The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla

by Lauren Willig

  No, wait. That had been Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You.

  If I was going to model my life on a movie, I should at least try not to pick a teen one. Not to mention that that sort of grand scene was entirely alien to Colin’s character.

  But all the same . . .

  I wandered out into the crowd, keeping an eye out for Colin. The run of costumes included the usual vampires, pirates, and witches, mingling with the more abstruse. I spotted two Beethovens, an Adam Smith (minus his invisible hand), and a very boozy Heidegger. But no Colin.

  Gathering my skirts in one hand, I forged towards the dining hall doors, only to come up short as someone called my name.

  It was a voice I hadn’t heard in a very long time.

  For a moment, I was caught in an odd sort of temporal limbo. It was 1999 and I was a first-year grad student again, here in Dudley Dining Hall, with that cute Gov professor calling my name.

  It had never occurred to me at the time to ask what a junior professor was doing hanging out with the twenty-two-year-olds.

  I turned, trying not to trip on my hem. It wasn’t 1999. And I wasn’t that twenty-two-year-old anymore. “Grant! How nice to see you!”

  My ex-boyfriend appeared to be dressed as junior faculty circa 1970, complete with tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, an ascot at his throat, and a pipe in one hand. The other hand was wrapped firmly around the waist of Amy-the-Art-Historian, the infant for whom he had dumped me nearly two years ago.

  It felt like much longer.

  “Eloise.” Grant’s voice was like Betty Crocker Devil’s Food Cake, just a little too rich. “What a charming surprise. You remember Amy?”

  Hell, yes, I remembered Amy. The last time I’d seen her, she had been making out with my boyfriend at my department’s Christmas party. It was hard to forget something like that.

  This time, she was dressed as La Primavera, in a skimpy white dress, a garland of plastic flowers, and an exuberant blond wig, which seemed appropriate, given that she had to be a good decade younger than her boyfriend.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.” Amy shot me a decidedly hostile look from under her long blond wig. I guess no one ever likes to see the ex. And goodness only knew what Grant had told her about me. My guess was that it was along the standard “she doesn’t understand me” lines.

  Which usually means that the other person understood you all too well.

  In retrospect, I owed a huge debt of gratitude to Amy. She had kept me from wasting more time on Grant. Because, with Grant, it had always been all about Grant.

  “I’m surprised to see you here.” Grant removed the stem of his pipe from his lips. “Haven’t you finished yet?”

  If Colin was going to stage a grand romantic gesture, now would be the time. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

  I managed to keep my fixed smile on my face. “I’m planning to finish up this spring. Are you still in the Gov department?”

  He looked mildly annoyed. “I’m on sabbatical this year.”

  “He’s working on a book,” piped up Amy-the-Art-Historian, sidling a little closer to her man in an attempt to shield him from predatory exes.

  “Great to see you both, but”—I lifted the glass of wine I still held in one hand—“I promised my boyfriend a drink.”

  “Oh?” Grant made a point of looking for my imaginary boyfriend.

  “He’s visiting from England,” I added, to add verisimilitude to what was otherwise a bald and unconvincing lack of boyfriend. “We met over there.”

  I really needed to make my lips stop moving. Who cared what Grant thought? I didn’t. Not anymore.

  Well, mostly not. No one wants to look pathetic in front of an ex, even one of the pond scum variety.

  “There was an Englishman on the phone in the foyer.” Grant gave a little smirk. “Is that one yours?”

  A phone call?

  Admittedly, it wasn’t the most scintillating of parties, but that was no reason to abandon me. I struggled with a little flare of annoyance. If Colin had run off to make a phone call, he must have a good and sufficient reason for doing so.

  At least, he had better have a good and sufficient reason.

  “He’s been planning some sort of mysterious birthday surprise for me.” I smiled a phony woman-to-woman smile at Amy-the-Art-Historian. “He’s gone all Double-O-Seven about it. Anyway.” I waved the glass of wine about, sloshing some on the worn floorboards. “I should be going. Good to see you both.”

