“I don’t see what good my shivering in a dank, crumbling old castle does my brothers,” he said. “I can think of no more ridiculous errand than traveling four hundred miles to save a lot of superstitious laborers from hobgoblins. Not that I understand what your villagers are afraid of. Every castle in Scotland is haunted. Every place is haunted. Battlefields. Trees. Rocks. They love their ghosts.”
“It’s more than ghosts,” his father said. “There have been shocking accidents, bloodcurdling screams in the dead of night.”
“They say a long-dormant curse was reawakened when your cousin Frederick Dalmay accidentally trod on the grave of Malcom MacFetridge’s great-great-grandmother,” his mother said with a shudder. “Frederick’s health began to fail immediately thereafter. In three years, he was dead!”
Lisle looked about him, wishing—not for the first time—there was someone he could turn to and say, “Do you believe this?”
Though his parents were no more capable of seeing reason than Lisle was of seeing unicorns, his own sanity demanded that he introduce facts into the conversation.
“Frederick Dalmay was ninety-four years old,” he said. “He died in his sleep. In a house in Edinburgh ten miles from the supposedly cursed castle.”
“That isn’t the point,” said his father. “The point is, Gorewood Castle is Dalmay property and it’s falling to pieces!”
And you never cared about it until now, Lisle thought. Cousin Frederick had left the castle years ago, and they’d let it be neglected.
Why, suddenly, had it become so important?
Why else? He was home and couldn’t ignore them the way he ignored their letters. It was a ploy to keep him in England. Not because they needed him or wanted him. Merely because they thought this was where he ought to be.
“What does he care?” his mother cried. “When has Peregrine ever cared about us?” She flung herself out of her chair and toward one of the windows, as though she would hurl herself out of it in despair.
Lisle was not alarmed. His mother never threw herself out of windows or dashed her brains out against the chimneypiece. She only acted as though she’d do it.
Drama was what his parents did instead of thinking.
“What monstrous crime did we commit, Jasper, to be punished with this stonyhearted child?” she wailed.
“Oh, Lisle, oh, Lisle.” Lord Atherton put his hand to his head and assumed his favorite King Lear pose. “Who can a man turn to if not to his eldest son and heir?”
Before he could launch into the usual speech about ingratitude and marble-hearted fiends and thankless children, Mother took up the cause. “This is our payment for indulging you,” she said, her eyes filling. “This is our reward for putting you into the care of Rupert Carsington, the most irresponsible man in England.”
“Only the Carsingtons matter to you,” Father said. “How many letters have you written to us, in all the years you’ve spent in Egypt? I can count them on one hand.”
“But why should he write, when he never thinks of us?” said Mother.
“I make a simple request, and he answers with mockery!” Father stormed to the fire, and struck his fist upon the mantelpiece. “By God, how am I to bear it? With worry and care, you’ll drive me to an early grave, Lisle, I vow.”
“Oh, my dearest love, don’t say so!” Mother shrieked. “I could never go on without you. I should swiftly follow you, and the poor boys will be orphaned.” She hurtled away from the window to sink into a chair, and commenced sobbing hysterically.
His father flung out his hand, indicating his distraught spouse. “Now look what you’ve done to your mother!”
“She always does that,” said Lisle.
Father let his hand fall, and turned from him in a huff. He drew out his handkerchief and pressed it into Mother’s hand—in the nick of time, too, because her own would soon need wringing out. She was the most prodigious weeper.
“For the boy’s sake, we must pray that dreadful day never comes,” Father said, patting her shoulder. His eyes filled, too. “Lisle, naturally, will be off on his jaunts among the heathens, leaving his brothers to uncaring strangers.”
His brothers already lived among uncaring strangers, Lisle thought. If orphaned, they’d go to one of his father’s sisters. Though Lord Atherton had lost one—Lord Rathbourne’s first wife—some years ago, the other six were in fine fettle, and wouldn’t notice a few more added to their own large broods. It wasn’t as though any of them actually cared for their children directly. Servants, tutors, and governesses reared one’s offspring. Parents had little to do but put their noses in when not wanted and find ways to annoy everybody and devise ridiculous and inconvenient schemes to waste one’s time.
He wouldn’t allow them to manipulate him. If he let himself be drawn into the emotional whirlpool, he’d never get out.
The way to keep on solid ground was to keep to the facts.
“The boys have scores of relatives to look after them, and more than sufficient money to live on,” he said. “They won’t end up abused and starved in an orphanage. And I will not go to Scotland on a fool’s errand.”
