Главная страница | Современная зарубежная литература | The Bride of the Unicorn

The Bride of the Unicorn
Kasey Michaels








Praise for USA TODAY bestselling author

KASEY MICHAELS


“[A] hilarious spoof of society wedding rituals wrapped around a sensual romance filled with crackling dialogue reminiscent of The Philadelphia Story.”

—Booklist on Everything’s Coming Up Rosie

“A cheerful, lighthearted read.”

—Publishers Weekly on Everything’s Coming Up Rosie

“Michaels continues to entertain readers with the verve of her appealing characters and their exciting predicaments.”

—Booklist on Beware of Virtuous Women

“Lively dialogue and characters make the plot’s suspense and pathos resonate.”

—Publishers Weekly on Beware of Virtuous Women

“A must-read for fans of historical romance and all who appreciate Michaels’ witty and sensuous style.”

—Booklist on The Dangerous Debutante

“Michaels is in her element in her latest historical romance, a tale filled with mystery, sexual tension, and steamy encounters, making this a gem from a true master of the genre.”

—Booklist on A Gentleman by Any Other Name

“Michaels can write everything from a lighthearted romp to a far more serious-themed romance. [Kasey] Michaels has outdone herself.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews, Top Pick, on A Gentleman by Any Other Name

“Nonstop action from start to finish! It seems that author Kasey Michaels does nothing halfway.”

—Huntress Reviews on A Gentleman by Any Other Name

“Michaels has done it again…. Witty dialogue peppers a plot full of delectable details exposing the foibles and follies of the age.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review, on The Butler Did It

“Michaels demonstrates her flair for creating likable protagonists who possess chemistry, charm and a penchant for getting into trouble. In addition, her dialogue and descriptions are full of humor.”

—Publishers Weekly on This Must Be Love

“Kasey Michaels aims for the heart and never misses.”

—New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts




The Bride of the Unicorn

Kasey Michaels





www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)



The Bride of the Unicorn




CONTENTS


PROLOGUE

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

EPILOGUE




PROLOGUE


1801

Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.

Blaise Pascal



And doom’d to death, though fated not to die.

John Dryden

“CAROLINE, DO SIT STILL, CHILD. It’s enough that this coach is rocking as if John Coachman were blind as well as deaf and can not see the ruts, without your bouncing to add to the jostle.”

“Felling ill again, pet?” Henry Wilburton, seventh earl of Witham, and soon to become a father again at the advanced age of forty-six, looked adoringly at his young wife, who was still dealing with the fractious three-year-old. “We shouldn’t have stayed so long. Silly children’s party.”

Lady Gwendolyn pulled Caroline closer to her on the wide velvet seat, tucking the carriage blanket around the colorfully embroidered hem of the child’s gown and the chubby legs that refused to remain still, then hastened to reassure her husband. “Nonsense, Henry. It was a delightful evening. I’m much improved now. It was ill-advised of me to have sampled the syllabub, that’s all. At least not until I am past this third month. My reaction to sweet creams was much the same with Caroline, remember?”

“Vividly, my dear, vividly,” Lord Witham answered, stretching forward from the facing seat to pat her hand. “I suppose I will simply have to cosset you outrageously for these next months, a chore I admit I look forward to with great delight.”

“You are the very best of husbands, Henry—and I vow to hold you at your word. I rather enjoy being cosseted.” She reached across her daughter to lift the leather flap over the window and peered out into the darkness brightened only by the coach lamps riding high on either side of the driver’s box, then frowned. She hadn’t been entirely truthful with Henry about the state of her stomach. A lingering queasiness was still giving her fits, and she could barely wait to be out of the swaying coach and on solid ground again. “Are we nearly home? I believe I see raindrops on the pane.”

“Very nearly, pet. Caro, my rambunctious little lamb, why don’t you sing us the song your mama has just taught you? You remember—‘Now Is the Month of Maying.’”

“No, Papa,” Caroline answered with a mulish pout squeezing her small, perfect features. “Caro’s tired,” she said as she burrowed her blond curls against her mother’s breast.

Lady Gwendolyn chuckled at this not uncommon display of temper. “Willful little beast, isn’t she, darling? We can only hope our unborn son will have half Caroline’s starch. Boys should be—What’s that? Henry? That was a shot, I’m sure of it!”

She watched as the earl immediately cocked his head toward the window to his left, then frowned at the unmistakable report of a second pistol shot. He opened his mouth to warn her to take hold of the strap, but it was already too late for her to have time to obey him.

A heartbeat later all three occupants of the coach tumbled to the floor when John Coachman, whose deafness might not have alerted him to the noise, hauled mightily on the traces, then put on the brake as two dark-cloaked riders plunged out of the trees and directly onto the roadway in front of the horses, calling: “Stand and deliver!”

Caroline immediately began to wail, sounding not hurt but angry, as if overcome by a mighty indignation born of finding herself sprawled inelegantly on the floor, wedged partially beneath her mother’s body. Lady Gwendolyn couldn’t blame her, for she too was feeling the effects of being tossed about like so much flotsam.

“Are you all right? Good. Quiet her, Gwen,” Lord Witham ordered as he helped his wife back onto the seat, then reached into his pocket and withdrew a small purse that contained ten or twelve gold pieces. “I have enough on my plate being robbed, without Caro’s bawling to add to the chaos. Damned depressing, you know. I was told this road was clear of high-toby men. I’d give half my fortune to be able to turn my pistols on them, but it’s best not to put up a struggle. Give me your jewels, sweetheart, and I’ll step outside and deal with the wretches. We’ll be out of this and home safe and dry in a trice, I promise you.”

Lady Gwendolyn, forgetting her nausea and fatigue, fumbled to remove her diamond earrings and the matching bracelet the earl had given her just that past Christmas. She handed them over, then laid a hand on her husband’s arm. “Filthy beasts. I won’t give them my rings, Henry,” she told him firmly, “nor shall they have my beautiful pendant. There are some things that simply cannot be replaced.”

Lord Witham’s smile was eloquent with love, so much so that Lady Gwendolyn felt herself dangerously near to tears. “Anything can be replaced, my sweet,” she heard him say, “except you and our dearest Caroline. Now hurry, my pet,” he added, frowning. “We can’t have the rascals catching more than a glimpse of either you or the child. You are both too beautiful by far, and I don’t wish to tempt them.”

Tamping down what she considered to be a reasonable rise of hysteria, Lady Gwendolyn slipped the rings from her finger for the first time since her husband had placed them there on their wedding day, and laid them in his hand. She was just raising her hands to her throat to slip the pendant up and over her head when the off door was flung open and a man wearing a full face mask gruffly ordered Lord Henry to leave the coach.

“Henry, no! For the love of heaven, don’t leave us.” Lady Gwendolyn felt her bravado desert her, and she clung fiercely to his arm, but he gently shook himself free of her grip, smiled reassuringly yet again, and stepped down into the road.

Left alone with her child, who was now wide-eyed and quiet, Lady Gwendolyn willed herself not to fall to pieces. People were robbed every day on the king’s highways. The lack of safety in these enlightened times was a national disgrace, as she had heard when the subject was discussed earlier, at Sir Stephen’s party for his youngest son’s birthday.

But people weren’t just robbed of their valuables, Lady Gwendolyn remembered. Sometimes, if they resisted, they were shot—killed! A man had met that terrible fate trying to defend himself just last month, somewhere near to London. Shot dead, he had been, and scarcely a mile from his estate.

Not that anything so terrible would happen to them. After all, this wasn’t London. This was Sussex. This was a civilized countryside. And her dearest, bravest Henry was cooperating with the highwaymen.

And yet…

Lady Gwendolyn was so frightened, no matter how reassuring her husband’s smile had been, and longed to do something to help him. Her hands went to her throat and the gold chain that still hung there. It wouldn’t do to have the highwaymen discover her wearing it and believe they had tried to hide some of their valuables. She quickly removed the pendant and chain and hung it around Caroline’s throat, prudently stuffing its length inside the collar of the child’s dress. No one, not even a highwayman, would be so basely cruel, so dastardly, as to search an infant!

But it wasn’t enough. There had to be something else—some other way to help. Henry had asked her to do something, something about Caroline. Yes, yes. She remembered now. He had wanted her kept quiet and concealed; he had distinctly said so. She looked down at the child, to see that Caroline’s little chin was quivering, as if she were about to burst into tears once more.

That wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t do at all!

And then Lady Gwendolyn was struck by an inspiration that would both keep her daughter quiet and hide the pendant from the highwaymen. Henry would be so proud of her for thinking of it! Why, at the next party they attended, Henry would hold court at the dinner table, recounting their brush with highwaymen and his wife’s brilliance.

Leaning forward, she raised the velvet-covered seat her husband had just vacated and surveyed the small, roughly lined compartment usually reserved for extra luggage. “Here, my darling,” she whispered, lifting Caroline and placing her small body in the compartment. “You hide in here for now, until Papa comes back. Be very quiet, please, so you can surprise him when I tell you to come out again. Can you do that, Caroline? Can you be a big girl and play this game for Mama?”

“A game, Mama?” Caroline repeated, visibly brightening. “Caro play a game?”

“Yes, darling! What a good girl you are. You are my sweet, darling Caro. Now give Mama a kiss.”

She hugged the child, clinging to her desperately, fearfully, for a moment before motioning for Caroline to bow her head so that the seat could be lowered back into position. Then Lady Gwendolyn sat down on the seat, daintily spread out the satin skirt of her gown, took a deep breath, and dared to push aside the leather curtain and peek outside.

It was raining steadily now, a drenching downpour, but the flickering light from the coach lamps provided her with a vague, distorted view of what was transpiring in the roadway.

She saw Henry standing no more than three feet from the door to the coach, his back to her, his hands raised, as one of the highwayman held a pistol leveled at his chest.

A second robber stood nearby, and she could see her jewels glinting in one gloved hand as he aimed a pistol up at the box, at John Coachman, an old man so timid and defenseless that Lady Gwendolyn had more than once suggested to her husband that the man was getting past it. And it was true. If John had only had the ears to hear the first shots he might have sprung the horses and they would be home and dry now, as her dearest Henry had promised, instead of sitting stranded on the roadway, in the clutches of these nefarious highwaymen.

Lady Gwendolyn shuddered, her feelings of helplessness returning. What was taking so long? Surely it was almost over now. Or were they planning to search the coach anyway? But why would they do that? They already had her jewels. They already had all of Henry’s money.

She pressed her fingers against the cold pane, wishing she could touch her husband, wishing she could hear what was being said, wishing she were stronger or smarter or braver.

And then the robber holding her jewels raised his pistol slightly and fired, the flash of powder visible a heartbeat before the earsplitting report that caused her entire body to flinch uncontrollably.

She heard rather than saw John Coachman’s body tumble into the roadway, for she was already looking toward her husband, who had dropped his hands and turned toward the coach, toward her.

“Gwen!” she heard him shout as he took a single step in her direction, his beloved face pale and frightened in the dim light. “Get out the other side. Run! Run into the trees!”

Run? Take Caro and leave him? Never! And yet, even if she had wanted to obey him, she could not have done so.

She couldn’t move.

She couldn’t breathe.

All she could do was watch, horrified, paralyzed, her fingers still locked behind the windowpane, as another shot rang out and Henry was flung forward heavily, to fall against the side of the coach, then slide away from her, to the ground.

“Henry—no!” Lady Gwendolyn reached for the latch, disregarding the earl’s warning, forgetting her child, not caring for her own safety. She threw open the door her husband, her protector, had closed behind him a minute earlier—a lifetime ago.

Her hands braced on either side of the opening, she struggled with the damning reality of seeing her husband lying just below her feet, his body facedown in the mud, a dark, ominous stain spreading on the back of his jacket. “Henry. Oh, my dear God—Henry!”

She raised her head and screamed at the highwaymen, her voice high-pitched with mounting hysteria. “We gave you all our money—all our jewelry. We gave you everything! And you killed him. There was no reason, no need. Why? Why did you do this?”

The man who had discharged his second pistol into the seventh earl of Witham stripped away his dark mask, revealing wickedly grinning features as he advanced in Lady Gwendolyn’s direction. “Good evening, Gwen. Beastly weather, isn’t it?”

She stared at the man as his face was revealed in the flickering light of the coach lamps, unable to understand either his presence or his actions. She then looked down at her husband’s body and shuddered convulsively before turning uncomprehending eyes back to Lord Henry’s killer. “But why? Why?”

She continued to watch as the man—this man she knew, this man she had trusted—took another step forward and slowly pulled a third long-barreled weapon from his belt….




BOOK ONE


A QUESTION OF HONOR

October 1815

Chance is a nickname for Providence.

Sébastien R. N. Chamfort




CHAPTER ONE


We die only once, and for such a long time!

Molière

LORD JAMES BLAKELY trusted his nephew did not view the scene now unfolding for his benefit as particularly jolly. Such interludes were by right supposed to be off-putting, damn it, deadly solemn and hung heavy with foreboding. Later—once the body had grown stiff and cold—there would be ample time for Morgan Blakely to perform a jig on his grave.

If he could.

For now, however, Lord James, in his own way, and in his own good time, would dance.

He had set up the particulars for this occasion with infinite care—planned his starring role down to the last detail. The gloomy, barnlike bedchamber suited his purpose perfectly, for he knew it had never been the most advantageous stage setting for any save moribund frolic.

Lord James had long ago opted to take his physical pleasures in somewhat less inhibiting surroundings, the more baseborn his partner the better. That sort of female did not take exception when the play turned rough. At least they had never shown their distaste—not for the heavy blunt he’d paid down to indulge his appetites.

And if he’d ruined one or two of the round-heeled bitches for the business, well, what of it? Nothing lasted. Nothing lived forever.

And he should know. He could see the demons gathering now, hovering in a far corner, high against the ceiling, rubbing their clawlike hands together and licking slimy, reptilian lips; eager to snatch him up, slash out his soul, and pitch it down, down, into the very bowels of the earth.

But not yet. No. He still had time. He still had something he had to do; a last, perfect mischief that would render his damnation tolerable.

Lord James moistened his parched, fever-cracked lips and looked about the room, searching out his audience of one.

The chamber was particularly musty this October evening, its bog-water green velvet draperies shut tight, its heavy Tudor furniture hulking ponderously against the tapestry-hung walls, the wretchedly ineffectual fire in the oversized grate hissing rather than crackling.

The price of good wood could beggar a man. The smoke and sizzle of green wood might make living plaguey uncomfortable, but it was more than good enough to die by.

The world outside the drafty windows couldn’t have been any more appropriate, nature helping him with his scene-setting. It had been raining all day; a heavy, drenching, reminiscent downpour that had set all the usual damp patches on the ceiling to showing themselves to disadvantage while lending to the stale, musty air another aroma to ponder: mildew.

The only sound Lord James heard was that of rainwater splashing tinnily into a half dozen pails set at irregular intervals on the threadbare carpet—along with his own decidedly evil chuckling and intermittent coughing, as he had just completed entertaining his guest with a little tale about a liaison he’d once had with the local rat catcher’s daughter.

Vulgarity was so comforting, such a glaringly human vice in the midst of this tawdry business of dying. He, Lord James Blakely, rapidly fading but still cheerfully malevolent, would do his damnedest to make his passing as miserable for his guest as possible. He might be only a few days or hours away from being put to bed with a shovel, but was that any reason to alter by so much as a hair the habits of a lifetime?

“The rat catcher’s daughter. My congratulations, Uncle, for you are nothing if not consistent,” Morgan Blakely said now, as Lord James went off in another paroxysm of high-pitched giggles. “I have always so enjoyed your feeble attempts at humor. You really should have written them all down somewhere, for the sake of posterity, you understand. But then, you did write some things down, didn’t you, some little tidbits of information—and then forwarded them directly to France via one of the less discriminating smuggling gangs that frequent the coast.”

Lord James’s face blanched, his enjoyment decimated, and he looked furtively at his nephew. “You know about that?” he asked, his handkerchief still pressed to his mouth, a string of spittle dribbling from his chin.

Morgan spoke in a deadly sweet drawl, his distaste for his uncle maddeningly obvious in the relaxed stance of his long, leanly muscled body. “Dear me, yes,” he answered, smiling for the first time since he’d entered the bedchamber.

Lord James gritted his teeth, shaking with fury. “When? How?”

