the correct time to her.
‘Abiger, you are twenty-five minutes late. I had expected you to join me on the steps to greet your brothers and sisters. You are the new Count now. As I am a widow and you are still unmarried, it would have been proper for you to have welcomed the family at my side. Instead, I have had to stand here alone.’
Abi kissed Madame, his mother’s, hand, and touched it to his forehead. Then he took up position a step or so below her on the stairs. ‘Vaulderie and I had a little business to attend to. You would have approved, I promise. Please forgive me.’
On the opposite hillside, Joris Calque fiddled with his night glasses, cursing the gibbous moon and the clouds that were obscuring it.
The Countess bent over and kissed her eldest son on the crown of his head. Vau hurried expectantly towards her, but was rewarded by a simple one-handed cupping of the face. He gave his brother a ‘nothing ever changes’ look, and hurried inside.
‘Of course I forgive you, my darling.’
The two of them – mother and adopted son – stood staring out into the surrounding gloom for a few moments, as though an invisible cine camera were recording them for posterity.
Then Abi took his mother’s arm and they followed Madame Mastigou back inside the house.
8
Calque threw himself back on his inflatable armchair and felt around for his cigarettes. Normally, at this time of the evening, he would never have dreamt of lighting up for fear of giving away his position – but today’s events were just cause for celebration. He was in with a fighting chance again.
The butler, Milouins, had been the first to emerge from the house at around four o’clock that afternoon. After a short pause to sniff the air, he had begun to rake the courtyard into something approximating Zen spirals. Then one of the footmen had appeared with a bucket and a squeegee mop to wash down the stone steps. Finally the gardener had entered unexpectedly from stage right and had attempted to snatch the rake back from Milouins – an altercation ensued, which the gardener lost.
The gardener had then retreated without his rake, scuffing the once immaculate gravel behind him as he went. The footman, plainly recognizing on which side his bread was buttered, had jettisoned whatever remained in his water bucket in the direction of the gardener’s retreating back.
Calque made a swift mental note to ascertain the gardener’s identity as a prelude to approaching him for indiscreet information about the household setup – disenchanted domestic servants, embittered spouses, and disinherited relatives had always formed a major part of his stock-in-trade.
After the initial flurry of preparatory activity there had been a pause of three hours, during which Calque had dozed off on six separate occasions – he had been on the job since early that morning, and was not in the first flush of youth. At about eight o’clock, during a gap between dozes, the Countess had appeared on the steps with her assistant, the ever-elegant Madame Mastigou, at her side. A certain amount of clock consulting had then gone on. At 8.15 the first of a total of five separate cars had drawn up in the driveway.
Each car had then disgorged its occupants, each of whom had gone up to the apparently immovable Countess to kiss her hand and to receive a series of four kisses – two on each cheek – in return.
Then the cars had retreated, leaving the Countess and Madame Mastigou to contemplate the abandoned courtyard like the final guests at a Wagner evening.
Not long afterwards a local taxi had lurched into view, and two men had emerged from its maw. The deteriorating quality of the light had made it impossible for Calque to make out the men’s faces – either one or both of them appeared to be the exception to the Countess’s rule on stasis, however, for she actually moved a step or two towards them in welcome, implying that they were marginally higher in the pecking order than the other arrivals.
One of the men had then disappeared inside the house, leaving the Countess and the other man standing in a pool of light halfway down the entrance steps.
By the time Calque had succeeded in refocusing his night glasses, the pair had turned around and gone inside.
9
Madame Mastigou sat with her pen poised over a sheet of finely milled Florentine writing paper and waited for the Countess to break her silence.
There was a palpable sense of expectation in the hermetically sealed assembly room. This was the first time in five years that all the Countess’s adopted children had been brought together in one place, and Madame Mastigou could sense the tension behind her employer’s otherwise frozen countenance.
The butler, Milouins, had been delegated for guard duty outside the hidden door in the library, and one of the footmen was acting as outrider in the salon, ensuring that no one could make their way through the household’s cordon sanitaire unannounced. Inside the secret chamber the Countess stood at the head of the table, with her children, in strictly descending order of seniority, taking up the remaining seats to her right and left.
They ranged in age from a mature twenty-seven, in the case of Lamia de Bale, the oldest girl, to around eighteen, In the case of Oni de Bale, the youngest male – a virtual giant, nearly seven feet tall, with the trademark red eyes and unpigmented skin of the true albino.
Abiger and Vaulderie, being the oldest males present, and therefore in legal receipt of the countcy and viscountcy through agnatic primogeniture, had been allocated the two senior seats, despite being two years their sister’s junior. At the very end of the table, a chair had been left empty. In front of it lay a sword, a signet ring, and a velvet brocade sash in memory of their brother, Rocha.
To the clinically detached eye it would soon have become apparent that each of the Countess’s adopted children was graced with some defining mark or characteristic that separated them from the herd.
The oldest girl, Lamia, had a prominent strawberry birthmark that spread across half of her face – seen from one side, she was beautiful, whilst from the other side her beauty was disguised by what, at first glance, appeared to be a piece of blood-soaked surgical gauze. Her younger sister, Athame, was dwarfish in stature, with tiny hands and feet. Berith, the young man sitting below her, had a harelip. Rudra de Bale limped as the result of an untreated club foot, and Aldinach de Bale was a natural hermaphrodite, something which only manifested itself in the marked delicacy of some of his movements – in reality there were times when it suited him to dress as a woman, and other times as a man.
Further down the line came Alastor de Bale, who suffered from cachexia, a wasting disease that made his near neighbour, Asson de Bale, appear even larger than his 22-stone frame would normally warrant. The 21-year- old Dakini de Bale had preternaturally long hair, which framed a face that seemed frozen in a sort of malevolent rictus, and her twenty-year-old sister, Nawal de Bale, suffered from hirsutism, which gave her the visage of an animal.
Each of the thirteen children had been told, since earliest childhood, that they had been marked out in this way by God as a sign of His especial grace. As a result they each bore their affliction not as an affliction, but more as a mark of special selection. The Countess had also explained to them that, thanks to the prevalence of a certain sort of guilty sentimentality in much of the twenty-first century’s increasingly decadent populace, they might even be able to use their afflictions to divert suspicion from themselves – and out towards innocent parties – in the event of a crisis.
Glancing about the room, the Countess could barely disguise her satisfaction. It was at her direct instigation that her husband had resuscitated the almost moribund Corpus Maleficus. The first time he had described the cabal to her – and his family’s inextricable link to its aims over a history spanning nearly eight hundred years – had been just a few days before their marriage. The Count had sounded almost apologetic, as if he had been forced to summon up a hoary old skeleton from the family vaults in order to forestall his future wife learning about it from
