Chapter 1

October, the harbinger of winter, had fallen upon England. A cold, blustery day swept across London, nd the many houses that bordered the city itself. Lady Serafina Trent stared out the window, and the gloom of the day dampened her spirit. The enormous oaks seemed to be spectres raising skeletal limbs toward the sky. She was a striking woman of twenty-seven with strawberry blonde hair and violet eyes. Her face was squarish, and her mouth had a sensuous softness. She was not a woman who paid attention to her appearance, her beauty natural elegant.

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

Serafina’s eyes lingered on the grounds of Trentwood, the ancestral estate of the Trents, but now the grass was a leprous grey, but the trees had dropped their leaves, and the death of the summer took away the beauty of the world. She suddenly turned and, with a quick movement, walked away from the window and toward the large table where her son, David, sat in the chair made especially for him. The blaze in the fireplace sent out its cheerful popping and cracking, and myriads of fiery sparks flew upward through the  chimney in a magic dance.

The heat radiated throughout the room as Serafina took a seat bedside he 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 a study, nd it was lined with the artifacts of the anatomy trade. A grinning wired together, stood at attention across the room. She and her father had built it 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 more than life, Serafina.”

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

“Mum, I can’t do these fractions!”

Serafina smiled and put her arm around David. A the age of seven he had some of her looks-- her fair hair complemented by the dark blue eyes that had just a touch of aquamarine. He was small, but there was a hint of tall frame to come.

“ Of course you can, David.”

“no I can’t,” David complained, and as he tuned t her, she admired the smooth planes of his face, thinking what a handsome young man he would be as he grew older.

She saw also that instead of figures on the sheet of paper before him he had drawn pictures of strange animals and birds, ha 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 learned 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 numbers and hard facts, which troubled Serafina.

“David, if you want to subtract a fraction from a whole number, you simply turn the one of the whole numbers o a fraction. You change the number five to four, nd that gives you a whole number. Now you want to subtract one-fourth from that. How many fourths are there in a whole number?

“I dunno, Mum.”

Serafina shook her head slowly and insisted, “ You must learn fractions, David.”

“I don’t like them.”

David suddenly gave her a odd, secretive look that she knew well. “ what are you thinking

,Son?”

“May I show you something I like?”

Serafina sighed. “Yes, I suppose you may.”

David jumped up and ran to the desk. He opened a drawer and took something out. It was, Serafina saw, a book, and his eyes were alight with excitement when he showed it to her. “ Look, it’s a book bout King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table.”

Serafina took the book and opened it. On the first page she read, “To my friend David” and it was signed “ Dylan Tremayne.”

“Dylan gave you this book?”

“Yes. Ain’t it fine? It was a present, and he gave me his picture too.” David reached  over and pulled the image from between the pages of the book. “Look at it, Mum. It looks just like him, don’t it now?”

Serafina stared at the miniature painting of Dylan Tremayne, and as always , she  was truck by the good looks of the man who had came to plat a vital role in her life. She studied the glossy black hair with the lock over the forehead as usual, the steady wide-spaced and deep set eyes, and then the wedge-shaped face, the wide mouth, the mobile features. With those beautiful eyes, he’s almost too handsome to be a man.

The thought toughed her, and she remembered how only recently it had been Tremayne who had helped her to free her brother, Clive, from a charge of murder. She remembered how at first she had resented Tremayne for everything that he was, all which ran against logic, scientific, and reasonable, Dylan was fanciful , filled with imagination, and a fervent Christian, believing adamantly that miracles were not a thing of the past. She  was also disturbed by the fact that although she had given up o  romance long ago, she had felt the stirrings o attraction for tis actor who was so different from everything that she believed.

She had tried to think of some way to curtail Dylan’s influence on David, for she felt it was unhealthy --- but this was very difficult. David as wild about Dylan, who spent time with him, and Serafina was well aware that h son’s affection for Tremayne was part of his latent desire for a father.

Firmly Serafina said, “ David, this book isn’t true. It’s made up, a storybook. It’s not like a dictionary where words mean certain things. Its not like a book of mathematics where two plus two is always four. It isn’t a history book when it gives the date of a famous person’s birth--- those are facts.

David listened but was restless. Finally he interrupted by saying, “ but, Mum, Dylan says these stories are about men who were brave and who fought for the truth. That’s not bad, is it?”

“No, that’s not bad, but they’re not real men. If you must read stories about brave men, you need to read history.”

“Dylan says there was a King Arthur once.”

“well, Dylan doesn’t know any such thing. King Arthur and his knights are simply fairy tales and you’d do well to put your mind an things that are real rather than things that are imaginary. But even as Serafina spoke, she saw the hurt in David’s eyes, and her own heart smoldered. “we’ll talk about his later,” she said quickly. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes!”

“You’re always hungry.” Serafina laughed and hugged him.

“Dylan says he’s going to come and see me today. Is it aright?”

“Yes, I suppose so. Come along now. Let’s go see what Cook has made for us.”

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