“Must I really indulge you? Oh, very well. I have known since before Waterloo, since shortly after my return from France. As for the how of it—you do remember my mission during the war, don’t you, my area of operation? Tell me, Uncle—was the money you received for selling secrets all the sweeter for the thought that the information you forwarded to Bonaparte could have meant the end of your brother’s son? I’ve occasionally wondered about that possibility—in idle moments, you understand.”

Morgan knew. Cold-hearted bastard! If only I had my pistol, I’d shoot him square between those mocking devil-black eyes, and consign him to hell before me!

But Lord James didn’t have his pistol. He was dying; defenseless in front of the man he had planned to bring low, now with more reason than simple hate to goad him. Was there no justice? No justice at all?

Lord James’s eyes slid away from his nephew’s face. He felt himself growing weaker by the moment, and still he had not begun to tell Morgan the reason he had summoned him. Instead, Morgan had taken center stage, had muddled the plot with a last-minute alteration to the script. Lord James had wondered why his contacts on the Continent had dried up three years ago—and with them nearly his sole source of income. Morgan had done it. His own nephew!

Yet why was he surprised? Shouldn’t he have known that Morgan was behind it—his maddeningly secretive nephew with the heart of stone and ice water in his veins?

Suddenly it became important to Lord James that his nephew understand the horrors he had been through, the very valid reasons for his treason. “This house took all my money, always has. Decrepit pile, the bane of every younger son! Why else do you think I agreed to work with Bonaparte? But my contact stopped asking for my help, stopped sending all that lovely money.” He tried to lift himself onto his elbows. “Because of you. All because of you!”

Morgan raised a perfectly manicured finger to stroke at one ebony eyebrow. “Ah, your contact, at the War Office. Thorndyke, wasn’t it? Yes, that was his name. George Thorndyke. He became very useful, once we were able to supply him with secrets we wished passed along—through other channels, of course. I could not have the family name involved. Having one’s own uncle hanging from a gibbet could be a tad embarrassing, you understand. I did tell you that poor Thorndyke is dead these past two months or more, didn’t I? I know you’ve been out of touch here in Sussex, dying and all.”

“Thorndyke’s dead?” Lord James narrowed his eyes as he glared at Morgan. “What did you do?”

“Uncle—how you wound me. You know I am not a man of violence. Thorndyke died suddenly. Hanged himself in his study only hours after I left him, as a matter of fact. And we’d had such a lovely visit, too. It was a most depressing funeral. You can count yourself lucky to have missed it.”

Lord James’s once large frame, now ravaged by illness, seemed to shrink even more under his nephew’s casually spoken words. It didn’t matter now. He couldn’t be hurt now, carted away for treason. Yet he had to know. “Who else? Who else knows?”

“Actually,” Morgan answered, “nobody.” He pulled over a chair and positioned it at his uncle’s bedside before sitting down. “I thought it prudent to keep your dirty linen in the cupboard.”

“Your father,” Lord James spat grudgingly, his ravaged face pinched into a condescending sneer. “Your endlessly ungrateful idiot of a father. You did it for him.”

“For my father, yes,” Morgan answered shortly. “I discovered that, at the time, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice his good name in order to exercise a paltry justice on you. But that is neither here nor there now, as your sadly wasted body has saved me from suffering through another interview such as the one I had with Thorndyke—just to tie up all the loose ends now that the war is over, you understand. Dearest Uncle James—and I trust I have deduced correctly: that is a death rattle I hear in your throat, isn’t it?”

Lord James looked at his nephew, seeing the dangerous facade the world saw, the darkly handsome, impeccably dressed gentleman of fashion whose sartorial splendor could never quite disguise the fact that Morgan Blakely could be a very, very dangerous man.

“I’ve always hated you, Morgan. If it weren’t for you, I would have inherited all my brother’s wealth. I had so counted on that. Instead, all my plans have come to naught. And now I am dying, while my holy brother still lives, mumbling his prayers on his makeshift altar while you live high on the Blakely money. There is no justice in this world.”

“I see no need to make my father any major part of this discussion.”

Lord James’s temper flared. “Of course you don’t! I thought I had summoned you—but you were coming anyway, weren’t you? To be sure of my death? And you’re here to watch me die, not to discuss my hypocrite brother. My brother! Loves his God more as each new dawn brings him closer to his own day of reckoning. Funny. Don’t remember Willy spouting scripture when we were young and tumbling everything in sight. Even shared a couple of ’em.”

“That will be enough.”

Lord James ignored his nephew’s warning and continued: “Hung like a stallion, your sainted father, just like you. Hypocrite! That’s what our Willy is. You don’t like his praying and penance any better than I, do you, nevvy? Serves no purpose, does it, when we both know there is no God. You and me, we know. Only the devil, nevvy, only the devil. Believe it, nevvy. There is a devil. It’s him or nothing. He’s sent some of his fellows on ahead to welcome me. See ’em? Over there—hanging from the ceiling like bloody bats. The sight would set Willy straight on his knees for sure, bargaining for angels.”

A muscle twitched spasmodically in Morgan’s cheek. “Your mind is going, Uncle, otherwise I would have to take you to task for your obscenity. However, I see no crushing need to remain here and listen to your ramblings. If you wanted me here for some purpose other than to allow me the faint titillation of watching you shuffle off this mortal coil I suggest you organize your thoughts and get on with it.”

“Ah, yes. Indeed, let us return to the reason for your presence, and hang this distasteful business about spies and Thorndyke and your so damnable, so patient revenges. Poor nevvy—this is one death scene you cannot manipulate to your own designs. Morgan Blakely is not omnipotent this night!”

Morgan inclined his head, not in acquiescence but in obvious condescension.

Nevertheless, the smile was back on Lord James’s face, not that it was an improvement, for years of dissipation had taken a permanent toll even before this last illness struck him down. But all was not lost. His darts had begun to hit home. His adversary was attempting to leave the field—although not before telling him about Thorndyke, not before indulging himself with at least one surgically precise parting shot. Well, he had taken that shot, and now it was time to get to the real crux of this bizarre meeting.

“All in good time, nevvy. You had me worried there for a moment, admitting that you had allowed sentiment to keep you from turning me over to the government, but you’re still the same, all right! Cold to the bone. No wonder we hate each other so—we’re two peas in a pod. Killed your share and more, haven’t you? And liked it, too, didn’t you, boy? The devil’s deep in you, just as he is in me.”

His smile faded and he became intense, for he knew he was about to close in for the kill. “But you’ve got bits of your mother stuck in you, too. A soft side, a silly, worthless part of you that actually cares. That’s why I sent for you. You’re vulnerable, and I like that. I can use that. Listen closely, nevvy. You think you know me, but you don’t. Selling secrets to Boney was child’s play, something to do to pass the time. How do you think I’ve survived all these years? I ran through my wife’s money in less time than it took to bury her along with the puling brat she’d died trying to birth—good riddance to bad rubbish—and I had to poke about, looking for another, more reliable source of income.”

Morgan held out his left hand and inspected his fingertips, frowning over a small cut at the tip of his index finger. “How utterly fascinating, Uncle. I am, of course, hanging breathless on your every word,” he drawled with patently deliberate nonchalance.

“Damned impertinent bastard!” Lord James accused hotly, struggling to rise from his pillows. “Never have I met your like! Never!”

“No, no,” Morgan corrected, his tone insultingly amiable. “I’m your image, Uncle, remember? ‘Cold to the bone,’ as I believe you said. Oh, dear. Is that the gong calling me to dinner? What a fortunate escape. Never fear that I shall find my meal inadequate. I took the precaution of bringing a basket with me from Clayhill.” He rose slowly, pushing the chair back to its former position, the cool precision of his movements galling Lord James. “If you should chance to expire while I’m dining, please consider this our last tender farewell. Good evening, Uncle.”

Morgan was nearly at the door before Lord James spoke again, for it took him that long to regain his breath after his last outburst. He had to say this now—say what he wanted to say, what had to be said—or else Morgan would be gone for good, and James would have died for nothing. If he could not leave behind some festering evidence of his malevolence, the only legacy of a childless, bitter man, it would be as if he had never lived….

“That’s it. Run away. No one can capture the Unicorn!” he called out, his voice loud in the quiet room. He lay back against the pillows, listening to the drops of rainwater splash into the pan nearest the bed, waiting for Morgan’s response, but not really expecting any.

“I’ve always thought it the height of irony that you were the Unicorn,” he continued when he felt enough time had elapsed to build the suspense he desired. “England’s greatest spy. My nemesis. And so modest about it. If I had not broken the codes that made up the messages I delivered to the smugglers, I might never have guessed. Even Wellington never figured out which was which, did he? Pompous, posturing dolt! But I recognized you immediately, recognized myself as I could have been—would have been if Saint Willy hadn’t been born first. So, yes. Yes! I did know my treason could mean the death of you. It was part of the joy of the moment! Jeremy’s death was no more than an accident of good fortune. But the war is over. Napoleon is banished. And still you cling to your secrecy, still you stand quietly and allow another to claim all your glory.”

Lord James paused for a moment, then smiled. “I hold the key to that man’s destruction, nevvy,” he continued quietly, liking the hint of menace in his voice. “Would you like it? What would you and your patient revenge do with the perfect tool for that man’s destruction? Shall that key be my parting gift to you, your legacy?” He lifted one skeletal hand, indicating the bedchamber and all of the house. “Along with this decrepit pile, of course.”

“You’re lying,” Morgan said, his hand on the door latch, his back still turned toward the bed. “You have nothing I want. You were a most deplorable traitor, Uncle, barely worth the effort it took to ferret you out. You say you knew my identity, yet you seemed surprised to learn that I, in turn, had caught you out. But I will admit your dramatics are interesting, if a trifle lacking in style—especially that little bit about Jeremy. Perhaps you should have devoted yourself instead to penny press fiction.”

His nephew didn’t believe him! He was going to leave!

Sudden panic lent Lord James new strength. “I’m not lying, damn you! Think, nevvy. As the twig is bent! Willy can tell you. I was always what I am now, capable of anything for the sake of a few gold pieces. Trading in secrets was my only mistake, a miscalculation of old age and greed, but not my only source of income. I was better when I was younger, sharper.”

“Hence this splendor in which you live, Uncle,” Morgan taunted, spreading his hands as if to encompass the faded ugliness of the bedchamber before opening the door. “I’ll ask one of the servants to come sit with you. Obviously you are now slipping toward delirium.”

“No! I’m telling the truth. I swear it.” James clawed his way to the side of the bed, the better to see his nephew, the better to allow his nephew to see him. “You cannot know all the things I’ve done, the vile, dastardly crimes I’ve committed.”

“Cannot and do not care to know.”

Lord James sneered. “Oh, nevvy, how far you have to fall from that perfidious pinnacle of indifference you perch on. You do care. You will care, because I hold all the cards now, all the answers to your schemes that you still do not admit to, even to yourself. You want revenge, nevvy. Damnation, man, you may even deserve it!”

“Perhaps you’re right. But it will be in my own time, Uncle, and in my own way.”

“Of course. I should have realized that you wouldn’t wish my help, even if I am trying, in this feeble way, to atone for any indirect connection I might have had with dear Jeremy’s death. I understand, nevvy.” Lord James began to pick at the coverlet, his eyes averted from Morgan. “But then, there is still the matter of the child.”

Lord James held his breath as Morgan let go of the latch and turned, his dark eyes narrowed as he stared straight into his uncle’s grinning face. “Child? What child?”

“What? Did you say something, nevvy? I cannot hear you very well, and the room grows dim. Come closer, nevvy. Come close so that I can give you my last confession.”

He heard Morgan’s footsteps and smiled into the frayed collar of his nightshirt. He counted to ten, slowly, then began to speak once more. “Once upon a time,” he began, then chuckled at his own wit, the laughter turning into a wet cough that left bits of blood on his already soiled handkerchief.

“Once upon a time, nevvy,” he continued, “there was a man like me, a man who found himself where he should not be, while another man, a lesser man, usurped his rightful place. We met, this man and I, no more than once or twice, and we bemoaned our fate together over several bottles of wine. Perhaps more than several bottles.”

“Go on,” Morgan urged, pulling the chair back over beside the bed. “Continue your fairy tale.”

Lord James shot his nephew a searing look, reveling in the lack of necessity to hood his dislike for the younger man. “I have every intention of continuing,” he said shortly. “We chatted idly, without real purpose—until the day the man’s circumstances changed and it became imperative for him to take steps to protect himself. He tried to enlist my help, but I refused. Why should I do for him what I might have done for myself?” He shook his head. “I only wonder why I never did it for myself when I was younger…when we all were younger. I only wonder….”

Morgan stood. “And I can only wonder, Uncle, why I am allowing a perfectly good roasted chicken to continue to lie downstairs untasted in my dinner basket.”

“No! Don’t go! You must hear the rest. I did not help the man, but I know what he did.” Lord James lowered his voice conspiratorially. “I followed after and watched—then fired my pistol to scare them off before they’d finished. He was even so stupid as to lift his mask and show his face, to crow about his success, so that he knew I saw him plain. That was a great help to me, almost as great a help as the child. After all, nevvy, what good is it to know something if you cannot turn a profit from it, hmm?”

“Uncle, I haven’t the faintest notion what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t,” Lord James agreed, feeling very satisfied with himself. “As one of those Greeks scribbled so long ago, nevvy, ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing.’ You look surprised. Did you think I was a total barbarian? I know something of the classics. You, nevvy, are like the fox, but I am the hedgehog. Blackmail, which depends on knowing a single great thing, would never occur to you. But it occurred to me.”

Lord James rubbed his palms together, gleefully remembering the long-ago night of his greatest brilliance. He could see it as clearly as he could see his nephew’s strained features. Maybe more clearly. “I waited until after the shot that silenced the woman before I fired my own pistol, frightening them off. And then I waited longer still, until I was sure they had gone, before riding in. I found the child on the ground—muddy, her mother’s blood mixing with the mud and rainwater on her face and little dress. The father was half sunk in the mud—back shot! But I digress. Bit me, the little hellion did, when I pulled her away from the bodies just as her mother breathed her last. I could have killed the child then—snapped her neck like a dried goose bone—but I didn’t. I needed her, you see.”

“The child?” Morgan’s voice was hushed, as if he wished to ask the question but did not want to interrupt. Which was as it should have been. It was time the boy paid his uncle a little respect.

“Yes, of course, the child. I put her in a safe place. Not a very nice place, I suppose, but you must remember—I could just as easily have disposed of her. Suddenly I had all the money I needed, although the fool never knew it was his occasional drinking companion who was taking a share of his new wealth. All the money I could ever want, delivered to a safe address at the beginning of each new quarter. Such a gentlemanly, civilized arrangement—for a time.”

He stopped his story once more, to cough, and to contemplate the injustices of his life.

“The payments stopped a few years ago,” he continued swiftly, not caring for this part of the story, “when the man demanded more proof and ordered me to produce her. I couldn’t, for they told me she had reached her teens and left the orphanage where I had so gladly deposited her that first night. That was careless of me, wasn’t it, nevvy? Misplacing the brat like that, if in truth she had left the orphanage. Luckily I already had Thorndyke—or unluckily, depending upon how you consider the thing. But this is the chit’s house by rights, not yours as is stated in my will, considering that the blunt I got from blackmailing her parents’ killer is what kept this place going for so long. This hulking money-eater and several grand estates scattered all over England that were deeded in her name by her father—all are hers. She’s a rich orphan, this missing heiress I spared in my generosity.”

“You have proof of this dastardly crime, I imagine?”

“Proof? Imbecile! You demand proof from a dying man?” Lord James could not hide his elation, sure all his hooks had sunk home with deadly accuracy. Now, at last, his little play was falling out as he had planned. It almost made his dying worthwhile, to be able to leave the noble Morgan behind to ruin his life trying desperately to right his uncle’s wrong.

Now it was time to reel out the line a few feet before hauling his newly caught fish in once more. “Never mind, Morgan. I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” he said, pressing back against the pillows. “Obviously you’re not interested in my heartfelt confession. Why would you want to help me atone, in this the house of my death?”

Morgan rose from the chair, his cool composure discarded, his eyes flashing fire. Grabbing hold of his uncle’s nightshirt with both hands, he half dragged him up from the bed so that Lord James had to turn his head to hide a triumphant smile. “Enough of this nonsense! This is no game we’re playing, not anymore. No more dancing around the facts, Uncle. I need to hear you say the name. I need to hear the proof from your own lips. Damn you, man, answer me!”

