The Hunger (2 page)

Blendon’s eyes grew round. He nodded eagerly. He would have heard the legends of her lovemaking abilities.
Those legends gave her power. She trailed toward the great front staircase. Several discreet servants doused lamps. Darkness stalked them as Blendon followed her.

Beatrix felt the hunger ramping up inside her. She had denied her need for too long. That was her only problem. She picked up a branch of candelabra from a rococo side table. Shadows flickered across tapestries of hunting scenes, making fear flutter in the cornered roebuck’s eyes and the saliva dripping from the hounds’ teeth gleam. She could hear blood pounding in Blendon’s throat. His breathing grew uneven in anticipation. He could never guess what would actually happen here tonight. If he did, he would run screaming into the street.

The desperation that hunted her lived in her memories of Asharti’s evil and Stephan Sincai’s teachings, surely, though she hadn’t seen either of them in centuries. She didn’t understand. Had she not spent her life fighting against becoming like Asharti? Always, when she fed, Asharti’s evil closed in, urging her to let desire intermingle with the blood. But she didn’t. She wasn’t like Asharti. Not anymore. Still, in spite of her resistance the darkness gathered round her. She held out her candle against it, but the darkness was strong. It had consumed countless others. In the end, it would win out.

Beatrix pulled aside the heavy draperies and peered down into the square, calm now that her need was filled. The dawn turned the edges of the night to luminescent gray. Blendon stood in the street clad only in his shirt, looking bewildered. That would add to her reputation. They were so suggestible. She suggested that they had made ecstatic love. His imagination would fill in the details. They had not. She had not made love to a man in what, six hundred years? To think they all thought her a courtesan! That was rich. The longing for the act itself had become a distant impression, not even a memory. She let the heavy fabric
fall, her protection against the coming sun, and turned into the room. At least she was safe from the memories, temporarily. But that thought alone seemed to spring a catch inside her, and memory flooded her . . .

AMSTERDAM
, 1087

The dress was red, not a virginal girl’s dress at all. She glowed with pride as she smoothed her hands over the fine wool covering the budding swells on her chest. “Thank you, Mother,” she whispered. It was a marvelous gift, a symbol of passage into womanhood
.

“Yes, well.” Her mother glanced at her and away. “Fripperies, no more.”

Theirs was the biggest house inside the walls of a medieval city clustering around a port where ships from far-flung places unloaded their cargoes and their money. The stone walls were hung with tapestries to keep the cold out. Bea watched her mother as she sat at her toilet. The golden light of the smoking oil lamps made the room seem warm, even if it wasn’t. Mothers just looked like mothers and it was hard to tell if they were beautiful. But she had heard many men say her mother was beautiful, so she knew it was true. She wanted to grow up to be just like her
.

Bea’s mother brushed her own lustrous dark hair until it gleamed. “You’re growing breasts, Bea.” It sounded like an accusation
.

Bea shrugged to put off guilt. But the facts were hard to deny
.

“Soon you ’ll be changing.” Her mother’s voice was hard
.

“How, changing?” Bea asked in a small voice
.

Her mother rose, rustling the heavy fabric of her trailing dress against the rushes on the floor. She looked down at Bea as though transfixed, then suddenly turned away and went to her jewel box. It was made of carved wood from the lands around the sea far away to the south. Her
voice trailed back over her shoulder as she said, “It is time for me to move on.”

Bea cocked her head. “What do you mean, Mother?”

“Our kind moves on every twenty or thirty years,” her mother said with seeming carelessness. She hooked large, lustrous pendant pearls through her ears
.

“Why?”

“People begin to notice that we never age after we reach maturity.”

Aging meant nothing to Bea. She was fourteen. “Where will we go?” Bea had never known a place other than Amsterdam. Was it possible to uproot oneself and just . . . move?

Her mother looked sharply at her and then away again. “Somewhere else.”

Bea knew that tone. She dared not press. Her mother’s moods frightened her
.

Her mother glanced up. “Oh, don’t look so like a rabbit, Bea,” she snapped. Then she continued, muttering, “You will soon find out that is not what you are.”

