Chapter 1
“Douglas!” Jeremy Bolt bellowed through hallways thick with black, choking smoke. “Douglas, where are ye?”
His eyes streamed, the damp cloth over his mouth barely doing anything to keep the slithering coils of smoke from clawing at his throat. But he’d be damned if he would give up before he had his brother safely outside, where the air was fresh and not trying to kill anyone.
Why did ye go racing back in? He raged silently as he felt his way through the halls, the stone walls warm to the touch.
Up ahead, the crackle of fire was louder, wavering pulses of orange fading in and out of the black smoke.
And the heat… He dripped with sweat, certain that Hell itself couldn’t be much hotter.
He’d told Douglas that he would see to Beatrice and Sophie’s survival, but stubbornness ran in the brothers’ blood.
Douglas, injured by falling masonry, had limped into the burning castle anyway, determined to rescue his wife and daughter with his own two hands.
Heroic or foolish; there was hardly a difference, as far as Jeremy was concerned.
Just then, he heard a cry, muffled but nearby.
“Douglas?” the desperate voice called. Beatrice’s voice.
A soft, hopeless sob punctuated the word, too high-pitched to be Jeremy’s sister-in-law. It had to be Sophie, his niece.
She’ll be terrified. She doesn’t like it when the sparks from the fire get too close, much less this…
Jeremy didn’t know what had caused the blaze, as he had been fast asleep in the stables after spending most of the night waiting for his prize mare to foal.
The scent had woken him first, then the sound, like soldiers marching on fallen leaves, had roused him from any lingering fatigue.
By the time he reached the entrance of the castle, the small number of servants were already spilling out, screaming that Douglas was trapped inside.
Only when Jeremy had reached his brother, stuck halfway up one of the servants’ staircases, pinned by a fallen chunk of stone, had he been informed that Beatrice and Sophie were still upstairs.
Jeremy had managed to lift the stone and help his brother outside, ignoring the slightly older man’s protests, reassuring Douglas that he would return for Beatrice and Sophie in a moment.
But no sooner had Jeremy managed to get his brother to safety than Douglas had charged back inside, the threat to his wife and daughter’s lives apparently giving him the strength to ignore his pain.
I can’t have passed him, Jeremy thought with some trepidation. I’d have noticed him if I’d passed him.
Then again, with the smoke so dense and disorienting, it would have been easy for Douglas to make a wrong turn somewhere.
“Douglas!” Beatrice cried again, as a great crash echoed through the hallways, and Sophie unleashed a bloodcurdling scream of terror.
Jeremy lunged toward the sound, his hand closing around the iron ring that served as a door handle.
A second later, his hand recoiled as the heat scorched his palm.
He swore loudly and ripped the damp cloth from around his mouth, quickly wrapping it around his hand before reaching again for the iron ring.
He heaved the door open, his blurred eyes seeing only shapes within the smoky room beyond.
“Give me the lass, Beatrice,” he commanded, barely able to swallow a cough. “And hold onto me shirt, so ye stick close to me.”
“Where is Douglas?” Beatrice demanded to know.
A muscle twitched in Jeremy’s jaw. They didn’t have time for this.
Soon enough, that blaze would come sweeping further down the hallway, and their last opportunity to escape would be gone, unless Beatrice decided she’d like to take her chance by leaping from the windows.
The fall would be crippling at best, fatal at worst.
“Just hand me the lass!” Jeremy barked, holding his arms out. “Sophie, lass, come to me. I will have ye outside in no time at all.”
The little girl was suddenly in his arms, and he swept her up, tucking her head into the dent where his shoulder and chest met. It would not do much to keep the smoke out of her five-year-old lungs, but it was better than nothing.
“Take hold of me shirt, Beatrice,” Jeremy said sternly. “If ye don’t, I can’t promise ye’ll make it out of here. I can’t wait for ye, so make up yer mind quickly. I will worry about Douglas once the two of ye are safe.”
He’d considered lying to her, telling her that Douglas was already outside, but he thought better of it. She would only come running back in to try and save her husband if she discovered he was not, in fact, outside with the staff.
