Chapter 11: : Chapter 10

Charles stared down at the deciphered list, a dozen new questions tumbling in his head.

‘It’s odd that Dunmykel is the only British place on the list,’ his wife said. ‘But considering we suspected the Elsinore League were connected to Britain and perhaps to Miss Talbot’s father—’

‘It’s not Dunmykel. It’s the name next to it.’ Giles McGann. Another piece of the past he thought he’d left behind, which seemed to be closing about him in an ever tighter web.

His wife was watching him with the gaze that often saw far more than he wanted. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You must know everyone at Dunmykel. He’s someone you grew up with?’

‘One of the tenant farmers on the estate. He taught Edgar and me to fish.’ For a moment, Charles could hear Giles McGann’s cheerful voice in his ear. Steady, lad, don’t pull on the line. His throat tightened.

Jessica wriggled in his arms and pressed a damp kiss against his shoulder. Charles smoothed her hair. ‘I suspect this is some sort of network rather than the membership of the Elsinore League itself,’ he said, returning his attention to the list. ‘If Francisco was acting as a courier, perhaps he’d been to visit these people.’

‘Do you think this is what Castlereagh knew? He didn’t want you involved because he knows you care for Giles McGann?’

‘Giles McGann is a scholarly man of liberal principles, fond of Rousseau, who supported the French Revolution until it turned into a bloodbath and who admired Napoleon Bonaparte until he made himself emperor. So, as a secret Bonapartist agent—it’s difficult for me to imagine.’ Charles shifted Jessica against his shoulder. ‘And yet—’ The words stuck in his throat like a betrayal, but he could not but deny the logic of the connection. ‘This could explain the link between the Elsinore League and Honoria Talbot.’

‘Mr. McGann knows her?’

Charles began to circle the room, jiggling Jessica in his arms, though he couldn’t have said which of them he was trying to soothe. ‘Honoria often visited Dunmykel as a child, along with Quen and Val and Evie. McGann was kind to all of us. But he had a soft spot for Honoria.’

‘Did he know Cyril Talbot well?’

‘Cyril visited Dunmykel, but he was the younger brother of Father’s friend. McGann was a tenant. In Father’s set, the two groups rarely mixed. But if McGann and Cyril Talbot were both connected to the Elsinore League, the visits would have given them a chance to communicate.’

‘And if Francisco had been to Dunmykel on business for the Elsinore League and met Mr. McGann, Mr. McGann could be the person he worked with who confessed to a fear for Honoria Talbot. Fear she’d learn the truth about her father?’

‘Or fear for her safety. Other members of the league could have held either one over McGann’s head.’ Charles looked down at his daughter, nestled against him with boneless trust. He remembered the day Mélanie had told him, over the gleaming linen of the breakfast table in their lodgings in Paris, that she wanted to have another child. He stroked Jessica’s soft, sparse hair, fingers trembling with the same wonder and terror he’d felt that morning in Paris. He had no doubt Mélanie loved Jessica as fiercely as she did Colin, but even now he wasn’t sure what had motivated her to want another child. A need to prove that the bond between them was more than convenience? A sense that she owed it to him, for all he’d insisted from the first that she didn’t? Or an uncomplicated longing that was hard to imagine in their very complicated lives?

‘I’ll talk to Honoria,’ he said. ‘See what if anything she knows about what’s going on. I think I can do mat without giving the game away. Unless I’ve completely lost my edge.’

He summoned up a smile and looked into his wife’s eyes. Her gaze had the impenetrable darkness of deep, still water. He wondered what she suspected about his relationship to Honoria. Probably something more obvious than the truth and yet not nearly as bad. He wondered how much she’d mind if she knew the whole story. They had the sort of marriage where they never asked those questions.

The door burst open without even a preliminary rap to reveal Gisèle, her straw hat askew and her cheeks flushed with color. ‘Have you heard? It’s too awful and I won’t go.’ She slammed the door shut and leaned against the white-painted panels. ‘He can’t make me.’

‘Who?’ Charles studied his sister. In the three months he’d been back in Britain, this was the first time she’d come to the house unannounced. ‘Go where?’

‘Father.’ Gisèle tugged off her hat and tossed it onto the nearest table, stalked over to a striped chintz armchair, and flung herself into it. ‘He wants to have a house party at Dunmykel to celebrate this ridiculous betrothal of his. Honoria’s family and our family in the wilds of Perthshire for a fortnight. Can you imagine anything more ghastly?’

‘Yes, actually, if I put my mind to it,’ Charles said. Such as the events of the last couple of days.

