The Prince of Midnight (15 page)

She lifted her face to the wind. S.T. watched her pure profile.

" 'Twas too much for my mother," she said quietly. "Even Mama wasn't strong
enough to take it all on herself. She told me to pack for my cousin's in London.
She shut up the house. She put the horses to the chaise herself—we didn't even
have a coachman! I sat inside while she drove." Her voice drifted as she looked
around at the sky and the hills. "She really wasn't in her right mind. I suppose
I wasn't either, or I would have stopped her. I don't think Mama had ever
handled a team. They bolted before we reached the bridge." She shrugged and
said, "My mother fell off the box."

He put his arm around Nemo and stroked the wolf's thick fur.

"You see, Seigneur," she said bitterly, "if you come with a price on your
head to England and take a stand against Chilton, you'll have every hand against
you from the Crown down to the parishioners. It's not one man alone who will try
to destroy you."

S.T. stood up, steadying himself with his hand in Nemo's deep mane. A certain
black elation had begun to uncurl in him, the potential of a gamble still too
distant and elusive to chance. There was the little glimmer of menace that
fanned the flame, the sharpening of thought and emotion, the keen sensation of
coming alive.

He wanted it; ah, he wanted it again. He felt as if he'd been asleep for
three years.

"I'll come," he said. "I'll do anything for you."

She looked at him, off guard, as if it startled her, and then her face grew
indifferent and her mouth set in calm irony. "They'll eat you alive, monsieur."

"They'll not even get close."

She gave him one of those infuriating little smiles, composed again,
cool—rejecting everything he offered.

"Damn you," he said under his breath. He took a step too quickly, brushed his
leg against Nemo, lost his balance, and landed on his knees with that sudden
blur and rush of the world tilting around his head.

She stood looking down at him, expressionless. "I've warned you," she said.

Nemo held steady, the way he'd been taught. S.T. gripped the dark fur. He
felt himself coming apart, pride and shame and anger and all the things he
wanted wrenching him in different directions.

The wolf licked his hand and leaned against his leg. S.T. took a deep breath
and pushed himself to his feet. "I'm coming," he said stubbornly. "You need me.
I'm in love with you."

The words had a power of their own. His limitations vanished and his old
world opened up as he said them— the excitement and glory of it, the passion. To
be alive that way, to hazard fortune for the sake of love ... he wanted it
again. He wanted all of it.

"You're a fool," she said, and turned away.

The Seigneur began to ask after a horse and vehicle in the town of Digne.
Leigh watched him inquire at every village and crossroads, but it was ten more
days of walking beside the donkey, with the mistral driving them ahead in cold
fury, before any such thing could be discovered.

Then it was only an old two-wheeled cabriolet, in a dusty street that felt
hot after the sudden lapse in the north wind. The blessed end of the mistral
came as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the atmosphere to settle to crystal
clarity and the colors to brighten into intense blue and dusky green, with the
limestone houses shining white against the shade in the narrow street. In two
weeks they had walked into the heart of Provence, from alpine foothills into a
land that might have been Spain or Italy from its aspect: a land of olives and
fruit trees, warm and baking beneath a cloudless sky.

Leigh leaned on a wall in the sun and listened to the Seigneur haggle over
the chaise. She couldn't follow the rapid argument, half in French and half in
Provencal, but there was a hint of angry desperation in his voice as he
bartered.

She waited. The street was empty of life, except for the donkey standing
patiently under their baggage, its eyes closed. The wall rose above her to a
great height, ascending to the crown of the village: a grand, crumbling
Renaissance chateau that towered over the tiny town huddled around its flanks.
In the warming air, the scent of lavender enveloped her, drifting from the wild
bushes that grew along the edges of the street and up the decaying wall.

The Seigneur's hair burned in the sun, gold and shadow, like the bright walls
shining against the charcoal depths of the shade. Next to the somber little
villager he was a flash of sunlight itself, an exasperated Apollo, his voice
ringing fluently in the vacant street.

Leigh caught herself staring at him, lowered her eyes, and looked away.

