The Moonlight Mistress
Victoria Janssen
It is the eve of the Great War, and English chemist Lucilla Osbourne finds herself trapped on hostile German soil.Panicked and alone, she turns to a young Frenchman for shelter. Together they spend a night of passion, but their dangerous circumstances won't allow more than a brief affair. Even with the memory of Lucilla's lushness ever present, scientist Pascal Fournier is distracted by his reason for being in enemy territory—Tanneken Claes has information Pascal could use against the enemy but, even more extraordinary. . . she's a werewolf.After entrusting Pascal with her secret, Tanneken and her mate, Noel, are captured. Suspecting a rogue scientist rumored to have a fascination with werewolves is behind the abduction, Pascal knows he must act fast to save them. He's all too aware of Professor Kauz's reputed perversions and lust for control. . . .As war rages, Pascal and Lucilla combine efforts to stop Kauz, struggling with danger, power and secret desires. . . .
Also by VICTORIA JANSSEN
THE DUCHESS, HER MAID,
THE GROOM & THEIR LOVER
The Moonlight Mistress
An Erotic Novel
Victoria Janssen
www.spice-books.co.uk (http://www.spice-books.co.uk)
For Charlotte, for more reasons than I can put into words.
Happy birthday!
Chapter One
THERE WERE NO TRAINS TO STRASBOURG.
The hand-lettered sign on the station wall might be wrong, or something might have changed. She would ask again. Lucilla Daglish clutched her single carpetbag more closely, to protect her scientific glassware from the anxious crowd, but also for reassurance. People jostled past her in every direction, all of them speaking in high-pitched, anxious tones that blurred into a babble conveying nothing but fear. Two different babies wailed, and a larger child screeched between gulping sobs. A fat man, reeking of stale pipe smoke, elbowed her sharply in the kidney as he pushed his way behind her.
Lucilla cursed herself mentally as she tried to explain her problem to the ticket agent. Had the man in the booth needed to know about titration or some other element of practicing chemistry, she could have explained it to him in great detail. However, her more basic conversational German was lacking. Perhaps she had misunderstood his meaning, or he had misunderstood hers. Perhaps her fear had led her to misspeak.
Summoning different German vocabulary, she phrased her question again. She was an Englishwoman. She wished to travel to Paris via Strasbourg. She had a ticket. Here was her ticket. Here were her papers, proving her nationality.
No, it was the gnädige Frau who did not understand. There were no trains to Strasbourg. There were no trains at all. Germany had declared war on Russia. There would be no trains until further orders were received.
“I am not at war!” Lucilla exclaimed in English, knowing the agent would not understand her frustrated outpourings. “Why can I not travel out of this country? Surely you have no use for me here?”
There were no trains today, the agent repeated in German. Perhaps tomorrow. Or the following week. The gnädige Frau would do well to find a room in the town, before they were all taken.
She could not smash her bag into the ticket agent’s smug, condescending face because he would surely call the police. She turned sharply away. She would have to temporarily abandon her trunk here at the train station. She would return to the Institute. Perhaps she could sleep there. She had been a fool to give up her room. An utter fool. But she had not had the money to pay for an entire additional month, as her landlady had insisted, and she was leaving anyway. Or so she had thought.
She had no friends here whom she could approach for help. The other women in the boardinghouse had grouped together at meals, discussing their prospects of marriage or employment. Unlike them, Lucilla was well past the age of marriage, and she was already employed. She had never stayed longer than needed to quickly eat while perusing a journal article; she did not have time for the pleasantries, when the laboratory called to her so passionately. One could not be a friend to one’s colleagues, either, when one was a woman, and they were all men who viewed her more like a trained monkey than a chemist. Some of the men would not speak to her at all, even to exchange pleasantries. After six months in Germany, she knew no one whom she might call, even to meet her for a cup of tea.
The sun had set while she fought the crowds inside the station. Even in the dark, the hot, dusty streets were mobbed, three times as crowded as on a normal night. Compared to that morning, the whole town felt alien to her. Boys hawked newspapers on every corner. Men stood and read the papers under streetlights and in the street itself, arguing vociferously, blocking wagons, whose drivers cursed. Singing and pipe smoke, drunken cheers and angry shouts billowed from the open door of a beer garden. Some men walked purposefully, carrying small bundles—soldiers, already? All the women she saw were in a hurry, whether they hefted market baskets or towed children. Their anxiety wormed its way into Lucilla’s stomach, and she found herself almost running as she drew closer to the Institute.
The tall iron gates were closed and chained, and the gas lanterns to either side flickered merrily, mocking her.
Lucilla ran forward and grabbed the bars with her free hand. Someone would be within. She shouted. No one answered; not a blade of grass stirred. The windows were all dark. She was sweating in her sober wool suit, but her belly contracted with cold terror. She shook the gate and shouted again. “Let me in!”
“Mademoiselle Daglish?”
Lucilla whirled. A young man loomed behind her. She recalled seeing him at the Institute, marked by his height, his pronounced Gallic nose and a truly spectacular air of untidiness, currently exacerbated by his dusty clothing. Smears of dark grime marked his sleeve and his cheek, just to the left of his unostentatious brown mustache.
He was a visitor like herself, but she had never learned his specialty, or his name. He would know her name because she was the only woman ever to study at the Institute. She took a steadying breath. “Where have they all gone?” she asked in English.
“The entire faculty was summoned to a meeting at the gymnasium. My country being likely soon at war with their country, I fear I am not welcome there, nor are you,” the young man said. He spoke English fluently, though with a French accent. From beneath the brim of his hat, he looked her up and down. She had an impression of grim displeasure, though nothing in his voice had revealed it. “You cannot stand here in the street, shouting.”
“And I suppose you have a better idea?”
“I have retained an hotel room. I suppose you have not done the same?”
“Such deductive prowess,” Lucilla muttered. Her hair was coming unpinned. She shoved the curling strands away from her face, one-handed, and glanced down the deserted street. She had to calm herself and think. “There must be another way out of the country.”
“I do not wish to be shot in the dark as a spy because I am in the act of escaping,” the Frenchman said. “You must accompany me. You will stay in my room tonight.”
“I will do nothing of the sort. Mr…?”
“I am Fournier. Tomorrow we may consider our dilemma further. Come, we should go.” He turned and began walking, not offering to carry her bag. She didn’t want to release her bag anyway; it held her precious laboratory notebook as well as her glassware.
She should not go with him. It was quite improper. True, Fournier was younger than she by at least a decade, so she did not fear he had designs upon her. Or not more than a basic level of caution would dictate. But it galled her to be ordered about like a lab assistant.
Lucilla scurried to catch up with him. “I will find my own room,” she said. He could ruin her reputation, merely by being seen with her in a hotel.
Fournier snorted. “A woman alone, and a foreigner? Don’t be foolish. No one will give you a room.”
“A woman might,” she pointed out.
“If she had a room to spare. Even early this morning, I had difficulty in procuring lodging for an additional period. You are not the only person who has just discovered there are no trains. Come, we should hurry.”
He was correct. And after her long dusty walk to the train station, then her futile longer and dustier walk back to the Institute, Lucilla was in no mood to procure a newspaper, peruse its listings and then perhaps circumnavigate the entire town in the dark, alone and subject to male harassment, in search of a bed. “I wish you weren’t right,” she grumbled.
Fournier glanced over at her and smiled, a quick flash of white teeth beneath his mustache. For that moment, he looked no older than her baby brother, and twice as dangerous. Then he began walking even faster, and all her energy was consumed in keeping up. If she lost him, she would truly be in the soup.
Fournier ducked into a shop and she followed. He purchased cheese and biscuits, the only available choices. Lucilla realized she had forgotten all about food, but the need would soon become urgent. On the way out of the shop, she halted abruptly; a Polizist was demanding Fournier’s papers.
She wasn’t sure if approaching was the wisest idea, but Fournier was helping her, and she would not abandon him. She came up beside him just as the Polizist snarled an uncomplimentary phrase and tried to seize her arm. Fournier swiftly intervened, but the Polizist wouldn’t release her. She struggled in his gloved grip, dropped her bag and heard the unmistakable shattering of glass.
Fournier shoved the Polizist, hard. “Run!” he said, so she grabbed her bag and ran, her heart pounding, hearing the scuffling behind her. She ran for perhaps a block, enough to soak her in sweat, then flung herself around a corner and peered back. Fournier was fleeing down the street toward her, still clutching the wrapped package of cheese and tin of biscuits. His tie was jerked askew, his hat nearly falling off the back of his head. The Polizist lay curled on the sidewalk. She could hear him cursing.
“This way!” she said, grabbing Fournier’s arm. He shook her off but followed her down several alleys. She had no idea where she was leading him, but quick action was paramount. When she could run no more, she flung her back against a wall and gasped for breath. Fournier bent over his knees, panting.
“Are you hurt?” she asked. She felt light-headed and exhilarated at the same time.
He didn’t answer her. Eventually, he straightened and said, “This way.”
By the time they reached Fournier’s lodging, the night seemed even darker. He grabbed her hand and pulled her around the corner of the building, to the servants’ entrance. His long fingers engulfed hers. He might be abrupt and overbearing, but he’d rescued her, and defended her against the Polizist. She appreciated his warm and reassuring human touch in the midst of chaos. She was sorry when he let go, glanced around and pushed the door open. “The stairs,” he murmured once she was inside. “Second floor.”
Fournier’s room was last in a poorly lit, narrow corridor. He unlocked the door briskly and pushed her inside before slipping in after her and throwing the bolt. She sighed in relief, then nearly laughed; never before had she considered that being locked in a room with a strange man could be a good thing.
Street noise, the rumble of wagons and voices mingling like a river, pushed in through an open window. Lucilla sought out the light switch with her hand, then was glad she hadn’t tried to move farther. She saw scarcely two feet of bare floor, with perhaps another foot covered by an open rucksack and a scatter of notebooks. The room held one narrow bed with an overstuffed mattress, a small table supporting a jug and basin, and an upended steamer trunk. A hook above the trunk supported a single towel. She stood with the rucksack at her feet, near the wall. She could easily sag backward against that cool, comforting plaster and let it support her aching head. Her carpetbag felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. Her elbows hurt from carrying it.
Fournier, the end of the bed at his back, was so close she could smell sweat and wool and the remnants of lime shaving lotion. He said nothing, instead dropping their dinner on the coverlet and futilely brushing at the dust on his charcoal jacket. He further loosened his navy tie and tossed his hat onto the steamer trunk.
Lucilla wanted to touch him again; an impulse, she was sure, caused by the close quarters and the sudden safety and intimacy implied by a closed and locked door. She was afraid. It had nothing to do with him personally. She worked closely with men every day, but she had never wanted to edge her body closer to any of them. A thought sprang from the depths of her mind. “Where will you sleep?” she asked.
Fournier snorted and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Better to ask, where will you sleep. I believe women are equal to men, and if that is so, then I should not have to yield my comfort to yours. It is hardly my fault you did not have the foresight to retain lodging. Besides, I cannot fold myself into this small patch of floor, and I cannot sleep in the corridor.”
His tone was harsh, but he made sense, and there was no use arguing when she agreed with him. Beggars could not be choosers. Lucilla squeezed past him and set her bag atop his steamer trunk. “No, you can’t sleep in the corridor,” she said after a moment’s thought. “Any foreigner is at risk at the moment, and if that Polizist finds us…” She could not deny the hostility and suspicion she’d felt in the air, steadily intensifying over the past few days.
“Many Germans still hate the French. I imagine they will find an excuse to declare war on us soon, and they know all Frenchmen have served their time in the army,” he said. “Any one of us might be a soldier.”
“Or a spy. This would be a wonderful opportunity to spy, if only I knew what to look for.”
Fournier grinned, just as briefly and startlingly as before. He blew breath out his nose, and she decided he was nervous, too. She began to feel more kindly toward him. He said, “Perhaps we will spy on the kitchen later, if we grow weary of cheese and biscuits. There is a bath down the corridor. I will guard the door, if you will do the same for me.”
“I have nothing clean to wear,” Lucilla said. Thinking she would be leaving today, she’d sent her trunk ahead, and her carpetbag held only toiletries and a change of linen for emergencies. And, of course, broken glass. She supposed it didn’t matter so much, not really, but she felt as if more had been broken than her glassware.
Fournier ducked his head. “A shirt,” he suggested. As if in afterthought, he added, “I am quite tall enough for it to be decent. Pah! Though why we should be concerned with niceties eludes me. It is obvious we no longer live in a world that rewards us for cherishing such concerns.”
Lucilla had no answer for him, not when her shoes chafed, her bust bodice chafed and the collar of her suit jacket chafed worst of all. “Thank you,” she said. “Though perhaps you should bathe first. I don’t want to guard you wearing only your shirt.”
“You are very sensible,” Fournier said, sounding surprised. Belatedly, he added, “And gracious.” Lucilla very carefully did not respond with her true thoughts at his belated compliment, which were uncharitable. As he stripped off his jacket, she held up her skirts and hurdled the rucksack, to sit on the end of the bed. She didn’t want to leave this room barefoot, so she would have to wait longer for the pleasure of removing her half boots, but simply being off her feet was lovely, and she sighed in relief. She unpinned her hat and set it aside.
