The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla

by Lauren Willig

  “Of all the—,” Sally began indignantly.

  “Wait.” Lucien’s voice was too loud for the small landing. He could hear it echoing in his ears. He forced himself to focus on his cousin’s face, the familiar Caldicott features, the fair hair dark with damp. So familiar, and yet so alien. “How did you know that?”

  Hal’s eyes shifted. “Shaw—I mean, saw—him in the Cockeyed Crow. Told you that. Jusht now.”

  “No.” Behind him, Lucien could hear Sally’s sudden sharp intake of breath. He forced himself to go on, to ask his cousin the one question he didn’t want to ask. “How did you know who she was?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  It felt suddenly cold in the passageway. Hideously, bone-jarringly cold. Sally felt a sick jolt in the pit of her stomach.

  The cunning of the extremely drunk spread across Hal’s face. “Saw her in the play, of course,” he mumbled. “Who didn’t know Fanny?”

  Lucien’s cousin was a remarkably poor liar.

  “It was you,” Lucien said. It was a statement, not a question. He stepped back, away. “You were her protector.”

  “That was you?” Sally gave up any effort to hide either her presence or her disgust. “You wrote those letters?”

  Hal’s head whipped around, his cheek scraping against the stone. “I—you—you’ve read them?”

  “Every last, excruciating line.” She hadn’t, but Hal didn’t need to know that. The two she had perused had been more than enough. Sally drew herself up to her full height, an avenging angel in an embroidered nightdress. “You, sir, have some explaining to do.”

  Hal looked from one to the other, and evidently decided Lucien was the less alarming of the two. He grasped at Lucien’s brocaded sleeve, his damp fingers scrabbling against the cloth. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t have anything to do with Fanny’s death. You have to believe me, Lucien. I didn’t do it!”

  The duke’s expression was carefully expressionless. Something about it made Sally ache. “Why didn’t you come forward at the time?”

  “Why—” Hal laughed wildly. “Do you think I’m mad? They would have blamed it on me! They would have thought—”

  “Instead you let them blame it on Lucien.” Sally’s voice was sharp as a lash. “How terribly noble of you.”

  Hal looked again from one to the other, like a caged beast. “It wasn’t like that! You don’t understand.” He made an effort to draw himself up. “Couldn’t do that to old Clarissa, not at her ball. Couldn’t let them think I—”

  “Oh, but it was better to let suspicion be thrown on her brother?” Sally stalked forward. “That would enliven her party no end, having her brother hauled away in chains for murder. Not that you would care, would you?”

  “I didn’t mean—” Hal stumbled back as Sally advanced, her skirts rustling purposefully against the stone floor.

  “How terribly fortunate for you, to have such a convenient scapegoat on hand to take the blame for your crime.” Sally held the candle high, letting the light shine full in Hal’s face. “Did you kill her, Mr. Caldicott? Did you paint those fang marks on her neck?”

  “Did I—fang marks—no! No!”

  Lucien gently moved the candle out of the way. “Why should we believe you? What cause have you given us to trust you?”

  “Because I wouldn’t!” Hal looked desperately from Lucien to Sally and back again. He slumped down on the stairs, like a marionette with the strings cut. His voice was muffled as he said, “God knows I thought about it. That woman—you don’t know how it was.”

  “We’ve read the letters,” said Sally pointedly.

  Lucien looked down at his cousin. “What happened, Hal?”

  Hal pressed his hands against his temples. “She was like a disease, and once I’d caught her, I couldn’t get free. God! She made me crazy.” He looked up, his eyes glazed with gin and memory. “She’d smile and laugh and promise me everything—and then the next day she’d be cool as you please. I would have done anything to have her. Anything.”

  Lucien crouched on the stairs beside him. “How badly were you dipped?”

  “Dipped? To my limit. Beyond. Couldn’t go to Father—he wouldn’t understand. Meant to hold up the name of the Caldicotts. Blasted family name.” He cast a sly look at Lucien. “Not as though it ain’t besmirched enough already.”

