Vixen (24 page)

“How long would I have to practice every day?” she asked cautiously.

Hugo threw up his hands. “As long as you feel it’s necessary to achieve what
you
want to achieve.”

“But what if I don’t achieve what
you
want me to achieve?”

“Then the lessons will cease, since clearly you won’t be interested.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “How well did you know my mother?”

It was a legitimate question, one he’d been expecting at some point. He made his voice matter-of-fact. “Quite well. But a long time ago.”

“Why didn’t you see her recently? You lived so close and she had no friends. But she must have counted you as a friend. She wouldn’t have made you my guardian otherwise.”

He’d prepared his answer to this during the long night watches of the insomniac. “She withdrew from the world after your father’s death. You know that yourself.”

“So, she didn’t want to see you?”

“I don’t think she wanted to see anyone. But she knew she had my friendship, regardless.”

“I see.” Still frowning, Chloe wandered over to the window. The evening star had appeared, hanging over the valley. “You must have known my father, then.”

He stiffened. All the preparation in the world couldn’t prevent his blood from racing or his palms from sweating. “I knew him.”

“How well?”

There was only one honest answer. “Very well.”

“I don’t remember him at all. I was three when he died, you’d think I’d have some vague memory … a smell, or an impression, or a sensation. Wouldn’t you?”

Stephen had had nothing to do with his daughter. Hugo doubted he’d laid eyes on her more than a couple of times in those three years. He had a son, and the son had a stepson, and only they were important in his scheme of things. If Elizabeth had given him a son, it would have been different. The child would have come under the father’s influence from his earliest moments. A girl child was of considerably less interest than the hunters in his stable.

“He was in London a great deal,” Hugo said.

“What was he like?”

Evil … unimaginably evil … corrupting all who fell under his influence with the devil’s enticements.

“Not unlike Jasper to look at. A bruising rider, a clever man, very popular in Society, which is why he spent so much time in London, I believe … he and your mother were somewhat estranged.”

“And then he died in the accident,” she stated flatly. “I’m surprised a bruising rider should have broken his neck on the hunting field.”

It was the official explanation, one that protected the
Congregation’s secrets. Stephen Gresham was buried in the family vault, the victim of a riding accident.

“Supper’s ready.” Samuel appeared in the open doorway.

With relief Hugo ushered his immediately diverted ward out of the library.

C
RISPIN HAD BEEN
watching his stepfather throughout dinner. He knew from the signs that Jasper was in one of his more fearsome rages. The morning’s visit from Hugo Lattimer and Chloe had put bellows to the smoldering ashes of his fury at the failure of the previous day. When Crispin had returned empty-handed and with the marks of Hugo’s fingers on his throat, Jasper had held back his wrath at his stepson’s failure. Now Crispin was afraid that the reprieve was to be short-lived. Someone would have to pay for whatever had happened between Lattimer and Jasper that morning.

Louise also recognized her husband’s mood. She sat trembling throughout the meal, terrified that a servant would fumble, or a dish would not be hot enough, or his wineglass wouldn’t be refreshed quickly enough. Any domestic derelictions, however minor, would be visited on her. There would be first the icy request that she correct the fault immediately. Later that night would come the punishment. He would humiliate her with his body while his voice softly taunted until he grew bored with her weeping and he would go to his own bed.

The servants knew their own danger and tiptoed around the gloomy, silent dining hall, keeping their eyes on the floor and standing as far away as possible from their master when they served him.

Jasper looked up suddenly. “What’s the matter with you, my dear wife? You look as blue as a gaffed carp.”

Louise jumped and tried to find something to say.
“Oh, nothing … nothing at all, Jasper. Nothing’s the matter … not at all … at all …”

“I take your point,” Jasper interrupted with heavy sarcasm. “There’s no need to belabor it, my dear. However, surely you must have some conversation with which to enliven the dinner table. Some detail of domestic trivia to impart, perhaps … or some piece of news from a friend … but, I was forgetting, you don’t have any friends, do you, my dear?”

Tears filled his wife’s eyes. Desperately she blinked them away, knowing that any sign of distress would only goad him.

Crispin shifted in his chair, wishing his mother weren’t so pathetic. It seemed to him she invited his father’s displeasure with her nervous twitching and stammering.

“Not even the vicar’s wife,” Jasper continued, his shallow eyes skidding over his wife’s pale countenance. “It strikes me as odd that the vicar’s wife should not call upon the wife of the chief landowner. Have you offended our neighbors in some way, my dear?”

Louise pressed her hands together tightly in her lap. Jasper had done the offending, as well he knew. The ungodly goings-on in the crypt, while not known in any detail, were widely speculated upon. And the whole neighborhood knew that Sir Jasper was a bad man to cross. No one would willingly and knowingly set foot across his boundaries.

“I await an answer,” he said silkily, half smiling at the effigy at the other end of the long table. He picked up his wineglass and sipped, his eyes glittering over the lip of the glass.

Louise took a deep breath. Her mouth worked and she pressed her handkerchief to her lips. Her voice shook as she said, “I don’t believe so, Jasper.”

“You don’t believe so? Well, I wonder what the explanation could be. It’s quite a puzzle.”

Louise pushed back her chair. “If you will excuse me, I’ll leave you to your port.” She fled the room with a pitiable lack of dignity that not even the servants could miss.

“Put the decanters on the table and get out!” Jasper said savagely to the butler, who obeyed and left with a degree more sangfroid than his mistress had shown.

Crispin hid his apprehension as he waited for the ax to fall on him now. He knew his only hope was to appear unafraid. Casually, he poured himself a glass of port as his stepfather slid the decanter toward him on the polished surface of the table.

