She was a full half-hour late to dinner. She clipped down the marble staircase, having forgot to replace her walking boots with something softer and more formal, and, after a moment’s hesitation, made for what seemed most likely to be southward, where she thought any sensible building planner would put a solarium.
The only sounds in the building were those of her boots as she walked the tiled floor and the distant rattle of cookingware in the kitchen. The tilleul light of noon came breaking in through the tall arched windows. She passed through the south peristyle; a great wind bore down on her and sent her skirts and veil whirling. She followed the walk alongside the dancing heads of hazel-bushes with their nuts abob in the wind, alongside the bryony which was trying valiantly to take over the azalea shrubs, and alongside the roses which had shut themselves up and curled dragonwise and thorny in their beds.
At the far end of the peristyle the solarium reared its glassy head above the walled garden. As she approached the door Margaret could spy the shadowy shapes of both men seated among the hot-house plants within, the one in a folding chair of wicker-work, the other in an armchair of deep yellow velvet that was beginning to grow worn. A lamp hung from the ceiling flickered over them, drenching them in a pool of golden light while the shadows raced around them, shadows of the walls and shadows of the clouds that the high winds were scuttling across the brilliant disk of the sun.
The brass latch was cold under her hand when she turned it and stepped inside. The wind tore in past her, blowing the light wildly about and bringing round the two men to look at her. With some effort Margaret shut the door again and stood in the uneasy quiet before the door, returning their stares.
Rupert was the first to move. Skander Rime, uncertain, shifted a little in his seat, but Rupert rose up out of the massive velvet-covered armchair and stepped forward, gesturing back to it as he did so.
“So you did come,” he said lightly. “Lilith said you would, but I was not certain…”
“I was not certain either,” said Margaret in a tone to match the velvet chair. She stepped past him and took it, feeling it swell around her like warm gold sand.
Rupert took a dark-stained, high-backed wooden chair, which was rigid and unmoving as he, and rested his hands on his knees. In contrast, the easy bulk of his cousin rested in a low folding camp chair, and out of it he leaned just then to offer Margaret a glass of wine. She hesitated at first, but finding herself thirsty, and guessing Skander had already partaken, she took it gratefully, careful not to meet Rupert’s eye.
“Do you like Marenové, Miss Coventry?” asked Skander, his tongue wrapping around the word with some slight difficulty.
She took the plate of tarts he offered and chose her words and her finger-food with care. “The grounds are very prettily laid out. The house is a kind of strange combination of close and open. I am not sure what it thinks it means to be.”
Skander tossed a mocking glance at his cousin and laughed heartily. “No? You have an eye for architecture. The garden there—” he pointed to the peristyle “—is the oldest part of the building. The family built up the rooms around the garden, and as the family grew larger over the years, continued to build off in wings from that. Three generations ago the massive bulk of the house was built at the height of an Overlord’s rule.” His laughter flickered away like a salamander around a stone wall, and Margaret noticed he also took care not to meet Rupert’s eye. He looked up through the light and plants and glass at the tall mass of building towering over the smoking chimneys of the kitchen wing, and his look held a dark and far-away aspect.
At last he went on. “It was built primarily to host a ball. A peace had been made with Hol, which was a thing not easily to be attained. It was a splendid gala, more splendid than the one I am scheduled to throw, but that was the last one this house has seen. Three generations ago.”
“That is a long time,” murmured she, “to not hold a ball.”
He smiled at her sidelong. “Yes, ma’am. Quite a long time.”
The long, iron-black figure of Rupert finally spoke. “You pressure me unadvisedly. Marenové’s meads are ill adjusted to many folk, and not so grand and old-fashionably splendid as Lookinglass. And, too,” he trained a level, cold gaze on Margaret, “I had no one before to entertain with me.”
In that light, Rupert’s eyes were so pale as to have no colour at all.
With a kind of cold iron in her own soul, Margaret forced herself to look back into that hateful gaze. “You owe it to your cousin, then, for bettering your circumstances.”
“Saddle me a hunter,” he replied, “but I am the one who gives chase.”
