Dark Season (2 page)

Christ, but his mood was black.

The rain came down more heavily. He’d lost his hat somewhere in the course of the evening, and his hair hung wet on his forehead. He walked slowly away from the river, turning down one narrow street then another. It was late, and he passed almost no one. Even the thieves had gone home to warm their clever fingers by the fire. A few cabs rattled by, splashing his boots. He could be riding in a town coach with his coat of arms on the door. Instead, he was soaked and exposed, teeth beginning to chatter, on the kind of night that kept the rats in their holes and the drunks in the taprooms and the beggars under bridges. The thought cheered him.

Hang his title and his dynastic responsibilities. He’d rather be a Smith or a Baker than a Blackwood. He’d trade his coronet for a song. He’d told his father as much during their last interview. He’d wanted to see the old man’s face grow livid, his wasted hands whiten around the gold-knobbed cane.

Now his father was stiff and cold in the churchyard, and Isidore carried that image with him—Lord Blackwood twitching with impotent fury as his heir spat upon the family name and spoke casually of dividing the ancestral lands, selling the parcels cheap to merchants or farmers or, hell, making a gift of them to Irish laborers, why not. He wasn’t sorry, but the memory sickened him.

He wasn’t drunk enough. He wasn’t nearly drunk enough.

Another cab approached at a walk, and he hailed it. Muttered the address of his club in Belgravia. But when he climbed down again, he wasn’t surprised at where he stood. Not in front of his club. He’d given the wrong address. The rattling bones he carried in his head—
her
bones—had spoken for him.

He was in front of the St. Aubyn house. Clement’s house. Lovely and imposing. A massive portico projected from its stone façade. Invisible from the street, on the backside of the house, the second-floor balcony overlooked a marble courtyard. Five years of rainstorms had washed that marble, but it would never be clean.

He wanted to drop to his knees and howl. He had done so then, in that courtyard, five years ago tonight. He had rocked beside her, the cold of the marble seeping through the thin cloth of his trousers. He had lifted her head, straightened her neck. He had smoothed her hair, which was wet with her blood, so much blood that his hands came away black in the moonlight. When he gathered her into his arms, her weight was awful in its indifference. It wasn’t her in his arms. It wasn’t Phillipa. It was just weight. Dead weight.

In front of the St. Aubyn house, he didn’t kneel, or howl. He stared at the light that glowed in the arched library window. Before he could think better of it, he had climbed the stairs and was pounding on the door.

Jenkins, bald as an egg and as expressionless, opened in an instant. He might have been standing behind the door. As though it weren’t near to midnight. As though he had been waiting for Isidore to arrive.

Isidore fought the urge to shake the water from his body like a dog. His ride in the cab had chilled him.

“A towel, Lord Blackwood?” Jenkins signaled to a maid who had crept into the hallway to investigate the commotion. She gaped, showing all the surprise at Isidore’s disheveled appearance that Jenkins did not, but turned smartly through a doorway at Jenkins’s signal.

“I will see if Lord St. Aubyn is able to receive you,” said Jenkins.

“He’s awake,” said Isidore hoarsely.

“Yes, my lord,” said Jenkins.

“He’ll receive me.” Isidore watched Jenkins’s thin, straight figure drift away down the hall, the dim light of his tallow candle winking. He wondered for a moment if Clement
would
receive him. They’d been like brothers once, but that was before. Since he’d arrived back in London a month ago, too late for his father’s funeral, he and Clement had barely exchanged words, just a few courtesies occasioned by the chance encounter. It was what remained of their friendship.

He shouldn’t have come. He was turning to let himself out when the soft “My lord?” arrested him. The young maid, holding out a towel. He took it, nodding as she gave a brief curtsy, and rubbed it roughly over his hair and face. Jenkins’s candle was floating back toward him.

“Follow me, my lord,” said Jenkins, as though Isidore had not been in the house a hundred, a thousand times before. They ascended the carpeted stairs and passed the library—door slightly open, light spilling through the crack—and then Isidore was being shown into Clement’s study. Clement was standing in the middle of the room in black trousers and shirtsleeves.

“Christ, Sid,” he said. “You look like a water rat.”

Isidore responded with a shrug. He stepped closer to the fireplace as Clement moved over to the desk to pour him a glass of brandy. He squatted and slid the wrought-iron fire screen to the side. He thrust his hands over the logs glowing red in the grate, as near as he could bear to the writhing flames.