Now, Lord James thought. Now is the time to take my exit—now, while he believes me. He began to cough, racking coughs that had him spitting small specks of blood that tasted of rust and maybe even the dirt that would soon cover his mortal shell. There were two Morgans hovering above him, menacing him with their flashing dark eyes. Defiance flashed in Lord James’s own eyes. “You—you’re the smart one, nevvy. You already know the names!”

Morgan’s desire to kill was apparent, but Lord James knew his nephew’s need for information would take priority, leashing his bloodlust, at least for the moment. “The child? Is she still alive? Surely you must know something. Where could she have gone?”

“A whorehouse, if she was smart,” Lord James answered, feebly trying to push his nephew’s hands away. “Chopping turnips in someone’s kitchen if she was stupid. Unless she’s dead. You know the way of orphanages. It’s a hard life. Even harder than mine has been. Maybe that’s why I lost touch. Or maybe I was lied to. Maybe the little brat is feeding worms. What were you hoping for, Unicorn—to lay your head in the lap of a virgin? I’d like that too, for you’d have to die to do it.”

Morgan released his grip on the nightshirt, which allowed James to slump back against the pillows, gasping for breath. “You’re lying, old man. Your story is full of holes. I don’t believe a word you’re saying. You’ve just taken bits of well-known truth and conveniently twisted them around for your own evil motives.”

Was he lying? Lord James couldn’t remember. He had told so many lies. Was this the truth? Yes. Yes, of course it was the truth. He hadn’t made this story up, designed it from bits of truth woven together with clever lies, to fashion a tapestry of revenge against his brother’s son. Had he? Oh, Christ—had he?

But wait. He remembered now. He had proof!

Lord James dragged himself to the edge of the bed, knocking over a candlestick as he groped on the nightstand for the proof that would seal his nephew’s fate, the one piece of evidence that would start him on what Lord James sincerely hoped would prove to be the path to his destruction. The path to destruction for all of them—and the revenge Lord James longed to see, if only from the other side of the grave.

His fingers closed over the pendant, and he fell back against the pillows, holding it out so that the long gold chain swung free. “Here! Here is your proof! I found it around the child’s throat. Take it, nevvy. And then think, damn you. Think!”

Morgan ripped the pendant from his uncle’s hand and held it up so that its gold chain twinkled dully in the candlelight. “It can’t be. I won’t believe it. You could have commissioned a copy. It would be just like you, for you’ve never done one genuine thing in your life. Uncle. Uncle? Do you hear me?”

Lord James was scarcely able to speak. Everything was suddenly moving too fast. Morgan was confusing him. He had wanted to enjoy this moment, draw it out, savor Morgan’s frustration, then leave him with the Gordian knot of the puzzle he had set him. But now he could barely think clearly, and his ears were full of the sound of rushing water.

Fear invaded his senses, washing away the elation, the thirst for revenge. This was real. His death—so long contemplated but never really believed in, never before comprehended for what it represented—was upon him. The pain in his chest was suffocating, pushing him down into a yawning blackness, a total nothingness that terrified him by its absence of recognizable reality.

This was all wrong. He had been wrong. Nothing was playing out as it should. The play was not the thing. Revenge wasn’t sweet. Not at this cost. Never at such a cost. He wanted to live. Longer. A second more. A minute more. Forever. Why? Why should he die?

Oh, God, but he was frightened. More frightened than he had ever been in his life. God? Why had he thought of God? Why had that well-hated name popped into his head? Could there really be a God? Could there be an alternative to nothingness, a substitute for hell? No wonder they had cried, those people he’d killed over the years. It was the terror that had made them cry! The terror of the unknown, the fear of the God he had sworn did not exist.

It was all so real now.

He had been wrong. His revenge against his brother and Morgan wasn’t worth this agony. He didn’t want to go to hell. If there was a hell there had to be a heaven. Why hadn’t he seen that? Morgan was the smart one. Why hadn’t he seen that?

Lord James didn’t want to spend the rest of eternity burning, burning, burning….

Morgan had to find the girl for him! He had to seek redemption for his poor uncle’s most terrible sin, save him from the demons. He’d tell Morgan everything he wanted to hear, tell him now. Tell him the chit’s name; tell him everything he wanted to know; hold nothing back. Confession. He’d give his genuine confession. Confession was good for the soul.

He grabbed at his nephew’s sleeve, trying to anchor himself to life for just a while longer. “Morgan? Could we be wrong? Is there a God? Oh, what if Willy’s right? What if there is a God? What if there is? What if I’m telling the truth? Am I lying? I can’t remember anymore. Help me, Morgan! I can’t remember the truth!”

“Not now, old man,” Morgan said, his voice tight. “Truth or lie, you have to tell me the rest of it, and then I’ll judge for myself.”

“Judge? We’ll all be judged! Save me, Morgan! Save my immortal soul! You already know the name. Check—check the orphanage in Glynde,” Lord James rasped, vainly trying to pull Morgan closer. “In Glynde,” he repeated, his eyes growing wider and wider as he stared up at the ceiling in horror. The demons had migrated, to circle just above him. They were grinning in avid expectation, their long, pointed fangs glinting in the candlelight, the unearthly whoop-whoop-whoop of their black bat wings sucking the air from his lungs.

Lord James heard a sound coming to him as if from a distance. What was it? Oh, yes. Morgan. His dear nevvy was yelling, still asking for proof, his carefully constructed facade of civilization stripped away just as Lord James had foreseen it—yet he could not take pleasure in the sight. For one of the demons was on his chest now, resting on its bony, emaciated haunches, its birdlike legs folded at the knee as it dug razor-sharp talons into him, letting all the remaining air bubble out his mouth, to be followed by a rising river of blood.

“You know. You…must only remember,” Lord James whispered, his voice clogged with blood, with mounting terror. “The murders…our neighbors…the missing child…the searching…”

The play couldn’t be over; the finale had to be rewritten. Yet the curtain had come crashing down…too soon. Too soon. He couldn’t do anything right, even die.

“No one ever told me! I didn’t know!” Lord James shrieked, his voice suddenly strong in his last agony. He felt himself beginning to choke, drowning in the hot liquid that rushed from his ears, from the tin pots—from everywhere in the universe—to pour into his lungs. He clutched at Morgan with a strength born of impossible panic, tearing at the fine white linen of his shirtfront. It had to be the truth. There was a girl—there was! Wasn’t there? “Find her, nevvy—or I’m damned…or we’re both forever damned! Willy…brother…pray for me!”




CHAPTER TWO


Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings,

and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

Voltaire

THE SUN SHONE BRIGHT as Morgan Blakely and his father, William, duke of Glynde, walked away from the family mausoleum at The Acres, the duke’s ancestral Sussex home. Each man was dressed in funereal black with an ebony satin armband, and each carried his hat while following behind the young minister who had conducted a mercifully short ceremony in the village church.

The duke appeared more than usually frail and wiped at his eyes with a large white handkerchief already banded on all four sides with a thin ribbon of black satin, as if his wardrobe was perpetually prepared for mourning—which, in a way, Morgan realized, it probably was. His father had buried his wife, both his sisters, one of his sons—and now his twin, James—in somewhat less than fifteen years.

Morgan though it must be a depressing way to live, surrounded by all that dying.

He sighed silently and glanced back up the hill at the impressive Italian marble structure that held all his relatives save the one at his side. How long would it be before he took this walk alone, leaving his father’s mortal remains locked behind those airless walls of veined pink stone?

Would his father forgive him—truly forgive him—before he died?

Would he, Morgan, forgive himself? Could he live with himself? Why did he live at all, with Jeremy dead? Were thoughts of revenge enough to keep a man alive? They hadn’t been enough for Uncle James.

But his father was speaking, and for once his tone held no censure, no pity. “It was quite a lovely service, wasn’t it? I had never supposed that the Reverend Mr. Sampson could discover so many pleasant things to say about our dearest brother James.”

“Indeed. I find it remarkable that anyone could summon up a single kind thing to say about the man, Father. And hauling his carcass here to The Acres for interment in the mausoleum is decidedly unnerving, as we have only succeeded in walling him up. Frankly, I would have much preferred to snuggle the bastard twelve or more feet belowground with a boulder or two piled atop his chest, on the off chance he should try to rise again.”

“Morgan! Keep a civil tongue in your head, if you please. We have just buried a man. My brother. My twin. The man with whom I shared our mother’s womb. Had it not been for the vagaries of the birth order, we might well have buried the duke this day.”

“Now, there’s an intriguing thought,” Morgan responded, putting on his hat even as he nodded his goodbye to the minister, who had earlier begged release from any refreshments being served to the mourners after the interment, citing the necessity of attending at the bedside of an ailing villager. “I can only wonder how The Acres would have fared once Uncle James reached his majority and transformed the place into a brothel.”

The duke looked at his son with rheumy blue eyes that had faded over the course of his three and sixty years, like curtains hung too long in the sun. “I will pray for you, Morgan,” he said, his voice tinged with sadness liberally mixed with resignation.

Morgan bristled, then swallowed down any hint of anger at his father’s words. Anger did no good in battle or when trying to reason with the unreasonable. That did not mean that Morgan Blakely, Marquis of Clayton, was not conversant with the tumultuous emotion. He simply chose to ignore it. “You do that, Father,” he said, deliberately stripping the black satin ribbon from his sleeve and stuffing it in his pocket. “You pray for me. Pray for Uncle James. Pray for Jeremy.”

“Do not make a mockery of your brother’s immortal soul!” The duke’s thin cheeks flushed with unhealthy color. Or righteous indignation. Or possibly even religious fervor. Morgan could never be sure. “Not when you were partially the instrument of his death.”

Morgan took one step backward, stung as sharply as he would have been if his father had just slapped his face. “You never tire of that song, do you, Father?” he asked after a moment. “Do you sing it every morning as you wake? Does its accusatory melody lull you to a dreamless sleep at night?”

“Now you’re being impertinent, Morgan,” The duke countered quickly, laying a hand on his son’s forearm. “I have forgiven you. In my heart I have forgiven you. My God demands it of me.”

“Really?” Morgan smoothly removed his arm from his father’s grasp even as he allowed his full lips to curve into an amused sneer. “Your God. Wasn’t that exceedingly accommodating of him? Promise me, Father, when next you speak with him—and I am quite convinced that you will—thank him for me. And pray don’t insult the fellow by reminding him of how damnably cold his charitable forgiveness is to us poor sinners. Ah, here is one of the grooms with your pony cart, Father. How thoughtful of the boy. I shall forgo a ride back to The Acres myself, as I wish to be alone a while longer—to mourn Uncle James, of course. I wouldn’t wish to distress you with my tears.”

The duke shook his head and sighed deeply, as if to acknowledge the impossibility of finding a way to communicate with his son. “If you wish it, Morgan. I will see you at the dinner table, I hope. And in time to help me lend a blessing to the meal, please. I do not ask much of you while you are at The Acres, but I must ask that you follow my wishes in such matters. Coming to table with a glass of Burgundy in your hand is offensive.”

Morgan assisted his father up onto the seat of the pony cart, then stepped back and bowed to the man. “I would rather cut off my own arm than offend you, sir,” he drawled softly, then motioned for the groom to drive on, leaving him behind to contemplate his uncle’s passing.

And to wonder why the sun was shining while Jeremy, and all of Jeremy’s older brother’s hopes for happiness, lay moldering in that pink marble mausoleum on the top of the hill.



THE SMALL ORPHANAGE at Glynde, a foundling home of indeterminate age and antiquated drains, was situated just outside the village proper, sunk in a small cutout of land and hidden behind a stout wall and a stand of trees. Good ladies and gentlemen riding in their carriages, farmers on their carts, and even people on foot could pass by the orphanage without fear of having their sensibilities offended by the sight of too-thin legs, too-large eyes, or the many tiny graves that lined a plot at the bottom of the kitchen garden.

The world, Morgan knew, was a hard, unforgiving place for an orphan in this land where wealth was too rare, where poverty and hunger already hung too close to home to be reminded of it daily, and where sympathy was reserved for the alms box at Christmas and Eastertide.

For all his newly discovered religion, even the very Christian duke of Glynde had not as yet extended his largesse past repairing the steeple of the Reverend Mr. Sampson’s church, to bestow his bounty on the unwanted, unloved children whose very existence cried out for compassion.

He should bring the duke here, Morgan thought. He should shake him out of his self-imposed religious limbo and back to the world of the living. Hell and damnation, just the smell emanating from the place should be enough to do that.

Or perhaps, like the rest of the county, his father simply hadn’t looked, hadn’t chosen to see past the walls and the trees.

Morgan knew he hadn’t seen past them either, except for a few times when, as a young, adventurous child, he had talked Jeremy into climbing over the high walls of the orphanage to steal apples from the single tree within the packed-dirt courtyard.

It wasn’t that there were not ample trees at The Acres or that the one within the orphanage wall was of a tastier variety. It was the thrill of the adventure itself that had intrigued Morgan. Just as the risk of the thing had led him to ride his father’s best hunter bareback at midnight, to steal away to watch a hanging in the village square, and to visit the local barmaid at the Spotted Pony at the tender age of fourteen.

Always dragging Jeremy, who was three years younger, along with him, of course, although he had allowed his brother to remain outside the first night he visited the Spotted Pony. There were limits, even to the debaucheries of headstrong youth.

No, he wouldn’t bring his father here. He couldn’t do that, any more than he could confide in the man about Uncle James’s unbelievable deathbed confession. William Blakely’s religious fervor—now doubled, thanks to his grief over Jeremy’s death—could not be corrupted by orphans and tales of foul murder.

After all, if the duke lost his devotion to religion, his only talisman in a world gone mad, there would be nothing left for him to live for. and Morgan would soon after be forced to make that solitary journey back from the mausoleum.

Now, unfashionably early in the morning the day after Lord James’s funeral, as the marquis alighted from his mount at the gates to the orphanage, gates that hung drunkenly from leather straps stretched long past their best effectiveness, he dismissed depressing thoughts of his father and of the lack of one single person in the world to whom he could confide his deepest hopes and thoughts. Instead, Morgan wondered silently if he had ever stolen food from the mouths of any of the foundlings, who must have viewed a ripe red apple as a prize beyond price.

But he didn’t wonder for long. There was no sense in condemning himself for the follies of his misspent youth, for he had long since outgrown them for the follies he had indulged himself in since becoming—in the eyes of the world, at least—a man grown.

He approached the gates purposefully, refusing to regard what he was doing as anything more than hunting mares’ nests because of a dying man’s insane blatherings, and pulled on the rope that set a bell to sounding tinnily on the other side of the wall. And then he waited, slowly realizing that, although there had to be at least thirty orphans in residence, he had not heard a single sound since the bell stopped ringing. Not a laugh. Not a cry. Nothing. He might as well have been standing outside a graveyard.

“Well, lookee here. Glory be ta God, and ain’t ye a fine-lookin’ creature ta see so early in the mornin’? And rigged out just loik a Lunnon gennelmun with it all, ain’t ye?”

Morgan turned about slowly to see a small, slight woman well past her youth—and most definitely years beyond any lingering hint of beauty she might ever have possessed—standing just behind him, a large bundle of freshly cut, still damp rushes tucked beneath her left arm.

He removed his curly-brimmed beaver and swept the woman an elegant leg, the distasteful aroma of unwashed female flesh assaulting his nostrils. “Good day, madam,” he said politely as he straightened, suppressing an urge to take out his scented handkerchief and press it to his nostrils. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am the Marquis of Clayton, here to see the person in charge of this charming institution.”

The small woman cackled—like an ancient hen with a sore throat, Morgan thought—then smiled, exposing her sad lack of teeth. She had some, for certain, but they were stuck into her gums at irregular intervals, as if she had stood at some distance while Mother Nature tossed them at her one by one, and she’d had to open her mouth to catch them as best she could.

“Mrs. Rivers? And what would ye be wantin’ with the likes of her, boyo? Drunk as a wheelbarrow the besom is, and has been ever since the quarter’s funds showed up here a fortnight ago, don’t ye know. Bring yerself back next month, when she’s murdered all the gin and can see ye straight. She’s always been one fer a well-turned leg.”

“I’m afraid my business can’t wait that long,” Morgan said as the woman moved to brush past him as if he—and his impressive title—didn’t exist. She was the rudest individual he had ever met—and yet she intrigued him. She had a look of cunning intelligence about her, well hidden by the grime on her face, but still noticeable.

