The Bride of the Unicorn. Kasey Michaels
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