She thought again that she ought to walk on and leave him here, as she'd
thought it a thousand times since La Paire. He'd be no help to her; he wasn't
the champion she'd come searching for; she should go on alone and do what she
must herself.

But she didn't. She lingered, uneasy and sullen, finding no logic in it and
tarrying still.

He turned away with the villager and glanced over his shoulder at her. "Wait
here," he snapped in English, an order that elicited a sulfurous glare from her
as he walked off still contesting vocally with the other man. The worst of it
was, she did wait; she and the donkey, equally docile, standing as if they were
tied in the street the same way that Nemo had settled, whining unhappily, under
a bush outside the town—all of them bound by some implausible magic, some
strange inertia that would only dissipate when he returned with a soft word and
a caress, a handful of forage and a whisper in a furry ear ... and for Leigh,
that smile slanted from beneath his devilish eyebrows.

He'd embrace the animals, put his arm around the donkey's neck and scratch it
under the chin, tussle with Nemo on the ground, sleep with the wolf curled at
his back. He never touched Leigh. She thought that if he had, she would have
felt it like a shock of light all through her.

She wished he would never come back. Implausible, romantical, air-dreaming
idiot.

When he had disappeared around the corner, she sat down against the wall and
pulled the little book out of her pocket, the one with the English words the
Marquis de Sade had not been sure of. Leigh was not perfectly certain of some of
them herself, but if she hadn't understood a syllable of the text, the detailed
illustrations would have made the point quite clear.

She wondered, archly, if the Seigneur would look exactly so undressed. Men
looked more or less the same—all of them, one presumed, although these pictures
appeared to somewhat exaggerate the matter. She examined them critically. Her
mother would have said any knowledge was valuable, even such stuff as
Aristotle's Masterpiece.
It was rather mortifying to Leigh to find just how
little she did know of the subject.

She scanned slowly through the book. Some of the plates seemed ludicrous;
some made her wrinkle her nose and some increased the sense of disquietude in
her, bringing an unwelcome warmth as she studied them. She stared at the erotic
illustrations and thought of the ruined temple in the mountains . . . and the
Seigneur.

She'd had only one man before him; one boy, who'd been clumsy with excitement
and pledged eternal love, who'd seemed infinitely younger than herself, even
though he'd been seventeen years to her sixteen. He had wished to elope. She had
not. Their short affair had ended when Leigh desired to end it.

That had been a sinking moment—when her mother discovered what Leigh had
done. All of Leigh's explanations had seemed to come out as defenses; all her
grand theories of seeking knowledge wilted before her mother's grave stare. She
knew better, Mama said. She knew that what was between a man and a woman was
blessed, or ought to be—Mama had hoped that Leigh could observe her own parents
and understand that.

And Leigh had been ashamed, and felt very young and careless, because she'd
lost something her mother thought precious.

She was older now. Even the shame seemed innocent, remembering. How
scandalous she'd felt, how stained and tarnished by an adolescent mistake, how
chagrined and utterly humiliated by the lessons Mama had decreed from the local
midwife on things Leigh had not comprehended.

She'd always been the strongest, the oldest and most clever, growing up
capable and admired like her mother. She'd given away her virginity because
she'd wished to do it, because she was curious, because there was a part of her
that sometimes, fitfully, rebelled against the narrow course of her breeding and
life and consequence. At sixteen, she'd not realized the risk of such an
experiment.

The midwife had taught her that, and a few other things besides, which Leigh
suspected even Mama had not known. Leigh hadn't forgotten; she had the proper
leaves and powdered herbs to protect herself in her satchel. She was no longer
so naive. Nor would she let herself be at the mercy of a man like the Seigneur,
who made such easy promises of love and radiated sensual hunger in every move
and glance.

The little donkey lifted its head, releasing a raucous bray, awakening
rasping echoes in the street. As the boisterous noise died away, Leigh heard the
sound of slow hoofbeats. She pocketed the book swiftly and stood up. The
Seigneur and the villager turned the corner, leading a roan horse between them.

