Page 14 of Master Wolf
No, he thought.You didn’t.
Marguerite sighed then and pushed her own plate aside. “Ah well, it no longer matters, does it? He has long since accepted that you are not destined to be together. That’s why I have not troubled you about him for a while. If that is how Lindsay feels, who am I to contradict him? He knows his own heart.”
It wasn’t a surprise—in fact, it was all of a piece with what Lindsay had said on that last night in Venice. Yet it felt like something new. A revelation even. A part of the puzzle of Lindsay Somerville that Drew had not understood till now. He hadn’t known, on that fateful night, how seriously Lindsay had meant his promise. He’d expected him to turn up, sooner or later. Maybe after a year, or two. But twelve years had passed with no contact at all, and wherever Drew went, Lindsay would make sure not to be there. Thinking about that made Drew’s heart seize like a clockwork mechanism wound too tight.
“I do not want to cause him unnecessary distress,” Drew said at last, his voice low. He had never wanted that. Well, not since the first days after his transformation, when he had, admittedly, been furiously angry and oddly grieved too, as though the man he had once been had died after all. Since then, though, he’d just wanted… to be free.
“I want you to free me. I want to stop craving you...”
Drew had caused Lindsay distress that night, no doubt. And on a score of other nights besides. A slave he might be, but he had never been entirely powerless, not as far as Lindsay was concerned. It was, however, a power he had never relished. In an odd way he hated his power almost as much as his powerlessness.
“Lindsay will be fine,” Marguerite said now. They were empty words, and they both knew it, but Marguerite had that determined look on her face that Drew had come to recognise over the years. The set look of a leader who had made up her mind and was not to be shifted.
“He will understand,” she added curtly. “For now, our priority must be our mission: we are there to retrieve the skeleton and to keep our eyes open while we are about it. It will soon be done and then you may return to your life in London, where you will have peace again.”
Yes. Maybe, one day, he would have that.
For now, it still eluded him. Ever since his transformation, he had carried inside him a nagging want that did not belong to him: his wolf’s yearning for its master. Over the last number of years, as his control over his wolf had grown, that ache had begun to lessen. It was still there, persistent and niggling, but perhaps one day it would vanish completely. And then he really would be free.
Perhaps then he would have peace.
* * *
They approachedEdinburgh from the east, passing through Portobello. Drew gazed out of the carriage window at the pale lonely stretch of the sands as the last of the wintry daylight dwindled away over the horizon.
“It is socoldhere,” Marguerite complained.
“It’s no colder than Newcastle or Berwick,” Drew replied mildly.
“Well itfeelscolder,” Marguerite muttered, pulling the carriage blanket tighter about her.
Drew chuckled but she was right. On days like this, with that damned Ha’ar lingering persistently, Edinburgh was cold enough to freeze the blood in your veins.
After a few decades away from Scotland, Drew should probably have been feeling quite as miserable as Marguerite, but the truth was, he felt the oddest stab of nostalgia even as the dank cold penetrated all the way to his bones.
Marguerite had rented a house in a new part of town: Rankeillor Street. The street was at the edge of the city and still being built, and Arthur’s Seat and the King’s Park were close by.
“We will be able to run easily,” Marguerite had said with satisfaction.
From Portobello, their coachman took the road to Duddingston, then headed for Peffermill, where the countryside began to give way to occasional houses. Just the odd one or two at first, then a clump of them here and there. And then, quite suddenly, they were driving up to the city’s new frontier.
When Drew had last been in Edinburgh, he had known every inch of this city. As an architect, he had been instrumental in the redesign and rebuilding of the capital of Scotland virtually from scratch. At that time, efforts had been concentrated on building the New Town, to the north of the Castle, but now the new building work had spread all the way over here, to the other side of the city.
As the carriage slowed, Drew took in their surroundings. They had stopped outside a substantial house at the completed end of Rankeillor Street. Great hulking shadowy structures squatted further down the road, like hunched gargoyles in the night.
The newness of these houses was obvious from the pristine, light sandstone walls. That sandstone would darken in time—it didn’t take long for the filth sputtering out of the rows of chimneys lined up on the roofs to darken the surrounding buildings—but for now it was sharp and bright.
As Drew and Marguerite climbed out of the carriage, the door of the house opened. A woman stood there with a candle. She stepped forward to greet them, a young man following in her wake. Drew recognised them both from the house in Amsterdam. They were two of Marguerite’s most trusted servants—she must have sent them on ahead to prepare the house.
“Greta,” Marguerite called. “Good day to you. And Marcus.”
“Madame,” the woman said with a brief curtsey. She bobbed at Drew too. “Sir.”
Marcus didn’t say anything, just nodded respectfully and stepped forward to help the coachman unloading the luggage.
“We are rather hungry,” Marguerite told Greta as she entered the house. “Could we have an early dinner? And perhaps some tea and cake just now?” She smiled brilliantly. “You know how famished I get.”
Greta smiled and nodded. “I’ll have that seen to right away, madame. In the meantime, there’s a letter waiting for you that Mr. Wildsmith brought this morning. He said to place it in your hands as soon as you arrived.”