The Golden Read Free

suspected that she had somehow orchestrated the girl’s
arousal—perhaps even his own overwrought reaction—in
order to humiliate him. Ablaze with shame, he lunged toward her, but
once again Agenor hauled him back, clamping a forearm under his chin
and holding him with irresistible strength. The laughter, which had
grown briefly uproarious, subsided. The silence that replaced it was
freighted with tension.
    “Let me
go,” Beheim said. “I’m all right. Let me go.”
    Reluctantly, it
seemed, Agenor released him.
    Beheim adjusted
the hang of his evening clothes, rumpled during the struggle, and
glared with unalloyed hatred at Lady Dolores. For a second she
appeared unequal to his stare, uncertainty clouding her face, but she
quickly regained her composure.
    “Surely
you don’t wish to challenge me?” she said in a mocking
voice.
    “What I
wish and what I must do in order to conform to tradition are two
different matters,” said Beheim. “But I swear to you,
lady, you’ll regret this night.”
    Several members
of the Cascarin branch moved closer to her, ready to take her part,
and behind Beheim, others of the Agenor branch assumed a like
posture.
    “Consider
carefully, cousin,” Agenor said to Lady Dolores, “whether
it would be wise to seek a feud with the Agenors.”
    After a moment,
with an almost imperceptible gesture, the Lady Dolores signaled her
supporters to retreat. She favored Agenor with a curt nod, and her
skirt belling with the abruptness of her turn, she stalked off into
another quarter of the ballroom.
    Beheim made to
thank his mentor, but before he could speak, Agenor, keeping his eyes
fixed on a point above Beheim’s head, said quietly, “Return
to your apartments.”
    “Lord, I
only—”
    “Are you
deaf as well as a fool?” Agenor drew a deep breath. “I
selected you for my protégé because I saw in you
qualities of temperateness and calculation that I felt would
withstand your passage into the Family. Tonight you’ve proved
me as great a fool as you yourself. Now go!”
    Beheim remained
standing, flustered and ashamed.
    “If you do
not leave,” Agenor said coldly, “I may not be able to
contain myself. Do you understand?”
    Beheim fell back
a step, muttered a stumbling apology, then fled the ballroom,
refusing to meet the eyes that followed his erratic course.
    Chapter
Two
    I f not for the consoling presence of his servant, Giselle, there is no
telling what Beheim might have done that night, for as he hurried
along the dimly lit corridor that led away from the ballroom, past
niches in which hung antique portraits shrouded in dust and shadow,
he grew increasingly angry, his mind fired by a vision of bloody
vengeance; by the time he reached his apartments—three vast,
high-ceilinged rooms in the west tower of the castle—he was
more of a temper to confront the Lady Dolores than to spend the night
haunted by the shade of his humiliation. But the sight of Giselle in
her nightdress—her light brown hair and slim figure, her
exquisite face with its high cheekbones and pouting lips, all so
reminiscent of the Golden—renewed his hunger, and though he had
fed only days before, without a word of greeting, he pushed her down
upon the black silk coverlet of the canopied bed, brushed back the
fall of hair from the vein in her neck, and drank deeply, drank in
fury and frustration, sublimating his need for revenge, imagining
that it was the Lady Dolores’s blood upon which he was supping.
Had he been a degree more enraged, he might have lost himself in the
act and drunk too deeply, but at last, his hunger sated, still dully
aroused, he rolled away from Giselle and lay gazing about the room,
absorbed by its funereal atmosphere of candles and black velvet
chairs and age-worn tapestries and tall windows with bolted iron
covers. Beside him, Giselle gave a plaintive sigh, and suddenly aware
of her as a living creature, as something more than a source of food,
he felt remorse at having treated her