Prince of Midnight Read online

  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 français 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 Élysées. 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.

  Again a tiny falter, an instant’s waver of that steady regard. She frowned at his chest, and he could see her thinking, weighing alternatives.

  “You need me,” she said at last.

  Not: I want to. Or I enjoy the company. Or I think we could come to admire one another.

  Just a task. Clearly she’d long since decided he was useless for her original purpose. Which he was. But he’d rather have been the one to deliver the snub, thank you.

  “Much obliged,” he said sarcastically. “But I don’t need your help, Miss Strachan—as a matter of fact, you’re a hindrance. You may think that outfit will fool a Frenchman, but Nemo won’t come near me as long as you insist upon skulking about in the vicinity.”

  She shrugged. “Tell me when to stay at a distance, then.”

  “Le diable. He let out an explosive breath. “Do you know nothing of a beast’s fine senses? He’ll discover me long before I can fi
nd him. Stay away, Miss Strachan, if you don’t need my nursing. Just stay away from me.” He pushed off the ledge and brushed past her. He kept going, down to the next curve in the trail, which he turned with studious leisure, careful to keep his hand on a rock and his eyes fixed on a tree to control the vertigo. He was aware that there was no sound of movement on the path behind him. He managed a quick glance up through the bushes, and saw her still standing there, as if she’d taken him precisely at his word.

  Fine. Grand. He’d have let her tag along with him if she’d shown the least sign of civility. Truth be told, he could find Nemo with or without her if the wolf was going to be found. Truth be told, he relished having someone to be responsible for besides himself—skirt-smitten blockhead that he was—calling halts when he judged she needed the rest, making certain she paced herself, trying to prevent the crazy chit from pushing till she dropped.

  She reminded him of an animal in that way. She kept on like some single-minded beast, the way a wounded stag would keep stumbling forward, oblivious of obstacles and pain and sense. Just moving, as if the motion itself had some design.

  His reason told him to leave it alone, that he’d had enough of damsels in distress to last any man ten lifetimes. But his spirit filled him with visions of that nighttime highway, of scandalous glory… erotic, heady pleasure, joy that burned through all his veins, in the saddle or in a woman’s arms.

  Love had never lasted; it had all come to naught more times than he could remember. He gave himself to the dream, and it vanished in his hands. It had ruined him.

  He ought to keep his wits.

  But she was like none of the others.

  Maybe, this time, it would be different.

  Bouffon! He always thought it would be different. He always thought: this time…

  Ah! but this time, this time, this time…

  Damnation.

  By the time he reached the village, his vertigo was abating, diminishing into the faint disorientation that he’d learned to tolerate, the sense of being constantly just a bit light-headed, but he wasn’t yet past a stumble. He didn’t know if she had followed him or not—there were a thousand paths she could have taken, splitting off from the trail to the village and heading north or south or east or west or any direction a lunatic girl might want to go.

  La Paire boasted two bridges over the narrow river, logically enough, and not much else. Marc’s tavern clung to the cliff in between them, a whitewashed, tile-roofed and green-shuttered domestication of the old fort walls, snugged between perpendicular neighbors. The hill town seemed to grow right up out of the top of the gorge and peer over into it, like an upended jumble of child’s blocks that managed by some miracle of balance and faith not to fall in.

  S.T. had thought the town and the canyon and the pair of bridges arched a hundred feet above the narrow cataracts quite picturesque when first he’d come here. And Marc had laughed at S.T.’s jokes and served good spicy red wine, and there was wild country for Nemo and sunlight like nectar, and it was all a long, long way from anywhere… and so he’d stopped running.

  La Paire was a border town on the flanks of the Alps, changing hands between Capets and Hapsburgs and the House of Savoy with monotonous regularity. Presently, La Paire stood on the French rim and S.T.’s Col du Noir on the Savoyard side of the border, but any treaty signed in Madrid or Rome or Vienna might change that in a day.

  He’d bought the ruined castle by letter from a young chevalier who preferred Paris to rustication. It made a home of sorts, the first one S.T. had had in his life—or the first he’d chosen for himself, at any rate, and one of the few he’d lived in for more than six months altogether. He found he liked solitude. He preferred to go to bed at sundown, he who’d spent all the nights of his past in revelry or scandal or lawless hunting along the dark highways. He painted, slept, and dug in the rocky dirt to grow things, and that had been good enough.

  Until now. Until three years of isolation pressed in his chest, a tangle of lust and chagrin curled on top of terror that he would walk across a bridge and see Nemo’s skin nailed to the town gate.

  He was spared that. The main gate was only a gate, in need of repair as usual, and presently blocked by a coach that had unwisely attempted to cross the river and pass beneath the low portcullis. Since the iron grating had hung at a slant over the cobbled street from some time in the early Middle Ages, there seemed little hope that the combined efforts of the mayor, a dozen townsmen, two housewives acting in an advisory capacity, and a swarm of dirty little boys were going to straighten it up and free the coach in the near future. S.T. took the other bridge across.

