Laura Kinsale (3 page)

For his part, Lord Winter manifested no hint of surprise or dismay at the novelty of the scene. The body was laid to rest in a dignified silence, only one of the black maids showing any sign of real sorrow in her quiet weeping. Beside her, a Bedouin boy stood straight and still, his wild elf-locks falling down on his shoulders, his dirty feet bare, a dagger at his waist and an ancient wheel-lock musket resting over his shoulder as if he had just come in like a young panther from the desert. Lord Winter’s searching gaze paused on him a moment, took in the girlish kohl-lined lashes, full lips and delicate chin peculiar to nomad Arab youth, and passed on. Familiar with the Bedu, he did not doubt this superficial frailty was a complete illusion, and the boy capable of the most arduous exertion and cold-blooded banditry. But he was not the man Lord Winter was looking for.

It was apparent that this particular individual had not chosen to grace the company with his presence. Viscount Winter did not allow the man’s absence to concern him, for it was unsurprising that the presence of Frankish strangers would make such a person wary of entering the walls of Dar Joon.

His expression grew distinctly sardonic as the consul unfolded a Union Jack and draped the flag of Britain over Lady Hester’s coffin. Of all her enemies, she had hated the missionaries and English consuls most fiercely: to be laid in her grave beneath the Union Jack and sermoned over by a Christian minister would have made her sick with rage.

Although the viscount’s attendance at Lady Hester’s funeral was chance met, coincident with his private engagement at her hilltop fortress, he was conscious of a feeling of regret that he had not come to her once more before she died. But his mouth lifted in a saturnine smile at the sentiment. No; if he had known the end was near, he would have hired the wildest Bedouins he could find and mounted an attack on the place, so that she could have died fighting.

She had always wanted that. She had told him.

He should have done it.

The service over, the Frenchman’s bones returned to lie beside Lady Hester’s coffin and the crypt sealed, Mr. Moore turned promptly and offered his hand. “Good evening, my lord! Or good morning, I fear. Wretched business, this. Decent of you to come.”

“I was in the district,” Lord Winter said briefly.

Mr. Thomson asked in a hopeful tone, “You are a friend of the deceased?”

“Yes,” Lord Winter said. He paused. “I had that honor.”

“A very great lady, I am sure,” Reverend Thomson said, on a funereal note.

“Indeed,” the consul said hastily. “A most extraordinary life. Will you take a late supper with us down in the village, my lord? They tell me we have beds arranged there.”

“As pleasing as that sounds,” Winter said, “I prefer to stay here tonight, if you will permit me.”

Mr. Moore looked astonished. “Here? But I’ll have to seal the place. I can’t allow the servants to remain.”

“Perhaps—” the missionary suggested gently, “as a mourner, Lord Winter wishes to be alone to reflect on this melancholy occasion.”

“Oh. Yes. Quite.” Mr. Moore gave the proposed mourner a doubtful glance, not being accustomed to considering the Right Honorable Arden Mansfield, Viscount Winter, in the light of a very feeling man. “Well, if that’s the case, I suppose it must be permissible.”

“Thank you.” Lord Winter bowed his head. “I am much obliged to you.”

Mr. Moore looked as if he might toss some quick remark, but then held his tongue. He merely smiled wisely and made his bow in return.

The consul would have been very much surprised to learn just how deeply Lord Winter did feel this death. After all the servants were herded out, their torches ablaze—professedly to light the steep, rutted path downhill for the missionary and Mr. Moore but in base truth for the worthier purpose of holding off night-demons and hyenas—Lord Winter barred the gate and walked back through the dark garden to the grave. He broke a rose from a sprawling bush, gazing moodily at the trampled earth and muddy stones before the crypt. The filthy condition of the place bespoke the neglect of decades. And yet beneath the debris it was still Dar Joon, the fabulous palace of the Queen of the Desert.

