Kasey Michaels - The Bride of the Unicorn

Morgan took a sip of his brandy. “You know, Miss Monday, with more teeth and less dirt, Miss O’Hanlan might just consider making her living as a soothsayer. Yes, my motives run deeper than altruism. But they are no concern of yours. You are to be exceptionally well recompensed for being Caroline Wilburton.”

“But you don’t believe that I really am Lady Caroline.”

“Do you?”

Caroline sighed, the sadness in her tone not lost on Morgan. “No. No, I don’t. Lady Caroline Wilburton has to be dead. You said there was a wide search, a search that continued for a long time. They couldn’t have missed me, if I were she, now, could they, considering that these murders you spoke of were committed not twenty miles from the orphanage?”

“If there really was a thorough search,” Morgan heard himself say, then frowned as he wondered when his mind had given birth to that particular thought. After all, if the murderer had discovered a living Caroline, the child might then have identified him as the man who shot her parents. The idea lent more credence to the murderer’s seeming willingness to be blackmailed—and likewise provided additional weight to Uncle James’s rambling confession. “Miss Monday,” he continued smoothly, relegating that supposition to the more private regions of his brain, “as I’ve told you, you are to be well paid for participating in my plan to present you to the Wilburton family. I have already agreed to ride herd on your coterie of misfits as part of my payment for your cooperation. However, there is a limit to my patience, and your questions are pushing toward it.”

He watched as Caroline leaned forward and took an apple from the wooden bowl that sat on the table, rubbed it against her thigh, then took a healthy bite of it with her small white teeth. Talking around a mouthful of the juicy—and somewhat loud—fruit, she said, “That’s a pity, because I have several more questions for you to answer. How, for instance, do you explain the fact that my name is Caroline? Peaches told me that I supplied that name myself the same morning she found me sprawled in the mud outside the orphanage kitchens.”

Morgan lifted a cheroot from his pocket, stuck it in his mouth, and leaned forward, sticking its tip into the candle flame. “That’s simple enough,” he said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke. “Our dearest Prince Regent married Caroline of Brunswick in 1795, shortly after which this entire island became knee deep in Carolines, with everyone from dukes to chimney sweeps naming their offspring after the new Princess of Wales. Do you have any more questions, or will you leave me in peace to contemplate the absurdity of this day’s events?”

He had to wait for his answer until Caroline had finished taking another bite of the apple, the sight of her small, well-shaped, yet badly chafed hands against the red skin of the apple and her obvious delight in the taste of the fruit making him believe he might possibly be slightly ashamed of himself.

Caroline nodded, chewing furiously, then wiped the back of her hand across her lips, where small droplets of juice had made them glisten. “I want you to tell me the story again, please,” she told him, her wide green eyes alive with interest. “I only listened with half an ear earlier at Woodwere. To tell you the God’s truth, for the most part I was lost to anything except the thought of escaping the place, once you said I might leave with you. Please.”

Morgan inhaled deeply on the cheroot once more, then blew out the smoke with a resigned sigh. “Don’t wheedle, Caroline. The role of supplicant doesn’t suit you.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Arrogance suits you,” she said, grinning at him. ‘Peaches says you’re as proud as Paddy’s pig. You’re probably bursting at the seams with pride that Aunt Leticia puts you on a pedestal alongside her hero, Don Quixote. And Ferdie, he—”

“Oh, very well, brat,” Morgan interrupted wearily, “if it will shut you up and hasten your departure, I will tell you the story again.”

She stood up, depositing the apple core on the table, then sat down once more, her legs tucked up under her. “Start with the murders. Were they very gory?”

“The earl was shot in the back, if that makes you happy, brat, and the countess took a bullet in the chest, close by her heart. Oh, yes, the coachman was also killed. Did I neglect to mention that?”

Caroline leaned forward eagerly. “You did, but never mind. How were the bodies found?”

“The coach horses bolted, most probably thrown into a frenzy by the bark of the pistols. Also, the coachman seemed to have neglected to put on the brake.”

“He may have been too busy dying to think of it,” she interrupted, her eyes sparkling with interest and, Morgan decided unhappily, the keen basic intelligence he had already suspected, an unlooked for aptitude for deduction that might hinder as much as help him in the coming months.

“Possibly. Unless the person or persons who kidnapped young Lady Caroline deliberately set the coach rampaging down the dark road. Whatever, it lurched into the next small village along the roadway, two of the horses so injured by their mad dash that they had to be destroyed while still in the traces, and the villagers rode back down the road to make the grisly discovery.”

“Poor horses. None of it was their fault,” Caroline said, her small heart-shaped face wearing a woeful expression for a moment before she rallied. “Go on. There was no sign of the child, Lady Caroline?”

“None,” Morgan agreed, looking at Caroline curiously. She could listen, unmoved, to a description of the terrible murder of three human beings without batting an eye, yet was bothered by the destruction of animals. Was human death so commonplace in her life? He felt a faint stirring of pity toward her—it had to be no more than pity—then quickly, prudently, squelched it. “The woods lining both sides of the roadway were searched, on the off chance she was thrown from the coach when the horses bolted, but there was no sign of her. I was away at school—both my brother, Jeremy, and I—and we only heard about most of it in letters from our parents. But the late earl’s brother, Thomas, now the eighth Earl of Witham, spared no expense in searching for her.”

“Or so you heard,” Caroline broke in, pointing a finger at him, so that he noticed, not for the first time, that the nail was badly bitten. For all her show of bravado, for all her seemingly thick hide, the girl must have some vulnerability to fall prey to such a nervous habit. “Continue,” she ordered imperiously, so that he had to struggle to suppress a smile. “How long did the new earl search? Did he soon call it off so that he could enjoy his new position?”

Yes, the girl was smart, perhaps too much so for her own good—most certainly for his. “The new earl and his wife and son were devastated by the tragedy, and had the full sympathy of the neighborhood. There was a rash of arrests in the succeeding months, and many a highwayman hung in chains from gibbets up and down the roadway, although not one of them would admit to having taken Lady Caroline. But the murders had been committed in October, and with the coming of winter and several heavy falls of snow, hope for finding the child began to fade. In the end, there was nothing to do but assume that she was dead.”

“For fifteen years,” Caroline said, as if speaking to herself. “Yet you came searching for her—and found me. Why?”

Morgan abandoned his chair to move to the window and look out over the darkened inn yard. How much of the truth would he have to reveal in order to put an end to her questions?

He turned to face her, wishing her rather exotically tilted green eyes weren’t looking at him so closely, wishing that she didn’t look so vulnerable beneath her atrocious clothing and overlong mop of unruly dark blond hair. She was little more than a child, yet she had seen more in her few years than most old men. Could he, too, now use her and then discard her, as society discarded its orphans, and still live with himself?