To his relief, he felt Beatrice grasp a tight fistful of his shirt. She had made her choice.
Without hesitation, Jeremy turned and, with one arm holding Sophie tightly to his body and his other hand skimming the increasingly hot wall, he retraced his steps back to the entrance.
At least, he hoped that was where he was headed, as he cursed the labyrinthine hallways of McIver Castle.
A place, a home, that had been good to the brothers until now.
“Oh, milady!” a gaggle of maids cried as Jeremy staggered out of the castle with Sophie and Beatrice, the women crowding around their mistress and the beloved little girl.
Someone pulled Sophie out of his arms, a gasp rising up. “She’s burned! Fetch a salve!”
“Too soon for a salve,” someone else shouted. “Get her to the brook.”
Rubbing the blur from his eyes and pausing for just a moment to catch his breath, Jeremy watched a few of the servants carrying his niece off toward the stream that babbled merrily past the castle.
It was one of Sophie’s favorite places to play, where Jeremy had recently been teaching her how to swim.
Beatrice, however, had not yet moved, her hand still grasping the back of Jeremy’s shirt in a tight fist.
“If me husband dies, I will never forgive ye,” she hissed, finally releasing her hold on him.
Jeremy turned slowly, his gaze hard as he looked down at her. “If me brother dies, I will never forgive meself.”
Striding past her, sending up a prayer to the heavens he hadn’t prayed in a long time, he took one last gulp of clean, crisp dawn air and marched right back into the blaze.
Douglas was in there somewhere, and he would not rest until they were both outside, lying on the grass, catching their breaths.
With trudging footfalls, exhausted to the very marrow of his bones, Jeremy made the last few steps down the front stairs of McIver Castle. There, every muscle in his body protesting this final effort, he slowly lowered his brother’s body onto the dew-drenched grass.
Douglas was alive. Barely.
“Bring me niece and me sister-in-law,” Jeremy croaked as he sank down beside his brother and stared into Douglas’ glassy, listless eyes. “He will not last long.”
The servants appeared confused for a moment, but as they saw Jeremy slide an arm under his brother’s shoulders to lift him slightly, they understood.
The master of their burning castle was somewhere on that bridge between the living and the dead.
Too much smoke had filled Douglas’ lungs; it would take a miracle for him to survive, and since no one else had died, Jeremy sensed they had run out of miracles.
“What did ye do that for, eh?” Jeremy asked his brother, who gazed at him as if he didn’t know him. “What did ye go running into the castle for? I told ye I’d save them. I did save them.”
But I can’t save ye… The fact boiled in Jeremy’s stomach as if he had gulped down a mouthful of molten bronze. To have almost had everyone survive such a blaze was too cruel a twist of fate. It felt to him like losing, and he did not like to lose. He could not accept it.
“Sophie?” Douglas managed to rasp, his throat undoubtedly ruined by each scorching inhale he had taken while stumbling aimlessly through hallways.
“Aye, she’s coming,” Jeremy said. “Ye just wait so ye can say goodbye to her. Don’t ye dare leave us before then. Ye can’t leave before ye’ve said farewell.”
He could almost feel his brother slipping away, like witnessing the last flickers of a candle about to sputter, with the wick burned down to the very last fibers. There was no way to prevent it from extinguishing, and the same was true for Jeremy’s brother.
“Nay, brother,” Jeremy urged. “Ye just stay right here a moment longer. Yer daughter is coming. Yer wife, too. Just ye wait.”
He shook Douglas as if his brother were merely dozing off, and though Douglas seemed to rally once…
twice… once more, it was all in vain. With a rattling breath and a roll of his eyes, Douglas went limp in Jeremy’s arms…
just as he heard Sophie calling out for her ‘Papa’ and Beatrice wailing for her beloved.
All too late.
To add insult to injury, the bruised Scottish skies saw fit to unleash a drizzling downpour as Jeremy pulled a blanket over his brother’s face.
Beatrice had brought Sophie back to the stream, where the little girl curled up in her mother’s lap as they sat under the sparse shelter of a weeping willow.
