Dark Season (8 page)

“I was teasing,” he said. “Don’t punish me by playing the perfect hostess. You know I think the world of Ben.”

Daphne ignored him, cutting a healthy portion of lemon tart. He put his tea on the table and accepted the plate.

“Delicious.” He pronounced after the first bite. “Your cook is truly a treasure. I could eat a dozen.”

Daphne smiled a real smile.

“I’m sure you could,” she said, giving him a look of frank appraisal. “I don’t know where you put it all. It’s unfair you should look like that. You’ve seen Warren Cowper? He’s produced the most alarming pair of jowls. Robert Abergavenny has gained a pound around the middle for every hair he’s lost off the top. Now that you’ve come back, you’ve put all the bloated bachelors to shame. I saw Lord Averly at the Puttnams’ musicale turning down the éclairs in favor of a watercress sandwich.”

“And you lay this culinary heresy at my doorstep?” Isidore polished off his piece of tart and returned the empty plate to the table.

“You cut an impressive figure.” Daphne poured him more tea, bending over the pot. Isidore couldn’t help but take in an even more generous view of her considerable endowments. She had a tiny port wine stain on her left breast just peeking out above the silk. It was shaped rather like a heart. How convenient. He nearly rolled his eyes. She looked up at him through her lashes.

“Do you have any idea how many questions I’ve had to field about your intentions? Does Lord Blackwood intend to stay in London? Does Lord Blackwood intend to marry this season? Does Lord Blackwood prefer blonds or brunettes?” She paused. “Or redheads?”

Isidore crossed his legs and leaned back on the settee. He remembered that a man had to be wary of Daphne. Daphne delighted in her powers of attraction. She flirted shamelessly then tried to flay you alive.

“It’s because of my figure, is it?” He shrugged. “I’ve always been possessed of it. The debutantes managed to restrain themselves in the past.”

“Now you are … unattached.” Daphne’s coquetry vanished. She regarded him somberly.

“I spent years in London unattached,” he reminded her. “My engagement to Phillipa was brief.”

“Formally,” she replied. “But it was obvious to everyone your affections were engaged. Even before you admitted it to yourself.”

He let this pass.

“Phillipa knew,” said Daphne. “I used to think she rather took advantage of you. Before the engagement, of course. Then I realized she reciprocated your love.”

“Of course,” echoed Isidore. He felt increasingly uncomfortable with the conversation. But he’d asked for it. He should have taken her cue and begun to discuss the demerits of his cook. Daphne’s gaze was too keen. He couldn’t imagine what she was trying to get at. He looked at her blandly.

“So do you?” Daphne glanced down then up again, as though trying to surprise a new expression on his face. “Intend to marry?”
Or are you still mourning Phillipa?
The unspoken question hung between them.

“Marry?” He laughed. “That’s what’s expected of me, isn’t it? London in the spring. Castle Blackwood in the summer. A wife for all seasons. An heir for the future.”

He saw Daphne flinch and cursed himself. Six years of marriage and she was still childless. The fault wasn’t necessarily hers, if one could speak of fault in such cases. But it couldn’t be easy. He wondered if this was the source of the strain he detected whenever she mentioned Ben. Isidore had lived his life in broad emotional strokes—love and hate, devotion and fury, joy and despair. Those were sentiments he understood. He didn’t consider himself particularly sensitive to nuance. But he couldn’t help but feel that there was a subtle undercurrent of unhappiness in the Bennington household.

The longer he sat across from Daphne, the more he began to notice the little changes time had wrought. The light lines around her lips had been carved by frowns. She didn’t move with the same fluid, boneless grace that he remembered. She was more awkward in her skin. As though something had shaken her confidence, her sense of who she was.

He wasn’t surprised Daphne and Bennington’s union had soured. Even if Daphne had borne a child, he couldn’t see those two comfortably settled in the nuptial bower. He’d thought the match doomed from the very beginning. He knew Daphne to be, for all her intelligence and charm, a vain and jealous woman. And he knew Bennington … well, he just knew Bennington. The man was, quite frankly, too handsome for his own good. Women had always thrown themselves at him, and he’d never seemed more deeply attached to one than another. He enjoyed them all. Isidore had always wondered if some secret financial difficulty had spurred him into the engagement. He’d never asked, and he’d never caught wind of any gossip that confirmed his suspicion. Daphne was certainly desirable enough to tempt a man into marriage, even if she hadn’t come with a substantial fortune. Maybe Bennington had simply fallen under her spell. He liked to fall under the spells of beautiful women. Usually it was all over in an evening’s enchantment. Isidore had known him to be so ensorcelled a hundred times … before and after he’d married Daphne. But he tended to be discreet. It could be Daphne was deceived and thought him faithful. He hoped so. But he rather doubted it. The lines in her face were most likely the signs of her disappointment. He wondered if she had strayed herself.