“So what are you going to do, sir?” He asked the question almost nonchalantly, leaning back in his chair, crossing his legs, taking a sip of his port, hoping that by bringing the issue into the open he would avert an explosion.

Jasper gave a sharp crack of laughter. It was not a pleasant sound. “Maybe
you
have a suggestion, dear boy, since you signally failed to bring off mine.”

“That was hardly my fault, sir.” Crispin defended himself as he knew he must. “Chloe took off before I knew what was happening. If the crowds hadn’t been so thick, I wouldn’t have lost her. If she hadn’t been riding Maid Marion, I might have caught her.”

“So it was my fault, was it?” Jasper stared morosely into the ruby contents of his glass. “Somehow, I don’t believe she would have escaped me. Maid Marion or not.”

“But you weren’t there.” He was daring much, but if anything would work, it was courage.

“No.” Jasper sat back. “For the simple reason, my asinine stepson, that Chloe would go nowhere with me willingly. God knows why she holds me in such dislike
… to my knowledge, I’ve always treated her with kid gloves.”

“She’s not afraid of you.”

“No … not yet,” Jasper agreed. “But that will come, make no mistake.” He twisted the stem of the glass between finger and thumb and his mouth thinned to a vicious line.

“So what do we do now?” Crispin knew he was no longer in danger.

“Intimidation,” Jasper said. “I’ll be revenged on Lattimer, and that little sister of mine is going to begin to feel the smart of fear.”

“How?” Crispin sat forward, the candlelight falling across his sharp face, his small brown eyes eager pinpoints in his sallow complexion.

“A little arson,” Jasper said softly. “And I believe one of those ridiculous creatures my sister loves so much must be constrained to suffer a little.”

“Ahh.” Crispin sat back again. He remembered the stinging rebuke she’d administered when he’d commented so carelessly on the condition of the nag. It would be very satisfying to avenge the insult in such appropriate fashion.

F
or the next two days Chloe played her game discreetly. She entered with enthusiasm into the music lessons but offered Hugo no seductive smiles, and whenever she stood or sat beside him she was careful to behave as if she were unaware of his closeness. When she touched him she made it seem like an accident. But she could feel Hugo responding to every brush of her hand, to every move she made when she was close to him. She knew he watched her when she seemed to be absorbed in the music, and she knew that much of the time he was not watching with the eye of a tutor or of a
guardian. And the more she affected ignorance and behaved with the natural ease of a girl who’d never tumbled with him on the faded velvet cushions of the old couch, the more relaxed he became in his responses.

They rode out together around the estate, Chloe on her new horse, a spritely chestnut gelding that almost made up for the loss of Maid Marion. Hugo found her an attentive and intelligent companion as he went about the dreary business of listening to the universal complaints of his tenant farmers, dismally examining the tumbledown cottages, the leaking barn roofs, the broken fences, desperately trying to think of some way to raise the funds to make the necessary repairs.

He sat up late in the kitchen after their ride, the sleeping house creaking quietly around him. His body was tired, but his mind, as always, wouldn’t take a backseat. His first sober overview of his estate had shaken him to his core. He’d allowed an already neglected property to go to rack and ruin in the past years, while he wallowed in brandy-induced self-pity. It was a painful realization and one that prevented all possibility of sleep.

Several times his eye and his mind drifted to the cellar steps. He could picture the racks with their dust-coated bottles of burgundy and claret, madeira, sherry, and brandy. It was a magnificent cellar acquired by his father and grandfather. He himself had added little … he’d been too busy depleting it.

That lash of self-contempt kept him away from the cellar for half an hour. Then he found himself on his feet, inexorably crossing the kitchen, lifting the heavy brass key off its hook by the cellar door. He put the key in the lock and turned it. It grated in the lock and the door swung open with a complaining rasp. The dark flight of stone steps stretched ahead. The cool earth smell of the cellar, overlaid with the musty scents of
wine, teased his nostrils. He took a step down, then realized he had no lantern.

He turned back. Abruptly he slammed the door shut at his back. The violence of the sound jarred the night. He turned the key, hung it back on its hook, extinguished the lamps in the kitchen, lit a carrying candle, and went up to bed.

The bang awoke Dante, who leapt from the bed with a growl. Chloe sat up. “What is it?” Dante was at the door, snuffling at the gap beneath, his tail waving joyously in recognition of the familiar.

It must be Hugo coming to bed. Chloe wondered what the time could be. She seemed to have been asleep for hours, but it was still darkest night beyond the window. Was he once again unable to sleep?

She slipped from bed and quietly opened the door onto the corridor. Hugo’s apartments were at the far end, beyond the central hallway. She could see the yellow glimmer of light beneath his door. She waited, shivering slightly, for the light to be extinguished, but it remained for hours, it seemed, much longer than it would take someone to prepare for bed. Thoughtfully, she went back to bed and lay down. Dante settled on her feet again with a sigh that expressed relief that these strange nighttime wanderings had ceased.

Sleep wouldn’t return. She lay gazing up into the darkness that her now-accustomed eyes could easily penetrate. Not for the first time, she wondered what it must be like never to know that once night fell, one would sleep and wake refreshed. She could see Hugo’s face in repose, when the vibrancy no longer concealed the deeply etched lines of fatigue around his eyes and mouth, the purple shadowing in the hollows beneath his eyes.

She thought he’d slept better since he’d emerged from the days in the library. He looked less depleted, his eyes
clearer, his skin supple. But what did she know about the way he spent the long, dark hours of the night?

She jumped out of bed and went back to the door. The light still glowed beneath the door at the far end of the corridor. Suddenly, she had the unmistakable sensation of pain … of some kind of struggle in the air around her. Was he drinking again?
Please, no.