The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla A Pink Carnation Novel (5 page)

The duke’s heavy-lidded black eyes swept from the bottom of her gold-embroidered hem all the way up to the glimmering concoction of gold and coral around her neck.

At least, she assumed it was the necklace at which he was looking, and not the fine blue veins in her throat.

The duke stepped forward, fallen leaves rustling beneath his feet. The air in the garden felt suddenly very close, heavy with the scent of dead flowers. “Are you volunteering to wield it?”

Sally stumbled as she took a half step back, trying to pass it off with an airy gesture. “I toil not, neither do I scythe. But I am assured that they are quite effective at eradicating extraneous foliage.”

“Perhaps,” said the duke, and Sally found herself unable to look away from the eyes that were so very dark in his pale face, “I like my foliage just as it is.”

Sally’s voice was somewhat more breathless than she would have liked. “Even when it obstructs your view?”

“That,” said the duke, “depends on what you wish to see.”

“Or on what you wish to hide?” said Sally boldly.

She couldn’t recall stepping forward, but she and the duke were nose to nose. Or nose to chin, as the case might be. His cravat smelled faintly of French perfume, a haunting bouquet of exotic flowers.

For all the rumors, up close, there was nothing the least bit incorporeal about the duke. There was a faint scar on one side of his brow and a callus on his ungloved hand; she could feel the warmth of his skin through the dark stuff of his jacket. She felt an insane urge to reach out and lay her hand upon his chest, to feel if his heart was beating beneath the antique silver buttons of his waistcoat or whether that was merely the echo of her own elevated pulse.

“In that case,” said the duke gently, and she could feel the brush of his breath against her cheek, “surely I wouldn’t tell you.”

Their gazes locked; the world around them receded to nothing.

Somewhere, not far away, a church bell tolled. The lonely knell broke over the garden, once, twice, and then again, breaking the spell that held her. Sally counted twelve.

Midnight.

She hadn’t realized she had said it aloud until the duke said, “That is the accepted term.”

He took a step back, and Sally became painfully aware of just how close they had been standing, her head tilted back like some silly ninny waiting to be kissed.

Sally hastily rearranged the angle of her chin, aiming for maximum hauteur. She was generally quite good at hauteur. It went with her height and the size of her dowry. But tonight she found herself at something of a loss.

“Forgive me if my hospitality”—the duke gave Sally a pointed look that brought the color into her cheeks—“seems lacking, but I have . . . an appointment. Shall I escort you back to the line of shrubbery, or may I trust you to make your own way?”

“I made it here without escort,” said Sally tartly, before realizing that that didn’t exactly help her case.

“I make the offer for your own protection.” Sally caught a glimmer of something that might have been a smile. “Against ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night.”

Oh, ha-ha. Very funny.

“Hmph,” said Sally, in her best imitation of Mrs. Reid’s infamous sniff. “The question you should be asking is, who will protect them from me?”

It was an excellent parting line, and Sally meant to use it to its full advantage. She turned on her heel with an exaggerated sweep of her demi-train. But one thing nagged at her. She knew she should leave it be, but . . .

Turning, Sally demanded, “Who makes appointments at midnight?”

The Duke of Belliston was standing just as she had left him, silhouetted against the dark shadows of the empty pool.

He essayed an ironical bow. “What better time for a creature of the night to travel?”

Lucien, Duke of Belliston, watched his trespasser as she stalked with great dignity as far as the cypress border, and then ruined it by glancing back over her shoulder.

To make sure, presumably, that he hadn’t turned into a giant bat.

Lucien essayed an elegant bow.

The girl gave a loud and disapproving sniff and disappeared between two twisted trees, and Lucien allowed the grin that he had been repressing to spread across his face. Beasties and ghoulies and things that went bump in the night, indeed. It had been worth it, just to see her eyes widen and then narrow again. He hadn’t been so amused since—

Since boarding the ship to return to England.

That thought was enough to wipe the smile off his face. Only a few weeks more, he reminded himself. Just a few weeks to sort through the yellowing papers in his father’s study and the long-abandoned journals in his mother’s workroom, to sift through moldering correspondence and mouse-eaten cards of invitation.

And then what? Back to New Orleans, to the home of his mother’s sister? Lucien had been happy there, or something close to it, but it wasn’t his home. The broad acres of his uncle’s plantation were well managed by others, and he had no place in the insular society of the French Quarter. An English duke was as out of place there as a Creole in London.

In New Orleans, he was too English; at home, he was tainted by his mother’s blood, by the tang of something foreign, and exotic, and more than a little bit French. His mother had come from Martinique, with the liquid accent of the islands, hair as dark as his, and pale skin warmed by the sun on distant shores. She had been considerably younger than his father.

Witchwoman’s brat,
the boys at school had taunted him.

Lucien’s face hardened. Others might flirt with girls in gardens, but he had another task, a task too long delayed. He meant to see justice done, or, at least, some measure of it.

To his right, he could see the remains of his mother’s greenhouse, the glass panes cracked and blackened with soot and grime, the frame warped by English winter weather. The broken panels gaped like a silent scream, leering like a demon’s smile.

She had been a botanist, his mother, specializing in the plants of the tropics. Her greenhouse had bloomed with exotic specimens, warmed by braziers through the cold of the English winters. Among Lucien’s earliest memories was his mother in the greenhouses at Hullingden, taking him from bloom to bloom, introducing each by name, warning him away from some, letting him crinkle and sniff others. Lucien had made mud pies in the rich garden loam while his mother had scribbled her notes in a flowing hand in the faintly scented brown ink she favored.