  “You too, Eloise.” The sound of my name on Grant’s lips felt uncomfortably overfamiliar.

  I waggled my fingers and hightailed it out the double doors into the foyer. Sure enough, there was Colin, cell phone to his ear, one shoulder turned to the wall to create a little zone of privacy.

  Not jumping out of a cake.

  Okay, that was it. I was officially cutting myself off. No more wine for me.

  Although the idea of a Colin-sized cake really was pretty funny.

  “Mm-hmm,” said Colin, looking grave. “Right.”

  Concern replaced annoyance. Colin’s great-aunt, ageless as she always seemed, was getting on in years. And then there was his sister, who seemed to lurch from meltdown to meltdown. Had we ever been to a party that hadn’t been interrupted by a Serena meltdown? I would be hard-pressed to name one.

  They do say that when you marry someone, you marry their family as well. Dating Colin was a bit like dating the Addams Family. They were ookey and kooky and you couldn’t take one without the others.

  I was mostly okay with that. Mostly.

  I marched up and tapped Colin on the shoulder. “Hey!”

  With an “Mm-hmm. Right. Cheers,” Colin clicked END on the call. He tucked his phone away in his pocket and turned to me with a big, phony smile on his face. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Shall we go back to the party?”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Fine,” said Colin. “Just fine.”

  There had been a lot of “just fine” over the past few days. It was beginning to wear on my nerves.

  If there was family drama, why not tell me? I’d been there with him for all levels of familial crazy, from his sister puking out her guts to his stepfather blandly renting out Colin’s home to a film crew.

  Unless, of course, it wasn’t anything to do with his family at all. It wasn’t the right time for calling England unless he was speaking to an insomniac.

  But, then, what? And why hide it from me?

  Despite my smug words to Grant, it didn’t sound like a birthday surprise in the making.

  “Who was that?” I asked, automatically taking a sip from the glass in my hand. It tasted like battery acid.

  “No one.”

  Right. That was no one like I was Mother Teresa. I tugged on Colin’s sleeve. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.” Colin rested a hand against the small of my back, steering me back towards the dining hall. “Would you like another drink?”

  “I’ve had enough.” The wine tasted sour in the back of my mouth. I resisted the pressure of Colin’s hand. “And it’s not nothing. Something’s going on. What aren’t you telling me?”

  “It’s nothing like that,” Colin said reassuringly, which would have been more reassuring if I’d had any idea what “like that” was meant to mean. “Let’s rejoin your party.”

  I took a deep breath, which did interesting things to the bodice of my Regency gown. (Thank you, ahistorical Wonder Bra!) “Let’s go somewhere else.” There had been too much weirdness over the past two days. “I think we need to talk.”

  Words that tend to act like Kryptonite on the average red-blooded male.

  Colin didn’t argue. “I’ll get your coat.”

  The October night was cold and dark, broken by the sounds of revelry. I’d planned for us to go
to Finale, the dessert place in the Square, for post-party drinks, but, by unspoken agreement, we headed back to my place instead. Some discussions are best held in private.

  I dumped my coat on the blanket chest and scooped up the battered old plastic pumpkin that sat in the middle of my kitchen table. “Halloween candy?”

  “Please.” My sofa squeaked as Colin lowered himself onto the sagging cushions.

  I’d bought that sofa—used—my second year of grad school, when I had moved from the dorms into my studio apartment, the very first place I had ever lived on my own. At the time, it had been just right. Now, like the rest of my apartment, it seemed too small, too small and vaguely shabby.

  I lowered the plastic pumpkin to Colin, who gravely passed over Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Twix Minis with bats on the wrappers, selecting a miniature candy pumpkin.

  “So,” I said, perching next to him on the edge of a frayed sofa cushion.

  “So,” Colin agreed, and turned the pumpkin around between his fingers, while I tried not to squirm too visibly.

  I dug into the pumpkin, pulling out a chocolate at random. Mr. Goodbar. Fine. I could eat Mr. Goodbar. “Is something on your mind? You’ve been a little . . . abstracted.”

