The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla

by Lauren Willig

  Someone had lit the two tall flambeaux in front of the theater. The light lent a demonic orange tint to the purple mist swirling around them as they stumbled their way to the place where the carriage had been.

  Miss Fitzhugh set the lantern down with a thump on a hitching post. “I thought you’d left the phaeton here.”

  So had he.

  “It must have been farther down the street,” said Lucien, with more confidence than he felt. Safe enough at night, when the alley was thronged with theatergoers, the area felt less salubrious by day, especially wrapped in the all-enveloping mist. The buildings across the street were all dark and shuttered; the black windows like a dozen winking eyes.

  “What was that?” Miss Fitzhugh’s hand slid from his arm. Lucien could hear the whisper of her skirt, the patter of her boots as she took a couple of swift steps, her violet pelisse blending into the fog. “Who’s there?”

  Lucien’s instincts screamed danger. He snagged her by the arm before she could disappear into the mist. She swung around, coming up hard against his chest. “Ouch!”

  “Sorry.” Lucien didn’t let go. He hadn’t realized he had been holding his breath until he let it out. “What were you doing, wandering off like that?”

  “I didn’t wander off. Didn’t you see . . . ? There was a man. A masked man. Following us.” Miss Fitzhugh squirmed in his grip, straining her head to look back over her shoulder. “If you let me go, I might still catch him.”

  “I don’t see anyone.” Lucien’s hands closed around her elbows, drawing her closer as he looked over her shoulders, scanning for danger.

  “He was there.” Miss Fitzhugh squinted into the fog. “I’m sure of it—well, mostly sure of it.”

  “Mist plays strange tricks.” So did their killer. For a moment, he’d almost forgotten why they were here. Lucien swung around, keeping Miss Fitzhugh in the shelter of his arm. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone there now.”

  “Nooo . . .” Miss Fitzhugh sounded distinctly disappointed. She murmured something that seemed to include the words “if only” and “sword parasol.”

  Lucien placed a hand protectively on the small of her back, glancing back over his shoulder with a frown. “Let’s find that phaeton. We must have got turned around in the mist.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Fitzhugh, sounding distinctly unconvinced. “That’s it.”

  Lucien scooped up the lantern. “If not,” he said, with more confidence than he felt, “we’ll find a hansom cab.”

  “On a rainy Friday? It’s impossible to hail a hansom at this hour.” Miss Fitzhugh’s breath was short as she hurried to match his pace. “Or so I’ve been told,” she added quickly, from which Lucien gathered that young ladies weren’t meant to be hailing hansoms. “Oh, look! There’s the phaeton.”

  Lucien could hear the relief in her voice. It was echoed in his own. “If we’d come out the front, we’d have seen it right away.”

  The horses stamped their feet against the cobbles, whinnying faintly as they approached. The small boy he’d paid to watch them appeared to have decamped, leaving the reins lying looped on the seat.

  “Belliston . . .” Miss Fitzhugh’s hand closed on his sleeve. “What’s that?”

  The seat of the carriage was scattered with small white blossoms, slightly crushed, and a smattering of glossy dark green leaves.

  “Don’t touch those!” Lucien grabbed her hand before she could reach into the carriage. “Those leaves. They’ll give you a nasty rash.” And that was the best possible outcome. Lucien’s voice sounded strange to his own ears as he said, “They’re manzanilla leaves. They’re highly toxic.”

  Ingested, the sap caused a nasty, prolonged death.

  He should know. He had seen it.

  “Oh,” said Miss Fitzhugh, her eyes meeting his with sudden comprehension. And then, “There’s a note.”

  “I’ll get that.” Lucien reached gingerly with his gloved hand, plucking up the folded piece of paper by a corner. It had been sealed with a single blob of red wax. In the center of the wax was something that might have been a flower, or merely a squiggle.

  The wax was still warm.

  Handing it carefully, he broke the seal, Miss Fitzhugh’s breath warm against his cheek as she leaned close, straining to see over his arm.

  “What is it? What does it—” She rocked back on her heels. “Oh.”

