Moonlight Masquerade (4 page)

“It must have been simply awful for you,”
Christine commiserated, tentatively stretching her muscles and
finding that she was very sore. “But where, please, Aunt, is
here
? This room looks much too pretty to be part of a
coaching inn. Are we guests in a private house?”

Aunt Nellis merely nodded, quickly averting
her eyes from her niece. “We’re on the estate of the Earl of
Hawkhurst. We’ve been here for two days. Two days too long, if you
ask me.”

“Two days? My, I have been a slugabed. Poor
Aunt Nellis, I must have frightened you beyond reason. Two whole
days, just imagine. We are unwelcome?”

Aunt Nellis lifted her chin and gave out
with a highly unladylike snort. “Unwelcome? It goes beyond
unwelcome, my dear. Why, the man positively refused to have us,
ordering us back out into the storm to die.”

Christine frowned, looking about the large,
pleasant chamber once more. “As we are here, and alive, may I then
assume that you somehow convinced the earl to have a change of
heart?”

Suddenly Aunt Nellis couldn’t contain
herself any longer. Rushing over to the side of the bed, she took
up Christine’s hand and poured out all her fears and misgivings,
her words tumbling over themselves.

“He wears a black silk cloak and an enormous
hood, and he never steps foot outside his study all the day long.
He came sneaking in here that first night, while I was taking a
short rest from my vigil, but you awoke and screamed, sending him
scurrying out like a thief who’d been discovered in the midst of
his crime. I believe he’s mad, completed deranged. He has a
servant, Lazarus, who is so thin and mysterious he positively makes
my flesh crawl. Christine—we have to get out of here!”

Christine had lived all of her eighteen
years with Nellis Denham and had become accustomed to the woman’s
love of calamity. She smiled kindly, patting her aunt’s hand. “Of
course we must, dearest,” she said, comfortingly. “He wears a
cloak, does he, and a hood? Tell me, Aunt,” she could not help
adding, “does he limp, or drag one leg, or perhaps have a hideous
hump on his back? Do you hear chains rattling as he moves?”

Aunt Nellis threw down her niece’s hand in
mingled dismay and disgust. “You don’t believe me! Christine, how
could you be so heartlessly cruel? You saw him. You screamed and
screamed —so that I had to hold you down. Don’t you remember?”

Christine lifted her hands to rub at her
temples. “I remember dreaming, lovely dreams, of being led to a
place where I felt so very safe and happy,” she said slowly. “But,
no, I don’t remember a man being in my dreams. Oh, dear, I hope I
didn’t frighten him. He must be very shy. I mean, to be afraid to
show his face!”

“Frighten him?
Shy
?” Aunt Nellis was
nearly overcome. “He is anything but shy. He is imperious,
autocratic, and thoroughly inhospitable. Anyone would think he
believes we deliberately planned to land on his doorstep just in
order to inconvenience him. And he’s completely hard-hearted.
Imagine, seeking to turn us back out into the storm. The man is
mad, I tell you. I wouldn’t be surprised if we woke up one morning
murdered in our beds!”

Christine, weary and sore as she was,
couldn’t help chuckling at her aunt’s last contradictory statement.
“I do believe I should like to meet this terrible host of ours.
Surely he joins you for dinner?”

Aunt Nellis grumbled. “I take my meals in my
own chamber, on his orders. I’ve never seen him but the once that
first night, and then he hid beneath his cloak like some criminal.
It was all I could do not to swoon dead away at his feet when he
appeared in the foyer. He was so tall, so dark... so menacing.”

“So intriguing,” Christine added quietly,
snuggling down under the covers. “Aunt, I fear I am quite tired.
Would it be all right if I slept for a while as you plan our escape
from this place?”

Immediately, Aunt Nellis was all concern.
“Of course, dearest,” she assured her niece, tucking the covers up
to Christine’s small chin. “I have been selfish to worry your poor
aching head with our troubles. I’ll just sit in that chair over
there as I have been doing, keeping vigil. Don’t worry, Christine.
I have your father’s pistol tucked beneath the cushion.”

“Papa’s pistol?” Christine repeated, sleep
already claiming her. “Oh, Aunt, you’re delicious!”

V
incent stood at
the ice-etched window, looking out over the terrace to the garden
that lay beyond a low stone wall that was now buried under a
foot-deep blanket of snow. The garden was a wonderland, each bare
branch of the rose bushes clothed in an individual jacket of
glistening ice, the evergreens bowing gracefully beneath heavy
mantles of blue-white snow.

Yet the heavy flakes still drifted down from
a sky white with the stuff, even as the chiming of the mantel clock
announced that it was long past the hour of dusk. It had been
snowing for three days and nights, and drifts as high as a man’s
head leaned against the walls of Hawk’s Roost and altered the
landscape all over the estate.

England was suffering under the longest,
hardest winter to hit the island in anyone’s memory. Vincent had
read in the few newspapers that had gotten through to him that in
London the Thames had been frozen from bank to bank between London
Bridge and Blackfriars for well over a fortnight in January, making
it safe for pedestrians to cross the ice for the first time since
the rule of Elizabeth I.

