The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla A Pink Carnation Novel (21 page)

Miss Fitzhugh lifted her chin. “I am in my second Season,” she said importantly. And then, when Lucien merely raised a brow, she said, “People talk.”

“Talk,” said Lucien, “was not what Miss Logan’s protector had in mind.”

This time, Miss Fitzhugh didn’t go pink. Instead she said, with admirable self-possession, “No. I don’t imagine it was her conversation that attracted him.”

She tilted her head up at Lucien, as if to say,
So there
.

She looked delightfully smug, her blue eyes bright with satisfaction, her very pose an unspoken challenge.

In fact, she looked like a woman waiting to be kissed. And if she weren’t the innocent she claimed not to be—which she was, Lucien reminded himself, however many Seasons she might have had—he wouldn’t have the least bit of compunction about taking her up on that offer.

All it would take was one step, one step forward, and then he could slide his hand beneath that artfully arranged hair, beneath that single curl that bobbed and bounced and drew the eye to the sleek line of her neck, rising above the demure braid collar of her walking dress. He would drop to one knee in front of that silly little stool and kiss the smile from the corners of her eyes. He would kiss the tender spot at the side of her neck, and the pulse in the hollow of her wrist, where her glove parted from her sleeve.

And then, when desire replaced surprise, when her breath quickened and her eyelids flickered, he would draw her down towards him and kiss those ripe red lips, kiss them until the papers fluttered unheeded to the floor around them, kiss them until neither of them remembered why they were there, or anything but that they were.

“Duke?” Miss Fitzhugh was watching him with bright eyes. She waved a hand. “Belliston? Are you quite all right?”

Lucien tugged at his collar. She was right. It was rather close in here. “Perfectly,” he said. “I’m just—thinking.” That was it. Thinking.

“Is there any clue in there to his identity?” Miss Fitzhugh leaned forward, her bosom molding the supple material of her dress.

His? Oh, yes. Miss Logan’s protector. Lucien gave himself a little shake. He hadn’t felt this randy since his Louisiana cousins had taken him, a raw seventeen, to their favorite little house of pleasure. He’d walked around in a happy haze for a week.

And he should absolutely not be picturing Miss Fitzhugh wearing a boned corset and draping herself across a red velvet settee.

Lucien hastily directed his attention back to the letters. “Whoever he was, she seems to have kept him on a short leash.” Some imp prompted him to add, “Metaphorically speaking.”

Miss Fitzhugh narrowed her eyes at him, but didn’t ask what she was clearly burning to ask. Instead, she pursed her lips speculatively. “What if she pushed him past bearing?”

It was a tempting theory. “It sounds as though she was bleeding the poor devil dry.” Lucien glanced down at the smudged pages. The writing grew more irregular as the correspondence progressed and the author grew correspondingly desperate. “She set a high price on her favors.”

Miss Fitzhugh looked down at her hands, her expression troubled. “That isn’t much of an epitaph, is it?”

“If Sherry was telling the truth, it’s a just one.” The old nickname slipped out without his meaning it to, bringing with it a stab of raw pain.

He’d scarcely thought of Sherry all these years, but now that he was here, all the old emotions came coursing back. Sherry had been the closest thing he’d had to a brother. The man had been telling the truth when he said he’d been scarcely older than Lucien was now; he’d been fresh out of university, just old enough to be worldly, but young enough to be a friend as well as a tutor. Lucien had looked up to him, had striven to emulate him in all things.

Against the greater tragedy of his parents’ deaths, Sherry’s defection had been a small wound. But it had ached all the same. Lucien had lost his parents, his confidant, and his home, all in the same week.

It was hard to speak to this new Sherry—to Mr. Quentin—without remembering the man he had known, without instinctively trusting him.

His own memories betrayed him. He’d remembered his childhood at Hullingden as a halcyon time, his parents devoted, his tutor a trusted companion. But his mother had been selling information, and Sherry—Sherry might have been plotting goodness only knew what.

Lucien shoved the letters into his waistcoat pocket. “It’s past four. We should be getting back.” Before Miss Fitzhugh could protest, he said provocatively, “You must be done buying laces by now.”