“Rupert,” said Skander in a chilly tone. Then he turned back to Margaret with a pleasant countenance. “How long have you been in Marenové?”
“Only since yesterday.” Only since yesterday? She felt as if a lifetime had elapsed since she had stood on the station platform at Leeds. It felt like a lifetime, and yet her family would not even begin to guess her whereabouts. They would not begin to guess for…for months. She was a poor letter-writer, and she knew her mother would not expect to hear from her. She had been going to surprise her relatives in Naples; even they would not know where she was. No one would think to worry. No one would miss her.
I have always been alone
.
If Skander was surprised, he did not show it. His smile, all warmth and confidence, reached across the distance to her. “You will have hardly seen anything, then! Do you ride at all?”
“Oh, yes. That is one of the few things that I do well.”
“You do many things well,” said Rupert.
With a conscious effort not to touch her tongue to her dry lips, she went on. “Did you have a ride in mind?”
“Well, yes. I thought we might go on a ramble through the countryside tomorrow morning. These autumn mornings are so fine, it seems a crime to coop oneself up when the scent lies low on the mists and there is good sport to be had.”
From a scroll-worked pewter plate Margaret took a small sandwich and began to politely work, it bite by bite, into her mouth. Between bites, to keep the conversation going which threatened to peter out under Rupert’s silence, she admitted to Skander, “I have never been hunting before. Is it very dangerous?”
This news seemed to take Skander by surprise. The thoughts flickered swallow-shadowed across his brow. “Well, that depends,” he replied slowly. “The most dangerous hunting I have done is boar, but that is done in winter and I would never dream of taking a lady along. The little red deer of the fells are good to chase, and not too dangerous unless you corner a buck. And there are hare and fox, too.”
Margaret reached for another sandwich, but Rupert was reaching for one at just that moment and his fingertips brushed her knuckles. She closed her hand, feeling his eyes on her, but managed not to jerk away. “Are there no wolves?” she asked carefully, recalling the awful noise that had awoken her in the night.
It was Rupert who answered. He slid his right leg over his left and leaned sidewise in his chair, elbow poised on the arm of it, sandwich between his fingers, yet somehow still remaining rigid. “There are few wolves in this part of Plenilune. They keep mostly to the wastes. Even boar are scarce, though you can find them in the woods at the See’s watershed. For the most part, when we hunt, we hunt deer and hare—and fox; I enjoy fox-hunting. So there is precious little sizeable enough in these parts to harm you on a hunt, my dear.”
She felt a flutter of apprehension at the thought of meeting a wild boar or a wolf and she was not wholly sure how she felt about hunting even a hare. But the sun was peeling back the yellow glow of the lamp and burning the place with a fierce silver colour that somehow stuck in her heart—and perhaps, she thought, a little in her eyes—and she flashed back at him scornfully, “I am sure I would comport myself with honour whatever the quarry.”
After that even Skander seemed to give up keeping a velvet cloth on the tension in the room. They ate in silence, making noise only with the ancient pewter-ware and the fine travertine. The clouds had burned off from the sky as Rupert finished his last glass and set it down, rising. “I need to fetch down a book from my library,” he said. “Skander, would you take Margaret through to the withdrawing room? I will be there in a moment.”
Skander got up and stepped out of the way of the table and chairs. Margaret waited for him to come around to her side. “Of course, of course. Would you fetch down Songmartin’s
Commentaries
while you are at it?”
Rupert drew up, looking over his shoulder at his cousin. In the same moment, as if waiting for it, Skander, too, had stopped and watched Rupert. Margaret watched the inexplicable tension run like threads of lightning between them before Rupert, still as motionless as ever, said in a low, regretful tone, “I’m afraid I have misplaced that particular collection.”
And Skander, in just the same voice, said, “That is a shame. I’ll find something in the withdrawing room, then.” And he stepped up to Margaret’s side.
The wind rushed into their faces as Rupert left the solarium. Margaret, holding onto Skander’s proffered hand, squeezed her eyes narrowly into the knife-slice of that wind, watching the tall, lean figure of her kidnapper vanish within the darker shadows of the colonnade and kitchen wing. She thought she ought to have been glad to have him go, but the feeling of his eyes on her only intensified in his absence. Whatever strong genius he possessed seemed to pervade every inch of Marenové House. She thought of her bath, and shivered.
