The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla A Pink Carnation Novel (3 page)

“That’s just the problem,” said Megan mournfully. “It turns out it’s the other way around. The book came first. And it was so perfect.”

I took a long, bracing swig of my coffee, so strong that it made Starbucks taste like a distant second cousin to caffeine. “What was?”

Outside, the air was crisp and bracing, perfect jacket weather. We picked up our pace in an attempt to get to the Barker Center before our students did. There’s always a little loss of moral high ground when the TF is five minutes late. And, trust me, we needed all the moral high ground we could get.

Breathlessly, Megan said, “There was a vampire scare in London—including a woman turning up dead with fang marks on her neck—and the author of
The Convent of Orsino
was all over it—but it looks like it happened
after
her book, not before.”

“Whoa.” Miss Gwen and vampires? I stumbled as my heel caught on a bit of uneven brickwork and just managed not to upend my coffee over my cream-colored sweater. “All over it how?”

I was amused by the idea of Miss Gwen as a sort of parasol-toting Van Helsing, but I couldn’t help but wonder if there might be something more to it. Whenever people turned up dead around Miss Gwen, they tended to be connected in some way or another to French spy rings.
The Convent of Orsino
came out in 1806. If my hunch was right, then maybe the dissolution of her partnership with the Pink Carnation was exactly what I had expected it was, a front.

It would make a brilliant chapter. If it were true.

“There was this duke—,” Megan began, and broke off as one of our students chugged up to us.

“Eloise? Megan?” She had the expression of contrition down pat. “I’m, like, SO sorry. . . .”

And it began.

“Don’t worry,” Megan was saying patiently. She gave me a shoot-me-now look over the girl’s head. “I’m sure you can find some way to make up the work.”

Grrr. The hands of the clock in the hall of the Barker Center clicked to one. Vampires were going to have to wait. And in three hours, my boyfriend was getting off a plane from England.

I thought of all the things I had intended to do before Colin arrived: shower, laundry, shove miscellaneous overdue library books into a coherent pile, go through the fridge to remove evidence of microwave dinners for one, buy fresh flowers to put into a vase (which led to the next item: buy a vase into which to put fresh flowers). Oh, yes, and bake cookies. Because, as we all know from
Clueless
, it’s important to have something baking.

Then I thought about Miss Gwen and vampires.

If I left directly after tutorial and hightailed it home, I would have time for at least the shower and quite possibly the library books. After all, any information Megan might have about Miss Gwen’s escapades in 1806 was already two hundred years old. It would keep for the weekend. It had been three long months since I had seen Colin. Surely, he deserved a little more consideration—and possibly, some fresh flowers—than a batch of long-dead spies?

I caught up to Megan as we joined the students jostling their way into the café of the Barker Center.

I couldn’t believe I was doing this, but . . .

“Do you have time for a very quick drink after tutorial?” I murmured. “I want to hear more about your vampire . . .”

Chapter One

London, 1806

“They say he’s a vampire.”

Sally Fitzhugh’s friend Agnes trotted after her as Sally made a beeline for the French doors to the garden, driven by a restlessness she couldn’t entirely explain. Behind her, she could hear the scraping of the musicians, the swish of fashionable fans. She just wanted out. Away from the heat, away from the smells, away from the petty gossip and murmurings.

It was October, and cold, but the ballroom was humid with the press of too many bodies in too small a place. The very mirrors seemed fogged with it, blurred and distorted. Even with her arms and neck bare, Sally felt uncomfortably warm in her silk and gauze gown.

The crisp October air hit Sally like a tonic, and, with it, Agnes’s words. Had Agnes really said—

“A what?”

Agnes ducked the rapidly swinging door. “A bloodsucking creature of the night,” she said helpfully as she followed Sally out towards the balustrade, away from the crush in Lord Vaughn’s ballroom.

