Twenty-eight

Good night to the Season! ‘Tis over!

Gay dwellings are no longer gay;

The courtier, the gambler, the lover

Are scattered like swallows away...

Good night to the Season!—Another

Will come with its trifles and toys,

And hurry away like its brother,

In sunshine, and odour, and noise.

Will it find me grown thinner or fatter,

Or fonder of wrong or of right,

Or married—or buried?—no matter:

Good night to the Season—good night!

–Winthrop M. Praed, “Goodnight to the Season”

In the front portion of Madame Duvall’s shop, Annis watched listlessly as Clare surveyed yet another walking dress. At the tinkling of the front bell, the fashionable patrons turned in a flock to stare at the street urchin who had dared to invade the shop’s elegant precincts.

“I’m looking for a lady,” piped up the urchin, “wot has a coachman name o’ Oulton.”

Annis stepped forward, a trickle of alarm running through her. “What’s amiss with Oulton?”

“He give me a sixpence to tell you your rig’s lost a wheel and been drug off to Bidwell Lane.”

Annis tipped the urchin another sixpence and then turned to Clare with the sigh of one who has been dealt an additional burden in a weary world. “I suppose we must go to this Bidwell Lane and see how Oulton is faring.”

Madam Duvall gave them directions: out the back of her shop and through the next four cross-alleys. Thus instructed, they picked their way into deeper and darker alleys, trying to ignore the scampering rats that crossed their path.

And suddenly Annis’s Sight came alive, and she knew. They were watched, targeted, and drawn like mice into this dark alley maze. Clare must go back, and she must go on, for perhaps whatever waited for them would be satisfied with her alone, and Clare would escape.

“Clare,” she said in a low voice, “turn around. For your life, turn around and run back to the shop.”

Clare hesitated. Annis reached for her sister’s wrist and clenched it with all her might. Clare’s eyes widened with shock, and she turned and hurried back the way they had come.

Annis marched herself deeper into the alleyway labyrinth, forcing one foot before the other, just as seven years earlier, she had marched her sixteen-year-old self down the aisle to become Russell Fulton’s wife for the sake of her land and family. Finally, she let herself turn around, and seeing no sign of Clare, she allowed herself to hope that her sister was safe.

And then she ran after Clare, running, she comprehended, for her very life—until two men stepped into her path, and she knew it was too late.

One man seized her around the waist, clamping a hand across her mouth. The other man jerked her feet out from under her. The two of them bound and gagged her with brutal efficiency and carried her to a covered wagon.

Dumped inside it, she saw with blood-freezing horror that Clare had not escaped but lay in a bound heap, her eyes wild with fear. One of the men clambered into the wagon bed with them, and the wagon jolted into motion.

Annis knew with sickening certainty who had them and why. This was why no breath of scandal had ever attached to her about the events at Bow Street. Nothing must occur to cause her to go home to the safety of Devon. Nothing must cause her to flee the Red Queen’s lair of blood magic in London.

The ride ended, as she had known it would, at the Red Queen’s Covent Garden establishment. She and Clare were heaved up like grain sacks, carried into the coach house, and dumped there.

And then she came, her dress a glowing incandescence of red, her painted mouth glistening moistly in a dead-white face. She was like a fantastical, bloodsucking insect that had gorged her fill. For now.

She walked around and around them, muttering words of power, encircling them with malignant sound as they lay supine at her feet.

Clotted around the Red Queen like old blood was a terrible aura that spoke to Annis—an aura composed of the echoes of old agonies, the echoes of other victims in this same moment of realization of their impending torment...A child whimpering fearfully at being left in the keeping of a sloe-eyed governess...A dwarf bought from a traveling raree show, finding that he must exhibit himself even more degradingly than before...A young girl, much-used by men, comprehending that now she would be used unto death...A simpleminded giant of a man lamed in the service of his terrible mistress and thrown into the streets to starve because he was of no further use...

With her inward-seeing eye, Annis saw all these moments of terror and agony swirling about the Red Queen, feeding her, for the suffering of others was her meat.

The guards cut the ropes, took the gags from their mouths, and dragged them to their feet. Annis drew her sister close as they faced their captress.

“Lord Ryder will kill you for this,” she said in a stony voice. She had no qualms about naming Nick as her champion in this dire hour. She knew he was her champion despite all the lovers’ tempests and dark prophecies that hung between them.

The red lips moved. The Red Queen spoke. “Ah, yes...Ryder.” Her tone was meditative as if her thoughts had also been running on him. “He will become troublesome over this, I don’t doubt. However, since I plan to retire from the trade as of tonight, I do not fear him. Before he can avenge you, he will have to find me.”