  Stay away, it said, in shaky block letters. And then, in letters from which the ink blurred and dripped like drops of blood: Or she’ll be next.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cambridge, 2004

  The next afternoon, I stumbled up the stairs to the second floor of Robinson Hall, my third cup of coffee clutched in my hand, feeling distinctly bleary and out of sorts.

  It wasn’t just jet lag. Colin was, even for Colin, behaving oddly. He was abrupt, he was abstracted, he was affectionate one minute, he was out to lunch the next.

  In this case, literally. Around one o’clock, he had announced that he had errands to run, gave me a quick kiss on the lips, and, for lack of a better word, fled.

  Not that I could blame him. The day so far had been a painful exercise in overcompensation. As Colin had pointed out when I’d leapt over him to get to the coffeemaker, he was perfectly capable of making his own cup of coffee. He was even perfectly capable of making my cup of coffee. At Selwick Hall, he almost invariably did. He was the early riser; I was the snooze-button queen. There was usually coffee perked and waiting for me by the time I staggered downstairs.

  At Selwick Hall.

  I rubbed my aching shoulder with one hand. I hadn’t shared a twin bed since college. Clearly, in college, I had been a good deal less geriatric. I felt like a wizened crone, all kinks and crooked back. As for Colin, he’d wound up hanging so far off the edge of the bed, he was practically on the floor.

  So much for close and snuggly.

  In this case, close and snuggly had turned a bit claustrophobic. I was beginning to realize that part of what made our relationship work so well in the past was that we’d both had our own space, both literally and figuratively. When we’d been together, it had been a joyous thing, not a game of sardines.

  Okay, it was only for three more nights. We’d figure it out. The point was that we were together!

  No matter how many exclamation marks I added, I couldn’t quite work up the requisite enthusiasm. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Colin to be there. I did. It was just that I wanted everything to be as it had been before. That comfortable. That easy.

  I couldn’t quite shake the conviction that Colin was hiding something. Or, if not hiding, at least not sharing.

  It wasn’t just the midafternoon errands, species unknown. Colin had woken before me that morning. That wasn’t unusual. Colin always woke before me. What was unusual was that I’d woken to find flowers on the kitchen table, a bunch of anemic daisies in cellophane, with a note that was already slightly damp from floral leakage. The note—all three words, signed just with his initial in classic Colin mode—made me smile. The flowers, not so much, and not just because they looked like they were in the last gasp of consumption. Colin generally wasn’t the flower-buying kind.

  His buying me flowers was as unnatural as . . . well, as my making him coffee.

  Stopping to poke my head into the little cubbyhole of my mailbox, I sighed. We were both behaving like weirdos. It was, I supposed, to be expected, given that we hadn’t seen each other for three months. It might not even have been that bad if I hadn’t imagined his visit as something out of a Calvin Klein ad, all joyful cavorting on a black-and-white beach.

  Obsession, by Eloise.

  I had various theories. Jeremy had done something dastardly and Colin was feeling too sheepish to tell me. (Likely.) Colin’s mother had swooped back into his life in her disastrous way and made him feel crappy. (Highly likely.) Colin was secr
etly a spy, and his visit was a cover for a secret mission. (Unlikely.) My birthday surprise was an engagement ring and Colin was having preproposal jitters. (Highly unlikely.)

  Or, pointed out a sensible voice in the back of my head, it might just be that I was nervous about seeing my advisor, and it was easier to create dramas about Colin than face the fact that I was (a) terrified that Professor Tompkins would hate my chapters, and (b) terrified that he wouldn’t.

  Transference, that was what my best friend in college called it. Stressed out about an exam? Break up with your boyfriend. Procrastinating over a paper? Obsess over a crush.

  I’d thought I’d grown out of that sort of thing.

  Apparently not.

  There was nothing in my cubby but a flyer inviting me to a conference titled “Representations of Gender in the Transatlantic World.” Having procrastinated all I could, I hitched my bag a little higher on my shoulder and tromped off through the grad student lounge, waving to the department administrator—she who wielded the all-powerful professor signature stamps. (What? You thought professors actually bother to sign their own grade reports?) If this meeting went well, someday I might have my own rubber signature stamp.

