The Mermaid in the Basement (46 page)

Winters stared at them and began to tremble. “Just shoot me,” he whimpered. “I can’t bear the disgrace.”

“You didn’t mind letting Clive Newton bear the disgrace,” Grant said, his voice hard.

Grant led Winters out of the room, and Serafina suddenly felt herself swaying. Dylan gently said, “Sit down, Serafina.”

As she sat down, Bertha came rushing in, along with Serafina’s parents. “What’s happened?” Septimus demanded.

“It’s good news, Father,” Serafina said. She was rubbing her neck, which she knew would later bear a bruise. “Clive’s going to be set free. Superintendent Winters killed the actress.”

“Superintendent Winters?” he asked in disbelief.

“Yes.” She explained to them how it had all come about, and finally she turned and said, “If Dylan hadn’t helped, it would never have happened.”

Septimus came over and put his hand out. “God bless you, my boy,” he said, wringing Dylan’s hand with all his strength.

Dylan smiled. “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“Well, I’ve been wrong about other things. I may be wrong about that too.We’ll have to talk about this, you and I.”

“I’ll be glad to, sir.” He turned to Serafina. “Do you need a doctor, Viscountess?”

“No, but my nerves are so on edge I don’t know if I can sleep.” And then she gave Dylan a strange look.He could not read her expression, but he saw her smile. “Some stories do have happy endings, don’t they?”

Dylan returned the smile. “Yes, they do, Viscountess Serafina Trent, and this is one of them, indeed!”

TWENTY-SIX

T
he formal dining room was extremely comfortable. The table and sideboard were Elizabethan oak, solid and powerful. The carved chairs at each end of the table had high backs and ornate armrests.Mirrors on the wall reflected the gaslight from the magnificent chandelier. The curtains were dark green, and pictures adorned the walls.

Matthew Grant had been silent for most of the meal, although Dora, who sat next to him, chattered amiably. The food had been completely outside of Grant’s experience. The first course, a bisque, was delicious. It was followed by salmon, and Matthew could not help but notice how much of the food was taken away. The family seemed to just sample a dish and then wait for the next. The fish was followed by an entrée of curried eggs, sweetbread, and mushrooms.

Dora smiled at Matthew and said, “Don’t eat too much. There’s a lot more to come.”

“I’m not used to such rich meals,Miss Dora.”

“Well, it’s time you got used to them.” She stared at him, and there was a winsome look on her face. “What’s going to happen to Superintendent Winters?”

“He’ll be tried and found guilty. He’s already confessed.”

“Well, who will be the new superintendent?”

Matthew smiled. “I will be,” he said.

Dylan and Serafina, who were seated across from them, both exclaimed, “Wonderful!”

“They couldn’t have made a better choice,” Serafina added.

Septimus said, “Well, it is indeed an honour to have Superintendent Grant with us tonight.”

Bertha had been prepared to cast disparaging remarks on a mere policeman, but the superintendent of Scotland Yard—that was something else again! “We’re so happy to have you here, Superintendent Grant,” she cooed.

Grant found her amusing. “Thank you, Lady Mulvane. It’s kind of you to say so.”

Clive was pale, but his eyes were alight with pleasure. “It will be good to have an official representation of Scotland Yard in the family. I propose a toast. Here’s to Superintendent Matthew Grant.”

They all echoed the toast to Superintendent Grant, and then Grant said, “If I may, I’d like to propose a toast to Viscountess Serafina Trent. She’s the best detective of us all.”

Serafina received the toast and then said, “We mustn’t forget the man who came to our rescue like a knight in shining armor, Mr. Dylan Tremayne.”

David, who had insisted on sitting next to Dylan, interrupted by saying, “Mr. Dylan, can we go fishing tomorrow?”

“Well, I don’t see why not.”

David’s eyes brightened, and he looked up at Dylan with a pleading expression. “I wish you’d come and live here, Mr. Dylan. Then we could be together all the time.”

