Devil at Midnight (6 page)

“Your angel did not answer when you called?”

“No.” Grace’s cheeks heated for where her mind had drifted. “I’m sorry. It looks like I’ll be staying here for a while.”

Christian grunted and rose. Seeing him straighten, she realized he was as tall as he was muscular, perhaps a shade above six feet. Giving her his back, he threw the pillow onto the bed and stalked to the door. When he opened it, she saw someone had left a jug of water and a deep tin basin on the floor outside.

“If you do not wish to see me,” he said, “you should turn away while I wash.”

She did wish to see him, but she supposed this was his way of asking her not to stare. She faced the blank stone wall as the sound of dripping water and a dampened cloth set her fantasies rioting. When a muffled groan broke from him, suggesting what he was washing now, Grace couldn’t contain her grin.

“Need help?” she teased, the boldness rising unexpectedly.

Her offer had more of an effect than she’d anticipated. His next groan became a curse. The slapping of the cloth stopped ... and then sped up determinedly.

“I think,” he said, his words coming breathily, “that it was not by an angel’s grace that you came to me.”

His play on her name made her laugh, but “Oh, Jesus,” he added without warning and more deeply. “Oh, holy Christ and the saints.”

My God,
she thought. He was ... he was masturbating in the same room as her. Medieval people certainly were more casual about their lusts. Then again, to judge by the hoarse noises he was making, not to mention the speed with which he washed his “marvel,” his current fit of cleanliness felt better than he’d been prepared for. Grace should have covered her ears, but found she wasn’t that considerate. Could his need really be so pressing that it couldn’t wait? Did all young men do this in the morning, or was his urgency worsened by her presence? He’d admitted he thought her a comely wench, but that was before he’d discovered she was a spirit. Had his attraction truly survived the shock?

Grace was forced to conclude it had.

“Unh,”
he grunted with real volume now, his breath coming in hard pants.
“Unh. Unh.”

He was rubbing himself so quickly, so desperately, that the cloth sounded like a whip.

“Christian,” she whispered.

Her voice pushed him past the barrier of his pleasure.

“Scheisse,”
he gasped as a splash of what she assumed was seed hit the floor. More moans came from him as the splash repeated, until finally he sighed, long and torturous. The sound seemed as regretful as it was relieved.

For half a minute, while he caught his breath, neither of them said anything.

“Forgive me,” Christian said at last, his tone unsteady. “I should not have done that, but when you stared at me ... In faith, my prick grew too ardent to subside on its own, and when I touched myself with the cloth, my need was too great for me.”

Incapable of facing him, Grace hugged her arms around her middle, oddly grateful that she was solid to her own embrace. “I never heard a man do that before,” she confessed.

“Never?” The nearness of Christian’s deep male voice made the back of her neck prickle. “You died a maid?”

She nodded, her lips pressed tightly together.

“I did not know,” he said. “If I had ...”

“Don’t apologize.” She forced her shoulders down from their hunch. “Maybe it wasn’t nice of me, but I liked listening to that.”

He laughed softly through his nose. “You see, Grace? It is as I said. No angel sent you to me.”

She turned, able to confront him now that he was joking. “Thank you.” When his eyes widened at her heartfelt manner, she saw she ought to clarify herself. “For calling me by my name. I know you didn’t invite me, but I appreciate not being shouted at.”

He blinked, more than surprise flickering behind his black coffee irises. She thought the fleeting look might be compassion. If it was, it faded before he spoke. “Whatever happens, Grace, I shall never shout at you again.”

He sounded coldly angry, but not with her. Grace’s throat was too tight to speak. With the sense that maybe he was her friend, after all, she nodded in gratitude.

 

 

T
he mystery as to whether Grace was visible to anyone but Christian was solved when Michael stuck his golden head around Christian’s door.

“You
have
arisen then,” he said. Perplexed, he squinted at his friend. Christian had been standing in the center of his cell-like room conversing with Grace. At Michael’s words, she drew back wide-eyed against the wall—
into
the wall a bit, to be precise. If Michael had seen her, he would not have asked his next question.

