A Kiss at Midnight (4 page)
B
y the time Kate escaped to her room hours later, she was exhausted. She had been up at five that morning to do three hours of accounts, then was on a horse at eight . . . not to mention the emotional toll taken by the day’s charming revelations. At dinner, Mariana had been snappy even with the viscount, and Victoria had wept softly through three courses.
And now the dogs—the “rats”—were waiting for her, sitting in a little semicircle.
There was no more fashionable accessory than a small dog, and Victoria and Mariana, with their characteristic belief that twenty-three ball gowns were better than one, had acquired not one small dog, but three.
Three small, yapping, silky Malteses.
They were absurdly small, smaller than most cats. And they had a sort of elegant sleekness about them that she found an affront. If she ever had a dog, she’d want it to be one of the lop-eared, grinning dogs that ran out to greet her when she stopped by the cottages on Mariana’s lands. A dog that barked rather than yapped.
Though at the moment they weren’t yapping. As she entered her small room, they rose in a little wave and surrounded her ankles in a burst of furry waving tails and hot bodies. They were probably lonely. Before the bite, they were always at Victoria’s side. Perhaps they were hungry. Or worse, they might need to visit the garden. If only she had a bell in her room . . . but persons of her status had no need to call servants.
“I suppose,” she said slowly, thinking of the stairs and her aching legs, “I have to take you outside.” In point of fact, she should be grateful that they had not urinated in her room; it was so small and the one window so high that the smell would last a month or more.
It took a few minutes to figure out how to attach ropes to their jeweled collars, not helped by the fact that they had begun yapping, jumping up and trying to lick her face. It was hard not to flinch away.
She trudged down the back stairs that led to her room, her steps echoed by the scrabbling little claws of the rats. She was so tired that she couldn’t even remember their names, though she thought they were all alliterative, perhaps Fairy and Flower.
“What do they eat?” she asked Cherryderry a few minutes later. He had been kind enough to accompany her to the kitchen garden and show her the area fenced off for the dogs’ use.
“I sent Richard up to your chamber an hour or so ago; he fed them and brought them out for a walk. I will admit to disliking those dogs, but they’re not vicious animals,” he said, watching them. “It’s not really their fault.”
They were all piling on top of each other, a mass of plumy tails and sharp noses.
“Caesar didn’t intend to bite Miss Victoria,” he continued. “You needn’t worry that he’ll bite you.”
“
Caesar?
I thought they were all named after flowers.”
“That’s part of their trouble,” Cherryderry said. “Miss Victoria never quite settled on names for them. She changed them every week or so. They started out as Ferdinand, Felicity, and Frederick. Currently they are Coco, Caesar, and Chester. Before that, they were Mopsie, Maria, and something else. The lead dog—see the slightly larger one? That one is Caesar. The other two are Coco and Chester, though Chester never learned to respond to any name other than Frederick or Freddie.”
“Why did Caesar bite Victoria, anyway? I never thought to ask.”
“She was feeding him from her mouth.”
“
What?
”
“Holding a piece of meat between her lips and encouraging him to take it from her. Foolish business, coming between a dog and his meat.”
Kate shuddered. “That is disgusting.”
“Princess Charlotte has trained her dogs to do the same by all accounts,” Cherryderry said. “The princess has a lot to answer for.”
“So how do I keep them quiet at night?” Kate asked, longing for her bed.
“Just treat them like dogs, with respect, but firm-like. Miss Victoria made the mistake of thinking they were babies, and then she would get annoyed and send them down to the kitchen whenever they misbehaved, so they never learned better. I’ll give you a little bag of cheese scraps. Give them a piece every time they do something right and they’ll be fine.”
Back in her room Kate discovered that the dogs had their own personalities. Caesar was remarkably unintelligent. He seemed to believe that he was very large: He prowled and pounced and kept issuing promises to attack anyone who entered the room. In fact, he reminded her of an imperial general; his name befitted him.
Frederick was lonely, or at least that’s what she surmised when he jumped onto the bed, licked her knee, and wagged his tail madly. Then he gave her a dramatically imploring look, quickly followed by a roll onto his back with his legs in the air. In short, he was silly and Freddie suited him better than Frederick.
Coco showed every sign of being remarkably vain. Victoria had glued tiny sparkling gems into the fur around her neck, and rather than trying to scratch them off, as would any self-respecting mongrel, Coco sat with her paws perfectly aligned and her nose in the air. She showed no sign of wishing to approach Kate’s bed, but arranged herself elegantly on a velvet cushion that had appeared on Kate’s floor along with a bowl of water.