Fournier reached for the towel, and it was then she saw his shirtsleeve was torn and stained with blood. “You’re injured,” she said, in case he’d planned to hide it from her.
“I was not quick enough to evade all injury,” he said, draping the towel over that arm, concealing it. He rummaged in the rucksack and produced a shaving kit. “That was from a disagreement earlier this morning. It’s a small price to pay for having later punched a rude Polizist in a tender place. You may borrow my soap. We must share the towel.”
“Have you cleaned the wound?” she pressed. “I am trained as a nurse.” At his incredulous look, she added, “One must earn one’s living somehow.”
Fournier shook his head. “You study chemistry at the Institute and go home to wipe runny noses.”
“There aren’t so many places that will hire a woman chemist,” Lucilla said sharply. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, France being full of them. Or no, I’m sorry—those women are cooks, aren’t they?”
Fournier snatched away the towel and held out his arm to her. Deciding to accept this as a peace offering, Lucilla extracted his cuff link and carefully folded up his sleeve, revealing a strong, flat wrist that appeared and felt sound except for bruising. That would be painful enough, and likely worse tomorrow. She could not push the sleeve above his elbow, but the rip helped her to expose a long, bloody scrape, deep enough to hold street grit. The dirt on his jacket sleeve, she realized, had actually been blood. He must have hit the ground forcefully to rip through a layer of tweed as well as his shirt. Or had there been a knife involved? He hissed sharply when she probed the wound. “Your hands are not clean,” he snapped.
“They will be soon enough,” she remarked. “Come along to the bath. I’ll clean it for you properly. You’re lucky I carry a kit with me.”
Fournier smiled wryly. “If this is the first wound in a war, perhaps I can obtain compensation for your labors.”
“Monsieur Fournier—”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. For rescuing me.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, not looking at her. He hurried down the corridor.
Lucilla hadn’t dealt with so simple an injury in a long time, as she specialized in nursing surgical recoveries. She’d forgotten how finicky a job it was to pick bits of grit from a wound. Tweezers helped. Her patient cursed freely each time she touched him, but seemed content to hold still when she pinned his hand beneath her arm. She could feel its warmth on the side of her breast, even through her clothing. The pressure felt good. She almost wished she could shift his hand a bit higher. She flicked her eyes to his. “This is not an invitation, young man.”
He sighed. “A great pity, Mademoiselle Daglish.” She could not tell if he was joking. She’d heard Frenchmen could be importunate. In her experience, all men could be importunate; but some could choose not to be. Emotion washed over her at this thought, almost lost as she concentrated on his wound. She realized she felt disappointed. A man bent on seduction would have been a welcome distraction just now.
After she’d finished her ministrations, she leaned against the wall outside the bathroom, plotting routes out of Germany. She did not have a good map in her head or in her bag. If she had to walk, she would be in sore trouble. Perhaps she could beg a ride from some other refugee. She need only reach a neutral country, such as Holland or Belgium. Would the market be open, to purchase supplies? Would she be able to take anything with her?
Much as she preferred to stand on her own feet, it would help to have a male companion such as Fournier on the journey. Any companion would be an advantage, but a man’s presence often rendered the woman with him negligible to the view of other men, hiding her in plain sight in the established role of wife or dependent relative. A woman alone drew the attention of predators, and she felt sure predators would take advantage of the current chaos. It might be a very good thing indeed that she and Fournier had encountered one another. She would broach the topic with him in the morning.
He might refuse. It made more sense for them to escape together, but perhaps he wouldn’t see that. Could she persuade him in some way? She thought of seduction and laughed into her hand, flushing up to her hairline. Before her fiancé’s betrayal, all those years ago, she had definitely enjoyed being seduced.
When it was her turn for the bath, she almost wept when fresh hot water poured from the tap. She didn’t dare soak too long—she feared encountering other guests, even with Fournier’s protection—but she relished every moment of what the previous day had been a utilitarian activity. She had no idea when she might have a bath again. She might find herself walking to France before she could catch a boat home.
Fournier had given her his silk dressing gown as well as a clean white shirt. The shirt fell past her knees and the dressing gown, redolent of shaving soap and male skin, dragged the floor. She belted it to ankle length and cautiously stepped into the corridor. Fournier waited for her, leaning against the wall and scribbling in a notebook with a stub of pencil. Muffled voices emerged from other rooms, but she saw no one else. Perhaps everyone had gone to ground. She felt huddled inside her own mind, too tired right now to think and plan any longer. She envied Fournier, able to work even in the midst of dangerous upheaval.
Her mind circled back to the sleeping arrangements. She could share. She’d shared a bed with her little brother, Crispin, when he’d been small. Fournier would be no different. He scarcely seemed aware of her as a woman. She discounted the moment when she’d been working on his arm. He’d only been joking with her.
When they reached the room, she bolted the door. Having already placed a dry dressing on Fournier’s arm, she put away her first-aid kit, then slipped out of her borrowed dressing gown. Its dubious protection would be too hot and awkward to wear for sleeping. The air from the window felt a little cooler than earlier; the voices on the street less frequent, but more strident. She shivered when one basso voice abruptly yelled invective, of which she caught only one word: coward.
Fournier straightened from tucking away his shaving kit. He seemed about to speak, then looked to the side. Lucilla waved to the bed. “You first. If we’re to share, you needn’t be overly concerned about modesty.”
Fournier nodded once and stripped down to his combinations, which covered him from biceps to knees. He then knelt and reached into his rucksack once again. He produced a pistol and loaded it, quickly and efficiently. Lucilla had always avoided seeing Crispin handle his sidearm. She had never been so close to a deadly weapon before. Her heart went into her throat as he handled the gun, expecting it to go off at any moment. Fournier set it carefully on the upended steamer trunk before climbing into bed. “You can shoot?” he asked. “You could shoot a man?”
Slowly, numbly, Lucilla shook her head.
“If you must, aim for his body. Hold the gun with two hands. Squeeze the trigger, do not yank. Be gentle with it, and be prepared for it to—” He jerked his hand. “Do not let it fly from your grip. You have six shots.”
Lucilla wasn’t sure what to say. At last, she settled for “Thank you.”
“Let’s hope it will be of no consequence,” Fournier said. He turned to face the wall and tugged the bedding over his shoulder. Lucilla loosed her hair, switched off the electric light and climbed into bed beside him. She could not lie flat without touching him. She did not mind the brush of his warmth against her hip and shoulder, for she lay awake, nerves thrumming, staring up at the ceiling in the faint light from the window. Gradually, the street noise quieted, and she could hear Fournier’s steady breathing and the ticking of his wristwatch. She closed her eyes, but her heart raced and her leg muscles twitched as if they wanted to run. Where they touched, the heat spread and sank through her skin. She shifted restlessly.
At least an hour had passed when Fournier said in a low rumble, “You aren’t sleeping.”
“Nor are you,” Lucilla replied as softly as she could manage.
Fournier turned over. He threw his uninjured arm over her ribs and pulled her to him. “Closer,” he said. “If you please.”
His arm was like a hot brand. Lucilla could no longer deny that she wanted to touch him. She eased against his body. She would definitely never sleep now. Cautiously, she rested her hands on his arm, which now wrapped snugly around her, beneath her breasts.
“Better,” he pronounced. He nestled his face into her hair, which was still damp from the bath. She could feel his breath fluttering on her scalp, and it flushed her entire body. He murmured, “This is better still.”
She’d thought at first he’d meant to be seductive, but clearly she’d been wrong, for he made no further move. He was only comforting the dried-up spinster. It was crazed to feel disappointed that she was not being ravished. Still, the embrace was nice. More than nice. She pressed her back into his chest, heat soaking into her through two layers of thin cotton, sensation rushing out from even the slightest friction as they shifted against each other. She remembered the heat of a man’s body, sweat springing into being and melting skin to skin; she remembered from her few nights with the man who would later betray her. She had never been held so closely since, and until now the memory of how it had felt, the safety of it, had been tainted for her.
Patience, Lucilla, she told herself. You might taint this moment yet.
She closed her eyes and inhaled scent and warmth, hers and his mingled. A decorous woman would protest even this, given their dishabille. She had passed decorous simply by being in this hotel, in this room, in this bed. She closed her eyes and felt their hearts beating, concentrating on the sense of wellbeing that cocooned her, trying to sear it into her memory against future need. She didn’t dare move, for fear it would end.
Fournier’s voice caressed the inner tunnel of her ear. “This is permissible?”
“Yes,” she said. Her throat tightened. Foolish to want more. Foolish. She did not even know this man. This young man. Far too young for her.
“Is it polite among the English to ask if you have experience?”
Lucilla’s breath stopped as the world flipped. She should not have been surprised. The world had flipped more than once today already. She drew a deep breath. “I don’t think so,” she said. “That seems silly just now, doesn’t it?”
“Well?”
He sounded as impatient as if he had demanded coffee from a recalcitrant waiter. Lucilla laughed a little. He was clumsier than she in these matters. “I was engaged to be married, once. It ended badly, very badly. Yes, I am experienced.” She paused as a thought occurred to her. “And you?”
Fournier snorted, a ticklish sensation against her neck. “Somewhat.”
A delicious sense of freedom flooded her to her bones. Lucilla rubbed her hand along his arm where it lay against her. She liked its heat and the contrast of soft skin over firm muscle, and the friction of hair beneath her palm. He must have liked it, too, for he shifted a little closer to her. She wondered how his skin tasted. “Have you asked me this for a reason?”
“You are toying with me.”
“Teasing,” she corrected giddily. She lifted his arm to her mouth and kissed the back of his hand. It didn’t taste of anything in particular. She would need to taste some other spot, such as—her breath caught at the thought—the crease where his leg met his thigh. “I’ve never done this with a stranger. Or anyone, except the one.”
“I do not make a habit of seducing women,” Fournier said. “If that is what you wished to know. I have always wondered why numbers are considered to be a factor in these matters, if once is enough to be damning.” He paused, rubbing his nose against the back of her neck. Lucilla shivered at the odd but pleasurable sensation. “It was not my plan to seduce you when I brought you here.”
“Oh, surely not,” she said. “You were so gallant. Why, when you offered to share your towel, I declare, my heart was all aflutter.”
She couldn’t help herself; she began to laugh at the absurdity of it all, at the circumstances that had led her, a spinster chemist, to find herself nearly naked in a bed in Germany with a French scientist. She didn’t even know his field of specialization.
That thought sent her off again, and she laughed until her gut hurt. At some point, she gasped out a few words of explanation and Fournier laughed with her. Seemingly without transition, she was on her back and his face loomed above her. She lifted her hand and traced his mustache with her finger, then he was kissing her, first gentle brushing and nibbling, then deep kisses full of bristles and heat and wet swirling sensation, whirlpools sucking her down.
Lucilla clasped her hands behind his neck, stroking the close-cropped hair there, then tangling her fingers in the longer hair above and trying to drag him closer. Fournier pulled away from her mouth instead, and began nipping her throat, each scrape of his teeth like a lightning bolt across her skin and into her sex. He was working his way lower; she felt his fingers at her shirt buttons, slipping one free, then another. His hands circled her nipples and traced designs on the skin of her breasts before he settled in to suckle at her, the pulls of his mouth echoing in her womb. His right hand traveled slowly down her chest, then her belly, unbuttoning her shirt and smoothing the flesh beneath.
She turned to flame. She shifted desperately, lifting her hips to him, her hands roaming over his back, trying to feel every shift of muscle. This was better, so much better, than it had been with the despicable Clive. Already Fournier had spent more time pleasing her than her former fiancé. Of whom she had planned never to think again. She banished the fleeting thought of him easily, as she had an overwhelming distraction at hand and a hard, hot erection digging into her leg. She found the bottom of Fournier’s vest and worked it upward. His skin sang to her palms.
He sucked in a breath when she lightly scratched the small of his back with her nails. “More,” he demanded. She was willing to oblige him. She shoved his thin knitted vest higher on his back and dug her fingers into the straining muscles of his waist, then slid her hands lower, beneath the waist of his drawers, wrenching them down, glorying in his gasp and curse as his erection sprang free and slammed into her thigh. She gripped his buttocks firmly and yanked him to her, wanting his flesh melded to hers. He landed on his injured arm and made a sharp noise of pain. Before Lucilla could apologize, he stopped her words with a quick, hard kiss.
For a few moments, they lay together, panting, her hand circling in the soft hair on his chest. She swore she could feel his cock pulsing against her leg, straining to go higher and burrow deep within her body. Her thighs slid against each other, bathed in her own wetness. She shifted them apart, cradling his narrow hips, needing pressure against her sex more than she needed air to breathe.
Fournier abruptly sat up. “Prophylaxis,” he said, as if it were a swearword. His chest heaved, and he yanked his vest the rest of the way off, throwing it onto the floor. Lucilla’s hand, without her volition, floated toward the line of dark hair that bisected his belly, pointing the way to his cock.
