The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla

by Lauren Willig

  “Quite,” said Lucien in strangled tones.

  Uncle Henry cast a quick look at his wife. “If you would like to learn more of Hullingden’s history, Miss Fitzhugh, I—”

  Aunt Winifred’s bosom swelled. “The cost of maintaining a house such as Hullingden, Miss Fitzhugh, is more than you might imagine, even without the addition of such costly renovations as you propose.”

  Uncle Henry cast Lucien an apologetic look. “The revenues of the estate have been down over the past few years,” he said, in a conciliatory way. “There was the roof to be releaded and the old moat to be drained, not to mention the tenants’ houses . . .”

  “I’m sure everything is just as it should be,” said Lucien quickly.

  “You see?” said Aunt Winifred to Sally. “Renovations are quite out of the question. Even if they were wanted.”

  “Oh, that’s no matter.” Sally smiled sweetly and dipped her soupspoon into her bowl. “My dowry is quite appallingly large.”

  Aunt Winifred’s spoon clanked against her bowl.

  Sally looked reprovingly at Lucien. “Oh, dear. We really must do something about that cough of yours.”

  Lucien forced himself to swallow his laughter. “Don’t worry. It’s probably just plague,” he said nonchalantly. Turning to his sister, he said, “I hope we haven’t caused you to miss too many entertainments in London?”

  Aunt Winifred answered for her. “If Clarissa cannot go to London, London must come to Clarissa. I have,” she said coyly, “sent out a few more cards for your betrothal ball.”

  Lucien’s eyes met Sally’s. The more fanfare surrounding their betrothal, the harder it would be to cry off. “I had thought it was meant to be a small party.”

  “Really,” said Sally brightly. “How very kind of you. That sounds like a great deal of bother. I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble. Given the great effort of managing a house such as Hullingden.”

  “It won’t be a large party,” Aunt Winifred said, in the air of one making a great concession. “I have only sent out two hundred cards.”

  “Oh,” said Sally weakly. “Only two hundred.”

  “I can’t imagine many people will want to come all the way out to Leicestershire for an evening’s entertainment,” said Lucien reassuringly.

  Sally’s lips settled into a grim line. “For this,” she said, “they will come.”

  Lucien was rather afraid she was right.

  “Won’t they be afraid to travel on All Hallows’ Eve?” he asked hopefully. “Highwaymen are bad enough, but when one adds ghosts and ghouls . . .”

  “We,” said Aunt Winifred repressively, “do not celebrate such pagan festivities.”

  “As boys,” interposed Uncle Henry, “we used to bob for apples. Some of the tenant farmers carve lanterns out of turnips. Rather gruesome ones, too.”

  “Tenants,” said Aunt Winifred dismissively.

  Sally leaned forward, the milky surface of her pearls catching the light. “Don’t they say that’s the night on which ghosts walk?”

  “I think they’re meant to float,” offered Lucien.

  His betrothed nodded decidedly. “Preferably on battlements. Do you have any battlements tucked away in the old wing? If so, I will be sure to avoid them on All Hallows’ Eve.”

  “We do not need an occasion for the ghosts to walk at Hullingden.” Clarissa spoke for the first time, her voice as sharp and clear as glass. “They are with us all the time.”

  After that cheerful statement, no one showed any inclination to linger over the repast.

  The ladies left the gentlemen to their port, but since the gentlemen consisted only of Lucien and his uncle and the empty seat that Hal had been meant to fill, they engaged in no more than a ceremonial glass before rejoining the rest of the party in the Blue Salon, a large and rather chilly apartment in the new wing.

  Lucien found his betrothed in a corner of the salon, below an ornamental arch supplemented with a drape of blue velvet that made her fair hair seem ever brighter. “Miss Fitzhugh—”

  “Sally,” she corrected him. “If we’re to make this betrothal believable, we must play our parts properly.”

  Just how properly? Her hair was twisted up in a Grecian knot, the artfully arranged curls leaving her neck and shoulders bare. He could see the pulse beating at the base of her throat, the tender hollows of her neck, and, below, the slope of her breasts rising from the scooped neck of her dress.

