The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla A Pink Carnation Novel (15 page)

I held tight to Colin’s hand. “I’ll keep it brief,” I promised. “It should be just a yes/no on those chapters. He just needs to tell me if I’m on the right track so I can keep going.”

“And then?” That was another of Colin’s strengths. He listened. He’d spent a lot of time listening to me babble on about my work in the months we were together. This dissertation was as much his as mine; he’d been part of it every step of the way.

Well, almost every step of the way.

I took a deep breath. “If he likes it—there’s a shot I could submit for June.”

Even as I said it, I wished I hadn’t. The words felt like a jinx. But there it was: vampires aside, I was scarily close to finishing. The chapters I’d given my advisor represented a good two-thirds of my outline. Discovering what had happened to the Pink Carnation would be nice, but it wasn’t necessary for the dissertation, which dealt less with personalities and more with mechanisms. Or, at least, that was the idea. My advisor was big on mechanisms, not so much on personalities. I’d tried to tamp down the fascination I felt for the individuals and make it look like I was merely mining them for their methodologies.

“Will I have to call you Doctor?” Colin’s voice was warm against the chill air, like hot cider with a kick of brandy in it.

“Please!” I said. “Only the pretentious do that. Besides, it’s only the first step. I may not be ready to submit in June. Who knows.”

The shadows seemed to press around us as we crossed the green in front of Peet’s Coffee, the same Peet’s Coffee where I had my weekly writing dates with my friend Liz. As counterintuitive as it might seem, I didn’t want to think about finishing. I’d gotten used to life as a grad student. As a grad student, I could pick up and spend three months in England. Once I was on the job market—what then? It was one thing to try to imagine Colin sharing my life in Cambridge, here and there, for a week at a time. But what would happen after that? The future was a large, frightening blank.

Jobs for historians of modern Britain weren’t exactly thick on the ground. I would have to go where I had to go.

But I didn’t want to think about that now, not with Colin here, with our own future so uncertain and unsettled.

“There’s a good shot that even if I finish this year, I’ll stay on in Cambridge another year,” I said, dodging a group of drunk B-school students who were staggering out of the depths of Grendal’s Den, having evidently started their weekend early. “It’ll be too late to go on the job market, so what usually happens is that they dredge up a job here as a Hist and Lit lecturer. I’m already teaching in Hist and Lit, so that’s an easy option for me.”

“So you’ll stay where you are?” Colin’s collar was up against the wind, giving me an obstructed view of his face.

“Possibly in a larger apartment,” I said, and grimaced at the needy note in my voice. “Anyway. Here we are. One pub. As promised.”

Shays was really a business school hangout, rather than a grad school one, but I’d thought Colin would prefer the sticky floor and round beer mats to the beige trendiness of Grafton Street. It was also one of the few places with an outdoor seating section, a tiny little sunken patio right off JFK Street. In a week or two, the unsteady metal chairs and tables would be dragged inside as the world battened down for winter, but right now it was just warm enough to sit outside with a glass of tannic-tasting red wine and enjoy the nip in the air and an arm around the shoulders.

Most of the tables were already occupied by students celebrating an extended weekend with Thursday-night drinks, including a group that had pulled three tables together. We managed to snag one to ourselves, off to the side, still bearing the dirty glasses and crumpled check of the previous party.

Colin neatly moved the detritus out of the way. “Gin and tonic?” he said, with the air of a man who knows.

“Er—red wine, actually,” I said apologetically. “Whatever they have for their house plonk. No, sit. They’ll come to us.”

Colin sank back down in his chair, and I found myself missing the Heavy Hart, where we had our regular routine, G&T for me, a pint for Colin, order at the bar, and ladies’ room to the back. Maybe it was that Colin was jet-lagged, maybe it was that I was tired, but our reunion felt oddly uneven, one minute comfortable and familiar, the next stiff and awkward, as if we were strangers on a train, forced into the false intimacy of sharing a limited space.

“How are things at Selwick Hall?” I asked quickly, eager to bring us back onto familiar ground.

