Chapter 3
A HAPPY FAMILY
Merlin licked Diana’s hand beneath the breakfast table, and she passed him a toast point, looking up from her book only long enough to ensure neither her aunt, sitting across the table, nor her cousin, sitting at the far end of the table, saw.
But Lady Tascott was reading the papers and Apollo was face down on the table next to an empty plate.
Merlin inhaled the bread before anyone could stop him.
He butted his big, furry head against Diana’s leg.
He was going to eat everything off her plate before she had three bites.
She ruffled her hand across his head, shaking his ears, and his back leg thumped loudly in the cavernous silence of the breakfast room.
“Stop that!” Lady Tascott shrieked.
Apollo shot upright then fell into the back of his chair with a groan. “Quiet,” he groaned. “Quiet.”
The thumping stopped, and Merlin dropped his heavy head into Diana’s lap.
“That beast should not be in the house,” Lady Tascott said. “Your grandfather is no longer alive to allow the slobbering brute free rein.”
“Merlin hurts no one.” Diana’s hand tightened in the dog’s fur. What would she do without the big old dear? He was the only one ever happy to see her.
“He’s a nuisance.” Lady Tascott folded the paper and placed it beside her plate then picked up her knife and fork.
Usually, Diana didn’t mind the clicking and clacking of cutlery across china, but today it felt like claws screeching across her brain. A side effect of the potion? Or of the unexpected marriage proposal?
More likely of humiliation. She curled down to nuzzle Merlin’s big bony head and hide her red cheeks. She’d love-drugged the wrong man. And now her half-eaten eggs sat heavy and sour in her stomach.
The screech of silver against china stopped.
“Thank God,” Apollo groaned. He’d ingested more potion than Lord Knightly or herself.
By leagues. And he was much worse off than Diana.
She couldn’t look at him without thinking of his pale backside, of him slamming into his mistress from behind.
Her stomach clenched, and she swallowed bile.
Thank heavens the potion worked. She would not trade places with his dear Lissy for the world.
“The flowers.” Lady Tascott blinked at her from across the table.
At least six feet stretched between them, and six feet between them and Apollo, all of it empty and cold.
Her aunt held her fork and knife poised above her plate, and her graying blond hair had been harshly parted in the middle, looped in braids on either side of her head.
She wore fashionable mutton sleeves in copper, and her lips were pressed into a thin line.
Her blue eyes were pale and worried. “What are we to do about the flowers? The wedding is soon, and while we could purchase real flowers, you know how… gauche they are.” She looked left then right, inspecting the room for eager ears, but the footmen had retreated to the kitchen for a moment.
She looked at her son as if he were dying of consumption, her bottom lip trembling. “Cannot you try once more? A tiny attempt to conjure something.”
“No,” Apollo snapped. “I’ve told you before. I cannot! I’ve been trying since he died and have failed every attempt.”
“Often it takes time—”
“And sometimes it doesn’t happen at all.” Apollo tugged his hair with skeletal hands. “Grandfather’s glamours have already begun to flicker. They’ll be gone soon, entirely. And everyone will know.”
Lady Tascott dropped backward with a huff. “Perhaps you could. If you really tried.”
“Grandfather popped off into the afterlife without a single thought for me. Or for what would happen to us when we are found out.” Apollo grabbed a nearby glass of wine and guzzled it.
“Apollo,” Diana ventured, “you should not—”
“I’ll do as I please. And mother’s right, Di, that dog shouldn’t be in here.”
As if he knew he was under consideration, Merlin withdrew his head from her lap and crawled beneath her chair, his head sticking out one side and his backside out the other. The old dear. She wanted to curl up with him on her bed and fall to sleep.
“If you truly cannot,” Lady Tascott said to her son, “then I cannot see what we are to do.”
Diana offered a small smile. “I am sure real flowers are fine, aunt. We will simply set a new trend.”
“You know nothing, Diana. Nothing of high society.” With a scowl, Lady Tascott returned to her meal. “I could call in a favor or two. I loaned the Duchess of Lovington a huge sum last year. She might ask her husband to—” She sighed. “No. Then they would know.”
“Truly, aunt, real flowers are lovely. And everyone will think Apollo has done such a wonderful job with his glamour that he’s created a scent to go along with it. A miracle!”
Apollo snorted, tried to grin, groaned instead.
His mother gasped. “Flowers that smell? Real flowers in a church? That smacks of”—she leaned over the table and lowered her voice—“witchery. Potions nonsense. Not a single petal will touch your church the day of your wedding, Apollo. Even if there are no flowers at all.” She nodded, decisive.