“I know what a vampire is. Everyone knows what they are.” Ever since
The Convent of Orsino
(by a Lady) had taken the town by storm the previous spring, the ladies of the
ton
had become intimate experts on the topic. The men, just as sickeningly, had taken to powdering their faces pale and affecting red lip rouge. Sally found it distinctly ridiculous.

But, then, she was finding it all a little ridiculous just now: the too strong perfumes, the smug smiles, the whispering voices behind fans, the incredible arrogance of those powdered fops and perspiring ladies. It would serve them right if there were vampires in their midst. Not that such things existed, of course. Any bloodsucking that went on in the
ton
was purely of the metaphorical variety, although none the less draining for that.

Sally gripped the cool stone of the balustrade with both hands, breathing in deeply through her nose. She wasn’t sure what ailed her. Back in the cloistered confines of Miss Climpson’s Select Seminary, she had been itching to try her wings on the world, to flirt and laugh and bend beaux to her will. She knew exactly what it would be like: a cross between a Samuel Richardson novel and those notices one read in the paper, the ones that began with “Lady A— wore a gown of watered green silk.” She would be the toast of London, taking the town by storm.

And why shouldn’t she? She was, she knew, without false modesty, more than passably attractive. Quite a bit more, really. It didn’t do to be disingenuous about such things. So what if Martin Frobisher called her a gilded beanpole? He was just sore because she made him look like the sniveling little thing he was—and jealous because his family hadn’t two guineas to rub together. Proud, he called her. Well, yes, she was proud. She knew her own worth, both in character and in coin. What did it matter that her family had never thrown down a cloak for Elizabeth I or provided a mistress for Charles II? Just because they had never toadied for a title didn’t mean that they weren’t as good as anyone. They were certainly a sure sight better-looking, and her dowry was as big as anyone’s.

Both of those, Sally knew, guaranteed her entrée into society—or her brother’s name wasn’t Turnip.

She had sallied off to London in the firm anticipation of champagne-filled evenings of compliments, in which she would hold court among her devoted and witty admirers.

Well, she had been right about the champagne, at least. She just hadn’t expected it to taste quite so sour.

Even so, it was better than ratafia, the drink of young ladies, of which she had imbibed enough over the past year and a half to float a medium-sized royal barge. To be honest, she hadn’t minded the ratafia at the first. And if her admirers were less witty and more waspish—well, she was too busy flirting her fan and enjoying her own wit to mind. It was only bit by bit, along the course of her first Season, that she began to realize that it all felt a little flat. The bright silks and satins looked best by candlelight, where the stains didn’t show. The glittering jewels were too often paste. The fashionable gossip, which had seemed so terribly clever and scandalous in that first month, became nothing more than the endless repetition of a series of painfully similar
on dits
.

Did it really matter that Lucy Ponsonby had been seen
without her gloves
at Lady Beaufeatheringstone’s latest ball? It was hardly a matter of international policy.

She was just in a mood, she told herself. Tired, cranky, weary. Too many nights of too many entertainments that weren’t all that entertaining. It would get better. It had to get better. She didn’t like feeling like this, so purposeless. So restless.

She had hoped that having her friends Lizzy and Agnes join her this year would help, that introducing them to society would provide some of the vim that she had felt last year, when it was all fresh and new. But Agnes didn’t care much for such things, and Lizzy had rapidly, without much help from Sally, acquired her own circle.

Lizzy had, in fact, become something of a minor sensation in her own right. Part of it was due to her stepmother, Mrs. Reid. Mrs. Reid’s novel,
The Convent of Orsino
, was the topic of conversation at all select soirees, her presence a coup for any hostess. People fought to send cards to her stepdaughter, in the hope that Mrs. Reid might attend, and—even better!—lose her temper and pink someone with her infamous sword parasol. A wound from Mrs. Reid was a sure sign of social success. But while Mrs. Reid’s notoriety might have garnered Lizzy the invitations, the rest she had achieved on her own. At any party, one could find Lizzy surrounded by a fascinated group of men and women, telling hair-raising tales of her youth in India. Given that Lizzy had left India at the age of six, and spent the rest of her formative years first with a retired vicar’s wife and then in the decidedly unexotic confines of Miss Climpson’s Select Seminary, Sally strongly suspected that the larger part of those stories were apocryphal, taken right out of the novels they had smuggled under the covers at Miss Climpson’s. Not that that made any difference to her audience.

