Vixen

T
HE SHADOWS OF
the two duelists, thrown by the massive altar candles, danced long and eerie on the stone walls of the crypt. The only sounds were the soft padding of their stocking feet on the granite tombstone slabs, the singing of steel on steel, and their swift yet measured breathing.

Ten men and one woman watched the deadly ballet. They stood motionless around the walls, barely breathing, only their eyes moving as they followed the dance. The woman’s hands were clenched so tightly against her skirt that her fingers were bloodless. Her waxen pallor had a greenish tinge to it, and her eyes, usually the vivid blue of a field of cornflowers, were so pale as to be almost opaque—as pale as her lips.

The duelists were both tall, powerful men, evenly matched except in age. One of them seemed barely more than a stripling, the other a man in midlife, with graying hair and a solid, muscled body that moved with a surprising speed and lightness to combat the youthful athleticism of his opponent. There was a moment when the older man’s foot slipped in a trail of blood that dripped from a cut in his opponent’s arm. There was an almost imperceptible stirring of the air around the watchers, but he recovered smoothly and only he knew that his adversary had drawn back for the split second necessary for him to regain balance and pace.

The knowledge of this courtesy gave Stephen Gresham no pleasure. He neither wanted nor expected such favors in a combat that could have only one end. He pressed the attack with a new ferocity, employing the skills learned and practiced over thirty years, relying on the relative inexperience of his opponent to offer him an opening. But Hugo Lattimer’s guard never dropped. He seemed content to let Stephen make the running, parrying with deft economy, turning aside the opposing blade at every thrust.

Stephen could feel that he was tiring and he knew that if greater experience couldn’t prevail, then youth would. Hugo was still breathing easily, although sweat gathered on his forehead despite the damp chill of the crypt. Stephen’s heart raced and his sword arm was a bodily extension of pure pain. The light flickered in front of his eyes and he blinked to clear his vision. Hugo danced and whirled in front of him, and now it seemed that he had lost the momentum, that control had passed to the younger man. He was being beaten back to the wall. It may have been a trick of the light and his own fatigue, but Hugo seemed to come closer until his vivid green eyes, filled with loathing and deadly purpose, pierced Stephen’s body as surely as his sword soon would.

And then it came. A lunge in high carte. He couldn’t summon the strength to bring his sword up in order to deflect it and he felt the smooth steel enter his body.

Hugo Lattimer withdrew his blade from the crumpled body of Stephen Gresham. Blood dripped to the floor. He stared, dazed and unseeing, at the faces around the wall. Elizabeth swayed in front of him. He wanted to go to her, to support her, but he couldn’t. It was not his right. He had just killed her husband. He watched, helpless, as she slipped unconscious to the floor. And the men who half an hour before would have drunkenly
participated in her dishonor averted suddenly sober eyes from the still figure.

Jasper Gresham moved suddenly, a vicious oath on his lips. He knelt beside his father’s body, ripping the shirt away from his chest, where the blood pumped forth. It had been a neat thrust to the heart. Stephen would have died instantly. For a second, Jasper’s finger traced the strange design pricked into his father’s skin above the heart—a tiny coiled serpent. He looked up at Hugo and their eyes locked. It was a silent message, but nonetheless lucid. Somehow, somewhere, Jasper Gresham would be revenged for his father’s death.

It didn’t matter that it had been a clean death in a duel fought according to the rites and ceremonies of the practice. It didn’t matter that in his fifty-two years, Stephen Gresham had fought ten such battles—all to the death. All that mattered to Jasper Gresham was that twenty-year-old Hugo Lattimer had defeated his father and he would avenge that humiliation.

Hugo turned aside. Elizabeth stirred and moaned. No longer able to stand back, he bent to lift her and she shrank from him, putting out an arm to hold him away. Her cheek still bore the shadowy bruise of her husband’s hand. Her eyes were blank, and it seemed to Hugo as if the frail body had lost some essential core. She had always been fragile, an ethereal creature of the air and the water. Now, at twenty-two, she seemed to have lost all substance. Whatever will she had once possessed to withstand the blows her destiny had dealt her had abandoned her. She was boneless, weightless, as he gently raised her, despite her rejection. His fingertips lightly brushed her eyelids in farewell. Unless she summoned him, he would never see her again.

