The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla

by Lauren Willig

  He’d certainly fouled that up, hadn’t he? Maybe Clarissa was right. Maybe they were a cursed race. Maybe the wrong ancestor had sacrificed the wrong chicken at the wrong time.

  Except that sacrificing chickens made him think of Sally, and her odd grudge against poultry.

  What did she have against chickens? Lucien wondered irrelevantly. As matters stood, it was unlikely he would ever find out.

  Dabney pointedly cleared his throat. “Lord Henry is in his office, your grace.”

  “Yes, yes, I know.” The last thing Lucien wanted was an interview with Uncle Henry, but the alternative, seeking out Sally and trying to figure out what to say, was even more alarming.

  With chilling formality, Dabney said, “The office is—”

  Apparently Lucien was still being punished. “I know the way. It hasn’t been that long.”

  “Your grace,” Dabney said gravely, and melted away into the dark recesses of the hall.

  It was amazing how much reproach could be packed into two little words, uttered with the utmost deference and respect. Lucien wondered if it was something that was taught to good butlers along with how to sneak up on one’s employer and terrorize footmen with a single curl of the lip.

  Lucien took himself off to his uncle’s office, a nook in the old wing in between the formal part of the house and the servants’ domain. It had its own exit and entrance, so that tenants and tradesmen could come and go without traipsing through the convoluted corridors of the house. Anything that happened at Hullingden passed through Uncle Henry’s office.

  It looked just as Lucien remembered. Unlike Uncle Henry’s richly appointed study in his house at Richmond, a gentleman’s retreat, the office at Hullingden had been designed for use. Shelves along the walls were crammed full of decades of ledgers detailing expenditures on everything from the servants’ tallow candles to seed for planting. The large oak table at the center of the room was all but eclipsed beneath piles of invoices, correspondence, and, for some reason that probably made sense to Uncle Henry, a fowling gun.

  “Lucien!” Uncle Henry looked up from his notations as Lucien entered. He plunked his pen back in its stand, pushed aside a fat ledger, and stood up, leaning his palms on the tabletop. “Dabney found you, then?”

  Lucien inclined his head. “As you see.”

  If Uncle Henry noticed the edge in Lucien’s voice, he didn’t comment on it. “I just had a very unpleasant interview with Sir Matthew Egerton.”

  The day only improved as it went on. Lucien mustered a weary smile. “I wish I could say that surprises me.”

  Uncle Henry looked grave. “Sir Matthew refuses to be disabused of the notion that you had something to do with the death of that unfortunate woman. He believes you have, as he put it, ‘an insatiable craving for blood.’”

  That was all the situation needed. Lucien rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I wouldn’t have thought that Sir Matthew would be a reader of The Convent of Orsino.”

  “No, no, not like that.” A network of furrows appeared between Uncle Henry’s eyes. “The phrase he used was ‘like mother, like son.’ He believes—”

  “That we have the seeds of evil within us.” Lucien meant the phrase ironically, but Uncle Henry nodded.

  “Just so.”

  Lucien buried his head in his hands. “Good God.”

  “There are higher powers to which you might appeal,” Uncle Henry suggested.

  Lucien lifted his head. “The Almighty?”

  “I was thinking more of the Lord Chancellor,” said Uncle Henry. “He was well acquainted with your father.”

  Everyone had been well acquainted with Lucien’s father—everyone who was anyone, that is. Lucien’s father hadn’t been very good at charming the tenantry, but he had been brilliant at dominating the ballrooms and back rooms of both London and Paris.

  The thought rose, unbidden, that if he were to face up to his responsibilities—stop brooding about the past, whispered Sally’s voice—he would be a very different sort of duke than his father had been.

  Maybe, thought Lucien, looking at the daunting piles and piles of papers and ledgers, it was time to try.

  And not just because he wanted Miss Sally Fitzhugh to look at him with something other than scorn in her bright blue eyes.

  “Before we get to that,” said Lucien, hating himself for the news he was about to deliver, “I have something I need to tell you.”

