These all featured the same woman in different poses.

  “She was so proud of those pictures,” Mr. Quentin said roughly. He cleared his throat. “Don’t mind me. Just a touch of the grippe.”

  “That’s she,” said the duke. Sally wasn’t quite so sure, but his voice brooked no disagreement. “That’s the woman we found.”

  Mr. Quentin set the lantern ceremoniously on a small table. “I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said tactfully. He turned to the duke. “Lucien . . .”

  “We can see ourselves out.” The duke busied himself with drawing off his driving gloves. As an afterthought, he added, “If you recall anything that might be of use to the investigation, I suggest you contact Sir Matthew Egerton.”

  There was regret on Mr. Quentin’s face, but he accepted the dismissal without demur. “I shall.” Pausing in the doorway, he subjected his former charge to one last, long look. “If you need me, my door is always open to you.”

  The door closed behind him.

  Sally looked at the duke, her lips pursed.

  “These doors are always open to anyone,” said the duke defensively. “Here.” He thrust a pile of tumbled costumes into Sally’s arms. “I’m not sure what we’re looking for, but since we’re here, we might as well look.”

  “You were very rude.” Sally dumped the pile on a stool and went to the dressing table instead. “I like him.”

  “Oh, yes, he’s very likable,” said the duke disagreeably. “Actors generally are.”

  “He’s not an actor; he told us so himself.” Sally looked at the duke over her shoulder. “You wouldn’t be so disagreeable if your feelings weren’t wounded.”

  The duke disappeared behind a large embroidered screen. His voice, slightly muffled, emerged from behind the frame. “There are three people dead. That’s hardly a little case of wounded feelings.”

  Sally sat gingerly down at the dead woman’s dressing table. There was a fascinating array of paints laid out on a silver tray and, next to them, a box of cherrywood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, far nicer than anything else in the room. “I thought you said spies murdered your mother.”

  The duke’s head popped over the top of the screen. “What Mr. Quentin isn’t telling you is that he was a member of a series of revolutionary societies.”

  Sally poked at the box, looking for secret compartments. She had one rather like this. If one pressed in just the right way . . . “That’s hardly illegal.”

  “Actually,” said the duke, “it is. But that’s beside the point. My mother had a contact. How do we know it wasn’t Sherry? How do we know he didn’t leave because his work there was done?”

  “Or,” suggested Sally, carefully keeping her voice matter-of-fact, “he might have left because he was dismissed.”

  The duke shook his disembodied head. With the dark waves of his hair disordered around his face, he looked more than ever like a poet’s romantic ideal of a tortured hero. “And now we have a dead woman who worked for him. We have only his word for it that this Fanny even had a protector.”

  Sally’s fingernail hit a crack in the wood and a little drawer popped out of the cherrywood box.

  “His word and these letters,” she said smugly.

  Chapter Twelve

  “I have a box just like this,” said Miss Fitzhugh cheerfully, as she neatly dispatched the blue ribbon holding together the packet of papers. “So, naturally, as soon as I saw this one . . . Goodness, did people really do such things? I can see why she tucked these out of sight. Her protector appeared to have a pet name for her—”

  “I’ll take those.” Lucien plucked the papers out of her hands.

  Miss Fitzhugh was certainly right about the nature of the documents. The first one, dated six months before, began with the words “I burn.” The subsequent elaboration made clear that the writer wasn’t referring to a freak cooking accident.

  Lucien flipped the paper over. With some disappointment, he said, “There’s no signature.”

  Miss Fitzhugh sat back on the stool. “No, and I’m not surprised! Would you put your name on that?”

  Looking down at her, Lucien raised a brow, his voice rich with amusement. “I would prefer to voice such sentiments in person rather than committing them to print.”

  “Do you— Well, never mind.” Miss Fitzhugh hid her blushes in a brisk reorganization of Miss Logan’s paint pots. “At any event, there’s your protector. I mean, Fanny’s protector. Goodness, it is close in here, isn’t it? You would think they would have arranged for a window.”

  “Mmm,” said Lucien, busily scanning Miss Logan’s correspondence. The letters certainly bore out Sherry’s story—and his reading of Fanny Logan’s character.

  Not that that proved anything, Lucien told himself hastily. It was still just too much of a coincidence, Sherry appearing out of nowhere, after all this time. Sherry, who had belonged to subversive societies. Sherry, who had been in love with his mother. Sherry, who had left without a word.

  In this, at least, though, Sherry had been telling the truth.

  Miss Fitzhugh was craning her neck, trying to see over his arm. “You’re holding them too high,” she protested.

  “I’m trying to spare your blushes,” said Lucien drily.

  Miss Fitzhugh sniffed. “I’m hardly so naïve as that.”

  Lucien lifted his eyes from the letters. “No?” he said lazily, and had the satisfaction of watching Miss Fitzhugh bristle.

