Moonlight Masquerade (13 page)

Suddenly her eyelids slammed open. What was
that sound? How could she have forgotten? The passageway. The sound
had come from the passageway! Although in two separate rooms, she
and Vincent were still linked together by the open passage. Her
gaze quickly shifted to the paneling as she wildly wondered how she
would ever be able to close it, but the wall was already sliding
shut.

Her tears dried on her cheeks. “Vincent,”
she said unnecessarily into the empty air. He had closed off the
corridor, sparing her the embarrassment of having to ask him to do
it. She stood away from the door, slowly shaking her head. “Was it
to help me, Vincent, I wonder, or am I still hopelessly trying to
fashion an angel from a devil?”

Her mind whirled about, seeking another
answer. Perhaps he had hurried to close the panel in order to show
her just one more time how completely and utterly he wanted her out
of his life.

“Well,” she announced with a defiant toss of
her dark curls, “I can only hope he didn’t do himself an injury in
his rush to seal the doorway. I shan’t be tempted to use the
passage again.”

She busied herself for the next few minutes
in moving the small tables back to their original positions around
the chamber, blowing out at least half the candles she had lit
earlier, her agile mind reliving the last half hour with varying
results.

“As a matter of fact, it would be no great
wonder to me if I were to be awakened bright and early tomorrow
morning to the sound of Vincent’s man Lazarus nailing the secret
door shut with a dozen foot long spikes,” she muttered, pushing the
last table back into place with a none too gentle nudge from her
hip.

Walking over to the window, she laid her
forehead against the cold glass, hoping it would ease the headache
now pounding behind her eyes. Outside, the world was dark, with
only a faint moonlight etching weird patterns on the snow. The
scene, once beautiful to her, now seemed barren and vaguely
oppressive.

“Oh, what a fool I am, just as Vincent said.
What a complete and utter ninnyhammer. Why, I all but fell at his
feet, begging for him to love me. Aunt Nellis would have me locked
up for life if she were to learn of it—immediately after she
recovered from her nervous spasm, of course. Whatever possessed me
to believe that Vincent might be falling in love with me? Or that I
could be falling in love with him?”

She pulled the drapery closed and turned
away from the window to begin unbuttoning the front closure of her
gown, not caring when her trembling fingers succeeded in tearing
one of the buttons from the fabric, to send it bouncing off into a
dark corner.

“He’s an awful, terrible man, that’s what he
is, a truly dreadful person. And he was right, I
was
weaving
silly, romantic dreams around him. He’s such a tragic figure, just
the sort gullible young girls love to gush over. That’s the only
reason he told me his story. To gain my sympathy so he could use
me. And yet, when I gave him his chance, he turned away from
me.”

Christine stepped out of her gown and tossed
it carelessly onto a nearby chair, then began removing her chemise.
She tilted her head to one side, recalling more of Vincent’s
words.

“Yet I
do
appeal to him. He told me
so,” she remembered, slightly comforted by the thought. It was so
strange. She had always thought of beauty in terms of face and
fashion. It hadn’t occurred to her that her body could be a source
of fascination.

Slowly, tentatively, she raised her hands to
her breasts, then ran them experimentally over her body, sensing a
new awareness of her physical form, a new yearning, a foreign
hunger. She conjured up a mental picture of Vincent’s body, the way
his muscular firmness had felt as she had pressed her softness
against him.

A shudder racked her body. “Oh, Vincent,”
she breathed on a sigh, reliving their impassioned kiss in the
garden. “I’m so sorry!”

How she had tempted him in her innocence,
her silly, juvenile stupidity! He was, after all, a man, with a
man’s yearnings. And she was a woman, feeling the first real
stirrings of her womanhood.

Love, to Christine, had always meant holding
hands, and kissing, and thinking sweet thoughts. This feeling, this
sudden warmth mixed with mounting frustration, she knew without
being told, was another side of love. This was loving. This was
needing. This was wanting.

She willed her hands back to her sides.

“There seems to be a whole wealth of
information Aunt Nellis has neglected to impart to me,” she decided
thoughtfully, quickly removing her remaining garments and nearly
diving into the concealment of her heavy cotton nightgown.

She mounted the small wooden steps and crept
onto the wide bed, sliding her feet under the covers to touch the
now cold brass warmer. Her tears were back, silent tears that knew
nothing of shame but much of understanding.

“Dearest Vincent,” she whispered into the
darkness. “How much you must love me, if you are willing to send me
away.”

Fifty feet. Not an insurmountable distance.
It would take him less than half a minute to close the gap. Two
doors. Just wood, easily disposed of by depressing the right
triggers. No great barrier to keep him from what he wanted. No
hindrance at all.

