The Prince of Midnight (8 page)

S.T. lifted his eyebrows and shuffled without answering.

"Have you heard of this club?"

He gave the count a level look and lied again. "No, I haven't."

"Ah," the count said, and spread his stock face down. "Pity."

The door to the salon opened again. The valet stepped aside, holding it open,
and S.T. glanced up from his hand to see Miss Leigh Strachan calmly enter the
room.

All she did was walk past behind him in her blue velvet coat and silk
breeches and accept a cognac from Latour, but S.T. found his concentration so
suddenly cracked that he neglected to announce his
carte blanche
before
he discarded and lost ten points ere the play even started.

Plague take her.

The count seemed equally bemused. He stared past S.T.'s shoulder at her,
holding his cards loosely. Suddenly he ran his hand through his light hair. "Latour,"
he said, "have you a new acquaintance here?"

"Indeed, monsieur—the young gentleman wishes the pleasure of watching the
play, if it is
convenable. "

The count grinned. "A thousand times
convenable. "
He stood up and
swept a bow. "Come, come—present the boy, Latour."

The valet made a formal introduction of Mr. Leigh Strachan to the Comte de
Mazan. S.T. did not stand up, but only nodded vaguely in her direction. He was
determined to be finished with her. Quite finished.

"Perhaps you would permit me to give you my chair," the count suggested,
making a move to rise.

"No,
merci
," she said in her painfully stilted French.

Her husky voice sounded blatantly feminine to S.T., but the other two
appeared to accept her for what she seemed. "I prefer to stand."

"But you are not of this country!" The count cried delightedly. "English. You
are English. We were just speaking of the English. I forbid you to be anything
else!"

She agreed quietly that she was English. S.T. drew a card and turned his head
just enough to see her. She looked pale. He had to restrain himself from
suggesting that she lie down before she fell down.

"Where are you bound, Monsieur Strachan?" the count demanded. "Where's the
rest of your party? Do you make a grand tour?"

There was a short silence, and then she said, "I'm not traveling with a
party. I will be returning to England directly. As soon as I secure
transportation to the north."

S.T. lost his trick.

"But you needn't seek transport!" the count cried. "I can see that you're a
gentleman; you're young; you're alone! You have had misfortunes, perhaps. No,
no, you mustn't be left to travel on some washerwoman's ass." He threw down his
cards in the midst of the next deal and stood up. "Impossible. You must ride
with us. We're for Grenoble, should this ten-times useless valet of mine ever
succeed in making our coach free. What news from below, Latour? I'm tired of
piquet."

He walked away from the table. S.T. looked down at the half-dealt deck in his
hand and tossed it on the table, turning toward the others with a frown. "That's
it?" he demanded. "You fold?"

The count waved his hand. "Nay, let us simply forget the game entirely. You
won't begrudge my livres, will you, my friend? The louis are yours." He sat down
on the couch. "I would rather talk to Monsieur Strachan. We must discuss our
travel plans. You will come with us?"

"You are kind," she said in a disinterested tone. "If 'twill not discommode—I
shall."

He grinned and leaned toward her. "I look forward to it. We can talk. I have
a curiosity about the English." His hand closed on her forearm and his voice
rose to an eager note. "The English vice, do you know what I mean?"

S.T. swung around sharply and frowned at him through a surge of dizziness.
Just at that moment, a chorus of enthusiastic shouts rose from below. The count
leapt up and strode to the balcony.

"Vive le diable!"
he howled. "We're free!
Venez,
Latour,
bring his portmanteau and let us be gone!" He stopped long enough to flip back
his coattails in a deep bow in front of Leigh, and then caught her wrist and
pulled her bodily to her feet. She made no resistance to this extraordinary
familiarity, simply informed him that she had no portmanteau, only the cloak
bag.

"Wait a moment," S.T. said. He started to rise, but she walked out of the
room without glancing at him. "Wait," he shouted. "You can't just go off with—"

The valet bowed briefly to him, retrieved the count's gold-headed cane and
plumed hat, and followed the others.

