Lady Killer (17 page)

“No.” Miles shook his head. “It might have been, if it weren’t for your ankle. The fact that your ankle was hurt makes this far more sinister.”

“Yes. It means that it was me.”

Miles worked to control his growing frustration. “No. It means that someone was impersonating you here, and whoever it was hurt their ankle—by accident or on purpose—so
your
ankle had to be hurt, too. Whoever is masterminding this is not leaving anything to chance.” But there was more to it than that, Miles knew. This business with the ankle suggested that the goal was not merely to frame Clio, but something else, and if it was as Miles surmised, it was something extremely disturbing.

“Why would the vampire impersonate me? That makes no sense at all.”

“It wasn’t the vampire, but someone working with him. Wittingly or unwittingly.”

“How do you know it wasn’t the vampire?”

“Whoever impersonated you had to be a woman, and I cannot believe the vampire is a woman. A woman with a hurt ankle would not have been able to haul Flora up that ladder and into your room.”

Clio thought for a moment, then looked at Miles, almost with pity. “Impossible. I am sorry, my lord, but that makes no sense at all. There is no need to go about making up demons and demon accomplices who traipse around London with the idea of doing me harm for unknown reasons when everything fits into place if you simply assume I am the vampire.”

Miles leaned forward. “You—are—not—the—vampire,” he said slowly. “Are you enjoying this? It is almost as if you
want
to think you are a fiend.”

“It makes more sense.” Clio’s voice was soft as she spoke, and it took Miles a moment to realize what she had said.

“Why? Why is it so easy for you to believe you are wicked?”

“Because I am,” Clio answered plainly. “Because I have always been. I have bad thoughts, thoughts about hurting people. Once, when we were girls, I hurt Mariana. I—” Clio stopped then, and her eyes got huge. “I bit her,” she whispered finally. “I bit her. I had forgotten, but now I remember. I bit her and she screamed and looked terrified and grandmother locked me in my room for a week.”
You are evil, just like your father.
That was when the comparisons had started, Clio remembered.

“Just once?” Miles interrupted her thoughts. “You only tried to hurt Mariana once? My cousins and I tried to kill each other at least a dozen times between the ages of four and fourteen, with, I suspect, less provocation.”

“It was not the same,” Clio told him. “It was not a joke. And then, since then, there have been the hiccups.”

“Hiccups?” Miles was clearly skeptical.

“Sometimes I feel violent and angry, like I am filled with a strong desire to harm someone, and when I don’t, when I hold myself back, I get the hiccups. But I have had them more and more often, recently. Sometimes even when I don’t know I am angry or upset. It is as if violence has been building inside of me, trying to get out. I am evil, my lord. You have to understand that. I should be sent to Newgate before I can harm anyone else. I should be chained up and flogged and beaten for what I have done.”

“No one should be beaten,” Miles said sharply.

Clio looked at him, but whatever she had seen in his face out of the corner of her eye was gone. “It would be better for everyone if I were locked away.”

Miles could not have agreed more. It was the only way to ensure that she would be safe. And that he would know where she was. “Lady Thornton, you are not evil, and I will not send you to Newgate,” he said, trying to strike a tone between imperious and polite. He was almost ready to tell her that even if she were sent to Newgate she would end up in his custody, but decided against it. “You are coming back with me to Dearbourn Hall where you will remain until another body is found. At that point, once you have been convinced of your innocence, you can decide to stay or return to your own house.”

“Absolutely not. I cannot go to Dearbourn Hall. I mean, I will not go.”

“Why?”

Clio hesitated. There were a thousand reasons she could give, none of them revealing the fact that her family reviled her. She countered with a question of her own. “My lord, do you possess anything so precious to you that you would rather suffer than lose it?”

The query caught Miles by surprise. “Yes,” he answered finally. “My cousins.”

“So do I. My home. The only thing I have. And if my grandmother finds me at Dearbourn Hall, I shall lose it forever. Compared with that loss, the loss of my freedom is nothing. Please take me to Newgate.”