Kate pulled Freddie out of her bed and dropped him on the floor, but he jumped straight back up again. And she was too tired, too bone-deep tired, to do anything about it.
So she lay there for a moment thinking about her father, little pulses of anger going through her body. How could he have done this? He must have loved Mariana; otherwise, why would he marry his mistress?
It was a good thing that she never made her debut. She knew little of society, all things told, but she knew that no one would befriend a young lady whose stepmother was a woman of ill repute, even given that Mariana did marry her protector.
And yet Mariana and Victoria had simply marched into London, opened up her father’s town house, and established Victoria as a beautiful young heiress.
There was a lesson there, she thought sleepily.
The next morning
T
he French coiffeur and the two London doctors arrived together the next morning, one prepared to cut off Kate’s hair and the others to lance Victoria’s lip. Both sisters refused. Mariana had hysterics, waving her cigarillo around her head and shrieking like a fishwife.
But the session with Rosalie the evening before had cleared Kate’s mind. She wasn’t getting any younger, and her only crowning glory was her hair. She already looked too thin, almost haggard. Her face might look even worse without her masses of hair.
“I refuse!” she declared, raising her voice over Victoria’s sobs.
The odd thing was that she had rarely refused anything. She had fought her stepmother tooth and nail in the past seven years: fought her when she sacked the house steward and told Kate to do the purchasing instead; fought her when she dismissed the bailiff and threw the books at Kate and told her to do them at night.
But she had never
refused
to do anything. She had taken up the estate books, and the bills, and the general management, said goodbye to her governess, to various maids, to the bailiff, and to the house steward.
She found it rather ironic that vanity was the point over which she discovered her backbone. “I won’t do it,” she repeated, over and over.
Monsieur Bernier threw up his hands, declaring in a trilling French accent that a smart crop would make her look ten years younger, and (he implied) mademoiselle needed every one of those ten years.
Kate hardened her heart. “I am grateful for your opinion, monsieur, but no.”
“You’ll ruin it,” Mariana cried, her voice careening to the edge of frenzy and back. “You’ll ruin everything. Your sister won’t be able to marry, and she’ll have her child out of wedlock.”
Kate saw Monsieur Bernier’s eyes widen and she gave him a look. Seven years of estate management had given her a quite effective glare; he flinched.
“It’s all right, Mother,” Victoria put in, sniffling, “Kate will simply have to wear wigs, that’s all. She’ll be hot, but it’s a matter of only a few days.”
“Wigs,” Mariana said, with a kind of strangled gasp.
“I have them in all sorts of colors to match my dresses,” Victoria said. “If Rosalie plaits Kate’s hair every morning and then pins it flat, she would be perfectly fashionable and everyone will simply assume that I love my wigs.”
“True,” Mariana said, taking a hard draw on her cigarillo.
“I’ll even give you my Circassian Scalp,” Victoria said.
Kate wrinkled her nose.
“No, it’s lovely, an elegant pale blue wig that goes beautifully with gowns in blue and green. Plus there’s a jeweled bandeau to wear with it, which will help it stay on your head.”
“Fine,” Mariana said. “Now the doctors are going to lance your lip, Victoria, and that is the last I want to hear from either of you for the rest of the day.”
Victoria screamed and cried, but at last the grim deed was done.
Mariana retired to bed with a headache; Victoria retired to bed with a weeping fit; Kate took the dogs with her on a visit to the Crabtrees.
Pomeroy Castle
S
o what’s the matter with the lion?” Gabriel asked Wick, walking quickly across the outer courtyard toward the makeshift menagerie that graced the back wall.
“I haven’t the faintest idea. He can’t seem to stop vomiting,” Wick replied.
“Poor old thing,” Gabriel said, coming to the lion’s cage. The beast was crouched against the back wall, its sides heaving painfully. He’d had ownership of it for only a few months, but its eyes used to be full of light, as if it were longing to spring from the cage and eat a bystander.
It didn’t look like that anymore. Its eyes were glazed and miserable. If it were a horse, he would have . . .
“It’s not old enough to die,” Wick said, as if he heard Gabriel’s thought.
“Augustus told me it wouldn’t last more than a year.”
“The Grand Duke no longer wished for his menagerie so he may have exaggerated the beast’s age. The lion is only five years old and should live many more, as I understand it.”
“How are the rest of them?” Gabriel walked past the lion’s cage toward that of the elephant, and found Lyssa swaying placidly in her cage. She had a sweet temperament; at the sight of him she blew some straw in a companionable sort of way. “What’s that monkey doing in there with her?”
“They became friends during the ocean passage,” Wick said. “They seem happier together.”
Gabriel walked closer and peered at the monkey. “Damned if I know what kind that is. Do you?”