"—strangers!" S.T. finished savagely. He took a step toward the door,
stopped—and sat down again.

He fingered the cards, shuffled and cut and stacked the deck over and over as
he listened to the echoing sounds of departure from the cobblestoned street
below. The slam of a door, the sharp calls of a postboy to the horses, the cries
of advice and warning amid the sound of iron-shod hooves and wheels grating on
stone faded into the indiscriminate noise of conversation as the chaise backed
from under the portcullis.

S.T. pressed his thumbs against the arch of the deck and sent it exploding
across the table with a curse.

He got up and poured himself a drink, staring down at the clutter of cards.
Just as the fuss from below was dying away, the street filled again with the
sound of horses. He turned toward the balcony, listening with his good ear. He
could make nothing of the new shouts and shrill cries of the women, and
abandoned all pride at last, striding to the balcony to see if they were
returning.

It was not the count's chaise. The steep street filled with mounted soldiers
from the other direction, the French side of the border. Cavalry horses milled
and reared amid a crowd of townspeople, and S.T. suddenly recognized the French
lieutenant from the guard post aiming his musket after the count's coach. The
sound of the shot blasted around and around the narrow chasm of the street, and
then the whole troop pressed and jostled through the crowd and took off at a
gallop across the bridge the way the coach had gone.

Marc burst through the door. "Too late!" he shouted, and ran to the balcony.
He leaned out over the rail, waving his fist at the last of the mounted
soldiers. "You drunken bumblers! Too late by a trice!" He snorted and pulled
back, shaking his head at S.T.
"Zut!
We did our best, did we not? You
and I can say so. The cards, that was an inspiration of the finest,
mon ami.
But they'll never catch him this side of the border again. And that poor young
fool—the
anglais—you
couldn't stop him going with them? These pups who
want to be heroes! God only knows what will become of him."

"Become of him!" S.T. snapped in frustration. "What the devil is going on?
They're after Mazan for something?"

Marc gave him a startled look. "You didn't know?"

"Know
what
?" S.T. shouted.

"Ha. Le Comte de Mazan. So he says, eh? Monsieur—he and his valet, Latour,
were condemned to the stake a month ago in Marseilles,. For blasphemy. And"—Marc
lowered his voice to an eager whisper—"sodomy." He shook his head with relish.
"And attempted murder of two young girls. He is no comte, my friend. He is Sade.
The Marquis de Sade."

S.T. had walked the mountain for hours, searching for Nemo far up over the
flank until he was almost to the other side, whistling and calling. Now he sat
on a lonely hilltop beneath the moon and cursed her.

And himself. His own futile instincts that always betrayed him, that had
never earned him anything but misery and a few moments of sensation, come and
gone like a winning gamble, the swift thrill that never lasted.

This time,
he'd thought, as he always thought:
this time it will
be different.
But it was not.

He should never have sent Nemo away, never taken that desperate a chance for
the sake of a woman. These grand gestures of his, they never endured beyond the
moment of glory before they vanished, and another game had to be played and won
again.

And paid for. He'd paid for this one with his last friend. Though he still
walked the mountain and searched, S.T. had the news he'd dreaded. He'd come
across a Gypsy cutting wood and heard the tale. Two children had seen a monster
up on the mountain flanks of Le Grand Coyer, a terrible supernatural creature
with the head of a man and the body of a beast. They'd even brought home the wig
it had snagged on a bush, and then the Gypsies had made incantations and potions
and gone out to draw the beast into a trap, where some Romany witch had turned
it back into a common wolf again before they killed it. He could go and see the
skin and the tattered wig of the devil's monstrosity if he liked, on display for
a small donation in the church at Colmars.

He hadn't gone. He could not. He walked out here on the mountain and
pretended there was some mistake, that it was all a dream and he would wake up
and find Nemo asleep, curled in a furry, untroubled mound at the foot of the
bed.