  The guard post was empty, also typically. S.T. walked from the sovereign territories of His Highness, the King of Sardinia and Duke of Savoy, across the official border into France without even a halfhearted challenge. The lack of ceremony suited him perfectly well, since it saved him having to hear the sad story of the lieutenant’s latest love affair.

  He went into Marc’s by the kitchen door, where the aubergiste gave him no more than a wild glance and rushed past, carrying a tray up the stairs to the salon. S.T. glanced at the crowd of spectators pressed around the windows in the public room and decided to follow Marc upstairs.

  He sauntered into the salon as if he were dressed in silk stockings and Venetian velvet instead of a waistcoat and stained breeches. Normally he didn’t bother to patronize the upper room, but he could put on his airs with the noblest of them, as Marc well knew. The innkeeper only bobbed his head when S.T. commandeered the divan and crossed his legs in his most elegant sprawl.

  Out on the narrow balcony that overlooked the town gate, a nattily dressed man in a powdered wig sat propped against the iron rail, swinging an ebony walking stick with a gold knob and grinning at the commotion in the street below. His companion, looking bored, slouched at the table where Marc was pouring two generous servings from a bottle of his best cognac.

  S.T. favored the guests with a distant nod and lifted his finger for a glass. Marc actually looked relieved to hurry over to him; the tavern keeper left the entire flagon on the side table, gave S.T. a significant glance and a peculiar twitch of his eyebrows in the direction of the seated man, and hastened out of the room.

  That was decidedly odd. Normally, Marc would have required a bit of cajoling and numerous promises before parting with even a bottle of his Hermitage, much less the cognac, given the sad status of S.T.’s bill. He took a thoughtful sip, tilting his head to survey the travelers discreetly.

  He found his interest returned. The man at the table was looking at him with insolent openness, one elbow resting casually on his armchair. He wore a gray frock coat, with a thick fall of lace at his throat, and breeches and waistcoat of matching marigold yellow. His weapon was a cane sword, lighter and more convenient than S.T.’s unfashionable but lethal colichemarde.

  The stranger’s dark eyes moved over S.T. as if he were a horse at auction; the bored mouth curved upward a little when S.T. met his look squarely. Without comment the man turned again to the balcony, stuck his hand into his fair chestnut hair, and rested his cheek on his palm.

  “Come and drink, Latour,” he said lazily to his companion, “and give me to hope that we won’t be incarcerated here for the night.”

  “I make no promise.” The other man straightened and bowed briefly. “Tis apparent to me that this execrable hole of a town, she is habited by clowns and monkeys.”

  “But, no!” Irony dripped from the soft words. “They cannot be so obtuse as this valet of mine, whose unfortunate idea it was to cross the bridge.”

  The man on the balcony hesitated an instant, and then bowed again more deeply. “Mais oui, monsieur le comte. It is as you say, of course.”

  “Come in and drink, Latour,” his master said in a low, silky voice. “Do show some respect. I may be amused to see you drape yourself across the balcony rail when it’s between us, but now there is a gentleman present.”

  Latour obeyed, placing the walkin
g stick carefully in a corner. He stationed himself behind the count’s chair and took the glass of cognac offered, but did not drink.

  S.T. thought this a queer pair of birds, and rather fancied he’d have done better to stay in the public room below. He’d have learned more there. The shouts and chatter drifted up from the street, echoing in the quiet salon. S.T. sighed and studied his glass. With this turmoil, he’d not get a quiet moment to question Marc no matter where he stationed himself.

  He tasted his cognac. At least there was no obvious sign that Nemo had been taken or any apparent concern about fever in town. This coach seemed to be the biggest event in La Paire since the Crusades. He glanced toward the table and found the young nobleman watching him again.

  “I am bored, Latour,” the man said slowly. “Bored. I must do something.”

  The servant Latour shifted uneasily. “Shall I bespeak a bedchamber, my lord?”

  “No… in a moment, perhaps. I wonder—dare I be so forward?” He smiled a little. “Could I hope that this gentleman might engage in a small hand of piquet to pass the time?”

  S.T. sipped his drink and considered the fellow before him with a professional eye. The man didn’t look like a seasoned gambler; he looked like a well-padded aristocrat overcome with ennui. S.T. knew better than to trust that, but on the other hand he hated to pass up an opportunity to fleece a lamb if he had one.

  “Nay,” he said. “I don’t wish to exercise my head so hard, monsieur. And I’ve no purse about me.”

  The comte sat up straighter. “This cursed place—” He stood suddenly and began to prowl the room. “I cannot bear it! Listen to them down there, the silly dogs; what are they about, to be of such idleness? Inform them I wish to leave, Latour. Go and tell them I cannot tolerate confinement.”

  The servant bowed. As he left the room, his master pulled out a wallet and emptied it on the table.

  “Look, sir,” he exclaimed, gesturing toward S.T. “There you are—twenty gold louis. You may count them. Yes—count them! I wager them against nothing, for the sport, if you please. A game, for God’s mercy; don’t deny me a little diversion!”