The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla (Pink Carnation) - Softcover

London, 1806

“They say he’s a vampire.”

Sally Fitzhugh’s friend Agnes trotted after her as Sally made a beeline for the French doors to the garden, driven by a restlessness she couldn’t entirely explain. Behind her, she could hear the scraping of the musicians, the swish of fashionable fans. She just wanted out. Away from the heat, away from the smells, away from the petty gossip and murmurings.

It was October, and cold, but the ballroom was humid with the press of too many bodies in too small a place. The very mirrors seemed fogged with it, blurred and distorted. Even with her arms and neck bare, Sally felt uncomfortably warm in her silk and gauze gown.

The crisp October air hit Sally like a tonic, and, with it, Agnes’s words. Had Agnes really said—

“A what?”

Agnes ducked the rapidly swinging door. “A bloodsucking creature of the night,” she said helpfully as she followed Sally out towards the balustrade, away from the crush in Lord Vaughn’s ballroom.

“I know what a vampire is. Everyone knows what they are.” Ever since The Convent of Orsino (by a Lady) had taken the town by storm the previous spring, the ladies of the ton had become intimate experts on the topic. The men, just as sickeningly, had taken to powdering their faces pale and affecting red lip rouge. Sally found it distinctly ridiculous.

But, then, she was finding it all a little ridiculous just now: the too strong perfumes, the smug smiles, the whispering voices behind fans, the incredible arrogance of those powdered fops and perspiring ladies. It would serve them right if there were vampires in their midst. Not that such things existed, of course. Any bloodsucking that went on in the ton was purely of the metaphorical variety, although none the less draining for that.

Sally gripped the cool stone of the balustrade with both hands, breathing in deeply through her nose. She wasn’t sure what ailed her. Back in the cloistered confines of Miss Climpson’s Select Seminary, she had been itching to try her wings on the world, to flirt and laugh and bend beaux to her will. She knew exactly what it would be like: a cross between a Samuel Richardson novel and those notices one read in the paper, the ones that began with “Lady A— wore a gown of watered green silk.” She would be the toast of London, taking the town by storm.

And why shouldn’t she? She was, she knew, without false modesty, more than passably attractive. Quite a bit more, really. It didn’t do to be disingenuous about such things. So what if Martin Frobisher called her a gilded beanpole? He was just sore because she made him look like the sniveling little thing he was—and jealous because his family hadn’t two guineas to rub together. Proud, he called her. Well, yes, she was proud. She knew her own worth, both in character and in coin. What did it matter that her family had never thrown down a cloak for Elizabeth I or provided a mistress for Charles II? Just because they had never toadied for a title didn’t mean that they weren’t as good as anyone. They were certainly a sure sight better-looking, and her dowry was as big as anyone’s.

Both of those, Sally knew, guaranteed her entrée into society—or her brother’s name wasn’t Turnip.

She had sallied off to London in the firm anticipation of champagne-filled evenings of compliments, in which she would hold court among her devoted and witty admirers.

Well, she had been right about the champagne, at least. She just hadn’t expected it to taste quite so sour.

Even so, it was better than ratafia, the drink of young ladies, of which she had imbibed enough over the past year and a half to float a medium-sized royal barge. To be honest, she hadn’t minded the ratafia at the first. And if her admirers were less witty and more waspish—well, she was too busy flirting her fan and enjoying her own wit to mind. It was only bit by bit, along the course of her first Season, that she began to realize that it all felt a little flat. The bright silks and satins looked best by candlelight, where the stains didn’t show. The glittering jewels were too often paste. The fashionable gossip, which had seemed so terribly clever and scandalous in that first month, became nothing more than the endless repetition of a series of painfully similar on dits.

Did it really matter that Lucy Ponsonby had been seen without her gloves at Lady Beaufeatheringstone’s latest ball? It was hardly a matter of international policy.

She was just in a mood, she told herself. Tired, cranky, weary. Too many nights of too many entertainments that weren’t all that entertaining. It would get better. It had to get better. She didn’t like feeling like this, so purposeless. So restless.

She had hoped that having her friends Lizzy and Agnes join her this year would help, that introducing them to society would provide some of the vim that she had felt last year, when it was all fresh and new. But Agnes didn’t care much for such things, and Lizzy had rapidly, without much help from Sally, acquired her own circle.

