the litter, the one who'd have the most trouble getting on, but despite his

weakness of character, Andrew finally seemed to have made a start, and now...

Royce Blood was completely ignorant of the fact that Ian was a closet drag

queen, and Andrew had always been very careful not to let his father find out

about all his debauched excesses. Michael alone had never hidden anything

from

him, not even his growing drinking problem; consequently Michael was the

biggest

disappointment to him. Royce simply couldn't understand what on earth had

possessed him to become a policeman, of all things. Every young boy thinks of

being a policeman or a fireman at one time or another, but Michael apparently

had never outgrown it. What sort of a career was being a policeman? What

could

one accomplish? You always saw people at their worst, day in and day out, and

no

matter how many of them you arrested, you couldn't even make a dent in the

evils

of society. All it did was make you callous and bitter. Small wonder that

policemen had such a high divorce rate. Who could live like that? It was like

pissing into the wind.

So, rather than be alone with his grief and his bottle, something Royce

considered the ultimate sign of weakness, he had allowed Jeremy Hastings to

talk

him into this affair at Carfax Castle, a medieval keep just outside of London

that had been rebuilt during the reign of Henry VIII and then restored again

during the nineteenth century by some wealthy peer, to be sold

eventually—along

with the peerage—to an Australian multimillionaire. Since the collapse it had

stood vacant and decaying until the young Lord Carfax had bought it and

performed extensive renovations that had to have been ruinously expensive.

The castle stood upon a hill overlooking a gently sloping valley. The keep

itself had thick stone walls, with four round, crenelated corner turrets

complete with embrasures and cruciform loopholes. All very authentic, if not

original architecture. The original outer wall had long since crumbled into

ruin, but Carfax had reconstructed it after a fashion. He had the wall rebuilt

a

bit closer to the keep and a great deal lower than the original one must have

been. An average jumper with a decent rider could have cleared it. Carfax had

incorporated miniature sally ports and a cosmetic wall walk that ran through

the

towers placed along the wall at all four corners. The bailey, or courtyard,

was

a beautifully landscaped garden with slate walkways curving through it and a

number of small fountains. On seeing it for the first time, Royce thought

wryly

that the only thing that Castle Carfax lacked was a scaled-down barbican in

the

narrow moat. Carfax apparently had his main residence in London, somewhere in

Mayfair. The castle was a lovely and fabulously expensive toy.

Upon arriving, Royce discovered that the evening was to be devoted to a

"neo-medieval festival," complete with costumes supplied to all the guests.

It

turned out that Jeremy had known about it all along and hadn't mentioned it

because he had been afraid that Royce would find it frivolous and refuse to

come. In point of fact, he would have, but since he had come down with

Jeremy,