Colin readjusted his cardboard beer mat. “Fine.”

What is it about the word “fine” that always makes it sound quite the contrary? As if “fine” were a synonym for “altogether crappy and thank you for not inquiring further.”

I shifted forward, making the iron table rock against the uneven flagstones of the patio. “Is everything okay?”

“Brilliant.” Colin glanced up. “Where’s that waitress?”

Serving a rowdy group of business school students, already dressed for Halloween. I counted one witch, one pirate, and at least two slutty vampires, one of whom was already several sheets to the wind.

“She’ll be here in a minute.” Fighting a sense of impending doom, I asked, “Is Joan Plowden-Plugge still seeing Nigel Dempster?”

Joan was the girl next door, although anyone less girl-next-door-ish would be hard to imagine. Fortunately, her designs on Colin appeared to have been quenched when she started dating Colin’s sister’s evil ex.

Our lives were very complicated sometimes. Don’t even get me started on the rest of Colin’s family.

Colin raised a hand to flag down the waitress. “I assume so. I made it a point not to find out.”

I nodded vigorously. “As long as they’re keeping each other occupied.”

My breath made little puffs of air in the evening chill. It was about ten degrees too cold to be sitting outside. But that wasn’t the sole source of the chill. What was going on with Colin? He might just be tired. He might. But all my antennae were quivering, like Miss Clavel in the Madeline books, who woke up in the middle of the night, sure that something was not quite right.

Something wasn’t quite right here. I just wasn’t sure what it was. It wasn’t that Colin hadn’t seemed glad to see me. He had. He wouldn’t have hauled all the way out here just to break up with me, would he? No.

At least, I didn’t think so.

No. Definitely no. Or if he had, he would have done it right away, and then removed himself to a hotel. He wouldn’t have smooched me like we were still a thing and left his suitcase by my bed. That wasn’t Colin. He was honorable to a fault, and, for a male, remarkably straightforward about his feelings. When he bothered to express them.

Which meant that it was something else.

I waited while Colin placed our orders, frantically going through our conversation in my mind, trying to isolate the moment when he had pulled his classic hedgehog impression. My dissertation? He’d told me he didn’t mind my putting his family stories out there—not that there was terribly much risk, given that (a) it tended to take a good five years to get from dissertation to book, and another few years on top of that for the academic presses to grind their way to publication, via a slow boat to China, and (b) the circulation would probably be roughly ten academic libraries, four cranky reviewers, and my mother.

“Is Jeremy behaving himself?” I asked. Colin’s stepfather had been a source of some drama in the not too distant past. He had designs on Colin’s home. Which he’d claimed he’d abandoned in the spirit of familial entente, but . . .

“As far as I can tell.” Colin’s stony expression relaxed somewhat. “There haven’t been any more break-ins, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s a relief,” I lied. Jeremy would have been an easy one. We’d dealt with Jeremy before.

Maybe Colin was just tired. Maybe that was all it was.

The waitress plunked our drinks down in front of us, making the table rock dangerously. I plucked up my glass of wine before the suspiciously viscous liquid could slosh over the sides.

“To your visit,” I said, a little too heartily, lifting my glass to Colin.

“To your meeting tomorrow.” Colin tipped his pint in my direction. There was a crash from the neighboring table as one of the Slutty Vampires caught her feet in the paving and went catapulting over her own chair. “And to vampires.”

Chapter Nine

London, 1806

Honor commanded that Lucien present himself, as promised, at Miss Fitzhugh’s residence the next day.

Pride, however, dictated that he not do so too promptly.

It was midafternoon by the time Lucien set off for Brook Street, easily evading the pursuit of a large man whose clumsy attempts at surveillance marked him unmistakably as a Bow Street Runner. The encounter did little to improve Lucien’s mood. Did the authorities really believe that he was a creature of the night who assuaged his bloodlust by supping from the veins of females wearing too much lip rouge? He hadn’t conducted an examination of the body, but he would have been willing to wager that the cause of death was more likely a knife in the back than a tooth in the throat.