She said, “I have prophylactics,” and stroked the silky-soft hair all the way down to the tangled, coarser hair of his sex. Fournier froze in place. She grasped his cock in her hand and dreamily stroked it in the ring of her thumb and forefinger. His skin there was the softest and most delicate skin in the world. With some effort, she summoned words to her lips. “I have condoms. In my medical kit. Sometimes they’re useful. As bribes. If you get one, and put it on, we can—”
Panting, Fournier said, “What?” She repeated herself. He said, “Let go. Let go or in moments we will be fucking. Without prophylaxis.”
Clive had never said the word, but that was what they had done. They had fucked. At least this stranger admitted to what they were doing. After Fournier tumbled off the bed and took a moment to finish removing his drawers, Lucilla might have found sanity or decorum. What use, though, were they? She wanted this, and she was old enough to choose for herself. She sat up and decisively stripped her shirt the rest of the way off. The breeze tickled her bare skin, and she shuddered, already needing his hands on her again.
“Fournier, hurry,” she said.
“Pascal,” he growled, then lifted a hand in triumph, holding a paper packet. “What is your name?”
“Lucilla,” she said.
He gave a little bow. “Good. We are introduced,” he said, snorting with laughter. After a moment he noted, “I fear you would enjoy this process too much,” and applied the condom himself before rejoining her on the bed.
She liked the way he’d laughed. Lucilla reached for him as he lay down on his side, butting her forehead into his chest and wrapping one arm firmly around his waist. He was breathing hard; she felt light-headed. “We’re going to do this, aren’t we? We’re really going to do this.”
Pascal said, “It’s my devout hope.” His hands shaped her shoulder blades, her spine, the upper curve of her buttocks as his hips eased against her, flinched away, then shifted toward her again. “It is wondrous. Inexplicable that this mere act can make one forget all else. Not merely a matter of biology. Truly it makes me believe in the physical existence of souls, for they must meet somehow when—you are a scientist. You understand these things, that is why I can say them to you.”
She’d heard Frenchmen were flatterers. She had to confess she liked being flattered—and the incongruity of his theorizing while naked and aroused. Lucilla cupped the head of his cock in her palm. He gasped, and said, “I…am sorry. I fear all the blood has left my brain.”
Lucilla chortled and pressed a kiss to his chest. “A philosopher!” She hesitated, then said, “I think it’s wondrous that our animal bodies can give us such pleasure, which I suppose is a form of transcendence.”
Pascal said, “Do you think the body matters, when it is the soul that is immortal?”
She stroked her free hand over his rib cage. “How can we separate ourselves from our bodies?” she asked. “Would anyone desire that?”
She did not think she had ever met a man who would have had such a conversation, especially with a woman. It made her belly shiver, to think of souls mingling like two chemicals in a beaker. What would be the end product? Apply heat, she thought. Distill.
She said, “I want you inside me. I don’t want to be alone.”
Pascal kissed her, groaning deep in his throat when she squeezed the length of his cock. Lucilla needed his weight on her, enveloping her. She turned onto her back and he followed, bracing himself above her with his injured arm. “Closer,” she said, spreading her thighs. Air tickled and cooled the hot folds of her sex, and she squirmed.
“Soon.” Streetlights limned his tousled hair, the prominent bridge of his nose, the long line of his jaw. He traced his hand down her cheek, her neck, her breast, her hip. He ran his fingers through her pubic hair and thumbed apart her folds, slicking his hand and circling with his thumb until he brushed her clitoris. Lucilla had gone rigid with anticipation, and now a cry escaped her. Her awareness spiraled inward, down and in, as his thumb circled and pressed, circled and pressed, until the whole area was so sensitized she thought she could come from a puff of air. She was moaning, she knew that because she had to gasp in a breath. Pascal pressed the heel of his hand into her mound, slow and steady, imprinting her with pleasure. She couldn’t breathe. She didn’t want to breathe and make this stop. It built, and built still more. She cramped with pangs of ecstasy, and then it overflowed, spilling out of her, jerking her helplessly in its wake.
All her strings had been cut. She lay gasping while Pascal kissed her forehead, then her mouth. She could feel him smiling. “In me,” she murmured. “We haven’t finished this experiment.”
She held him close as he guided his cock into her, both of them flinching at first from the intensity of the sensation. She laid her cheek against his chest, liking the slide of his flesh on her face as his cock pressed the walls of her vagina. She flung one arm over her head and he twined his fingers with hers as he thrust and withdrew. After a time, she found the strength to lift her hips to his, working with him toward climax. It all flowed into one sensation of lazy pleasure, an endless rocking and slapping like floating in the sea. She did not climax again, but she didn’t mind. It was too fascinating to concentrate on Pascal, the feel and sound and musky salt scent of him as he lost himself to physical pleasure.
At last, he growled, his fingers tightening on hers as his hips rapidly jerked. She felt his cock twitching within her and kissed his chest lingeringly until his crisis passed and he sagged onto her, panting. A few moments later, he kissed her, withdrew with a sigh and disposed of the condom. Lucilla snuggled into his arms when he turned back to her, drifting in a lake of well-being. Their skins were slick with sweat in the summer air, but lying still, the breeze began to cool them. Her eyelids drooped. From the limp weight of Pascal’s arm on her, he was already asleep.
After one of the worst days she could remember, and the most surprising evening, Lucilla slept the best sleep of her life, at least until an elbow dug painfully into her breast. She shoved Pascal’s arm away. His eyes opened and he blinked at her, dazed. “Quelle heure est-il?” he asked.
“Go back to sleep,” Lucilla mumbled. A loud noise from the street sent her bolt upright, clutching his forearm. “A gun?”
“Backfire, from an auto,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“I have had army training. I know the sound of a gun.” He turned to her and smoothed her hair away from her face. “You must not be afraid. It will obscure your thinking.”
“You aren’t afraid?” She thought he must be, given that he had embraced her in the night for comfort before he had done so for sex. She wished, now, that she had been brave enough to draw nearer to him. The mere act of joining together had strengthened her, soothing the near panic that had buzzed along her nerves like bees.
She sensed him smile. “Were I an English gentleman, I would say I wasn’t afraid. It would be a lie, of course.”
“No, it’s a way of pretending until the pretending feels real.” Lucilla grabbed his wrist and turned it to see his wristwatch in the light from the window. Three o’clock. “It will be light soon,” she said. “If there are no trains, I had thought we might find someone with a wagon who would be willing to take us closer to the border. Perhaps one of the men who brought deliveries to the Institute. They will recognize me, and I have some money.”
“If we can reach my colleague at the Institute, perhaps we can borrow his motorcar,” he said. “That is why I came here in the first place, to see him. Perhaps he will feel obligated.”
“You sound doubtful.” Lucilla drew up her knees and rested her chin on them.
Pascal turned to his side, facing her. “I was…dismayed, by Herr Doktor Professor Kauz. We had never met before last week, only corresponded. He requested I come here, insisted he must share a discovery of incalculable importance.”
“Kauz,” Lucilla said, remembering a paper-skinned old man with wild hair and a cane. “A biologist as well as a chemist, with a grant from the kaiser’s special fund. He was rude to me.” In truth, he’d said a woman who worked alongside men was no better than—she’d had to research the German word he’d used, which turned out to mean whore. From his vicious tone when he’d said it, and his frequent vituperative glances, she hadn’t been surprised by the meaning.
Pascal hesitated then said in a rush, “I did not like his laboratory. He used animals in ways that were cruel, even for science. He said I was soft, and all Frenchmen doubly so.”
“You study—”
“Everything,” he said, with no trace of arrogance that she could detect. “I have a special fondness for maths and engineering, but my work now, it is to find the new things in biology, on behalf of an agency in the government. Since I am paid for that, and I prefer to eat and provide a home for my cats, I cannot practice engineering as I would like. Though I find biology is something like engineering.”
“The new things?” Lucilla asked, still wrestling with the image of Pascal with pet cats.
“The things that will be of interest, that will reward further study. I report on these things to a board, and they decide who is to receive funding. I have met many…eccentrics, I suppose you would say, who believe their work is vital. None discomfited me like Herr Kauz.”
“He’s vicious,” she said without thinking.
Pascal stared at her for a moment, in silence, then he touched her leg, petting it idly. “Yes,” he said. “That is there, beneath the surface. Perhaps it is not a good idea to ask a favor of a man who is vicious, and who has a dislike of women and Frenchmen. But the others at the Institute do not know me, nor I them. I know where to find Kauz.”
“We can only try,” Lucilla said. “A motor would be much better than our other choices, and there are not many available in this town. He can only say no.”
“He could do far worse than that, I am sure,” Pascal said.
“It might be worth the risk,” she said. “He need not know I am involved.” She paused. “If I am.”
“You are certainly involved now,” Pascal said, sounding affronted. “I did not intend that we should fuck and part.”
“I might swoon, that is so romantic,” Lucilla said.
He glared at her. “I will see Herr Kauz alone. You will wait nearby. If he refuses us, then your plan will be next. Where will we begin?”
“I’ll speak to Frau Greifen, at the coffeehouse across the road from the Institute. She must know someone who would be willing to help us. I saw enough deliverymen lounging there and smoking, every afternoon. If anyone could tell us how we could obtain a motor, or a wagon, surely they would know.”
“Good,” Pascal said. “We should sleep now.”
Lucilla spoke before she could lose her courage. “I don’t think I can.” She cupped his cheek in her hand and brushed his mustache with the edge of her thumb. “Perhaps you would help me.”
He grinned. “And you, me.” He bore her down into the mattress.
INTERLUDE
CRISPIN DAGLISH LOOKED UP FROM THE STACK OF counterpoint exercises he was marking and froze. The new diction and deportment master held out a slip of yellow paper, a telegram. “Sorry, old chap,” he said. “Didn’t mean to read it.”
Crispin snatched the paper from his hand and scanned it, then blew out his breath. It was not about his missing sister, Lucilla, at all. His hand shaking with relief, he laid down his pen and stood. “I’ve been called up,” he said. “Could you let Miss Tremblay know, so she can take my classes? I’ve got to talk to the headmistress, then I’m to be on a train tomorrow morning.”
Diction and Deportment was extraordinarily beautiful, and the girls were already swooning over him in battalions, but Crispin had quickly and sadly discerned that he was selfcentered and not very bright. “We’re at war? With whom?”
“Not yet,” Crispin assured him. “Perhaps you could glance at a newspaper to learn more about what’s happening in Europe. Your girls might have questions. Particularly the German ones.”
At home, he spun his hat toward his bed, stripped off his suit jacket and tie, and unbuttoned his tweed waistcoat before ascending to the attic. He brought his trunk down and quickly threw together his kit. His uniforms had been laundered recently, and he regularly unpacked his pistol from its box for cleaning and oiling. Quickly, he polished his cap badge, which bore the device of a running wolf. All that was missing was his sister to give him a kiss goodbye.
He thought he would know if anything had happened to her, but confirmation of her safety would have been nice. Perhaps his company captain, Wilks, could put in a word for him with Whitehall or the German ambassadorial offices. Or he could make the journey himself. He’d met some of the other lieutenants in his battalion before, albeit briefly. He particularly remembered the charismatic redhead Noel Ashby. Also the band’s leader, Lieutenant Meyer, a handsome blueeyed blond whose regimentals were uncommonly finely tailored. He could ask Meyer to go with him to London, he thought, and blushed, then was promptly ashamed of himself for thinking what he’d been thinking while his sister was trapped in Germany.
He ought to be worrying about Lucilla, and of course he was, every minute, it had only been a silly fleeting thought.
Regardless, he would at least send a telegram to the British embassy in Berlin. No doubt they’d be inundated with similar pleas. He’d had a tutor at King’s, though, who might be able to help. Still pondering, he assembled a duffel and pronounced himself ready.
Ready for what, he wasn’t sure.
Chapter Two
LUCILLA WOKE WHEN PINK LIGHT BEAMED THROUGH the window. She was pinned beneath Pascal’s arm and one of his legs, her nose shoved into his shoulder. She’d had barely any sleep and had gotten quite a bit of unexpected exercise. Also, she was trapped in a country at war, with no easy way home. She felt better than she had in weeks. There was something to be said for meeting the body’s animal needs, when one wasn’t bound up with romance and love and guilt. And when the man one chose paid attention to her needs as well as his own.
Pascal snored very lightly. She drew one finger along the prominent bridge of his nose. He ought to have been producing quite a bit more sound, she thought, and smiled. She hadn’t expected to like him at all after their first meeting. Perhaps he’d blurred her mind with orgasms, because she felt deeply fond of him now, mixed with tender exasperation because she was awake and he was not.
She wanted to kiss him awake and entice him into one more coupling, one last time before they left this temporary haven. She was apparently more of a sensual being than she’d thought. After so many years with no sexual contact at all, once she’d had a taste of how good it could be, she wanted more and more. Perhaps she would become depraved and have to be analyzed. She grinned, then her grin faded. They had no more time for indulgence. She had better accept that their idyll had ended.