The desert—and Lady Hester. They had been tinder to a boy’s dreams, the spark and the flame of his manhood. English mist, the clipped gardens of Swanmere, none of it had ever seemed so real to Arden as the fierce air of the wilderness. And no woman had ever possessed his mind as Lady Hester Stanhope had done.

He could not remember a time in his life when he had not known of her. When he was five years old, she had defied Bedouin brigands and crossed the desert to become the first Englishwoman ever to enter Palmyra; while Arden was still in short coats, pestering his father’s trout with a string and a stick, she had searched for treasure in the ruins of Ascalon; as he was learning to jump his first pony she had commanded a pasha’s troops, laying waste the countryside in sanguinary retribution for a friend’s murder; before he became a man she had defied an emir, dared the Eastern prince to send his son to make terms with her, so that she might kill him with her own hands. She had dressed as desert tribesmen and Turks dressed; she had given shelter to wounded Druses and rebellious Albanians, to orphans and defeated Mamelukes. When the all-conquering, all-powerful Ibrahim Pasha had demanded that she render up his enemies to him, she had said only, “Come and take them.” And he had not cared to try.

She had never disappointed Arden, though age had withered her into impossible metaphysics and flights of astrology and magic. In her twilight she was more majestic than any female he had ever encountered. They said she had claimed to be the bride of the new Messiah, but Arden had never heard her claim it—only that she would ride beside Him into Jerusalem. She had possessed a towering conceit and a biting wit, a mind distracted by absurd prophecies, but it was the heart of a lioness that had defended this one mountaintop, alone amid the vicious tyrannies of the East, and kept it free of any law but her own.

Arden tossed the white rose down before the crypt. He had been born too late. Hester Stanhope was dead. He would never in his own lifetime find a woman to match her, and tonight, the indefinable restless loneliness that drove him— always drove him to the empty, brutal places of the earth, as if he could find there whatever piece of his soul he had been born missing—seemed sharper than it had seemed in a long while.

With a muttered curse, he doused his lamp and turned away from the crypt. By starlight, he walked desultorily among the silent courts, picking his way through the serpentine pathways toward the strangers’ quarters where he intended to make his bed, losing himself twice in the maze of screens and passages. Finally, more suddenly than he expected, he stepped round a corner into a grassy yard.

He stopped. In the quiet, the sound of weeping came to him—no simple crying, but the terrible, rending sobs of a soul in the depths of despair.

With eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw the dim glow of light from an open door across the yard. Intrigued by this unexpected sign of occupation in a room supposed to have been sealed along with all the others, Lord Winter walked over the grass, allowing his boots to scuff an audible warning. He looked in at the chamber from which sprang this desperate lament and observed a figure in a dingy striped
abah,
hunched down in an attitude of profound misery among open chests and boxes full of papers.

Lord Winter made no attempt to conceal himself, but stood openly in the doorway. Even so, when he spoke the boy leapt back, knocking over a stool and sending papers flying in his start. The clattering sound was like a gunshot echoing off the stone walls.

“Peace be with you.” Lord Winter gave a greeting in Arabic, recognizing the Bedouin lad of the flowing elf-locks and primeval musket. The youth said nothing, only stared at him with dread, breathing in heavy, uneven hiccoughs.

The young Bedui had reason enough to look dismayed. The consul had meant to lock all the servants out. No one with the least acquaintance with the Bedouin would trust that this son of desert robbers had remained behind for anything but larcenous intent, weeping or not. The boy held himself poised, as if he might be sprung upon at an instant.

Lord Winter returned the frightened stare with a shrug.
“Ma’aleyk,
there shall be no evil upon you, wolf cub. Come and drink my coffee.”

If he expected this offer of hospitality to engender any gratifying degree of friendliness or appreciation in his audience, he was mistaken. The youth did not appear to be of a confiding nature. He remained standing silently amid the shadowy chaos of papers.

“Yallah!”
Arden turned away. “Proceed with the sacking, then. God is great!”

“Lord Winter,” the boy exclaimed in a husky, perfectly well-bred English accent. “I’m not a thief!”