  “Not a confession, I hope,” said Uncle Henry, smiling to show that he was joking.

  “No.” Not his, at any rate. Lucien couldn’t think of any way to sugarcoat it, so he just got straight to the point. “The woman who was found dead—Hal was her protector.”

  “Hal?” Uncle Henry echoed the name, as though it was foreign to the tongue. “My Hal?”

  Lucien felt like the embodiment of all evil. It was cruel, doing this to Uncle Henry—Uncle Henry, who had never been anything but diligent and honest. “I’m afraid so.”

  Uncle Henry sat down, hard.

  When he looked up at Lucien, his face was pale, but composed. “Is there any chance that you might be—mistaken?”

  Lucien hated to ruin his hopes. “No. I had it from Hal’s own lips.”

  Considerably soaked in gin, but if vino brought veritas, then gin was a veritable fountain of truth.

  “I see.” Uncle Henry’s face looked as gray as his hair. “I had suspected—guessed—that he was embroiled with an actress—the signs were there—but I hadn’t realized—I hadn’t known—that it was this particular one.”

  “It may be just an unhappy coincidence.” Even as he said it, Lucien realized how absurd the words sounded. Gruffly, he added, “I can’t believe that Hal is a murderer.”

  “Thank you.” Uncle Henry mustered a faint smile. “You always were a good lad.”

  Lucien looked around Uncle Henry’s office, so familiar and so foreign.

  The point is that all this is yours. It’s your responsibility. And you behave as though you’re just passing through.

  Which made Hal his responsibility too.

  Lucien took a deep breath. “I’m not going to throw Hal to the wolves.”

  Whatever Hal might have been prepared to do to him. But Hal was young, untried. He had seen less of the world than Lucien had. He was so painfully young, not just in years but in experience as well.

  And, as Sally had pointed out, Hal wasn’t the duke.

  “We’ll see this through as a family.”

  Uncle Henry rose, stiffly, as though his joints pained him. “Would you mind if I spoke to Sir Matthew myself?”

  Lucien hurried to clear a path for him. “I would be grateful for it. As you may have noticed, Sir Matthew has no great love for me. My intervention could hardly improve Hal’s case.”

  Uncle Henry stared blindly over Lucien’s shoulder. “This was meant to be a time of celebration. Your return home after all these years. And we had hoped—” Uncle Henry checked himself. “It was your aunt Winifred’s fondest wish that Hal and Clarissa would provide us another reason to rejoice.”

  Lucien looked at him blankly.

  Uncle Henry elaborated. “Your aunt hoped that the betrothal ball might mark not one but two betrothals.”

  That explained Aunt Winifred’s sudden largesse. He ought, thought Lucien wryly, to have realized that Aunt Winifred would never have gone to so much trouble for the small matter of his nuptials. It had just never occurred to him that she might have an ulterior motive. Particularly since neither Hal nor Clarissa appeared to have the least desire to be betrothed. At least, not to each other.

  But Lucien wasn’t going to say that to Uncle Henry, not when he looked like an old chair that had lost its stuffing.

  “There is no reason any of this needs to be made public,” Lucien said quickly. “I’m sure once Sir Matthew in
vestigates, he’ll realize that Hal’s involvement is purely incidental.”

  It would have been better if Lucien had believed what he said. Right now, he wasn’t sure what to believe.

  “Yes,” said Uncle Henry heavily. Coming around the table, he rested a hand on Lucien’s shoulder, saying with false heartiness, “Let’s not allow this to overshadow the occasion, shall we? It’s not every day that the duke takes a duchess.”

  Oh, hell. On top of everything else, how was he meant to explain the sudden dissolution of his betrothal?

  Sally not speaking to him would probably be a clue.

  He should have gone after her. He should have bowled Dabney over and apologized to her right there and then. He should have told her he was an idiot and begged her to stay.

  Not just for the ball.

  Forever.