“Buying— Oh. Right.” Miss Fitzhugh took his hand and let him help her to her feet. “With any luck, Parsnip will have got into another pot of jam. They won’t have any notion that I’m gone.” Changing the subject, she said, “Tell me about Mr. Quentin.”

“He was Mr. Sheridan when I knew him. Sherry.” It was easier to think of the man they had met in the theater as Mr. Quentin, a different creature entirely from his own Sherry. Lucien shrugged. “There’s nothing to tell. You know as much as I do.”

“No,” said Miss Fitzhugh, “I don’t. Not if you won’t confide in me.”

What was there to confide? “My mother was a spy and my old tutor is most likely a cold-blooded killer.” Lucien retrieved his cloak from the chair on which Miss Fitzhugh had deposited it and swirled it around his shoulders. “I should have stayed on the other side of the ocean.”

He had been happy in New Orleans. As happy as one could be in perpetual exile, with unfinished business left behind.

“Was that where you were?” Miss Fitzhugh lifted the lantern that Sherry had left with them. Strange shadows played along the walls of the narrow corridor. “Gossip has it that you were chained in an attic. Or in the family crypt.”

“Gossip was wrong.” His parents had been laid to rest in the crypt, beneath marble slabs with their names engraved in the stone, the lettering fresh and raw beside the graves of his ancestors.

“Obviously,” said Miss Fitzhugh. Skirting a pile of sandbags, she pressed her advantage. “And you might be wrong about Mr. Quentin. Whoever arranged that body has a twisty sort of mind.”

“Theatrical.” The word was bitter in Lucien’s mouth.

“Yes. I mean—no!” Miss Fitzhugh paused, the lantern suspended in her hand. “If I were a theatrical impresario, the last thing I would do would be to draw attention to myself by killing one of my own actresses. Or if I were to kill one of my own actresses, I would be sure to do so in a way that didn’t draw any attention to me.”

“That’s just what was done,” said Lucien wearily. “She was left in Richmond. Her appearance was altered. If you hadn’t recognized her, we’d never have traced her back to Pudding Lane.” He could hear rustling and scratching behind them, undoubtedly mice in the wainscoting. “Didn’t someone once say that the simplest solution is usually the best?”

“Yes, a person with no imagination.” Miss Fitzhugh discarded Occam’s razor without a qualm. “The simplest solution is merely the path of least resistance. It doesn’t mean it’s
right
.”

Lucien walked faster. They ought to be in the wings by now, but the corridor went on and on, piles of scenery propped against the walls, dressing room doors on either side. “Why are you so determined to defend him?”

Miss Fitzhugh hurried to keep up, one hand holding her skirts, the other the lantern. “Because you cared for him once. Would your own instincts lie?”

His instincts were the last thing he’d trust right now. The corridor dead-ended on a door with a heavy latch. They had taken the wrong turning. He couldn’t even do a simple little thing like get them out of the theater right.

Lucien’s frustration expanded to encompass the door, the corridor, the whole situation. Backed into a corner, he said shortly, “My instincts are about as honest as a harlot’s kiss.”

“Well, then.” Miss Fitzhugh’s skirts brushed his legs as she wormed her way around him. “This isn’t the stage.”

“No,” agreed Lucien. Behind them, bits of discarded scenery littered the corridor like the debris of a shattered world: fallen columns jostled with stone towers; stairs leading to nowhere loomed above chaise longues upholstered in tattered velvet. “We should be able to get out this way.”

Lucien gave the latch an experimental rattle. The door held fast, the metal latch clanking against the wood.

Behind them, there was a loud crack. The lantern swayed wildly as Miss Fitzhugh swung around, setting the shadows leaping, strange shapes looming and dancing all along the corridor. Dust rose in the air, the motes turning a demonic orange in the lantern light, making Lucien’s eyes water and his throat sting.

Inhaling deeply, Miss Fitzhugh lowered the lantern. “It’s a bit of scenery. I must have brushed it with my skirt as I passed.”

“Yes, that must be it,” Lucien agreed.

Was it his imagination, or could he smell the cloying scent of dead flowers, stronger now than it had been before?

He peered down the corridor, but all was still now. Even the rustling and scrabbling in the wainscoting had stopped. It was all as silent as the grave.