Leigh looked skeptically at the thin mare. The Seigneur met her glance and
shrugged. "We'll not do better," he said.

"She's moon-eyed," Leigh pointed out.

"Aye, I know it." He still sounded nettled. "She's got a little sight left."

"And the price?"

He scowled at her. "Four louis for the chaise and the mare. Do you try to
chaffer him down yourself, if you please."

Leigh turned away from him. " 'Tis no concern of mine."

He was silent a moment. Then he spoke to the villager briefly in patois. The
little man led the mare to the cabriolet and backed her between the traces.

S.T. drove. He kept his eyes locked on the ground ahead, determined not to
display any sign of the queasiness that he felt in the swaying chaise. Leigh sat
beside him, gripping the side of the cabriolet against the bumps, wincing every
time the blind horse tripped. S.T pretended not to notice.

Across the Rhone at Montelimar, through wave after wave of the strange hills
of the Ardeche, volcanic rock and black promontories, the blind mare took her
stumbling passage on a road that was sometimes little more than a stony track.
As long as S.T. concentrated, and didn't relax or allow the vehicle to pitch him
about, he kept the discomfort under control. More than once, he got out and
walked, leading the horse over the roughest stretches.

For distraction, he began to work the mare while he drove the chaise, both
reins gathered into his left hand and passed between his fingers so that the
lightest squeeze sent a signal. He murmured to her, a soft, tuneless rise and
fall of tones, using his voice to precede the cues of the reins.

The little sightless mare was smart; after taking some time to accept the
sound and smell of a wolf as Nemo trailed behind, she started to settle down and
to respond quite readily: to turn slightly left in answer to a low tone, to the
right in reply to a higher one even before he tightened the rein. He was pleased
to find that it seemed to help her move. Instead of being pulled off balance by
the reins in order to avoid rocks and obstacles, stumbling when she reacted too
slowly, the more subtle cue of his voice brought an instant response that
allowed her to evade the impediments before she tripped over them. By the time
they'd traveled half a day, the horse was walking bravely on long reins, her
ears flicked back to catch the signals and her stumbling infrequent When the
road widened into a smooth, new-built stretch, she picked up a willing trot.

Nemo jogged along behind the cabriolet, looking purposeful and content now
that they were covering ground. It was for the wolf's sake that S.T. had chosen
this secondary road instead of the frequented highway through Lyon and Dijon.
The memory of the man-eating Beasts of Gevaudan, blamed for killing threescore
human victims only a decade ago, was fresh all over France. Nemo wouldn't show
himself if he could help it, but the more lonely the country they traversed, the
easier for him to find cover.

What would come of taking the wolf into the belly of populated France, S.T.
had not yet brought himself to face.

By evening, he judged they had traveled nearly three times the distance they
might have made on foot. His back hurt from the tension of sitting forward and
resisting the motion of the chaise. His head ached. Just outside of Aubenas, he
stopped the cabriolet and looked at Leigh through the chilly evening air. "Would
you like your supper served on a table tonight?"

Her eyebrows rose. "What a novel idea."

He hiked himself out of the chaise, calling Nemo. The wolf came panting up
from some side trip, leaping over a clump of broom and greeting S.T. fervently.
S.T. led him up off the road into the pines, casting about until he found a
promising fallen log. He knelt down and pushed at the pine needles and dirt,
scooping a wolf-shaped bed. Nemo joined in, circling and pawing until he finally
flopped down, satisfied, and curled his tail over his nose, looking up at S.T.
from behind the furry brush.

S.T. made the signal to stay. Nemo's head came up. As S.T. walked away, he
knew the wolf's eyes were on his back. He wasn't absolutely certain Nemo would
remain there until he returned, but he hoped the wolf's training would hold in
the absence of some intense distraction like the pack that had lured Nemo away
from Col du Noir.

He returned to the chaise, dusting the dirt off his sleeves. Inside the
vehicle, he took a deep breath against the queer sensation that gripped him as
soon as the cabriolet lurched forward. Leigh looked at him sideways.