  “I can’t tell you how delighted I am.” Uncle Henry walked with Lucien to the door, his hand as heavy as a shackle on Lucien’s arm. Lucien only halfway heard him. “It’s time to put the past behind us and focus on the future. Your Miss Fitzhugh may not be quite what I would have chosen for you—”

  Why the devil not?

  “Oh?”

  “But she’ll do very well, very well, indeed. She, er, seems to have a natural talent for the role. Whatever her plans for the kitchen.”

  Lucien felt like he was sinking deeper with every word. “As to that—”

  “No, no, you needn’t explain. It’s natural a bride would wish to set her mark on her own home. And,” Uncle Henry added damningly, “it is quite clear that she cares for you a great deal.”

  She did? Illogically, Lucien felt his spirits lift, before he remembered that, in fact, she was only going to care for him until roughly midnight tomorrow.

  All Hallows’ Eve.

  Would she have maintained the pretense of the betrothal longer if he hadn’t made such an ass of himself? And why did it matter one way or another?

  Unless, of course, he held on to the fantasy that the pretense wasn’t just a pretense.

  That had never been part of the plan. He’d had no intention of staying at Hullingden, no intention of making a life for himself here.

  No intention of falling in love.

  “Ergh,” said Lucien eloquently. Struggling to gain control of the situation, he said rapidly, “Thank you. That’s very kind. As to Sir Matthew—”

  “Don’t let it bother you,” said Uncle Henry. “At a time like this, you should be thinking of poetry and roses, not . . . unpleasantness. You just concentrate on that pretty fiancée of yours, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

  There was a special circle of hell reserved for those who entered into false betrothals. “Thank you. That’s more than generous. But—”

  “You deserve your happiness,” said Uncle Henry, adding coals of fire to Lucien’s nicely sizzling infernal pit. “It will be nice to see Hullingden become a home again. Your marriage is a source of joy, not just to the family, but to everyone on the estate. The tenants look forward to these things, you know.”

  “Er—” Lucien didn’t know what to say. “This betrothal ball will certainly be an occasion they’ll remember.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Cambridge, 2004

  I wasn’t feeling all that festive by the time we arrived at the Dudley House Halloween Party.

  I was freezing in my puff-sleeved “Regency” gown, which had started life as a thrift shop nightgown, before being embellished into Austenian splendor with a ribbon around the Empire waist. Long leather gloves completed the look, making it hard for me to grasp anything with my fingers, a fact I was rapidly discovering as I tried to get a grip on a plastic glass of white wine.

  I had a newfound respect for those intrepid ladies of the early nineteenth century, who had managed to wield sword parasols in gloved fingers and wear scoop-necked dresses in England in October. Their constitutions—and coordination—were clearly far superior to mine.

  “So,” Colin said. “This is your Halloween party.”

  I couldn’t blame him for making it sound like a question. The dining hall tables and chairs had been shoved to the side to make room for the festivities. The room was high-ceilinged, classical in style with the woodwork painted white, but nothing could quite disguise the fact that it was still a dining hall, or that the other partygoers looked, from a distance of five years, quite painfully young.

  This was really an event for first- and second-years, people still living in their grad school cliques. I hadn’t been to any Dudley House events since . . . Well, I forgot when. Before England, at any rate. I’d forgotten just how college-like it all was.

  I’d brought Colin because I wanted to show him what my grad school life was all about. But it wasn’t my grad school life anymore. It hadn’t been for a very long time. I didn’t know these new people. I’d gone to this party my first year of grad school and had a riotous time with my clique. Of that bunch, Megan and I were the only ones left on campus. My friends were almost all gone, away doing research, writing up elsewhere, in junior faculty jobs at far-flung campuses. Or they had taken their interim master’s degree and run, off to the real world, to non-academic jobs. One was a lawyer now, another a middle-school history teacher.

  Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, the world had changed around me. I didn’t belong here anymore.

  I just wished I knew where I did belong.

  Colin rested his own glass on the edge of the bar. “Would you excuse me for a moment?”