Outside, wagons rattled along the street. She couldn’t hear any movement within the hotel, at least not in their corridor. They both needed another bath before they set out. Reluctantly, she set to waking Pascal.
An hour later, the sun was fully up, and she was struggling back into her walking suit from the day before. She was cleaner than the suit, but she had washed her underthings, and they had dried overnight, or mostly dried in the case of her bust bodice. Pascal cautiously slipped into a clean shirt; his entire forearm had turned black with bruising overnight. He was lucky he hadn’t fractured the bone.
“Let me help you,” she said.
Pascal swore. Lucilla ignored this and buttoned the shirt for him. “The aspirin will help. Give it time.”
He murmured a foul word in French and reached for his jacket, a clean and undamaged one he’d extracted from the steamer trunk. “Can you drive a motorcar?”
“Luckily for both of us, yes.”
A slow smile stole across his face. “You are a paragon among women.”
Lucilla patted his shoulder and handed him his hat. “Where does Herr Kauz live? In the town, I hope.”
“It’s not far.”
Pascal carried the pistol in his jacket pocket, his uninjured hand tucked in on top of it. She’d suggested a sling for his other arm but he’d said it would be too conspicuous. He’d abandoned his trunk and stuffed a few items into his rucksack. Lucilla carried her carpetbag, with his rucksack slung over her back. Herr Kauz lived only two streets over from the Institute, in a brick house that looked far more pleasant than its owner, with fat red flowers growing in pots to either side of the front door. A plump woman in a servant’s uniform pinned wet trousers to a line in the side garden. Lucilla could see the motor, an open two-seater model, parked just beyond.
“Wait here,” Pascal said, stopping in the shade of an elm. It overhung the corner of a neighboring house’s front garden, and would provide good concealment.
Lucilla desperately wanted to go with him, not because she felt it wise, but because she felt more exposed standing in the street than she had the night before in their bed. She set her carpetbag on the grass and crossed her arms, to prevent herself from reaching for him. She was a middle-aged woman who had traveled to a foreign country to perform research, not a green girl who couldn’t let her lover out of her sight. “Go,” she said.
She watched as Pascal strode off down the street. He followed a neat brick path to Kauz’s door and rapped the knocker. She could not see who answered, but he was admitted. She bent and fiddled with the hooks on her shoes, feeling excessively visible again. She was sure many pairs of eyes burned through her back and could sense lace curtains being twitched aside all along the street.
She amused herself by imagining explanations for her presence. She was Pascal’s mother, and he the illegitimate son of Kauz. She was a spy. She had been sent by the German government to check their readiness to deal with foreign spies. She was selling scientific glassware, door to door. She watched Kauz’s housekeeper finish with the laundry, pick up a basket and go inside by a rear door, letting it slam behind her. Lucilla stared at the motor, thinking.
Pascal emerged. He did not turn toward the side garden, but walked quickly toward her, his shoulders rigid. He ducked behind the tree’s trunk and swore.
“Stay calm,” Lucilla said. She picked up her bag and handed him his rucksack. “The servant went inside. We’ll walk to the motor now. There’s no crank, it must have a self-starter.”
“He refused.”
“Then we commandeer his vehicle. Isn’t that the word? You know how to start the engine, don’t you? I can do it if you don’t know how.”
Pascal only hesitated a moment before seizing her arm and walking back toward Kauz’s home.
“Not too quickly,” Lucilla murmured. “We must behave as if we have every right.”
“He will hear the engine.”
“There’s a clear path from his garden to the street. We must be quick. Do you know where he is in the house?”
“He returned to his library.”
Laughter gurgled in the upper region of Lucilla’s chest as she ducked beneath damp shirttails fluttering in the summer breeze. Pascal pushed his way through a sheet. She would never have dared this on her own, would never have entertained such desperate measures had the night not changed her entire idea of herself. She would never have imagined that stealing a motor could be such a thrill.
She laid her carpetbag gently in the rumble seat, took Pascal’s rucksack and laid it in, as well. Pascal quietly opened the door; he fiddled with the spark and throttle levers while she arranged herself to block him from view and kept a wary eye out. He looked at her beneath his arm. “When the engine catches, be ready. You must drive.”
Lucilla nodded and gathered her skirts into her hands. The engine roared and Pascal threw himself onto the seat, sliding across. She followed, remembering to release the hand brake before she slammed the door and sent the motor into high gear. She hadn’t driven in over a year. “It’s like cycling,” she said to herself, turning onto the street. Behind them, she heard banging doors and shouting. She gave the motor more petrol, and soon the shouting faded. It was satisfying to drive faster than Kauz could run. She hoped he’d seen her. He could add thief to whore, she thought with savage glee.
The Institute’s gates were still shut. As they neared the more populous areas of the town, she tried to look as if the motor belonged to her. Surely someone would recognize it. But if they did, they were too concerned with their own business to take note of who occupied the seat. They passed the train station’s brick facade. The shaded porch was even more crowded than the day before, and there was no sign of trains. She glanced at Pascal, who slouched in the seat next to her, cradling his arm. “Do you have a map?”
He shrugged. “In my head.”
They motored past the town’s medieval walls and were suddenly surrounded by countryside. The summery smell of grain blew in Lucilla’s face. She would have to see if Kauz kept goggles in the glove box. For now, her hat would have to serve as protection. “Can you get us to France?”
“If no one shoots us, and we do not run out of petrol.”
“I’d forgotten about petrol,” she admitted. “It’s a pity motors can’t eat grass.”
“Perhaps in the next town they will be willing to sell us some.”
“I’ll be helpless,” Lucilla decided. “My children are waiting for me.”
“You have children?” Pascal asked abruptly.
“Not a one, but I’ll pretend if necessary. You?”
“Of course not! I am not married.”
Lucilla laughed. Unless she had amnesia about the event, he was not married to her, but that had not stopped him from making love to her for most of the night.
He seemed to hear her thoughts. “That was different!”
Lucilla continued to laugh. He sounded younger with every protest. At last she said, “I’m laughing in relief, I think.”
“We aren’t safe yet.”
“We’ll proceed one step at a time,” she said, thinking of chemistry experiments.
“Perhaps if we run out of petrol, we can sell the motor and buy a cart,” he said.
“That’s a good plan.”
“I would sell this motor now for coffee and croissants.”
Lucilla’s stomach growled in agreement. “I forgot about that sort of fuel, too.”
“You were fed by criminal instinct,” Pascal suggested. She glanced at him, and he was grinning. “This could be easier if you stayed in France. With me.”
Excitement leaped in her chest. She took a deep breath. “In the middle of a war.”
“England will soon declare war. This may have happened already. We did not see the papers, as we did not have coffee and croissants.”
Her empty stomach fluttered, and she felt short of breath. “I have to go home. My brother, Crispin, is a reservist. He might be called up. If there’s fighting, they’ll need nurses.”
“You could nurse for France, if you desired. Or you could work as a chemist.”
“I’m sure France would look on that as kindly as England does,” she said. “I already don’t like being a foreigner alone among foreigners in a country at war, and that’s how it would be for me.” When he said nothing, she added, “If I don’t return now, I might not get the chance later. I don’t want to be away from my family in a crisis.”
“They cannot endure this crisis without you?”
“It’s not a matter of—think of sheep huddling together.”
“You are not a sheep. Not in the least.”
“I am also not young and idealistic, like you,” she said. “I would love to stay with you a bit longer, to see what might happen, but I can’t. I have to go home. I feel I owe a duty toward my country.” Also, she feared Pascal did not truly mean what he said, not deep in his heart. He might think he did, after their enjoyable sexual encounters, but she doubted he could have formed serious feelings for her in so short a time.
Pascal didn’t speak for several kilometers. At last he said, “There’s a sign. Perhaps we can find coffee in that town. That would immeasurably improve the quality of this day.”
As Lucilla had suspected, croissants were not on offer in the village of Grobschmiedensberg, but she was able to obtain sausages, cheese, fresh bread, a thermos of strong coffee, and bottled beer and lemonade for a reasonable sum. Two cans of petrol cost an exorbitant price, but she was glad for it, having no idea how much remained in the motor’s tank, and how much petrol would be required for the distance they must travel. The hazards of being an auto thief, she supposed. Three kilometers down the road, she stopped the motor and they ate ravenously, in silence.
Lucilla offered the last of the coffee to Pascal. He shook his head, so she drank it herself and shook the drops into the road. “Will you tell me about Herr Kauz?”
“Why do you wish to know?” Pascal looked wary. Even earlier, in the midst of danger, she hadn’t seen that expression on his face.
“It’s a long way to the border.” He knew about her work—it was common knowledge that she experimented with pharmaceuticals to alleviate pain—but she knew little about his. Before she had to leave him, she wanted to know more of this man with whom she’d shared her body.
Pascal leaned over the seat back, rummaged in his rucksack one-handed, and emerged with a crumpled wax-paper packet. Lucilla tidied away the remains of their breakfast and tucked the brown paper parcels in among the beer and lemonade, so the bottles wouldn’t clink together. When she settled back in her seat, Pascal pressed a small piece of chocolate between her lips.
Sweetness blossomed on her tongue, mingling with the saltiness of his fingertips. She suckled the tip of his thumb, closed her eyes and swept out her tongue, caressing its length. He cursed softly and kissed her, crushing their hats together.
Desire drenched her entire body. For a few moments, she didn’t care that the motor sat beside an open field, many kilometers from safety. The sun heated her blood, and Pascal’s hand on her cheek was even hotter. She dislodged his hat and grabbed the back of his head, holding him to her with a desperation she’d buried until this moment.
He pulled his mouth away and thudded his forehead to hers. His breath puffed unsteadily against her face. “Pardon,” he said.
“Bugger,” Lucilla said. She loosened her hands in his hair and let them drift down to his shoulders, stroking him absently as she tried to bring herself under control instead of nuzzling into his chest and tasting him with lips and tongue. She pulled away and clenched her hands in her lap, staring down at her whitened knuckles. Her desires fought her, and she had a difficult time remembering why she could not set them free. “I will miss you when this is over.”
He reached for her again, then let his hand fall. “I will help you to get home,” he said. “I have cousins who work in Le Havre.”
“Thank you,” she said. For the first time in years, she wanted to weep.
“We should go,” he said.
Lucilla started the engine and released the hand brake. She concentrated on the road for several minutes, then said, “Tell me about Herr Kauz.”
The noise of the motor and the wind necessitated he face her as he spoke. Lucilla focused on the road ahead rather than risk glancing at him. What did she think she would see in his eyes, anyway? They were brown. That was all. Her own were the same, and just as subject to bits of blown grit. She had sand in her eyes now. Her own fault, because she had not looked for Kauz’s goggles. She blinked furiously.
Pascal said, “Kauz first wrote to me over a year ago.”
“Why?” She swallowed, and gave the motor a bit more petrol.
“Long before I was born, he was married to my great-aunt.”
In some families, like her own, a connection by marriage could be a close one, but Pascal’s tone said otherwise. Lucilla looked away from the road for a moment, at Pascal. His expression was blank. She sensed some family trouble there. “You didn’t know him well.”
“At all,” Pascal said. “My great-aunt never returned from Germany. She died shortly after her marriage. She bore no children. It was forever after a source of grief for my grandoncle, Erard, who was her brother.”
“Kauz presumed upon his distant relationship with you?”
“To try and obtain funds, yes. My superiors found items of interest in his work and thought I would be the best candidate to extract further information from him.”
“Unpublished items of interest, I assume,” Lucilla said. She cast her mind back to the library at Somerville and the welcoming odor of old books. She remembered pursuing strings of letters through a series of journals, trying to discover if any of the writers thought or felt as she did, back when she still imagined she had hope of a permanent academic position, somewhere other than a school for girls. The shifting rivalries and alliances had fascinated her. She’d corresponded with a few fellow chemists, never revealing her gender, but it was difficult to explain why she held no position, and never attended conferences. She had not wanted to lie and pretend to be infirm.
“Yes. He is very secretive—it is rumored he has other laboratories than those at the Institute and at his home, where he pursues bizarre interests in isolation from the scientific community. His public work is often privately funded, and no one knows how much remains unpublished. For instance, his work with the body’s healing mechanisms ran parallel to that of an English biologist I knew from Cambridge, and there were hints of great advances he did not fully reveal. Also, disturbing implications about how the body could be harmed.”
“What college at Cambridge?” she asked.
“Trinity.” He paused. “My English is more respectable than my French.”
She’d barely heard him speak his own language. She nodded. “So why did you come to Germany? What did he promise you?”
Pascal said, “You should understand, not all of the scientists with whom I speak are conventional. I am used to being told strange things. I didn’t know when I traveled here what Kauz wished to reveal to me, though I had my suspicions. He gave only hints.”
“Stop hedging,” she said, annoyed. “I want the story.” She risked a glance at his face, and was surprised by how disconcerted, almost fearful, he appeared. He looked away quickly. His next words were almost lost in the roar of the motor and the rush of the wind.