Lizzy had, in fact, become something of a minor sensation in her own right. Part of it was due to her stepmother, Mrs. Reid. Mrs. Reid’s novel, The Convent of Orsino, was the topic of conversation at all select soirees, her presence a coup for any hostess. People fought to send cards to her stepdaughter, in the hope that Mrs. Reid might attend, and—even better!—lose her temper and pink someone with her infamous sword parasol. A wound from Mrs. Reid was a sure sign of social success. But while Mrs. Reid’s notoriety might have garnered Lizzy the invitations, the rest she had achieved on her own. At any party, one could find Lizzy surrounded by a fascinated group of men and women, telling hair-raising tales of her youth in India. Given that Lizzy had left India at the age of six, and spent the rest of her formative years first with a retired vicar’s wife and then in the decidedly unexotic confines of Miss Climpson’s Select Seminary, Sally strongly suspected that the larger part of those stories were apocryphal, taken right out of the novels they had smuggled under the covers at Miss Climpson’s. Not that that made any difference to her audience.

It didn’t hurt that the rumor had made its way around the ton that Lizzy’s mother had been an Indian princess, complete with elephant and priceless jewels.

It was Sally who had started the rumor about Lizzy’s mother being an Indian princess. Not the elephants. The elephants had come later, along with other embellishments that made the originator of the tale raise her brows and wrinkle her nose. People did come up with the most ridiculous things. . . .

But, still, it was all better than the truth, which was that Lizzy’s mother had been a bazaar girl. A touch of royal blood rendered Lizzy interesting and exotic; without it, she would be stigmatized as nothing but the bastard brat of an insignificant East India Company Colonel of little fortune and no birth. That was what Sally had reckoned when she started the rumor.

Of course, she hadn’t reckoned on it running away from her like that.

She hadn’t reckoned on being left behind.

That was silly. It wasn’t as though Lizzy had left her. They still spent a great deal of time together. It was just . . . When Sally had left Miss Climpson’s for London, it had never occurred to her that Agnes and Lizzy would carry on without her, turning their trio into a duo. They had even had an adventure of their own—not that it was terribly much of an adventure, given that Lizzy and Agnes had run off the moment there was a hint of a French spy on the scene, disappearing for weeks and causing everyone a lot of bother finding them again. If Sally had been there, they would have routed the spy on their own, and saved everyone a great deal of trouble.

But she hadn’t been there. As they had reminded her countless times. Not always intentionally, but in little ways—in jokes she didn’t understand and in memories she didn’t share. Sally was used to being the leader of their little trio. It felt very odd to be rendered de trop.

“—inconvenient diet,” Agnes was saying. “Blood does stain so.”

Belatedly, Sally pulled her attention back to Agnes. Unlike Sally, Agnes did not seem to be enjoying the cool night air. Her teeth were chattering slightly and her skin was turning a faint shade of blue that matched the color of her gown.

“Here,” Sally said, and took the light shawl from her own shoulders and wrapped it around Agnes, who hadn’t had the sense to bring her own. “What are you talking about?”

“The rumors,” said Agnes, blinking innocently at Sally as she absently tucked the corners of the wrap beneath her arms. “Haven’t you heard? They say he’s a vampire.”

“A vampire? Hardly.” Sally paused to glower in the general direction of the ballroom. There was no love lost between her and their host. Lord Vaughn was not an admirer of Sally’s brother, Turnip, which meant that Sally was not an admirer of Lord Vaughn. No one but Sally was allowed to insult Turnip. Still, even so . . . “Whatever else I may think of the man, Lord Vaughn looks perfectly corporeal to me. Those waistcoats are just an affectation.”

It would be just like Lord Vaughn to set himself up as an undead creature of the night. He prided himself on being slightly sinister, going about in those black waistcoats with silver serpents, murmuring cryptic comments. It was, reflected Sally critically, all just a little too obvious.

“Not Lord Vaughn,” said Agnes patiently. “The Duke of Belliston.”

“The Duke of Who?” Lizzy joined them on the balcony, her bronze curls escaping from a wreath of flowers that had gone askew, like the halo of a naughty angel. There was a healthy glow in her cheeks and her brown eyes were bright.

“Belliston,” said Agnes, palpably unaware of any social frissons or fissures. “In the house across the garden.”

She gestured in the other direction, away from the crowded ballroom, past long rows of perfectly trimmed parterres.

Even in the waning season of the year, Lord Vaughn’s shrubbery didn’t have a leaf out of place. The garden was arranged in the French style, all gravel paths and geometric designs, scorning the more natural wilderness gardens coming into vogue. Above the close-clipped hedges and the marble statues glimmering white in the moonlight, Sally could just make out the outline of the great house across the way.