And her ... she deserved it, he thought; she got what she was asking for in
leaving his protection, which might not rate all that it had in younger days,
but was at least more than a match for some popinjay in marigold smalls. She got
just what she warranted, running alone about the countryside dressed in
breeches: a murdering aristocrat with unnatural tastes to use her and abuse her
and leave her body for the birds.

He tilted his head back in despair. A sound hovered at the base of his
throat, a low moan of grief and loneliness that swelled into a long note he'd
learned from Nemo in the days when they'd lounged on his castle steps hurling
wolf music at the moon. He hoped the Gypsies heard it; he hoped the housewives
and shopkeepers heard it in the towns; he hoped Sade heard it; he sang Nemo's
haunting call as passionately as his human lungs could carry it and hoped they
all shivered in their beds, in their carriages and tents and houses and all the
places they thought themselves safe.

The wild melody filled him, made him an outlaw again, transmuting his
solitude into exile. He sang until his chest ached and the wolf note fell like
water into a deep well, cascading down to silence.

He drew a breath. The night was still around him. In the waiting hush, he
could hear the blood in his ears, the last faint echo of his wordless lament
from the hills around.

And then from far away there came an answer. A single, desolate voice raised
the howl again on the night wind, rising up to a peak and sliding earthward. It
was joined by a second singer, and a third, until at last it was a chorus: a
reckless, savage symphony in celebration of his outlaw cry.

* * *

Leigh had long since grown impatient with this count and his insinuations. He
spoke so quickly that she could keep up with only half of his French, fidgeted
and touched her arm and babbled on about the English and the Hell Fire Club,
staring at her fixedly and then grinning avidly at his valet. She regretted
accepting his invitation. Whatever evil he planned could only delay her, and
she'd wasted time enough already in this vain journey.

Looking back, she saw that it had been weakness that had sent her here in
search of fighting skills she'd never learn. She'd left England driven by a
nightmare; clinging to the illusion that she could take revenge as a man would
take it. She'd come seeking a champion of justice, a shining, mysterious,
half-remembered legend of her girlhood . . . and found that he was human—and
lonely—and looked at her as if she could console him.

She would have used that masculine hunger in his eyes, lured him into aiding
her in her plan the way a hunter would coax some starving tiger into his baited
trap. But when he'd stumbled and held on to her shoulder for support and looked
at her with his fine handsome face full of pride and longing, he'd shown her the
true extent of his desire.

Something deep inside her had recognized that look. She saw the anticipation
in him, and it went beyond uncomplicated lust. Aye, she'd have yielded her body
as the price of her goal—she'd resolved on that long ago—but her body wasn't
enough. That look asked for more.

So she had left him. She took the first available means, abandoning one more
childhood delusion along with all the others. There was no one responsible for
justice but herself. She would do what she must alone, in whatever way she could
find to do it. She'd hoped to have vengeance with honor, but if honor was not
possible, she would have vengeance all the same.

The Comte de Mazan had been in a ferment of excitement all the way from La
Paire, where the sound of musket fire had followed them out of town. Apparently
the halfhearted pursuit had stopped at the border, since the chaise could have
been easily overtaken on the rutted, twisting roads. The track worsened as they
went along, reducing them to a pace slower than walking, the wheels falling
heavily into holes, bouncing everyone inside, and then climbing out with a
creaking groan.

Leigh sat silent and tense, clinging to the strap to keep her seat. She
judged it prudent to refrain from inquiring into the count's recent past,
holding him at a distance with cool replies to his enthusiastic conversation.
The valet, Latour, spent the endless time frowning mutely at the road behind
them, interposing that with intent glances at Leigh.

"Look at this," the count said, and leaned against her as the coach swayed.
He slipped a little leather volume into her hand. " 'Tis in English. Have you
read it?"

Leigh glanced down at the spine, barely able to hold the book steady. It was
titled
Aristotle's Masterpiece.
She didn't open the cover.

"Have you read it?" the count asked again.

Leigh shook her head.

"Ah, you will enjoy it. Keep it. Mr. John Wilkes gave it to me, and I'll give
it to you."