The Prince of Midnight (6 page)

The excursion had one success—he took his musket along and managed to poach a
brace of royal pheasant, which solved the problem of supplies for the time
being. When he returned, Miss Leigh Strachan was sleeping, her dark hair tousled
around her face in sable curls, but she woke and struggled up in bed the moment
he entered the room.

"How are you feeling?" she asked abruptly.

He lifted an eyebrow. "Considerably better than you, I don't doubt."

"Your appetite is regular?"

"Prodigous," he said. "You're keeping me from my breakfast."

"No febrile symptoms? Or chilling?"

He leaned against the wall. "Not unless my daily sojourn in that bloody
frigid stream counts."

"You've been taking a cold bath?" She regarded him with a weak scowl. "That's
something then, at least."

"Your orders, mademoiselle."

She lay back on the pillows wearily. "Would that you'd followed them all. I
told you to go away, too, but you weren't sensible enough for that. I only pray
you won't suffer the consequences."

"I've been drowning myself in rosemary and rue. I'm most delightfully
aromatic. Have you noticed?"

She took no regard of the arm he held out for a sniff. "That will be helpful
as far as it goes." Her voice was strained, the natural huskiness pronounced,
but she went stubbornly on. "I've been considering a further list of herbs you
must collect, but you'll have to bring me a pen and paper to write them down."
She didn't wait for him to do so, but took a trembling breath and started
immediately onto her next point. "In Bedfordshire, they've had some success with
washing the walls of fever residences in quicklime. Is there any available?"

S.T. shook his head, watching her closely. He doubted she ought to be
exerting herself to this much talking.

Her fingers moved restlessly. "You'll have to make some. I can tell you how.
But the herbs should be gathered first; you can brew several necessary
decoctions for dosing yourself." She closed her eyes, paused a moment, and then
opened them. "You should continue the cold baths. And I'll want to know
instantly if you develop the headache or any other of the signs. I'll write them
down for you. As for the quicklime, you must gather—"

By the time S.T. had been regaled with the long list of prophylactic measures
he was to take for his continuing health, he couldn't decide if Miss Leigh
Strachan was truly concerned for him or simply a born drill sergeant. She had
that methodical style of categorizing things in descending, ascending, and
elliptical orders of priority that he associated with middle-aged spinsters and
tax clerks. He began edging out of the room, finally claiming a pot of garlic
was on the boil to hasten his departure, and escaped down the spiral stairs.

He got to the armory, tried to remember the first thing he was supposed to
do, and shook his head in defeat. "God's blood," he muttered to Charon's
portrait. "Quicklime. Peruvian bark. Smoking hell."

He kicked at a ball of dust and shrugged off his coat, electing to clean the
pheasant instead. He didn't intend to be hanging about gathering herbs and
whitewashing walls anyway—as soon as she could fend for herself, he intended to
leave her with some supplies and go looking for Nemo.

When he took her a midday meal of
aigo boulido,
she was sitting up
in his chair, wrapped in a bed sheet. S.T. grunted in annoyance. "You'll have a
relapse, damn you. Get back in bed."

She merely looked at him coolly, and then at the chipped bowl, full of bread
soaked in a broth of sage, garlic, and olive oil. S.T. ate it all the time; it
had kept Provencal Peasants alive for centuries. Marc even considered the dish
particularly suitable for invalids, S.T. knew, but Miss Leigh Strachan's nose
flared delicately as she turned her face away.

"I cannot," she said, turning even paler.

"You can't eat it?"

"Garlic." The single word held soul-deep loathing.

He sat down on the bed. "Very well." He held up the bowl and dug in himself.
She watched him with a faint pinch to her mouth. He leaned against the bedpost,
savoring the pungent soup. "What would you prefer, mademoiselle?"

"Perhaps . . . some plain beef tea?"

"I heard of a cow in Provence once," he said. "In Avignon. That's about
thirty leagues from here." He took another bite. "Lady Harvey had it imported
from England."

"Oh."

"She didn't care for goat's milk in her tea."

Leigh bit her lip. "I should like my bread plain, then."