“He is a charmer, isn’t he?” asked Skander in a wry tone.
She cast him a look askance.
He
could take it blithely, if he liked.
He
was not being courted against his will.
He saw her face and fell grave once more. As they stepped out into the wild blowing of the peristyle, the wind catching Margaret’s veil and whipping it up like a wing behind her head, he said apologetically, “I am truly sorry. You don’t like him at all, do you?”
“Would
you
?” she retorted.
His eyes fell a moment to a patch of stone in the middle distance of the floor, but whatever he was thinking in the face of her blistering words, he did not reply. Margaret looked away, balling her fists and feeling suddenly, unaccountably wretched.
After a moment he made a small gesture toward the door and she moved mechanically with him, allowing him to lead her wordlessly to the northeast wing of the house into a fairly square, high room lined with full bookshelves and two tall windows looking out on the back lawn, and fitted overhead with an exquisitely-carved, dark-stained tray ceiling. An instrument, appearing to be an enormous harp laid flat and on legs, stood under one window. Into the south wall was set a great fireplace which was not made up, and around it clustered sofas and chairs and little end-tables that sported their age in gnawed legs and water-winged surfaces. The whole place was chilly and gold-shot and smelled of old books, and to Margaret, though she knew Rupert would be hard on their heels in a moment, it reminded her of her own drawing room back home, and it seemed almost comforting.
Skander kindly took Margaret to a sofa and made sure she was settled before strolling about, perusing the literary selection. With her hands folded in her lap, back straight, feet tucked together ankle to ankle, she watched him somewhat blandly. He was a fine figure, tall and strapping, with a touch of unconscious swagger that she found appealing. He was cheerful and pleasant, and though cheerfulness and pleasantries were not to Margaret’s taste at present, she found she could not resent him. He seemed honest, and her soul ached for honesty.
There was a step and knock at the door, and the maid which Margaret had seen before leaned into the room. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “The master has been detained. He said to bring down this book for the lady to look at.”
Margaret, quizzical, held out her hand as Skander took the book from the maid and gave it to her. She turned it over, but it seemed to have no title.
“Thank you, Lilith. Mind you, would you send in someone to build up a fire in here?”
“Yes, of course, sir.”
Lilith shut the door behind herself. Over the edge of the book Margaret saw Skander’s boots come up, and the whole sofa shifted ominously as he perched beside her, leaning in to get a look at the book as well. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” She turned back the first few pages, and started. “Why, they are dress designs. Whatever does he mean by this?”
“Oh, ha!” said Skander, laughingly. He took the book from her and began thumbing through its pages. Gaily-coloured images flashed by, beautiful gowns and smart men’s wear, all fine and foreign to Margaret. “He means for you to pick out a style. You will have a new gown for the ball I am going to throw.”
“A ball?” asked Margaret, carefully keeping her gaze on the book.
He returned it to her hand. “Oh yes, I did mention that, didn’t I? I’m to give a ball at Lookinglass next month. That was really why I came down today, to tell Rupert about it. All the lords and ladies of Plenilune should be there.” He leaned down and smiled, catching her eye encouragingly. “So, of course you must come.”
To her dismay, she found herself colouring at the cheeks. She wished that the manservant might come in to make up the fire and cause a distraction, but for a long, agonizing moment the awkward silence lay unbroken between them. In a bid to take control, Margaret pointed out a dress.
“This is rather ghastly,” she said. “There is no form to the dress.”
“It isn’t very flattering, no,” he admitted. He turned a page and a rather splendid gown in red sprang out. She made a note of it but did not call his attention to it. But though he continued to turn the pages and other gowns flickered across her vision—high-waisted gowns in deep blue, floor-length tunics in whites and off-whites and saffron, gowns that left the back bare and gowns that came wildly off the shoulders—the scarlet dress lingered in her memory. It was rich and full, sitting becomingly close and riding against the collar-bones in a way that could, with the right poise, be cold and uninviting.