“Well, I have a living to make, see?”

David thought this over and then blurted out, “Well, Mum, you’ve got lots of money. You could marry Mr. Dylan, and he could stay with us all the time, couldn’t he?”

For once Lady Serafina Trent was speechless.Grant and Clive were trying not to laugh, but their attempts were not entirely successful. Everyone at the table seemed to be trying to hide their smiles. Dylan’s face was flushed, and Serafina could not look up. Finally Dylan gave Serafina an inexplicable look, then turned to David. “Well, viscountesses don’t marry actors, my boy.”

“Why not?”

“Because actors aren’t acceptable husbands.”

“But you’re nice, isn’t he, Mum?”

“Yes, he is nice,” Clive said, his eyes laughing, some colour in his cheeks now. “Since he’s ridden to our rescue, I think it’s something you might consider, Serafina.”

Serafina knew she was blushing, and she hated it. She arose quickly and said, “I think we can move to the drawing room for dessert.” They all got up and began to move, but Dora took Matthew by the arm and said, “I thought you were a brave man, Matthew.”

“You think I’m not?”

“If you were really brave, you’d do more than just come courting me.”

Matthew stared at the young woman with whom he had fallen so completely in love. It was an unexpected thing for him, and he was much more excited over the fact that Dora Newton liked him than he was over his promotion to superintendent of Scotland Yard. “If I asked you to marry me,” he said, “people would say I was a fortune hunter.”

“Oh, you could never be that.”

Suddenly Matthew laughed and did a very uncharacteristic thing. “Yes, I am a fortune hunter, and you’re the fortune I’m hunting for, Dora Newton.”He leaned forward and kissed her, and then she laughed. “Aunt Bertha will go into spasms.”

David had insisted that Dylan put him to bed, and Dylan had picked him up and carried him up the stairs, followed by Serafina.He had watched as she undressed him, put on his pajamas, and then put him into the big bed.

“Now a story, is it?”

“Yes, a good story, Dylan!”

Serafina moved to the other side of the bed and sat down. She saw Dylan’s face, mobile and expressive, and watched his hands as he waved them in the air telling a fanciful story.He was making it up, she knew, and she wondered again at the imagination of this man who had come into her life with such power and such force.

Finally Dylan finished the story, and David reached up and took him by the hand. “I still think you ought to marry Mum and be my father.”

Dylan cast a look at Serafina and winked. “Well, maybe I’ll be like the frog prince—you remember the story I told you about him? Maybe your mother will kiss me and turn an ugly frog into a fine, handsome young prince.”

“You’re not ugly!”

The three of them laughed together, then Dylan said, “Good night.” He stepped back, and Serafina kissed the boy, then they left the room.

When they were outside, she asked, “Would you like to have tea?”

“Oh, that’s good, it would be.”

The two of them went to the kitchen, and she moved about heating water in the kettle, and they talked while it was steeping. She turned away from him and said, “I’m sorry that David embarrassed you with all his foolish talk, but David’s wrong. I could never marry. I have terrible memories of my marriage. I’ve already told you why I’m cold. Sometimes I think my soul is frozen.”

At once Dylan came to her. Her eyes widened as he turned her around, and his face was framed in her vision. His wide, mobile lips were smiling, and he pulled her closer and said, “But ice can melt, yes?”

“No—not in my case.”

Dylan pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Something swirled rashly between the two of them, and once again, as she had before, Viscountess Serafina Trent felt a wonderful warmth that began somewhere in the vicinity of her heart and touched her face. At the same time there was a feeling of deep need that yearned to be satisfied. The loneliness of her past life seemed suddenly cold and barren. Dylan’s arms were strong as he held her, his lips gentle. There was strength in this man, but a gentleness that drew her.

He lifted his head and said,“Many waters cannot quench love.Neither can the floods drown it. It’s stronger than death, Serafina. Stronger than anything.”

She stepped back, putting her hand on his chest, letting it rest there lightly. “I told you I’m nothing but ice.”