Miles regarded her with an indecipherable expression for a moment, then said, “Your grandmother is not in the habit of coming to my apartments. You can stay there. There’s nowhere else for you anyway, the rest of the house is full.” Watching her mouth open he added, “And there is no use protesting—you have no choice.”

“You mean I am your prisoner?”

“No. You are simply going to be forced to enjoy my hospitality.”

“Can you explain the difference?”

“It would take some time. It is very subtle.”

“Yes. I have noticed your subtlety. Along with your wit. And charm.”

“You are very kind, but you don’t need to flatter me.”

Clio blinked at him, and was torn between the desire to laugh and the desire to hit him over the head with a blunt object. “Why are you doing this? Is it because of Beatrice?”

“I suggest you refrain from mentioning that name in my presence again.”

Clio frowned. “Then why?”

“Because it seems to me that whoever has gone to all this trouble to frame you would be overjoyed if you turned yourself in—it would save them a lot of work—and I would hate to give them that pleasure. In addition, I do not care to spend another uncomfortable night pacing the street in front of your house.”

“Neither of those is a real answer.”

“No,” Miles conceded thinly. “But they are the only ones you are going to get.”

Clio suddenly felt very tired. Although it was only nine o’clock in the morning it felt as if it had been a very long day. She was tired of fighting, tired of worrying, tired of trying to reason with the irrational Deerhound, tired of trying to keep her thoughts straight, tired of trying to remember why she was evil, or why she wasn’t, tired of trying to recall where she wanted to go, and where she did not, tired of trying to keep her eyes open, and hold her head up and ignore the regular rhythm of the coach wheels as they bounced up-down-up-down-up-dowwn-up-dowwnn-up-dowwwnn-up-dowwwnnnn…

Miles carried Toast and Clio up the back stairs of Dearbourn Hall to his apartment without waking either of them. He would deposit Toast on a chair and her on his bed and then find Corin, he decided. But as he pulled the downy linen coverlet up over Clio’s sleeping form, her fingers curled gently around his. Unable to disentangle himself despite his best efforts
(liar),
he kicked off his boots and lay down next to her. In less than a minute, he had fallen asleep.

The wine decanter stood on the table next to the bed, untouched for the first time in months.

The working clock in Miles’s bedchamber quietly marked the passage of an hour, and Miles and Clio slept.

Four men arrived unexpectedly at Which House to deliver a handsome new armoire to Clio’s bedroom and remove her old one, now strangely heavy. Snug was sure he had seen one of them before, and Princess Erika felt certain—whether it was a premonition or the sight of a sliver of yellow sleeve peeking out from beneath the cuff of one of their shabby work robes—that there was a mystery afoot concerning the viscount Dearbourn. This affiliation was confirmed when one of them reappeared shortly with a note saying that Clio was engaged on a very secret investigation on behalf of the viscount and would not be back for several days, accompanied by a purse containing five hundred pounds “as a retainer for her services.” In the kitchen, the Triumverate began work on a new play about enchanted servants.

The clock counted off another hour.

Three new silk gowns were delivered at a side entrance of Dearbourn Hall by a young apprentice from the studio of Octavia Apia, London’s most sought after dressmaker. A generous tip kept her from probing too hard for the name of the gowns’ recipient.

Two hours went by.

The man known as the Vampire of London sat at the writing table in his room at Dearbourn Hall, carefully studying a document. He had to force himself to concentrate, not to mention stay seated. Every time he heard a chambermaid pass in the corridor, he jammed the document into a hiding space he had created between the top of the table and its base, and moved next to the door, hoping for a snatch of gossip. At last he heard what he had been listening for, the news that another body had been found. But when he discovered that no one knew where, or by whom, his face went white.

“Looked like he might faint he did,” one of the chambermaids told the Special Commission later.

“Or like he was real angry,” the other suggested.

The hands on Miles’s clock traced a complete circle.