  Sally’s hands itched with the desire to shake the smug look off Hal Caldicott’s slack-jawed face. “Those are rumors,” she said coldly. “Rumors based on nothing more than boredom and sheer idiocy. What’s your excuse?”

  “Madness.” Hal looked wildly at Lucien. “They say we’re mad, don’t they?”

  “No,” said the duke. “They say I’m mad.”

  He sounded impossibly tired. Sally resisted the urge to go to him and put her arm around his shoulders and draw his dark head to her breast.

  Hal tugged at his caped greatcoat where it had become tangled around his shoulders. One of the many fobs on his waistcoat pulled off, falling to the floor with a discordant clang. “She claimed I’d promised to marry her. Can you imagine? An actress?”

  Sally thought back to that poor woman, the one who had nursed the first baron back to health after Bosworth Field. “Did you?”

  Hal’s eyes shifted. “Not in so many words—I’m not that stupid!”

  Sally’s eyes met Lucien’s. It didn’t take much insight to tell what the duke was thinking.

  Hal saw it too. His cheeks flushed. “It was just—she wouldn’t have me any other way! There was nothing binding.”

  “No,” said Lucien. He rose slowly to his feet, stepping away. “Just your word.”

  “Exactly!” Hal nodded enthusiastically. “I never put anything down on paper. But she was threatening to sh— to sh— to take me to the courts. She wouldn’t have. She wouldn’t have. It was just a ploy. Get more money out of me.”

  Sally risked a glance at Lucien. His face was still and set.

  Lucien reached out a hand to his cousin, hauling him none too gently to his feet. “Sleep it off, Hal.”

  “We were done,” said Hal urgently, breathing gin fumes so strong that Sally could feel the impact from a yard away. “She knew that. Didn’t need—didn’t need—oh, God. I just wanted her to go away. That was all. Just go away. Not like that . . . Not like that . . .”

  There were tears running down his wind-reddened cheeks. Sally found herself caught between disgust and pity.

  Lucien slid an arm under his cousin’s shoulders. “I’m going to put him in my bed,” he said in an undertone. “Do you hear me, Hal? We’re going to get you into bed.”

  “Bed,” said Hal, and Sally watched as his eyes rolled slowly back in his head.

  Lucien hadn’t been lying. He did have experience seeing drunks to bed. He was gentler than Sally would have been about it. Left to herself, she would have dumped a pitcher of cold water over his upturned face and shaken him until he sputtered. Hal Caldicott had seen Sir Matthew Egerton in the village, but had he bothered to tell him that he knew who the murdered woman was? Intimately?

  Sally would be willing to wager not.

  It was worse than craven. It was low and crawling and worm-like.

  While Sally fumed, Lucien deftly stripped Hal of his cape and deposited him in the great bed, beneath the sigil of the broken sword.

  Sally looked at Hal Caldicott, snoring away in the vastness of the ducal bed. Seeing him in Lucien’s bed, tucked up comfortably among the embroidered bedsheets, added insult to injury.

  Sally turned to Lucien, her hands on her hips. “That’s all very well and good, but where are you going to sleep?”

  Lucien shrugged. “There’s a cot in the dressing room.”

  Sally pressed her lips together. Fifty-odd bedrooms and sundry feather beds, and the duke was sleeping on a cot in his own castle.

  Sally glare
d at Hal’s sleeping form. “Do you believe his story?”

  Lucien drew the bed curtains closed around his cousin. Sally watched his hands on the cords, deft and sure. “I would prefer not to do otherwise.”

  “Words,” said Sally belligerently, “are meant to convey meaning, not to obscure it.”

  “There’s nothing about this business that isn’t obscure,” Lucien said bitterly. He dragged a hand through his hair. “Do you think I want to believe that Hal could— We were boys together!”

  Yes, and Sally had been girls with some quite unmentionable creatures at Miss Climpson’s.

  The expression on Lucien’s face was such that she decided not to mention that.

