The Moonlight Mistress. Victoria Janssen

his forehead to hers. His breath puffed unsteadily against her face. “Pardon,” he said.

      “Bugger,” Lucilla said. She loosened her hands in his hair and let them drift down to his shoulders, stroking him absently as she tried to bring herself under control instead of nuzzling into his chest and tasting him with lips and tongue. She pulled away and clenched her hands in her lap, staring down at her whitened knuckles. Her desires fought her, and she had a difficult time remembering why she could not set them free. “I will miss you when this is over.”

      He reached for her again, then let his hand fall. “I will help you to get home,” he said. “I have cousins who work in Le Havre.”

      “Thank you,” she said. For the first time in years, she wanted to weep.

      “We should go,” he said.

      Lucilla started the engine and released the hand brake. She concentrated on the road for several minutes, then said, “Tell me about Herr Kauz.”

      The noise of the motor and the wind necessitated he face her as he spoke. Lucilla focused on the road ahead rather than risk glancing at him. What did she think she would see in his eyes, anyway? They were brown. That was all. Her own were the same, and just as subject to bits of blown grit. She had sand in her eyes now. Her own fault, because she had not looked for Kauz’s goggles. She blinked furiously.

      Pascal said, “Kauz first wrote to me over a year ago.”

      “Why?” She swallowed, and gave the motor a bit more petrol.

      “Long before I was born, he was married to my great-aunt.”

      In some families, like her own, a connection by marriage could be a close one, but Pascal’s tone said otherwise. Lucilla looked away from the road for a moment, at Pascal. His expression was blank. She sensed some family trouble there. “You didn’t know him well.”

      “At all,” Pascal said. “My great-aunt never returned from Germany. She died shortly after her marriage. She bore no children. It was forever after a source of grief for my grandoncle, Erard, who was her brother.”

      “Kauz presumed upon his distant relationship with you?”

      “To try and obtain funds, yes. My superiors found items of interest in his work and thought I would be the best candidate to extract further information from him.”

      “Unpublished items of interest, I assume,” Lucilla said. She cast her mind back to the library at Somerville and the welcoming odor of old books. She remembered pursuing strings of letters through a series of journals, trying to discover if any of the writers thought or felt as she did, back when she still imagined she had hope of a permanent academic position, somewhere other than a school for girls. The shifting rivalries and alliances had fascinated her. She’d corresponded with a few fellow chemists, never revealing her gender, but it was difficult to explain why she held no position, and never attended conferences. She had not wanted to lie and pretend to be infirm.

      “Yes. He is very secretive—it is rumored he has other laboratories than those at the Institute and at his home, where he pursues bizarre interests in isolation from the scientific community. His public work is often privately funded, and no one knows how much remains unpublished. For instance, his work with the body’s healing mechanisms ran parallel to that of an English biologist I knew from Cambridge, and there were hints of great advances he did not fully reveal. Also, disturbing implications about how the body could be harmed.”

       “What college at Cambridge?” she asked.

      “Trinity.” He paused. “My English is more respectable than my French.”

      She’d barely heard him speak his own language. She nodded. “So why did you come to Germany? What did he promise you?”

      Pascal said, “You should understand, not all of the scientists with whom I speak are conventional. I am used to being told strange things. I didn’t know when I traveled here what Kauz wished to reveal to me, though I had my suspicions. He gave only hints.”

      “Stop hedging,” she said, annoyed. “I want the story.” She risked a glance at his face, and was surprised by how disconcerted, almost fearful, he appeared. He looked away quickly. His next words were almost lost in the roar of the motor and the rush of the wind.

      “Very well, I will tell you. Kauz claimed he had met a woman who could transform her body into that of a wolf.”

      “You mean a werewolf?”

      His jaw dropped. “You don’t sound surprised.”

      “If it weren’t odd, you wouldn’t be embarrassed to tell me about it,” she pointed out. “I think such legends are interesting. My father used to terrify us with lurid tales of beasts who would eat us at the full moon. Well, lurid enough for children. I imagine Kauz’s imagination outdid my father’s. For instance, that he made his werewolf a woman. That doesn’t surprise me at all.” He’d acted as so virulent a misogynist, could perversion be far behind?

      “The scope of Kauz’s imaginings is impressive.” His tone was flat.

      “I take it you didn’t believe him.” Pascal didn’t reply immediately. Lucilla glanced over. He was glaring at the innocent cows whom they were passing. “You did believe him,” she said.

      “I did not disbelieve. There are more things in heaven and earth,” he growled.

      “That’s true,” she said. “But?”

      “He had no evidence, no photographs or film.”

      “Or a werewolf.”

      “No, not one of those, either,” he confirmed with a hint of humor. “Though perhaps I should be grateful he did not present me with a corpse. Wolf or human.”

      Lucilla shuddered. “What evidence did he show you? He must have had something. You seem like a practical sort of chap.” Except when blathering about human souls in the midst of sex, but she could forgive him that. “Did he have samples, of blood or fur?”

      “No, only quantities of figures,” he said. “Weights of the woman and of the woman-as-wolf. Lengths of time to shift from one to the other, and back again. A detailed description of the process, which was not limited to the full moon as legend suggests. An analysis of nutritional needs, and lack thereof.” He paused. “Length of time to heal injuries. As woman and as wolf, and if the change from one form to the other took place while injured. Clean cuts, ragged cuts, cuts from a silver blade, bruises to soft tissue. Broken bones.”

      “I like Kauz less and less. That’s monstrous.” Electrifying a dead frog was nothing compared to deliberately injuring an intelligent creature. One was science, the other cruelty.

      “His laboratory notebooks read as if he’d held a werewolf captive for months. The records did not appear to have been faked—he’d written them over a long period of time. His results were consistent with physical possibility. However, he could not produce this werewolf, though he repeatedly hinted that he would do so once he was sure he could trust me. But I do not think that day would ever have come. His werewolf may have existed only in his fevered mind. I am not sure if I am grateful or not, that he could produce nothing to support his statements. Then, I cannot help but worry that his captive was real, and that he might have killed her. As he kills his laboratory animals once they have served his purpose.”

      She glanced away from the road and saw Pascal looking back at her, his expression troubled. “Perhaps she escaped,” Lucilla suggested.

      “Perhaps,” he said. “To survive so long, she must have been—be resilient.”

      Lucilla said, “I don’t think anyone at the Institute knew of this.”

      “No. Perhaps I should have spoken of it to the trustees, but I didn’t think they would take my word, a visitor and a foreigner, over his. I was preparing to visit him again, to see if I could gather more