He decided to give it another try. He’d use the name his uncle had not given him, a name he already knew. “I’ve come with a mission—to locate a child, a young lady by now, I suppose. Her name is Caroline. Blond hair, or at least it was when she was little. She would be about eighteen.”

The woman stopped abruptly, looking back at him slyly across one bony shoulder. “And is that a fact, boyo? And what, I’m askin’, would a fine upstandin’ gentrymort like yerself be doin’ pokin’ about for Caroline? Plenty of willin’ bodies at the Spotted Pony—iffen ye don’t mind a dose of the clap. Go there, why don’t ye? I’m past such tumblin’s now, even with a pretty un like yerself.”

Until the woman spoke the name aloud as if familiar with it, Morgan had been willing to believe that his uncle’s story was just as he had presented it—a fairy tale meant to send his nephew off to chase his own tail. Until this very moment he had refused to believe there was a grain of truth in James Blakely’s words, or a single reason to hope that he, Morgan Blakely, had at last found a fitting instrument of revenge against his enemy.

“Surely you jest. You are the very picture of feminine beauty. What’s your name, madam?” he asked now, extracting a single gold piece from his pocket and offering it to her.

“And that’s a golden tongue ye have, don’t ye, boyo? My name is Mary Magdalene O’Hanlan, seein’ as how ye asked so nice like, but I’ve been Peaches since m’salad days in Dublin and then in Piccadilly.” The woman smiled, then quickly snatched the coin from his fingers, biting on it to ascertain whether or not it was real before stuffing it inside the low bodice of her filthy gown. “M’cronies dubbed me with the name ’cause I was so good at stealin’ sweet things from the stalls. I was the best—once. But that’s a long time past, and best forgotten.”

Her smile vanished as she leveled narrowed eyes at Morgan. “Now take yerself off, pretty boy. I ain’t got nothin’ more ta say. Just like I told that other fella all those years back—a mean-lookin’ mort with a smile that wide, but that still couldn’t hide the old divil what was peekin’ out between his two eyes—there ain’t no Caroline here. Not no more.”

Morgan shook his head, disgusted with himself that he should feel so discouraged. He should have known. “She’s dead, then?”

Peaches cocked her head to one side, blowing a greasy lock of graying red hair out of her eyes. “And did ye hear that from me? Ye got a mind what leaps ahead fast as a horse can trot. Mayhap she is, boyo, and mayhap she ain’t. It depends, don’t ye know. What would the loiks of ye be wantin’ with Caroline Monday anyhows?”

“Caroline Monday?” Morgan repeated the name questioningly. “Then this particular orphan we’re speaking of has a surname—a last name? Perhaps she isn’t the one I’m seeking after all.”

Peaches snorted. “Don’t know a lot, do ye, boyo? It’s me what named her Monday. That’s the day I found the creature on the doorstep, just like I find so many of ’em, cryin’ her little heart out fer her ma. She told me her other name all by herself,” she continued, smiling reminiscently. “No higher than m’knee, she was, but she told me her name plain. Just afore she bit m’hand as I was offerin’ it ta her. The divil’s own rogue, she was, and no mistake. Then she caught the fever, like so many of them do, and I wouldna gived a plugged pennypiece fer her. But she didn’t cock up her toes, not that un, even if she was poorly for ever so long. Too stubborn ta know she should be dyin’, I said then ta anyone who’d listen, and I say it again now. Too simple mean stubborn by half! Think she was the bloody queen o’ England herself!”

Morgan was elated by this information, but he deliberately tamped down his enthusiasm, saying only, “Yet you told me, as you told this other man you spoke of, that Miss Caroline is gone.”

Peaches allowed the bundle of rushes to fall to the ground. “Miss Caroline, is it, now? And don’t that sound grand fer a foundlin’ brat?” She peered at him again, as if assessing him for flaws. “Now I’m thinkin’ mayhap it’s time some more of your worship’s lovely gold passed over Miss Mary Magdalene O’Hanlan’s palm?”

“Perhaps,” Morgan replied tightly, and then for the first time spoke aloud of the memory his uncle’s patently false, contrived confession had brought crashing to the forefront of his mind. “Or perhaps it’s time I rode to the village to summon the constable, so that you can tell him that Mary Magdalene O’Hanlan is a member of the gang of nefarious and long-sought kidnappers of one Lady Caroline Wilburton, daughter of the earl and countess of Witham, who were cruelly murdered on a roadway not thirty miles from here some fifteen years ago?”

Peaches plunked herself down atop the bundle of rushes, her skinny calves sticking out from beneath the hem of her gown. “The divil you say, boyo,” she responded as she looked up at him, her voice tinged with wondrous awe but not a trace of fear or guilt. “And would ye be knowin’ if there’s a reward in the offin’ for the safe return of this poor little darlin’? After all is said and done, it’s me what kept her little heart beatin’—what with m’lovin’ good care of the tot, don’t ye know.”

Morgan knew he could either dole out a coin for each piece of information or shorten the process by some minutes by acknowledging how important the woman’s answers were to him. Deciding to leave subterfuge for another day and for someone less sharp than Peaches O’Hanlan, he pulled a small leather purse from his pocket and dropped it in the Irishwoman’s lap. “Where is she?”

The purse followed the gold coin before Peaches answered him. “That’s what I like, boyo—a fella who comes right to the heart of the thing. She’s not here, nor has she been in this stinkin’ hole fer this year or more. But I knows where she be, and it’s more than a good ride from here. Ye’ll be needin’ me ta get ta her, don’t ye know. Needin’ me to point her out ta ye, ta get her ta trust ye. And it’s the only real mither she’s ever known or remembered since the fever struck that I am, the only one she loves. I’m her dearest Peaches, that’s what I am.”

“How commendable of you. You’ll be well rewarded if you continue to cooperate. That purse is only a pittance, one that could be trebled. Gather whatever belongings you have and meet me outside these gates in an hour. I’ll return with my carriage.”

Morgan felt very tired as he turned to mount his horse. What was he doing? The Irishwoman could be lying to him. His uncle James most probably had been lying to him. And yet some of the puzzle pieces were already beginning to fit. He had to continue the search for his instrument of revenge against Richard Wilburton. He had been patient for three long years. It was time to act. “An hour, Miss O’Hanlan, and no more. And don’t breathe a word to anyone.”

“Me?” Peaches responded, scrambling to her feet. “It’s close as an oyster I’ll be, and ye can take that as m’word.”

“I’d prefer not to take either your word or your person anywhere, Miss O’Hanlan, but as you Irish say, ‘Needs must when the devil drives’.”

Morgan swung himself up into the saddle. “Oh, and one more thing. Kindly bathe before I come back. You reek of the sewers, Miss O’Hanlan.”

Peaches gave a flirtatious flip of her bony hand as Morgan guided his horse toward the path. “Dip m’self in parson’s ale? Well, all right—but only a little bit, and only ’cause ye’re a such pretty thing, boyo.”




CHAPTER THREE


Beware, as long as you live, of judging people by appearances.

Jean de La Fontaine

“DULCINEA? DULCINEA! You sweet, wretched angel, I see you skulking out there. Come in here to me at once! I have just now had the most splendiferous notion!”

Caroline Monday lifted her small chin from her chest, where she had let it drop while she indulged herself in a moment of exhaustion not unlike all her waking moments, and tiredly hauled herself up from the slatted wooden bench pressed against the wall of the hallway outside one of the small rooms reserved for affluent patients.

“Aunt Leticia, all of your notions are splendiferous,” she soothed kindly as she walked toward the open doorway, “and as you have these notions at least three times daily, I see no need to rush lickety-split to hear the latest one.”

“Oh, pooh,” Leticia Twittingdon, who would never see the sunny side of fifty again, complained from her cross-legged perch on the wide cushioned window seat, thrusting her lower lip forward in a pout as Caroline entered the room. Miss Twittingdon’s long, angular body was dressed from head to toe in brightest scarlet, and a crimson silk turban perched primly on her childlike curls. “And I was so certain you’d want to have me teach you the names and various titles of all of good King George’s royal princes and princesses. All accomplished young ladies should know these things by rote, Dulcinea. It isn’t enough merely to be beautiful. We must complete your education. Let’s see, is Princess Amelia still alive? I seem to remember some tragedy about that dear little thing.”

Caroline bent to pick up Miss Twittingdon’s wool shawl, which had somehow found its way to the threadbare carpet, and laid it over the back of a wooden chair. “Another time, dear lady,” she said, smiling wanly as she pushed her palms against her arched back at the waist, trying to ease her aching muscles. She was so tired. But then, she was always tired. “This particular well-informed debutante is woefully late emptying the chamber pots today.”

“Dulcinea! How many times must I remind you that genteel ladies such as yourself do not speak of such base mortal necessities? Chamber pots, indeed! Don Quixote de la Mancha, that dearest and bravest of knights—a veritable saint!—would have deemed them golden chalices. Oh, dear. Should I have said that? Have I been sacrilegious?”

“I really wouldn’t know. If I understand the meaning of the word correctly as you have taught it to me, life itself is sacrilegious. Perhaps you should call me Aldonza, as in Mr. Cervantes’s book?”

“Never!” Miss Twittingdon lifted one index finger and jabbed it into the air, as if to punctuate her denial. “I may not be a man, and thus forbidden the splendiferous adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, but I will not be denied my Dulcinea!”

“Of course you will not be denied her. Please forgive me, Aunt Leticia. I must be overtired to have forgotten my high station so far as to mention the pots. I spent most of the morning peeling potatoes in the kitchens and half the afternoon on the public side attempting to convince Mr. Jenkins of the folly inherent in his wish to bite off Mr. Easton’s left ear as he held the little fellow tight in a stranglehold.”

Miss Twittingdon shivered delicately as she leaned forward, her long, needle-sharp nose all but twitching, to hear the latest gossip. “The horror of it! And did you succeed?”

“I’m not quite sure,” Caroline told her before sinking into the chair and leaning back against the shawl, which smelled of dust and the old lady’s rose water. “Mr. Jenkins ended by biting off the bottom half of Mr. Easton’s right ear—although Mr. Easton didn’t appear to mind. But then, Mr. Easton doesn’t mind much of anything, not even his lice. Tell me, should I consider a change of ears a success?”

Leticia tipped her head to one side, pressing a finger to her thin lips. “I shall have to ponder that a moment…. No, I don’t believe so, Dulcinea. I thought you told me that Mr. Jenkins confined himself to the occasional proboscis. But truthfully, my dear, I don’t know why you bother going over to the public side at all.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially as she added in a near whisper, “A lady shouldn’t say this, I suppose, but they’re all as mad as bedlamites over there, you know. As mad as bedlamites.”

Caroline turned her head away from Miss Twittingdon who, after five years in the private side of the asylum, had yet to recognize that she, too, was an inmate and not a pampered visitor. Perhaps if she visited the public side she might begin to understand the precariousness of her position, for if her brother—“the Infernal Laurence”—ever chose to stop sending quarterly payments to the proprietors of the asylum, Leticia would soon find herself in one of those narrow, unheated cells. But then, what good would frightening such a dear, harmless old lady do?

The only wonder was why she, Caroline Monday, hadn’t been reduced to madness herself in the year she had worked as a servant of all work at the Woodwere Asylum for Lunatics and Incorrigibles. From her first day there, when one of the inmates had flung his own excrement at her, Caroline had known that her move from the Glynde orphanage had provided no great stepping stone up to a better life.

But Caroline had survived.

She had survived because the only alternative to survival was the unthinkable failure of death. Or, as Peaches had suggested, she could travel to London and join the ranks of the impure who hovered around Covent Garden hoping to make a passable living at “a fiver a flip”—at least until her teeth loosened from a bad diet, her body showed the ravages of one or more of the many venereal diseases rampant in the area, or her love of blue ruin, one of Peaches O’Hanlan’s many colorful names for gin, left her “workin’ the cribs for a penny a poke.”

Peaches hadn’t really wanted Caroline to become one of the soiled doves of Covent Garden. Caroline knew that now. She had simply intended to frighten her into realizing that a life spent as general dogsbody in an asylum full of raving maniacs was preferable to following in the footsteps of so many of the orphans who were pushed out of the foundling home to make their way as best they could.

“Will you have time for lessons this afternoon, Dulcinea?”

Caroline shook herself from her reverie and looked to the older woman, smiling as she saw the apprehension in her face. Miss Twittingdon hated to be alone and in charge of filling her own hours, for she often found them stuffed with unladylike thoughts concerning her brother, thoughts that frightened her. “And of course I do, Aunt Leticia, don’t you know,” she answered. “Don’t I do my best to make time for you every day?”

Miss Twittingdon frowned, shaking an accusatory finger in Caroline’s direction. “No, you don’t—or else I wouldn’t be hearing snippets of heathen Irishisms slipping back into your voice. We do not begin our sentences with ‘and’ and then tack a ‘don’t you know’ on the end of them. Both are appalling examples of Irish cant. To speak so is a sure sign of low breeding. You will remember that, won’t you? You must! Or how will you be able to show yourself to your best next Season when you make your come-out?”

Caroline rolled her eyes. She had been listening to this insane business of her come-out ever since first meeting Miss Twittingdon, who had immediately demanded that Caroline address her as “Aunt.” She hadn’t been very impressed with the notion at the beginning and complied with the daily lessons only because Miss Twittingdon seemed to have an endless supply of sugar comfits in a painted tin she hid under her bed.

But over time she had grown fond of the woman and enamored of the lessons and the books her “aunt” read to her as well. Not that improving her speech, memorizing simple history lessons, and learning the correct way to attack a turbot with knife and fork—and Caroline had never so much as seen a turbot—were of much use to her here at Woodwere.

But Leticia Twittingdon’s room was warm in the winter and there was always a fresh pitcher of water for Caroline to use to wash herself, and there was something vaguely comforting about having someone to call “Aunt,” so that it now seemed natural for Caroline to listen to Leticia’s grand plans for her “niece” without stopping to wonder at the futility of the thing.

Or even of the pain Leticia Twittingdon’s grand schemes for Caroline’s future caused, late at night, when Caroline lay on her thin cot in the attic, knowing in her heart of hearts that Caroline Monday, unlike Dick Whittington’s cat, would never look at a king.

“Caroline! Caroline! Come quickly! There are people here to see you. Downstairs, in old Woodwere’s office. Have you done something wrong? Did you filch another orange while you were in the village? Woodwere may keep Boxer and the other attendants away from you, but even he can’t pluck you from a jail cell.”

Caroline watched as Leticia uncrossed her legs and rose to her full height to stare across the carpeted floor at the doorway, where Frederick Haswit, a remarkably homely dwarf standing no more than three feet high, was jumping up and down on his stubby legs in a veritable frenzy of apprehension. “Is that any way to enter a lady’s chamber, sirrah?” she asked, arching one thin eyebrow. “Really, Ferdie, the disintegration of manners instigated in this modern age by hey-go-mad gentlemen such as you is appalling. Simply appalling! Furthermore, there is no Caroline here, but only Dulcinea and myself.”

Caroline smiled at Ferdie, another of her friends at Woodwere, who had been installed at the asylum six or seven years previously, when he was no more than thirteen. He had been placed there by his father once the boy’s doting mother had died, as the man did not appreciate having “a bloody freak” cluttering up either his impeccable lineage or his Mayfair town house.

Ferdie stamped one small, fat foot. “Not Dulcinea, you ridiculous twit! Caroline! Caroline! Oh, never mind. You’re too addlepated to know chalk from cheese.”

“At least I can see over the top of the dinner table to find the cheese, you abbreviated little snot,” Miss Twittingdon responded, looking down her long nose at the dwarf.

“Who is asking for me, Ferdie?” Caroline inquired quickly as the dwarf stuck his small hands in his pockets and struck a belligerent pose, obviously ready to go into battle with the woman, a move that would do Caroline no good at all. “Do I know these persons?”

“Of course you don’t, Dulcinea,” Mrs. Twittingdon pointed out in her usual reasonable tone, a tone that had played accompaniment to many an outrageously splendiferous notion. “You are not yet Out, and so you know nobody. I wouldn’t allow it. Why, as your guardian, I haven’t as yet even given you leave to put up your hair!”

“Of course,” Caroline echoed meekly, refusing to snap at the woman. Besides, she had enough to do wondering whom she might have offended lately with her sometimes sharp tongue, or what sleight of hand she had indulged in while visiting the village—picking pockets was one of the skills her first mentor, Peaches, had taught her—that might now have some back to haunt her. “You will forgive me, I hope.”