“What do you mean to do with us?” Annis whispered, determined to know the worst, for it could certainly be no worse than she was imagining.

The Red Queen smiled consideringly. “Ah, what to do with the famous Mrs. Fulton, who thinks she can diddle the Red Queen and steal my slavey in the night? It’s a question that I have mused upon of late. I considered that I might give you and your sister to the Hellfire Club.” Seeing Annis flinch, she laughed. “You have heard of them, I see, and rare sport the two of you would have offered them, your sister being a virgin, no doubt, and you...”

She came closer to Annis, sloe eyes probing amber. “What are you that you should vex and entice my masters so? Why are you such prime altar meat as only a nun or a saint would be? But I have seen you standing with your black fighting cock of a lord, and I know you are neither nun nor saint.” She lifted Annis’s chin with a red-taloned finger. “So what are you? What are you, that we who sacrifice to the Fallen One should covet you so?”

Annis jerked away. Gathering up the shreds of her courage, she said steadily, “You cannot frighten me with this nonsense about the Hellfire Club. It is well known that the members are all dead.”

“Oh, my foolish little Dolly,” crooned Belle Barlow. “Do you think something like that ever dies? Oh no, the brotherhood continues, but the current membership is far more discreet and exclusive and ferocious than the original founders, bumbling dabblers that they were. You will have met some of our current members at the great houses, though you did not know it, and one of them comes to us with the vestments of the Church of England still upon his back. Oh, the Hellfire Club is very much alive, and ever so much more powerful and ambitious than before, and ever so much more hungry. And do you know who sated the gentlemen’s hunger when last the Hellfire Club met?”

“My, you are quick. Yes, I sold her to the Hellfire Club, and I could have sold you and your sister, too, for a fine fat fee. But I did not, for when they finished with you, you would be merely...dead. And I want the two of you to live a long, long time so that every day of your life you can remember me and what I have done to you. I want you to cringe at the memory every morning and weep into your pillow every night. I mean to make such a mock and muck of your name that the whispers will follow you wherever you go for the rest of your life, and all the fine drawing rooms where you have queened it will be shut against you.”

So they were not to die! Annis thought with a thrill of relief that ended in a chill of fear of what was coming now. Though banishment from the drawing room seemed a mere abstraction when compared to death, still the drawing room stood for something vital in her life. She valued her place in that little woman-ruled piece of the world, and she did not want to lose that place due to the evil workings of the Red Queen.

“So tell me, Dolly”—and the hating red mouth smiled in anticipation—“do you know what affair happens tonight?”

“The Cyprians Ball happens tonight.” Belle Barlow was walking around and around them again, and the sound of the red skirts raised the hairs of the back of Annis’s neck. “As this is to be my last appearance, I should like my passing from the scene to be remembered. Tell me, Miss Dolly, clever Miss Dolly, have you ever heard of The Scourging of the Unchaste Vestals?”

Annis could say nothing, for her Sight was whittling at her spine like a hot knife. Something terrible was going to happen to her, something that would be more terrible for her than for any other, for she had riled the blood magic in London as no one else ever had.

Belle Barlow raised a painted brow in mock amazement at Annis’s silence. “One would think the granddaughter of the eminent Sir Cedric Robson would be better versed in the classics. The Scourging of the Unchaste Vestals is a painting by one of the Italian masters. It shows two vestal virgins who have broken their vows being beaten by a Roman priest. It is most prettily rendered—perhaps too prettily rendered, for vestals who took lovers to their beds were scourged to death. You, Miss Dolly the actress, and your little sister will have the roles of the unchaste vestals tonight at the Cyprians Ball. And here is your scenery piece.”

She snapped her fingers, the long red nails clacking against each other. The guards pulled away a dust cover to reveal a wheeled platform with two posts set upright in it. Across the posts were two crossbars, lengths of rope dangling from each end.

The ground reeled beneath Annis’s feet as she realized that the dead whip hand of Russell Fulton had indeed come out of the grave for her. Her knees gave way and she sank to the floor, Clare kneeling beside her, clutching at her hand.

Belle Barlow raised a surprised eyebrow at her victim’s cow-heartedness. “Perhaps you think a real scourge is to be used. But no, I have a prop even for that.” She picked up something that looked like some terrible, obscene child’s toy—a miniature cat-of-nine-tails. “See.” She ran her red-nailed fingers through the lengths of it. “Knotted cording only. A mere plaything that I keep about the place for the little boy-men to play their little games with. Fear not, your noble lover shall not find you marked.”

Annis began to laugh hysterically, which did not please Mrs. Barlow. She brought the whip down across the side of Annis’s face. Clare shrieked, but Annis numbly realized that there was no real pain, only a stinging sensation—nothing compared to what she had previously endured.

