It was only with great difficulty that he resisted the temptation to pay his old club a visit and wreak some kind of havoc inside. He would have enjoyed smashing a gilded mirror or two with his stick, knocking off old Rees-Mogg’s glasses or punching a hole in that portrait of Baden-Powell. Oh, how his hands itched!
The management had blackballed him a couple of years back, the moralizing morons. He couldn’t remember the reason for his expulsion. Well, he didn’t think much of them either. Smug, small-minded nincompoops, mostly rather inept, quite absurd, leading puzzled, barren lives – like children standing at a grave, searching futilely for the secret of life. He had no patience with them. Not worth his wrath, really.
The moment you learnt to speak, you dedicated your new faculty to unsettling or outraging people. That was what a tedious old uncle of his, long dead, had once told him. His French governess had babbled about his mauvaises habitudes. He had been the proverbial demon child. He remembered Deirdre, his late wife, telling him that he was evil in a rather old-fashioned kind of way, whatever that might mean.
No, he mustn’t do anything that would attract attention. They would most certainly try to arrest him if he did, which would be a bore. He mustn’t let the police take a close look at him. Or, rather, at Peter Quin. Which of course was the same thing. He kept forgetting.
There is no difference between continued affectation and reality. It was Congreve or someone who wrote that.
Yes. Quite.
He sat on a bench in Green Park, yawned prodigiously and stared before him for what seemed an age. He pushed his underlip out petulantly, always an ominous sign to those who knew him. His scowl deepened. He was bored. A dark despondency had him in its grip and he could see no future for the human race. He’d been hurl’d from th’ethereal sky, down to this bottomless perdition, here to dwell. Not in adamantine chains and penal fire, true, though that afforded him little consolation.
He hated being at a loose end. He felt like a shark out of water. He had an acute sense of anticlimax. He didn’t think anonymity suited his temperament. Despatching couriers with horns to clear the roads for his passage would have been more his style.
Gripping his silver-topped stick between his gloved hands, he thrashed at a pigeon. His mood then suddenly improved. He rose. Moments later he was back in Piccadilly, standing in front of a shop window, admiring his reflection. He reminded himself that he belonged to that stratospheric breed of men to whom the world was but a lump of clay, infinitely pliable to their wants and whims.
‘What I want,’ he mouthed at his reflection, ‘is a pair of wings. Black wings. They’ve got to be black.’
He found exactly the kind of wings he wanted half an hour later at a little shop in Covent Garden, which specialized in different kinds of theatrical paraphernalia. Black wings, something funereal about them, rather sinister, exactly as he had envisaged them.
‘Are these real feathers? I like the feel of feathers nearly as much as I like the feel of fur. I am going to wear ’em, you know,’ he said as he watched the young man place the wings inside a rectangular tulip-red box. ‘Soon.’
The shop assistant, accustomed to eccentric customers, gave a polite smile.
Looking round at the grinning masks on the shelves, he thought of the Grimaud. He hadn’t seen the arrival of the magnificent white hearse drawn by plumed horses, but the knowledge that it had been there was enough for him. He liked putting on a show even when he was not around to see it.
Purchasing the wings put him in a state of reckless excitement. He attempted to trip up a barbaric blob of a woman with his stick and stuck out his tongue at a little boy, then had a Cuba Libre with gin at the Criterion, which further raised his spirits, though he intensely disliked the girl who served him.
The silly creature was plump and she seemed to find the sight of him comical, for some reason. The flaming cheek of it! She had clapped her hand over her mouth.
He eyed her with a glare of indescribable malignancy, which only seemed to provide her with further amusement. His face turned the colour of raspberry jam. The impudent hussy clearly had no idea who he was; she couldn’t possibly know that his pedigree had been established in a direct line by genealogists from the year 65 of the Christian era and that he had been brought up in a house where most objects had at one time or other been owned or handled by a king or an emperor! He nearly complained to the management about her but decided against it. Fuss was so middle-class.
He would stay at Remnant a while. Not for too long, goodness, no. He would be bored. But he would stay long enough.
His thoughts turned to Clarissa. Clarissa was not plump. Far from it. Clarissa was imperially slender, with the delicious, delicate curves of a succubus fashioned in dreams…
I am a traveller in an arid desert, he thought, but there is an oasis in sight.
He would drive. He would rent a car. Apart from Clarissa, there would be no one else at Remnant. No servants. Not even Tradewell, who had always gazed at him with a rather pathetic expression of awed devotion on his face. He had instructed Clarissa to keep the place empty and she had done so.
He had felt an unaccustomed leaning towards caution. Was he getting old? He hated the idea of encroaching old age. The funny thing was that he didn’t feel he was sliding into his dotage. He felt energized, rejuvenated. He had started experiencing the kind of desires that had troubled him as young man…
The powder. The powder seemed to be working. Freshly aborted human foetuses. That was what the voodoo doctor had told him. Strange-looking fellow, jet-black, with peculiar orange-yellow eyes, like a cat’s, veined with purple, but he clearly knew what he was talking about.
He now felt drawn towards Remnant Castle as if by some magnetic force. He would start early tomorrow morning, some time after four.
The hour between the first lightening of the morning sky and sunrise was his most auspicious time, the voodoo fellow had told him. It was then that his energies were at their most vibrant and his aura most vividly coloured, apparently.
He rather liked the idea of arriving at a house submerged in murk, or as morning came to consciousness and light crept up between the shutters…
He would sneak in through a side door and go up the stairs, past the portraits of his savage, wily, fearless ancestors. He had no doubt his ancestors would have approved not only of what he had done, but also of what he was planning to do.
He was a true Remnant. His brother, on the other hand, was not. The fact that Gerard had turned up at La Sorcière on the night of the murder suggested little more than misguided bravado. A damned ineffectual chap, Gerard, like all bookish chaps. As a boy his brother had been potty about the Arthurian legend and perhaps he had seen himself as that flower of chivalry, Sir Lancelot, on a white warhorse, charging the Monster of Remnant, lance at the ready!
There had been a full moon that night and he had seen Gerard from his dressing-room window. Had Gerard travelled all the way to Grenadin intent on committing fratricide? Who could tell? If he had, he’d been too late!
Once more he looked into the near future and saw himself arriving at Remnant Castle, striding stealthily down the corridor towards Clarissa’s bedroom. Clarissa would be in her bed. She would still be sleeping. He would open her bedroom door – he’d be able to hear her breathing, perhaps he’d see the rising and falling of her bosom…
He experienced another surge of youthful energy.
The once-familiar flame. He might have swallowed a dose of ethyl chloride… Why, he hadn’t felt like that for years.