"As you please." He shook his head, finishing off the last bite. "I'll bring
some for you before I go."

"Go where?" she asked sharply.

He set the bowl aside. "First to the village. Maybe farther; I don't know. I
was going to wait a day or two, but if you're strong enough to complain about
the menu, I believe I can leave you to lift your own food to your mouth."

"Certainly I can, but you mustn't leave here now."

He frowned down at his feet. "I won't touch anyone. I'll keep my distance. I
just need to—ask some questions."

"Why?"

He glanced down, fitting one fist inside the other. "My wolf . . . he's gone
off. I want to look for him."

"He's lost?"

"Possibly."

"How long has he been gone?"

He didn't look at her. "A fortnight."

There was a long silence. S.T. drew a circle, and then a figure eight in his
hand.

"It's my fault, then," she said quietly.

He took a deep breath. "No. I sent him. To the village with a note. I didn't
have to. You didn't ask."

The bed sheet rustled as she stood up. "Where are my clothes?"

He looked up at her. She swayed a little and held on to the back of the chair
for support. "You don't need your clothes. You're going back to bed."

"No," she said. "I'm going with you."

Lying with her cheek pillowed against her cloak bag, feigning sleep beneath a
pine tree, Leigh watched him from under her lashes. If not for the painting of
the black horse Charon, she wouldn't have credited that this man was really the
Seigneur.

It was true enough that he fit the physical description. He sat cross-legged
in his shirt sleeves, tricorne tossed negligently aside, looking out over the
steep-sided valley and chewing on a sprig of wild thyme. His hair was tied back
in a careless queue; the sunlight of the south turned it to that shimmer of gold
and deep earthen shadow that had sounded so peculiar by report and turned out to
be so extraordinary in reality. The black ribbon tumbled halfway down his back.
His easy smile and the strange fiendish curve of his brows gave his face a
satyric cast, laughing and wicked at once.

But he talked to himself. And though his normal motion was easy and fluid, if
he turned quickly, he lost his balance. She'd seen it happen three times now on
their hike down along the gorge. At first she'd feared it was an early symptom
of the fever, but he seemed unaffected otherwise—save for the way he looked the
wrong direction half the time when she spoke to him.

It didn't seem possible that a man with clumsy balance and flawed reflexes
could be much of a swordsman, though he wore a rapier at his hip. Or a horseman
either—and the Seigneur had been a master of both.

But there was the painting of the black horse. And his legendary way with an
animal, asking a wolf to do his bidding as if it were a reasoning being instead
of a wild beast. And his singular coloring, green and gold and gilded chocolate,
which was what had led her to him from as far away as Lyon, where they knew all
about the eccentric Englishman with the manner of the true
noblesse,
who spoke
fran
ç
ais
so creditably
and had unaccountably taken up residence in a ruined pile of stones.

She'd found him. He was the Seigneur du Minuit, without doubt.

He just wasn't precisely the Seigneur she'd been hoping for.

In truth, she could almost feel enough to pity him. To come to this: living
in unkempt isolation, grubbing off the barren land with only a wolf and a few
ducks for company after what he'd been and done. 'Twas no wonder if he'd gone a
little mad.

He looked toward her. Leigh maintained her pretense of sleep, not wanting to
speak or move yet. Through the web of her lashes, she watched him use a tree
branch for stability as he hiked himself up.

He stood still a moment on the canyon rim, his face half turned toward her
but his attention focused intently elsewhere, like someone trying to catch the
words of a distant song. The deep sleeves of his linen shirt moved in a faint
breeze. It fluttered the simple fringe of lace at his cuffs and outlined his
shoulders beneath the fabric. In the back seam of his waistcoat there was a
small tear that needed mending before it grew, and his soft leather top boots
could have done with a vigorous polish. On his elbow a patch of blue paint
marred the creamy white of good linen.

He looked lonely.

Leigh shifted restlessly, turning her face into her arms. The sharp scent of
pine needles engulfed her. She closed her eyes. Her body wanted to sleep, to
rest and mend, but her soul resisted it. There were decisions, questions, new
plans to be made if the old ones wouldn't do. She had nothing to spare for
sentiment. If he wouldn't teach her— if he couldn't—she had to go on to another
course.