Jeremy could hear his niece’s sobs, even through the rain and the distance, just as he could feel the burn of Beatrice’s glare pricking down the back of his neck.
As if I am not torturing meself enough, I don’t need ye joining in.
From where he kneeled beside his brother, Jeremy slowly rose to his feet, telling himself that he could not be angry with his sister-in-law.
She needed someone to blame for this tragedy, and if that was him, and that helped her in some small way, then so be it. He would bear it, at least for now.
“Mr. Bolt, someone’s coming up the hill,” the housekeeper said, wiping her eyes as she pointed her knobbly hand to whatever was behind him.
Not bothering to shield his eyes from the rain, grateful for the downpour soothing their soreness and hiding anything he didn’t want his people to see, he turned.
Sure enough, a carriage was coming up the rough hillside road, the horses struggling with the last bend. The beasts looked exhausted, their heads low, as if they had been traveling for some time without rest or water.
The sight immediately raised Jeremy’s hackles, for if there was one thing he couldn’t abide, it was the mistreatment of horses. Or, perhaps, he needed somewhere to divert his anger and his grief, too, just like Beatrice.
The carriage rolled to a standstill, though it was a good few minutes before anyone emerged, and Jeremy did not bother to approach.
Whoever this was, they would not be greeted warmly.
In fact, if it were not for the horses clearly needing a respite, he would have sent them on their way before anyone could step outside the carriage.
As it was, an old man stepped out, his neck craning as he observed the sight of a castle collapsing inward, the fire still burning inside its walls. Unless the rain grew heavier, the blaze would burn for several days, leaving only ash and ruin.
We’ll never live here again. The thought came to Jeremy as a pinprick to his brain, as he waited for the old man to move closer.
“Do you know where I might find the master of the… uh… castle?” the man asked, his voice carrying the clipped accent of the far south.
The same accents that had surrounded Jeremy when he went away to school as a boy, transforming his own from the brogue of his childhood to something that always seemed stuck between the border of England and Scotland.
“That was me brother until this morning,” Jeremy replied coldly, gesturing to the covered body on the ground. “Who wants to know?”
The man cleared his throat, grimacing. “I sincerely apologize for the… um… poor timing of my arrival,” he said, his tone genuine at least. “Had I but known, I would, of course, have waited for a more… um… appropriate moment. I was unaware that–”
“What do you want?” Jeremy interrupted, his patience wearing thin.
“I… well, I have been searching for you for over a year,” the man replied in haste, a familiar fear in his rapidly blinking eyes. “You must be the younger brother, I take it? Uh… Jeremy Bolt?”
Jeremy gave the smallest nod.
“Well, Mr. Bolt, it… um… well, it would appear that you are the last living heir to a title and considerable land and inheritance in the south-west of England,” the man replied, his throat bobbing. “A dukedom, in fact. Stonebridge.”
Jeremy took a step toward the man, towering over him. “Is this some jest?”
“No jest, Your Grace,” the man replied, taking a half step back.
“As I say, I have been looking for you for some time, and I am so very sorry that I could not find you sooner.” His gaze flitted from the smoldering castle to the body on the ground and back to Jeremy again, looking intensely uncomfortable.
“Truly, I… I can only offer my deepest sympathies.”
Jeremy took a breath. “If I am the last living heir, there must be a lot of men in me brother’s situation.”
“Unfortunately, yes,” the man answered, unwilling to look Jeremy in the eye. “I can show you the line of inheritance on our journey south, so you can be certain that this is no mistake.”
Turning his head to look over his shoulder and lifting his gaze to the suffocating clouds billowing from the burning castle to blend with the rainclouds, Jeremy glanced at the scared, trembling little girl in her mother’s arms. He did not need to think for very long.
“Looks like we’re headed to England, then,” he said flatly.
For there was nothing left for any of them here. And though he would be sorry to bury his brother here and move so far away from that grave, Douglas would have haunted him forever if Jeremy had dared to bury him in English soil.
I don’t know that I will be much of a duke, brother, but at least yer bairn will want for nothing. And, right now, Sophie was the only thing that mattered: the last piece of Douglas that existed in this world.