“You see,” said Belle Barlow, “not so bad. Of course,” she continued reflectively, “I do not know how one would bear up under it for three or four hours. But we shall see, won’t we?”

She walked closer to where her prisoners crouched together. “Just picture your theatrical triumph, Miss Dolly, and yours, too, my dear.” She prodded Clare with a red-shod foot. “All the gentlemen’s eyes will be upon you as you are wheeled into the Argyle Rooms, a veritable piece de resistance of the Fashionable Impures. Imagine the crush that will surround you as gentlemen vie for the opportunity to chastise wayward vestals.”

Clare seized on a sudden fleeting hope. “My sister and I are well known. We will surely be recognized and set free before we even reach the Argyle Rooms.”

Belle Barlow laughed brightly. “Oh, did I not mention that you will go masked? A great many patrons attend in disguise, so it will not be remarked upon. There is always the possibility, of course, that you could call out to someone who would recognize you. Picture the stir when the two lightskirts in the Red Queen’s masque are revealed to be the famous Robson sisters. So there is your choice. You may bear up under your punishment or else reveal your identities and suffer the public humiliation of it. A most interesting dilemma, all in all. I leave you to the contemplation of it.”

Annis lay on the floor of Belle Barlow’s cellar in a stupor of fear and despair. Her mind was paralyzed by the conviction that her life was turning in a doomed circle that always led back to the same terrible place. And tonight she would be carried to that awful place once more. And this time Clare must go with her.

She became aware of Clare beside her, cradling her head in her lap, weeping softly. She forced herself to sit up. “My fault,” she said thickly. “All of this.”

“But surely”—Clare looked at her with such childlike hope that it broke Annis’s heart—“someone will have missed us by now.”

Annis shrugged wearily. “But how are they to guess what’s been done with us? And once we are taken into the Argyle Rooms, no power on earth can save us, unless we choose to reveal our identities—which, I suspect, is what she wants.”

For then the low-bred whoremistress would have her oh-so-delicious revenge—a woman’s revenge against another woman, exquisitely cruel, acutely torturous, perfectly on target.

After a moment, Annis roused herself to inspect the carriage house. It was a remarkably stout carriage house with a single small barred window built high against the roof peak. Mrs. Barlow had surely kept prisoners here before. An empty bucket smelling faintly of human waste confirmed it. She and Clare would have to make use of it too—

The side door to their prison flew open, freezing them in place. One of Belle’s men stood silhouetted in the doorway.

“Ere you are, ladies.” He tossed a white bundle in their direction. “Mrs. Barlow says to put these on, and if you don’t, I’m the lucky bloke wot gets to make you.”

He departed with a meaningful leer, and Clare ran to where the parcel had fallen. It contained two pairs of gold sandals, two gold masks, and two white gowns—only “gowns” was hardly the proper word to describe them.

Clare flung the sheer draperies to the floor and declared in a quavering voice, “I won’t wear them, I tell you.”

“I think we must,” Annis said, resigned. “They will only force us, and we may as well spare ourselves the indignity.”

Patiently, she cajoled Clare out of her walking dress and into the draperies. When she had put on hers, she sat down against a carriage wheel where bands of light from the setting sun shone through the barred window.

Clare sighed, and sighed again, cajoled by the voice that had soothed away her hurts and lulled her into slumber since the day she was born. Soon her breathing was relaxed and even, and Annis hoped that her sister had gone into the strange waking sleep that opened the mind to the command of whoever had sent it there.

The Druids had mastered the practice a thousand years before the famous Dr. Mesmer came on the scene. Devona had been taught the principles and had passed the knowledge on to her witchling. Annis had once watched her cure a milkmaid who had become irrationally terrified of cows after being severely kicked. Devona’s remedy had saved the milkmaid from penury, for the unfortunate young woman had no other way to earn her keep.

Clare’s breathing had slowed and deepened. “Clare, you will listen to me carefully, and you will do everything I say.”

“When I tell you to go to the post, your mind will go far away into a deep, deep mist. Everything will be a dream, only a dream. What you see will be shadows, what you hear will be distant echoes, what you feel will be no more than a warm wind upon your back. You will be far, far away. None of what happens now will touch you in mind or body. By the power of the mind that rules over the senses of the body, I say this, and it shall be as I have said. So mote it be.”

“So mote it be,” echoed Clare, and then drifted into a true sleep, gently propelled into that safe country by her sister’s lulling arts.

While Clare slept on their folded-up clothing, Annis hid her locket beneath a floorboard in a darkened corner of the carriage house, hoping she might somehow be able to retrieve it. She was certain the Belle Barlow’s men would steal it if they saw it.