  Colin looked up at me. “Good word,” he commented, with a shadow of a smile.

  “I try.” I felt a chill at the elegiac tone of his words, as though they were already a testament to things past. “What’s up?”

  Colin lowered his head, examining that blasted candy pumpkin as though it were the Rosetta Stone. My heart clenched a little. I knew the top of his head so well, the streaks where the sun had turned his dirty-blond hair to straw, the cowlick at the back.

  “Since we’ve been apart—I’ve been doing some thinking.”

  “Mmm?” I said encouragingly.

  The bright bulb of the overhead light picked out the hollows below Colin’s cheekbones. “You here, me there—it’s not the same, is it?”

  “Well, no. But it’s just—” Just for now? That wasn’t true. I peeled the wrapper off a Twix Mini. Inside, the halves had already broken in two. The sight fueled a growing sense of panic. I didn’t want to be a lone Twix. “I’ll try to come out to England again this spring.”

  “For how long? Three days? A week?” It would have been easier if Colin had sounded angry. Instead, he just sounded resigned. And that made me very, very afraid.

  The Twix was melting in my hand, leaving chocolate streaks on my palm. I didn’t want it anymore, but I shoved it into my mouth anyway. “There might be some changes to my schedule. I haven’t signed up for any teaching yet next term.”

  Colin rested his palms on his knees. “That’s not a solution,” he said firmly. “I won’t see you scuttle your career for me.”

  What if I didn’t have a career left to scuttle? But now wasn’t the time to tell him. Not when I had the uneasy feeling that we might, inexplicably, be heading towards “It’s not you.”

  I crumpled the Twix wrapper between my fingers.

  “It’s hardly scuttling,” I hedged. “I don’t mind.”

  “But I do,” Colin said gently. He took my sticky hand in his, and I tried not to remember alternative versions of this scene that had played in my head, versions that involved a ring and one knee. “This isn’t working, is it?”

  “No,” I said, my throat dry. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.”

  “On five minutes a day?” Put that way, it did sound absurd. Colin shook his head. “You here, me there—it’s just not on.”

  There was a lump in my throat the size of Sussex. I couldn’t think of anything to say. “So what do we do?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.” Colin squeezed my hands. He looked down at my fingers, giving me a good view of that cowlick of his. “If we’re to have a proper chance, we need to be in the same place for more than three days at a time. Which is why—”

  “Yes?” My lips hardly moved.

  Colin squared his shoulders. “I’m leaving Selwick Hall.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Hullingden, 1806

  “Am I truly meddlesome and officious?” Sally demanded of her two best friends.

  Finally freed from the receiving line, Sally had bolted like a champagne cork from a bottle in the direction of Lizzy and Agnes, both of whom had arrived for the masquerade ball, along with what seemed like the rest of London.

  Lizzy and Agnes were among the first group of guests, along with Lizzy’s father, Colonel Reid, and her nine-month-old half sister, Plumeria. There really weren’t meant to be children at the masquerade, but Colonel Reid had blandly explained that she was part of his costume. Plumeria was currently perched on her father’s shoulder, doing her best to live up to her monkey costume by grabbing at footmen’s wigs as they passed by.

  Turnip, disguised as a giant carnation, was browsing among the comestibles, assisted in this task by Miles Dorrington, who was dressed as a cavalier, complete with a long feather that kept flopping down over his brow. Their wives were a few yards away, deep in conversation with Letty Pinchingdale, who, from what Sally was overhearing, was expecting a fourth addition to the Pinchingdale nursery.

  All around them, revelers were reveling, the Vaughns were sneering, and Percy Ponsonby appeared to have got himself tangled up in the train of someone’s costume.

  In short, it was life as usual.

  Except that it wasn’t. It had been sheer torture standing there beside Lucien, accepting the congratulations of their guests, when, of course, there was no “their.” Their betrothal was about as convincing as Turnip’s costume, a trumpery thing, designed only to fool the severely credulous or madly myopic. Sally had pasted a fake smile on her face and smiled and smiled and smiled, when all the while she was stewing inside, fuming and fulminating and altogether too aware of the man standing beside her. The man who didn’t want to be beside her.

