He couldn’t meet her eyes. Her frown deepened.
“Clearly, you have gotten nowhere. Clearly, you are not even trying,” she stated. “Reggie, this is important. You have to get that girl under your control. You have to win her; it’s imperative to have her your creature.”
“It’s damned hard to flatter someone who isn’t listening,” he muttered, casting a resentful glance at her from under long eyelashes that most women would sell their souls for. Though there seemed to be plenty of women who would sell their souls to have Reggie himself. Just—not the one that mattered, it seemed. “Furthermore,” he continued, “I should think it would make more sense for you to work on that curse of yours. After all, if the little wretch just dies, the problem will be solved.”
If she answered that, she’d be on the defensive—and it was always her policy to be on the offensive, not the defensive. She glared at him, the “it’s all your fault” look. “Try harder,” she ordered. “Put some imagination into it, instead of using all the tricks that work on girls with more sophistication. She might be intelligent, but she is not sophisticated. You might take her somewhere, show her some sight or other. From all I can tell, she never ventured out of that tiny village of hers—take her to Exeter for an excursion!”
Reggie groaned. “Damn, Mater, what the hell is there in Exeter worth looking at?”
“That’s not my business,” she told him, exasperated at his willful lack of imagination. “It’s yours. Find something. A conservatory. Theater—there has to be a music hall, at least. The shops—the cathedral—a concert. Even a pantomime is going to be something she’s never seen before!” Her eyes narrowed. “She’s spending every Wednesday and Friday at the vicarage, and I’m not entirely certain that it’s chess and piety that take her there. That vicar is young and single. Did it ever occur to you that he might be your rival for her affections?” She raised an eyebrow. “He certainly seems to be setting the hearts aflutter in the village.”
“A vicar?” To her great annoyance, Reggie snorted. “Not bloody likely! Not that vicar in particular—he looks like a bag of bones, and he’s all prunes and prisms. Miss Marina may be a bore, but I’ve never seen a bore yet that didn’t have repressed passions seething under the crust. No stick in a dog collar is going to be my rival for her.”
Arachne’s exasperation overflowed. Arrogance was one thing, but this—this was blind stupidity itself. “Then do something about those repressed passions! Rouse her somehow! Go take her slumming and tell her it’s the fashion to do so, I don’t care, as long as you impress her.”
“Yes, you do,” he said sullenly, his eyes smoldering with things he didn’t dare express, at least to her face. “If I were to take her slumming and she managed to slip away from me and back to those artists of hers, you’d have my hide.”
He was right about that, at least. “Yes,” she replied grimly. “I would. And don’t think that you can get out of this by helping her on her way, either. Don’t even give her the chance to acquire a single stamp. Because the moment she gets in communication with them, they’ll tell her enough about me—and you, by extension—that she won’t trust us. No matter how circumspect they are, they can still make the case that Alanna sent her away to hide her from me, and there were six witnesses there to back them up.”
“Even without talking about magic?” he asked skeptically.
“Especially without talking about magic. Elizabeth Hastings can turn black into white if she puts her mind to it, and all they have to do is send the girl to her. Then where will we be? Damn it, boy, all they have to do is smuggle her over to the Continent and hide her there until she’s twenty-one for her to have complete control of her property, unless you manage to get her married to you! Do you want her property or not?”
She did not want to consider what would happen with Marina on the Continent, and it wouldn’t take waiting until she was twenty-one, either. If the curse didn’t take effect by the time Marina was eighteen—and if Arachne herself was not in physical contact to nullify or even cancel it—it not only could backfire against the caster, it would. She had worked that much out, at least. Not that she was going to tell Reggie any of that. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t use for leverage against his mother. He was getting altogether too independent lately.
No, the blasted Tarrants wouldn’t have to hide the girl until she was twenty-one; the eighteenth birthday would suffice. Shuttling her around France in company with a gaggle of schoolgirls would do the trick—she’d never be able to find one schoolgirl tour among all the ones traipsing around Provence and Paris.
“I had intended,” she said smoothly, “to use the girls from the Exeter works to make the curse work again. I tried to do that. The accident put paid to that plan, rather thoroughly. They were too damaged; there wasn’t enough power in them. None of the others are strong enough or ripe enough, nor will they be for at least a year.”
Reggie shrugged, striving to look indifferent, and managing only to look arrogant. He was getting altogether too like his mother for her comfort. Altogether too like. Ambitious, manipulative, sly… “Do what you did to set the curse in the first place. Find me a sacrifice. The proper sort.”
“I’ve tried,” she admitted, nettled that she’d needed to admit anything. “A single virgin child of Master potential is difficult enough to obtain; it was only a fluke that I managed to get my hands on four and only because they were all from the same family! And if you had any notion how long I waited with that curse heavy on my hands, until Hugh got himself an heir—”
Now it was Reggie’s turn to frown, and his brows knitted in confusion. “Four? You shouldn’t need four, not for enough power to reinstate an existing curse. A single child should do, so long as it’s mage-born and virgin. His Infernal Majesty should—” At her dubious expression, his frown deepened, and he blinked, slowly, as if some entirely new thought had crossed his mind. “Mater, don’t you believe?”
He sounded—shocked. As shocked as any good Christian would have been to learn that she was a Satanist. Well, now it was coming out; her son, whom she had raised and trained to be her helper, had finally grasped the idea that his mother was a skeptic. How had he missed it? How had she raised a believer? “I have never seen anything to make me believe—or disbelieve,” she said reluctantly. “The rites give me power; that was all I have ever cared about. It’s power I take from the weaker creatures that I sacrifice, so far as I can tell, and not from any other source; what odd’s that? It’s still power, it works, and it gives me what I want. Belief doesn’t enter into it, nor does it need to.”
She’d have laughed at the expression on his face, if she hadn’t known that would make him turn against her. What a joke! To think that she, a skeptic above all else, had raised up a pious little Satanist! Could Satanists be pious? A true believer, at any rate, and she wondered how, as careful as she had been with him, she had missed the signs of it developing.
And how far had he gone down that road? Did he go so far as to keep a shrine to the Dark One in his room? Oh, probably not; of all the servants, only Mary Anne and his valet were aware of anything unusual in the household, and Mary Anne only because she had discovered Reggie’s secret when she first became his mistress. She had, in fact, been an actress, and a clever one at that—but not a good one. Good enough to get the secondary parts, but never the leads; graceful enough to ornament the stage, but nothing else. So she augmented her status and income with gentlemen, and she managed to snare Reggie. But she had plans, she did—plans for a comfortable old age, having seen far too many of her kind tottering around as street whores, without even a room to take a customer to. She was not satisfied with all the accompanying privileges and presents of being Reggie’s regular, for she wanted something more in order to keep her mouth shut. Clever girl; you couldn’t eat a dinner twice, if the man didn’t keep paying for your flat you had to find a way to pay for it yourself or be out in the street. Presents of flowers were worthless—presents of jewelry always pawned for less than they cost. She wasn’t in love with Reggie. It was entirely a mercenary relationship with nothing in it at all of affection.