“As I understand it, she’s called a pocket monkey. The Grand Duke was given her by a pasha.”
“And the elephant came along with that Indian raja, didn’t she? I wish people would stop giving animals as gifts. This courtyard smells.”
Wick sniffed loudly. “True. We could move them to the gardens behind the hedge maze.”
“Lyssa would get lonely out there by herself. I don’t suppose we can let her out of her cage now and then, could we?”
“I could ascertain whether we might build an enclosure in the orchards,” Wick said.
Gabriel stared at the unlikely pair for another moment. The monkey was sitting on the elephant’s head, stroking a big ear with her knotty-looking fingers. “Have you had any luck finding someone to care for the animals who actually knows something about elephants and the like?”
“No,” Wick said. “We tried to lure a man from Peterman’s Circus, but he refused to leave his own lions.”
“We can’t have Peterman’s lions along with our own, the poor sick bastard.” He walked back to the first cage. “What the hell could be the matter with it, Wick?”
“Prince Ferdinand suggested that it might be accustomed to a diet of human flesh, but I thought it best to ignore the implications of that comment.”
“In lieu of that, what have we been feeding it?”
“Beefsteak,” Wick said. “Good stuff too.”
“Maybe it’s too rich. What does my uncle eat after a bad night?”
“Soup.”
“Try that.”
Wick raised an eyebrow but nodded.
“On that charming topic, where
is
my uncle?”
“His Highness is working on the battle of Crecy this morning. He has commandeered the pigsty, which is happily free of occupants, and renamed it the Imperial War Museum. Forty or fifty milk bottles represent the various regiments and their leaders. His exhibit,” Wick added, “is very popular with the servants’ children.”
“He’s happy then,” Gabriel said. “I suppose—”
He was interrupted as a tall man with storklike legs trotted into the courtyard. He had hair like thistledown, which stood straight in the air and waved slightly every time he moved. “Speak of the devil,” Gabriel said, bowing.
“Same to you, dear boy,” his uncle Prince Ferdinand Barlukova said vaguely. “Same to you. Have you seen my poor dog anywhere?”
Wick moved slightly behind Gabriel’s shoulder and said quietly, “There is some belief that the lion ate him.”
“Fur and all?”
“It might explain the beast’s current plight.”
“I have not seen your dog,” Gabriel told his uncle.
“Just yesterday he ate a whole plate of pickled crab apples,” Prince Ferdinand said, looking a bit tearful. “I have him on a pickled diet, everything pickled. I think it’s much better for his digestion.”
The pickled apples might not have agreed with the dog—or, secondhand, with the lion. “Perhaps he ran away,” Gabriel said, turning toward the great arch that led back to the inner courtyard. “He may have not appreciated your dietary innovations.”
“My dog adores pickled food,” Ferdinand stated. “Adores it, especially pickled tomatoes.”
“Next time, try pickled fish.” From the corner of his eye, Gabriel could see two aunts approaching, out for a perambulation, waving their fingers in his direction, smiling archly. He started moving more quickly, avoiding the cook’s child at the last minute, striding finally into his chamber with a feeling of having narrowly escaped.
The problem with having a castle was that a castle filled with people. And they were all
his
people, one way or another: his relatives, his lion, his elephant, his servants . . . even the pickle-eating dog was his responsibility, though it sounded as if it might have escaped to the great hunting ground in the sky. Probably gratefully.
“I’ll take a gun out and look for birds,” he told his manservant, a lugubrious man named Pole, who had been jettisoned from his brother’s court because he knew far too much about the sexual proclivities of every courtier.
“Excellent,” Pole said, putting out a riding coat and breeches. “Young Alfred could do with some fresh air. Mr. Berwick is training him in service
à la française
and he’s not taking to it easy-like. He will do to carry back the birds.”
“Right.”
“May I suggest that you ask the Honorable Buckingham Toloose to accompany you?” Pole said, placing a pair of clean stockings precisely parallel to the breeches.
“Who in the world is that?”
“He arrived yesterday, with a note from Queen Charlotte. You would have met him this evening, but I gather the meal will be
en famille
, given the imminent arrival of your nephew. So it would be polite to greet the gentleman now.”
“And he is of what sort?”
“I would suggest that he is of a proselytizing nature—”
“Oh no,” Gabriel said. “My brother’s court was overrun by religious types. I don’t want any of those here.
You
don’t want that, Pole. If I turn into my brother, you and the lion would be out in the cold.”