  I looked up at him, one of my hairpins slipping. “Isn’t that usually my line?”

  The touch of his hand against the two-inch gap between glove and sleeve was warm, but his smile was perfunctory. “I’ll find you here?”

  By the bar? It seemed the most appropriate place. I wasn’t quite sure what else to do with myself. I didn’t know anyone in any of the chattering, squealing groups.

  “You’ll find me here,” I confirmed, and managed to down my glass without spilling more than a few drops down my cleavage.

  Colin had come in black tie. I wasn’t sure if he was meant to be James Bond, or if it was just that he didn’t have anything costume-y, but, either way, he looked unfairly handsome in evening dress with his bow tie rakishly askew. For a moment, I could imagine him as an undergrad at Cambridge, before his life became complicated, happily boozing it up at the May Balls.

  I wished I had been there for that.

  Or maybe not. If I’d known him then, we wouldn’t be who we were now. I liked this Colin, even with his maddening reticence. I just wished he would tell me what was bothering him. It was there, between us, whatever it was, like an elephant in the room. And there was no space in my studio apartment for the two of us, much less a metaphorical pachyderm.

  Not that I should talk. I was just as bad. When Colin had asked me how my meeting with my advisor had gone, I’d gushed, “Not bad. Great!” and dragged him off to Casablanca for drinks, where I’d downed too many grasshoppers and talked brightly about movies I hadn’t seen.

  Telling Colin—telling anyone—would make that conversation too real. As it was, if I kept it to myself, I could pretend it hadn’t happened, that I was still on track to graduate in June, or, at worst, next September. Theoretically, I could still graduate in June. I could hand in my dissertation as it was, and my committee would, probably, pass it. There were the requisite number of footnotes, after all. I’d have the letters behind my name, but my job prospects would be next to nil. Professor Tompkins wouldn’t put his clout behind a product he considered subpar.

  The alternative? Tear it up and rewrite it from scratch. “Fundamentally reconceiving the project”—that was the phrase Professor Tompkins had used.

  Which meant, by extension, fundamentally reconceiving my future. I could take another three years to write a completely new dissertation and make Professor Tompkins h
appy. Or I could step back and ask myself some hard questions about what I was doing and what I wanted. How much was it worth to me to finish the PhD? Did I really want to be a professor?

  And what would Colin think when he found out that my career had broken up with me?

  “I’ll take another of those, please,” I said to the student bartender, who obligingly filled my glass back up and took my little yellow ticket.

  If the night went on as it had begun, I was going to need a whole roll of those yellow tickets.

  I waved to Megan, who was there in her capacity as a Conant Hall RA, mothering the little first-year grad students. She’d come dressed as a cat, in a black leotard and paper ears.

  “Not a vampire?” I shouted over the din of “Monster Mash,” pathetically grateful to see someone I knew.

  “I’m off duty,” she bellowed back. She looked over my shoulder. “Is Colin here?”

  “Bathroom,” I mouthed.

  Megan said something incomprehensible.

  “Huh?”

  She made a frustrated face, gesturing in wordless annoyance at the student DJ, who appeared to have turned the sound system up to eleven. “Introduce me later.”

  I stuck two thumbs in the air to indicate consent. “Will do.”

  Assuming Colin reappeared sometime in this century. The puffed sleeves of my Regency gown were beginning to itch and my hands were sweaty inside the long leather gloves.

  I fidgeted, looking at the place where my watch would have been, had I been wearing one.

  The student bartender poured me another drink, this time without being asked, and without a yellow ticket.

  I decided it was time to move away from the bar. Blotto was not the way I wanted to end the evening.

  Wasn’t this supposed to be the night of my birthday surprise?

  Surprise! My boyfriend had disappeared on me.

  My imagination began to run rampant. Maybe Colin had planned the sort of big, embarrassing scene one always sees at the end of Rom Coms. The DJ would stop the music, and Colin would take the microphone, singing—