The Prince of Midnight (17 page)

The blind mare pulled the extra load patiently. The bright winter of the
south had fallen behind, yielding to low clouds. Rain set in, and the folding
leather hood of the cabriolet afforded only slight protection.

Leigh drove much of the time, using the Seigneur's voice commands and
trusting to her growing faith in the blind mare's native surefootedness. The
Seigneur slept whenever he wasn't driving, having worn himself out, Leigh didn't
doubt, in making love to the tap maid he'd found so enchanting and talkative at
supper in Bourges last night.

Sometimes amid the bumps and rocking, his body grew heavy against hers and
his head came to rest on her shoulder. And sometimes she just let him stay
there, while she stared into the cold drizzle, listening to the carriage creak
and the mare's hooves slap in even time through the puddles, feeling his breath
warm on her neck.

She drifted into a reverie, dreaming that they traveled to some unnamed
place, some home she'd never seen, where her family waited . . . New Year's Eve,
'twould be, and everyone gathered with the hot spiced ale and mince pies and
plum pudding, with the bells ringing all through the sky at midnight. Her papa
would be mumbling the important lines of his New Year's sermon, so that he
wouldn't forget them, and Mama would supply the proper word when he faltered—at
the same time that she handed out noisemakers and coaxed everyone from their
games at the stroke of the clock to greet the first visitor to step over the
threshold in the New Year. And what a splendid First Footer the Seigneur would
make, to bring in the traditional New Year luck: handsome and male and
unmarried, with his remarkable coloring and fine height, as auspicious as could
be desired. And surely nature could not have been so cruel as to make him
flat-footed. By unchangeable superstition that flaw would be ill fortune indeed
for the coming year. Leigh caught herself glancing speculatively at his feet in
the worn pair of top boots.

Reality revived. She frowned and gazed ahead, feeling numb still after all
these months, yet unable to believe it was true, wanting to lift her face to the
leaden clouds and shriek and scream that it wasn't, that it could not be, that
she would not allow it. That so much love and life could not just . . . vanish,
into nothing, as if it had never been. That they must be alive and snug and
happy somewhere, waiting for her.

The Seigneur turned his head into her shoulder.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est?"
he mumbled sleepily.

She shoved at him, blinking hard. "Get off me."

He lifted his head and peered at the landscape without sitting up. "Have we
passed La Loge yet?"

"No." The tears menaced behind her eyes. She could not look at him.

He nestled back into place, his cheek turned into her body. "I'd rather stay
here," he murmured.

"Get you off," she snapped, pushing him desperately. "Get off, get
off!
Don't touch me!"

He struggled upright. His sleepy, confused look only made her angrier. She
turned her face away, toward the puddle-marked ditch beside the road.

"It's time for lunch," she said sullenly.

He rubbed his palms over his eyes.
"Eh bien."
His voice was quiet.
"Pull up under that chestnut."

Leigh directed the mare into the shadow of the tree, where the yellowing
leaves and outstretched branches created something of a shelter from the cold
drizzle. He pushed himself off the seat and stepped down from the chaise,
leaving a chill where his warmth had pressed up against her.

He walked to the mare's head. "Hungry?" he asked the horse.

The mare lifted her nose high in the air and nodded up and down in a perfect
imitation of a positive answer.

Startled, Leigh looked from the horse to him. He patted the mare's neck, not
meeting Leigh's eyes. She scowled. After a moment, she got down from the chaise.
She stretched and turned her back on him and began to search for provisions.

Their midday routine was well established. After the Seigneur spread a rug
over the horse, he went around to the rear of the cabriolet to release an
urgently impatient Nemo. The wolf did a dance of excitement and then raced along
the empty road, sending showers of water out of the puddles. He came flying back
at a whistle, and leaped into the air as the Seigneur raised his arm, coming
down with a splash and then whirling around to leap again the other way.