“What about the outside ones?” Diana asked, training her mouth into a straight line.
Lady Tascott blinked, the gears in her head whirring. “I, well… you might be right. We should have those removed.”
“See what you’ve done now, Di,” Apollo said, finishing off his wine. “She’ll have every damn footman out there, plucking individual blades of grass.”
“If you think it would help us maintain the dignity of our station.” Lady Tascott could look like an owl—eyes wide, hair ruffled like feathers.
“No, no, aunt,” Diana said. “Please, no. I was teasing.” Apollo was right. His mother would pick each rogue flower herself until the dirt sullied her gloves, then she’d oversee the servants, pointing out each undesirable blade of grass that dared touch St. James.
St. James. A tomb. A specter looming in the distance.
“It is not only the flowers,” Lady Tascott wailed. “It’s you, Diana!”
“Me?” Diana looked down at her serviceable gray gown, dog hair scattered across her skirts. “What about me?”
“Your grandfather worked hard your entire life to keep you glamoured, and now look at you!”
It was still odd to see herself without the glamour.
It had been one of the first of grandfather’s illusions to flicker out.
And when she wasn’t alarmed by her changed appearance, she rather…
liked it. Much better to know that people saw her as she really was.
That way, when men looked at her as Lord Knightly had, she knew he looked that way because of her.
Of course, if Apollo were casting the same glamour over her their grandfather had, no one would look at her at all.
And, of course, Lord Knightly had only looked at her like that because of the potion.
“I think… one day… I might like the way I look,” Diana grumbled. When it stopped feeling odd, when it stopped feeling like someone else. Her glamour had always appeared so… small, helpless. But the woman she saw in the mirror now didn’t look meek at all.
“It’s unseemly,” Lady Tascott said. “You have hips.”
“Most mammals do, aunt.”
Apollo snorted, winced. “God, my head.”
“Do take this seriously, Apollo.” Lady Tascott looked ready to melt into the floor. “There’s already rumblings about Diana not having a glamour, about you not wearing the traditional glamour of your title.”
Every Marquess of Fordham since the second one glamoured himself to look like the first and never went into public without the glamour in place.
Apollo massaged both temples. “I’ve told everyone I’m much more handsome than the Fordham glamour.
Everyone understands why I wouldn’t want to look like a short frog from another century.
And I’m not about to marry a scarecrow, which is exactly what Diana’s old glamour made her out to be.
Not only does everyone of my set understand, they think me rather dashing and dangerous.
I’m a trendsetter. Besides, it’s all true.
I have no desire to make myself less attractive with a centuries-old and out-of-date illusion. ”
“But it’s tradition for the Marquess of Fordham to wear it!”
“Fuck tradition, Mother,” Apollo grumbled.
His mother gasped.
Diana closed her book. “Aunt… you do not think we should postpone the wedding? Or call it off entirely?”
Apollo looked up, eyes suddenly clear.
The older lady paused in the middle of slathering jam on a point of toast. “Why would we do that? It was your grandfather’s dying wish. And who knows, it’s possible we’ll be blessed once you wed. It is possible he’s withholding his talent from beyond the grave. Until you comply.”
“It is only that things, with the family, are so very precarious right now,” Diana said. “If anyone discovers Apollo did not receive grandpapa’s—”
“Shh!” Lady Tascott dropped her toast. “Shh! Do not even think those words. Do you wish to lose everything? The power of your cousin’s title? Our home?”
“N-no.”
“That is what will happen,” Lady Tascott hissed. “If the king discovers Apollo’s predicament, he will strip us of everything. Only the transcendent des—”
“Deserve titles, I know.” Diana glanced at her cousin.
He’d gone pale, and he stood slowly, using the table to push upright.
“Pollo, dear, are you unwell?” his mother asked.
“Are the undeserving ever well?” His voice was hard as stone. He marched around the table and toward the doors.
“Do come back!” His mother wrung her hands. “We have a fitting for Diana’s wedding gown today. You promised to accompany us.”
He threw a hand in the air as he exited, his voice trailing. “I’ll meet you there.”
“Perhaps you wish I’ll be run over in traffic before then,” Diana spoke softly into her plate.
But Apollo heard her. He hovered in the doorway, his chin touching his shoulder almost as he looked back at her. “That would be convenient, wouldn’t it?” He left silence in his wake. It was the heavy kind you couldn’t breathe in.