  Sally put a hand on Lucien’s crimson brocade sleeve. The fabric was warm beneath her fingers. “You do realize what this means? If your cousin killed Fanny Logan—then it’s not about your parents at all.”

  If there wasn’t a French spy on the rampage, it did beg the question of what she was doing here, enmeshed in a false betrothal, but she decided to deal with that later.

  Lucien looked down. “No,” he said. “It just means that my cousin killed his mistress and then tried to see me blamed for the murder.”

  When he put it that way . . . a French spy would be preferable.

  Sally gave Lucien’s arm a squeeze. “He might be telling the truth.”

  “He might.” Lucien’s face was bleak. He looked down at her. “I should see you to your room.”

  Sally wrinkled her brows. Did he really think she was going to leave him to brood nobly on his lonely cot?

  “You’ve just had a shock. You shouldn’t be alone.”

  Lucien thrust his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown. “I’m fine.”

  And she was Queen Charlotte. “No, you’re not. Not that it’s the least bit surprising,” Sally said encouragingly. “You do have the most appalling family. Anyone would be distressed to discover his cousin might be a murderer.”

  Lucien’s face twisted into a crooked smile. “Are you trying to make me feel better by telling me how miserable I am?”

  “I—” Put that way, it did sound a little absurd. Sally shook her hair back behind her shoulders. “Well, it worked, didn’t it?”

  Lucien didn’t mean to laugh. It came out as a cross between a hiccup and a snort. “Only you,” he said, his voice rich with amusement. “Only you.”

  If Lucien hadn’t meant to laugh, he most certainly didn’t mean to kiss Sally. It just . . . happened.

  She looked so delightfully smug, with her lips pursed in that smirk that was so entirely hers, and her hair tumbling down around her shoulders, that it was just impossible not to kiss her. His fingers, of their own volition, curved around her cheek, the strands of her hair brushing his wrist, catching on his sleeve, crimson and gold in the firelight.

  Lucien was still shaking with laughter as his lips touched hers. But not for long. He could feel her brief, startled movement, and then her hands slid up around his shoulders, and her lips angled against his, and any laughter was lost, lost between their lips, behind the lids of his eyes, in a warm, velvet darkness where there was nothing but the feel of Sally in his arms, the silk of her hair forming a tangled net around his hands, the velvet of her robe soft and supple beneath his fingers.

  Sally fit against him as though she had always belonged there, the lithe line of her body molding itself to his, her long skirts tangling around his legs, the lace ruffles on her sleeves tickling the back of his neck. She smelled of French soap and lilacs and the fresh green buds on trees in spring, or at least that was the image that came to Lucien’s mind—a garden, in its first bloom, dappled in sunlight.

  There was a groaning noise, followed by a thrashing, followed by a most unpleasant retching.

  Lucien came back to earth with a thud. His lips parted from Sally’s with a pop. They stared at each other, just a hand’s breadth apart, so close that Lucien could feel Sally’s breath against his cheek, feel her heart pounding wildly through the fabric of her robe. Or perhaps that was his heart pounding. He wasn’t quite sure. He felt as though he’d run a mile across rough terrain, windburned and breathless, every muscle straining, including the unmentionable ones.

  “Hal.” Lucien’s voice sounded scratchy. “That was Hal.”

  His arm was still around Sally’s waist, her hair still tangled around his sleeve. Sally blinked several times, her blue eyes slowly focusing on his face.

  “Well, then,” she said. “Well, then.”

  Lucien knew exactly what she meant. He dug around in his muddled brain for something eloquent to say. “Well, then,” he agreed.

  The retching sound came again from behind the bed curtains, followed by a bout of coughing.

  Lucien winced.

  Sally shook herself free of Lucien’s encircling arm, sweeping her hair back with an abrupt gesture and bundling it in a knot that promptly fell down again. There were still golden strands clinging to Lucien’s arm. Somehow—Lucien wasn’t taking responsibility for something he couldn’t quite remember doing— her robe appeared to have come undone, revealing a white linen nightdress that had most certainly not been designed for a drafty castle in October.