“Very well, I will tell you. Kauz claimed he had met a woman who could transform her body into that of a wolf.”
“You mean a werewolf?”
His jaw dropped. “You don’t sound surprised.”
“If it weren’t odd, you wouldn’t be embarrassed to tell me about it,” she pointed out. “I think such legends are interesting. My father used to terrify us with lurid tales of beasts who would eat us at the full moon. Well, lurid enough for children. I imagine Kauz’s imagination outdid my father’s. For instance, that he made his werewolf a woman. That doesn’t surprise me at all.” He’d acted as so virulent a misogynist, could perversion be far behind?
“The scope of Kauz’s imaginings is impressive.” His tone was flat.
“I take it you didn’t believe him.” Pascal didn’t reply immediately. Lucilla glanced over. He was glaring at the innocent cows whom they were passing. “You did believe him,” she said.
“I did not disbelieve. There are more things in heaven and earth,” he growled.
“That’s true,” she said. “But?”
“He had no evidence, no photographs or film.”
“Or a werewolf.”
“No, not one of those, either,” he confirmed with a hint of humor. “Though perhaps I should be grateful he did not present me with a corpse. Wolf or human.”
Lucilla shuddered. “What evidence did he show you? He must have had something. You seem like a practical sort of chap.” Except when blathering about human souls in the midst of sex, but she could forgive him that. “Did he have samples, of blood or fur?”
“No, only quantities of figures,” he said. “Weights of the woman and of the woman-as-wolf. Lengths of time to shift from one to the other, and back again. A detailed description of the process, which was not limited to the full moon as legend suggests. An analysis of nutritional needs, and lack thereof.” He paused. “Length of time to heal injuries. As woman and as wolf, and if the change from one form to the other took place while injured. Clean cuts, ragged cuts, cuts from a silver blade, bruises to soft tissue. Broken bones.”
“I like Kauz less and less. That’s monstrous.” Electrifying a dead frog was nothing compared to deliberately injuring an intelligent creature. One was science, the other cruelty.
“His laboratory notebooks read as if he’d held a werewolf captive for months. The records did not appear to have been faked—he’d written them over a long period of time. His results were consistent with physical possibility. However, he could not produce this werewolf, though he repeatedly hinted that he would do so once he was sure he could trust me. But I do not think that day would ever have come. His werewolf may have existed only in his fevered mind. I am not sure if I am grateful or not, that he could produce nothing to support his statements. Then, I cannot help but worry that his captive was real, and that he might have killed her. As he kills his laboratory animals once they have served his purpose.”
She glanced away from the road and saw Pascal looking back at her, his expression troubled. “Perhaps she escaped,” Lucilla suggested.
“Perhaps,” he said. “To survive so long, she must have been—be resilient.”
Lucilla said, “I don’t think anyone at the Institute knew of this.”
“No. Perhaps I should have spoken of it to the trustees, but I didn’t think they would take my word, a visitor and a foreigner, over his. I was preparing to visit him again, to see if I could gather more evidence. Then I heard that war had been declared. I am now obligated to return to France.”
She drove for another kilometer in silence. Neither of them could do anything now about a situation that might be at least partly illusory. Best to distance herself from the troubling implications and concentrate on the most fascinating part of Pascal’s revelations. “Both species are mammals,” she said. “I wonder how different they are? Humans and wolves?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” Pascal said. “Do you think it possible?”
“Perhaps the wolf form isn’t a true wolf. Perhaps it only looks like one. On the inside, it could be more human. It’s an interesting exercise. Though I wonder how the change would initiate? Would the werewolf trigger a chemical reaction in her own body? It’s a bizarre idea, but possible, I suppose.”
“Like the duck-billed platypus.”
Lucilla cast him a glance. He was smiling. She said, “If it could turn into a duck, as well.”
“Have you ever traveled to the Antipodes?”
Lucilla considered his change of subject. She didn’t want to talk about Kauz anymore, either. “Alas, no. You?”
“Once, with my grand-oncle Erard, who worked on a merchant ship. I was eleven. It was the greatest adventure of my life.”
His tone sounded affectionate in a way she hadn’t heard before. “Tell me about it, and him,” Lucilla said.
“Perhaps later. First you will tell me how you became interested in chemistry,” Pascal said.
“Done,” she said.
INTERLUDE
LIEUTENANT GABRIEL MEYER WAS IN THE MIDST of testing his boy trumpeters on their fingering exercises when his fellow lieutenant and closest friend, Noel Ashby, entered the band room. Ashby, a lean man with cropped red hair and a slender mustache, leaned against a cabinet and crossed his legs at the ankles, outwardly casual, but Gabriel could read the tension in his normally relaxed posture, and he tensed, as well. Kern fumbled a pattern and stopped.
With a glance, Gabriel silenced the comment about to erupt from Wiley’s mouth. Wiley was inclined to rivalry. “No, keep on with it,” he said to Kern gently. “If you stop, you might stop there the next time, and make a habit of it.”
“Sir,” Kern squeaked, and lifted his trumpet again, aiming it at the regimental wolf banner that hung behind Gabriel’s chair. This time, he played more slowly, but accurately.
“Good,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you two run along. I hear there’s cake for tea.”
When the boys had gone, Noel ambled over to Gabriel’s podium and leaned on his wooden music stand. “Reserves have been called up,” he said.
Gabriel rubbed his mustache with his forefinger. “So it’s happened then.”
“Soon,” Noel said. “I came here because we’re to be in the same company.”
“The same—you mean, the band—”
Noel gripped his forearm and gave it a shake. “I’m sorry. When it comes to war, your boys are to be trained as regimental stretcher bearers. There won’t be any band for you to lead.”
“Bloody hell.” Gabriel bowed his head, reeling from having his musicians snatched away from him. They’d be scattered across the regiment. Some of them weren’t old enough for active duty, and would have to be left behind. Kern and Wiley would be someone else’s responsibility now.
His stomach plummeted as another thought occurred. “Jemima,” he said. “She won’t be pleased.”
“Now’s a good time to break it off, then,” Noel said.
Without rancor, Gabriel said, “You’d marry to have children, too. You’ve said it a thousand times.”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t marry Jemima.”
“She’s Jewish,” Gabriel said with a shrug. “You know I can’t marry a Gentile. Not unless I never want to hear the end of it.”
“You don’t really care about that,” Noel said.
Gabriel wasn’t up to resurrecting an old argument. “I’ll run down to the office and telephone her.”
Noel sighed, and cuffed his shoulder. “Good luck. I’m thinking I’d rather be shot at.”
Chapter Three
THE REST OF THE DAY’S DRIVE FELT LIKE AN OUTING. Lucilla had rarely had the opportunity to speak at such length, and with such freedom, to another scientist. She didn’t think she ever had done, except once or twice at university with older alumnae, as her own crowd all studied literature or languages. The next village appeared, but the motor had plenty of petrol, and she and Pascal had plenty of food. They ate their tea while sitting on the grass, seen only by a few birds gleaning seeds from the roadside. She doffed her hat and let the afternoon sun glow on her face. Bees buzzed in the hedge.
Pascal drew an astonishingly detailed map in one of his notebooks, his lines strong and sure. Lucilla peered over his shoulder, noting that they would need to drive through the night. When he’d finished drawing, he tore the page free. “Take this, and keep it safe,” he said.
Their fingers touched as she accepted the map. “Do you have an eidetic memory?” she asked.
“For some things,” he said. “Why do you wish to know?”
“You needn’t snap,” she said. “I was only curious. It’s a useful talent.”
Pascal took her hand again, and kissed the back. “I am sorry. I tell no one.”
“I won’t tell anyone, either.” It was a strange thing to be embarrassed about, but he was entitled to his secrets. She did not reclaim her hand, and soon he clasped it to his thigh, interlacing their fingers. She asked, “Have you told anyone before?”
“My mother knew,” he said. “My father does not. He would tell the government.”
Enlightenment struck. “I see. You would make a most excellent spy.”
He smiled grimly. “I would make a terrible spy. I am not…diplomatic. Also, I doubt I could withstand torture, or die with patriotic dignity. I wish to do neither of those things. I am not a brave man. I want to live.”
Lucilla tightened her fingers on his. In a rush of boldness, she said, “Kiss me.”
Pascal studied her, then took off his hat. “Come and sit across my legs.”
“Striving for efficiency?” Lucilla knelt, leaned over and kissed his mouth, awkwardly and sideways. Thoughtfully, she teased the corner of his mouth with her tongue. “Mind your arm,” she said before climbing into his lap.
His uninjured arm closed around her so tightly that the boning of her bust bodice dug into her flesh. She hooked her arms around his neck and yanked his face to hers. The heat and slickness inside his mouth forcibly reminded her of how his cock had felt inside her, each slide hot and sweet. She shifted restlessly as their tongues darted and tangled. She dug her fingers into the back of his neck, then her nails, and he groaned and pulled away. “Off,” he said.
Disentangling herself reluctantly, Lucilla sighed. “Of course we must stop. We’re right beside the—”
She landed on her back in the fresh grass. “Road,” he said. “We’ll have to hurry.” He shoved up her skirt, having to unfasten both sides to do so. It wasn’t cut for such unconventional activity.
“Pascal!”
“You wear too many underthings,” he said, flipping up her petticoat. He swooped down and kissed her through her drawers.
She couldn’t get her breath. He hadn’t done this the night before. His fingers shaped and massaged her thighs while he slowly and deliberately rasped his mustache against the cambric covering her sex. The hair on her arms prickled. He nuzzled deeper, and hot velvety sensation flooded over her rear and belly. “Christ almighty,” she choked out.
He lifted his head. “Did I hurt you?”
She stared at him, dazed. She licked her swollen lips. “You don’t have to hurry too much,” she said. “If we drive through the night, this…this might be…”
“It will not be the last time.” Pascal bent and firmly kissed her thigh. “I will go to England and find you.”
“What if you’re killed?”
“What if you are? Don’t fret about that now. Have you no romance in your soul? You English,” he said, fumbling with the drawstring of her drawers.
“It isn’t romantic to be ravished beside a country lane?” Lucilla asked.
“Bees, flowers, I suppose so,” he admitted. “Touch me.”
She couldn’t reach much of him, so tangled her fingers in his hair. She didn’t let go even when lifting up so he could drag off her drawers and her awkward skirt. Her petticoat made for admirable protection from the grass, which she quickly forgot about as his rough cheek brushed her thigh. He spread the lips of her sex with his fingers, and for a moment the air on her wet skin was like a chill up her spine. Then his hot breath gusted over her, and his tongue pressed her open with a long lick. She arched into his mouth, her eyes fluttering closed. Delicately, he searched out each fold and traced its path while she twitched in pleasure. She’d never experienced such a light, slick, exact touch; it was as if he found thousands of nerves too hidden for fingers to discover, nerves that tingled and sparked deep inside her belly and sent electrical currents coursing through her arms and legs.
Her belly twisted, coiling her ever tighter. “More,” she said at last. “Please, Pascal. More.”
He shifted her leg, and to her shock lifted her knee over his shoulder. A brief awkwardness, and he did the same with her left leg, wrapping his injured arm lightly around her thigh. She felt splayed open, yet secure because he held her. She tightened her calves against his back and he sighed before bending to kiss her again, his tongue flicking inside her with unbearable intimacy and lapping at each fold of flesh as if it were her mouth. Her body throbbed ceaselessly, and she writhed in his grip, panting for breath. She moaned when he slipped the very tip of his finger into her opening, the sound a momentary relief of the pressure building inside her, until his finger slid deeper and she was forced to moan again. She couldn’t think. “Please,” she said. “I can’t—”
“Harder?” he asked.
“Yes—deeper—”
He slid two fingers inside her, massaging his thumb over her sensitized flesh and, after a moment, closing his mouth over her clitoris and sucking, a bolt of feeling that speared her to the ground. Her back arched; she both craved and winced away from the intensity of his fingers thrusting within her, his lips pulling at her. A brief climax shuddered over her skin without giving her relief. Her body continued to fight toward pleasure until she let her mouth open and screamed, short and satisfying.
Pascal froze and withdrew. “You aren’t hurt?”
Lucilla panted. “Needed air,” she said. “More.”
Lubriciously, his fingers slid into her again, reaching up and in, rotating on withdrawal. He laid his cheek against her thigh, watching his hand move, his expression intent upon her. Lucilla watched his face until she had to close her eyes from the intimacy of it. She laid her head back on the grass and drew deep breaths. The pressure inside built inexorably now, as if her first climax had been only the first road sign on the way to fulfillment. She could feel the tightening within her beginning again, from a different place than before. “It’s so good,” she said, then moaned when he touched his mouth to her again. “Pascal—”
He didn’t withdraw this time, suckling harder, thrusting faster with his fingers. Lucilla lost count of how many times her skin shuddered, flutters of climax teasing her toward some unknown peak. When she crested, at first she expected another small spasm, but it built and built, and then the heavens ripped open and golden sunlight spilled through her and over her, racking her with pleasure in its wake.
