Mesmerized

* * *

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.