“What are you doing? Charles claimed he heard you making strange noises.”

Christian should have told him about Grace then, should have sought his help in banishing the shade. The words would not push themselves from his throat. If no one else could see Grace, she was his secret.

“Nothing,” Christian said. “Talking to myself.”

“Talking to yourself,” Michael repeated dubiously. When Christian did not change his story, Michael shrugged. “Come down to supper, assuming you are done pretending to be the Maid of Orléans.”

The lately martyred Joan of Arc was not what occupied the others’ minds as Christian and Michael reached the hall. Christian’s father laid a generous board. His men sat shoulder to shoulder around the long trestle tables, tucking into the hearty fare all soldiers relied upon. The standard under which they fought—a boar on a yellow ground between two red stripes—hung high on the painted wall above the dais.

Gregori Durand’s absence was evidenced by the raucous humor of the company.

“O, merciful Saint Onan,” Charles cried, leaping to his feet as soon as Christian appeared. “Forsake me not, lest my manly parts burst with lust!”

He accompanied this speech with genuflecting motions. Then, in case his meaning was mistaken, he added a lascivious hip thrust to drive it home.

“Very witty,” Christian acknowledged as he took the space on the bench that Philippe and Matthaus had made for him. Someone slid him a trencher heaped up with stew. Taking it, he felt grateful Grace had remained behind. He was not certain he could have kept from blushing if she were there.

“You waste the strength of your good right arm,” Hans counseled from the table’s end. “Everyone knows the lasses in town would gladly spare you that labor.”

“O, Christian,” one of his father’s men sighed in dulcet tones. “Is that a pike in your braies, or are you happy to see me?”

Christian grinned at the inanity of the chaffing, resigning himself to more of the same for the duration of the repast. He was glad the men felt comfortable enough to tease him, though he knew their awe at his luck with women was partially genuine. Bereft of any gift for love-talk, he had—nonetheless—a knack for gazing into females’ eyes and luring them to him.

A sudden thought surprised him into laughing, causing him to choke on his venison. If he had not been so skilled at luring women, perhaps he would not be haunted by one now!

“We should go into town this eve,” Charles suggested, his orange hair glowing in the light from the high windows. “Remind the wenches why they miss us.”

“Not too late,” Michael cautioned. “Tomorrow is no holy day.”

“Saint Onan’s day,” Charles put in predictably—which set off another round of jests at Christian’s expense.

He was almost restored to his normal humor by the time he rose from his seat, the only difference being a disturbing keenness to return to his room.

Not to see if Grace was there, he assured himself, but instead to hope she was not. With his stomach full and his ears ringing with male laughter, it was possible to believe he had imagined the visitation, maybe due to a fever from his whipping.

“I will bid Cook to change your bandages,” Michael said.

Christian clapped him on his shoulder.

His habitual caution snapped back in place when a broad, dark shadow detached itself from a turning in the passageway to the stairs.

“Father,” Christian said, startled to meet him there.

Gregori stood in his path, blocking the way. Though the light was dim, the seams and hollows of his brutal visage seemed deeper than usual. The idea that Christian’s indomitable sire might be getting older was unsettling.

“They laugh with you, son,” he said, “but that is not the same as following you in battle.”

Sometimes it was, but Christian had the sense not to utter this. He tried not to think of Lucy, knowing his anger over the young hound’s death would show in his face. “Do you need something, sir?”

His father gave him one of his silent stares. “What could I need,” he mused after a moment, “that
you
would have the power to supply?”

To this, there was no answer. Christian bowed respectfully to his sire, then moved to squeeze past him. Gregori allowed it, but it was a near thing. Christian hated the fact that his scalp was prickling with fear-sweat as he edged by. Too many childhood beatings lurked in his mind, too many memories of helplessness.

“Familiarity breeds contempt,” his father called after him.

