The Bride of the Unicorn. Kasey Michaels
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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,