Involuntarily, Leigh found herself watching them as they moved slowly away
along the road playing catch with chestnuts. The wolf was a glorious sight,
vaulting into the air after the targets, showing his incredible long teeth in a
gape that ended with a snap Leigh could hear even from a distance. Several
times, die Seigneur made a motion with his hand, and the wolf dropped onto its
belly. They would stare at one another for long moments, and then the Seigneur
would tilt his head left or right and Nemo would go racing off in that
direction. Once, the wolf disappeared into the bushes, and the Seigneur walked
casually on down the road until Nemo erupted from his cover, yelping and
cavorting delightedly at his friend's melodramatic whoop of surprise.

Leigh leaned against the chaise. She squinted at the mat of wet yellow leaves
on the ground. She swiped angrily at her eyes and rummaged in her satchel for
her medicinal Wallet, taking out a vial of eye bath she'd prepared from a powder
of lapis calaminarius, rose water, and white wine. She walked to the mare's head
and pulled back the blinkers, applying two drops with a glyster pipe to each of
the horse's eyes. When she saw the Seigneur turn back, far down the road, she
bundled up her medicinals and prepared to stuff the wallet away.

The corner of her sketchbook stuck out from beneath the flap of the traveling
satchel. As she tied the wallet, she looked at the worn cover of the book. She
glanced again at Nemo, watched the wolf spring into the air, all muscle and
rippling fur and wild joy, with the Seigneur flicking a chestnut off one thumb.

She fingered the sketchbook. She chewed her lip, and then suddenly pulled the
book free. He had charcoal and pencils at hand for his own little drawings that
he never bothered to finish of houses and trees and old peasant women they'd
passed. Leigh sat against the footrest of the chaise and opened her book,
flipping quickly past the watercolors to the last blank pages. She grasped a
pencil stub between her fingers.

She stared at the creamy page. There was an old smudge on it, the print of
her own thumb, left from some other day—some other scene that had caught her
heart. Some forgotten, never recorded occasion ... a birthday, an afternoon's
teatime, one of the small things that she sketched when she wanted to
crystallize a moment in time and take it with her into the future.

She held the pencil. She put the point down on the paper. For a moment she
thought of the wolf, the outline of it, the proper shading—she never got it
right, really she was only a dilettante . . .

She pressed her trembling lips together. Suddenly she gripped the pencil in
her fist and tore it across the page with a violent move; gritted her teeth and
pressed the point down hard, scrubbing it viciously into the book, scrawling a
black jagged scribble of nothing over the paper.

Her hand seemed to move of its own will, not drawing, attacking—battering and
violating the empty page, tearing through the paper with slashes of dark and
gray and white. She could hear herself breathing, dry sobs as she bent over the
book, squinting down at the work, not stopping until she'd torn the page into
ugly shreds that hung from the binding like old clothes.

She looked down at it, at the pencil and her smeared hands. Then she stood up
and threw the book away from her as far as she could throw it.

She turned around to the scratched and faded sideboard of the chaise, panting
as if she'd been racing: as if she'd climbed and crawled to the top of a
mountain. She pressed her palms together and held them to her mouth while her
whole body shuddered. She swallowed, and swallowed again, and slowly her breath
came back to her. The force that gripped her muscles let her go; she could move
again, and think.

She closed her eyes for a long moment. She heard the wolf go panting past
her, and looked up to see the Seigneur. She wanted to turn away, but she watched
as he walked over to a puddle in the road and picked up the open sketchbook that
lay half in and half out of the skim of muddy water.

He didn't look at Leigh. He brushed away the wet leaves that clung to the
book and then separated the pages, drying the corners with his coat sleeve. The
copy of the thieftakers' bill lay a few feet away; he dried that too, and with
his stiletto, he stood in the road and painstakingly cut away the tatters of the
mutilated page.

He wadded up the torn pieces and tossed them in the puddle. Then he walked to
the chaise and packed the book in his own bag, sliding it carefully between his
shirts, slipping linen shirttails between the wettest pages and padding the
book's corners before he closed the valise again.

He never looked at Leigh. He said nothing. If he had, she would have
disintegrated into a thousand shivering rags of mad anguish.

But he didn't, and she held on.