“It’s rather odd without the actors, isn’t it?” said Miss Fitzhugh. She craned her neck to look over her shoulder. “A little . . . eerie.”

As if in answer, something creaked behind them.

“Old buildings settle, don’t they?” said Miss Fitzhugh gamely.

Lucien slid his hand into the secret pocket of his cloak, reaching for his pistol. He was sure it was all their imaginations, the result of the strange lighting, the fragments of a hundred illusions, but, just to be safe . . . “This building isn’t that old.”

He gave the latch another tug, and this time the door gave, opening with a tremendous screech that made Miss Fitzhugh draw in her breath.

Cold air came rushing in, along with fingers of mist that swirled along the tops of Lucien’s boots and plucked at his hair.

“We’ve come out at the side,” said Miss Fitzhugh. There was a cobbled courtyard, the stones all but obscured by a low-hanging fog. She reached to hang the lantern on a hook on the wall, and then thought better of it. Dark hadn’t yet fallen, but the gray sky lent only a thin, pale light that barely penetrated the rising mist. “I’m sure Mr. Quentin won’t mind if we borrow this.”

“Let’s get you home,” said Lucien, possessing himself of her arm. “It’s later than I like.”

The sound of his bootheels echoed eerily behind them as they hurried across the courtyard. The swish of Miss Fitzhugh’s long skirts against her half boots sounded like the whispers of a hundred malicious tongues.

Someone had lit the two tall flambeaux in front of the theater. The light lent a demonic orange tint to the purple mist swirling around them as they stumbled their way to the place where the carriage had been.

Miss Fitzhugh set the lantern down with a thump on a hitching post. “I thought you’d left the phaeton here.”

So had he.

“It must have been farther down the street,” said Lucien, with more confidence than he felt. Safe enough at night, when the alley was thronged with theatergoers, the area felt less salubrious by day, especially wrapped in the all-enveloping mist. The buildings across the street were all dark and shuttered; the black windows like a dozen winking eyes.

“What was that?” Miss Fitzhugh’s hand slid from his arm. Lucien could hear the whisper of her skirt, the patter of her boots as she took a couple of swift steps, her violet pelisse blending into the fog. “Who’s there?”

Lucien’s instincts screamed danger. He snagged her by the arm before she could disappear into the mist. She swung around, coming up hard against his chest. “Ouch!”

“Sorry.” Lucien didn’t let go. He hadn’t realized he had been holding his breath until he let it out. “What were you doing, wandering off like that?”

“I didn’t wander off. Didn’t you see . . . ? There was a man. A masked man. Following us.” Miss Fitzhugh squirmed in his grip, straining her head to look back over her shoulder. “If you let me go, I might still catch him.”

“I don’t see anyone.” Lucien’s hands closed around her elbows, drawing her closer as he looked over her shoulders, scanning for danger.

“He was there.” Miss Fitzhugh squinted into the fog. “I’m sure of it—well, mostly sure of it.”

“Mist plays strange tricks.” So did their killer. For a moment, he’d almost forgotten why they were here. Lucien swung around, keeping Miss Fitzhugh in the shelter of his arm. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone there now.”

“Nooo . . .” Miss Fitzhugh sounded distinctly disappointed. She murmured something that seemed to include the words “if only” and “sword parasol.”

Lucien placed a hand protectively on the small of her back, glancing back over his shoulder with a frown. “Let’s find that phaeton. We must have got turned around in the mist.”

“Yes,” said Miss Fitzhugh, sounding distinctly unconvinced. “That’s it.”

Lucien scooped up the lantern. “If not,” he said, with more confidence than he felt, “we’ll find a hansom cab.”

“On a rainy Friday? It’s impossible to hail a hansom at this hour.” Miss Fitzhugh’s breath was short as she hurried to match his pace. “Or so I’ve been told,” she added quickly, from which Lucien gathered that young ladies weren’t meant to be hailing hansoms. “Oh, look! There’s the phaeton.”

Lucien could hear the relief in her voice. It was echoed in his own. “If we’d come out the front, we’d have seen it right away.”

The horses stamped their feet against the cobbles, whinnying faintly as they approached. The small boy he’d paid to watch them appeared to have decamped, leaving the reins lying looped on the seat.