Londoners had made the best of this
phenomenon while it had lasted, mounting a Frost Fair on the ice,
completed with booths, swings, bookstalls, skittle alleys,
toyshops, and even drinking and gambling halls. Vincent had read
the accounts with a tinge of sorrow, imagining himself as one of
the fair goers, laughing and drinking and gambling, watching his
friends as they made rare cakes of themselves chasing the
gingerbread girls and trying out skates that had lain idle and
rusting since the end of their childhood.

But London was not for him, even if he could
have traveled through the frostbound countryside to reach the city.
And now, just as the frost had begun to release its crippling grip
on the countryside, there had been this snowstorm—this great cold
carpet of white that showed no signs of stopping.

He did not mind being locked in at Hawk’s
Roost. After all, where else would he go? This was his home, his
hiding place, his sanctuary, his prison. He would not leave even if
he could snap his fingers and have the snow disappear overnight.
There was nothing left for him beyond the boundaries of Hawkhurst,
not anymore, not ever again.

“Your lordship?”

“Lazarus,” Vincent answered, without turning
about. “I’m confident you believe you have an excellent reason for
disturbing me.”

“It’s the young miss, your lordship,” the
servant informed him, moving about the darkening room to light a
single small brace of candles.

Vincent stiffened. “She’s no better?”

Lazarus shook his head. “Oh, no, your
lordship. She’s wide awake, and eating everything Cook can think of
to send up to her. Such a nice young lady; very polite and grateful
for everything we do for her.”

Shutting his eyes, Vincent’s agile brain
immediately conjured up a picture of Christine Denham as he had
seen her that first night, small, vulnerable, and so deathly still
as she lay against the sheets. But the picture swirled and changed,
so that when it was clear again he saw only her sky-blue eyes
opened wide with horror and repulsion as she stared up into his
face.

“So, she’s awake,” he bit out sharply,
willing the damning image to leave him. “How very wonderful for
Miss Nellis Denham. You must convey to her my congratulations on
her devoted nursing of her niece. Perhaps now she will agree to
retire to the bedchamber you have prepared for her, taking her
great pistol with her, of course. You have removed the ball, I
trust?”

“Oh, yes, your lordship!
Um
, your
lordship?”

Vincent turned away from the window so that
his right profile was visible to the servant. “Now what? Am I to
have no peace?”

“The young lady wants a bath, your
lordship,” Lazarus informed the earl in an awed voice, just as if
Christine had asked the servant for the moon and he had no idea of
how to fulfill her request.

Vincent smiled, or at least it appeared to
be a smile, the servant wasn’t quite sure, for Lazarus could see
only half of the earl’s mouth. Besides, he couldn’t recall ever
seeing the man smile in the four years he had served him.

“So fearful, Lazarus?” Vincent quizzed. “Has
she also requested that you scrub her back?”

“No, sir!” the servant exclaimed, horrified
by the suggestion. “It’s just that we’ve been a male household for
so long—these past four years with you, sir, and a dozen more
before them with your uncle, the late earl, may he rest in peace.
We’ve only the one tub about anymore except for those in the
attics, your lordship, and it’s in your chambers. I don’t know if
it will even fit through the door. Please, sir, what do I do?”

Vincent’s smile faded and he turned his back
to the servant, hiding even his profile from the man. Lazarus’s
words had immediately brought to mind the vision of Christine
Denham’s petite body, rosy from the hot, fragrant water, reclining
gracefully in the huge tub in front of his fireplace, her heavy
mane of curling black hair tied atop her head with a pink
ribbon.

She would raise one bare leg to lazily soap
it, a huge sea sponge stroking, gliding, from knee to shapely
ankle. She would then stand, rising to her feet as a goddess rises
from the sea foam, laughing at him as he knelt on the floor beside
the tub, tearfully begging her to allow him nothing more than the
honor of rinsing the clinging soap bubbles from her glistening
body.

The vision splintered into a million pieces
as Vincent’s fist slammed down on the windowsill. This was
impossible. This was insane. He had been alone too long. He had to
get Christine Denham out of his house, out of his life, before he
turned into a woman-starved beast that would sneak into her chamber
at midnight and ravish her.

“Tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. No later,
no earlier,” he said at last.

“Your lordship?” Lazarus questioned,
wondering if he had heard aright.

“My chamber, tomorrow morning at ten
o’clock,” Vincent repeated evenly, each word costing him more than
he dared admit. “Inform Miss Denham that she may have her bath at
that time with my compliments.”

“Very good, sir. Will you be wanting your
brandy now, your lordship?”

“Do I not have brandy every night at just
this precise time, Lazarus?” Hawkhurst asked, idly massaging his
left shoulder.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I doubt there is any reason why I
should deviate from that custom just because Miss Denham has
managed to regain consciousness.”

But Vincent did deviate from that custom,
for later that night, long after the rest of the household—save the
loyal Lazarus—was asleep, he called for a second decanter of the
mind-dulling liquor.

C
hristine had slept
so long that now, just past three o’clock in the morning, she found
it impossible to get comfortable in her bed. She had stuffed
herself on rare roast beef and fresh, home-baked bread—plain fare,
but hearty—so that even now her stomach was fuller than she would
have liked it to be. She had scrubbed her face and hands at the
washstand in the corner, but still she felt dirty and
disheveled.

She longed for morning and the bath she had
been promised. She’d soak for hours and hours, until her fingers
and toes resembled nothing more than soggy prunes, and then she
would wash her hair—three times—so that it squeaked as she pulled
her fingers through it.