They ate without talking, the way they did almost everything. Leigh sat in
the chaise, while he leaned against the trunk of the chestnut with Nemo at his
feet. It was peaceful and cold, the road vacant of any other traffic. Nemo put
his head on his wet paws and napped.

When the Seigneur finished his lunch, he went to the mare's head, removing
her nose bag. "Was your meal perfectly satisfactory, madame?" he asked.

The horse nodded extravagantly.

"You've taught her that," Leigh said, making her voice curt, so that he would
not think her disarmed by such a child's trick.

The mare nodded again.

"I don't perceive how you're doing it," she said.

He stroked the mare's forehead. "Oh, once I learned she spoke English, 'twas
easy enough to strike up a conversation."

"How droll," Leigh said sarcastically.

He smiled a little. "I'm pleased to hear you like it," he said, and folded
back the blanket.

Five more dreary days to Rouen, where Leigh went quietly out to the stable
just before she retired to her chamber at the Pomme du Pin. She took her medical
kit to bathe the mare's eyes, even though after a fortnight she doubted the
treatment was having much result. She'd not really thought it would, but she
looked ahead and thought of what would become of the faithful creature when they
reached the coast.

She was a little later than the usual hour of her evening visits. Normally
she only waited until the Seigneur had occupied himself with whatever flirt he'd
discovered for the night, and slipped out just after supper. The drops only took
a moment to apply; then she went directly upstairs to her room.

This night, after supper at the common table, the twelve-year-old son of an
English family staying at the Pomme du Pin had engaged her in a game of
chess—the Seigneur having been so kind as to promise the boy that Leigh was
monstrous good at the game, and to issue an extravagant challenge on her behalf:
a sack of bonbons to the Seigneur's jar of pickled cherries from Orleans. Leigh
had lost, but at least it had been by design.

The Seigneur himself had long since disappeared, of course, out seeking his
pleasures according to habit.

She'd borrowed a lamp from the inn, but she could see a shaft of light
pouring across the cobbles from a crack in the door. Beyond the roofs, the
asymmetrical towers of the cathedral showed black and gothic against the sky,
their bells pealing an echoing call to late mass. Her breath frosted around her
as she reached for the door.

Laughter and voluble French drifted out of the stable. Inside, a little group
of stable hands clustered in the open area outside the stalls, gathered around
the roan mare, who sat on her rump in the center.

Quite literally sat, her forelegs splayed out in front of her and her tail
spread on the clay floor.

Leigh stopped in the doorway and put down the lamp. No one noticed her, least
of all the Seigneur. One of the grooms asked a loud question, and the mare
nodded vigorously. The little audience roared with laughter, which spooked the
mare, but before she gained her feet the Seigneur was tapping her rump with a
whip, murmuring,
"Non, non
—
a bas, cherie!"

She sank back with an equine grunt. He rubbed her ears, feeding her a biscuit
and calling her sweet names in French. Then he stepped back.
"Avant!"

The mare heaved herself to her feet and received another warm cherishing. In
the midst of interested comments from the bystanders, the Seigneur looked up and
saw Leigh.

He grinned and turned the mare toward her. The blind horse struck out with a
foreleg and lowered herself onto one knee in an impeccable bow.

All the ostlers applauded.

Looking at their delighted expressions, Leigh suddenly realized what he'd
done. He'd trained the sightless mare into value, given her a solid worth, made
her an asset when she'd been only an encumbrance. While Leigh watched, the mare
stood up and stuck out her nose, nibbling at the Seigneur's tricorne, then
taking the brim in her long yellow teeth and pulling the hat off. She shook it
up and down, while the ostlers screamed with mirth.

Leigh lowered her eyes. She couldn't help the way her lips curled upward.
"Good," she said softly.

The Seigneur bent his head. He rubbed the mare's ears vigorously, slanting
Leigh a sidelong smile as he took his hat and settled it on his head again. He
handed the mare's lead to an ostler.

"And what brings you out so late?" he asked, coming toward her. "I thought
you snug in bed."

Leigh shrugged. She leaned against the door and held the wallet behind her.
"I wished for some air."