Laura Kinsale (55 page)

Stepping out into the wind, Zenia saw that the Arab mare was blanketed and tied to the carriage. She glanced at Lord Winter.

“Shajar al-Durr belongs to Beth,” he said, the cold wind blowing his hair. “She is Elizabeth’s to keep. Not yours or Jocelyn’s. Mr. Bode will see that she has a box on the train.”

Zenia nodded.

“Good-bye,” he said, with a small bow. He turned and went back into the house.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Zenia entered the carriage with the image of his face as he had turned away from her: dark and austere, showing nothing, not emotion or anger or regret. In the daylight, the house was a solitary gray rectangle with tall handsome windows, standing entirely alone on the moorside, the stables and outbuildings tucked in the valley below.

She heard Mr. Bode speak to the horses. The chaise pulled away, grinding over the snow. Beyond the gates, it turned to lumber slowly downhill, following a narrow drive cut into the side of the hollow.

She tried to think of Elizabeth, of the journey ahead, but she could not banish the image of him as he had closed the door. It would be the last thing now; the last memory, to overlay all the others. She put her gloved hands up to her temples and her face, breathing in short gasps.

It would pass. She knew this would pass, and leave her empty and safe. This was the worst. In London there would be Elizabeth waiting.

The road swung along the edge of the valley, turning so that she saw the house again, standing like a sentry on the moor.

Here’s my tunnel,
he had said, when he was deep in delirium.
Do you want to come in?

“You won’t stay,” she whispered. “You won’t, you won’t.”

But she was the one leaving. She chewed the knuckles of her glove, hunching in misery, watching the house disappear. She had a sudden vivid impression of her mother’s voice, screaming, driving one of the servants out of the house—driving Zenia out of Dar Joon. She stared at the seat opposite. She remembered the night Mrs. Williams died. Zenia had shouted back at her hysterical mother for killing the only person Zenia had ever loved—and she could remember her mother looming over her, that white-robed figure, like a djinni, cursing her with Arab curses. She remembered the silent Bedu who had taken her away into the desert, into exile—all alone, all alone, terrified and alone among strangers.

Suddenly she seized the checkstrap, dragging frantically on it. The carriage ground to a slow halt. Mr. Bode drew back the little door in the roof. “Ma’am?”

‘Turn around,” she said, her throat so tight she could barely speak.

“Turn around, ma’am? Beg pardon, but the road’s too narrow here, ma’am—and might be we will miss the train. Have you forgot something?”

She thrust open the door, with her mother’s djinni shrieking a warning in her ears, blinding and choking her. She stumbled as she reached the ground, barely hearing Mr. Bode’s voice.

“Turn around,” she exclaimed. “I want to come in!
El-Muhafeh!”

Her mother howled prophecies and threats; she blamed Zenia for the black draught that had killed Mrs. Williams, she called her faithless and cowardly and female, worthless and nameless; she raged against trust; only a fool would depend on love; what was love but a weak woman’s delusion, a madness, a pestilence—he did not love her, but wildness and wilderness—he would go back to it, called back to it inevitably, not today or tomorrow, but just when she came to need and rely on him...

Zenia faltered, finding herself halfway up the road to the house, with Mr. Bode calling behind her. She felt the pull of her mother’s life—she felt the fixed will in her own heart to clutch Elizabeth to her, to never let her go, the way her own mother had held Zenia and Mrs. Williams, alternating sweetness with dread, with the sheer force of her dominion over them—Zenia knew with a terrible certainty that she had the same power inside her and the knowledge to use it. She did not want to, but when she thought of being alone, of the days to come, she stood still in the snow, shaking with fear.

“I’m not like my mother,” she said. “I’m not.”

She walked a few feet, and then turned and looked back toward the carriage. It was moving away from her, down the hill. She felt a welling of panic.

“I don’t want to be alone,” she cried. She ran down, stumbling, slipping on the snowy slope. She stopped, panting. “I want to be safe! I hate the desert! You’ll leave me!”

But she remembered his face. His face, and the rooms in a deserted house. And a man growing strange and lonely and remote, speaking to no one. While her mother’s djinni roared furiously in the wind, dragging her ruthlessly away from him, promising refuge and peace, safety; promising no loss, because everything was lost already.

She began to run. She did not know if it was up or down, until the house loomed up in front of her. She was up the steps and into the dark passage, discovering herself there, the door closed behind her.

She swallowed her panting. Her heart was beating so that she could hear nothing, not even her own footsteps as she walked down the passage and stopped before the door of his room.

He sat at one of the desks, his head bent over a book. He was so still that he did not even seem real to her. He seemed like someone very far away.

He flipped the page, leaning over it: an English gentleman sitting alone, intensely occupied by the volume before him. Zenia could see the print. The engraving he was staring at so raptly was still covered by a leaf of blotting paper tucked in the spine.

“El-Muhafeh,”
she said desperately, “help me!”

His head jerked up. He rose, knocking the book from the desk.

