S. Stirling - Shadows of Falling Night

“Wreaking?”

“Of course. Dousing him in gasoline and using a match would have been excessive, even cruel and irresponsible, and anyway would have drawn attention. So would making the can of paint explode. It wasn’t difficult; he had a very badly worn belt. The opera was the revival of Maometto Secondo , by Rossini, and very well sung.”

Ellen laughed. “I’ve seen that one. It’s got a pants part for the hero, and you keep expecting Anna to do a number warbling: But Daddy, this Calbo you want me to marry is tooootally a chhhhhiiiick innnn draaaaag!”

He laughed too. “Yes, I had not realized Renaissance Venetians were so enlightened. Perhaps next year, if all goes well-”

“If the world doesn’t end in apocalyptic disaster.”

“Exactly. If the world does not end in apocalyptic disaster, in ’22 we will take a month in Italy, touring the hill towns, and end with the Rossini Festival in Pesaro. The Villa Imperiale there is well worth a visit, too.”

“Right, those frescos by del Colle and Genga,” she said, feeling a stab of longing for quiet days. “I’d like that, a lot.”

And we really could do that, just because we felt like it, if it weren’t for the apocalyptic end-of-the-world thing. Now I’ve really got a reason to hate the Conspiracy of Evil!

In some ways the fact that Adrian was quasi-human and drank her blood and could send his consciousness out in animal shapes and twist the fabric of reality with his mind was easier to deal with than being married to someone who was inconceivably, mind-bogglingly, absolutely filthy rich. The rest was true alien weirdness, but she’d always wanted wealth, yet found that world as disquieting as it was attractive. Her emotions treated it as real in a more fundamental sense than the Power.

He’d transferred half the capital to her name, too, which was a sum to make Gates choke. Leaving aside the nefarious Shadowspawn plan…plans…to wreck the world, which would fall like the gentle rain from heaven on rich and poor alike, and the fact that she was madly in love, she could walk tomorrow and be an exceedingly affluent divorcee…which was probably the point of what he’d done. It was sort of equivalent to their safe word, letting her exult in the way he pampered her without really being like a kept woman.

At least Adrian doesn’t think about money a lot, which merely rich people generally do. Of course, he doesn’t have to.

Since he could have it in any quantity he wished by-literally-sticking the occasional pin in the financial pages to determine what was going up or down and texting the result to his brokers in Hamburg. That his ancestors had been aristos under the ancien régime (and heads of a cult of murderous peasant-sacrificing Satanist black magicians called the Order of the Black Dawn, to boot) was only a slight complication. Her own father had been a degenerate child-abusing shit and her mother a doormat who pretended it wasn’t happening. There was no point in disliking people for what their progenitors had done. Because then she’d have to start with herself, and she’d given that up long ago.

The outfit did go well with the crown-braided platinum hair, and the light hint of makeup that brought out her turquoise eyes.

And the glyphed silver-edged knife and derringer with silver bullets tucked into the cutest little purse, she thought mordantly. Taking silver to a Shadowspawn party, how vulgar.

She paused as they went through the living room. One of the paintings on the wall to the left of the fireplace was The Nut Gatherers by Bouguereau, a late-19th-century Academic who’d been in and out of fashion and now was very much back in again, driving some of the older and more reactionary critics bananas. It showed two barefoot prepubescent rural girls sitting in a wood. They wore rather plain brown-and-white outfits and looked like French peasant elves, except for an unexpected and rather charming realistic chunky thickness to their ankles and calves. Those were the legs of girls who walked five or six miles a day, usually carrying a wicker basket full of something heavy.

“I wonder who actually posed for this?” Adrian said, stopping beside her. “It is beautiful…or at least very pretty…but not much like real countrywomen, even that young.”

He held his jacket over his shoulder with one finger in the collar; he was wearing a sleek black suit in slightly wrinkled linen, sockless black-on-black worked Louboutin shoes, and a narrow black tie against the white Egyptian cotton shirt.

Despite that and his slightly androgynous handsomeness, he didn’t look like a model. There was something too concentrated in his eyes…not to mention several fading scars. And the way he moved had a gliding grace that made your spine bristle, even before you felt the shocking strength of his hands.

Ellen grinned. Adrian could be a little intimidating, even when he wasn’t trying. Which she very much liked , a man without a hint of danger was like boiled potatoes without salt, but it was nice to have something she knew more about than he did. They’d met in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she’d been working in a gallery, fresh out of NYU, and at first she’d thought he was just an old-money Euro-trash collector, of whom she met legions in the course of her work in that art-crazy resort town. He’d been an unusually sexy one even at first glance, of course.

“No, look closer,” she said. “Yeah, they’re too clean and they don’t have calluses on their feet, but look. ”

She had a degree in Art History from NYU, and these days that included a fair degree of social background.

“They were probably actual peasants ,” she went on. “Back then French peasants were cheap and you could get swarms of ’em. This one was painted near La Rochelle, I think. God, but this man could do skin tones.”

“Strikingly clean peasants, with expert hairdressers!”

Her finger traced above the outlines of the girls’ legs, caressing the air. “Yes, but see? He didn’t show the muscle articulation. That would have violated the canons he worked with, but those aren’t dainty little pegs. And look at the sitting girl’s arms, the younger one, her forearms here just below the elbow? She so whacks wet laundry on rocks for Mom. Most of the time Bouguereau is as stylized as a Kabuki mask-when he does something mythological the women are always hoofers from the follies or high-priced demimondaines or both, with those big butts the Victorians liked that always look like they’ve been carved out of marshmallows-but every now and then something like that breaks through. It’s the contrast, you see? They’re pretty, idealized village girls. And pretty real ones, both at the same time.”

“Hmmm. Looking at art with you is always an education, my darling. Someday we will take a year and tour galleries. Assuming the world does not end.”

“All these things we’re going to do if the world doesn’t end! And sometimes it’s better just to appreciate. All those years at NYU mean I can’t, usually. I got into it because I just liked it, loved it in fact, but now I start to analyze by sheer reflex.”

“You still enjoy,” Adrian said with a smile, touching one finger to her cheek for an instant. “And the knowledge…enlarges…things for me. Harvey’s tastes ran to neon paint on black velvet; he is a very competent cook, but otherwise aesthetically…”

His face went hard for a moment at the mention of his old mentor’s name. The man who’d raised him to think of himself as human was an enemy now. He thought he was about to destroy the Council, and all the while he was Adrienne’s catspaw.