Лорен Уиллиг - The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

"Let your fears be set at rest. The creature for whom you are so concerned — although one can hardly see why — is currently cooling his heels in the West Indies."

"Really, Sebastian! How could you?"

"More to the point, how could you? Then again," Vaughn added meaningfully, "you always did have appalling taste in men."

The woman in front of him stiffened, her teeth digging into her lower lip.

"How can I argue?" she retorted. Shaking back her blond curls, she looked provocatively up at him from under her lashes. "After all, I married you."

It wasn't every day that one had the opportunity of sparring with a ghost.

Crossing his arms across his chest, Vaughn smiled lazily at his dead wife. "Ah, the tender joy of the matrimonial bond. What do you want, Anne?"

She tilted her head at him in that practiced way she had had, eyes growing wide and misty in incipient supplication.

After all these years, it came back to him with a thud of recognition, collapsing the decade in between to the space of days. He knew that expression. Next would come an innocent flutter of the lashes, followed by a charmingly perturbed expression, as though she were searching for the right words. And, finally, the long, drawn-out, wheedling rendition of his name. Sebastian…

Vaughn's voice sharpened, cutting her off before she could get past the first flutter. "How much?"

Anne blinked up at him disingenuously. "It's not money I want, Sebastian," she said, dewy-eyed as a bride "I want to come back."

"Back," Vaughn echoed delicately.

"I want to come home," she repeated artlessly, resting a confiding hand on his sleeve. Against the dark wool, the small white fingers looked like claws, the bright rings like bits of a jackdaw's hoard. "I'm sick of abroad. All those foreigners with their smelly food. And their breath! If I never see another garlic clove again it will be too soon."

She tried to smile up at him, but the bright curve of her lips warred with the watchful tension of her eyes. Beneath the attempt at levity, her expression was as brittle as an eggshell, fine cracks showing in the lines around the corners of her mouth and eyes.

Dropping her eyes to his sleeve, she went on in a voice so low as to be almost inaudible, "I'm sick of it all. It was amusing in the beginning, but now…I've seen what happens to…to women when their looks begin to go."

"So have I," said Vaughn tonelessly. "There is one slight problem with your solution. You're dead, you know. You managed all that yourself, as you might remember."

Anne chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip, a habitual gesture that Vaughn had found seductive a long, long time ago.

"Well, we didn't want you following us," she said, as if it were only logical.

"Don't worry. I built you a lovely monument in the classical style. Persephone pulled down to Hades, I believe, was the theme. It seemed appropriate. In more ways than I knew, apparently."

Anne shrugged aside classical allusions. "Oh, monuments! It's all very well to talk about monuments, but one can't eat marble. Where am I to live, how am I to go on?"

"Who will keep you in jewels?" echoed Vaughn, sotto voce.

Instead of getting angry, she took a deliberate step towards him, tilting her head up in an intimate smile. "You haven't changed a bit, have you, Sebastian?"

Her voice was soft, nostalgic, deliberately drawing him back to shared memories, a shared past. He could see their once-upon-a-times reflected in the slick surface of her china blue eyes, like a rococo painter's fantasy of man and maid.

Everything had been pastel in those halcyon days: the soft shades of her clothes, sashed at the waist and topped with the filmy fichus demanded by sentimental fashion; the long, ash-blond curls tumbling clear to the great bow at the back of her dress; the muted straw of the great, sweeping hats that crowned her curls, shading her expression and masking her eyes. There had been boat rides, with servants to do the rowing; rural picnics, properly supplied with linen and silver; and long strolls in a conservatory where constantly burning stoves and a regiment of gardeners maintained a wilderness of flowers in eternal and artificial summer.

Like all illusions, it had been a very pretty one. Until it crumbled. Afterwards…no, what followed hadn't been pretty. Some of it, he had brought down upon himself, deliberately seeking the low, the dark, the debauched. The Hellfire Club, the stews of St. Giles, anything that would serve to obliterate the cloyingly sweet scent of false flowers from his memory. He wanted the noisome, the foul, the gritty, those seamy subterranean swamps of humanity too ripe to be anything but real.

