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“Of course.” Belinda looked affronted at the idea that she could not.
Lady St. Leger arose from the piano, taking her son’s hand, and led him around to the sofa across from Pamela. She sat down beside him, beaming, her hand still tucked in his.
Stephen smiled back at his mother, then said in carefully neutral tones, “Whom did you visit this evening?” He had a pretty strong suspicion who it had been.
“Madame Valenskaya—and her daughter and Mr. Babington, of course.” Howard Babington, Stephen knew, was the gentleman who had opened his house to the Russian medium and her daughter during their stay in London. “It was such a pleasant evening,” his mother went on.
Her smile was enough to make Stephen wonder if perhaps Capshaw wasn’t right, after all. Maybe it was better for his mother to believe in this nonsense if it lightened her heart. She had been plunged into grief at his older brother’s death almost a year ago. It had taken Stephen some time to settle his affairs and return to England to take up the title and estate left to him by Roderick’s demise, so it had been four months after Roderick’s death before he reached their ancestral home. But his mother had still been in the depths of despair. He had wished many times over the months that he could lighten her sorrow somehow. Even if it took the ministrations of this Russian medium, perhaps it was worth it. They would, after all, be leaving in a few days to return to the family estate, leaving Madame Valenskaya in London. Hopefully, by the next season, his mother would be past this nonsense.
“The most wonderful thing happened,” Lady St. Leger went on, excitement tingeing her voice. “Madame made contact with Roddy.”
“What?” Stephen looked at her, then glanced over at Roderick’s widow, Pamela.
Pamela nodded. “The spirit rapped out ‘Roddy.’”
“His nickname!” Lady St. Leger went on excitedly. “You see? Not St. Leger, or even Roderick, that anyone might know. But the pet name I called him since he was a baby! It must mean it was really he, don’t you see?”
“But, Mother, you must have spoken of him as Roddy sometime when you were around this woman,” Stephen could not keep from pointing out.
Lady St. Leger made a disapproving noise. “Oh, Stephen, you are so suspicious. What does it matter if Madame Valenskaya knows his name is Roddy? It was the spirit who rapped it out.”
“Of course.” It was pointless, he thought, to try to reason with her. She thought the sun rose and set on Madame Valenskaya.
“It was the first time he’s actually spoken to us, although of course Chief Running Deer has told us that he knows Roderick is well and happy.” Lady St. Leger’s eyes welled with tears at the memory. “You can imagine how thrilled I was.”
“Yes.”
“But I couldn’t help but be sad, too, because we are leaving London soon. And it was so unlucky that Roddy should appear just now, when we are about to leave.”
“Yes, wasn’t it?” Stephen commented dryly.
“I said so to Madame, of course, and she agreed. She was very tired, as she always is after a visitation, but she is so kind. She stayed and talked to us for a long time afterward. Madame is certain that Roderick wants to speak with us again. She says she can feel his eagerness. It is just that when they are so new to the other side, as he is, it is a trifle difficult for them to communicate. But she knows it is coming soon.”
Stephen could well imagine that the woman would hate to lose such a generous client; no doubt that was why Roddy’s “spirit” had been trotted out. But Stephen kept his lips firmly shut against such words. His mother would not believe him, and it would only anger and hurt her.
“She suggested that we remain in London, but of course I told her we could not, what with you coming here to escort us back to Blackhope. You could not be away from the estate too long, I said. I could hardly ask you to twiddle your thumbs here in London when there is so much needing to be done. And, of course, the season is over. But it all turned out quite wonderfully! I realized that although we had to leave London, that didn’t mean I could not see Madame Valenskaya. She could come to Blackhope Hall to visit us!”
Lady St. Leger beamed. Stephen stared.
“What? You invited her home with us?”
His mother nodded happily. “Yes. And, of course, her daughter and Mr. Babington. I could scarcely leave them out, especially after Mr. Babington has so kindly opened his home to us time after time. I cannot believe I never thought of inviting them before.”
Stephen clenched and unclenched his jaw, at a loss for words. He wondered exactly who had come up with the idea for the visit—his mother or Madame Valenskaya.
“I am sure that Madame Valenskaya can communicate with the spirits just as well at Blackhope as she can here in London,” Lady St. Leger went on. “Indeed, when I told her about the house, she was ecstatic. She says she is sure that someplace as old and as full of history as it is must be very well suited to communications from the spirit world. I had never thought of it, but that does make sense.” She paused and looked at Stephen. “I know I should have asked you first, dear. It is, after all, your house now. But I was sure you would have told me to invite whomever I wanted.”
“Yes, of course. It is your house, always has been. I would not forbid you to invite whomever you wanted there.”
