His footsteps echoed around him as he traversed the ancient halls of the original keep built in the fifth century. The motte-and-bailey fortress had eroded over time, sinking into a devouring earth that wished to reclaim it. Then, around the sixteenth century, his ancestors had simply built new over the old.
Their actions had the unforeseen consequences of preserving, entombing, these corridors. The sloping walls, the adze-notched timbers, the great hall with the inglenook fireplace and hexafoils carved into the mantel were the same as they had been when a round table sat at its center.
As he lifted a torch from an iron wall-bracket and lit it in what was left of the dying embers, he gave the carving of a circled daisy a passing glance. He’d always been curious about the people who had believed that these apotropaic symbols held any power in their lives, as if they had no control of their own.
But that was a question for another day.
Turning on his heel, he continued onward through the screens passage. At the end of a short and constricted corridor, he turned the key in the lock, ducked his head beneath the warped lintel and stepped into the old buttery.
The narrow barrel-shaped room was no longer used to store ale, wine and spirits. Those were conveniently located for the butler’s access in the more recent addition overhead. Yet, the shelves remained, lining the bowed stone walls.
Even though the ceiling was too low for him to stand upright unless he kept to the center, and the air was stale and three degrees shy of being uncomfortably cold, he didn’t care. This was his laboratory where no one would bother him. Here, he could devote all of his considerable concentration to every recipe in the book to test their validity.
It was his life’s mission to understand them.
Crossing the room in three strides, he turned the wick of the oil lamp on the ancient and scarred trestle table that served as his desk. Light flickered over the meticulous lines of the code written in his ledger.
His notes never revealed the actual recipes. Those were still kept in the vault, and he possessed the only key. So instead, he had developed a mathematical cipher he used. A code. And with it, he could calculate with absolute precision the exact alteration from yesterday’s sample to today’s.
“The metheglin,” he hypothesized aloud, tapping the page over his concise script.
Standing, he moved to the shelves and withdrew a dark bottle. The recipe had called for the organ meat to be soaked in mead, which he had always done before. This time, however, he had used metheglin—a spiced mead that would have been more common during Arthur’s time.
Lucien had even made his own honey. Caliburn Keep’s apiary was surrounded by the very herbs that gave metheglin a medicinal flavor—agrimonia, angelica, lemon balm and mead wort.
Removing the cork, he sniffed. The rich, syrupy and redolent brew contained a sharp, astringent undertone that caused the glands at the back of his mouth to contract.
Was this the secret ingredient? The answer he’d been searching for since his parents had died?
He wasn’t certain. And he needed certainty per centum. In other words, he had to be one hundred percent sure.
Lucien moved to the shelves lining the opposite wall, ducking his head along the way. This was where he kept the finished samples to study them further. Neat rows of identical earthenware jars were tagged by date and a corresponding code for the ledger entry. He left nothing to chance.
Taking down today’s jar, he returned to his desk and removed the lid. Retrieving the remaining half of the pie, he held up the semilunar wedge to the light and admired the layers of various cuts of meat and organs, fats and spices. An exultant exhale left him as he studied the pastry with a mixture of fascination and triumph.
But no, not triumph. Not yet. He was not one to rush to judgment.
And yet, his heart was thrumming again as he recalled that brief moment in the corridor when he’d felt the effects.
Something had been different about this one. There had been a distinct alteration in his own physiology.
It had been distracting, to say the least. Especially when the symptoms had begun while he was standing with that directionally challenged woman who liked to speak in circles.
The first thing he’d noticed was the peculiar levitation of the hair on his nape as he’d walked down the passage. This had caused him to stop. Catching an unfamiliar sweet scent in the dank and musty air, he’d turned. That was when he’d initially located the trespasser in the shadows. Through his grimy lenses, he’d surmised that the figure was female but soon established that she was not from his serving staff.
Thusly identifying her as an intruder, he’d stepped closer. And that was when the recipe truly began to take hold.
He had felt predatory. Strong. Virile. There was no way around it. And those were precisely the effects that the recipe was reputed to have imbued in the warriors who’d supped on it centuries ago.
Nevertheless, Lucien couldn’t consider this actual proof without expanding his test to other subjects. And he knew who would be the perfect guinea pig.
* * *
“What makes you think I’d want to try your weird little pie?” Without lifting his blond head from the corner of the camel-backed drawing room sofa, Viscount Pellinore Holladay eyed the offered wedge with dismissive interest. His cousin spent most of his evenings in that exact spot, lounging with utter insouciance, his trouser-clad legs crossed at the ankles and a glass of whisky dangling from his fingertips.
“Because I once watched you consume the larva of a dung beetle. You’ll eat anything.”
“That hardly signifies. I was only four years old at the—” Pell stopped when Lucien nudged the sample against his lips. On a grunt of resignation, he took a bite and chewed.
Lucien waited for him to finish and checked the time on the ormolu mantel clock. “How do you feel?”
“Rather put upon, if I’m to be honest,” he said as he took the remainder of the wedge and finished it off. “Dare I ask what’s in it?”
“Primarily pig snout and ears, calf tongue and brain, goose neck and tongue, frog legs—”
“Forget I asked.” Pell held up a hand in surrender. “Whenever one of your experiments begins with pig snout as the pièce de résistance, just pretend you didn’t hear me ask.”
Lucien turned a deaf ear to the complaints and studied his subject with keen interest. By his calculations, it had taken approximately seventy-six seconds for him to walk from the buttery to where he’d encountered the trespasser and first noticed the effects of the sample.
With a glance to the clock, he knew it was time.
Sliding his index finger up the bridge of his nose, he anchored the saddle of his spectacles in place as he bent over the sofa and looked for any pupil dilation or flesh discoloration. “Do you feel anything now?”
“Other than you breathing down my neck and manhandling my collar—Ow! Those are still attached.”
Lucien shrugged. “I had to see if the hairs on your nape were standing on end.”
“Well, they are now. They’re in full revolt,” Pell groused, scrubbing a hand over the back of his neck.
“Perhaps you should stand up. Move about. Get your blood flowing.” Without waiting for agreement, he took his cousin’s hand and hefted him upward. Then linking arms with him, he began to pace quickly around the rectangular perimeter of the rifle green room. “And now? Anything?”