“It is my father’s legal name. Edward Merivale. I thought of taking on McAllister, but I wanted to honour my father by keeping the name. I’ve always associated Merivale more with my father than withhim.”
“What happened then?”
“Father died.” Philip swallowed. “A carriage accident. He’d gotten under the wheel of a barouche. I was seven.”
“I’m so sorry,” Arabella whispered.
“It happened some days before school started. Father had wanted to send me to a grammar school in London. I could already read and write and already showed a marked tendency for mathematics. After the accident, Mother insisted I continue to go to school. I had to walk there on my own, it wasn’t too far away. On the third day, a carriage stopped next to me. Before I could say a word, a man jumped out and dragged me in.”
Arabella gasped. “He kidnapped you?”
A bitter line formed on Philip’s mouth. “Yes. My father’s father — I refuse to call him grandfather — kidnapped me. I was next in line, wasn’t I?”
“He’s a right old bawbag.” Fergus nodded.
“There was a sinister-looking old man in black skulking in one corner of the carriage and a giant who tied me up, because I struggled, kicked, fought, and bit like a wild animal. In the end he drugged me with opium to make me compliant.” His face darkened.
Arabella clasped her hands over her mouth. Naturally, the duke hadn’t told her that particular version.
“I must’ve been knocked out for several days. My guess is that whenever I showed signs of waking, they fed me the stuff to knock me out again. When I finally awoke, I found myself in a tremendous bed in a dark room. The old man sitting by the bed claimed he was my grandfather. He wanted to raise me into a proper duke, he said. I needed to learn manners. Get a proper education. He saw I was terrified of the dark and loud noises and said I needed to toughen up. My mother had raised me into a milk sop — he called her a ‘rat in the gutter’. They tore me out of bed in the middle of the night, left me alone in the park, shivering, in my nightgown. I thought, what kind of a strange game is that? Then a sudden shout from the right: ‘Watch out, a wolf is coming!’ and shots.” Philip shuddered. “There wasn’t any wolf, of course. And the shots, I didn’t know where they were coming from. I was just a little boy. Maybe they were just pistol shots, but to me, they sounded like cannonballs hurtling over my head. The randomness of it, in the darkness, not knowing where the next shot was coming from, it was terrifying. I curled up on the ground and cried. Morley wasn’t impressed.”
Arabella burned with indignation. “How terrible! What on earth was he thinking?”
“That was his way of toughening me up. A duke is never afraid of anything. Only God and the king are above him. Behave in that manner.” His face darkened. “Well. I was afraid of lots of things. The dark. Sudden shots, thunder. I was most afraid of never seeing my mother again. I tried to escape. Again and again. It never worked. He had bars attached to my window. I had someone watching me day and night. I refused to eat.” He shrugged. “He could be stubborn but so could I. They tried to force food into me. I spat it out again. His wife, the duchess, was a faded old lady who seemed to sympathise, but other than making me sit straight at tea and patting my hand now and then, she did not move a finger to help me. She was terrified of him, too.”
His wife. The one he said who’d died so conveniently.
“With a perverted kind of logic, one may understand where the man is coming from. He sees in me the continuation of a legacy, his heritage. Of course, he wanted me raised in his image. Especially after his own sons failed him so. But what I can’t forgive is the way he treated my mother. She came to plead for me. She begged him to let me go, to see whether they could reach a compromise. He refused. Then he went and killed her.”
Arabella gasped. “How?”
“He threatened to have the hounds set on her if she didn’t leave. I know this because a footman, who witnessed it, told me afterwards. She fled, stumbled, and fell down the stairs. She broke her neck. I lost my father, my mother, and my unborn sibling within a span of half a year. She was eight months with child.”
“I am so, so sorry.” A tear glided down Arabella’s cheek.
Fergus patted her hand. “As terrible as it sounds, this story has a happy end.”
Philip looked at him with affection. “Aye. Eventually this old man here came and rescued me. Thank God.”
“How did you do it?”
Fergus cracked his knuckles, one by one. “After that miserable scumbag killed my Marian, I planned a cloak and dagger operation. I’m a blacksmith, after all. Do ye think a lock and some iron bars keep me from gettin’ into a room?” He laughed a rusty laugh. “One or two servants who could no longer stand to see how they treated my Pip also helped. We got him out before the old man turned in his creaky bed. I left a dagger next to him on his pillow. As a reminder that I could’ve used it on him but didn’t. I took Pip to the far north. The duke’s powers didn’t reach that far. We were hiding for the first few years. After several years, I decided it was nonsense to always be on the run, always be hiding. Face your enemy, I say. So, I went down to him and came in the same way I rescued Pip: through the window. Stood over his bed as he slept. I could’ve killed him. As revenge for my daughter. But I didn’t. He tried to intimidate me, but I saw the fear in his eyes. Made him swear on his life that he would leave us alone.” He smiled at Philip. “It worked. Pip grew up to be the prime fellow you see here.” He patted his arm. “Got an excellent education. When it became clear school was too easy for him, I engaged only the best tutors for him. Learned to speak English as cleanly as any of the ‘nobs in London. I made sure of that. But Pip kenned more than his tutor in mathematics. Got himself a scholarship at the University of Edinburgh. Which he breezed through in record time. And like his father, got himself married when he was still a whelp.”
“Hm. How old were you when you married, Granda?” Philip asked with a grin.
“Seventeen. Don’t change the topic.”
“Jenny and I were married when we were both twenty-two.”
His grandfather sniffed. “Pups.”
“Then Katy came and Robin, and then I enlisted. To save the country from the French beast.”
“You ran away, my boy, you ran away.”
A pink colour crawled up Philip’s neck. “I did not. That has nothing to do with the topic at hand.”
“I dinna blame ye. But back to the topic.” He turned to Arabella. “The buffoon of a duke never realised that this boy here is extraordinarily intelligent. Unthinkable what he would’ve done to him if I hadn’t gotten him out. He’d have squashed his spirit. My boy here is a brilliant inventor.” Fergus frowned. “The odd thing is that none of his inventions are gettin’ through the patents’ office. They send a check but never the patent. Odd.”