Christian’s stride hesitated without his willing it. His father would see the hitch and know what it signified. However much he had grown, Christian was still his dog to kick.

He fisted his hands and continued walking, smoothly, steadily, refusing to increase his pace even after Gregori Durand could not possibly witness it.

 

 

T
he Durand abode’s main entrance, which led by way of a tunnel into the practice yard, was guarded by not one but two heavy iron gates. The walls to which these gates were bolted were thick and clad in rusticated masonry, much like the ponderous architecture quarrelsome Florentines preferred. Though a house rather than a castle, the residence’s defensive nature was obvious.

Christian doubted anyone but he paid that mind this evening. As he and his friends emerged, they were more interested in making merry. Christian was accompanied by his closest associates: Michael, William, Charles, Philippe, and Matthaus. Only Hans was missing, the older man claiming that carousing was for the young. Grace was in Christian’s chamber, where Christian had most sternly ordered her to stay. Part of him regretted leaving the ghost alone, a regret intensified by the forlorn obedience his adamancy had inspired. He imagined Grace’s father had cowed her, and now he was doing the same. The parallel did not sit well, but what to do with her confounded him. He did not want her trailing after him while he made up his mind.

These were not the only thoughts that had him unbalanced as they trod the well-worn road down the hill and around the lakeshore to town. His recent encounter with his father also disturbed him. Christian could not help thinking his sire had been issuing a warning.

He was gnawing his lower lip when Charles’s freckled finger poked his shoulder.

“Come, now, Sir Gloomalot,” he chided. “How will we draw the fairest damsels to our table if you resemble a rain cloud?”

Christian raised one eyebrow. “Are you implying you cannot draw them yourself?”

“Of course I can ... once they see past my hair and discover my other charms.”

“More like your gift for nonsense,” William scoffed. His huge shoulders shifted within his marginally too-small blue tunic. William’s dagger, an accessory without which none of them left the house, hung from a scabbard on his leather belt.

“You only wish you had my silver tongue,” Charles retorted, smoothing his looser green tabard down the front of his chest. Beneath the pleats, his hose were particolored, one red and one white, in the eye-catching style he favored. “I was simply referring to Christian’s ability to hasten the process of enticing butterflies into my net.”

Christian rolled his eyes, his gloom shaking from him at Charles’s foolishness. They were entering the narrow, winding street that led to their favorite tavern, the half-timbered walls of the surrounding buildings lit in passing by the lantern Matthaus carried. Their goal awaited beyond a shuttered apothecary, its entry bracketed by torches. Their short boots gritted on the cobbles as, one by one, the friends ducked through the ironbound door.

Once inside, more ducking was required. The Crowing Cock’s low ceiling was made lower by wooden beams. These were prettily painted with the symbols of local guilds. The Durand boar gleamed among them in the tallow light, thanks to Christian and his friends spending so much coin here.

Fortunately, Christian’s father’s cronies drank elsewhere.

“Table,” William said, pointing to a square one opposite the fire. Three men sat at it, tanners by the acrid smell of them. William’s size shuffled them off with only a few grumbles.

“Good man,” Charles praised, pausing long enough to slap William’s shoulder before pushing through the crowd to find—and no doubt flirt with—the barmaid.

Christian lowered himself onto a bench at the table William had commandeered. As he did, he ran his gaze around the noisy room. He wasn’t expecting trouble, but this was need as well as habit for him: to always know who was beside and behind him.

Life with his father had ingrained that.

At the table’s other end, Philippe and Matthaus were setting up a Nine Man Morris board on which to play each other. Matthaus was grinning, an expression Christian seldom saw on his roughly handsome and pockmarked face.

“Those two,” Michael sighed, sitting next to Christian.

Christian knew he referred to the rumors that when
those two
shared a bedroll, more than sleeping went on. “They are discreet,” he said. “And they harm no one. In any case, I have heard some say the same about us.”

“About us?” Michael sounded so surprised Christian had to chuckle.

“They say you are too pretty to resist on those long campaigns.”