  If this were a real betrothal . . . He still shouldn’t be thinking the sorts of things he was thinking.

  Sally’s lashes glittered gold at the tips. The shimmer drew the eye. Her words, however, were dishearteningly prosaic. “You should speak to your sister.”

  “My sister?” Lucien glanced over his shoulder at his sister, who seemed to be doing her best impression of Patience on a Monument, smiling at Grief. “Because she might know something?”

  “Because she’s unhappy. And you,” Sally said, as though that explained it all, “are her brother.”

  Lucien opened his mouth to point out that he barely knew Clarissa.

  And then closed it again. He remembered the easy affection between Sally and her brother. In her world, brothers looked out for their sisters. It was as simple as that.

  Lucien found that he couldn’t bring himself to disillusion her.

  And maybe she was right. Maybe it was as simple as that.

  Meekly, he said, “All right.”

  “Now?”

  Next week would be better. Or the week after that. He might be able to schedule a tooth extraction in the interim.

  “Now,” Lucien said resignedly. Before he marched off to do his duty, though, he couldn’t resist saying, “At dinner . . . were you determined to give Aunt Winifred an apoplexy?”

  Sally bared her teeth in Aunt Winifred’s general direction. “It wasn’t my original ambition, but I am finding the prospect increasingly attractive. What an appalling woman!”

  It didn’t help that Lucien agreed wholeheartedly. “She has been a very good steward to Hullingden.”

  “If stewardship consists of re-covering chairs and choosing drapes. You can tell she hasn’t the least feeling for the spirit of the place.”

  “Don’t you mean spirits?” said Lucien, and went off to corner his sister before Sally could think up a crushing retort.

  Clarissa’s silver-gilt head was bent over her embroidery as Lucien crossed the salon. Unlike Sally, she didn’t favor the curls currently in fashion. Her hair was braided into an elaborate knot that looked like a coronet.

  For all Sally’s warm sentiments, this woman was a stranger to him, as much a stranger as any woman one might meet in a ballroom. He knew nothing of her, or what her life had been these past twelve years.

  And that, as his sister had pointed out to him last week, was entirely his own fault. He had believed he was punishing himself with his self-imposed exile; it had never occurred to him that he might be hurting his sister as well.

  Feeling doubly guilty, Lucien claimed the seat next to his sister. “Might I beg a moment of your time?”

  Clarissa set aside her embroidery. “I have no other pressing commitments at present.”

  She looked up at him, and, for a moment, Lucien saw the little girl she had been, with her pale wisps of hair and those great, dark eyes.

  The polished words he had meant to utter fled, and he found himself saying instead, “What’s wrong, Clarrie? If I can make it right, I will.”

  It appeared that that had been absolutely the wrong thing to say.

  “Make it right?” His sister looked at him incredulously. “It was all right until you came home and ruined everything. And now here you are, with your intended, making eyes at one another across the dinner table, and I’m meant to wish you happy and pretend that everything is just as it should be. It’s n
ot fair.”

  Making eyes at one another?

  The words were rolling out, one after another. “It’s not fair to flaunt your happiness in front of me when you’ve cost me my—” Clarissa pressed her fingers to her temples. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying.” She mustered a stiff little smile. “Will you allow me to wish you happy and return to my needlework?”

  “No,” said Lucien bluntly. He reached over her needlework to try to take her hand, but she moved it out of reach. “How am I the cause of your unhappiness?”

  In profile, Clarissa’s nose was just a little too long for beauty. She had their father’s features, but on their father, the long bones had been lightened by a well-developed sense of humor. There were no leavening laugh lines on Clarissa’s face.

  “Do you remember Adam Standish?” she said abruptly.

  “Not well.” He had been closer to Clarissa’s age than Lucien’s. “At Broome Hall?”