“Well,” said Daphne, an ugly smile stretching her beautiful lips. “That
is
what’s expected of you. What you will do, of course, remains to be seen. We all play our roles with differing degrees of success. My life has not gone as I’d planned.”

“Nor has mine.” He fumbled for the right words. He wanted to comfort Daphne, who suddenly seemed perilously close to tears. “We don’t always have complete control over what happens to us. There are greater forces at work.”

“Sid,” she said. Her blue eyes were enormous, brimming. Her voice had faded to a whisper so low he could barely hear her. “What forces do you mean?”

The sneer the question summoned was more for himself than for her. He’d wasted enough time with his mad, black thoughts about the devil. And he couldn’t really bring himself to mouth platitudes about a watchmaker God.

“Chance,” he said flatly. “Contingency. The random unfolding of the universe. The forces of chaos. That’s all. Nothing grand. Nothing purposive.”

“Sid.” Daphne didn’t seem to have listened. She was sitting up very straight, her hands on her lap. Staring at him. “Sometimes I think that I’m cursed. I think that she cursed me.”

“Who?” he said, leadenly. He knew who. The room seemed suddenly suffocating. It smelled of old leather and dust and cooling, bitter, overdrawn tea. Shouldn’t there be flowers? Daphne could have insisted on a few bouquets to add just a little life and color and fragrance. He couldn’t sit still a moment longer.

“Can I open the window? It’s a fine day,” he said and, without waiting for an answer, walked to a window, pulled apart the curtains, and lifted the sash.

“Sid.” He felt a hand on his shoulder. “Do you think it’s possible?”

“I think you’re mad,” he said. From the window he watched men in high-crowned hats walking smartly along the street. They were utterly, intractably sane. They didn’t look for the reflection of a raven-haired, black-eyed girl in every puddle, every shop window. He found himself crossing his eyes so he could see the windowpane rather than the scene outside. That dark blur was his own raven hair. Not hers.

He heard a muffled sob and turned to catch Daphne in his arms. She pressed her small, soft body against him, and he stroked her hair, the silky strands touched with flame by the afternoon light that shone through the parted curtains. The sitting room door was open, and his eyes strayed to it. All he needed was a servant to pass that door. Or Bennington.

“Daphne.” He thrust her back, hands on her shoulders. “That was cruel. I didn’t mean … We all went a little mad.
I
went mad. For years. You’re not cursed. No one is cursed.”

“She could be so spiteful.” Daphne stared, not at him, but at the light streaming over his shoulder. Her heart-shaped face was illuminated. Eyes like blue fire. “She envied me. Do you think she’s happy? Knowing how I suffer?”

“Stop it,” he said, muscles straining with the effort it took not to shake her. Her eyes focused on his.

“You loved her,” she said. “I loved her too. Everyone loved her.” Daphne pulled out of his grasp, drifting to the other side of the room. She let her fingers trail across the mantel then picked up an antique pistol from its mounting and laid the barrel across her palm.

“It’s heavy,” she said. He crossed to her in two strides and snatched the pistol from her hand. She smiled at him as though she’d scored a point.

“Are you frightened?” she asked. “That hasn’t been fired since Waterloo.”

He returned the gun to the mantel.

“I’m not frightened,” he said. “I’m finished. I’ve played every sick game, indulged every morbid thought. I let a phantom chase me from London clear into the Sahara. It’s over. Five years, Daphne. Do you think she’s still roaming after five years? She’s at peace. Now it’s our turn. If I can try to believe that, surely you can too.”

“If she’s at peace, why did Miss Seymour say she’s still in the shadows?”

Isidore leaned against the mantel. He made his face a perfect blank. “You can’t bait me with a riddle,” he said evenly. “I’ve lived in the land of the sphinx. I don’t think all riddles need to be answered.”

He waited. He figured she might last a minute. She didn’t.

“Miss Seymour is a medium.” Daphne chose a newspaper from the table and handed it to him.