He left the dank crypt with its stench of corruption and blood and death, climbing the steps into the frozen winter air of the bleak Lancashire moorland. The stark
ruins of Shipton Abbey stood out against a January sky as sharp and clear as glass. The air bit deep into his lungs, but he took it in in great gasps. For two years he had played in that dark and vicious world below. He carried its mark—the mark of Eden—on his skin and its curse in his soul.

I
T WAS MID-MORNING
when the weary horse finally scented home and turned through the crumbling stone gates into the rutted driveway leading to Denholm Manor. He blew through his nostrils and raised his drooping head, breaking into a trot as the black and white half-timbered house came into view. The hot sun caught the latticed windows and set the red tiles of the pitched roof aglow. The house had an air of neglect, exemplified in the mud-ridged, weed-choked driveway, the tangled bushes, the straggly remnants of what had once been neat, sculptured box hedges.

Hugo Lattimer sat his horse and noticed none of this. He was aware only of his throbbing head, parched mouth, and frying eyeballs. He couldn’t remember how he’d passed the hours since he’d left his home the evening before—in some alehouse in the Manchester stews, probably, drinking gut-rot brandy and dallying with whores until he passed out. It was his usual method of getting through the night hours.

The horse, without instruction, trotted through the arched gateway at the side of the house and into the cobbled courtyard. Here it became apparent to Hugo that something out of the ordinary had occurred in his absence.

He blinked and shook his head, staring bemusedly at the post-chaise standing at the foot of the steps leading
up to the house. Visitors … he never had visitors. The side door stood open, again most unusual. What the hell was Samuel thinking of?

He opened his mouth to bellow for Samuel, when a huge brindled mongrel bounded out of the doorway, barking its head off, and hurtled down the steps, teeth bared, hackles up, and yet, most incongruously, its long feathery tail wagging in fervent welcome.

The horse whinnied in alarm and skittered on the cobbles. Hugo swore and reined him in. The unknown dog pranced, barking and wagging, around the horse and rider as if welcoming long-lost friends.

“Samuel!”
Hugo yelled, flinging himself from his mount, wincing as the violent movement sent exquisite pain shooting through his head. Bending low, he brought his head close to the raucous dog and snapped “Quiet!” with a low ferocity that sent the animal backward, his tail now wagging uncertainly, a long, dripping tongue lolling out of his mouth.

Samuel failed to appear, and with a muttered curse Hugo knotted the reins, slapped the horse on the rump, sending him stableward, and took the steps to the side door two at a time, the mongrel on his heels for the moment mercifully silent. In the great hall he stopped, having the eerie sensation of entering a house that was not his own.

A road of sunlight ran from the open door across the muddied stone flags; dust motes danced in the rays from the latticed windows; the dust lay thick on the oak settle against the wall and the massive Tudor oak table. All this was as it always was. But the center of the space was filled with trunks, bandboxes, and assorted items that Hugo at first couldn’t identify. Under his incredulous stare, one of these items revealed itself to be a parrot in a large cage. Closer inspection indicated that the bird had only one leg. It cocked its head and offered
one of the fouler oaths Hugo had learned during ten years service in His Majesty’s Navy.

Bemused, he turned slowly. The dog yipped as he accidentally trod on its tail, now spread out in a feathery fan on the flagstones behind it. “Out!” he demanded without too much hope of being obeyed. The dog grinned, panting hopefully, and stayed where it was.

Hugo’s eye next fell on a hat box, or, rather, the bottom half of a hat box. Its lid lay rolled to one side. There were no hats in the box. Instead, he was staring in disbelief at a tortoiseshell cat, her distended sides rhythmically heaving and contracting. As he watched, she delivered a tiny, shiny parcel that she immediately attended to with practiced efficiency. The kitten blindly sought and found its mother’s belly and the swollen teat, and the tortoiseshell returned to the business of delivery.