  “Yes.” She looked down at her needlework, her eyes fixed on the elaborate pattern of leaves and flowers. The leaves looked uncannily like those of the manzanilla. “We were betrothed.”

  “No one told me.” Lucien still wasn’t sure what he had to do with any of this.

  “Of course they hadn’t,” said Clarissa impatiently. “We hadn’t announced it. Aunt Winifred insisted I have a Season first.” She made a face at their aunt, looking more like the little girl Lucien had remembered. “It was hardly out of the goodness of her heart. She’s determined to marry me off to Hal. Not that Hal is having any of it, thank heavens.”

  “What went wrong?”

  Clarissa cast a quick, furtive look over her shoulder to make sure the elders weren’t listening. “You. All those rumors. People started talking about the family and curses. . . .” Her lip curled. “Adam didn’t even have the basic decency to tell me himself. Just a horrible, stiff, formal letter saying that his parents wouldn’t hear of his marrying into such a family.”

  “‘Such a family’? You’re the daughter of a duke.”

  “Yes, but no one here ever really liked Papa,” Clarissa said, picking distractedly at her embroidery. “He didn’t hunt; he didn’t shoot; he was always dressed in the height of fashion. . . . And then there was Maman.” Her voice was rich with condemnation.

  True, the good matrons of the county had never taken to their mother. She was too foreign, too different; her interests weren’t theirs. Their mother had never minded. She had never seemed to know or care that there was a position she was meant to fill.

  It had mattered only afterwards.

  Lucien would have liked to argue with Clarissa, to take their mother’s part. His memories of their mother sparkled like prisms in the sunlight: impromptu excursions into the woods, swimming lessons in the reflecting pool, picnics and outings, unexpected trips to London, where they would descend on the big house in St. James and take the servants unawares, with Holland covers over the furniture like ghosts.

  His sister had been younger, so she remembered none of the good; she only suffered the legacy of the bad.

  Witchwoman’s brat.

  “If he feels that way,” Lucien said with false heartiness, “you’re better out of it.”

  Clarissa plucked at the edges of her embroidery with unsteady hands. “Maybe I should marry Hal. At least we would know where we stand.”

  “And endure a lifetime of Aunt Winifred?” Lucien was only half joking. His sister had had enough of that regime already. He thought he knew whence many of her attitudes about their parents had come. “There must be something better.”

  “Is there?” Clarissa looked up at him sideways. “I suppose you must think so—with your Miss Fitzhugh.”

  Lucien was tempted to tell her the truth, if that might soothe some of Clarissa’s hurt, but a modicum of common sense held him back. Wounded animals tended to strike out at friend and foe alike.

  Clarissa stabbed the needle through the cloth. “I imagine by the time she’s through with it, Hullingden will hardly be recognizable.”

  She sounded so much like Aunt Winifred that Lucien looked at her in surprise. “Moving the kitchens is hardly the same as tearing down the battlements.”

  Across the room, he could see Sally looking at them expectantly. Sally, who had told him that it was his duty to comfort his sister. She might be a little outspoken at times, perhaps even a little imperious—all right, very imperious—but there wasn’t a mean-spirited bone in her body. Her meddling was all kindly meant.

  She certainly didn’t deserve to be stabbed in the back by the very woman she had sent him to help.

  Sharply, Lucien said, “Perhaps a little change is just what Hullingden needs. As you say, we’ve allowed the spirits of the past too much sway.”

  “As you like.” Setting her needlework aside, Clarissa rose from her seat. “Then I suppose I shouldn’t tell your Miss Fitzhugh that Aunt Winifred put her in the Haunted Chamber?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sally’s room looked like it hadn’t been slept in since the last time Queen Elizabeth had paid a formal call.

  The bed was of the baronial variety, with vast carved posts, and hangings that could be drawn shut to keep out drafts, mice, and the odd ghost. The casement windows, with their leaded glass, appeared to have been designed to keep out the light and let in the draft. They rattled ominously as the wind rose, straining against the catches that held them fast and causing the candles in their tall stands to gutter.

