Unnatural Selection Read Online Free PDF Page B

question. He was believed to be a supporter of Cromwell, although there is room for doubt on the matter.”
    “Last year,” Julie said, “I was next door in the Sir John Wildman Room. He was imprisoned for being disloyal to Cromwell and supporting the monarchy.”
    “Times change,” Gideon observed.
    Mr. Moreton’s hand swept the surroundings. “I’m told the duke found his lodgings here quite comfortable.”
    “And I know we will too,” said Julie.
    Pleased, Mr. Moreton brushed a finger along either side of an immaculately trimmed, pencil-thin mustache. “The reception is at six,” he told them. “A number of local dignitaries have been invited.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Moreton,” Gideon said.
    “Dinner will be at seven-thirty, in the dungeon. Madam. Sir.” He closed the door soundlessly behind him.
    “Now there’s a line that hasn’t been heard since The Addams Family ,” Gideon remarked when he’d left. “Dinner in the dungeon. What do we get, gruel?”
    “I doubt it,” Julie said, laughing. “As dungeons go, it’s pretty nice. You’ll see, you’ll be impressed.”
    “I’m already impressed. I never met a real majordomo before.”
    A few minutes later, with their bags open on the beds, she paused in her arranging of the bags’ contents in the armoire. (This was a task that always fell to Julie. The alternative was chaos, bewilderment, and wrinkled clothes.)
    “Gideon?”
    “Mm?” He was wandering absently around the room, testing out the window seat that was cut into the three-foot-thick walls, running his hand over the rough-plastered walls themselves, the age-darkened wood of the eighteenth-century armoire, and the smooth round columns of the bed, and taking in the primitively carved, dark-painted beams that supported the low ceilings. “Those are real adze marks on them,” he mused, his head tipped back. He was able to reach them with his hand and feel the delicate scoring from the individual adze blows. “Probably the original sixteenth-century beams.”
    “Gideon, tonight’s reception-you will be there for that, won’t you?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “And you’ll be nice to everyone?”
    He looked at her, surprised. “When am I not nice to everyone? I was nice to Joey Dillard, wasn’t I? And he was wearing buttons.”
    “Well, I was just thinking… if it’s like last time, Vasily will be making a sort of speech to set the agenda, and he does have some, uh, odd ideas about evolution and things that even I can spot. If he should say something that isn’t exactly accurate, you won’t jump all over him, will you?”
    Gideon sighed. “I can’t win, can I? Last night you were upset because I didn’t want to participate. Today all you want is for me to keep my lip buttoned.”
    “I just want… Oh, come on, you know perfectly well what I mean.”
    “Julie,” he said, as they closed the door to their room behind them, “you can count on me. I will be the very model of decorum and restraint; the perfect spouse.”

THREE
    And at first, he was.
    With the weather as mild as it was, the reception was held outdoors on the castle ramparts. Eighteen feet wide and bordered by sturdy, four-foot-high stone parapets, these earth-filled, star-shaped walls (with cannon ports, some empty, some with rusted seventeenth-century cannons in the points of the stars) surrounded the castle itself, creating a deep, narrow passageway that circled the building on the inside. On the outside, the ramparts overlooked a dry moat, with a wonderful view over Hugh Town harbor, the bright, blue-green sea beyond, and the low, mounded green silhouettes of the nearby islands. Kozlov or a previous owner had sodded the top of the thick walls so that there was now a rich, green lawn underfoot, with a few old picnic tables scattered about, and a well-stocked bar that had been set up for the occasion.
    Vasily Kozlov, dressed in a bright yellow T-shirt, Bermudas, and sandals, was there to greet them-and to exuberantly