That was the problem, of course. Despite the fact that he was lord of Blackhope now, Stephen would not think of telling his mother who she could or could not invite to the home that had been hers from the day she married his father.
He glanced over at Pamela, who was watching him with a faint smile on her lips. There were times when he wondered if Pamela encouraged his mother on this foolish course just to arouse his ire. She talked about Valenskaya and her “spirits” as his mother did, but he had a little difficulty believing that Pamela really believed such things. She was a woman who was ruled by her head, not her heart; she had proved that much years ago when she married Roderick. Perhaps she was fond of Roddy in her fashion, but Stephen didn’t believe that she had ever been passionately in love with his brother, certainly not enough to be overwhelmed by the torrent of grief that had inundated his mother. He knew that Pamela’s heart had been more scored by the knowledge that she inherited nothing but a widow’s share at her husband’s death than by the death itself. He knew firsthand that hers was a cold and calculating heart, and he found it hard to believe that she wished so much to communicate with Roddy.
Lady St. Leger patted Stephen’s hand. “I know. You are such a dear son, just like Roddy. I knew you would not mind, and, anyway, you are always locked up in your office or out riding the estate or something. You’ll scarcely notice that we have guests.”
Stephen sincerely hoped so, but he said only, in a neutral voice, “How long are they staying?”
“Oh, I didn’t ask them for any specific time. I don’t know what will happen, you see, or how long it will take. And three guests will scarcely tax the resources of Blackhope.”
“No. Of course not.” He paused. He could think of nothing to say about the matter that would not upset his mother. Life had been easier, he thought, when all he had to worry about was locating silver ore and bringing it out of the ground.
He cleared his throat. “Well, then...I suppose we will be able to leave soon.”
“Yes, of course. The sooner the better, really. I must make sure that the house is ready for guests.”
Stephen left his mother happily making plans for her guests and started up to his room. He had reached the stairs when he heard the sound of light footsteps behind him.
“Stephen!” Pamela’s voice sounded behind him, and he turned reluctantly.
“What?” His voice was formally polite, his gaze devoid of warmth.
Age had changed Pamela little. Golden haired and blue eyed, she was still beautiful, her pale features a model of perfection. She walked toward him in her habitual slow way, as though certain that any man would willingly wait for her. It was the way she went through life, confident and cool, sure of getting her way. And, indeed, she had every reason to think so: she had rarely been thwarted.
“Must you run away so quickly?” she asked, her voice lowering huskily. “I only wanted to talk to you.”
“About what? This nonsense that you are encouraging in my mother?”
“Nonsense?” Pamela raised an eyebrow. “I am sure Lady Eleanor would be shocked to hear you call it such.”
“You are not, I see,” he retorted. “Why the devil do you go to these séances?”
“I am not shocked to hear what you think about them,” Pamela explained. “It is clear to anyone, even your mother, though she tries not to admit it. That does not mean that I agree with you.”
Stephen’s mouth twisted into a grimace, and he started to turned away.
“Why do you run from me?” Pamela asked again. She smiled, her eyes alight with knowledge. “Once you were quite happy to be near me.”
“That was a long time ago,” he replied shortly.
Pamela came closer, moving up onto the step below him. Leaning toward him, she placed a hand on his chest. Her cornflower-blue eyes gazed earnestly up into his. “I hate that things are so awkward between us now.”
“I see no other way for them to be.” Stephen wrapped his fingers around her wrist and removed her hand from his shirtfront. “You chose this. You are my brother’s wife.”
“I am your brother’s widow,” Pamela corrected huskily.
“It is the same thing.”
Stephen turned and went up the stairs, not looking back.
* * *
SLEEP DID NOT come easily that night, even though he drank a snifter of brandy as he paced the floor of his bedroom. His head was too full of thoughts of mediums and heartless chicanery—and a small wom-an with a compactly curved figure and huge brown eyes that seared right into a man.
It was a long wait in the dark, tossing and turning, eyes opening and shutting, before at last he drifted down into the blackness....
* * *
THERE WAS THE smell of smoke and blood in the air, and the castle rang with the clash of iron against iron, underlaid by the moans of the wounded and dying.
He blinked his eyes against the acrid smoke; sweat trickled down into his eyes and dampened the shirt on his back. He had had no time to do more than don his hauberk of chain mail and grab up his sword.
He was on the stairs, close to the bottom, making his slow retreat up the curving stone steps to the tower room above. It was, he knew, the only slim hope for her safety. The lady of the castle. His love.
She was behind him now, her body shielded by his, inching up the steps as he did. No coward she, she had not run up the stairs to the safety of the tower room with its heavy barred door; instead, she stuck with him, turned to face out to the side of the stairs, the dagger pulled from its sheath at her belt and held to the ready.
His heart hurt with love of her—and fear.