  Fine. If Lucien didn’t want her help, he didn’t have to have her help. It wasn’t as though it made any difference to her, Sally told herself, and bared her teeth in the direction of a new group of guests. She wasn’t the one headed for the gallows.

  Meddlesome? He should be grateful—grateful!—that she had stepped in out of the goodness of her heart to help him out of his difficulties.

  Except that it wasn’t all goodness, was it?

  Everyone else’s troubles are just so much fodder for your entertainment.

  Sally couldn’t quite shake the guilty, squirmy feeling that there might be the tiniest little grain of truth to what Lucien had said. That did nothing to improve her disposition.

  Lucien thought he could manage without her? Sally would just like to see him try. He needed her. He might not see it, but he needed her. Left to himself, he would let his family take over his home and Sir Matthew hang him for a crime he didn’t commit—all right, behead him for a crime he didn’t commit—and if that was the way he wanted it, that was just fine with Sally.

  She had her own life to get back to.

  She had her own comfortable bed in her own comfortable room, in a house where the food was served warm and the company was pleasant and there were no ghosts or Haunted Chambers or secret passageways or brooding dukes. There would be raspberry jam with Parsnip in the mornings and ratafia with Lizzy and Agnes in the evenings and balls and routs and Venetian breakfasts and shopping in Bond Street and then more shopping in Bond Street.

  For some reason, that prospect, instead of lifting her spirits, made Sally feel distinctly blue-deviled. Which was ridiculous. She liked her life. She liked her niece, she liked her friends, and she certainly liked shopping.

  There was a particular hat she had her eye on at the moment, blue velvet, with the most cunning little feather. It made her eyes ridiculously blue, or would do, as soon as she acquired it.

  Sally indulged in a brief, v
engeful fantasy of Lucien encountering her in Hyde Park. “How blue your eyes are,” he would say—only he wouldn’t say nonsense like that, and why was she even bothering herself trying to impress him, when it was obvious that he was an ungrateful boor and she certainly didn’t care in the slightest and, besides, she had only kissed him out of pity anyway, if she was thinking about that kiss, which she wasn’t. And, even if she was, the nasty things he had said that morning ought to have made it quite clear that there were no tender feelings between them.

  Goodness, it was exhausting living in her head.

  Sally turned on her two friends. “Well?” she asked ferociously. “Am I meddlesome and officious?”

  Her two closest friends exchanged a look. Lizzy was dressed as her namesake, Elizabeth I, complete with orb, scepter, and long rope of pearls. Agnes, going back to her rural roots, had come as a shepherdess, with a stuffed sheep under one arm.

  Agnes nervously fingered the ears of her sheep. “Only in the nicest possible way,” she said earnestly. She turned to Lizzy. “Don’t you agree?”

  Lizzy tapped Sally’s arm with her scepter. “We wouldn’t love you so much if you weren’t.”

  “But— But I—” Sally looked from one to the other, her words sputtering to a halt. There was concern on Agnes’s face, wry understanding on Lizzy’s. Neither was a comforting response. “But I thought you wanted my help.”

  “Always,” said Lizzy, and squeezed her hand.

  “Sometimes it’s even helpful,” piped up Agnes.

  Lizzy whacked Agnes with her scepter. “Hush,” she said imperiously. “You’re meant to be making her feel better, not worse.”

  “I—” Sally didn’t even know what to say. She felt bare and cold in her Diana the Huntress costume. The white tunic wasn’t particularly skimpy, but she felt exposed all the same. Her arrows were flimsy, trumpery things, mere straws against the monumental sense of hurt that enveloped her.

  Sally lifted Lady Florence out of her specially designed quiver and buried her fingers in the animal’s sleek fur. Lady Florence squirmed irritably, twisting out of Sally’s grasp.