He read the banner across the top. “
Spiritual Magazine.
” He flipped the pages so hard one tore with a dull, protesting sound. “That’s what this is about? Of all the faddish nonsense.” He thrust the paper back at her. “Daphne, you can’t be serious.”

“Don’t look at me like that.” She flung herself into the armchair. “I’m not the one who started it. It’s Louisa Trombly. She hired a woman as a private medium.”

“She
what?
”

“She hired a medium,” repeated Daphne.

“I heard you,” he grated. “I understand the concept of retaining an employee at wages for services. But this medium, what does she do?”

“What all mediums do,” said Daphne. “She uses her mystical powers to communicate with the dead.” Her lips curved into her habitual smile, the teasing smile of a society flirt who wants to insinuate that she and her interlocutor are somewhat above the rest of the company.
You and I know better, of course.
But her eyes were still wide, and her smile slipped. “No one has ever heard of her. She doesn’t have a following.”

He made a choked sound of disbelief.

“Laugh all you want. There are quite a few very famous mediums in London. Americans mostly. You don’t have to subscribe to newsletters.” She threw
Spiritual Magazine
onto the table, where it blanketed the lemon tart. “You can read about them in the society pages. They’re popular at parties.”

“She’s American?”

“No.” Daphne tapped her fingers on the arm of the chair. He had never known her to fidget. Her movements had always been so sinuous, so practiced. She tried to smile again, but its falsity must have struck even her because she abandoned the effort. “I told you, she has nothing to do with all of that. She’s not established as a medium. She’s a non-entity. A woman from some backwater. Very shy, said Louisa. Not the sort who would ever go in for a spectacle. It
can
be a spectacle, you know.”

He felt his patience thinning. “And how did Louisa come by this blushing damsel, this modest mystic who avoids spectacle but practices the dark arts in secret for a set fee? Did she find her mooning over a grave in Cornwall?”

Daphne’s fingers now traced figure eights on the upholstery. She was watching them describe their unvarying loops. “She was at Miss Seymour’s last séance,” she said to her fingers. “Miss Seymour called Phillipa down from the shadows, and the woman sat bolt upright then toppled over and shook, and Miss Seymour held her down and felt Phillipa pass into her. Mrs. Wheatcroft was there, and she said it was undeniable. She got chills from it.”

“Mrs. Wheatcroft is a twit,” he said. “I could rap on her skull with my own knuckles on Midsummer’s Eve and convince her it was the Ghost of Christmas Past.” Dear God but he felt the desire to rap on
somebody’s
skull growing stronger within him. “She’s exactly the type I’d imagine goes to these séances.”

“All types of people go.” Daphne frowned. “Louisa went. Would you claim that
she
is a twit?”

“No.” He put a hand on his forehead. “Of course not. But she’s vulnerable. She’s … ”
She’s lonely and miserable.
That too was partly his fault. He should never have gone away. He should have weathered the storm and been a son to her.

“Louisa and I discussed it.” The drumming began again—Daphne beating a march on the chair. Maybe she was transmitting a message from one of the old generals whose likenesses stared down at them. “Yesterday. She called in the morning. She feels that the woman, the medium, will help Phillipa. She trusts her.”

His exclamation carried him forward. “Trusts her!” He didn’t care that he was shouting. That he was looming over Daphne threateningly and he was not a small or gentle-looking man. “Trusts
who?
Who is she? Where is she from? What kind of woman hires herself out to
channel
another woman’s dead daughter? A fortune hunter. A liar. A shill. A
prostitute
who realizes she can wheedle more out of genteel women appealing to their sentiments than she can out of men appealing to their … ”

He choked off the tirade before it devolved into a stream of vulgarity. His blood rushed hot and cold in his veins. The slender woman, the woman in black at the harpsichord … Was she Louisa’s medium? Did she spend her waking hours in the music room playing Bach on the harpsichord like Phillipa’s very ghost? Tormenting Louisa. Tormenting
him.
He shouldn’t have barked at her. He should have forcibly ejected her from the house.

“You think she’s a fraud?” Daphne’s face mingled too many emotions for him to decipher them all. Relief was among them. Also fear. “Of course, she may be. But … ” She swallowed. “Spirits linger when they have something they want to communicate. And Phillipa … ” She broke off again, licking her lips. Her eyes seemed too bright, almost feverish. “What does Phillipa have to tell us? What do you think she’s come back to say?”