Chapter 10: Chocolate

Isaline didn't take the roses.

Lothaire held them out a moment longer, then laid them on the corridor table himself.

"I'll come back tomorrow," he said. "And the day after. I'm a patient man, Isaline."

"Since when?"

"Since I met my wife properly." He smiled at her. "Good night."

He went off down the corridor whistling.

The Margrave watched him all the way to the stairs.

"He's lying," he said.

"I know."

Lothaire came back the next evening, and the next.

He brought a bracelet of garnets. Sidonie bit one and pronounced it glass.

And every night at ten his valet knocked on the north wing door with a silver tray.

A cup of hot chocolate. Thick and dark, with cinnamon on top.

"With His Grace's love," the valet said each time, looking at the ceiling.

The Margrave took the tray from him at the door, every time, before Isaline could.

She smelled each one.

Chocolate. Cinnamon. Milk. Sugar.

Nothing else.

She and Sidonie poured them into the chamber pot and felt wasteful.

"He's going to wear you down," Sidonie said. "That's his plan. He'll be charming until you forget he's a pig."

On the seventh night, the valet brought the tray as usual.

The Margrave took it.

Isaline lifted the cup to her nose.

Chocolate. Cinnamon.

Then she tipped it toward the candle and looked at the surface.

There was a fine green-gold glitter on the skin of the milk.

In her old life, a professor had once passed a little glass jar around a lecture hall full of yawning students.

Blister beetle, dried and ground. They used to sell it as a love draught.

It burns. It swells everything it touches. A pinch will set a body on fire with wanting it can't stop.

A spoonful will burn through a bladder and kill.