He raised his hand to hold it suspended six
inches above the candle in the holder beside his chair. He couldn’t
feel the heat. But, if he lowered his hand, the heat would do more
than warm him. It would burn him. If he could hold his hand three
inches above the flame for a count of fifty, surely he would
deserve a reward.

He closed his eyes and carefully lowered his
hand until he could feel the heat radiating into his palm. “One...
two... three...” he began, slowly counting the numbers out loud the
way he had done so many times before in so many other private games
meant to keep him from going insane. He barely noticed the
discomfort.

“.... nine... ten... eleven...” The heat was
beginning to penetrate his skin. Or was this madness itself,
twisted around to make him think he was sane? Had his solitude
finally served to unhinge him? Was he seriously considering such an
asinine, juvenile stunt to be a game? Did he really believe he
could use this trial by fire as justification for traveling down
that fifty-foot-long passageway to claim Christine for his own?

He pulled his hand away, disgusted with
himself, and flung his body back into the chair he had been sitting
in, sulking in, when Christine had crept into his chamber. “I must
be mad,” he muttered, dropping his chin onto his chest as he glared
into the fire.

The firelight danced over his sprawled
figure, reflecting in his eyes, highlighting his flawed perfection,
revealing his inner torment. He looked into the flames, but he saw
only Christine. Christine, kneeling at his feet, her dark hair
tumbling away from that slight widow’s peak to flow down past her
shoulders. Her sweet little face registering her confusion,
revealing all that was in her heart, mirroring her loving soul.

There was no flaw in her, either hidden or
apparent. She was not a great work of art, to be admired, or a
paragon, to be placed on a pedestal and worshiped from afar.

She was merely and supremely Christine.
Tenacious, playful, at times belligerent, not without moments of
temper, and more than a little adventurous. These were not flaws,
or faults. They were just the wonderful facets that came together
to make Christine the lovely, desirable whole that she was.

Why hadn’t he seen that? Why hadn’t he
known? Why had it taken him so long to understand? Objects weren’t
perfect. Life wasn’t perfect. People weren’t perfect. Perfection,
beauty, happiness was, is, in the eyes of the beholder.

Vincent sat stiffly forward, feeling that he
was on the verge of a great discovery.

Arabella
. She had been so lovely, so
very lovely. She had been his dream, his ideal, walking into his
life to make his dreams reality.

“And when she couldn’t live up to my perfect
dream of her,” he said slowly, his words measured as he tried to
understand this horrifying revelation, “she allowed that dream to
destroy her.”

He was still guilty, he knew that, but he
had been suffering for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t that
Arabella had been flawed, it was that he had made her believe she
was flawed. She had been human, no more, no less. He had been
human, no more, no less.

His sin wasn’t that he had loved too much.
His sin was that he had loved too little. He had fashioned an
impossible ideal, a perfect happiness, and tried to mold Arabella
to fit inside it.

A woman like Christine would have fought
him.

A woman like Arabella had chosen another way
out.

Vincent raised his hand to stroke the
well-remembered scars on his face. He could still see them in his
mind’s eye, raised, and angrily red, and incredibly ugly—the
outward signs of his guilt, his overweening arrogance, his damnable
stupidity. His fingers came away wet, moistened by tears he hadn’t
been aware of shedding.

Everything was different, but nothing had
changed. Arabella was still dead, and he was still responsible for
that death. He did not deserve to be happy.

The following morning it snowed again, but
only for a few hours. Later that day the sun returned to the
land.

Outside the walls of Hawk’s Roost, the thaw
had begun.

H
awk’s Roost wasn’t
an overlarge estate, as country estates went, even if it was the
earl’s oldest and primary seat. Its bedrooms didn’t number in the
hundreds, nor could the house boast elaborately hung state chambers
reserved especially for visiting royalty.

It was a most charming place, rather than an
impressive edifice; a single, tasteful jewel of mellowed pinkish
brick and large expanses of glass, as opposed to a gaudy diamond
necklace sporting turrets and sprawling wings in a hodgepodge of
architectural styles.

It was, however, large enough to make it
possible for a person wishing to avoid the presence of another
person residing within the same walls to accomplish his purpose
without difficulty. When two people were both of a mind to steer a
wide course around each other, the task became downright
simple.

Simple, that is, except for Lazarus, who
seemed to be spending all his waking hours dashing back and forth
between his master and the Misses Denham, trying to serve them all
without acknowledging one’s existence to the other. This was made
doubly difficult thanks to Miss Nellis Denham, who seemed to have
developed a near obsession with the absent earl.

“I shall never understand it,” Aunt Nellis
spoke up quickly as Lazarus entered the drawing room with the
afternoon tea tray. “It is just the greatest mystery. The strangest
thing, I vow, since the disappearance of those two poor, innocent
boys in the Tower.”