“Here.” Clement stood over him with the glass. As Isidore rose to take it, Clement’s nostrils flared. His eyebrows shot up. “You smell like a gin palace.”

Isidore tossed back the glass, emptying it. He handed it back to Clement. Clement didn’t smell like roses himself. He smelled astringent. Isidore dropped into a chair.

“I feel like Ozymandias,” he said.

Clement poured him another brandy and refilled his own glass. He sat in the chair adjacent to Isidore’s, smiling quizzically. “How the mighty have fallen,” he said.

Isidore leaned back in the chair, resting the glass on his shirtfront. He dipped his chin and tried to look into the fire through the brandy. It blazed ochre, like desert sand.

“The ‘trunkless legs,’” he said. “I feel rather as though my head has tumbled from my body.”

Silence. The fire popped. Isidore sighed. Drained the brandy and set the empty glass on the floor. He wouldn’t have had to explain himself to Clement five years ago.

“I didn’t mean to come here.”

“You shouldn’t have.” Clement stood and stirred the fire. A violent movement. He turned to face Isidore, back lit, the firelight touching his hair with gold.

Black and white knights. That’s what Phillipa used to call them. Isidore was so dark, and Clement was so fair. Women tended to prefer Clement. Isidore didn’t blame them. Probably better to throw one’s lot in with the white knight. Less likely to end up dead.

“I thought you might have left already,” Clement said. “Daphne said you’d been engaged to dine with her and Bennington but never showed up. We all imagined … ” He broke off to give the fire another vicious poke. “Frankly, I didn’t think you’d stay in town this long.” There was an implied question that Isidore chose to ignore. He shifted in the chair. His wet clothing had begun to itch. He realized he’d forgotten to scrape his boots outside the front door. He must have tracked mud all through the house.

There was a roll of thunder in the distance.

“It was so much warmer that night,” he said, rising to pour himself another drink. “There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.”

Warm, clear, bright with moonlight. A beautiful night. Everyone was flushed with drinking, dancing. He’d gone over it so many times, every detail, trying to identify the exact moment when all of the possible outcomes of the evening converged on the one. He didn’t believe in fate. Phillipa Trombly hadn’t been born to die at twenty years old at a party at Clement St. Aubyn’s. When had it occurred, the moment? Before their quarrel? During? Or was it not until the very moment she started to fall that it was finally too late?

His mouth had gone dry. He drank, poured again, and set the decanter on Clement’s desk between ledgers and an ink-stained blotter. Why was Clement awake? He’d imagined him brooding, remembering, but maybe the date, what it meant, had slipped from his mind. Maybe he was simply up late, tending to business.

The idea that Clement had forgotten made him want to knock the ledgers to the floor. He turned, gripping the edge of the desk with his free hand. It restrained his arm from sweeping the desktop clean. It also helped him keep his feet.

“If it had been raining, like tonight,” he said, “the balcony doors would have been closed. She wouldn’t have run out there.” He forced himself to sip the brandy and glanced at Clement. “What can you count on in London if you can’t count on the rain?” He laughed harshly and tipped back the glass. The brandy didn’t even burn his throat. He was beyond burning.

“You’re torturing yourself,” said Clement. “What does it serve?”

“
Whom
does it serve? Maybe that’s the question.”

“Is it?” Clement shook his head. His eyes, green, were invisible, dark hollows in their stead. “Whom, Sid? Phillipa? You? Me?”

At the sound of that name—
her
name—Isidore flinched. Then he shrugged.

“I don’t know.” He laughed again, a strangled sound. “The devil, most likely.”

Clement swore, tossing back the last of his brandy.

“It was ghastly for all of us,” he said. “I thought of selling this place. I didn’t think I could stand to live here … after.”

“But you did,” said Isidore. “You do.” It sounded bitter. But why? He couldn’t have expected Clement to close up his house. Clement had become the head of the St. Aubyn family young, as a boy at Eton, when his parents had died in a carriage accident in Scotland. Clement had always felt the weight of his responsibilities. Was he to have moved his sisters into a hotel for the season? Made of the St. Aubyn house yet another crypt, another shrine to Phillipa’s memory?

He was finally drunk. He was losing control. He couldn’t channel his anger. His anger was spilling over.