  Senior grad students and junior faculty had their offices down in the basement, windowless cubicles separated by cardboard, down by the vending machine that never worked. In a literal representation of the food chain, senior faculty were graced with offices in the corners and crannies of the second floor, tucked away behind the student lounge, past the grad student mailboxes.

  And very senior faculty? They had the skyboxes, offices at the top of a flight of stairs that led incongruously up out of the middle of the grad student lounge, with windows looking down onto the lounge below. It made gossiping about our advisors a bit rough, knowing they were up there, looking down.

  Which was, presumably, the idea.

  My advisor had one of the skyboxes. Harvard had swiped him from Columbia ten years ago in a much-publicized act of academic piracy. Dr. Tompkins was, not to put too fine a point on it, rather a big deal in the field. And he knew it, too.

  I trudged up the narrow flight of stairs to an even narrower hallway, my bag weighing heavily on my shoulder. I don’t know why I’d felt the need to bring all two hundred pages of my fledgling dissertation with me. It just made me feel more prepared. It also weighed a ton. But that was good, right? Weighty was what we academics went for. Page forty-three had more footnotes than text.

  Megan’s file on vampires was in there, too, but I wasn’t sure I was going to show that. Not yet. Not until I had something more solid to tell him. My advisor was a political historian, which meant he went in for hard facts and tended to sneer at anything that smacked of cultural history, or, even worse, theory. He wasn’t a big fan of the Hist and Lit program except inasmuch as it tended to provide employment to his students.

  I could hear my advisor’s voice within, but no one seemed to be crying, so I had to assume it wasn’t a student-teacher meeting.

  I checked my watch. Three thirty. On the dot. I rapped gently on the door.

  “Just a minute.” Yep, he was definitely on the phone. If I scooted closer, I could catch some of the conversation.

  I heard the name “Steve” and leaned closer.

  Steve was one of my advisor’s older students. He’d long since graduated, but once a Tompkins student, always a Tompkins student. We were all of the lineage of Tompkins, and he plotted his legacy accordingly, maneuvering his academic offspring with the ruthlessness of a sixteenth-century monarch who harbored dynastic ambitions.

  Professor Tompkins had a reputation for moving his students around like pawns on a chessboard, positioning them not necessarily according to their own interests or desires, but as part of a master plan of his own devising. Admittedly, the master plan accrued to the greater good of the individuals involved. Eventually.

  “Stanford,” I heard through the door.

  So it was true about that tenure-track position opening up at Stanford. There had been rumors that Professor Dubinsky, one of the monuments in the field (girth as well as reputation), was planning to retire, opening a spot. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t have a shot at it. There would be fifty scholars on it faster than goldfish on fish food. But if I knew my advisor, Professor Tompkins was going to make a bid to get that job for Steve, who had graduated five years ago and currently had a junior faculty position at Catholic University in D.C., which would open up the Catholic job for Jessica, who was currently at the University of Oklahoma.

  Which made it increasingly likely that Professor Tompkins would try to push me towards Oklahoma. That was the way his mind worked.

  The Tompkins Dynastic Plan would be great for me five or six years down the road, when I was Steve, and there was a job opening at NYU or Princeton. Not necessarily so great right now.

  It was already more than six hours to England from Cambridge. It would be much longer from Oklahoma.

  On the other side of the door, Professor Tompkins moved on from Steve’s job prospects to a prolonged gossip fest about various colleagues. After five minutes, I took my ear away from the door. After fifteen minutes, I was slumped on the floor, leafing through Megan’s file, when my advisor finally called, “Come in!”

  I scrambled to my feet and blundered through the door, bag banging against my knee. This was a familiar routine. Professor Tompkins didn’t believe in rising from his desk to greet visitors; he simply swiveled in his chair to realign himself. He also didn’t believe in showing people out; departing guests were advised to shut the door behind them, and, sometimes, to show in the next person.