Unlike Lord Vaughn’s, that garden had been allowed to run to seed, by either accident or design. Weeping willows trailed ghostly fingers over the dim outline of a pond on which no swans swam, while ivy climbed the walls of the house, dangling from the balconies, obscuring the windows. In the heart of London, the edifice had an eerie air of isolation.

It was the largest house in the square, larger by far than Lord Vaughn’s. Sally felt a certain satisfaction at that thought. Lord Vaughn could put on all the airs he liked, but he still wasn’t the biggest fish in the square. And by fish, she meant duke. The Duke of Belliston out-housed and outranked Vaughn.

He was also remarkably elusive. In her two Seasons in society, Sally had never met the man. There was some sort of story about him . . . something to do with a curse and his parents.

But vampires? Nonsense.

“Is that Belliston House?” Lizzy shook back her curls as she stared avidly at the house across the way. “I hadn’t realized we were so close to the Lair of the Vampire.”

Sally rolled her eyes at the idiocy of mankind. “Vampires are a myth. And not a particularly interesting one,” she added repressively.

“People said the same thing about the Duke of Belliston,” Agnes pointed out. “About his being a myth, I mean. But you can’t deny there are lights in the windows.”

That much was true. Through the ivy and the dust, a faint but distinct light shone.

“She has you there,” said Lizzy. There was no denying that someone was in residence at Belliston House. Whoever—or whatever—that someone might be.

“Yes, but . . .” Sally made an impatient gesture with her hands. “Next you’ll be telling me you saw a bat flying around his belfry.”

Lizzy cocked her head, considering the urns that lined the roof of the house. “I think it’s a crow.”

“Did you know what a group of crows is called?” Agnes’s voice dropped to a hushed whisper. “The collective term for a group of crows is—”

“Oh, no,” said Sally.

“—a murder,” Agnes finished earnestly.

As an academic appellation it was just a little too atmospheric, especially with the moon silhouetted against the chimney pots, casting strange shadows through the abandoned garden. Sally felt a chill shiver its way down her spine, beneath the thin fabric of her gown and chemise.

Catching Lizzy’s too-knowing eye, she hastily looked away, wishing she hadn’t parted with her shawl.

There was no call for Lizzy to look at her that way. Chills were simply what one got when one stood on a balcony in a scoop-necked ball gown in the middle of October. It had nothing at all to do with the black bird flapping about the chimney pots.

Somewhere in the depths of the garden, an owl voiced its mournful cry.

“That”—Sally cast about for a suitably dampening adjective—“is absurd.”

“No, truly,” said Agnes. “It’s a murder of crows and an unkindness of ravens.”

That last, at least, was appropriate. Sally cast a glance back over her shoulder at the ballroom. “I’d say it’s more an affectation of imbeciles.”

Lizzy grinned at her. “You sound like my stepmother.” Before Sally could decide whether that was an insult or not, Lizzy turned her attention back to the dark shell of Belliston House. Leaning her elbows on the balustrade, she said with relish, “They say he sucks the blood of unwary maidens.”

Agnes considered this. “I imagine they’re less trouble than wary ones.”

“Utter rubbish,” said Sally crisply. Before Agnes could argue with her, she added quickly, “Just because the man scorns society doesn’t mean that he’s an unholy creature of the night.”

In fact, at the moment she would say it was rather a sign of his good sense.

“No one has seen him for seven years,” Lizzy pointed out. “Or was it ten? That’s rather a long time for societal scorning unless he had some other motive in mind.”

“Such as draining the blood of wary or unwary maidens?” Sally gave a delicate sniff. “I think not.”

Agnes’s face took on the distant look it acquired when she was parsing a difficult academic question. “Seven is a mystical number. . . .”

“So is three,” said Sally. “Or five hundred and thirty-two.” She had no idea about five hundred and thirty-two, but someone had to show a bit of sense. Sally pushed away from the balcony, her gauze overskirt catching on the carved edge of an acanthus leaf. “Whatever the Duke of Belliston is, he’s just a man.”

Lizzy’s eyes glinted with mischief. “Prove it,” she said.

Agnes looked in alarm from Lizzy to Sally and back again. “You don’t mean—”

Lizzy nodded decisively. “Someone ought to go over there. In the interest of truth, of course.” Her face was a picture of guileless innocence as she added delicately, “Unless, of course, you don’t care to go.”

They had played this game so many times before, i...