“What am I?” Bea whispered, hoping the question made her seem less like a rabbit
.

Her mother became brisk. “I have kept you to yourself, but surely you’ve noticed that you are not like other children. Or like Marte?” Bea just looked up, wide-eyed. Her mother threw up her hands. “No scabbed knees? No sickness of any kind? God knows you’re such a little ruffian you must have realized you are stronger, you run faster than others? You can hear things they can’t hear, see in the dark where they can’t.”

Bea said nothing. She did know she was different. She had been ashamed of it for some time now. Marte called her a boy because she was so strong
.

Her mother looped a rope of pearls around her neck. It fell over breasts exposed by the deep square neckline of her aubergine velvet dress. She sighed in exasperation. “Well
.
You’ll learn. The way we all learn. I was never made for this sort of thing, you know.”

What sort of thing did she mean?

“Who was to know I’d be saddled with you? None of us has had a child in as long as any can remember. Why me? I can’t . . .” She was growing angry. Bea shuffled from foot to foot, anxious. “Oh, never mind. Get to bed. I’m going out.” Her mother’s throat seemed full
.

Bea saw not only the familiar anger in her mother’s eyes but something else. Shame? Fear? Bea’s eyes widened for only an instant before she whirled to obey, her dress shushing through the rushes. She ran for her room. What had she seen in her mother’s eyes?

She lay down in her fine red dress that night but sleep was far away
.

Beatrix stared at the high bed in Berkeley Square, still tumbled from Blendon’s ecstatic experience of giving. That night so many centuries ago was the last time she saw her mother. She came home from church the next morning to find Marte dead, her mother gone. It was not surprising to her now. Her mother was ill equipped to deal with a child, let alone the turbulence puberty brought to their kind. A tiny flash of anger flared in Beatrix’s breast. Could her mother not have left Marte as solace for her daughter during the terrible transition that came after? But perhaps Marte was doomed anyway. Better that Marte died at her mother’s hands than Beatrix’s.

Why did she remember that night with her mother now? Maybe that night was the beginning. She thought it was Stephan and Asharti, and the terrible time that followed. But maybe it had begun with her mother’s . . . disinterest. She squeezed her eyes shut. That began the diminishment of her soul. What was left of her? And was whatever left of her worth fighting to preserve against the darkness?

She tried to brush away the thoughts as though they were cobwebs. Dawn always made her melancholy. She clutched her bloodred wrapper around her and crawled into the great bed, hoping slumber would protect her against her memories.

Two

John Staunton, Earl of Langley, sauntered west on Piccadilly resplendent in breeches, evening slippers, a perfectly starched cravat, and a coat that fit so snugly he would need Withering’s help to get it off again. He hoped the bandage on his shoulder was bound tightly enough that it would not create a bulge. He was due at Countess Lente’s drawing room tonight.

Shop windows glittered with raindrops in the light of the new gas street lamps. Expensive hotels spread noisy revelry into the street. Green Park on the left was all night-black grass and the dancing silhouettes of trees in the spring wind. Two Frenchmen had paid for his wound with their lives in Calais. Had it already been nine days ago? He threaded his way up Hay Hill Street.

Movement caught his eye to his left and behind him. He spun in time to block the blow of a truncheon with his stick. There were two of them. No, three. Heavyset men. He got the impression of seedy clothing as he struck out at the nearest. His cane landed a blow across the ruffian’s ear. He put an elbow into the one on the left’s midsection as he took a blow to his good shoulder from a truncheon.
He managed to turn his back to the next strike and protect his wound. They descended on him. A blow landed on his forehead. Someone wrenched his wounded shoulder backward. He brought his heel down against a knee. It cracked. One of the attackers staggered back. The remaining two grappled with him.

He threw them off. Just enough room—he drew the rapier concealed in his cane. That made them think! John circled his point, watching the man with the broken knee try to straighten. “Well, lads,” he panted. “Spoiling for a turnup?’

The one clutching his knee growled, “Get ’im, boys. ‘E’s just a dandy with a stinger.”