She fell into sleep almost immediately after, aware of Pascal kissing her mouth, covering her with her skirt and easing his jacket beneath her head, then no more. She woke, and it was dusk. A dog howled, then another and another, like a pack of foxhounds baying—she realized that was what had woken her. She blinked at the emerging stars, too few as yet to pick out the summer constellations. Pascal was watching her.
“You needed to sleep,” he said, his tone brusque. His finger gently traced the shape of her upper lip. “I don’t think we should stop again.”
Lucilla lifted her arm, which seemed to weigh ten stone, and closed her fingers over Pascal’s wrist. “I will miss you,” she said.
He leaned down and kissed her, a quick hard pressure. Then he took her hand and helped her to her feet. They didn’t speak as they stowed the remains of their meal, lit the motor’s lamps and set out again.
INTERLUDE
IN THE UNDERGROUND LABORATORY, TANNEKEN did not change form, so as she had expected, her wounds took three days to heal. She no longer regarded the pain. She refused to think of it. She had long ago given up imagining herself free; now she imagined the hot salt of the old man’s blood coursing across her tongue. She ran pattern after pattern in her head that might lead her to this goal.
During those three days, the old man did not come to the room where she lay on concrete, beneath a bare bulb. Neither did either of the men in uniform, who stank of tobacco. This was unusual, but not unheard of. She would much rather forgo food than suffer their odoriferous presence.
On the third day, she began to wonder if their absence was part of some new test. She paid more attention to the sounds of the laboratory, dim and muffled by this room’s thick walls: water in pipes, the roar of a generator for electricity, the occasional distant rumble of a train rushing over her head. Nothing else. The motorcar did not arrive or depart.
When she’d been in the room with cages, she’d heard wolves whine or growl, but could not smell them to discern whether they were like her or true wolves, or perhaps even dogs. Sometimes she’d seen them, the gleam of their eyes across a room as they watched her, and heard their breath, but the stench of the laboratory blurred all scents, even her own, and she could not identify them at all. Perhaps they were merely dogs. They did not seem large enough to be wolves.
Their presence now, whatever they were, would have been welcome as a diversion as the third day moved into a fourth. Had the old man taken them elsewhere? Was she to be left here to die? Surely he would not waste the opportunity to see how long it took for her to die from his torture.
She was hungry, and glad she had become accustomed to rationing her water. If not for that necessity, she could have gone into her wolf mind and ignored the dull passage of time, but then she would have no water, and though she could live for a few more days without food, water was another matter. She’d been wise not to change form. Her weak human body could not last so long.
On the fifth day, she found a new corner to pace, then lay with her head on her paws, drowsing. It was difficult to remember how long she had been in this room. She had not been entirely conscious when dumped here. Perhaps it had been longer than she thought. She might not have drunk water each day. She might have been forgotten here—
Above, she heard a shallow roar. Not the motorcar, but perhaps a motorbike? She’d heard this one before, or one very like it. It heralded the taller of the uniformed guards, who held her down after she had been drugged, and broke her bones upon request. That one often brought food.
She rose slowly and stretched, careful to loosen each muscle. She might have one chance. The guard might not know she had been alone so long. He might not know that she was fully recovered from her injuries. She might, this time, be able to escape.
She always thought these things, and was always driven back from the door by the old man and his electrical prod. This time he was not there. She had not heard him or his motorcar in days. She stalked over to the door, her legs weak from lack of exercise and hunger, and leaned against the concrete wall, trying to ignore its pervasive chemical stench. She waited.
The door opened, tobacco and wool and engine oil. She sprang. A gun went off. Her teeth met in flesh. Blood spilled into her mouth. She thrashed. The gun went off again, spitting bits of concrete over them. He was down! She released her bite and breathed in his face. He stared back, trapped, eyes wide, lost in terror. Good. Let him see what it was like.
She trotted out of the room, following his distinctive scent through twisting corridors. The fool had left open a door leading to the surface. She ran.
Chapter Four
THE MOTOR RUMBLED IN THE SILENCE OF A RURAL night. Lucilla wished she’d saved some of the coffee from earlier. To her relief, Pascal eventually asked, “Do you know your primes?”
“Choose something more difficult,” she said. “That won’t keep me awake, it’s only recitation.”
He thought for a moment. “What is the pattern? Eighteen, fifty, one hundred fourteen, two hundred forty-two.”
Lucilla pondered as she drove. Working backward, she arrived at the solution. “N plus seven multiplied by two. Another.”
“Create one for me,” Pascal said. They passed an hour in this fashion, their patterns growing quickly more complex as they tried to outdo each other, laughing and cursing when they failed. After an hour, they switched to word games, which became games of association and thus reminiscences.
“We lived on the outskirts of London, so we could play outside. When I was small, I liked playing with boys more than with girls. Dolls bored me, unless I could send them flying from trees or floating downstream on a raft. I played with Anthony, who lived in the house next door. My brother, Crispin, was too small, really, but he followed Tony everywhere, and me, as well, and I liked having a follower. He was the sweetest little boy.”
“I didn’t like other children,” Pascal said. “They never wanted to speak of interesting things, only run about like a pack of rabid, howling animals.”
“I doubt they appreciated being called rabid,” Lucilla noted with some humor. “I assume you did not restrain yourself?”
“No, I did not,” he said. “Tact is foreign to me. It’s a waste of time. We have so little on this earth.”
“So how did you amuse yourself?”
“My grand-oncle Erard, the one who took me to the Antipodes, taught me accounting, and navigation, and a number of card games. He was a most satisfactory companion,” Pascal said, and when she glanced at him, he was looking at her. “It’s always pleasant to meet someone agreeable.”
Lucilla refrained from pointing out that if he made himself agreeable to more people, this might happen more often. She was beginning to understand his priorities, and to wish she could share his indifference to societal rules of politeness. A woman didn’t have as much freedom in these matters as a man, but she could think of some cases in which she might have been better off to say what she thought. In the future, she decided, she would do better. She said, “When Anthony grew up, he married our neighbor, Lizzy.”
“Should I be sorry that he married her and not you? You would not be here if he had. Or would he have allowed his wife to travel abroad to study derivatives of phenacetin? If not for those things, I might still be negotiating for a way home to France, instead of motoring along with a woman of considerable intellectual attainments.”
Intellectual attainments, and willing to have sex with him, as well, Lucilla thought, amused. “You can be insufferably smug when you’re right,” she said. “My life would have been very different had I married Tony. He and I grew apart when he became interested in girls, as I apparently was not one.” She could not imagine ever allowing Tony to kiss her as intimately as Pascal had done. Perhaps unfamiliarity had some advantages. One did not know what to expect, so one was more open to new things.
Pascal said, “I scorned girls long past the point of most boys.”
“You must have had a change of heart at some point.”
“I will tell you, if you wish to hear.”
In the easy intimacy of the long dark ride, it was easy to say “I do want to know.” She paused. “I’d rather not speak of my broken engagement, if that’s all right with you.”
A brief pause. “My curiosity was so obvious?”
Lucilla admitted, “I don’t want to spoil this by thinking of him. In fact, I don’t think I shall think of him ever again.”
“Will you think of me, instead?”
“I will,” she said. Pascal would be difficult to forget. “Now, tell me of your amorous adventures.”
He hesitated. “I have never spoken of this to anyone else. You understand?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Very well. My father worked at shipbuilding, and my grandfather, as well. We lived near the docks. I saw prostitutes ply their trade, and at home we children slept in an open loft above my parents’ bed, where we could hear what went on. I saw no mystery in sexual congress.”
For all his English education, he’d grown up among the working class. Lucilla found it didn’t matter to her. “My upbringing was very different,” Lucilla said, though it was obvious he did not need her to tell him this. It was the best she could say to acknowledge their differences. “My mother would have summoned up the wherewithal to give me the basics if I’d gone through with my marriage, I suppose, but I had to go to all sorts of lengths to find out what I wanted to know.” She paused as an idea slid into place in her mind, like a puzzle piece. “Women are easier to control if they are not allowed to know their own desires.” After pondering this for a moment, she asked, “Did you know your desires?”
“I felt desire, but it caused me to be angry with myself. I had thought I was different from other males,” Pascal said ruefully. “It was a sad day for me when I found myself loitering for a glimpse of women’s ankles. I was not prepossessing. I was healthy enough, but very small until I reached my seventeenth year. Like a plucked chicken.” Lucilla laughed at this image. He would not yet have grown into his nose. He continued, “I had no idea how I should speak to women, or how to entice them into an alliance.”
“Surely you’d seen others courting.” In her world, once one reached a certain age, courting had taken up ninety percent of everyone’s energy.
“Their conversations had no point, and even seemed duplicitous at times, as surely no one could truly believe all the things men said to women, and vice versa. I watched, and eventually deciphered the language of their bodies, which was often quite different from their spoken language. Communication on both levels was required. Mastering both was the solution. I then experimented.”
“With some success?”
“None at all.”
Lucilla laughed. “I was expecting the triumph of the scientific method.”
“I continued to have faith in it for some time, though my academic studies took more and more of my time once I began to prepare for university and work toward various scholarships,” he admitted. “I had given up when a woman chose to seduce me, just before I left for Cambridge.”
He fell silent for a moment, drinking from his bottle of lemonade.
Lucilla said, “Will you tell me what it was like?”
“How would you like me to tell you?” He spoke quietly, barely loud enough to be heard over the rumble of the engine.
Lucilla swallowed. She kept her eyes on the packed dirt of the road, winding away before the motor’s lamps. “Tell me as if we were lying together. After.” She pictured it in her mind, their bodies close and warm, the sound of their breathing, the scent of their effort lying on their skins, and shuddered inside.
She heard him take a deep breath. “I was sixteen.”
“So young!”
“Ancient, compared to my compatriots in the neighborhood. One could have a prostitute for a single coin, if one were not afraid of one’s mother finding out.”
“Who was the woman?”
“The widow Jacques. She owned her late husband’s bakery. She was not so old, but had been a widow as long as I could remember—perhaps ten years or more. She had no children. I recall my oncle Marius wasted a year in courting her at one time, but she did not wish for a partner in her business.”
“Her name?” Lucilla felt this was important.
“Marie-Beatrice. I did not call her this, you understand. I was not so brave.”
Lucilla wanted to know more; she wanted to know everything about how Pascal’s experience had differed from hers. Women weren’t supposed to want to know these things, but if she did know—it felt as vital to her now, to know his experience, as when she had learned the first workings of chemistry. “How did she—”
“She was a woman much to be admired. One afternoon, I had extra francs from my grand-oncle. I was hungry—I was always hungry, no matter how much I ate, or how often—and as I walked past her shop, I smelled the bread baking. I went inside, but no one was there to sell me bread. So I slipped past the counter and went in search of her in the kitchen.”
“What did she look like?” Lucilla asked.
Pascal offered her the bottle of warm lemonade, and she drank, one-handed, as she drove, then handed the bottle back. Their fingers brushed. He said, “She was very small, even compared to my height then, but with a prodigious bosom.” He added wryly, “You understand that this was of the greatest interest to me.”
So far as Lucilla had been able to determine, his interest was for all parts of the female body, but perhaps he’d been less catholic in his tastes as a young man. “Was she alone?” she asked.
“Yes.” Pascal paused, as if remembering. “She stood behind a table that was dusted with flour. She wore an apron, decorated with flowers, and a cap over her hair, of the same fabric. She didn’t wear these things in the front of the bakery. It is hard to explain. It was as if I saw her in a negligee, to see her in these items that she wore for baking in her own place, where none saw her.”
“I understand,” Lucilla said, remembering the first time she’d seen a man other than her father or brother in shirtsleeves.
“She asked after my studies, and told me that she herself had left her home in Picardy to marry Monsieur Jacques when she was just sixteen, and she had never regretted this decision. She did not think I would regret it, either.”
“Did you?”
“No. She was the first person who had told me this. All my family, they left France to travel, but they always returned home, to the same two streets. I did not plan to return there, and to this day I never have, except to visit. You went away, to Somerville College?”
She didn’t want to talk about herself just now. “I did,” Lucilla said. “My father thought I would meet a man and marry before I’d been there a year. Tell me what happened next.”
“She asked me for help in removing her apron. The knot was too tight.”
“You believed her?”
“I did,” Pascal said. “I did not see myself as she did. I went to help her.” He paused. “She smelled of baking bread. Her nape was bare. I wanted to lean closer and lick it, perhaps even bite. I could see myself bent over her. I had never had such a desire before. I had to look away, but I could still smell her. When I touched the knot of her apron, I also touched her skin. It was hot and damp, from the heat of the ovens. As I untied the knot, I could not help but touch her with my fingertips, again and again.”
Caught up in the story, Lucilla was surprised to find that his description aroused her; whether the cause was imagining herself as Marie-Beatrice, or putting herself in Pascal’s place, or both, she didn’t know. “Did she touch you?”
“She removed her cap. Her hair fell onto my hands and across my wrists. It smelled of bread and vanilla. Then I did lean closer, and she told me I could go home if I wished.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. I realized her intent as soon as she released her hair. I asked her why she had chosen me.”