It didn’t hurt that the rumor had made its way around the
ton
that Lizzy’s mother had been an Indian princess, complete with elephant and priceless jewels.

It was Sally who had started the rumor about Lizzy’s mother being an Indian princess. Not the elephants. The elephants had come later, along with other embellishments that made the originator of the tale raise her brows and wrinkle her nose. People did come up with the most ridiculous things. . . .

But, still, it was all better than the truth, which was that Lizzy’s mother had been a bazaar girl. A touch of royal blood rendered Lizzy interesting and exotic; without it, she would be stigmatized as nothing but the bastard brat of an insignificant East India Company Colonel of little fortune and no birth. That was what Sally had reckoned when she started the rumor.

Of course, she hadn’t reckoned on it running away from her like that.

She hadn’t reckoned on being left behind.

That was silly. It wasn’t as though Lizzy had left her. They still spent a great deal of time together. It was just . . . When Sally had left Miss Climpson’s for London, it had never occurred to her that Agnes and Lizzy would carry on without her, turning their trio into a duo. They had even had an adventure of their own—not that it was terribly much of an adventure, given that Lizzy and Agnes had run off the moment there was a hint of a French spy on the scene, disappearing for weeks and causing everyone a lot of bother finding them again. If Sally had been there, they would have routed the spy on their own, and saved everyone a great deal of trouble.

But she hadn’t been there. As they had reminded her countless times. Not always intentionally, but in little ways—in jokes she didn’t understand and in memories she didn’t share. Sally was used to being the leader of their little trio. It felt very odd to be rendered de trop.

“—inconvenient diet,” Agnes was saying. “Blood does stain so.”

Belatedly, Sally pulled her attention back to Agnes. Unlike Sally, Agnes did not seem to be enjoying the cool night air. Her teeth were chattering slightly and her skin was turning a faint shade of blue that matched the color of her gown.

“Here,” Sally said, and took the light shawl from her own shoulders and wrapped it around Agnes, who hadn’t had the sense to bring her own. “What
are
you talking about?”

“The rumors,” said Agnes, blinking innocently at Sally as she absently tucked the corners of the wrap beneath her arms. “Haven’t you heard? They say he’s a vampire.”

“A vampire? Hardly.” Sally paused to glower in the general direction of the ballroom. There was no love lost between her and their host. Lord Vaughn was not an admirer of Sally’s brother, Turnip, which meant that Sally was not an admirer of Lord Vaughn. No one but Sally was allowed to insult Turnip. Still, even so . . . “Whatever else I may think of the man, Lord Vaughn looks perfectly corporeal to me. Those waistcoats are just an affectation.”

It would be just like Lord Vaughn to set himself up as an undead creature of the night. He prided himself on being slightly sinister, going about in those black waistcoats with silver serpents, murmuring cryptic comments. It was, reflected Sally critically, all just a little too obvious.

“Not Lord Vaughn,” said Agnes patiently. “The Duke of Belliston.”

“The Duke of Who?” Lizzy joined them on the balcony, her bronze curls escaping from a wreath of flowers that had gone askew, like the halo of a naughty angel. There was a healthy glow in her cheeks and her brown eyes were bright.

“Belliston,” said Agnes, palpably unaware of any social frissons or fissures. “In the house across the garden.”

She gestured in the other direction, away from the crowded ballroom, past long rows of perfectly trimmed parterres.

Even in the waning season of the year, Lord Vaughn’s shrubbery didn’t have a leaf out of place. The garden was arranged in the French style, all gravel paths and geometric designs, scorning the more natural wilderness gardens coming into vogue. Above the close-clipped hedges and the marble statues glimmering white in the moonlight, Sally could just make out the outline of the great house across the way.