“Go!” he barked at her. “Get up to the room and lock yourself in.”
“I won’t leave you.” Her voice was calm, a silvery pool underlaid by iron.
He continued to swing his sword, holding off the rush of men who pushed up the staircase. There were two in front, for the staircase was no wider, and at the edge of the steps there was no rail, only empty space to the great hall below. Here, only a few steps above, some tried to climb up onto the steps or to grab at his legs to pull him down. One had managed to land a hit with his sword, but fortunately only the flat side had slammed into his calf, hurting even through the thick leather of his boots but not cutting him. He had taken care of each of them with a hearty kick that broke one man’s jaw or a swift downward slice of his sword that left another without a hand. Lady Alys, behind him, had dispatched another by hurling at him the poker she had carried. The man had fallen like an ox, but unfortunately, the poker was now lost to them.
His arm was weary, yet still he swung. He would fight, he knew, till he was bleeding and on his knees, and even then he would fight. Even though he knew they were doomed, he would fight. It was all he had of hope.
* * *
STEPHEN’S EYES FLEW open, and he sat up, a gasp torn out of him. He was drenched in sweat, his hair lying wetly against his skull, and he still felt the heavy ache in his arm, the sting in his eyes from sweat and smoke.
“Bloody hell!” he said. “What the devil was that?”
CHAPTER TWO
OLIVIA MORELAND SAT back against the comfortably cushioned seat of the carriage. Her spine was ramrod-straight with irritation. The nerve of that man!
“Mad Morelands, indeed,” she muttered.
It was an epithet she had heard all her life, and it rankled. Her family was not mad in the least;
it was simply that all the rest of England’s upper crust were narrow-minded, set-in-their-ways snobs.
Well, perhaps her grandparents had been a little strange, Olivia acknowledged in the interest of fairness. Her grandfather had been somewhat obsessive about some rather bizarre medical cures, and Grandmama had insisted that she had “the second sight.” But her father was simply a scholar of antiquities, and her great-uncle Bellard was a shy, sweet man who loved history a great deal and stayed away from strangers with equal zeal. There was nothing odd in either of those things, she thought. Nor was there anything wrong with Aunt Penelope going off to France to sing opera, though everyone in society had reacted with as much horror as if she’d been transported to a penal colony.
The problem, she knew, was that her family thought differently and acted differently from the rest of society. Her mother’s greatest sin in society’s eyes, Olivia knew, had been to be born to minor country gentry instead of the nobility. Personally, Olivia suspected that this attitude was prompted simply by jealousy over the fact that she, a virtual nobody, had managed to snare the prize bachelor, the Duke of Broughton, when none of the titled debutantes had been able to. Olivia found her parents’ meeting and subsequent marriage a charming love story. One of her father’s many holdings upon his own father’s early demise had been a factory. Her mother, an ardent social reformer, had managed to burst in upon a meeting between him and the manager of the factory, somehow evading all the minor clerks outside, and she had passionately put forward to him the rampant injustices in the treatment of his workers. The manager had moved to toss her out, but the duke had refused to allow him to do so and had heard her out. By the end of the afternoon, he, too, was seething at the plight of the workers and even more passionately in love with the redheaded, shapely reformer. She had also grown to love him, moving past her strong dislike of the nobility, money and power. They had married two months later, much to the dismay of the dowager duchess and most of the British peerage.
Olivia’s mother, who held decided and innovative views on women’s place in society, held equally unusual views on the education of children, and all seven of her children had been educated by tutors under the duchess’s careful eye. The girls had received the same education as the boys, and all had been allowed to explore every manner of subject as their interests dictated, though their father had insisted on a basic grounding in Greek, Latin and ancient history. As a result, the entire brood was a well-educated lot, as well as an independent one. It was this combination of bookishness and independence that had caused most others in society to term them odd. Caring little for society’s strictures, each of them had gone his or her own way.
Theo, the heir to the duke, had followed his passion of exploring, whereas his twin sister, Thisbe, had pursued the area of science, conducting experiments and writing papers on them. It was true, Olivia had to admit, that a few of Thisbe’s experiments had gone awry. There had been a small shed on the country estate that had blown up during a study of explosives, and there had also been one or two fires, but, after all, it was in the interest of science and little damage had been done. It was excessively wrong, Olivia thought, to label Thisbe a pyromaniac, as some had done.
The younger twins, Alexander and Constantine, had gotten into a number of scrapes, but, really, what else could one expect from two lively, intellectually curious boys? It was a nuisance, of course, to find one’s clock did not run because they had taken it apart to find out how it worked, and even Mother had been a trifle upset when they had ruined the Carrara marble floor in the conservatory trying to build a steam engine. It was an endeavor, the duchess had pointed out, that was better suited to one of the outbuildings behind the house. But the hot-air balloon incident, in Olivia’s opinion, was entirely the fault of the owner of the balloon. Anyone with any sense would have known better than to leave two ten-year-old boys alone with one’s empty-basketed balloon. And, anyway, they had managed to bring the thing down with a minimum of damage, hadn’t they?