But she owed him something. She'd stay with him until the danger of fever
passed, little as he seemed to credit it, and she hoped that a pitiless
providence might work one small miracle and return the wolf unharmed.

S.T. had offered to carry her satchel four times, but she'd turned him down.
He was miffed about that; she had a way of making a simple gentlemanly
suggestion appear to be an immoderate encroachment on her dignity, as if he'd
tried to slip a hand up her shirt instead of merely carry her bag.

He would have been happy to slip a hand up her shirt, of course. Or anything
else of that nature. He walked along behind her, watching her legs and the swing
of her velvet coat over the feminine curves beneath, smiling to himself.

"So," he said, after they'd resumed their pace long enough for the silence to
become strangling, "from whence do you hail, Miss Strachan?"

"Don't call me that." She stepped heavily down from a boulder onto the lower
grade of a hairpin turn in the path.

S.T. followed, lost his balance in a too hasty rotation, and clutched at a
branch to steady himself. This sharp attack of vertigo had begun when he'd woken
in the morning and lifted his head. Like the inside of a colorful giant ball,
the room had booted into motion, spinning wildly around him.

After three years, he was halfway resigned to the faint dizziness that
plagued him all the time, the sensation of disorientation when he closed his
eyes or turned his head too suddenly. But the bad spells came on without warning
and varied in intensity. Sometimes he couldn't even get out of bed without
falling down. Sometimes, he could swallow down the nausea and concentrate on
steady objects and move, as long as he didn't move too fast.

Walking downhill was like playing roulette. The slash of leaves from his
ungainly stumble brought a look backward from his companion. He stared at her
defiantly. "What do you expect me to call you?"

She turned back and kept walking.

"Fred?" he asked. "William? Beezlebub? Rover? No, listen—I've got it. How
would 'Pug' suit?"

She stopped and turned, so abruptly that he had to grab a ledge with one hand
and her with the other to keep from pitching onto his face. She stood still, her
shoulder steady beneath his sudden grip. His instant of dizziness subsided.

" 'Twould be foolish," she said dispassionately, "to dress as a man and be
called by a feminine title. Would it not, monsieur?"

S.T. told himself to take his hand off her, but he didn't. It was the first
time he'd touched her when she'd been in her right mind, and she wasn't ordering
him to let go.

"I suppose that's a consideration," he said, and tried out a smile on her.

For a moment he thought it might actually meet with some success. Her steady
gaze faltered, a downward brush of black lashes hiding blue, but when she looked
at him again it was with the ice of attack.

"What's wrong with you that makes you so clumsy?" She moved her shoulder
beneath his hand.

S.T. let go of her instantly. "A case of general ineptitude, as you see." He
leaned on his other hand, bracing against the rock ledge, doing his best to look
casual. "Any other complaints, Sunshine?"

"There's something wrong with you," she said.

He tried to stare her down. "Thank you."

"What is it?"

"Bugger off, mademoiselle."

"For God's sake, don't call me so when anyone can hear you."

"Ah, yes—we're all to think you're a great lump of a man, aren't we? Then
bugger off, you son of a bitch. Does that suit your masculine sensibilities?"

It seemed impossible to goad her. She merely looked at him intently, and he
felt as if he were standing naked in the Champs Elysees. He took a breath,
meeting the look, feeling as bullheaded and foolish as he undoubtedly appeared.
But he couldn't tell her. His mouth simply would not form the words
I'm
deaf. I'm half deaf and I can't keep my equilibrium anymore. I can't hear and I
can't ride and I can't fight and I can barely walk down this hill without
falling on my face.

She knew. How could she not? She watched him narrowly enough with those
ice-water eyes. Saints, she was so beautiful, and he was a clumsy, stumbling,
frustrated shadow man, who would have lied like Lucifer to have her if he'd
thought he could get by with it... but he reckoned that in the end he couldn't,
and so he had nothing but his thick-witted pride to preserve.

"You needn't come along in any case. Nobody asked you," he said—a pretty
brilliant sample of school yard wit, he thought in vexation.