  Inside, Dr. Tompkins’s office was standard-issue circa 1980: beige carpet, shelves stapled unevenly to the wall, a rickety, round Formica table (which looked suspiciously like my parents’ old kitchen table) that served as conference table for grad student tutorials, or, as they were called in the department, Reading Groups. The desk was little more than a countertop, set against the far wall, under the window that looked out onto the grad student lounge.

  Such were the heights to which all grad students aspired.

  I dropped my bag on the floor and lowered myself into one of the sagging black swivel chairs.

  “Happy Halloween!” I chirped.

  My advisor grunted at me. This time, he hadn’t even bothered to swivel. He was squinting at his computer screen, giving me a good view of the back of his head. “Damn thing is frozen again,” he grumbled.

  That, I could sympathize with. “I hate when that happens.”

  Professor Tompkins glanced back over his shoulder at me. His hair stood up in two tufts on either side of his head, like one of the grumpy Muppets. “I don’t suppose you know how to fix it?”

  That would be the day. “No. Sorry.” I help up my hands. “Luddite.”

  Professor Tompkins’s eyes narrowed. Uh-oh. Poor choice of phrase. My advisor’s thing was the Chartists. He had published groundbreaking work on the Chartists. It irked him beyond reason that the Luddites got more press just because they had a catchy name.

  Also, they bashed machines, which does rather resonate with anyone whose computer has frozen in the middle of sending an e-mail.

  My advisor swiveled around so that he was facing the conference table rather than the desk. “I read your pages.”

  Pages. It made it sound like I’d handed him four pages of loose-leaf paper, rather than three hundred double-spaced pages larded with footnotes.

  “Thank you!” I said effusively. “I really appreciate your making the time.”

  “Mmmph,” said my advisor, and squinted at a pile of dog-eared pages that I recognized, vaguely, as the pristine manuscript I had dropped off last month. It appeared to have had ice cream spilled over it in the interim.

  He turned a page, then another.

  “So,” I said, clasping and unclasping my hands in my
lap. “Is Steve going for the Stanford job?”

  “Stanford will work nicely for Steve,” Professor Tompkins said briefly, as though it were a done thing. Perhaps it was. One of Professor Tompkins’s old drinking buddies was on the search committee.

  Other academics fell into two categories: drinking buddies or sworn enemies. Professor Tompkins hadn’t placed a student at Yale in years, due to a two-decades-old rivalry based on his Yale counterpart’s borrowing his tie without asking, back in grad school. On such small things do academic careers rise and fall.

  Professor Tompkins turned another page. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, and not just because the springs were gone.

  “So . . . ,” I said, “what do you think?”

  I wasn’t hoping for kudos, just for an okay. I knew that my topic wasn’t Professor Tompkins’s cup of tea—or, in his case, can of diet root beer.

  He was really a Victorianist. I’d come out of undergrad intending to work on the eighteenth century, specifically Jacobitism. But, academia being as it is, the eighteenth century tended to fall between the cracks, with the Tudor/Stuart folks on one end and the Modern Britain guys on the other. The Napoleonic Wars had been a compromise option, close enough to my advisor’s field to make him less cranky, but still part of “the Long Eighteenth Century” for me.

  Despite a lingering interest in Jacobites, I’d come to love my adopted topic.

  Professor Tompkins, not so much. He would have been much happier supervising a dissertation on midcentury popular political movements, not enterprising aristocrats with quizzing glasses and a knack for disguise.

  But it was what it was, and, having okayed the topic three years ago, he was honor-bound to see it through.

  Professor Tompkins looked up from his perusal. “Your source base is too heavily weighted to one collection.”

  I hadn’t seen that one coming.

  “You mean the Selwick papers?” I could feel a guilty flush covering my cheeks, which was silly. It wasn’t like I’d used the archives as an excuse to stay near Colin, mining a dead source. It was the other way around. Those archives were a treasure trove. Even if Colin had been knock-kneed and squinty-eyed with fish breath, I would have stuck around.