Lucilla had guessed. “Because you were leaving.”
“Yes.”
When he didn’t continue, she asked, “How did she—”
“She lived above the bakery. She closed for the afternoon, and took me up the stairs, to her bedroom. The drapes were drawn, but sun beamed through gaps and laid bars of light on her bed. It was the largest bed I had ever seen, with many pillows.”
Lucilla’s pulse beat between her thighs. She was not Marie- Beatrice; she was Pascal, about to experience the hot wet pain of sexual congress for the first time. Her throat felt thick. “Were you ready?”
Pascal snorted. “In those days, there was no time when I was not ready. Or I thought I was. I sat on the bed, and I grew harder still while she undressed me. She explained that she did not want this encounter to be over too quickly, as we would not have the opportunity for another. I agreed, of course. She took off my cap and ran her fingers through my hair, as my mother and sisters had sometimes done, but her touch was utterly different. It went through me like electricity.”
“I would like to undress you,” Lucilla said.
“I will permit that, when time allows,” he said with some humor. “The widow Jacques, she undressed me down to the skin and laid my clothing on a chair. I had never considered before what happened to one’s clothing, as the couples I had seen all wore their clothing while coupling. When she bent to tuck my boots beneath, I could see into her dress.”
“Did you undress her?”
“No. She stood before me and disrobed. Her corset unhooked in the front and she—” He swallowed. “Beneath it, she was bountiful. She did not wear drawers beneath her shift. I thought I would choke for lack of air, when I realized I could see the hair on her cunt through the cloth. I had never before had a close view of the hidden places of a woman’s body, and I felt balanced above a fall into some great understanding. She touched her breasts, stroking her nipples. She told me she liked to have them suckled gently, and that later she would like me to take her from behind, as that was the best for her.”
Pictures flashed through Lucilla’s mind, and she nearly lost control of the motor. “Pascal,” she said, her voice shaking. “We need to stop soon. I need you to fuck me one last time.”
He drew a long breath. “Perhaps we could stop now. It need not be the last time.”
If only that could be true. Lucilla drew a matching breath, remembering where they were. “I would prefer to be safely in France first. Finish your story.”
“After asking me to fuck you, you still wish me to tell you of Marie-Beatrice Jacques?”
“Yes.”
“It’s difficult to think of her when I would rather think of sinking between your soft thighs.”
Lucilla’s heart pounded in her ears. “Finish the story.”
Pascal breathed deeply again. “Very well. We stood beside her bed and I explored her body through her shift. She explained that she liked the fabric to rub against her skin.”
“Especially when your skin is damp,” Lucilla said. She felt strangled, though she was breathing deeply; her nipples had drawn tight, and rubbed painfully against her bust bodice.
“I suckled her nipples and also her cunt, then she removed her shift. Her skin was like cream, except on her breasts, where the skin had stretched and left shiny lines. I licked each one, trying to forget my cock, but this was difficult, you understand.”
“No doubt. What did she do for you?”
“She held my shoulders or arms, but that was all. I think if she had done more, I would have spent myself immediately.”
She would have done more, had she been in the widow’s place. She wouldn’t have been able to restrain herself from stroking every inch of him, for wasn’t that part of the pleasure? The freedom to touch as one willed? Perhaps for Madame Jacques, the freedom had been in allowing another to borrow the control she held over her body. “And then?”
“When she was ready for me to fuck her, she knelt on the bed with pillows to support her, and I knelt behind her. I rubbed myself along her back and on her rear, which was soft as a pillow, and could easily have done nothing else, but she spread her thighs and cried out for me to fuck her. It was…”
“Powerful,” Lucilla said, imagining that she could order someone else’s pleasure.
“Yes. But as soon as I was inside her, I felt an obliteration of the self, of the self that thinks. It was not only my cock that she squeezed inside her passage, but my whole being, shrunk into one fine point. It was extraordinary. All-consuming.” He paused. “Is it like this for you?”
Lucilla had to think to understand the question he’d asked. He’d been honest with her, so she would do her best to be so with him. “It’s like…holding my breath, and reaching, and…No. That doesn’t explain it.” She swallowed. “There’s wetness, and tension, and it’s close, so very close…I’m no good at explaining this.”
If there were a formula, perhaps, and a predictable outcome. A protocol of physical actions leading to replicable results, easily described in terms of weight and color and viscosity. It ought to work that way, if the world were just. But she knew it didn’t. Though her first experiences with sex had only felt more than physical at the beginning, her later solitary experiments had been harder to quantify and more varied in result. And what she’d shared with Pascal had been different than that; she hadn’t always been aware of herself, or of her own body, in her fascination with him and his. Yet at the same time she felt fulfilled. Happy. Why? Did her body need sex, like a vitamin? If that was it, why was sex better with Pascal than alone? She shouldn’t notice a difference. She drove another kilometer in silence.
Pascal interrupted her thoughts. “Perhaps next time, I will ask you what you feel at the appropriate moment.”
“If I can form sentences, you’re welcome to try.” She took a deep breath. “What happened next? With Madame Jacques.”
The motor purred. “It progressed in the usual way,” he said.
Lucilla cast him a glance. “That’s vague. I thought you remembered everything.”
“I don’t think I can speak on this anymore, unless my hands are on you,” Pascal said.
Her stomach twisted a little, as if hungry for him. “Finish the story, at least.”
“The smell of baking bread is, to this day, a reminder.”
“So if I brought you a baguette, you would—” Imagining the lewd appearance of a baguette, Lucilla began to laugh. Pascal joined her. To her surprise, the rest of their journey, all through the night, became a blur of laughter and shared memories, but now only memories of safe things, such as her childhood experiments with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, and his first dish of ice cream, which had been strawberry.
She told him of when she’d been a girl, and imagined that she could easily dress in boys’ clothes and run off to have adventures, just like the boys in the illustrated stories that Tony and Crispin pored over. She’d had to read those stories in secret, sneaking them into the garden shed to avoid her mother’s lecturing on what was appropriate for a young girl and, at much greater length, what was not. “But now,” she said with great satisfaction, “I am on an adventure of my own.”
“Am I required to be your assistant in this endeavor? Or may I be the intrepid scientist?”
Lucilla grinned at him and deftly swerved around a hole in the road. “I stole the motor. I think you’d better be the girl. Only no swooning, I beg you.”
“Only if you ravish me at the end,” he said hopefully.
INTERLUDE
BOB HAILEY’S SISTER WAS NOT IMPRESSED WHEN told the regiment was mustering.
“You can’t leave,” Agnes said. “The water closet’s got a leak. It makes a terrible drip all night, and keeps Mother awake.”
“I’ll have a look before I go,” Bob said. “Captain Wilks is expecting me early.”
“You care more about that old man than about your own family!”
“It’s my duty.”
“We’re your duty! And what do you think will become of us if you get sent who-knows-where to be killed?”
“Haven’t I done enough already? You’ll get my pay, same as you’ve been getting,” Bob said. “I’ve asked Mrs. Tollis upstairs to look in every few days. She’s happy to do it.”
“She doesn’t care two pins for me, she just likes to gossip with Mother.”
“You’re able to take care of yourself,” Bob said. “You had a factory job before I went into the service. If you need to, you can do it again.”
“And then who’ll take care of Mother, I ask you? She can’t stay by herself any longer, and you know it. Yet I don’t see you here but once in a fortnight.”
Agnes was convinced the army was like a holiday camp, enlisted in for the adventure of it, much as their father had signed on with the merchant marine. Though of course he’d never been seen again.
“If I’m killed, will you still blame me for not mending the leaks?” Bob asked wearily. “I’m off.” To my other life.
Chapter Five
LUCILLA DID NOT REALIZE THEY HAD CROSSED the border into France until she stopped the motor so they could relieve themselves. The night sounded unusually quiet; she’d grown used to the motor’s vibration and the mournful baying of dogs, and she stood for a moment, listening to the engine tick. She heard Pascal’s returning footsteps, then a curse. He’d stumbled into a stone milepost. She backed the motor enough for the headlamps to illuminate it. The distance it marked was worn illegible, but it sheltered a gaily painted plaster Madonna, her feet pinning at least twenty scraps of paper, their penciled prayers inscribed in French. Lucilla was tempted to leave an offering of her own, she was so glad to be free of Germany, but at the same time, she realized her journey’s end would mean the end of her affair with Pascal. She restrained herself from snarling at the statue’s serenely smiling face.
She stepped out of the headlamps’ glare and said, “If we keep going, we might find a village in time for coffee and croissants.”
“We could stop here and rest,” Pascal said.
“And sleep on the ground with no blankets? If we push on, we might find a nice, comfortable bed.”
The wavering headlamp turned Pascal’s grin more devilish than he might have intended.
“I intend to have a good day’s sleep, at least!”
“I intend to make sure of it,” he said. “Come. You’re right. This road should lead us toward Verdun and Reims. There will be towns along the way if we run out of petrol.”
Lucilla planned never to forget that dawn, pink and orange like a dish of sweets, the light gently washing over fields of summer hay. She glanced at Pascal to share it with him, but in the few moments since they’d last spoken, he’d fallen asleep.
She yawned, and considered pulling to the side of the road for a small nap herself, but she wanted a bed. More than that, she wanted one last time to make love with Pascal, so the sooner they reached a place where she could have that wish, the better.
This adventure was drawing to an end. She could feel it like a doom advancing. They would be separated, by her own choice before it could be his, and she would go home, and if England went to war, she would go, as well, who knew where—she might be sent anywhere. For all she knew, she would be sent back to Germany—that would be ironic. And Pascal had been in the army, like all Frenchmen. He would not be able to escape some form of service, no matter how he felt about it. And he could easily be killed, or be wounded or so changed by a war that he would forget about her completely. And that would be that. She would spend the rest of her life alone.
She berated herself for being melodramatic. It would matter to her if he were killed, but so far as her life went, it would not matter, as she knew already she would not see him again. Clinging together in the midst of chaos was no solid basis for anything long-lasting. He was a young man, with a future ahead of him, whereas she was already past forty and had no wish for children or housewifery. If she planned, hoped, to see him again, she would be building castles in the air, as she had when she’d envisioned marriage with Clive, long and comfortable and filled with hours of quiet study, when she should have known what he really wanted was a helpmeet and someone to bear his children. He’d only wanted an educated wife so he could show her off to his fellow dons as she served them tea.
She had even less idea of what Pascal wanted. She’d only known him for…she was too tired to calculate the hours, and too dispirited to think on the future any longer. Oh, for a thermos of coffee. And now they were in France. She could really have croissants, with thick creamy butter and clots of strawberry jam.
Pascal woke when she slowed the motor on the outskirts of a sizable town. He squinted at the sunlight and growled in French. His stubbled face and shadowed eyes made him look particularly villainous and bad-tempered. Lucilla grinned because she felt much the same. “We’ll have coffee soon.”
“And a bath,” he said, scrubbing at his face with one hand. “And a bed. If such are to be had.”
They soon discovered that hotel lodging was difficult to come by here, as well, but a concierge directed them to a lodging house that still had a few rooms. Posing as a married couple, by afternoon they were ensconced in a large attic room, a bit warm from the sunlight that poured through a skylight, but clean and smelling of lavender and old wood, and enlivened by bouquets of bright poppies. Best of all, there was a shower, the prettiest Lucilla had ever seen, with brass fittings on three walls in the shape of lily blossoms, and tiled in green-and-white patterns like lacework.
Lucilla was nearly asleep in a borrowed linen nightgown when Pascal returned from his shower. He didn’t speak, but smoothed his hand over her wet hair, and stroked her face. She murmured, pleased, and reached her arms for him. He went into her embrace, tucking her close against him, before he said, “Lucilla. Please wake up.”
She blinked, her hand lazily curling on his shoulder. “Be quick about it.”
“The German army has crossed into Belgium. Your country and mine are now both at war with Germany and Austria.”
Lucilla closed her eyes again. She might not have forgiven him, had he spared her this news. They had little time left together now. She didn’t want to waste it in sleep. “Kiss me. And help me remove this gown.”
They woke in the wee hours of the morning and coupled once more, in a feverish and sweaty tangle of limbs that, in her fatigued haze, felt like a dream, even when their bodies struck together with enough force to shake the heavy iron bedstead. It was the sort of dream that is brighter and more vivid than reality, and that upon waking is so engraved in memory that it feels as if it were real. If only it were a dream, then she would not suffer the inevitable grief of their parting. Lucilla clamped her thighs on Pascal’s hips and locked her arms about his torso, hiding her face in his shoulder as she silently urged him on with her hips and fingernails; his fingers and cock, meanwhile, drove her higher and higher until she screamed her pleasure into his skin. After, he turned onto his side and kissed her for an interminable interval, his hands tracing over her skin as if to imprint her body on his perfect memory. They broke apart only to gasp for breath before joining their mouths again. Lucilla thought that was to be the end, but hadn’t reckoned with Pascal’s vigor. In a quarter of an hour, he rose to the occasion again, and this time she took him from above, silent and fierce and angry that this had to end.