  Miss Fitzhugh lifted her chin. “I am in my second Season,” she said importantly. And then, when Lucien merely raised a brow, she said, “People talk.”

  “Talk,” said Lucien, “was not what Miss Logan’s protector had in mind.”

  This time, Miss Fitzhugh didn’t go pink. Instead she said, with admirable self-possession, “No. I don’t imagine it was her conversation that attracted him.”

  She tilted her head up at Lucien, as if to say, So there.

  She looked delightfully smug, her blue eyes bright with satisfaction, her very pose an unspoken challenge.

  In fact, she looked like a woman waiting to be kissed. And
if she weren’t the innocent she claimed not to be—which she was, Lucien reminded himself, however many Seasons she might have had—he wouldn’t have the least bit of compunction about taking her up on that offer.

  All it would take was one step, one step forward, and then he could slide his hand beneath that artfully arranged hair, beneath that single curl that bobbed and bounced and drew the eye to the sleek line of her neck, rising above the demure braid collar of her walking dress. He would drop to one knee in front of that silly little stool and kiss the smile from the corners of her eyes. He would kiss the tender spot at the side of her neck, and the pulse in the hollow of her wrist, where her glove parted from her sleeve.

  And then, when desire replaced surprise, when her breath quickened and her eyelids flickered, he would draw her down towards him and kiss those ripe red lips, kiss them until the papers fluttered unheeded to the floor around them, kiss them until neither of them remembered why they were there, or anything but that they were.

  “Duke?” Miss Fitzhugh was watching him with bright eyes. She waved a hand. “Belliston? Are you quite all right?”

  Lucien tugged at his collar. She was right. It was rather close in here. “Perfectly,” he said. “I’m just—thinking.” That was it. Thinking.

  “Is there any clue in there to his identity?” Miss Fitzhugh leaned forward, her bosom molding the supple material of her dress.

  His? Oh, yes. Miss Logan’s protector. Lucien gave himself a little shake. He hadn’t felt this randy since his Louisiana cousins had taken him, a raw seventeen, to their favorite little house of pleasure. He’d walked around in a happy haze for a week.

  And he should absolutely not be picturing Miss Fitzhugh wearing a boned corset and draping herself across a red velvet settee.

  Lucien hastily directed his attention back to the letters. “Whoever he was, she seems to have kept him on a short leash.” Some imp prompted him to add, “Metaphorically speaking.”

  Miss Fitzhugh narrowed her eyes at him, but didn’t ask what she was clearly burning to ask. Instead, she pursed her lips speculatively. “What if she pushed him past bearing?”

  It was a tempting theory. “It sounds as though she was bleeding the poor devil dry.” Lucien glanced down at the smudged pages. The writing grew more irregular as the correspondence progressed and the author grew correspondingly desperate. “She set a high price on her favors.”

  Miss Fitzhugh looked down at her hands, her expression troubled. “That isn’t much of an epitaph, is it?”

  “If Sherry was telling the truth, it’s a just one.” The old nickname slipped out without his meaning it to, bringing with it a stab of raw pain.

  He’d scarcely thought of Sherry all these years, but now that he was here, all the old emotions came coursing back. Sherry had been the closest thing he’d had to a brother. The man had been telling the truth when he said he’d been scarcely older than Lucien was now; he’d been fresh out of university, just old enough to be worldly, but young enough to be a friend as well as a tutor. Lucien had looked up to him, had striven to emulate him in all things.

  Against the greater tragedy of his parents’ deaths, Sherry’s defection had been a small wound. But it had ached all the same. Lucien had lost his parents, his confidant, and his home, all in the same week.

  It was hard to speak to this new Sherry—to Mr. Quentin—without remembering the man he had known, without instinctively trusting him.

  His own memories betrayed him. He’d remembered his childhood at Hullingden as a halcyon time, his parents devoted, his tutor a trusted companion. But his mother had been selling information, and Sherry—Sherry might have been plotting goodness only knew what.

  Lucien shoved the letters into his waistcoat pocket. “It’s past four. We should be getting back.” Before Miss Fitzhugh could protest, he said provocatively, “You must be done buying laces by now.”

  “Buying— Oh. Right.” Miss Fitzhugh took his hand and let him help her to her feet. “With any luck, Parsnip will have got into another pot of jam. They won’t have any notion that I’m gone.” Changing the subject, she said, “Tell me about Mr. Quentin.”

  “He was Mr. Sheridan when I knew him. Sherry.” It was easier to think of the man they had met in the theater as Mr. Quentin, a different creature entirely from his own Sherry. Lucien shrugged. “There’s nothing to tell. You know as much as I do.”

  “No,” said Miss Fitzhugh, “I don’t. Not if you won’t confide in me.”

  What was there to confide? “My mother was a spy and my old tutor is most likely a cold-blooded killer.” Lucien retrieved his cloak from the chair on which Miss Fitzhugh had deposited it and swirled it around his shoulders. “I should have stayed on the other side of the ocean.”