As the day darkened into night, Annis brooded on how easily the Red Queen had broken her. She cringed at the memory of herself crawling in fear at the Red Queen’s feet. I have failed you, Devona, and I have failed those of my name who have come before me. But I will not fail again. I will be like the moon tides of the Goddess. I have been at my lowest ebb, but I will come back with all the force that I have in me.

She saw the picture clearly now: Belle Barlow was her born adversary, her archenemy, the greatest practitioner of blood magic she was ever likely to meet. They were destined to clash, the two of them, the white priestess of wicce against the hateful, fallen daughter of Mother Earth. For white magic must always contend against the blood-fed red.

She must not let Belle Barlow escape to a life of ease, plump and sated on the blood and sufferings of others. Somehow she must strike down this buyer of young girls’ innocence, this seller of women into degradation and death. Belle Barlow had made herself a queen atop the bodies of other women. But now, all of womankind—the spring maidens, the nurturing mothers, the wise crones—they all cried out for justice.

I will kill the bloody-handed traitoress if I can, vowed Annis in her witch’s soul.

A key grated in the lock and Clare awoke in terror. The Red Queen’s men came, bearing lanterns, and behind them their mistress, her red gown shimmering painfully in the light. With her enemy before her, Annis began to calculate how she might kill her. Knives were close at hand, in the belts of Belle’s men, who were hitching up the wagon team that would pull the stage piece.

Belle Barlow walked around her two gauze-clad prisoners, admiring them as if they were dolls she had dressed herself. Suddenly her red-clawed hand twitched the back of Annis’s draperies. “Why, Miss Dolly, you’ve felt the whip before!”

Clare, who also saw what the Red Queen saw, gasped at this newest horror, the latest in a long day of terrible horrors. But Annis felt a sudden falling-into-place of fact and fate, an arcane interconnectedness that might enable her to thwart their captress.

“Ah,” she said, not bothering to turn around, “you refine upon my scars. A governess did it to me when I was left in her charge.”

“The governess fled,” Annis went on, rock-steady in her cunning, “before she could be brought to book. But that is not the end of the story.” She turned to the Red Queen. “Do you wish to hear the end of the story?”

Annis smiled. “Once I met a wise woman who told fortunes and found lost objects. I asked her to find my governess so I could avenge myself. The wise woman looked into a crystal ball and told me that I would never find my governess. But she also foretold that one day I would have my revenge upon another governess who had hurt a helpless child. The wise woman said I would bring this governess to her death.”

Belle Barlow took a step back and then another, and all the while her sharp black eyes were fixed on Annis, trying to pry the truth out of her skull. But Annis, secure in the glamour of her lie, said to the Red Queen in her most insinuating voice, “If you let us go, Mrs. Barlow, I will spare you. Let us go free and save yourself.”

But the knifepoint eyes had gone to Clare, and the game was up. The Red Queen pounced. “Tell me the name of your sister’s governess. Her name, her looks. Tell me.”

Clare’s bewildered expression was enough to undo her sister’s cunning story.

“So,” sneered Belle Barlow, “such a thing happened, and your sister never knew. I think not.” She stared at Annis. “Oh, you are uncanny in a way I’ve not seen before. Perhaps I should keep you and pry your secrets out of you.”

Annis eyed the powdered neck measuringly, but she knew Belle’s men would intervene before she could do any real damage.

“Alas,” Belle Barlow said with a shrug, “I have promised a show at the Argyle and a show there will be.”

Her minions came closer, to force the unwilling vestals to their posts. Annis knew this was the moment.

Clare went, docile as a sleepwalker. And men being what they are, the eyes of the two men were drawn to the beautiful creature who swayed dreamily past them. Annis moved unnoticed toward the nearest man. She snatched the knife from his belt, pivoted, and launched herself at the red beating heart of blood magic in London Town.

She was outnumbered by men who slit throats and cracked heads for a living. A crushing hand came down on her shoulder and jerked her back. Her knife sliced air and then was knocked from her hand.

When finally Annis was held helpless, Belle came closer, nails crooked, ready to claw. Annis closed her eyes, tensing in expectation of the pain to come.

Belle Barlow laughed deep in her throat and delicately drew her red talons along the curve of Annis’s cheek. “Oh, you are quite delicious when you tremble. But, fear not, I won’t mar your pretty face. Not before your unmasking at the Argyle.” She turned to her men. “Get her in place.”

But Annis found that she just could not put on an attitude of noble martyrdom and go gracefully to the post. She kicked and bit and clawed and struggled, and was bruised and cuffed and buffeted as she was dragged into place.