But Miss Twittingdon was speaking again, and Caroline tamped down any niggling fears in order to listen. “Did these persons leave their cards, Ferdie? You know we receive only on Tuesday mornings from ten until two. There is nothing else for it—they shall have to leave calling cards, as civilized people know they ought, with the corner bent down to show we did not receive them. As you should have known, Ferdie, if you were civilized, which we all are aware you are not. Then, if we so choose, we will condescend to receive them next week. Do toddle off downstairs now and pass on this information, if you please, and don’t hesitate to remind these people, whoever they may be, that certain basic rules of civilization must be maintained, even here in this benighted countryside.”

“Heavens yes, Ferdie,” Caroline seconded, caught between apprehension and a real enjoyment of Miss Twittingdon’s strict rules for receiving visitors in a madhouse. “Do tell them that Miss Caroline Dulcinea Monday regrets that she is not receiving today. She receives only on Tuesdays, and this, after all”—she began to giggle—“is already Wednesday. Can you do that for me, Ferdie—with so many days to remember?”

“Levity is not called for at this dark hour, Caroline, even if that loony red crow over there can’t see it,” Ferdie told her portentously, slowly shaking his too-large head. “Your visitors are an odd pair—an Irish drab and a great, large gentleman dressed in London clothes. Has eyes black as pokers and talks like he’s used to being listened to. Maybe you didn’t steal another orange. Maybe you’ve broken a big law this time. Maybe he’s come to take you away and brought a keeper with him to tie you up. Maybe—”

“Maybe I’ll hang, Ferdie,” Caroline snapped, her usual good humor evaporating under the uncomfortable heat of the dwarf’s melancholy suppositions. “Well, Aunt Leticia,” she proposed airily, turning to look at the older woman, “shall I trip off downstairs and do my best to stare down this well-dressed hangman, or will you stand firm beside me here while I…Ferdie! Did you say an Irishwoman?”

Frederick Haswit nodded with some vigor, then puffed up his barrel chest, folded both his hands over his heart, and recited importantly:

“A winsome damsel she is not,

with scrawny breast and lackluster hair,

her teeth numbering little more than a pair.

I saw her there, and must tell you true;

She peered at me, and laughed—hoo, hoo!

The man, he silenced her mirth with a look,

showing she’s naught but this black king’s rook.

It is in him I see the menace, the danger,

deep in the eyes of this intimidating stranger.

So come now, sweet child, we’ll hie away to

the sea,

the ridiculous Miss Twittingdon, Caroline—

and me.”

“Your meter worsens with each new, excruciatingly uneven couplet, Ferdie, and I for one wouldn’t cross the street with you, let alone run off to sea in your company,” Miss Twittingdon told him flatly, reaching into the sleeve of her scarlet gown to extract a lace-edged handkerchief and lift it to her lips. “Red crow, indeed! It’s no wonder you’ve been locked up. I would have had you put in chains and fetters myself. But enough of this nonsense. There is nothing else for it—show the gentleman upstairs.”

“And the Irishwoman as well, Ferdie,” Caroline instructed, sure that the dwarf had described Peaches. She hadn’t seen her in over a year, since the day the woman had left her, weeping uncontrollably, behind the locked gates of Woodwere.

Caroline frowned. What could Peaches be about? Certainly she hadn’t found a protector for her, some London swell who would, according to Peaches, set her up in a discreet apartment on the fringes of Mayfair, then use her for his convenience until he tired of her. Peaches had always thought such an arrangement to be the pinnacle of success—especially if the woman was smart enough to ask for diamonds at regular intervals and talented enough to lift coins from the man’s purse each night after he’d taken his pleasure on her and fallen to snoring into his pillow.

“Come sit here, Dulcinea,” Miss Twittingdon commanded, indicating the best chair in the room which, as there were only two chairs in the room, both of them as hard as the bread served in the servants’ hall, was not much of a recommendation. “And don’t cross your legs, even at the ankle. It is a deplorable habit. And pull this brush through your hair. You look as if you’ve been tugged backward through a hedge. And—”

“I thought no woman of breeding began her sentences with ‘and,’ Aunt Leticia,” Caroline interrupted, hating the fuss the woman was making over her. She had no time to think of her ankles, her hair, or even her grammar. She had to rack her brain for a way to rid herself of this London gentleman and not injure her friendship with Peaches, who the good Lord knew probably only meant well.

“A woman of breeding is also never impertinent, Dulcinea,” Miss Twittingdon intoned solemnly, arranging her own skirts neatly after depositing her lean frame in the other chair. “Now hold your chin high—ah, just so—and fold your hands in your lap. It wouldn’t do for anyone to see how you’ve gnawed your nails to the quick. And don’t say a word, my dear. I, as chaperon, will be in charge of this interview. Do you think our London gentleman likes red? I do hope so. I’m considering dyeing my hair to match my turban. His reaction, the opinion of a man of the world, a man who moves in the first circles, will be most helpful, don’t you think?”

“Ferdie says he’s a hangman,” Caroline pointed out, curling her hands together so that her bitten nails were hidden against her palms. “He probably would like you to dye your hair black.”

“Oh, pooh!” Miss Twittingdon said, shaking her head so that the scarlet satin turban slid forward, to hang suspended drunkenly over one eye.

Caroline bit her bottom lip, fearful that if she laughed, her giggles might easily turn to tears.



MORGAN WAS HAVING MORE than a little difficulty believing himself to be where he already knew he was—in the small, stuffy office of the owner of the Woodwere Asylum for Lunatics and Incorrigibles. He was having even more trouble reconciling himself to the fact that he was accompanied by a wizened, foul-mouthed Irishwoman named Peaches—for the love of Christ, Peaches!—who had eaten with her hands when they stopped for nuncheon at a nearby inn, and then strolled outside to the innyard, moved her skirts to one side, spread her feet wide apart, and relieved herself beside the closed coach, like some stray dog lifting its leg against a tree trunk.

“Coo! Not bad for a loony bin, is it, yer worship? Bet ye a bit of this would be like a torchlight procession goin’ down m’throat.”

Morgan, shaken from his reverie by this rude interruption, looked to where Peaches was standing beside a well-supplied drinks table, fondling a lead-crystal container filled with an amber liquid he supposed to be brandy. “You will oblige me by removing your grimy paws from that decanter at once, Miss O’Hanlan.”

Peaches pulled a face at him, but moved away from the drinks table. “No need to put yerself in a pucker, yer worship. And it was just a little nip I was after, don’t you know. That beefsteak at the inn was tough as the divil and left m’gullet dry as a bleached bone.”

Morgan sat very straight, his right calf propped on his left thigh. The woman had been trying his patience all day, but he refused to be baited. “I’m sure there is a pump out in the yard, if you’re in need of liquid refreshment. I believe I can handle things from here without your assistance.”

Peaches swaggered across the room to stand in front of him. “Oh, and is that so, yer high-and-mighty worship? Like I keep tellin’ ye, Caroline won’t give ye the time o’day without me here to vouch fer ye. Not that it’s much of that I’ll be doin’, still not knowin’ what ye’re about and all.” She marginally relaxed her threatening pose. “Is our Caroline really rich? Always thought there was somethin’ special about the wee darlin’. Raised her up m’self, I did—raised her up proper—and fed her outta me own bowl. Wouldna had a whisker of a chance without me, and don’t you know. Now, yer worship, if we could talk a little mite more about that reward?”

Morgan ignored her questions and asked one of his own, not of Peaches, but merely rhetorically. “Where is this fellow Woodwere? That dwarf said I should wait here for him. I doubt I should tarry too long, for this is such an insane quest that it would be no great wonder if I ended the day locked inside this madhouse myself.” He turned to look at Peaches, still unable to believe the woman was proud of what she had done. “A madhouse. How could you have steered Caroline—any child—into employment in such a pesthole?”

“Because there weren’t no better openin’s hereabouts for earls’ daughters, I suppose,” Peaches shot back, jamming her fists on her hips. “Ye beat Banaghan for fanciful notions, yer worship, do ye know that? And where else was I apposed ta put her, I ask ye? The local workhouse? Caroline wouldna lasted a fortnight there.”

“A-hem.”

Morgan wheeled about in the chair to see the dwarf standing just at the edge of the threadbare carpet. “What is it? Didn’t you locate Woodwere?”

“No, I didn’t, which isn’t surprising, because I didn’t go looking for him,” the dwarf answered solemnly, then grinned. “But I did tell Miss Monday about you and the Irishwoman. You can come upstairs, if she comes with you,” he said, indicating Peaches with a slight inclination of his large head. His smile disappeared as he added, “What did Caroline do wrong, sir? Is this about the oranges?”

Morgan stood, then retrieved his hat, gloves, and greatcoat from a nearby table. “No. Oranges do not enter into any business I have to discuss with Miss Monday, although you have piqued my interest, Mr.—”

“Haswit. Frederick Haswit. But you can call me Ferdie, since you’re not here about the oranges. Unless you’ve come about that bolt of cloth, of course. But you don’t look any more like a draper than you do a greengrocer. What crime of Caroline’s are you here to punish?”

“Ah, and it’s keepin’ her hand in, our Caroline is,” Peaches said happily, walking over to pat Ferdie’s misshapen head. “Taught her all she knows, I did, and it’s a pretty fair teacher I am, too, even if I’ve lost the touch a mite. The rheumatism, ye know. Else why would I be workin’ with foundlin’ brats, only the good saints could say. It sure an’ isn’t because Mary Magdalene O’Hanlan cares a clip about the creatures. A roof over me head and a dry cot, that’s all I cares about now—and mayhap a little reward for doin’ a good turn now and again. Come on, little fella, fetch me ta Caroline.”

Morgan lifted his eyes to the chipped paint of the ceiling and silently cursed his dead uncle who, he believed, was probably grinning up at him from the bowels of hell at the moment, enjoying his nephew’s predicament immensely, then followed after Peaches and Ferdie as they left the room and walked toward a wide flight of stairs.

As the marquis walked along, he took out his pocket watch, glanced at its face, and was faintly surprised to see that it was only a few minutes past five. It should have been later, considering all he had been through already this day, since encountering Peaches that morning at the orphanage fifteen miles away in Glynde.

But now, at last, the moment had arrived, and he was about to come face-to-face with one Caroline Monday, who might or might not be Lady Caroline Wilburton, who as a child of three had disappeared without trace from the scene of her parents’ brutal and still unsolved murder.

Morgan had been only fifteen when he saw young Lady Caroline for the first and last time. He had very little remembrance of her beyond a hazy impression of blond hair and very sharp elbows, one of which she dug into his ribs when, at his mother’s orders, he attempted to pick her up as she teetered precariously at the edge of the fish pond while Morgan, Jeremy, and their parents were at Witham for a visit.

He remembered the earl and his beautiful young wife much better, having suffered an impressionable youth’s wild infatuation with the countess, Lady Gwendolyn, that hadn’t lived out the summer. News of her horrific death that October had reached him at school, and he had immediately remembered his supposed deathless passion for the woman, which caused him to sink into months of melancholy, during which he produced the only poems he had ever penned in the name of Grand Romance.

As he climbed the stairs, Morgan conjured up a mental picture of Lady Gwendolyn, sure that the real Caroline, whom everyone had searched for, then presumed dead all these long years, would be the picture of her beautiful, sweet-smelling mother. That was all that this visit to madness would take, he was sure, one quick, assessing look—and then he would be on his way back to Clayhill and sanity and, of course, his solitary thoughts of revenge.

“This way, sir,” Ferdie called back to Morgan. The dwarf was already dancing down the long hallway in the direction of the single open door at the end of the passage. “Miss Twittingdon is waiting for you. But don’t mind her—she’s an inmate, if you take my meaning.”

“She’s one of the loonies, ye mean,” Peaches—whose steps had slowed as she gained the hallway—said, her usually booming voice lowered to a whisper. “And what would ye be, Ferdie, iffen ye don’t mind me askin’?”

Ferdie pulled himself up to his full height, which brought him just past the bottom button of Morgan’s waistcoat, and announced:

“All men are measured alike in the eyes of God;

but a father’s vanity gauges with a different rule.

A mother’s love protects while she has life,

but once she is gone, naked hatred runs rife.

Hide him away, secrete the embarrassing Haswit.

Remove him, forget him, brand him a half-wit!”

Morgan looked down at Frederick Haswit, really looked at him for the first time, and felt a twinge of guilt. He had dismissed the youth, who looked to be at least in his late teens, as being faintly feebleminded merely because of his size, assuming that Ferdie was incarcerated at Woodwere because that was where he should be. Granted, the fellow was vaguely eccentric, spouting bad poetry at the drop of a hint, but did he really need to be hidden from the world, locked away from a normal life?

“Haswit. You can’t be Sir Joseph’s son, can you, Ferdie?” Morgan heard himself inquiring, not realizing that he had come to that conclusion until he spoke the question aloud. “Sir Joseph Haswit. As I recall, he resides in London year-round and is known to be a childless widower.”

Ferdie’s expression was painful to see. “As he sees it.”

“I’m sorry,” Morgan said sincerely. “We English can be remarkably cold bastards.”

Ferdie tipped his great head to one side, and his painful grimace became a smile in earnest. “Not to worry. The world will come to an end in eight months anyway. Eight months, three weeks, and four days, to be completely precise about the thing. Nobody can stop it. Everything has to balance out.”

Peaches backed up until she was pressed against Morgan’s side. “More’n a few slates offa this one’s roof, yer worship, and don’t ye know,” she whispered to him out of the corner of her mouth. “If it’s wantin’ me ye’ll be, I’ll be in the coach, m’shiverin’ body stuffed under the lap rug, and mumblin’ a prayer ta the Virgin—iffen I can call one ta mind.”

Morgan grabbed hold of Peaches’s elbow as she attempted to back toward the staircase. “In eight months, you say, Ferdie,” he said calmly. “You seem very precise about that. I wonder why.”

“Eight months, three weeks, and four days. And why not?” Ferdie answered, evading Morgan’s searching look. “June 7, 1816. It’s as good a day as any to die.”

“I imagine you might have a point there, Ferdie,” Morgan said consideringly, remembering the horror in his uncle James’s eyes as that man had gasped for his last breath. “I doubt the day matters much to a dying man. It’s only what that man may have done while alive that puts the fear of the Hereafter into him.”

“The dear Christ preserve us, and it’s as queer as Dick’s hatband ye are, the both of ye!” Peaches exclaimed in high hysterics, pulling against Morgan’s grip on her arm, her eyes wide with fear. “Caroline! Caroline! Where be ye, gel? And it’s a pair of bleedin’ madmen ye should be savin’ yer dear Peaches from, don’t ye know! Where are ye, Caro?”

“Peaches! Is that you? Oh, Peaches—I can’t believe it!”

Morgan looked down the hallway, following the sound of the female voice calling out the Irishwoman’s name, to see a thin snip of a girl dressed in little more than rags barreling at him full tilt, her well-shaped legs bare nearly to the knee.

Behind her, standing tall in the doorway, appeared a woman dressed from head to foot in brightest scarlet. “Dulcinea!” she cried, bracing her hands against either side of the door frame as if an invisible Something were keeping her from taking so much as a single step into the hallway.

“Caroline, you bacon-brained besom!” Ferdie shouted, beginning to jump up and down in obvious fury. “Her name is Caroline!”

“Silence, you doomsday Lilliputian! Dulcinea! Come back to me at once, you impulsive child! How many times must I tell you that well-bred young ladies don’t—Oh, pooh!”

As Ferdie unleashed a badly metered poem pointing out the flaws inherent in “batty biddies” who believed themselves better than they should be, and as the lady in scarlet stared owlishly at Morgan, then took a single step backward, to begin adjusting her slipping turban as if suddenly realizing she was in the presence of Somebody Important, and as the little blond waif and the weeping Irishwoman fell on each other’s necks, Morgan Blakely, Marquis of Clayton, searched in his pockets for a cheroot, which he stuck, unlit, into his mouth before leaning against the wall, an island of contemplative calm in the middle of the raging storm.




CHAPTER FOUR


Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child.

John Dryden

CAROLINE SAT perched on the window seat, the index finger of her left hand to her mouth as she absentmindedly worried at the already badly chewed nail, watching the handsome, impeccably dressed Marquis of Clayton as a bird might watch a snake sliding through the tall grass.

