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

Clarissa’s chilling words, Lucien found his scorn tinged with a genuine edge of concern. Cursed race? Seeds of evil? What manner of nonsense had they been feeding her?
    From his long-ago school days, he could hear the echo. Witchwoman’s brat. Murderess’s brat .
    He had borne their taunting at the time, but he’d had no idea that the whispers had persisted, or that they had morphed and twisted into something quite so intricate. And insane. So he was meant to be an undead creature of the night because his mother came from a cursed race?
    He’d like to see someone tell Tante Berthe she was cursed. She would dose them with wormwood and turn them out to dry.
    Now, that was a satisfying image.
    No, thought Lucien, sobering. There was nothing the least bit occult about the events of twelve years past. It was all quite brutally, sordidly human. Just because the murderer had slipped poison into their tea rather than driving a knife through their flesh didn’t make it any less corporeal. There had been no incantations chanted, no chickens slaughtered. It was murder, plain and simple.
    If there was ever anything simple about murder.
    Even now, after all these years, Lucien still couldn’t fathom who might have wanted to kill his parents—and who might have hated his mother enough to do so in such a way as to make sure that all suspicion fell to her. Had it been malice? Or merely expedience? Foreign and scornful of society, Lucien’s mother made a tidy scapegoat.
    Lucien had been over it again and again, a million times in his nightmares. The means was clear, but motive eluded him. Had the target been his mother? His father? Both? He had been only twelve at the time, his world confined to the schoolroom and the nursery. He knew enough to know that his father had been a senior member of His Majesty’s government, wielding a quite disproportionate influence on foreign affairs. There was no doubt that he had his political rivals. One might even call them enemies. But would any of them have killed?
    In a duel, perhaps. His father’s compatriots were men of their generation, quick to see a slight, quick to draw their swords. But a dawn affair of honor was a far cry from poison in one’s tea.
    There was no honor to poison.
    As for his mother . . . Yes, she had her rivals and detractors. Even in the schoolroom, Lucien had been well aware that his mother wasn’t exactly in the common mode. And it hadn’t taken Aunt Winifred long to make clear that his mother had been nothing that had been desirable in a duchess. But it seemed equally absurd to try to imagine a disappointed candidate for his father’s hand taking the desperate expedient of eliminating her rival, and in such a way that Lucien’s father might, too, sip of the poisoned brew. As he had.
    It was no good. He was drifting in circles, around and around, theorizing with insufficient evidence.
    It was time to seek help.
    Lucien made his way from the dance floor, trying to ignore the exaggerated reactions of his uncle’s guests as he navigated the crowded room. Was that girl really peering at his teeth? Yes. Yes, she was.
    The idiocy of mankind never ceased to impress him, and that was after six months spent at sea, sharing a berth with a deckhand fondly known as Foolish Pete.
    A quick scan of the ballroom assured Lucien that his quarry had already beaten a retreat from the dancing. That didn’t matter; Lucien was reasonably sure he knew where to find him.
    He had spent a month at his uncle’s house the winter he was fourteen, when he was sent down from Eton for fighting. It might have been a decade ago, but the contours of the house were impressed upon his memory. Lucien made his way without faltering out of the ballroom, through an anteroom, around a corridor, and up a short flight of three steps that led to a narrow back hallway. Uncle Henry’s study was at the back of the house, away from the noise and hubbub of the grand rooms that Aunt Winifred used to overawe