The effect of hearing his own name and English tongue fluently on the lips of this disreputable desert urchin was more startling than Arden liked to disclose. He looked back, one brow cocked.

“My lord,” the boy asked despairingly, “will you give me to the consul?”

“It’s no matter to me if you steal all this rubbish you can carry,” he answered, reverting to English himself. “But it appears that her loyal retainers have made off with everything down to the last spoon already.”

“I’m not stealing!” the lad insisted.

Lord Winter leaned against the doorjamb and gave him a skeptical nod. “As you say.”

“The consul—”

“My dear child,” Winter said, “if you suppose I babble everything I know to the likes of Mr. Moore, you are vastly mistaken in my character. I daresay even he would be astonished at the thought. Did Lady Hester teach you English?”

The boy hesitated, and then said in Arabic, “Yes,
ma’alem.
May it please Allah.”

“She seems to have achieved uncommonly good success. How long have you been in her service?”

But the lad retreated into shyness at such pressing questions. “For many summers,
ma’alem,”
he mumbled, turning his face downward.

From his voice and beardless face Arden thought him not more than fifteen, perhaps younger. He stood taller than the usual child of the Bedu—but he had the pure, gaunt look of the desert upon him, everything about him Beduish from his small, graceful hands beneath ragged cuffs to the shoulder-length braids of the two lovelocks dangling down beside his cheeks, emblem of a young nomad gallant, and the huge curved dagger tied to his waist. Slender as a reed, with a pensive, tear-swollen face and smooth sun-hued skin.

Arden was disposed to like him, for no reason but that he was Bedouin, and a member of the freest race on earth. “Come, little wolf, take your drink of me, and the Lord give you life,” he said.

The boy glanced up under his wet lashes. He seemed reluctant to accept the invitation, his large dark eyes full of tears and as wary as a gazelle’s. Lord Winter was not especially conversant with the science of weeping, since he had little to do with children and sought out feminine company for one purpose only, having a detached disdain for womankind in general and a violent dislike in particular for the sort of wilting, flower-scented young English ladies so frequently served up to him in the hope that he might do his aristocratic duty and select one for his bride. But looking upon the trembling lip and filling eyes, he feared an imminent relapse in this case.

“Son of the wolf, weep not—you are Arab!” he commanded, to forestall the impending flood. This bracing admonishment seemed to have the reverse effect, however, for the lad burst out with a sob and covered his face with his hands.

With a wry twist to his mouth, Lord Winter watched the slight figure for a moment. He shouldered his rifle and pushed off the door. “Suit your own convenience, then.” He strolled back into the courtyard, leaving the boy to his determined woe.

CHAPTER TWO

The wretched individual he abandoned to tears sank down amid the piles of useless papers. Zenobia was still shaking with the alarm of discovery, unable to stop the crying which so disgusted Lord Winter.

Lord Winter! If only it had been faithful Dr. Meryon, or kind Monsieur Guys from the French consulate, or even one of the German travelers; if only someone had come besides Lord Winter, with his cold-blooded indifference and his humor as cutting as her mother’s.

She had been sure he would give her to the consul for thievery. And the consul would give her to Emir Bechir to cut off her hand if he thought she was a Bedu boy, or demand the thousands of pounds outstanding to Lady Hester’s creditors if he discovered who Zenobia truly was. The English had taken away her mother’s pension to pay her debts, and Lady Hester had written in fury to the English Queen herself, resigning her citizenship in a nation of slaves. But if the consul discovered that Lady Hester had a daughter, what might they not do to her to recover the money? He would tell the Jewish money-lenders and Turkish merchants and the English Queen; Zenia might be sold as a slave herself to pay the debts, because beneath her shabby robes she was white-skinned and valuable, the only thing of value that Lady Hester had left. Zenia would never have a chance to escape, to reach England and find her father there; she would never see a whole land like a garden; she would never be among her own people or have a proper dress as English ladies wore.