Clement picked up the poker then threw it down. The thud was muffled by the carpet. Isidore wanted to cover his ears. His grip on reality, on sanity, was slipping. Five years ago, had anyone heard it? The scream? The thud? The band had been playing. Couples were dancing in the ballroom. They’d quarreled, and then, or before, or after, the moment had occurred. He was trying to chase after Phillipa, but he was as drunk then as he was now. Drunker. Angrier. In the hall, he’d stumbled across a plump young man, too young for the depravity of that late-night revelry; he was lying in his own vomit. Isidore had nearly fallen in the mess, staggered, then dropped to his knees. The weight of his sagging head tipped him over, and he’d stretched out on his stomach, pressing his flushed cheek to the cool oilcloth that lined the floor along the wall. Maybe it came then, the moment that turned into
too late.
When he was belly-down on the floor.

Clement was speaking, and he sounded angry too. Isidore realized he preferred this to restraint, to the wall that had grown up between them.

“I couldn’t pack up and run away to Italy, to Egypt.” Clement bit off the words. “I had sisters to bring out. The barony to run. I couldn’t indulge my grief or make grand, futile gestures or throw away my life. Too many other people depend on me.”

“Clem—” Isidore began, stepping toward him. Clement had balled his hands into fists, and Isidore realized that his hands too were in fists. His hands were in fists, but his fury had fled. What was he going to do? Beat Clement senseless? Hope that Clement beat him senseless? They’d never fought in earnest, only scrapped in fun. Isidore had always been a hairsbreadth quicker to evade and deal blows. He’d had more practice. This was madness. The horror he was reliving was making him mad. He had to stop it.

“I don’t blame you,” he said, relaxing his stance. “You’re right. It would have been ludicrous … ” He waved his hand vaguely. “To shut up the house. Futile, like you said. I’m not thinking clearly tonight.” He wanted to ask Clement why, why he’d pulled back from their friendship five years ago, why they didn’t talk anymore in that easy way that bespoke understanding and acceptance, but if he started, he knew he’d turn maudlin.

I needed you, Clem. You closed yourself off to me when I needed you.
His mouth quirked, but it was nothing like a smile. He wasn’t one for admitting need.

Maybe Clement felt guilty it had happened at his house. Maybe he had other reasons to feel guilty. A dark thought, one that Isidore refused to pursue. He had long ago tried to give up assigning blame. He’d taken it all on himself.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. He half expected Clement to say it back to him—
It’s not your fault either, Sid.
Wasn’t that what people did? Mouthed platitudes? Salved the conscience of whatever wretch stood in front of them?

But Clement didn’t say it.

Isidore leaned back over the desk and picked up the decanter. The stopper fell from his nerveless fingers. He put the heavy crystal lip to his mouth and drank. He shut his eyes, felt the brandy running through him.

“Oh, hell.” The muffled expletive sounded close to his ear. Clement had grabbed the decanter from his hands. He swayed. Clement braced him with an arm then pushed him into a chair. Isidore let his head drop then dragged it up again in time to watch Clement stowing the brandy decanter on a high shelf next to his collection of figurines. Terracotta horses. A gift from Malvina, the sister closest to him in age. It amused him—Clement putting the brandy on that shelf as though Isidore was a child who wouldn’t be able to reach. As though he weren’t a man who stood over six feet in height.

Well, maybe he was behaving more like a child than a man. And maybe he couldn’t reach it. His vision was swimming. The pools of light and dark in the study were flattening out into a checkerboard pattern.

White knight. Black knight.

I’m going to pass out
. The idea was not unwelcome.

“Will you go to Castle Blackwood?”

Isidore came back into his body with a start.

“What?” he muttered. Clement was one of the few people who knew something of why he might not want to return to Castle Blackwood. Even as a boy, he’d been observant. Isidore could never keep his face from tightening when he talked about his father. Nor could he hide every burn, bruise, cut, and scar. But Clement, whatever he suspected about Isidore’s childhood, also believed in duty, in discharging one’s responsibility to kith and kin no matter what. He really was a white knight. A staunch defender of the Protestant succession. The perfect scion. Isidore couldn’t answer. Couldn’t imagine getting out of the chair, let alone taking up his father’s mantle at Castle Blackwood. He would worry about all of that … tomorrow. Or the day after.