It was less than an hour until dawn when she dragged herself from his arms and tugged him down the hall into the bathroom, luckily deserted at this hour. She inspected his injured arm once more, then pulled him into the shower with her, where they soberly soaped each other, and washed each other’s hair. When her gentle, soapy handling brought Pascal erect again, Lucilla backed him against the shower door and took his cock in her mouth. She’d never done such a thing before, but they had no condoms with them, and she feared, besides, that coupling would be unsafe on the slippery floor. He tasted of clean flesh and his cries, even muffled by his teeth in his arm, were the sounds of someone torn apart with pleasure. The hard pressure of his cock’s head against her palate reminded her of having him deeply inside her sex, except that she was more in control of this and could lick and scrape and tease and pull on his cock and scrotum to such an extent that his knees failed him and they sank to the floor of the shower in a heap.
They’d intended to leave at dawn, but her vision blurred with exhaustion. She wouldn’t allow Pascal to reciprocate the pleasure she’d given him when they returned to their room. Together they made up the bed with fresh sheets she’d found in a closet, and tumbled into an exhausted heap, her head pillowed on his chest.
She slept until the afternoon. This time, Pascal woke her with aromatic coffee and rolls and an omelette on a tray. Unshaven, wearing a severely crumpled shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and with his bruised arm all the colors of the rainbow, he still looked delicious enough to make her mouth water. She tasted raspberry jam on his lips.
“Café au lait,” he said, placing a cup into her hand. He ripped a roll apart and buttered it for her. “The trains are running. Not often, but perhaps the train would be better than the motorcar. We can get to Le Havre by way of Rouen.”
Lucilla swallowed coffee and closed her eyes for a moment, in bliss at the smooth sweet milkiness. “You don’t have to go with me,” she said. “I could leave from Brest, or Dieppe.”
“With a great deal more trouble, and knowing no one at those ports,” he said, putting down her roll and picking up another for himself. He paused, with the bread held in one long-fingered hand. “You don’t want my help?”
“I don’t want you to feel you have to take care of me,” she said.
“We have had this discussion before,” he noted. “We have fucked, and now you wish to part? Have you considered my faults and taken me in dislike? Because I know you aren’t in the least foolish, and I can think of no other reason. What is the point of, of rabbiting across France alone—”
“Haring off,” she said. “Not rabbiting. I can take care of myself.”
He flicked his hand dismissively. “You do not need to prove to me that you are capable of taking care of yourself. Truly, do you want me to go away?”
His jaw was tight, and his brows drawn. Lucilla remembered tracing her fingers along the lines of his eyebrows in the night. “No.” She looked down into her coffee cup.
“Good, then we will stop this pointless arguing. We go to Le Havre, and my oncle Marius will find a berth for you. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said, ripping apart his buttered roll and stuffing half of it into his mouth.
Lucilla drained her coffee and cut herself a bit of omelette. It was dense with soft cheese and thin ham and fine herbs. For the next several minutes, they ate in silence. When she emerged from her troubled thoughts and glanced at Pascal, he was watching her, his fork lax in his hand.
She said, “It’s very good of you to offer your help, and your family’s.”
“You are welcome,” he said. He poked at the omelette with his fork. “I am not at all gracious. I do this because I’m selfish. I wish you to be safe. I would be unhappy if you were not.”
Lucilla swallowed the lump in her throat. His gaze burned straight through her. “When does the train depart for Rouen?”
The posted train schedule was overly optimistic, but the trains were running. One had only to be patient amid the tense, unusually large crowds. They bought tickets and drank coffee at the station as the sun set. Lucilla bought a pack of cards from an enterprising vendor and taught Pascal to play All Fives while they sat crammed onto a bench near the departures board. The snap of their cards vanished in the noisy clack of numbers being constantly changed on the board and the low roar of hundreds of conversations.
On the crowded train, Pascal used his long legs to secure seats for both of them, and for all the ride to Rouen, though she’d intended to converse, Lucilla dozed with her head on his shoulder, waking only when he waved a sandwich beneath her nose sometime after midnight. The paper-thin slices of ham and dark mustard might as well have been paper, for all she tasted; the fizzy lemonade burned in her stomach, which was uneasy with nerves.
Pascal poked the crumpled sandwich paper into a pocket on the outside of his rucksack. “Sleep,” he said, his voice rough. “I will wake you at Le Havre.”
“It’s your turn to sleep,” she said. “I can play Patience.”
“I’m not tired,” he said. A moment passed, then he touched her cheek, tracing the shape of her cheekbone. Lucilla shivered. He said, sounding angry, “I would go with you if I could.”
“I know you must stay here.”
“I could leave. I have lived in England before.”
“You will go back to the army,” she said. “I understand that you must. Just as I will do what I must.”
Scowling, he turned his head toward the window. Lucilla slipped her arm into his and laced their fingers together, not caring if anyone saw. She would never see these people again. His hand tightened painfully. He did not speak again. Lucilla closed her eyes and fell into shallow, chaotic dreams.
Despite the early hour of their arrival, Le Havre was even more overwhelmed with travelers than the train station had been. She heard English spoken more than once, fragments carried to her on waves of the crowd’s ocean. Have the tickets?…Where’s Teddy? I told you to watch…leaves on the hour, but I don’t believe…what shall we do…hold the bags…
Lucilla was glad enough to cling to Pascal with one hand and to her carpetbag with the other. She was gladder still when he led her away from the mobbed station and through a series of small side streets to his uncle’s house, a white twostorycottage wedged tightly in a row of similar homes, each one featuring a different array of flowers in front. Pascal introduced her as a chemist and colleague, which garnered baffled looks from his uncle, aunt and three female cousins, but she was still offered kisses on both cheeks and fresh coffee and croissants and a chance to freshen up. She scrubbed her face and the back of her neck roughly with a cloth, hoping to wake up before she had to be polite to strangers.
Lucilla spoke French with some facility and understood it better, but their accents baffled her unless they spoke very slowly, so she smiled and nodded as often as she could. Pascal’s accent was the same, she noted, as he explained her needs to his uncle with a number of expressive hand gestures. His uncle departed soon after reassuring her that a berth would be easy to obtain, for him at least. Lucilla would have given him money for bribes, but he assured her it was not necessary; he was calling in favors.
Her lack of proper sleep had left her in a hazy, numb state. When one of the cousins took her by the arm and led her upstairs to a cramped loft, she was only barely aware of having her shoes unhooked for her as she drifted off to sleep, fully clothed and atop the coverlet.
“Lucilla,” Pascal said.
She patted the mattress next to her, but he wasn’t there. She rolled over and reached for him; he captured her hand and brought it to his lips. She shivered all through the center of her body, waking into a rush of sensual awareness. What was she to do without him?
He said, “You must get up. Your ship leaves in an hour.”
“What time is it?”
“Nearly six.” Pascal tugged, and she sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed in a tangle of crumpled skirt and petticoats. She spotted her stockings draped tidily over the fireplace screen, her shoes set beneath. “I’ll go with you to the dock,” he said in a tone that permitted no argument. “My aunt has made you sandwiches. She is sorry she could not brush out your clothing for you.”
“It’s too late for mere brushing to do any good. Please thank her for me,” Lucilla said. “I need to wash my face.”
Pascal bent and kissed her, briefly but not chastely. “Come downstairs when you’re ready to go.”
Lucilla barely had time to thank her hosts before, smiling, they bustled her and Pascal out the door. He walked quickly, this time carrying her carpetbag for her while she kept her hand around his biceps, careful not to stray toward his bruises, which he had not shown to his family.
“You’ll see your father, won’t you?” she asked.
“After you’ve gone,” he said. He led her past a boatbuilder’s shed and toward a row of ships, their railings crowded with passengers. “This one,” he said, and stopped at the foot of the gangway.
“Already,” she said, foolishly.
He set down her carpetbag, took off his hat and dug in his jacket pocket. He held up three wrapped chocolates, then slipped them into her skirt pocket with a stealthy caress. “I will find you when this war is ended.”
Lucilla tipped up her chin, trying to send her sudden impending tears back into her head. She wasn’t so brave when it came down to it. She wanted to fling herself into his arms and beg him never to leave her, like someone in a cheap novel. “I’ve enjoyed our time together. I’ll miss you.”
“Don’t speak as if you’ll never see me again.” Pascal ducked beneath her hat brim and kissed her, long and lusciously. Her knees turned to water, and she clutched at his jacket until he pulled away and slapped his hat back on his head. “Au revoir.”
“Goodbye,” she said. She picked up her carpetbag and turned away. All the long walk up the gangplank, she did not look back.
Chapter Six
ON THE FIFTH DAY AFTER HER ESCAPE FROM THE cage, the wolf decided she had finally outrun all pursuit. She stopped to lick at the dried blood on her wounded shoulder before she slept, to allow herself to heal. She waited for twilight that evening before she moved on, and did the same on many subsequent nights, covering perhaps twenty kilometers without ceasing her steady lope, unless she found water; then she would stop to drink and clean herself. Traveling as she did through fields of grain and vegetables, devouring field mice, only clean dirt clung to her pelage’s stiff hair, but she had become fastidious since her escape.
She not only swam in any suitable water she encountered, but rolled vigorously in sand or against rough rocks, whatever she could find. The stench of him lingered, no matter what she did, and to the wolf an illusory stink was as real as the ground beneath her paws. She took to scrubbing her muzzle in the grass when the taint overpowered her. That helped, or at least provided a distraction from her mother’s never-ceasing voice in her mind: “You must not attack a human. It’s forbidden. Forbidden. Forbidden.”
The weather grew steadily warmer and the days longer. The farther she ran, the more her mother’s voice faded, submerged in the wolf’s mundane concerns. The air of freedom smelled sweet as a fresh kill.
Only once did memory return. Weary of hunting mouthfuls of mouse, one evening she hunted hare, successfully predicting its zigzag dash and seizing its quivering body in her jaws. Blood spurted into her mouth, over her tongue, and it was a man’s blood flowing down, soaking her ruff as she gripped his hip in panic and anger, too weak and fearful to let go and rip instead at his tender belly. The shock of memory almost forced her to change. When she came back to herself, she found the hare’s mangled corpse lying at her feet, but could not summon any appetite for it. She left it for the smaller predators of the fields and went hungry that night, running until she forgot all but the raw-rubbed skin on the bottom of her paws.
After dawn each day, she denned in hedges or ditches, nuzzling her way beneath brush and leaves or whatever cover she could locate. This might have been easier with human hands, but she was reluctant to change, lest anyone see her. And…she did not want to see her human form again. Not yet. It didn’t matter that she bore no scars. That form was bizarre to her, unlikely, and, oddly, she felt as if it had betrayed her. Absurd, when as a human she was also herself; but as a wolf she had never cowered in quite the same way, or yielded to dominance. Her human form was small, pale, weak. It had nothing to offer her today, or tomorrow, or any day after that. Besides, when in wolf form, it was difficult to think too many days ahead. As far as she was concerned, she might remain on four legs forever. So long as she reached home, what did it matter which form she held? This one was as good as any other.
When the full moon came, she dared not run. She heard her mother’s voice again, sensed her mother’s human hands on her puppy fur as she gently told tales of the wolves who’d gone out in the light of the moon, been seen, and been killed.
“You must hide, little one. Hide when the light is too bright. We are only safe here, on our own lands.”
She denned on the edges of a forest, too skittish to go deeper into the dense, cagelike trees and too afraid to lie in the open without concealment. She tried to sleep the night through, to pass the time, but sleep came only in shallow snatches, her legs twitching as if to continue running, so she woke even more weary than she’d been before. At dawn, she found water, then fell truly asleep.
Perhaps her body sensed the trees close around her. She dreamed of being held immobile in a wooden chute, claws scrabbling frantically at the floor while bullets slammed into her haunches, bursts of numbness blossoming into hot, ripping agony. She snarled and yelped, trying to curl in on herself, but there was no refuge, and her blood slowly soaked through the layers of her golden pelage, her strangled whimpers of pain erupting into howls that wrenched and tore into human screams. In her dreams, the change was pain like snapping bones and she jolted into another place, another time. She heard her leg bone creak and twist and pop while she fought uselessly against crisscrossing, pinching leather straps, growling through her bound, bleeding muzzle, while her captor cursed her and smacked her nose, annoyed that she would not hold still. Across the room, the others watched and growled.
She could not bear to sleep among the trees after that endless night. She trusted cornfields, open and predictable, to hide her from view, but sometimes even the spaced green rows seemed to whisper behind her and close in over her head, leaving her no escape but a panicked burst of speed under the white light of the revealing moon.
She had traveled forever. One evening, when she’d slept next to a road, she woke to the stench of tobacco and man. The wise course would be to remain hidden. Instead, she sprang free of concealment and into the road, hackles raised.
He stopped. He spoke.
Her upper lip quivered and lifted, a growl tremoring forth from her belly. Run, she thought. If he ran, she would chase. If he ran, he would be prey. Rage and revulsion fought each other in her belly. She imagined hot blood gushing into her mouth and the slick tenderness of meat beneath his hide.
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