Free Mischief by Amanda Quick Page A

stays in this house a moment longer, you will no doubt bind him to you so tightly with your damned tears and apron strings that he will never become a man.”
    “You cannot send him away. He is all I have. I will not allow it.”
    “You have no choice, madam,” Thomas had retorted. “I have already made the arrangements. His tutor has been dismissed. With any luck Eton and Oxford will undo the damage you have tried to inflict.”
    School had not been altogether unpleasant. Having spent the first ten years of his life attempting to please his father, Matthias continued the futile effort. He had thrown himself into his studies.
    Thomas had paid little attention to the boy’s scholarly successes, but something unusual did occur during those years. Unlike the majority of his companions, Matthias had actually become enthralled by the classical texts that formed the core of the curriculum. As he grew older they continued to draw him with an inexplicable power. He sensed the secrets hidden deep within them.
    Long, melancholic letters from Elizabeth had kept him informed of her endless complaints about his father’s selfish, tight-fisted ways, the house parties she hadplanned, and her illnesses. Matthias dreaded going home between terms, but he did so because something inside him told him that it was his duty. As the years passed, he saw enough of his mother to realize that between house parties she had begun to treat her depressed spirits with increasing quantities of wine and laudanum.
    The letters from his father had been few and far between. They were concerned primarily with the high cost of Matthias’s school expenses and angry diatribes about the relentless financial demands Elizabeth made through the solicitor.
    Elizabeth drowned in an estate pond the winter of Matthias’s fourteenth year. The servants said that she had had a great deal of wine at dinner that night and several glasses of brandy afterward. She had told her staff that she wished to take an evening walk alone.
    Her death had been declared an accident, but Matthias sometimes wondered if his mother had committed suicide. Either way, he was doomed to bear a measure of guilt for the rest of his life because he had not been there to save her. His mother would have wanted it that way, he thought wryly.
    He could still see his father standing on the other side of Elizabeth’s grave. It was a memorable occasion for many reasons, not the least of which was that Matthias had made his first serious promise to himself that day. He had looked into his father’s face and silently vowed that he would never again bother to try to please him. A coldness had settled somewhere inside him that day. It had never disappeared.
    Thomas had been blithely unaware of Matthias’s mood. He had taken him aside immediately after the funeral and jubilantly announced his intention to wed again. Thomas’s relief at being free of Elizabeth and his happy anticipation of his forthcoming nuptials had stood in sharp contrast to the colors of mourning that surrounded them.
    “Her name is Charlotte Poole, Matthias. She is lovelyand gracious and pure. A noble paragon of womanhood. She will bring me a happiness I have never known.”
    “How nice for you, sir.”
    Matthias had turned on his heel and walked away from his mother’s grave. He had known then that her ghost would follow him.
    The letter from Thomas announcing the birth of a daughter, Patricia, had come a year after the earl’s marriage to Charlotte. Matthias had carefully read the joyful, glowing words his father had penned describing his “deep and abiding affection” for his infant daughter and her mother. When he was finished, Matthias had consigned the birth announcement to the hearth. As he watched the letter burn, he thought he saw his mother’s ghost in the flames. Hers proved to be the first of many.
    The streak of silver appeared in Matthias’s hair almost overnight. Thomas began to send increasingly earnest letters