Free The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla A Pink Carnation Novel by Lauren Willig

think?”
    It was a bit late for many things. Month by month, year by year, Lucien had promised himself that he would return to England to seek justice for their parents—but it was easy enough to drag it out and put it off, letting himself be seduced by the easy life of the bayou.
    Lucien fumbled for the words. “When I left—I was a fifteen-year-old boy.” Burning with a sense of injustice and anger at the world. No one listened to a fifteen-year-old boy, not even if that boy was a duke. They nodded, and smiled, and patted him on the head, and packed him away to school, while his parents’ blood still cried out for justice. “I never meant to stay away for as long as I have.”
    Clarissa turned her face away. “There’s no need to explain.”
    In profile, her face was eerily like their father’s, the lean, fine-boned lines, the aquiline nose. A feminine version, but with the same blade-keen elegance, refined over the centuries.
    “But there is.” He had never thought of what it meant to her, left behind. A little girl in a nursery was nothing to a boy of fifteen. “I was remiss in my duty to you. And, most of all, I failed them . Our parents.”
    “I try not to think of them.” The pattern of the dance parted them and brought them together again. Clarissa’s eyes were fixed on the far reaches of the ballroom, searching—for what?
    A portrait of Aunt Winifred, pug-faced in puce, smirked down at them from above the mantel.
    If their parents were alive, this dance would be at Belliston House, with the paired portraits of their parents looking down from the wall, his father in his powdered wig and silver-embroidered ice blue waistcoat, his mother laughing down at them, her dark hair, unpowdered, in long curls hanging over her shoulders, one elbow leaning on a marble pedestal, a scroll unrolling from her hand, the frame of her greenhouse behind her.
    Those portraits were dull with dust, hanging behind tattered curtains in the empty ballroom of Belliston House, his father’s sharp-edged smile and his mother’s laughter filmed by the haze of memory.
    “Do you remember any of it?” Lucien asked. His hand touched hers, palm to palm, and then parted again. They had danced together when she was a chubby-legged toddler, clap in and clap out and ring around the rosy, under Nurse’s approving eye. “Do you remember Maman teaching you your letters? She drew a book for you, with a garland of flowers around each letter. A is for apple-blossom—”
    Clarissa swept her skirts away, twisting around the next person down the line.
    “And the smell of papa’s powder,” Lucien persisted. “What was it?”
    “Violet.” Clarissa shut her lips tightly on the word, but it was too late. Lucien could see the cracks in the ice, the memories that she had claimed to have shut away.
    “And there was the song that Maman always sang to us. About a shepherd, searching for his sheep in the rain.” He could remember it, painfully and vividly, their mother, when he was very young, or ill, laying a cool hand against his cheek, singing softly. “Il pleut, il pleut, bergere. . . .”
    “Stop . ” There was a faint flush on Clarissa’s pale cheeks. She modulated her tone, forcing a smile for the benefit of their audience. “It’s all past. Over.”
    “Not for me.” The dance had drawn to a close. Lucien halted in front of his sister. “Not until we find out who killed them.”
    Clarissa looked at him as though he were an idiot. “Our mother killed our father and then herself,” she said flatly. “What more do you wish to know?”
    Chapter Four
     
    It had been a very long time since anyone had said that to Lucien’s face.
    The fixed social smile on his sister’s face only made the impact worse.
    “Do you wish to refine upon that?” Clarissa was still smiling, smiling. It was a smile of teeth, not eyes. “I don’t.”
    Lucien felt as though someone had just reached into his chest and squeezed.
    “Can you really