Some of it had found him, and been almost more than he had bargained for, for all his vaunted sophistication. France. Teresa. Compared with France, the creative perversions of his friends in the Hellfire Club had been nothing but a tawdry pastime, the petty transgressions of bored boys. Sophistication, pitted against real evil, was about as much protection as a fine coating of gold leaf against a hurricane. France had toughened him, hardened him. It wasn't even the mob, crying with mad joy as the heads of their former masters tumbled into the straw. No, that was a good little malice, comprehensible in its own way. It was the Talleyrands, the Teresas, the men who coolly presided over the demise of civilization with an eye to nothing but what they themselves could glean from it, condemning former friends and lovers with no more ear to their cries than a butcher slitting the throat of a bleating sheep. If he had had any belief left in the innate goodness of human nature, it had bled out in France, into the straw beneath the guillotine, among the linens he shared with his lover, his accomplice, his éminence grise.

"I've changed more than you think," Vaughn said flatly.

She might have demurred, but he raised one hand, the great diamond on his finger winking a warning. Her eyes fixed on it with a magpie's fascination for shiny objects. "I believe we can spare ourselves the bourgeois joys of tender reminiscence. There is, after all, so little one would care to recall."

His wife tilted her head softly to one side. "That's not how I remember it…Sebastian."

Vaughn didn't move, but something in his face hardened, became as cold and glittering as the diamond on his finger. If she wanted to stroll down memory lane, there were certain avenues that bore exploring.

He raised a lazy eyebrow. "Whatever happened to — Fernando, was it?"

"Franзois," Anne corrected sharply.

"Forgive me," Vaughn murmured. "Franзois."

The man who had been fascinating enough that young Lady Vaughn had abandoned husband and rank in a precipitate midnight flight, along with the contents of her jewel box and a fair portion of what ancestral silver had survived the Civil Wars. He had been her music teacher. It was an embarrassing cliché, the wife running off with the music master. He supposed it could have been worse. It could have been the dancing master.

Anne's eyes dropped to the pale blues and yellows of the Aubusson rug. "Franзois proved…uninteresting."

"You mean he left you after the money ran out."

Anne tossed her blond curls. "He wasn't what I had thought he was."

"People so seldom are," Vaughn said, with deceptive gentleness. "It is a lesson we all learn sooner or later. And after Franзois?"

Anne looked away, over one shoulder, as though seeing people and places that weren't there. "There was an Austrian gentleman. He took me to Vienna with him. For a time."

"Until he tired of you," Vaughn translated.

She didn't attempt to correct him or deny it, but there were lines of strain around her eyes that hadn't been there before. He had seen that look on the past — but not on Anne. It had been in France, a marquis who had been run from hiding place to hiding place, cutting and weaving, always just evading capture, until at the end he had been caught and dragged forth.

Vaughn had barely known the man, but his eyes had stayed with him for weeks after, the eyes of a hunted thing, scarcely human.

"After that," Anne went on, speaking rapidly, "I moved to Rome. There was a cardinal who was kind to me."

"How fitting," said Vaughn softly. "A Protestant whore for a papist priest. What a charming pair you must have made. Does Babylon mean anything to you, my dear?"

Face twisting with annoyance, Anne made an impatient movement. With her, petulance always had won out over diplomacy in the end. "It wasn't like that!"

"Then what was it like?"

"You wouldn't understand. It's all different over there."

Vaughn ran a languid finger along the contour of his quizzing glass. "Then why don't you go back?"

"I can't — I don't want to," she corrected herself. Nervously working her fingers, the words came rushing out, "It's not just that. My current protector, he frightens me. I can't go on with this any longer. Sebastian…"

The sound of his name on her lips grated on his nerves. In the two years they had been married, she had always begun with his name when she wanted something, in just that tone. A long, drawn-out caress of a salutation, with the emphasis on the second syllable. Gambling debts, jewels…music lessons. Whatever it was, he had given it to her, not out of love — not by then — but out of boredom, because he had it to give, and it was easier to accede than argue.