His hair was as dark and glossy as the bottom of a wet wooden bucket, and his heavily hooded eyes were blacker than a stormy night. He had the smooth, tanned complexion of a man who saw the sun much more often than she did, and she removed her finger from her mouth to gaze down at her own too pale skin, whose only color stemmed from the chilblains spiderwebbing her hands and fingers.

Her intensive scrutiny, which had also taken in the vertical slashes in his high-boned cheeks—lines that spoke of a man who kept a tight rein on his emotions—his aristocratic nose, his beautiful, clean white teeth, and even the fact that his shoulders were as wide as his long legs were straight, concluded with a visual inspection of his clothing.

He was dressed all in midnight-blue, his linen snowy and exquisitely starched, and the ruby winking in the folds of his cravat tempted her to mentally cipher how many pairs of wooden clogs the stone would fetch for the inmates on the public side if she could just lift it from his person and take it to Seth Bosley, a storekeeper in the village who was not averse to dealing in such questionable transactions.

Not that she’d ever try such a thing. Peaches had taught her well, and Caroline had needed no more than one look to conclude that the Marquis of Clayton was no easy mark. The smartest way to deal with a man like him was not to deal with him at all.

“More tea, my lord?”

Caroline smiled as she watched Miss Twittingdon lift the crude jug and pretend to pour tea into the chipped tooth glass she had pressed on the marquis once the commotion in the hallway had fizzled to a stop and they had all adjourned to the old woman’s room.

“Thank you, no,” the man who had introduced himself as Morgan Blakely, Marquis of Clayton, replied, setting the glass on the tabletop. “I’ve had quite enough. And I must say, the cucumber sandwiches were extremely pleasing. It is always pleasant to indulge oneself in a hearty repast after a day’s journey, especially at this time of year.”

“And it’s clear as day that the man’s ta let in his attic,” Peaches whispered to Caroline, as the Irishwoman was sitting close beside her on the window seat. “I ain’t seen hide nor hair of any sandwiches—just them plates with spools of thread plopped on ’em.”

“It’s how we practice serving tea,” Caroline whispered back at her. “Sometimes Aunt Leticia gets confused. What I fail to understand is why our gentleman caller is going along with the sham. Kindness doesn’t seem to set easily upon his shoulders.”

“Don’t let the cove fool ye, Caro. If he’s bein’ kind, it’s only ’cause he’s loonier than her, that’s the why of it, and don’t ye know!” Peaches shot back at her. “I’ll tell you true. It was just leadin’ him on, I was, hopin’ ta gets a chance to see ye again, my dear darlin’ girl. Never believed his fairy tale fer a minute, I didn’t. Callin’ ye the lady Caroline and sayin’ ye was the daughter of an earl. Flippin’ batty, that’s what he is!”

“But he tells a plausible story,” Caroline said, tilting her head to one side and watching while the marquis appeared to listen intently as Miss Twittingdon told him of her plans for “Dulcinea’s Come-out.”

Peaches pushed a faintly disgusting sound through her pursed lips. “Plausibibble, is it now? And what sort of highfalutin word is that, Caro, I’m wantin’ ye ta tell me? I hardly know ye anymore, girl, and that’s a fact. Where did all m’good teachin’ take ye, if yer gonna be spoutin’ jawbreaker words no one can figure out?”

Caroline dipped her head forward slightly, then turned to wink at Peaches. “Ah, and it’s a glory to hear ye in a snit, don’t ye know,” she said, easily falling back into the lilting Irish brogue. “But it’s not ta go puttin’ yer hair in a twist ye should be, Peaches, m’love—yer Caro can still curse a fuckin’ hole in a copper pot at ten paces.”

“Ah, isn’t that lovely? Utterly charming.”

Caroline’s head snapped up. The marquis was now standing directly in front of her—and she hadn’t even heard the scrape of the chair as he stood. “Your veneer of civilized speech, as touted to me by Miss Twittingdon, slips with alacrity, Miss Monday, when you are confronted with the equally articulate—in her own way, of course—Miss O’Hanlan.”

“How did you do that?” Caroline demanded of him, not caring that the marquis had overheard her. “How did you get across the room without my hearing you?”

Morgan looked at her curiously for a moment, then smiled. “A veritable sponge, aren’t you, little girl? Sopping up the vernacular of the gutter, and the clipped accents of the gentry—and now planning to enlarge your education by requesting lessons in silent, economical movement from me. What new thievery are you planning, Miss Monday? Or am I incorrect in suspecting that our young miss of the pilfered oranges and stolen yard goods is at this very moment considering the benefits to be derived from being able to sneak up on unwary persons and filch their purses?”

Caroline pushed aside his words and his accusations with a wave of her hand as she concentrated on examining his feet—feet clad in high-top, hard-soled Hessians that certainly should have made some noise as he walked toward the window seat. “No, no,” she said dismissingly. “I was only thinking how wonderful it would be if I could learn to move so silently as I pass by the Leopard Man’s cell each morning. He always hears me coming, you understand, no matter how hard I try to be quiet, and it’s a considerable feat trying to race past before he can…um, before he can…”

“Yes? Please continue, as you have piqued my interest. Just what does this Leopard Man—is he spotty, to have earned such a name?—do as you pass by his cell each morning?”

“Dulcinea! You are not to speak of such things,” Miss Twittingdon warned her direly, although she did not rise from her chair, seemingly preferring to continue sipping her “tea.”

“Ah, go ahead, dearie,” Peaches prodded, giving Caroline a short poke in the ribs. “About time his worship got hisself a peek at the world most of us live in, and no mistake.”

Caroline looked past the marquis to see Ferdie Haswit, who was sitting cross-legged on Miss Twittingdon’s bed, his mouth stuffed with sugar comfits, nodding his agreement with Peaches.

“Very well,” she said at last, lifting her chin and glaring straight into Morgan’s bottomless-pit black eyes. She’d tell him the truth, and watch for him to flinch, to turn away in disgust. That would give her a true measure of the man. “His name is really George Ustings, but we call him the Leopard Man because he refuses to wear clothing, either summer or winter, and decorates himself by drawing circles on his bare body with his own excrement. Not that it matters, for everyone knows—or so they say—that lunatics can’t feel the cold or the heat. But to answer your question, in the mornings, when I am passing down the corridor in order to get through to the women’s side, George waits for me, then grabs hold of his—” She hesitated only momentarily, then swallowed hard, and continued, “He grabs hold of his cock, my lord, and speeds me on my way past his cell by chasing me with a spray of hot urine. I know it is hot, my lord, because George has very good aim.”

Her “party piece”—as Miss Twittingdon had once dubbed any public recital—completed, Caroline suddenly realized that she was embarrassed, not by what she had said but because she had used an innocent person, George Ustings, to her own purposes. No longer wishing to observe the marquis’s reaction, she lowered her eyes to stare at the ruby stickpin and asked, “Do you still wish to believe that I am the long lost daughter of these people, the earl and countess of Witham? Or perhaps you’ve changed your mind.”

She watched as Morgan lifted one well-manicured hand and removed the stickpin, twirling it between his thumb and forefinger as if the shiny bauble were some small treat he was about to offer her. “I do not recall putting forth the theory that I believe you to be Lady Caroline Wilburton, young lady. I’ve only said that Lady Caroline—an innocent child orphaned by the brutal murder of her parents fifteen years ago, to then disappear from the face of the earth and be presumed dead after an extensive search that undoubtedly included the countryside around Glynde proved fruitless—should be returned to the bosom of her still grieving family if at all possible. And, for my sins, I’ve decided that you should be that innocent child.”

Peaches pushed against Caroline’s shoulder and whispered none too softly, “Mad, his bloody worship is, Caro. Mad and bad. He don’t care a flip who ye are. It’s usin’ ye he’s after, and no mistake. Listen ta me, darlin’. Tell him it’ll cost him—tell him it’ll cost him dear.”

Caroline looked at Morgan Blakely’s clean well-shaped nails and at his strong hands that were free of chilblains.

He was so clean. And he smelled good. She felt certain he had never gone to bed hungry or been forced to tie down a screaming inmate while other, beefier servants administered emetics and purgatives to cleanse her system of ill humors.

Caroline’s gaze traveled from Morgan’s hands, past the glittering ruby stickpin, to his handsome, expressionless face. No, it was not completely without expression. She was certain that there was a hint of disappointment deep in his eyes. “You say you don’t care whether or not you have discovered the real Caroline Wilburton. But that’s a lie. You do wish to find her. I can see the longing in your face. So why are you still here, since you are already convinced that I am not she?”

The marquis lifted one expressive eyebrow, a movement that fascinated Caroline against her better judgement. He spoke quietly, so that only she and Peaches could hear him. “Why? That is a very good question. Perhaps I am terminally afflicted with an undeniable affection for happy endings. Perhaps I am no more than a bored English dandy out to enliven his life by stirring up a fifteen-year-old hornet’s nest. Or, just perhaps, my reasons are my own. If you wish to ask questions, Miss Monday, ask them of yourself. Which would you rather do—live as a rich heiress with the world at your feet, or continue to spend your mornings dancing out of the way of George Ustings’s squirting cock?”



MORGAN SAT ALONE in the private dining parlor he had ordered for himself at the Spread Eagle, the inn where he had decreed he and his odd party would spend the night before continuing on to Clayhill. As he sat nursing the snifter of warmed brandy he had requested of his host, he remembered Peaches’s declaration at Woodwere.

“Mad. Mad and bad,” she had said, and maybe the crusty Irishwoman was right. It was mad, what he was about to do, and he must be bad clear through to the marrow of his bones to be contemplating doing it. He felt dirty, soiled with a filth ten times fouler than anything to be found in the sweepings of the cells at Woodwere. But then, he had been to the depths before….

What he really could not justify to himself was the great length to which he had already traveled in his effort to revenge himself on his enemy. It was one thing to have saddled himself with a foul-mouthed, thieving foundling-home brat turned servant at a lunatic asylum. But to have agreed to drag along the insufferable, too insightful Peaches, as well as the sadly confused Miss Leticia Twittingdon and the morose (and quite easily remembered) dwarf, Frederick Haswit, was stretching the boundaries of credulity.

And yet, it was the only way he could persuade Caroline Monday to leave Woodwere—by agreeing to her demand to be accompanied by her friends and, lest he forget it, by turning over to her the ruby stickpin that had so lately adorned his cravat.

“Excuse me, my lord, but might I come in for a minute?”

Morgan, who’d had his back to the door, lifted his booted feet from the wooden table top and turned in his chair to see Caroline Monday standing directly behind him.

“I’m a quick learner, my lord,” she said, grinning, as his reaction to her quiet breaching of his private domain showed in his eyes before he could hide his surprise. “All it needs is to walk balanced on the balls of one’s feet. That, and to rid myself of my wooden clogs—something I would not do at Woodwere even if it meant risking a wetting from the Leopard Man. I cannot begin to tell you of the filth that is on the floors all over the public side.”

“Yes, I can imagine—and already have, as a matter of fact. And for the small indulgence of sparing me a cataloging of that assorted filth, Miss Monday, I vow you will have my undying gratitude,” Morgan drawled, moving his hand to indicate that she should sit down in the chair beside his. It did not occur to him to rise, as a gentleman should, until she was seated. “Now, what might I do for you? Are you having trouble sleeping? Shall I ring for our host to bring you some warmed milk, which you surely must be accustomed to having before you are tucked up in your comfortable four-poster bed? Or perhaps, if you merely find yourself at loose ends, you might like to mingle downstairs in the common room for a space, separating some of the local farmers who patronize the place from their purses. Anything I can suggest to ease your way to your rest. In other words, which Caroline Monday are you this evening?”

He watched as Caroline took her seat, a small smile flitting at the corners of her mouth. “You truly enjoy listening to the sound of your own voice, don’t you, your lordship? I had a terrible time calming Aunt Leticia so that she would agree to go to bed. She believes you are Don Quixote come to life, and we are setting off on a glorious quest. Ferdie is at this very moment composing an ode to your determination. But I believe Peaches has the right of it. She thinks you’re plotting something much deeper than rescuing an earl’s daughter and returning her to her family.”

Morgan took a sip of his brandy. “You know, Miss Monday, with more teeth and less dirt, Miss O’Hanlan might just consider making her living as a soothsayer. Yes, my motives run deeper than altruism. But they are no concern of yours. You are to be exceptionally well recompensed for being Caroline Wilburton.”

“But you don’t believe that I really am Lady Caroline.”

“Do you?”

Caroline sighed, the sadness in her tone not lost on Morgan. “No. No, I don’t. Lady Caroline Wilburton has to be dead. You said there was a wide search, a search that continued for a long time. They couldn’t have missed me, if I were she, now, could they, considering that these murders you spoke of were committed not twenty miles from the orphanage?”

“If there really was a thorough search,” Morgan heard himself say, then frowned as he wondered when his mind had given birth to that particular thought. After all, if the murderer had discovered a living Caroline, the child might then have identified him as the man who shot her parents. The idea lent more credence to the murderer’s seeming willingness to be blackmailed—and likewise provided additional weight to Uncle James’s rambling confession. “Miss Monday,” he continued smoothly, relegating that supposition to the more private regions of his brain, “as I’ve told you, you are to be well paid for participating in my plan to present you to the Wilburton family. I have already agreed to ride herd on your coterie of misfits as part of my payment for your cooperation. However, there is a limit to my patience, and your questions are pushing toward it.”

He watched as Caroline leaned forward and took an apple from the wooden bowl that sat on the table, rubbed it against her thigh, then took a healthy bite of it with her small white teeth. Talking around a mouthful of the juicy—and somewhat loud—fruit, she said, “That’s a pity, because I have several more questions for you to answer. How, for instance, do you explain the fact that my name is Caroline? Peaches told me that I supplied that name myself the same morning she found me sprawled in the mud outside the orphanage kitchens.”

Morgan lifted a cheroot from his pocket, stuck it in his mouth, and leaned forward, sticking its tip into the candle flame. “That’s simple enough,” he said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke. “Our dearest Prince Regent married Caroline of Brunswick in 1795, shortly after which this entire island became knee deep in Carolines, with everyone from dukes to chimney sweeps naming their offspring after the new Princess of Wales. Do you have any more questions, or will you leave me in peace to contemplate the absurdity of this day’s events?”

He had to wait for his answer until Caroline had finished taking another bite of the apple, the sight of her small, well-shaped, yet badly chafed hands against the red skin of the apple and her obvious delight in the taste of the fruit making him believe he might possibly be slightly ashamed of himself.

Caroline nodded, chewing furiously, then wiped the back of her hand across her lips, where small droplets of juice had made them glisten. “I want you to tell me the story again, please,” she told him, her wide green eyes alive with interest. “I only listened with half an ear earlier at Woodwere. To tell you the God’s truth, for the most part I was lost to anything except the thought of escaping the place, once you said I might leave with you. Please.”

Morgan inhaled deeply on the cheroot once more, then blew out the smoke with a resigned sigh. “Don’t wheedle, Caroline. The role of supplicant doesn’t suit you.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Arrogance suits you,” she said, grinning at him. ‘Peaches says you’re as proud as Paddy’s pig. You’re probably bursting at the seams with pride that Aunt Leticia puts you on a pedestal alongside her hero, Don Quixote. And Ferdie, he—”

“Oh, very well, brat,” Morgan interrupted wearily, “if it will shut you up and hasten your departure, I will tell you the story again.”

She stood up, depositing the apple core on the table, then sat down once more, her legs tucked up under her. “Start with the murders. Were they very gory?”

“The earl was shot in the back, if that makes you happy, brat, and the countess took a bullet in the chest, close by her heart. Oh, yes, the coachman was also killed. Did I neglect to mention that?”

Caroline leaned forward eagerly. “You did, but never mind. How were the bodies found?”

“The coach horses bolted, most probably thrown into a frenzy by the bark of the pistols. Also, the coachman seemed to have neglected to put on the brake.”

“He may have been too busy dying to think of it,” she interrupted, her eyes sparkling with interest and, Morgan decided unhappily, the keen basic intelligence he had already suspected, an unlooked for aptitude for deduction that might hinder as much as help him in the coming months.

“Possibly. Unless the person or persons who kidnapped young Lady Caroline deliberately set the coach rampaging down the dark road. Whatever, it lurched into the next small village along the roadway, two of the horses so injured by their mad dash that they had to be destroyed while still in the traces, and the villagers rode back down the road to make the grisly discovery.”

