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ostentatious
“This is my dear Doc, who treated me at Brandywine. He is a great admirer of your writing, and can recite Common Sense chapter and verse. Marcus de Clermont, my friend Thomas Paine.”
but Marcus couldn’t help but feel he was being managed.
Since Marcus left Edinburgh and returned to London a proper doctor, she had become the de facto lady of the house on Pickering Place, hosting card parties and receiving visitors in the afternoon.
Marcus had never clapped eyes on the man, who was known as Father Hubbard and seemed to occupy a place in the civic imagination that was roughly akin to that of Gog and Magog, the ancient giants who guarded London from her enemies.
They found Baldwin in New Jonathan’s, trading futures and cashing in his chits with the rest of the stockjobbers and bankers. “Baldwin.” Marcus took off his hat. He had stopped bowing, but when faced with one of the elder de Clermonts, it was impossible for him not to make some sign of respect.
He was ginger-headed, with a temper to match, and underneath his forest-green stockbroker’s suit he had the muscular, athletic body of a soldier.
“I’m not going to bloody Hertfordshire,” Marcus said, halfway out the door. “I’m going to Philadelphia.”
Marcus put his pistol in his belt and picked up the child. There was no scent of death on her. “I’ll get you some,” Marcus said, heading toward Dock Creek.
“No. Saving the world is not your duty. I know that’s what Matthew tries to do, but it’s going to get us all killed one day.”
His son—his family—was gone. No amount of vampire blood could bring back a lifeless corpse.
A bloodcurdling shriek came from upstairs. “Apollo really doesn’t like your brother, Matthew,” Sarah said. “He’s flying around in the stairwell, carrying on as if it’s the end of the world.”
“God, I love that woman,” Sarah said, beaming. “Down with patriarchy. Right on, Agatha.”
“How I’ve missed family gatherings,” she said. “What have you done this time, Baldwin?”
“Mum and Dad trust me,” Jack said. “Which means for the first time in my life, I feel like I can trust myself. That’s what families are supposed to do—not order each other around and make promises nobody should have to keep.”
Becca squirmed to be put down. Once Jack placed her feet on the floor, she ran straight to Baldwin, her steps sure and her face determined as she trod on the fading remains of my spell. “Horsey?” she said, looking up at her uncle with a winsome smile. Baldwin took her hand in his. “Of course, cara. Whatever you wish.”
“Ready?” Marcus asked, coming up behind me. “As I’ll ever be,” I said.
I set up another arrow made from witchfire and launched it into the air. This one was golden and burnished, morphing and twisting into a young griffin who chased the firedrake across the heavens.
“We are such stuff / As dreams are made on,” Matthew said softly, “and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.”
“I don’t remember spending this much time in the kitchen before,” Baldwin said, looking around as though the space were unfamiliar to him. “I must say, it’s a pleasant room.” Sarah and I exchanged smiles. The domestication of Baldwin had begun.
“The hidden hand need not always be a crushing grip,” Ysabeau said gently, looking at Matthew with love. “The touch we feel as a restraint when we are younger has a way of bringing us comfort later in our lives.”
And it took me even longer to admit that Matthew was right to come to New Orleans and put a stop to what I was doing.”
Marcus had walked the earth for more than half a century, and during that time he had always felt the retrograde pull of Hadley, his family, and the War for Independence.
“Ransome Fayreweather, at your service.”
Marcus began to look for Fayreweather as he went about his daily business, and to be disappointed when he didn’t catch the man’s sardonic green eyes or have a chance to greet him in the market.
One by one Marcus’s family grew larger and more boisterous. It happened so incrementally that Marcus took no notice of it, though Marguerite D’Arcantel and her coven surely did, as did the city officials.
“Marcus de Clermont.” The woman smiled like a cat. Ransome pulled a pistol out of the desk drawer. “Juliette.” Marcus’s heart jumped, and Geraldine looked from him to the woman at the door, curious about her effect on him. “Hello, Marcus.” His maker, Matthew de Clemont, joined the woman. “I told you he would remember you, Juliette.”
Matthew’s were surgical, precise. One fast, quick cut from ear to ear across the throat. Like Vanderslice.
“I will never forgive you for this,” Marcus promised Matthew. “I don’t expect you to,” Matthew said. “But it had to be done.”
It was far more humane to sniff than to bite, and raised fewer human eyebrows.
particularly nice Renoir that reminded her of how she felt when she was with Marcus. It was soft and sensual, and the dark-haired woman picking roses looked a bit like her.
“You think all light is too strong, Phoebe, and yet you are drawn to it in your art as well as in your life.” Freyja inspected the painting closely. “It’s really quite good, you know.”
“There’s always Baldwin’s collection to catalog, I suppose,” Phoebe replied. “Not to mention making an inventory of Pickering Place. And Sept-Tours.”
Having seen some of the places where Matthew kept his art, which included the downstairs loo at the Old Lodge, Phoebe wasn’t surprised.
“You cannot save the world or everyone in it, but you must find a way to make a difference. My father always said that was what vampires were put on earth to do.”
Françoise, whom I had not seen since leaving sixteenth-century London, opened the door. She bobbed a curtsy.
“Phoebe,” I said, wading into the conversation, “would you mind very much if I worked a bit of magic on you?” “Thank God,” Françoise said. “I knew you would think of something, madame.”
Miriam considered her options. I was used to her quick reactions. This thoughtful side of Miriam was unexpected—and welcome.
“We are, all of us, asked to grow up too quickly. It is the way the gods remind us that life, no matter how long, is still but a breath.”
“Diana’s firedrake broke one of those,” Ysabeau said, pointing to a large lion’s-head vase. “Philippe commissioned a set of two. I must confess I was never very fond of them. If we are lucky, Apollo will break the other and we can find something new to take its place.”
“To be a vampire you must choose life—your life, not someone else’s—over and over again, day after day,” Ysabeau said. “You must choose it over sleep, over peace, over grief, over death. In the end, it is our relentless drive to live that defines us. Without that, we are nothing but a nightmare or a ghost: a shadow of the humans we once were.”
After the past several weeks, she would walk across deserts for Ysabeau, and was keeping a silent record of every slight uttered against the matriarch of the de Clermont clan. Phoebe intended to settle those accounts one day.
“I paid Freyja to take Ysabeau and Marthe to Saint-Lucien for lunch.” Phoebe giggled. “I see that meets with your approval,” Marcus said.
Evermore.
“My God, that’s a griffin!” Chris Roberts stood in the doorway to the kitchen in New Haven, holding a birthday cake and staring at Apollo.
“Blocks. Granny. Boat. Marcus,” Philip said, reeling off the high points while he hopped in place. “Jack. Griff’n. Gammer. Aggie.”
I looked at my husband in triumph. Matthew owed me ten dollars and a foot massage. I planned on collecting it as soon as Chris left.
“Just walk it through a warm room, my friend,” Chris replied. “Good man,” Matthew said. “My sentiments exactly.”
Marcus drove through the center of Hadley, along the village green that preserved the town’s colonial layout.
She took a picture of the house and sent it to Diana, as she had promised.