Her face crumpled. ‘There is a djinni!” she cried. “It’s my mother!”

He stood gazing at her as if she were a supernatural manifestation herself.

She gripped the doorframe, shaking her head. “There are no djinn,” she exclaimed. “It is all superstition and ignorance. It is unchristian.”

His blue eyes narrowed. “What has happened?”

She closed her eyes. “I’m afraid! She’s in my head. She makes me do things, and say things! She’s making me the way she was! She’s making me leave you.” Her eyes opened. “Do you understand?” she cried. “You promised to protect me!”

She saw the elemental spring alive within him, the demon she had always thought she feared. With a sudden move, he stepped forward, his teeth showing in a fierce smile. “You’re mine, little wolf. I won’t let her have you.”

“I’m afraid! I’m afraid you can’t stop her.”

“Who came for you,” he said, “when you were alone at Dar Joon?”

“You came,” she whispered. “You were never afraid of the djinn.”

“Never,” he said.

“They aren’t real,” she said. But in her heart she believed, she felt the malevolent power that reached out to tear her away. She looked up at him, ashamed to plead for reassurance. “But my mother—I dream about her. What if you leave me? What if you go away and I wake up and she’s there?”

He did not touch her. He stood looking down at her, smiling his demon smile. “I’ll write you a charm,” he said. ‘To keep you safe.”

While Zenia watched wide-eyed from the doorway, he caught the leather thong off the sculpture on the mantel and carried it to his desk. He lit a candle, and then tore a small strip of paper, writing on it.

Carefully, soberly, he rolled the scrap and held it in the smoke for a moment. Zenia watched his lips, but he spoke his short incantation silently, his face intent.

With a knife, he split the seal of the amulet, a little silver box the size of a sugar lump, and flicked the former contents into the fire. He placed his charm inside, resealed the silver band with a hard pressure of the knife, and rose.

“I said I would always be with you,” he murmured, lifting the amulet about her neck. “Wolf cub. This holds me. This defends you. Forever.”

She put her hand up, clasping it. She didn’t believe in magic—that was her mother’s influence, her mother’s folly, the delusions of the East. But there was such a look of strong certainty in his expression, such an assurance...

For the first time, with the charm about her neck, she felt conviction spread through herself. It was like sweet water, like a mantle wrapped about her as she looked up into his face—his strong, harsh face that held no fear of demons—a pure, calm trust in him to stay.

She held onto the amulet all through their wedding, performed in the cold staircase hall before Mr. and Mrs. Bode. And when the curate copied out her marriage lines and gave them to her, she held them, too. She kept them in her lap through the surprisingly excellent dinner, put on by Mrs. Bode in the dining room surrounded by guns and maps.

There was an extra place cleared for the diffident young curate, who only blinked and discreetly applied himself to his soup when Lord Winter began, “Now that Beth’s parents have made a Christian marriage—” And broke off in the middle of the sentence. “I mean to say—”

He apparently found nothing that he meant to say after that unguarded blunder. In the ensuing awkward silence he glanced ruefully at Zenia and made a faint gesture of regret with his hand. He seemed disinclined to say much at all after that, sinking into one of his bleak dinner-table silences.

But Zenia did not care. She felt pleased and easy with everything. After a long interval in which neither of the gentlemen offered to look up from their soup bowls, she even ventured to suggest that perhaps they could wait a day, or even two, to return to London, as Elizabeth was in excellent hands with Mrs. Lamb.

Lord Winter made a little grimacing glance about the room. “What a delightful place to honeymoon!”

“There is the cottage,” Zenia suggested.

He looked at her, and then at the politely attentive curate, and positively blushed. She watched blood rise in his throat and cheeks. He cleared his throat. “Where the gamekeeper lives, do you mean?”

Zenia remembered that Mrs. Bode had called him a shy gentleman. It was such a wildly incongruous description of the man she knew that she had hardly paid it any mind. Reserved, yes—moody and difficult to understand—she curled her hand about her amulet and observed him curiously, his arrogant look down at the glass, black brows raised a little, as if he had been affronted.

You are shy,
she thought, gazing at him with profound affection.

“It seemed quite cozy last night,” she said placidly.

He gave her a smoldering glance, still red in the face, and then scowled at his glass, turning it around and around between his fingers.

It seemed her place, then, between these two backward gentlemen, to take the lead in conversation. She managed to carry them along, one after the other, with a speculation on the weather, and questions about the curate’s parish duties, and a description of how Lord Winter’s property lay in relation to the railway, but she did not engage them both until she happened to hit upon the topic of guns.

The curate, apparently too bashful to inquire for himself, eagerly seized her lead to enter into a torrent of queries about Lord Winter’s collection. He was, it appeared, a devotee of shooting; he was inspired by several of the pieces hanging upon the walls and positively in awe when Lord Winter took down the Colt revolving rifle.

The clergyman listened with passionate attention to his host’s description of the gun’s action and performance in a series of desert encounters. They had it all apart on the table while the mutton grew cold and Mrs. Bode pugnacious.