Lucien’s grandfather had been a botanist too. He had taken Lucien’s mother with him from Martinique to London to give a paper at the Royal Society—and it was there that Lucien’s parents had met. His father had little interest in plants, but he, who had defied all the best matchmaking efforts of London’s matrons, had displayed a great deal of interest in the bluestocking from Martinique. The duke was well past forty, at an age when London had despaired of seeing him married; Lucien’s mother was barely twenty. But something in them had called each to each. They were married a mere three weeks later, with half of London in attendance to speculate and gawp.

An old man’s fancy, they called her, but Lucien knew otherwise. His mother hadn’t been like that; his parents hadn’t been like that. He could remember them together, teasing and mocking, his mother inquiring after his father’s activities in the government, his father displaying a valiant interest in his mother’s cuttings and sectionings and who had insulted whom in which learned paper. Lucien could remember them sitting together on a bench in the garden at Hullingden, his mother’s unpowdered head on his father’s shoulder, the black curls falling long and free across his silver-brocade waistcoat as little Marie-Clarice batted her hands in a basket by their feet.

Lucien looked across the garden, at the dark bulk of Belliston House. For a moment, he could see it as it had been, the statues solid on their plinths, lithe goldfish swimming in the clear water of the fountain, hedges neatly trimmed, windows blazing with light. All gone now. Gone these past twelve years.

Lucien had been only twelve. He had been shunted off to school, left to stew and brood and avenge his honor with his fists as best he could on and off the playing fields of Eton. Those hadn’t been pleasant years. He had been numb with shock and grief, and the concerted malice of his peers had caught him on the raw. He had escaped as soon as he could, first for the family seat, and then, when Uncle Henry had sent him back, where all the Uncle Henrys in the world couldn’t reach him, all the way to his mother’s family in America.

“Your grace.” A rough voice pulled him back to the present, the guttural accents turning the title from an honorific into a grunt.

It was Jamison, who had served as caretaker of the house these past twelve years, and now, for want of a better option, butler and general factotum. His wife, once an under-housemaid, made a pretense of keeping the house, and served Lucien meals so consistently inedible that he was forced to conclude that either her taste buds had long since atrophied or she was engaged in a plot to slowly poison him with rancid pie.

Despite their inadequacies, there had been no call to go to the bother of hiring staff, the sort of staff the house had once boasted, the legions of maids and footmen, the well-starched butler and chattering scullions. He didn’t intend to stay long.

Besides, it wasn’t as though Lucien would be receiving callers. The only guests he was entertaining were long since dead.

With the exception of that girl in the garden.

“Your grace.” As always, Jamison’s weather-beaten face revealed nothing of his feelings. His loose-lipped visage and stooped shoulders suggested ancestry of the simian variety, but he had been head gardener in Lucien’s parents’ day. More importantly, he was the only one of the staff to stay on, after—

After.

Lucien’s life was divided into two halves: before and after. There was no need to specify the event.

Never one to waste time on niceties, Jamison got right to the point. “You have callers.”

He spat on the last word, which might have been an opinion as to their guests or merely his habitual form of communication.

“At midnight?” Lucien heard himself echoing the girl in the garden. But she was right. Midnight was a deuced odd time for anyone to come calling.

Jamison merely directed another wad of spittle towards a spot just to the left of Lucien’s right shoe.

“All right, then,” said Lucien. “I suppose it’s too much to ask whether you showed them in?”

But Jamison had already departed. Buttling was not among his core competencies.

Curious despite himself, Lucien retraced his steps along the crumbling flagstone path and let himself in by a little door in the side of the house, a door once meant for the comings and goings of servants, but which, in their absence, had proved a convenient means of ingress for the master of the house. Especially when he wished to enter without being seen.

For a moment, he wondered if the girl with the golden hair had chosen to essay another approach, having been banned from the garden. Was it was a weakness in himself that he rather hoped she had? His self-appointed task might be a noble one, but that didn’t make it any less lonely.

Jamison had left the callers standing in the hall, which, Lucien supposed, was rather what one got when one visited, unheralded, at midnight. There were four of them: a young man in high shirt points, an older man with his hair clubbed back in the old style, a matron in the finest stare of style, egret feathers bristling from a turban of Nile green satin.

And a young woman, a fillet of filigree shining in her gently curling hair.

“—disgraceful!” the older woman was saying. But Lucien had eyes only for the young woman.

He felt that dislocation again, that curious overlay of past and present. In place of the slender woman in the hall, he saw a little girl in a white dress with a sash embroidered with posies, her chubby hands grasping a bouquet of dandelions.

Lucien stepped out from behind the suit of armor. “Marie-Clarice,” he said.

All four turned to stare at him as though the suit of armor had suddenly taken to its legs and staggered forward to greet them.

Marie-Clarice stared at him, with eyes that were too dark for her pale face. She had inherited their father’s fair coloring, but their mother’s eyes, deep-set and black, the same eyes that Lucien saw in the mirror every morning.

“So it is true,” she said distantly. Her eyes narrowed and her voice hardened. “It is you.”

There seemed very little to say to that except, “Yes.”

How else did one fill nine missing years?

“Well!” said Aunt Winifred, her stays creaking ominously beneath her satin gown as she drew in an indignant breath. “One would think you might have allowed your own family to hear of your return from your own hand, rather than leaving it to the mouths of common gossips—”

“We’re delighted,” Uncle Henry intervened, shooting his wife a hard look. A little too heartily, he said, “Welcome home, my boy. Welcome home.”

Lucien’s cousin, Hal, his hair the same silver-gilt that Uncle Henry’s had once been, did nothing but stare, his jaw dropping until it connected with the top fold of his elaborately tied cravat.

They were all fair. The Caldicotts had been breeding fair-haired, light-eyed, and pink-cheeked since time immemorial, a testament to their Saxon forebears. Next to them, Lucien felt, as he always had, a cuckoo in the nest. It was an unfortunate mischance that he was the cuckoo who bore the title.