A shriek echoed through the west wing of Dearbourn Hall as Lady Alecia discovered that one of her favorite hairpieces—indeed, the one she had been planning to wear to the wedding—was missing. Corin held off rousing his master but promised that a full search of the house would be made, and pretended to consider Mariana’s order that the malefactor be severely flogged.

Another hour passed.

Doctor LaForge entered the library, then passed into the reading alcove at its rear. He slid a volume with dark blue binding off the shelf, inserted a piece of paper between the eleventh and twelfth pages, and returned it to its place.

Ten minutes later, Mariana’s maidservant Jocelyn entered the alcove, looked over her shoulder to make sure she was not observed, removed the same book from the shelf, and left.

Three quarters of an hour ticked by.

Responding to a summons from Mariana, Corin was relieved to hear that he was not expected to give a report on how the footmen were progressing in their search for the thief of Lady Alecia’s hairpiece. Rather, he was told that because one member of Mariana’s entourage was feeling low, the program for the night was being changed from a ball to the latest craze in entertainments, “a tablooviant.”

“Tableaux vivant,” Doctor LaForge corrected her.

“Darling Saunders suggested it,” Mariana went on to Corin, ignoring her tutor. “It is the rage in Europe and I shall have the first one of the season here. Everyone must dress up like characters from famous works of art. I shall go as the goddess Diana. She is the one with all the baby animals around her, isn’t she?”

“I believe that is Saint Francis,” Doctor LaForge put in, but was again unheeded.

Half dreading and half dreaming of Miles’s reaction to this change, Corin dispatched three-quarters of the footmen on the staff to spread word of the substitution, and the other quarter in the search of “darling baby birds” to adorn Mariana’s costume.

Throughout Dearbourn Hall, clocks chimed five.

An apologetic and somewhat breathless Corin wakened Miles then, who frowned when he heard about the tableaux vivant, frowned harder when he saw what he was supposed to wear, and frowned harder still when he learned of the missing wig. He used his special key and disappeared up the hidden staircase inside his clock. If Corin had been surprised to find his master in bed with a woman, he did not show it.

The clock ticked on undisturbed by his passage, and undisturbed Clio slept. After a few hours, she began to dream.

She was small, a little girl, and she was walking around a fair, holding a man’s hand. He bought her a sugared citron. It was the first time she had tried one.

“Do you like it?” the man asked, and she nodded, even though she wasn’t sure. She wanted the man to be glad.

“I knew you would,” he said, happily drinking the juice out of his own. “You are just like your daddy, and daddy has a taste for them.”

Clio felt a surge of happiness then, for being with her father, being like her father. She held his hand tighter, willing him never to let her go, and he pushed her hair off her forehead affectionately. She raised her face to smile at him and tell him she loved him, too, but he was gone. Instead she saw a sign floating above the heads of the fair crowd with something written on it in large black letters, and she knew instinctively that it contained a crucial clue. She ran toward it and for an instant she could almost see the letters, almost make them out—

She awoke abruptly. In the split second between unconsciousness and consciousness, Clio caught one last glimpse of the spinning sign and the letters froze in her mind. N-E-V-E-R-D-E-S-I-R-E. Never Desire. Could that be what it said? Could that be the clue? It felt right, almost. Never desire. It made sense, sort of.

“Is there something you need, Lady Thornton?” said a voice behind her, and Clio’s eyes shot open.

She must have walked in her sleep again. She was standing in the middle of what should have been a beautiful room. Even in the pale darkness she could make out the expensive sheen of the smoky gray velvet that covered the walls, but instead of furniture there were only crates stacked in the corners. To her right was a set of windows, under which stood four trunks with clothes spilling out of them. To her left was the lofty bed from which she had presumably sleepwalked, its striped hangings supported by lightly silvered pillars in the shape of ancient columns. And at her feet lay an overturned wooden box from which had been spilled a glass figurine in the shape of a headless bear, the bear’s head, a handful of checkers, a sling shot, and what had once been a small gold table clock, which was now a not-so-small pile of gold coils and gears. Clio bent to pick it up, but the voice behind her—Corin’s voice—stopped her.