The whole affair stank to high heaven.

Between the rumors, the note, and the disposition of the body, Lucien had the uneasy sensation that he was the prime actor in a drama whose script was known to everyone but him. He wouldn’t have been surprised to have touched the body to find that the flesh was wax, an elaborate prop in a play being enacted around him for purposes unknown to him.

And what was Miss Fitzhugh’s role in all this? Last night, there had been no time to do anything but take her at her word; he had been over the balcony before he could question her advice or her motives.

But the hours had passed and his head had cooled and Lucien found himself reexamining, with increasing disquiet, his brief acquaintance with Miss Sally Fitzhugh.

If that was even her name. He had only her word for it, after all.

It was the presumed Miss Fitzhugh who had, by her own admission, appeared in his garden the other night, and it was Miss Fitzhugh who had boldly presented herself to Lucien the night before. Was it mere officiousness or something more, something sinister? Her presence by his side at the exact moment the note was dropped began to seem something more than coincidence.

Lucien conjured up the image of Miss Fitzhugh’s elegant figure and guinea-gold hair. In her pale gown, with her hair arranged in ringlets, she was the perfect image of a debutante—but for the disconcerting directness of her conversation.

She couldn’t be his mother’s mysterious contact; she was too young. An actress, hired for the occasion? A confederate? The daughter of the original spy?

No matter how Lucien turned the matter over in his mind, the pieces wouldn’t fit. If Miss Fitzhugh were part of a dastardly scheme designed to implicate him in murder, one would think she would have raised the alarm and drawn half the ballroom to their side, not urged him over the balcony.

Unless, of course, that was merely a piece of the plot. In the wee hours of the morning, in his gloomy bedchamber in his parents’ abandoned mansion, Lucien’s paranoid imaginings ran rampant. What if the object weren’t his arrest, but this very meeting? The corpse might have been wax, the entire scenario designed to draw him out, to catch him off his guard.

As he made his way across town, through a mist that drifted across the cobbles and hugged the trees, Lucien wondered just what he was likely to find at Number Twenty-two Brook Street. Miss Fitzhugh? Or a trap of some kind?

If it was the latter, Lucien thought grimly, let them do their worst. He would welcome the opportunity to meet his adversary face-to-face. He had some questions that wanted answering—and a sword in his cane.

The town house on Brook Street hardly presented a sinister aspect. Light shone in bright patches through the windows, fighting bravely against the gloom of a rainy afternoon. Lucien could see a drawing room through the drapes, with a pianoforte in one corner and some rather appallingly pink upholstery embroidered with carnations. It all looked entirely respectable and reasonably benign, but he kept a tight grip on his cane as he rapped on the door, half expecting a skeleton to tumble out at him, or someone in chains to gibber from the attic.

“Yeth?” A man in black opened the door, regarding him with what might have been either a squint of suspicion or merely the result of extreme myopia.

Lucien peered over the man’s shoulder, waiting for an ambush, but saw only a gold-framed mirror and what looked like a child’s fallen toy. The house smelled pleasantly of dried flowers, beeswax candles, and lemon oil. Lucien wasn’t entirely sure what duplicity was meant to smell like, but he doubted it was lemon oil.

Unless, of course, this was a false address and he would find himself encountering an entirely unknown family rather than the mysterious Miss Fitzhugh.

In his grandest voice, he said, “Tell Miss Fitzhugh that the Duke of Belliston is here to see her.”

“Your grathe.” The butler bent low with an audible creaking of bones. “Ith your grathe would be tho kind . . .”

Lucien stalked into the hallway. “Is Miss Fitzhugh at home?” he asked suspiciously.

There was the smell of something baking, something involving apples and cinnamon. The scent made his stomach rumble. Lucien sternly silenced it.

“Mith Thally ith otherwithe occupied,” the butler informed him. He appeared to have a bit of a limp as well as a lisp. “Ith your grathe would be tho good?”