The two still mobile rushed forward. John thrust his sword into an upper arm, but the other attacker laid a truncheon over his wounded shoulder. John staggered to one knee. Blows rained upon him. But he got his sword point up and found a belly. He knelt there, panting, as the attackers fell back.

“George!” the one holding his own arm yelled. “Ye’re pierced!” The other assailant looked at the blood oozing from his belly with surprise. The ringleader turned to the ragged thug who clutched his knee. With two down and the leader’s arm bleeding, the game was up.

“You’ll pay for this,” he hissed to John. They stumbled away, supporting each other.

John hung his head to steady his stomach. The slick night spun around him. Christ, but his shoulder hurt! His head throbbed. The edges of his vision went black and gold. He was losing his touch. Three, true, but hardly more than muscled hulks. It was his shoulder, that’s all. After a long minute, he raised his head and tested his vision. The black and gold edges expanded ominously for a moment, then stabilized.

“I say, there, are you all right?”

A young man with long mustachios dressed in a
lieutenant colonel’s uniform of the Twelfth Light Dragoons hung over him. John managed a smile. “Damned cutpurses.”

“Bold buggers!” The young soldier grabbed John’s elbow. “Let me summon aid.”

John shook his head, as much to clear it as to decline. “I am steps away from Berkeley Square. I am expected there.” That sounded inane. “I shall do, I assure you.”

A carriage clattered by and a pair of gentlemen much the worse for wear inside could be heard slurring their intention to check in at White’s. “I am going up Berkeley Street myself, if you wouldn’t mind the company,” the colonel said.

John ran his hand through his locks. “Not necessary, but my thanks to you.”

The young dragoon raised his brows. “I was after the fact,” he remarked, handing John his hat. “Excellent swordplay. Name’s Ponsonby, by the by.”

John placed it gingerly over the knot he could feel rising on his forehead. “Langley.”

“Langley? No wonder those fellows got the worst of it! Gads, you’ve a punishing left! Saw you take a round with the Gentleman himself at Jackson’s.”

John sighed at Ponsonby’s eagerness, and resigned himself to company.

“Your duel with Jepson November last? Let him have the first shot, calm as you please, and then knocked the gun from his hand with your shot. We all wondered you did not drill him. It was he who forced the quarrel.” They turned up toward the square.

“Ah, but he was in the right.” John let his tone be damping. “I had seduced his wife.”

The young soldier smiled to himself. “When Sherry hears of this turnup . . . or Blendon!”

John was glad to relinquish Ponsonby to his engagement in Berkeley Street and continue into the square. Number 46
was a beautiful step-backed house of Portland stone, its great first-floor windows casting light and life into the darkness. John could see men lounging against butter-colored walls lined with tapestries and paintings. The sound of a cello and violin duet poured into the street. Boccerini. Before he lifted the knocker he straightened his cravat, pushing down the pain. He had torn his wound. But it was important that he be seen tonight. The word of the attack on him would spread, thanks to Ponsonby. An appearance tonight would minimize the whole affair. The evening would be insufferable, of course. He knocked at the unconventional blue door. An uneasy feeling rippled through him. Footpads in Hay Hill Street? Unusual. He mistrusted the unusual. The footman ushered him in.

Beatrix glanced up. There was a swirl by the door. Alvaney sprang to his feet. “There he is! I knew he wouldn’t fail his engagement!”

“The Earl of Langley,” Symington announced.

He was tall, but the shoulders were too broad for elegance. They spoke of strength beneath the perfectly cut black coat—understated, probably made by Weston. Her gaze strayed to his thighs. Beatrix required knee breeches in spite of the fact that they were slightly old-fashioned. She liked to be able to see the shape of a man’s leg. Langley’s were powerful indeed. His hair, nearly black and curling at his nape, was worn in a casual disarray not casual at all. The eyes were, remarkably, green with that black hair. His skin was fair and fine, a girl’s complexion almost, but there were hard lines around his eyes and mouth. His lips were sensual, full, hardly manly, yet the overall impression was one of overwhelming masculinity. She watched him nod to his acquaintances. He was nearly negligent in his address. His gaze passed over the room sharply as though recording everything he saw, then his eyes went sleepy and hooded. Hmm . . .