The Wolfman (8 page)

Muscles bunched and flexed at the corners of Lawrence’s jaws. He looked past Nye to the tavern door and the moment stretched.

“Truer words were never spoken.”

Then he drew in a breath through his nose and exhaled slowly and took the pouch from Nye. As Lawrence turned and began walking to where his gelding was tethered, Nye fell into step beside him.

After a dozen silent paces, Lawrence said, “What happened to my brother and those other men?”

Nye shook his head. “It had to be some kind of animal.”

“And what are you doing about it?” Nye hesitated and Lawrence wheeled in front of him. Lawrence stepped closer. He was bigger and taller than Nye and the constable was forced to look up in order to maintain eye contact. “You’re not doing
anything
.”

For all the raw menace that Lawrence exuded, Constable Nye held his ground. “There’s been no sign of it for weeks, Talbot. It’s likely moved on . . . whatever it was.”

“And what if it hasn’t?” Lawrence asked. “What then?”

Nye did not even try to answer it. It was clear that he had thought about that and did not have a clue as to what to do.

“I thought as much,” said Lawrence with venom and pushed Nye out of his way. He stalked to the hitching post and whipped the tethers away from the wrought-iron rail and swung into the saddle. He threw one black look at Nye and a longer, far darker one at the tavern door, then nodded to himself as if he’d made a hard decision, and kicked his horse into a canter.

L
awrence’s foul mood was with him all the way home and only slightly diminished when Singh informed him that he was expected at the table with Sir John and Gwen Conliffe. The image of the young woman was captured in his mind as if the photograph had sunk beneath his flesh, and as he bathed and dressed he felt conflicted. Gwen had been engaged to Ben. She was a stranger to him. Nevertheless his baser self had been powerfully drawn to her image.

The lust, guilt and anger at the townsmen were all bandages to hide the real wound: grief. Lawrence knew it and that just pumped more bile into his demeanor.

By the time they sat down to dinner his troubled feelings had not much diminished. In person Gwen Conliffe was even more beautiful than the photograph had suggested. She was young and lovely in a way that made all of the beautiful actresses Lawrence cavorted with suddenly seem
plain.
She was uncorrupted, unsullied. Her fair skin was not the product of powder and paint, and her eyes were bottomless.

She was dressed in a mourning gown of black, but it was beautifully cut and did nothing to divert his attention from her beauty. By contrast, Sir John wore a suit with an old-fashioned cut. Elegant but out of place and showing wear. The old man’s white hair was sketchily
combed, his face unevenly shaved. Lawrence himself had no mourning clothes, though he wore his most somber colors and a cravat that was as modest as he could manage with no notice.

The dining hall itself was a strange setting for the meal. The big ballroom was in disrepair and this smaller room had been intended for informal meals, which this should have been. The table was too large, the draperies too heavy, the paneling too dark, the chandelier burning with too many candles so that the overall effect was ostentation shoved to the edge of claustrophobia. The walls were crowded with tables and sideboards, and the dining table itself groaned under the weight of an absurdly large feast. Lawrence suspected that Singh had used every piece of silver plate in the house. Platters were laden with eels baked with lemon and black pepper, whole pheasants sitting in nests of roasted chestnuts, grilled brook trout whose eyes glared in apparent shock at the room, a rack of rare lamb’s ribs in mint sauce and a massive boar’s head with an apple larger than Lawrence’s fist shoved between its jaws. Bowls of roast potatoes stood alongside the last of the autumn greens.

Under other circumstances Lawrence would have dug in with the rapacity of a Roman at a bacchanal, but under the circumstances it all seemed too much, and it was far too soon. A feast like this would have been better suited to entertain a crowd of mourners after the funeral.

He briefly caught Gwen’s eye as she picked delicately at a sliver of fish. Her manners were those of a cultured London lady, though he could not yet tell if she had the snobbery to go along with them, or if her reserve was like his own. Grief and awkwardness.

In truth they’d barely said ten words between them since Sir John had made introductions prior to ushering Miss Conliffe to the table. Sir John, on the other hand, had set to the feast with a will and had managed to keep a flow of conversation going between hefty portions of every meat on the board. Lawrence watched Gwen as she in turn watched Sir John reach across the table to tear another rib from the rack. The fragile bones cracked and he smiled at the sound, then laid into it with his strong white teeth. Gwen colored slightly and turned away, apparently interested in the arrangement of the silverware beside her plate. Sir John must have caught the movement of her head and flicked a glance first to her and then to Lawrence.

“You should have sent word you were coming,” he said while chewing. “The telegraph line does reach us here at Blackmoor.”

Lawrence said nothing. He was trying not to stare at Gwen as he played and replayed the moment when he first saw her. He and his father had already sat down, and Sir John had started eating without preamble. When the door to the cramped dining room opened, Lawrence turned but Sir John had leapt nimbly to his feet. Lawrence stood slowly, entranced and, for once in his life, unaware of the emotions on his face.

Sir John was a clumsier host than Lawrence expected. He was gruff, possessive and even rude—but all of this was directed at Lawrence. To Gwen he was overly deferential and courteous. Too much so.

Now, half an hour into the meal, Sir John was still eating and both Gwen and Lawrence seemed to be looking for an open window through which they could separately escape. Lawrence was hoping to make direct eye contact with Gwen so they could share that fragment of
awareness. Would it make her smile? Even a rueful smile would be a wonderful thing to see on so beautiful a face.

“You find it surprising?”