Pole smiled in a slightly detached way, as if he had been told a joke of extreme indelicacy. “I have faith that Your Highness will not succumb to the delectations of a roving preacher, as did His Majesty Grand Duke Augustus. Mr. Toloose proselytizes in a different arena. I have warned all the younger maids to stay away from the east wing. He has a quite amusing way about him; he was exerting it on the Princess Maria-Therese this morning, but I fancy she was unmoved.”
Gabriel brought to mind his beetle-browed, sixty-year-old aunt, as sturdy and ethical as a German-built boat. “I fancy you’re right about that,” he agreed. “And what is Mr. Toloose looking for in my household?”
“My guess would be that he is rusticating due to debts in London,” Pole observed. “His stockings are quite interesting—a brilliant orange, with clocks—and his coat is worth more than a moderate-sized emerald.”
If Pole said that, it was true. Pole knew all about emeralds.
“All right,” Gabriel said. “Tell Berwick I’m in the gun room and send a note to Toloose requesting his company. I believe my uncle might like to go as well.”
Down in the gun room, he set to polishing the barrel of his Haas. It was a lovely tool, one of the only air guns he’d seen with seven rifling grooves, allowing a man to switch in a moment from hunting deer to hunting pheasants.
The German hunting air gun was everything life wasn’t: beautifully designed, spare, decorative. He didn’t actually care to hunt anything other than game birds and rabbits. But that didn’t mean he scorned the beauty of a Haas, its barrel etched with the coat of arms of the Duchy of Warl-Marburg-Baalsfeld.
His older brother’s coat of arms, to be exact.
A pulse of relief, so old that it felt as familiar as his morning beard bristles, panged in the area of his heart. He’d decided years ago that it was far better to be a prince than a grand duke.
For all that Gabriel thought his older brother was a dried-up old stick, he felt sorry for him. It wasn’t a pleasant task, ruling a small principality, especially given the three brothers who stood between Gabriel and Augustus, each of whom rather thought they’d like to have a crown as well.
And if not a crown, an heiress. He’d had a letter the other day implying that Rupert, the most handsome of his brothers, was toying with the sister of Napoleon.
His mouth tightened. If Augustus hadn’t lost his mind a few months ago, Gabriel would be in Tunis this very moment, quarreling with his old professor Biggitstiff over excavation of the legendary city of Carthage.
He wouldn’t be sitting in a damp castle in a puddle of summer rain, surrounded by elderly family members and debt-ridden courtiers . . . he’d be sweating in the sun, making sure the dig didn’t turn into a greedy ransacking of history.
Gabriel looked down to discover that he was polishing the Haas’s barrel so hard that he was likely to obliterate the duchy’s coat of arms.
Damned Augustus and his damned ideas. Gabriel had been on the very eve of leaving for Tunis when his brother’s religious fervor burst into flame, inspiring the Grand Duke to expel from his court everyone he considered corrupt, infirm, awkward, or mad.
In short, practically everyone, and all to save Augustus’s self-righteous little soul.
One by one, each of his elder brothers had refused to intercede, either because he was toadying up to Augustus or because (like Rupert) he just didn’t give a damn.
Finally it was left to Gabriel. He could accept a godforsaken castle in England, big enough to house all those deemed too imperfect to grace Augustus’s court, or he could leave for Tunis and never look back.
Put Wick and Ferdinand and the pickle-eating dog and all the rest of them out of his mind.
He couldn’t do it.
So . . . rain rather than blinding sun. A bride on her way from Russia, with a dowry to support the castle. And a castle full of miscreants and misfits, rather than an excavation site full of crumbled rocks and bits of statuary that might, eons ago, have been the magnificent city of Carthage.
Not that he believed it was Carthage. He had wrangled his way into the excavation because he didn’t believe in Dido, the famous Queen of Carthage, or even the existence of the city, for that matter. It was all a myth, made up by Virgil.
And now Biggitstiff was out there in Tunis chortling and labeling half the rocks in the countryside “Carthage.” Hell, by now he’d probably identified Dido’s supposed funeral pyre. The next step would be articles detailing his sloppy assumptions and sloppier fieldwork. Gabriel’s jaw clenched at the thought.
But he had no choice, not really. He wasn’t Augustus, with his religious principles unleavened by a sense of humor. He couldn’t watch everyone he grew up with, from his cracked uncle to his father’s jester (seventy-five, if he was a day), be thrown into the street because Augustus deemed them likely to tarnish his halo.
The only thing he could do was pray that Augustus’s choice for his bride—probably pious and whiskered, as virtuous as she was virginal—had enough backbone to run the castle, so that he could leave for Carthage.
He didn’t really care who she was, as long as she could manage the castle in his absence. Beddable would be nice; biddable was a necessity.
He bent back over the Haas.