“How can you be so heartless?” his mother cried. “A family treasure faces extinction!” She sank back in the chair, letting her husband’s handkerchief drop from her trembling fingers as she prepared to swoon.
The butler entered. He pretended, as he always did, that an emotional extravaganza was not in progress.
The carriage, he told them, was waiting.
The drama didn’t end with their departure, but continued throughout the drive to Hargate House. Thanks to the late start and the press of traffic, they were among the last to arrive.
Lisle’s parents resumed their reproaches before and after greeting their hosts and the assorted Carsington husbands and wives, and in the interval before they made their way through the crowd to the guest of honor.
The birthday girl, the Dowager Countess of Hargate, appeared unchanged. Lisle knew, thanks to Olivia’s letters, that the old lady still gossiped, drank, and played whist with her friends—known among the Carsingtons as the Harpies—and still found ample time and energy to terrorize her family.
At present, garbed in the latest and most expensive mode, a drink in her hand, she sat on a sort of throne, the Harpies clustered about her like ladies in waiting to a queen. Or perhaps like vultures about the queen vulture, depending on one’s point of view.
“You’re looking sadly peakish, Penelope,” she told Mother. “Some bloom when they’re breeding and some don’t. A pity you’re not one of the blooming ones—except for your nose. That’s red enough, and your eyes, too. I shouldn’t weep so much, was I your age, nor dropping brats, either. If you’d asked me, I’d have advised you to stick with the birthing business when once you’d started, instead of stopping and leaving it until all your looks went and your muscles stretched past mending.”
Leaving Mother temporarily speechless and red in the face, her ancient ladyship nodded at Lisle. “Ah, the wanderer returns, brown as a berry, as usual. It’ll be a shock to you, I daresay, seeing girls fully clothed, but you’ll have to bear it.”
Her friends caught the pun and laughed loudly.
“Bare it, indeed,” said Lady Cooper, one of the younger ones. She was only about seventy. “What will you wager, Eugenia, that the girls wonder if he’s as brown everywhere as his face?”
Beside him, Mother gave a faint moan.
The dowager leaned toward him. “Always was a missish little prune,” she said in a stage whisper. “Never mind her. It’s my party, and I want the young people to have their fun. We’re awash in pretty girls, and they’re all panting to meet our great adventurer. Run along now, Lisle. If you find Olivia getting engaged to anybody, tell her not to be ridiculous.”
She waved him away, and reverted to torturin
g his parents. Lisle abandoned them without the slightest twinge of conscience, and let himself become lost in the throng.
The ballroom, as the dowager had promised, was overrun with beautiful girls, and Lisle was by no means immune to the species, fully clothed or not. He certainly wasn’t averse to dancing. He found partners easily, and danced happily.
All the while, though, his gaze roamed the crowd, seeking one head of violently red hair.
If Olivia wasn’t dancing, she must be playing cards—and fleecing whoever was dim-witted enough to play with her. Or maybe she was in a dark corner, getting engaged again, as the dowager suspected. Olivia’s many broken engagements, which would have ruined a girl of lesser fortune and less powerful family, wouldn’t discourage suitors. They wouldn’t mind her not being a beauty, either. Olivia Carsington was a catch.
Her late father, Jack Wingate, had been the feckless younger son of the recently deceased Earl of Fosbury, who’d left her a fortune. Her stepfather and Lisle’s uncle, the Viscount Rathbourne, had pots of money, too, and he was heir to the Earl of Hargate, who had even more.
Between and during dances, she was a frequent topic of conversation: the daring gown she’d worn to the coronation last month, her carriage race with Lady Davenport, the duel she’d challenged Lord Bentwhistle to—because he’d whipped a footboy—and so on and so on.
She’d been “out” in Society for four years, she still wasn’t married, and she was still the talk of London.
This didn’t surprise him in the least.
Her mother, Bathsheba, came from the rotten branch of the DeLucey family: a famous lot of swindlers, imposters, and bigamists. Before Bathsheba Wingate married Lord Rathbourne, Olivia had shown clear signs of following in the ancestral footsteps. Since then, an aristocratic education had hidden the signs, but Olivia’s character, clearly, had changed not at all.
Lisle remembered some lines from a letter she’d written to him in Egypt, shortly after his first brother was born.
I look forward to the day when I become a Bachelor. I should like to live an unsettled life.
Judging by the talk, she’d succeeded.
He was about to start actively searching for her when he noticed the men preening and jockeying for position in one corner of the room—competing for the current reigning beauty, no doubt.