Lawrence blinked, realizing that his father was talking to him. He read back the script of the last few moments and understood that his father was making a challenging follow-up to his remark about the telegraph. Lawrence had no intention of rising to the bait. He offered a meaningless smile and token incline of his head and sipped the wine. That, at least, was excellent.

Sir John reached for a platter and held it out to Gwen. “May I suggest some baked eel? Singh has outdone himself.”

Gwen smiled—as meaningless a gesture as Lawrence’s had been—and selected a piece of eel that looked less alive than did the others.

“Lawrence seems surprised that the telegraph wire reaches us here, even at lonely old Blackmoor.” He chewed for a moment. “Also—I hear that the Americans are running lines for their new telephone system in the Boston area. How about that?”

“Is that so?” Gwen said with feigned interest. Had an actress read the line that way Lawrence would have scolded her for a poor performance, but Sir John was a devoted audience and took it as a cue to continue his ramble.

“I don’t think I could stand the intrusion,” the old man said, forking more eel onto his plate, “being at the beck and call of every Tom, Dick and Harry with such a device.”

“I’m not surprised,” murmured Lawrence, and immediately regretted it as Sir John turned a hostile eye toward him. For a moment the air crackled with tension
but then Sir John cut another covert look at Gwen and jammed another forkful of eel into his mouth.

Gwen used the moment to shift the topic, and she turned her smoky blue eyes toward Lawrence.

“Do you find your home much changed, Mr. Talbot?”

Without looking at his father, Lawrence said, “Blackmoor does seem rather the same as I left it.”

“How?” Sir John’s question was almost a grunt.

Lawrence affected a casual expression as he said, “The villagers have some wild ideas.”

“Yes,” said Sir John, “we’re a provincial lot, I must confess. Ignorant. Superstitious. To a worldly man such as yourself we’re savages at the end of the Earth—”

Gwen cut him off. “I didn’t intend to start a squabble—”

“No, no,” persisted Sir John, overriding her protest. “I’ve
seen
savages at the ends of the Earth. All I am saying is that you dismiss the natural man at your peril.”

The defensiveness in his father’s voice amused Lawrence. He took a sip of wine and settled back against his chair. “I find your insecurity strange.”

Sir John raised an eyebrow, equally amused. “Oh? And how comfortable are you in your skin, may I ask?”

“You can get used to anything,” said Lawrence.

There was a sharp
clack
as Gwen set her silverware down with too much force and started to rise. Lawrence half rose, the gesture almost a bow.

“Please,” he said. “Stay a moment.”

She sat very tall, eyes cool and challenging. Sir John’s eyes held equal challenge, but his eyes were almost palpably hot.

Lawrence knew that the moment was his to lose or repair. He nodded to Gwen and to his father, placing a
hand over his heart in a gesture he contrived to look honest rather than affected.

“I want to apologize to both of you,” he said, his voice quiet and guileless. “For not attending you in a more timely and . . . appropriate fashion.” Both sets of eyes continued to watch. Neither said a word, so Lawrence continued. “It’s a regret I’ll carry with me the rest of my life.”

The line was dramatic, and Lawrence had constructed it with the intent to manipulate the moment, but as he stared into the smoky depths of Gwen Conliffe’s blue eyes, he realized that he meant it.

Sir John sat back and refilled his wineglass, his gaze probing, calculating. Gwen studied Lawrence as well, and he could feel the strength of her insight and intellect, and he saw the moment when she made her decision. She gave him a single, brief nod, but as she did so her eyes softened. Just a bit.

T
he rest of the dinner was extremely polite and no one wandered within biting distance of controversy or challenge. After Singh had cleared the plates, Gwen excused herself and retired.

That left the two Talbot men alone. Lawrence expected his father to return to their argument, but instead Sir John suggested they retire to the Great Hall for drinks. Lawrence was happy to agree.

In the Hall, Sir John poured scotch into a pair of cut-glass tumblers. The animal heads on the walls watched him with glassy indifference. He carried the glasses over to a pair of overstuffed chairs positioned before a roaring fire. Lawrence stood by one of the chairs, firelight flickering on his face, his dark eyes reflecting the blaze. He accepted the glass with a nod and sipped the rich single malt. They did not toast one another or even touch glasses. That would have been an absurd gesture on both their parts.

Sir John settled into one of the chairs and looked over the rim of his glass at a display of Masai spears that he had acquired before Lawrence had been born. His eyes were distant, as if he wandered through fields of memory.

Sipping his scotch, Lawrence wandered the room,
pausing now and then to examine the hunting weapons—and the stuffed and mounted proof of their effectiveness—that made up the room’s motif. Then he spotted a newspaper that lay folded on the settee. He picked it up and opened it. The theater review page of
The London Times
. The headline read:

“I’ve never understood it,” said his father, and Lawrence turned to see that his father was standing by his elbow. He hadn’t heard him come up behind him. “Acting. Playing at being other men . . . but, I understand that you’re celebrated for it.
Famous
for it. Perhaps someday I’ll see for myself what all the fuss is about.”

Lawrence tossed the newspaper onto the desk.

Sir John threw back the rest of his scotch and as he poured a fresh drink he glanced up to see Lawrence looking at the beautiful portrait of Solana Talbot that hung above the fireplace. Sir John took a strong pull on his new drink.

“She was so beautiful,” Lawrence murmured.

“She cared very much for the two of you.”

Lawrence turned to his father, the sneer threatening to curl his lip again. “Why did she take her own life?”

Sir John was a long time in answering. “I don’t know,” he said softly.

But Lawrence was on the attack now, his earlier rage stoking the fires in his heart. “Was it something you did to her?”