  Sally looked from Lucien’s hands to his face and back again, pulling her robe more tightly around her.

  “Goodness!” she said brightly. “That was quite an act!”

  “An act?” The blood was thrumming in Lucien’s temples. He was hot and cold and thoroughly confused.

  Sally swallowed, hard. Lucien could see her throat working beneath the ruffles at her neck. “Keeping up our betrothal. Our false betrothal. That was terribly convincing.”

  “Terribly,” Lucien echoed.

  The word “false” reverberated through his brain.

  Of course. That was all it was. A contrivance. A fiction.

  Lucien’s heated body protested that, quite to the contrary, the curve of her chest, her waist, her hip beneath his hands had been quite real; there had been no feigning in the answering pressure of her lips against his, the way she had stood on tiptoe to wrap her arms more firmly around his neck. He could still feel her against him, the slide of the silk of her hair between his fingers, the softness of her skin.

  Some relic of self-preservation surged to the fore. Lucien stepped back, stuffing his hands in his pockets, preventing himself from reaching for her and drawing her back into the circle of his arms, proving that there had been nothing false about it.

  That would be the act of a cad.

  Sally was looking at him with wide, expectant eyes, waiting for him to take her cue. Lucien could see the uncertainty there, and it struck him to the core. One slippered toe stuck out beneath the hem of her robe, as though poised for flight.

  Lucien gathered the shreds of his honor.

  “We mustn’t be too convincing,” he said quietly. “Unless you want this betrothal to be more than a fiction.”

  Sally blinked rapidly, and then mustered an entirely unconvincing laugh. “Don’t be foolish! The point is to keep you out of shackles, not to fit you with new ones.” She moved rapidly towards the secret door. “I’ll just be going now, shall I? No need to see me out. I know the way.”

  Before he could molest her again? Lucien’s conscience smote him. Consciences could be extremely inconvenient items. “Don’t be absurd,” he said shortly. “I’ll see you to your room.”

  “There’s really no need.” Sally fluttered her hands elegantly, moving with a speed that in anyone less graceful might have looked like flight. “I’m hardly going to run into anyone else on the secret staircase. Although your secret staircase isn’t very secret, is it? You really must do something about that.”

  Lucien ducked under the tapestry after her. “I’ll see to it at the first opportunity. Sally—”

  “No, no, no need to look for bogeymen under my bed
. I’m sure I’ll be perfectly safe.” Sally’s slippers beat a rapid tattoo on the stone stairs.

  Lucien fell back, feeling like the worst sort of cad. Did she really feel that she needed to run from him?

  “Nothing has changed.” That was a lie, if ever he’d heard one, but he didn’t know what else to do, what else to say to make things right. “What just happened—it was a mistake. It won’t happen again.”

  Already on the landing, Sally looked back over her shoulder. “Of course not.” Even with her hair down around her shoulders and the sash of her robe tied crookedly, she held herself like a duchess. “As you say, we wouldn’t want our betrothal to be too convincing.”

  And with that, Sally disappeared behind the secret door in the paneling, leaving Lucien alone in a windowless stairwell that felt darker and danker than it had a moment before.

  Chapter Twenty

  Sally collapsed with her back against the paneling.

  That had not been part of the plan.

  Not that she had had terribly much of a plan in mind when she went barreling down the secret staircase, but if she had had one, that would not have been part of it.

  Sally lifted one hand tentatively to her lips. For a rather foolish moment, it had been all too easy to forget that this betrothal of theirs was meant to be a sham. She wasn’t quite sure how it happened. One minute, they were talking, and the next . . .

  She had felt sorry for him; that was all. His family was so awful to him and his cousin was in his bed and he had looked so broken up about Hal, and, really, wasn’t it enough to melt the hardest of hearts? And she was nothing if not compassionate.

  Compassion—that was all it was. Why, she was practically a Good Samaritan! It had nothing at all to do with the way his hair tumbled down across his brow or the triangle of his chest exposed by his open dressing gown or—

  Lady Florence poked her narrow head out of her basket, fixing Sally with one beady eye.