  He had been happy in New Orleans. As happy as one could be in perpetual exile, with unfinished business left behind.

  “Was that where you were?” Miss Fitzhugh lifted the lantern that Sherry had left with them. Strange shadows played along the walls of the narrow corridor. “Gossip has it that you were chained in an attic. Or in the family crypt.”

  “Gossip was wrong.” His parents had been laid to rest in the crypt, beneath marble slabs with their names engraved in the stone, the lettering fresh and raw beside the graves of his ancestors.

  “Obviously,” said Miss Fitzhugh. Skirting a pile of sandbags, she pressed her advantage. “And you might be wrong about Mr. Quentin. Whoever arranged that body has a twisty sort of mind.”

  “Theatrical.” The word was bitter in Lucien’s mouth.

  “Yes. I mean—no!” Miss Fitzhugh paused, the lantern suspended in her hand. “If I were a theatrical impresario, the last thing I would do would be to draw attention to myself by killing one of my own actresses. Or if I were to kill one of my own actresses, I would be sure to do so in a way that didn’t draw any attention to me.”

  “That’s just what was done,” said Lucien wearily. “She was left in Richmond. Her appearance was altered. If you hadn’t recognized her, we’d never have traced her back to Pudding Lane.” He could hear rustling and scratching behind them, undoubtedly mice in the wainscoting. “Didn’t someone once say that the simplest solution is usually the best?”

  “Yes, a person with no imagination.” Miss Fitzhugh discarded Occam’s razor without a qualm. “The simplest solution is merely the path of least resistance. It doesn’t mean it’s right.”

  Lucien walked faster. They ought to be in the wings by now, but the corridor went on and on, piles of scenery propped against the walls, dressing room doors on either side. “Why are you so determined to defend him?”

  Miss Fitzhugh hurried to keep up, one hand holding her skirts, the other the lantern. “Because you cared for him once. Would your own instincts lie?”

  His instincts were the last thing he’d trust right now. The corridor dead-ended on a door with a heavy latch. They had taken the wrong turning. He couldn’t even do a simple little thing like get them out of the theater right.

  Lucien’s frustration expanded to encompass the door, the corridor, the whole situation. Backed into a corner, he said shortly, “My instincts are about as honest as a harlot’s kiss.”

  “Well, then.” Miss Fitzhugh’s skirts brushed his legs as she wormed her way around him. “This isn’t the stage.”

  “No,” agreed Lucien. Behind them, bits of discarded scenery littered the corridor like the debris of a shattered world: fallen columns jostled with stone towers; stairs leading to nowhere loomed above chaise longues upholstered in tattered velvet. “We should be able to get out this way.”

  Lucien gave the latch an experimental rattle. The door held fast, the metal latch clanking against the wood.

  Behind them, there was a loud crack. The lantern swayed wildly as Miss Fitzhugh swung around, setting the shadows leaping, strange shapes looming and dancing all along the corridor. Dust rose in the air,
the motes turning a demonic orange in the lantern light, making Lucien’s eyes water and his throat sting.

  Inhaling deeply, Miss Fitzhugh lowered the lantern. “It’s a bit of scenery. I must have brushed it with my skirt as I passed.”

  “Yes, that must be it,” Lucien agreed.

  Was it his imagination, or could he smell the cloying scent of dead flowers, stronger now than it had been before?

  He peered down the corridor, but all was still now. Even the rustling and scrabbling in the wainscoting had stopped. It was all as silent as the grave.

  “It’s rather odd without the actors, isn’t it?” said Miss Fitzhugh. She craned her neck to look over her shoulder. “A little . . . eerie.”

  As if in answer, something creaked behind them.

  “Old buildings settle, don’t they?” said Miss Fitzhugh gamely.

  Lucien slid his hand into the secret pocket of his cloak, reaching for his pistol. He was sure it was all their imaginations, the result of the strange lighting, the fragments of a hundred illusions, but, just to be safe . . . “This building isn’t that old.”

  He gave the latch another tug, and this time the door gave, opening with a tremendous screech that made Miss Fitzhugh draw in her breath.

  Cold air came rushing in, along with fingers of mist that swirled along the tops of Lucien’s boots and plucked at his hair.

  “We’ve come out at the side,” said Miss Fitzhugh. There was a cobbled courtyard, the stones all but obscured by a low-hanging fog. She reached to hang the lantern on a hook on the wall, and then thought better of it. Dark hadn’t yet fallen, but the gray sky lent only a thin, pale light that barely penetrated the rising mist. “I’m sure Mr. Quentin won’t mind if we borrow this.”

  “Let’s get you home,” said Lucien, possessing himself of her arm. “It’s later than I like.”

  The sound of his bootheels echoed eerily behind them as they hurried across the courtyard. The swish of Miss Fitzhugh’s long skirts against her half boots sounded like the whispers of a hundred malicious tongues.