“Poor horses. None of it was their fault,” Caroline said, her small heart-shaped face wearing a woeful expression for a moment before she rallied. “Go on. There was no sign of the child, Lady Caroline?”

“None,” Morgan agreed, looking at Caroline curiously. She could listen, unmoved, to a description of the terrible murder of three human beings without batting an eye, yet was bothered by the destruction of animals. Was human death so commonplace in her life? He felt a faint stirring of pity toward her—it had to be no more than pity—then quickly, prudently, squelched it. “The woods lining both sides of the roadway were searched, on the off chance she was thrown from the coach when the horses bolted, but there was no sign of her. I was away at school—both my brother, Jeremy, and I—and we only heard about most of it in letters from our parents. But the late earl’s brother, Thomas, now the eighth Earl of Witham, spared no expense in searching for her.”

“Or so you heard,” Caroline broke in, pointing a finger at him, so that he noticed, not for the first time, that the nail was badly bitten. For all her show of bravado, for all her seemingly thick hide, the girl must have some vulnerability to fall prey to such a nervous habit. “Continue,” she ordered imperiously, so that he had to struggle to suppress a smile. “How long did the new earl search? Did he soon call it off so that he could enjoy his new position?”

Yes, the girl was smart, perhaps too much so for her own good—most certainly for his. “The new earl and his wife and son were devastated by the tragedy, and had the full sympathy of the neighborhood. There was a rash of arrests in the succeeding months, and many a highwayman hung in chains from gibbets up and down the roadway, although not one of them would admit to having taken Lady Caroline. But the murders had been committed in October, and with the coming of winter and several heavy falls of snow, hope for finding the child began to fade. In the end, there was nothing to do but assume that she was dead.”

“For fifteen years,” Caroline said, as if speaking to herself. “Yet you came searching for her—and found me. Why?”

Morgan abandoned his chair to move to the window and look out over the darkened inn yard. How much of the truth would he have to reveal in order to put an end to her questions?

He turned to face her, wishing her rather exotically tilted green eyes weren’t looking at him so closely, wishing that she didn’t look so vulnerable beneath her atrocious clothing and overlong mop of unruly dark blond hair. She was little more than a child, yet she had seen more in her few years than most old men. Could he, too, now use her and then discard her, as society discarded its orphans, and still live with himself?

“I met a man recently,” he began, deliberately tamping down any further misgivings about what he planned to do. “He was dying and made his last confession to me, including the admission that he had been involved in the disappearance of Lady Caroline. His last wish was for me to find her and return her to the bosom of her family, in expiation of his sin.” He smiled, spreading his hands wide as if to bestow a blessing on this dead sinner. “How could I, as a God-fearing Christian, refuse?”

Caroline looked at him levelly for some time from across the dimly lit room, then shook her head. “You’re lying,” she pronounced flatly. “Or, at the very least, you are not telling me all of the truth. But it doesn’t really matter, I suppose. I’m out of Woodwere, and Aunt Leticia, Ferdie, and Peaches are with me. I don’t need to know why you want to use me, as long as you keep your promise to take care of my friends.”

“Oh, so you noticed my reluctance to adopt those three sterling characters, did you?”

“I would have had to be blind as a cave bat not to,” Caroline returned, grinning. “They’ll be nothing but trouble, you know, even if they mean well. Except for Peaches, of course. She’ll be after your silver, bless her heart. So why did you? Adopt them, that is.”

That was a good question. Morgan, smiling thinly, squashed the cheroot into the tin dish holding a small candle. It had cost him a good deal of blunt to convince Woodwere that he could deal without Haswit and Miss Twittingdon, and he felt certain—as their relatives never visited anyway—that the director planned to continue to collect fees for housing them. “As soon as I have an answer for you, imp, I shall race hotfoot to report it to you.”

She uncurled herself from the chair and stood, tilting her chin at him defiantly. “You just do that, my lord. We made a bargain, you and me, and I’ll see that you stick to your end of it.”

Morgan stood and executed an elegant leg. “I am your servant, Lady Caroline,” he said mockingly, then added as he straightened, “although there has been one small alteration to my plans. I had not really counted on finding you—for from this moment on you are to consider yourself the true Lady Caroline—and my plans were more slapdash than well thought out. I cannot take you and the rest of our traveling freak show to Clayhill. It’s too dangerous, as I wish to keep your discovery private until I have groomed you sufficiently to take your place in London society.”

Caroline pulled a face, her mobile features turning mulish. “Aunt Leticia has been preparing me for my come-out for over a year. I know how to behave. I even know how to eat turbot.”

“My felicitations, Lady Caroline,” Morgan returned affably, watching as she scratched an itch on her stomach—an itch that probably signaled the existence of a family of fleas that had taken up residence in her gown. “However, Miss Twittingdon’s undoubtedly comprehensive instructions to one side, I fear I must insist upon some further education in the ways of the ton. To that end, and because my father no longer moves in society, either in London or here in Sussex, I have decided to move directly to The Acres, his estate. There we can prepare you for your reunion with your relatives without them immediately locking you up somewhere as a disgrace to the family name. Now, are there any more questions, or may I bid you a good night, my lady?”

Caroline looked at him through narrowed eyes, then quickly snatched up another apple from the wooden bowl. “I think I understand everything now,” she said, her grin once more turning her into a scruffy wood sprite. “Good night, my lord. I look forward to seeing your father’s house. Is Mr. Clayton as arrogant as his son?”

“There is no Mr. Clayton, my lady,” Morgan told her, deciding to begin her education. “My name is Morgan Blakely, and I am the Marquis of Clayton, among other, lesser titles. My father’s name is William Blakely, and his most senior title is that of his grace, Duke of Glynde. Do you think you can remember that?”

“If I’m ‘well recompensed,’ I suspect I can remember anything—and forget anything just as easily. Miss Twittingdon didn’t teach me that, but Peaches did,” Caroline said, then skipped out of the room, closing the door behind her, leaving Morgan to wonder if, this time, his revenge, his planned retribution for an unpardonable sin, was truly worth the bother.

And to wonder why Caroline Monday’s intelligent green eyes pleased him so—on a level much more personal than thoughts of revenge.




CHAPTER FIVE


It is impossible to please all the world and one’s father.

Jean de La Fontaine

CAROLINE SAT COMFORTABLY on the soft leather seat of Morgan’s closed coach, enjoying the unfamiliar feeling of having her stomach filled with good food. She had been eating almost constantly since driving away from Woodwere, and warranted that no single ambition in this life could be loftier than to continue filling her belly at regular intervals until she was as immense as a wheelbarrow and rocked from side to side as she walked.

Not that she believed she would get that chance, certain that she would soon be sent on her way. She had seen the marquis briefly this morning as they all exited the inn, before he climbed on his beautiful bay horse, vowing he would not ride inside with the four none-too-sweet-smelling additions to his entourage while he retained a single sane bone in his body. He had said much the same yesterday, Peaches had told Caroline, while the two of them were traveling to Woodwere, a statement that just proved that the marquis was “too high in the instep by half.”

But it wasn’t his desertion, riding ahead to The Acres and leaving the coach to follow along as best it could, that had forced Caroline to conclude that her introduction to polite society was still no closer to becoming a reality than it had been in Miss Twittingdon’s room as that lady taught her the correct way to curtsy to the Prince Regent. No, it was more than that.

Morgan Blakely, Caroline had decided, had spent the night adding up one side of his personal ledger with the benefits to be had from declaring Caroline Monday to be Lady Caroline Wilburton, then deducting the drawbacks to such a scheme on the other side. Peaches, Aunt Leticia, and Ferdie—who had taught her all she knew about ledgers—had to number on the minus side, as she probably did herself. He certainly had not gone to any great lengths to hide his contempt for them all.

The only thing that could make the ledger amounts tilt in her favor would be if the marquis had some very personal reason for wanting to have her declared the missing heiress. He hadn’t labored very long claiming that he was just an Englishman doing what was right. He had his own reasons for finding Lady Caroline, she was convinced, and his own plans for using her to his advantage. And, most probably, to someone else’s disadvantage.

But Caroline would leave off all this heavy thinking for a while, she decided, and enjoy her second ride in a coach in as many days. She had never before traveled in such style, having rarely left the orphanage for more than an occasional trip into the village, and had been transported to her position at Woodwere on the back of an open wagon. To be surrounded by luxury such as that provided by the marquis’s crested coach was an adventure that nearly outstripped last night’s treat of sleeping in a bed with only two other people, Peaches and Miss Twittingdon, sharing it with her.

Unwilling to miss a single moment more of the trip due to fruitless introspection concerning Lord Clayton’s motives for seeking out a plausible Lady Caroline Wilburton, she lifted the leather flap and looked out at the scenery that was flying by at a dizzying pace. According to the marquis, they were now traveling the same roadway the earl and his countess had ridden along that fateful night.

She squinted out at the trees, bare of their greenery in anticipation of the coming winter, and tried to imagine how they had looked that night fifteen years earlier, with the bare branches illuminated only by the light from coach lamps, like those on the marquis’s coach that had lit their way to the inn last evening. They would have been traveling quickly, the earl and his lady, in order to reach the warmth and comfort of their home, but not too quickly, because it would have been difficult for the coachman to see the road unless there was a full moon that night.

Did highwaymen ply their trade only during a full moon, or did they confine their activities to moonless nights? Peaches would know, Caroline felt sure, but did not bother to ask. It was enough to let her imagination set the scene.

Caroline sat back and closed her eyes, deliberately using that imagination to conjure up two well-dressed people and the child who was traveling with them. She had seen detailed drawings of society people in the dog-eared fashion plates she’d often pored over in Miss Twittingdon’s room, so it wasn’t hard to picture what that doomed trio must have looked like, with their fancy clothes and curling feathers and elaborate jewels.

It had been late at night, so the child was probably sleeping—or crying. It was either the one thing or the other with children, Caroline knew, thanks to her years at the orphanage.

For the moment she’d pretend that the child was quiet, determined to stay awake past her bedtime, but on the edge of sleep, her head nodding wearily against her mother. And then, just as they all thought they were nearing their home, they heard shots, and a threatening, highwaymanlike voice called out the well-known words: “Stand and deliver!”

Caroline shivered, tensing as if she had actually heard the man’s command. She could clearly imagine the pandemonium that must have been unleashed inside the doomed coach at that terrible sound!

In her mind’s eye she could almost see the horses plunging to a halt, hear the coachman yelling, understand the countess’s plight as she was caught between fear for her husband and child and a reluctance to part with all her beautiful jewelry. And the earl. Poor man. Caroline could feel his frustration. How he must have wished to take up the pistols hidden in the pockets of the coach—like those she had earlier discovered in the marquis’s coach—and leap to the ground, shoot down the highwaymen, and protect his women.

Why hadn’t he done that? Caroline frowned, her eyes still squeezed closed, her palms damp. Why was she supposing that he hadn’t? Perhaps that was why he and his wife had been shot. Perhaps if he had stayed where he was, even hidden himself—hidden himself? and where could he have hidden inside a small coach?—the highwaymen wouldn’t have blown a hole in him, and his lady wife wouldn’t have had to scream and scream and scream….

“Caro, m’darlin’. It’s bored to flinders I am, and that’s a fact, what with these two loonies snoring louder than hens can cackle. Why don’t ye give us a song?”

“No!” Caroline’s green eyes shot wide open, her mouth suddenly dry, her heart pounding furiously. “Caro’s tired!”

Peaches crossed her arms beneath her flat breast and snorted. “Well, aren’t we cross as two sticks this mornin’? Tired, is it, with the sun climbin’ high in the sky and not a single turnip chopped or nary a chamber pot emptied? It’s a fine lady ye’ll make, little gel, and that’s fer certain—fer ye surely has the temper fer it.”

Caroline pressed trembling hands to her cheeks for a moment, then sighed. For a moment, just a moment, it had all seemed so real. Perhaps a single year was still too long for an imaginative person such as she to work in a madhouse. “I’m sorry, Peaches. I was just trying to suppose what it was like to be robbed and murdered. Do you think the real Lady Caroline saw what happened? Do you think they carried her off and sold her to the Gypsies, or did they just kill her and leave her body for the animals?”

Peaches waggled her head from side to side, chuckling softly. “Better not ever let his worship hear ye askin’ such questions, and don’t ye know. But since ye’re askin’, the way I figure the thing, the high-toby men planned ta sell the bairn ta the Gypsies—seein’ as how we all know how Gypsies like boilin’ up and eatin’ little kiddies—but she proved ta be such a trial that they got rid of her at the orphanage, sayin’ good riddance ta bad rubbish.”

“At the orphanage? In Glynde?” Caroline leaned forward and peered at Peaches intently. “Then you’re saying that I am Lady Caroline?”

“As long as his worship feeds me I’ll be sayin’ anythin’ he says, little gel, and so should ye,” Peaches told her, then closed her more than usually shifting, secretive eyes. “Say it, think it, and swear on m’mither’s grave ta the truth of it, don’t ye know. Now go ta sleep, iffen ye’re so tired, and so will I. We won’t be gettin’ ta his worship’s da’s place fer a while yet.”

Caroline, who knew Peaches was right—hadn’t she said almost the same thing to the marquis last night?—leaned back against the soft leather, knowing it would be impossible for her to close her eyes again without immediately conjuring up the horrific scene that had played behind her eyelids only a few moments earlier.

Instead, as Miss Twittingdon’s head nodded onto her shoulder and the snores of Ferdie and Peaches competed with the sound of the coach wheels as they rolled on and on along the roadway, Caroline Monday peered out at the passing scenery, gnawing on the tip of her left index finger until she had drawn blood.



THE ACRES MIGHT HAVE BEEN Morgan’s birthplace, but he had ceased many a long year ago to consider it his home. As he rode along the wide, tree-lined avenue that led to the four-story mellowed pink stone structure, he wondered why he felt that way and why it had been so impossible for his father to love him.

Perhaps, he considered thoughtfully, they had been too different or, as Uncle James had hinted, too much the same.

According to his uncle, Morgan’s father had seen his share of adventure in his salad days, before he ascended to the dukedom. Then, in short order, he had taken a wife, fathered two sons, buried that wife, and become so bloody responsible that laughter and frolic seemed to be foreign words, unable to be understood by the man.

Along with many other of his uncle James’s deathbed assertions, Morgan was still having more than a little difficulty believing that his father had ever been a carefree youth. William Blakely, as far as Morgan could see, had been born full grown, with no notion of what it was like to be young, to career around the countryside with some of the tenant farmers’ sons, changing signposts and liberating chickens from their coops, or cutting a lark in the village—or even laughing out loud at the dinner table.

When he couldn’t talk Morgan into seeing his point of view, or sermonize him into sensibility, William had taken to whipping the “frivolous frolic” out of his son, punishing Morgan for setting an unsavory example for his young brother, Jeremy. Those whippings had come to an abrupt halt when, at the age of thirteen, Morgan pulled the switch from his father’s hand and flung it across the room, daring the man to come at him with his fists.

The next day, over his weeping mother’s protests, Morgan had been packed off to boarding school for most of each year, where he instantly became an outstanding, if not outstandingly well behaved, student. Two summers later his mother died peacefully in her sleep, and William buried his grief by way of a closer association with religion, a turning point that Morgan now saw as the worst possible catastrophe to strike the Blakely sons.

Jeremy, three years Morgan’s junior, was not allowed to rejoin his brother at school once the year of mourning was over, as William had decided to continue tutoring his younger, more beloved—more tractable—son at home, preparing him for a life among the clergy. After all, as the duke had said at the time, heaven only knew boarding school was not proving capable of knocking any sort of sense of responsibility into his older son.

But the duke hadn’t counted on Morgan’s compelling personality or Jeremy’s near worship of his hey-go-mad, neck-or-nothing older brother, who appeared in his orbit for only a few months a year. In the end, Morgan was sure, it was that love, that devotion, that misplaced adoration, which had led Jeremy to follow that older brother into war—and to his death.

And William Blakely, devastated by this additional loss, had turned even more devotedly to his God, and away from his remaining son.

Morgan pushed aside his memories as the wide front doors of The Acres opened and a footman raced to offer his assistance. Morgan dismounted, patted the bay’s rump, and instructed the boy to make sure a groom rubbed the horse down well before he fed and watered him. And then, knowing the coach carrying his oddly assorted entourage would not arrive for at least another hour, he took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and walked up the steps to enter his father’s house.