  It was all very atmospheric and entirely inconvenient.

  When Lady Henry had delivered Sally to her room, she had told her, in smug tones, that she hoped Sally wouldn’t mind being in the Haunted Chamber. The implication being, of course, that she would run howling off into the night and never darken their casements again. Sally didn’t believe in spooks, and even if she had, she doubted any spook would have the poor sense to haunt a chamber known as the Haunted Chamber. It showed a distinct lack of initiative. She was, Sally was quite sure, more in danger of being pickled from the smoke blowing back down the chimney than of being visited by midnight specters.

  If she were staying, one of the first things she would do would be to order the chimneys rebuilt. There was no reason for them to smoke the way they did. Some larger flues, more modern chimney pots—really, this room could be quite cozy without a haze of smoke.

  And then there was that dining room. It was foolish for the family to have to choke through cold soup for the sake of dining in baronial state when they were en famille. There were a dozen small chambers that didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular, all of them closer to the kitchens. One might easily be turned into a family dining room while the kitchens were being reconsidered.

  Even she couldn’t redesign the kitchens without having seen them, but she’d wager that they were of the subterranean, late-medieval variety, with huge fireplaces designed for roasting whatever the lord of the manor happened to haul in over his saddle. A nice modern kitchen, that was what was needed, connected to the house by a covered gallery so that the food didn’t turn to ice in winter. And think of all the work it would make for local masons!

  If she were staying. Which she wasn’t.

  Sally retrieved her hairbrush and plied it so vigorously that her hair crackled. This faux betrothal was proving more complicated than she had expected. She knew she shouldn’t be making these sorts of plans; it wasn’t her place. But every word Lady Henry had said just made Sally itch to whip Hullingden Castle into shape, to turn it into the kind of home it could be—the kind of home Lucien needed.

  There had been no mistaking the pride and affection in his voice as he had shown her around the gardens. Sally set down her brush with a thunk. The duke belonged here, even if Lady Henry didn’t think so.

  Even if his own family treated him like an unwanted guest.

  It was no wonder Lucien had run away. His
uncle treated him with an anxious affection of the sort designed to make a healthy male twitchy; his aunt accorded him the heavy-handed courtesy owed an uninvited visitor. As for his sister—Sally had been inclined to be sympathetic at first, but she was coming to believe that what Clarissa Caldicott needed was a good dose of salts.

  She wasn’t the one who had found her parents’ bodies.

  Really, had no one thought of Lucien in all this? Had no one taken the time to inquire after his feelings, to make him feel welcome in his own home? The very thought of it made Sally’s blood boil. They all treated him like an inconvenience, and the worst of it was that he, poor man, just sat back and let them do it. Vampire, ha! The man was too good-natured for his own good. He let them all run roughshod over him, and apologized to them for doing it.

  Someone, Sally decided grimly, needed to do something.

  She coughed as another gust of smoke blew back down into the room.

  Starting with the chimneys.

  Shaking back her hair, she pulled her dressing gown around her shoulders, and went to peer ineffectually around the fire screen. The wind was whistling back down the chimney, producing more smoke than heat. There must have been a bird caught in the flue. Sally could hear a rustling and scrabbling that seemed to echo from behind the stones.

  A bird? Or mice? Sally wrinkled her nose. She really wasn’t the least bit fond of mice. Ghosts were one thing; rodents quite another. Ghosts didn’t chew one’s pillow and leave nasty droppings in one’s shoes.

  The scrabbling was louder now. It sounded almost like . . . footsteps. Sally lifted the poker, edging closer to the fireplace. If that was a mouse, it had awfully large feet. And was wearing boots.

  Nursery rhymes to the contrary, mice, in Sally’s experience, did not generally go shod.

  The tapestry hanging to the right of the fireplace undulated in the draft, a draft that seemed to come from nowhere. The candles guttered and sputtered as the sound of the wind whistling down the chimney resolved itself into a low moan, a moan that sounded like someone, in a rasping voice, calling, “Sally . . . Sally . . .”