Kyria’s “madness” in the eyes of society was that she refused to marry. And Reed—well, Olivia could not imagine how anyone could find Reed odd. He was the most normal and down-to-earth of them all, always the one to whom one turned in trouble, the one who would step in and right things. He took care of the family’s finances and reined in their extravagances and kept the admittedly erratic path of the family ship somewhat straight.
Olivia knew that most would consider her profession a strange one. Indeed, most would consider it bizarre that a woman would have an occupation at all. But Olivia had been intrigued by the possibility of communication from the spirit world since she was a child and had listened with a combination of horror and fascination to her grandmother, the dowager duchess, tell her that she was possessed of second sight and suggest that Olivia was similarly inclined. Although Olivia was quite certain she possessed no such ability at all, she had wanted to study the subject. She saw no reason why one could not apply the tools of science, such as research, logic and experimentation, to the more nebulous world of spirits. Several scientists, indeed, were also exploring the claims of mediums and the possibility of communication with the dead, although it seemed to Olivia that they were all strangely inclined to ignore evidence of fraud and to seize upon any evidence that seemed to support the existence of spirits.
There was nothing wrong with any of the Morelands, Olivia thought staunchly as she got out of her carriage and marched up the front steps of the grand Broughton House. It was the rest of society who was wrong.
As she stepped inside the massive front door of the house, she was met by her twin brothers, who were taking turns jumping off the steps of the main staircase onto the black-and-white squared tile of the entry hall.
“Hallo!” Alexander called cheerfully, bending down to place a marker where his brother’s feet had landed, then hurrying up to the same step from which his brother had jumped.
Constantine gave her a cheerful wave as he bounced up from the floor and went over to get a silver candlestick to use to mark his twin’s progress.
“You might be careful,” Olivia told them mildly. “You could crack your heads on that marble.”
“We don’t land on our heads,” Con remarked scornfully.
Since her brothers had been jumping from the steps onto the marble since they were toddlers, Olivia had to admit that they were, in all likelihood, experts at it. “What are you marking?”
“How far we slide. You can’t accurately measure your jumps from the stairs because you always slide. We’ve tried factoring in the slide, but one really cannot.”
“Sometimes one slides a lot, and other times hardly at all,” Alex put in. “Here I go, Con.”
He jumped and slid, coming up short of Con’s marker. “Blast!”
“Language, Alex,” Olivia reproved automatically.
“So we thought, why not see who could slide the farthest?” Con finished the tale.
“I see.” Olivia was well used to her brothers’ competitions. Theo and Reed had been much the same, although to Reed’s disgust, Theo had nearly always won, being two years older. “But why are you up so late?” Though her mother believed in freedom, she also had definite views on health, and her children, when young, were bound by early bedtimes. “And where is Mr. Thorndike?”
“Oh, him.” Alex shrugged, dismissing their tutor. “He’s sound asleep.” The twins found sleep a boring and useless pastime and were seemingly able to run endlessly on sheer energy.
“I am sure he is exhausted after a day trying to keep up with you two,” Olivia noted. “But that doesn’t explain why you are up. Your bedtime was an hour ago.”
Con grinned. “We have permission. Thisbe is going to take us out back for an astronomy lesson. We’re just waiting for Desmond.” He named Thisbe’s husband, also a scientist. “He has an experiment running, and he won’t be through until ten o’clock.”
“Ah, there you are,” Thisbe said as she came into the entry from the back hall. “I thought you were working on your Latin upstairs.”
Con’s mouth twisted in a grimace. “It made me sleepy. I hate Latin.”
“Well, you can’t get out of it,” Thisbe said. “You know Papa insists on it. And, besides, you have to know Latin if you hope to be a biologist. Or a doctor,” she added, turning her gaze to Alexander.
“On a more immediate note...” said an amused voice from above them, and they all looked up to see Kyria, in an elegant emerald-green gown, her flaming red hair done in an intricate pattern of curls, descending the stairs. “If either of you hopes to live past ten and a half, you might want to retrieve your boa constrictor. It was traveling down the hall toward the back stairs when I stepped out of my room just now. You know what Cook will do if it enters her kitchen.”
The two boys, who had a healthy respect for Cook and the great metal cleaver she had threatened to use on the next “devilish serpent” that entered her domain, cast an alarmed glance at each other and started off at a run toward the kitchens.
“Hallo, Thisbe. Liv. Have you been out this evening?” Kyria cast a glance at Olivia’s hat.