“Good day, m’lord,” Grisham, the family butler—who had more than once hidden a filthy, bruised, much younger Morgan so that his father would not see that he had been fighting with one of the village boys again—inclined his balding gray head stiffly and held out his hands to take the marquis’s riding crop, hat, many-caped greatcoat, and gloves. “We had thought when you left yesterday morning that it was for a return to Clayhill. Is his grace expecting you?”

Morgan laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Now, Grisham, what do you suppose?”

The butler lowered his eyelids and pressed his chin toward his chest. “Forgive me, m’lord.” Then he raised his head once more and smiled. “But, if I may be allowed to say so, sir, I am extremely pleased to see you again.”

“You are most definitely allowed to say that, old friend, and thank you.” Morgan looked around the high-ceilinged entrance hall, then toward the closed doors to the main drawing room. “Is my father in there?”

“No, m’lord,” Grisham answered, his voice rather sad. “He’s where he is every day at this time. In young Master Jeremy’s rooms.”

“Sweet Jesus, Grisham, does the man enjoy suffering?” Morgan shook his head. “Well, there’s nothing else for it—I’ll have to go upstairs. Do you have any sackcloth and ashes about, old friend, or do you think this road dirt I’m wearing is enough to make me look the penitent?”

The butler didn’t answer, but only stood back, bowing, so that Morgan had nothing else to do but walk toward the wide, winding staircase. He reached the bottom step before he turned. “My coach will be arriving within the hour, Grisham. Inside it will be three women—I cannot bring myself to call them ladies, I fear, at least not until they are all bathed—and a young, smallish gentleman. Please see that three rooms are prepared in the guest wing, and one in the servants’ quarters. I believe you’ll have no great difficulty ascertaining which of our new residents belongs under the eaves. Simmons—my valet, as you might remember—is riding atop the coach with my driver. He’ll see to the unpacking of my things. Tomorrow will be soon enough for him to ride to Clayhill to collect more of my wardrobe, for I am planning an extensive stay here at The Acres.”

“Yes, m’lord,” Grisham said, bowing yet again, his face expressionless. “That is wonderful news. And should I order three extra places set for supper, for your guests?”

Morgan scratched at a spot just behind his right ear. “I don’t think so, Grisham. Our guests can bathe, then dine in their rooms. I don’t wish to push my luck.”

“Very good, sir. I’ll see that your instructions are carried out to the letter.”

Smiling, Morgan returned the butler’s formal bow. He could always count on Grisham to stick to business, without turning a hair at what the marquis knew was an outrageous set of instructions. “You do that, Grisham,” he said, turning to head up the stairs two at a time. “Oh,” he added, looking back over his shoulder, “and you might want to hide any valuables that may be lying around in the bedchambers. Just on the off chance any of our guests decide to cut short their stay with us in the middle of the night.”

Morgan’s smile faded as he climbed the stairs to the first floor of the forty-year-old house. The original estate house had burned to the ground ten years before Morgan’s birth, and the duke and his lady wife had perished in the blaze. The new H-shaped building, although fashioned very much like its predecessor on the outside, had been divided in the new, modern way, with the public rooms on the ground floor and extensive family chambers on the first floor.

Jeremy’s rooms were located to the left of the top of the staircase, through a door at the end of a wide hallway lined with oil paintings depicting bucolic country scenes found nowhere on this particular estate, several doors beyond Morgan’s former bedchamber. The duke’s chambers occupied a large area in the middle of the house, with the guest rooms taking up the wing to the right of the staircase. The nursery was on the third floor, half of which was also devoted to quartering the upper servants. The kitchen servants and, for tonight at least, Mary Magdalene O’Hanlan, had their beds in small cubicles under the eaves in a section of the attics.

Morgan’s mother had been in charge of furnishing the house, for nothing save a few portraits and several sticks of furniture had survived the blaze, and her good taste could be clearly seen in the light colors and delicately carved furniture that would make any outsider believe that The Acres was a well-loved, happy home.

Only it wasn’t. It was a shrine, or at least a part of it had been turned into a shrine, one dedicated to the memory of Lord Jeremy Blakely, dead these past two years, four months, three weeks, and five days.

Morgan pulled a face as he realized what he had been thinking. He was no better than Ferdie Haswit, ticking off the days from the termination of his personal world, his personal happiness, in much the same way that Ferdie was counting down the days until, if his prediction proved correct, the entire world would end.

Should he, Morgan, be locked up alongside Haswit in a place like Woodwere? Should his father the duke be incarcerated there with him? Or was Ferdie Haswit the sane one? How did the world make these judgments? And why, Morgan wondered briefly before dismissing his random thoughts, did any of it matter in the first place?

He approached the door at the end of the hallway, hesitating only slightly before depressing the latch and stepping into the small antechamber that led directly to his brother’s bedroom. “Father?”

There was no answer, which Morgan considered to be a great pity, for it meant he would have to go searching the three large rooms of the apartment for the man. It wasn’t an expedition he looked forward to with any great anticipation. Steeling himself to blank-faced neutrality, he advanced into the apartment, deliberately refusing to look to his left, where Jeremy’s life-size portrait hung against the wall, or to his right, where his brother’s collections of bird’s nests, oddly shaped stones, and ragtag velveteen stuffed animals were displayed on table tops.

Morgan knew without looking that every piece of clothing Jeremy had worn in the last months he’d been at home still hung in the wardrobe in the far corner.

Jeremy’s silver-backed brushes gleamed dully in the half-light, as this wing was on the shady side of the house and the sun had already made its circuit past its many windows.

His brother’s riding crop, a birthday gift from Morgan, was curled on the coverlet on his bed.

The lopsided birdhouse Jeremy had hammered together at the age of six was displayed on the night table.

A pair of mittens knitted by their mother for his fifth birthday lay on a chest at the bottom of the bed.

And a Bible, opened to the Twenty-third Psalm, rested on the desk where Jeremy had written his farewell note to his father before riding away in the middle of the night to seek out the adventure he would never have found at The Acres.

Jeremy’s rooms were exactly as they had been before he went off to war, to join his brother, his idol, and eventually to die a terrible death in that brother’s arms.

“You say you have forgiven me, Father,” Morgan said softly, giving in, only momentarily, to the pain. “Yet this room is still here, still the same. How can you truly forgive if you refuse to forget?”

“Who’s there? Grisham? How many times must I tell you that I do not wish to be disturbed when I am in here? Is there no peace to be found anywhere in this world? No compassion?”

Morgan took another step into the room, to stand just at the edge of the carpet. “No, Father, as a matter of fact, I don’t believe either of those things does exist,” he said, espying the duke standing just beside the windows, his thin face eloquent with pain. “Just as there is no real forgiveness, no entirely selfless charity, and precious little understanding.”

He took two more steps, turning to peer into the smiling blue eyes of his brother, brilliantly captured in the painting that was done on his seventeenth birthday, then slanted a look full of meaning at his father. “There is, however, revenge. The Old Testament, I believe, is chock full of it. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—and, in admittedly a rather backhanded, perverse way, a child for a child. Tell me, Father, are you at all interested in winning some revenge of your own?”




CHAPTER SIX


With how much ease believe we what we wish!

Whatever is, is in its causes just.

John Dryden

CAROLINE LOOKED DOWN at her fingertips and the skin that was still soft and puckered from her bath, the first she had ever taken in a tub. She lifted her wrists to her nose, sniffing at the delicate scent of rose hip soap, a smile coming to her face as she raised her shoulders and rubbed her cheek against the collar of the soft pink terry wrapper the maid, Betts, had provided her with after helping her dry herself with huge white towels that had been warmed beside the fireplace.

Beneath the wrapper was a miles-too-long white cotton nightgown, old and mended, but with touches of lace at the hem, high collar, and cuffs. It had been one of Lord Clayton’s mother’s nightgowns, Betts had told Caroline, long since passed on to the servants’ quarters and well worn. Caroline thought it to be the most beautiful nightgown in creation.

She had told Betts, smiling at the girl, who was no more than a few years older than she—and who appeared to be shocked speechless at the admission—that she had slept in her shift in the summer and in the same clothes she worked in during the colder months. Betts’s possible disapproval had kept Caroline silent about the fact that, during the hottest nights, tucked up under the eaves in her narrow cot, she had dared to sleep with no clothing covering her at all.

Clucking her tongue over the sad state of Caroline’s bitten nails, Betts had nevertheless taken care to rub a perfumed ointment of crushed strawberries and cream into her new mistress’s hands, vowing that it would soon heal the dry, chapped skin, then solemnly repeated these ministrations on Caroline’s roughened feet and heels, an embarrassing and somewhat ticklish process that had made Caroline giggle nervously.

Betts had also helped her to wash her hair, then exclaimed that it was three shades lighter than it had been before the determined scrubbing that brought tears to Caroline’s eyes. Now, hanging halfway down her back, each strand free of tangles, Caroline’s hair was only faintly damp, for Betts had brushed it dry as the two of them sat on the hearthrug, warmed by the fire.

Now, lying back against the pillows as she sat cross-legged in the middle of the large tester bed, Caroline placed a hand on her stomach, enjoying the unfamiliar feeling of fullness that lingered a full two hours after her meal, which had been served on a silver platter—nothing like the wooden trencher she had used at Woodwere or the chipped bowl that was dipped into the common gruel pot at the orphanage. She was so full, in fact, that she didn’t believe she could eat above two of the half-dozen soft, crusty rolls she had stuffed into her bodice while Betts’s back was turned and later hidden behind one of the cushions on the chair in the corner.

Betts, before she left, had put forth the hope that “Lady Caroline” would have a restful night, and she had watched proprietarily as a footman slipped a warming pan between the sheets. Once the door closed behind the maid, Caroline had investigated every drawer and cabinet in the room, lifted each exquisitely formed figurine, inspected every small decoratively carved wooden chest and dainty porcelain box, sniffed at the contents of the crystal bottles on the dressing table, then whirled around in a circle in the middle of the room, arms outflung, laughing aloud at her good fortune.

All in all, Caroline decided happily now, looking around the candlelit room, she truly must have died—and this was heaven.

She had just stifled an unexpected yawn and was about to slip her toes beneath the coverlet, reluctantly giving in to sleep, when the door to the hallway opened once more and Miss Twittingdon—dressed in her ridiculous blue and purple plaid woolen wrapper and pink knitted slippers—entered, to stand beaming at Caroline.

“I’ve just come to check on my charge, my lady Dulcinea,” she said, approaching the bed. “I do hope you’ve been treated in accordance with your exalted rank. Otherwise there is nothing else for it but to sack the servants. Every last lazy one of them. Although I must say they have been extremely cooperative thus far, even going to the trouble to cut my meat for me when I found the chore beyond my strength.”

Caroline giggled and threw her entire upper body forward, pressing her forehead against the mattress, then rolled onto her back, her arms and legs spread wide as her sleek curtain of hair splayed out on the coverlet. She began sliding her limbs back and forth across the coverlet, in much the same way she could remember making angels in the snow at the orphanage when she was a child.

Then, looking up at Miss Twittingdon, her green eyes twinkling with mischief, she exclaimed, “Aunt Leticia! Can you believe this? Can you honestly believe any of this? Look at me! I’m reaching as far as I can in every direction, and still I’m miles and miles from the edge. We could fit six other people in this bed. Maybe eight!”

“My lady! To think such a thing! You are virginal,” Miss Twittingdon pointed out.

“Oh, pooh!” Caroline exclaimed, deliberately teasing the old woman with her own saying. She scrambled from the bed, not even noticing that her bare feet might be chilled by the cold floor, and began racing around the room. A generous amount of the material of her overlong nightdress bunched in one hand so that she wouldn’t trip, she pointed out one treasure after another to Miss Twittingdon until she happened to catch sight of herself in the tall freestanding mirror placed in front of one of the curtained windows. She released her grip on the material and stood rigidly still, looking at the stranger who grinned back at her. “Oh, my!”

Her smile slowly faded as she approached the mirror, one hand to her cheek as the other pressed against the cool glass, to confirm the evidence of her eyes. “Is this me, Aunt Leticia? Is this really me?”

“Of course it is you, my lady,” Miss Twittingdon stated firmly, if only slightly deferentially. “Surely you have seen yourself before this. You look as you have always looked every day of our acquaintance. Beautiful. Sweetly, heartbreakingly beautiful. However, you are barefoot, which I cannot approve, any more than I can like the notion of you remaining under this bachelor roof. I would be shirking my responsibility as your chaperon if I did not admit that. Have you had any of the apricot soufflé I was served earlier, my dear? It was supremely satisfying.”

Caroline began to gnaw on one side of the tip of her little finger, then abruptly dropped her hand, whirling to face the old lady she had cared for, the dear woman who had shared her comfits and her clean water and her faintly scrambled knowledge with her. “Aunt Leticia, you—you’ve always seen me as looking like this?”

Miss Twittingdon smiled, looking almost motherly. “Always, my dear. My beautiful Lady Dulcinea.”

“Lady Caroline,” Caroline corrected apologetically, turning back to the mirror. She took her disheveled hair in her hands, twisting it around and around itself, and pulled up the long blond coil against the back of her head so that it looked vaguely like one of the styles she had seen depicted on Miss Twittingdon’s fashion plates, then tilted her small chin and looked down her nose at her own reflection. “You must remember to call me Lady Caroline, Aunt Leticia. It is very important to the marquis’s plans.”

And then she crossed her eyes and grinned.

“Sons and fathers, fathers and sons;

Do you e’er wonder which are the ones

Who, siring, or born through transient lust,

First turn family love and honor to dust?

Father and son, son and father;

Living and lying are such a bother.

The days keep turning, the hate burns bright,

And the only peace is in endless night.”

MORGAN CAREFULLY PLACED his wineglass on the table beside him and looked at Ferdie Haswit, who was perched elflike on the center cushion of the overstuffed couch. “Maudlin little beast, aren’t you?” he inquired casually while idly wondering why he had thought to pour himself a glass of wine when it had only gone eleven—he, who never drank before three.

Ferdie grinned, showing even but widely spaced small teeth that reminded Morgan of a monkey he had seen once at a local fair. “Not really, my lord. I encountered your father this morning at breakfast. You had just finished and gone, although I noticed that you had left your plate all but untouched. The duke promised to say a prayer for me. Do you think he believes he can ask the good Lord to make me grow?”

“Now, why do I find it difficult to believe you expect me to answer that particular question?” Morgan put forth, feeling vaguely embarrassed for his father.

Ferdie waved one short arm as if in dismissal of Morgan’s words, his pudgy fingers spread wide. “You’re right. Never mind that last bit. His grace was most solicitous, offering to have one of the servants fetch me a pillow so that I might be more comfortable at table. A very agreeable man, your father. So tell me, if a confirmed although recently liberated lunatic might be allowed to inquire—why do you two dislike each other?”

“I have always considered it a mistake in judgment to overeducate infants,” Morgan said, staring piercingly at Ferdie. “They ask such impertinent questions.”

“Sorry,” the dwarf apologized quickly, holding up his hands as if the marquis had just produced a pistol from behind his back and leveled it at him. “At least your father acknowledges you. I imagine I’m just jealous, when I should be grateful that you allowed Caro to convince you that she couldn’t bear to leave her dear friends behind if she tossed in her lot with you. You aren’t going to hurt her, are you? I’d have to kill you if you did, and I rather like you.”

“Maudlin, impertinent, and bloodthirsty. You have quite a lot of vices stuffed into that small body, don’t you, Ferdie?”

“See? I told you I liked you!” Ferdie maneuvered his body forward and hopped down off the couch. “You couldn’t care less whether or not you insult me, when most people either stare at me like they’re seeing something that just climbed out from beneath a rock or look at me with pity in their eyes—like your father. And yet you treat me like I have a mind—as if I can think! You can’t imagine what it is like to have people talk above you, as if you can’t understand plain English, or yell at you, as if you’re deaf as well as stunted, or hate you—call you names or throw stones at you—because you scare them, because your very existence reminds them that God still makes mistakes. But you—you don’t hate me or pity me or look down on me.” He shook his large head, tears standing in his eyes. “You treat me like I was just anybody.”

“Which is not the same as saying I like you,” Morgan pointed out, beginning to smile. “You can be as obnoxious as all hell, you know.”

Ferdie clambered back up onto the sofa cushions, then turned to wink at Morgan. “Yes, my lord. I know. I’ve had considerable practice at it. But I’m not short of a sheet. I’m just short.”




Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.


Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/keysi-maykls/the-bride-of-the-unicorn/) на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.