“You’re wrong about that, Viscountess Serafina Trent. I don’t know what others see, but I see in you a woman of fire and imagination. You couldn’t kiss me like that if you were cold.”

“Dylan, we could never—” She broke off.

“We could never marry, you were going to say.”

“We’re too different.”

“But one of us could change.” He reached out and put his hand on the smoothness of her cheek, then smiled. “Good night, Serafina.”

“You’ll come back?” she asked quickly and then flushed. “To—to see David, I mean.”

“Yes, to see David, and you and I will have more talk about a great many things.” He did a strange thing then. He lifted his hand and ran it over her hair. His touch seemed to awaken something in her, and as he stood there smiling, it seemed to her that her heart beat faster. He turned and walked out of the room, and when he did, she walked to the window. She looked up at the stars spangling the heavens and whispered, “I’m not cold! Dylan said so—”

And then Lady Serafina Trent smiled and watched until he disappeared into the darkness.

She hugged herself and whispered, “He’ll be back tomorrow. I know he will.”

Excerpt from
A Conspiracy of Ravens,
Book Two in the Lady Trent Mysteries

O
ctober, the harbinger of winter, had fallen upon England. A cold, blustery day swept across London and the many houses that bordered the city itself. Lady Serafina Trent had come to stare out the window, and the gloom of the day dampened her spirit. As she looked at the enormous oaks, they seemed to be specters raising skeletal limbs toward the sky.

A fleeting memory came to her as she thought of how she had come to Trentwood House as a young bride. She remembered the joy and the anticipation that had been hers when she married Charles Trent—but then a trembling, not caused by the temperature, shook her as a bitter memory touched her. She thought of her husband, now dead and buried in the family cemetery, then forced the thought away.

Serafina’s eyes lingered on the grounds of Trentwood, the ancestral estate of the Trents. The grass was a leprous grey, the trees had dropped their leaves, and the death of summer took away the beauty of the world. Serafina suddenly turned, and with a quick movement moved away from the window and toward the large table where David sat scrunched up in a tall chair made especially for him. The blaze in the fireplace sent out its cheerful poppings and crackings, sending myriads of fiery sparks upward through the chimney in a magic dance, and the heat radiated throughout the room.

Serafina took a seat beside her son. She glanced around, and once again old memories came—but this time more pleasant ones. This was the room that she had persuaded Charles to give her as a study, and it was lined with artifacts of the trade of human anatomy. A grinning skeleton wired together stood at attention across the room. She and her father had put it together when she was only thirteen, and after her marriage it had come with her to Trentwood. Charles had laughed at her, saying, “You love death rather than life, Serafina.”

Once again, the bitter memory of her marriage to Charles Trent brought gloom. She quickly scanned the room, noting the familiar bookshelves stuffed with leather-bound books, the drawings of various parts of the human anatomy on the walls, the stuffed animals that she and her father had dissected and put back together again. A table stretching the length of one wall was covered with vials, glasses, and containers. She remembered how she had labored in the world of chemistry during her early years at Trentwood.

“Mum, I can’t do these old fractions!”

Serafina smiled and put her arm around David. At the age of seven, he had her looks—fair hair and dark blue eyes with just a touch of violet like Serafina’s own. He was small, but there was a hint of a tall frame to come.

“Of course you can, David. It’s easy.”

“No, it ain’t,”David complained, and as he turned to her, she admired the smooth planes of his face, thinking what a handsome young man he was. She also noticed that instead of figures on the sheet of paper before him, he had drawn pictures of strange animals and birds. He had a gift for drawing, she knew, but now she shook her head saying, “You haven’t been working on fractions. You’ve been drawing birds.”

“I’d rather draw birds than do these old fractions, Mum.”

Serafina had learnt from experience that David had inherited neither her passion for science, nor the mathematical genes of his grandfather, Septimus. He was intrigued more by fanciful things than by numbers and hard facts, which troubled Serafina.