‘It’s going to be hideous. You don’t know what you’re in for, Mélanie.’ Gisèle cast a brief glance of acknowledgment at Charles’s wife. ‘You’ve never seen us all gathered together full force.’

Mélanie took Jessica from Charles’s arms. ‘I own it doesn’t sound the pleasantest way to spend the summer, but I shouldn’t think you’d find it wholly distasteful. I presume Lord Valentine will be there.’

Gisèle started. ‘Oh. Yes.’ She smoothed her fingers over her crumpled skirt. ‘Of course.’

Charles studied his little sister. For a moment, he’d swear Gisèle had forgotten that the man she’d been outrageously flirting with all season even existed.

‘Have you quarreled?’ Charles asked. Though surely a quarrel would have generated more passion.

Gisèle pleated the patterned white fabric of her skirt. ‘No, nothing like that. But you know what it will be like—Honoria looking superior and criticizing me. And sitting down to dinner with the same people every night—’

‘Disagreeable, but hardly enough to justify this sort of panic.’

‘I’m not panicked, I’m—’ Gisèle glanced round the room, looking everywhere but into the eyes of the people present. If her hair had been a shade paler and her face a fraction thinner, she might have been their mother. She gave the same impression of volatile emotions welling up beneath the flushed eggshell porcelain of her skin, ready to break free in a myriad of unexpected directions. ‘Aunt Frances says we have to go for the sake of the family.’

‘Typical of Aunt Frances,’ Charles said. ‘She always picks the most inconvenient moments to turn conventional.’

She looked up at him the way she had when she was a little girl who’d thought her elder brother could fix anything. ‘I can’t go to Dunmykel, Charles. Don’t ask me to explain why. Just help me. Please.’

Charles dropped down beside her chair. ‘Do you want me to talk to Father?’

‘You can’t. He’s already left.’

‘What?’ Charles was hardly in his father’s confidence, but Kenneth had said nothing about leaving town when he summoned Charles to Berkeley Square the previous day. ‘For Dunmykel?’

‘This morning. Lord Glenister and Honoria left as well. Evie and Quen and Val are following in a couple of days.’

Odder and odder. ‘How long had this been planned?’

‘It hadn’t been planned at all, as far as I know. If you ask me, something happened to send them all haring off to Scotland at a moment’s notice, but I can’t think what. The rest of us are to join them as soon as possible. It’s not like a normal house party at all, where one has time to plan and make arrangements properly and choose the right clothes.’ Gisèle’s breath caught with panic, belying the frippery nature of her words. ‘It’s bad enough Father’s making a fool of himself by marrying a girl young enough to be our sister without dragging us all into it as well.’

Charles laid a hand over her own. ‘I’ll talk to Aunt Frances, Gelly. Perhaps you can stay with a friend.’

Gisèle smiled at him, a real, direct smile, the first she had given him since he’d returned to Britain. ‘Thank you, Charles.’

Charles nodded, not daring himself to push further against the boundaries his sister had set. Gisèle disengaged her hand from his own and sprang to her feet. ‘Colin will never forgive me if I don’t look in on him. Where is he? In the schoolroom? No, it’s all right, I know the way.’ She touched her fingers to Jessica’s cheek and whisked herself from the room.

Charles and Mélanie stared at each other.

‘It sounds as though your father and Lord Glenister wanted Miss Talbot out of the way,’ Mélanie said. ‘Could they suspect she’s in danger as well?’

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s coincidence. Though I’m disinclined to believe in coincidence at the moment.’

‘So we all go to Dunmykel?’ Mélanie said.

Charles looked across the nursery at his wife, a slender figure in a rose-striped dress, the strong, fragile bones of her face lit by the light from the window, their daughter nestled against her. She didn’t deserve to have his problems inflicted on her. And he flinched at the thought of her seeing the sordidness of his family and his past. ‘Mel—’

‘Charles, don’t you dare turn Hotspur on me. The children and I are coming with you.’

Mélanie wasn’t the sort of woman who could be packed off to safety. Even assuming he had the least idea where safety from their unseen enemies might be found. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘At least if we’re all in one place we can look out for each other.’

In Scotland he could talk to Giles McGann. And he could talk to Honoria, as he had meant to do before he learned she had left London. The more they discovered, the more imperative that talk became.

Honoria’s image flickered in his mind, blue eyes wide with trust and entreaty; lips parted; strands of gold hair spilling over her pale shoulders, her fragile collarbone, her firm, naked young breasts.

He blinked the image away and met his wife’s unreadable gaze.

‘When do we leave?’ Mélanie asked.

Dunmykel, Perthshire Ten days later The rain slapped against the granite and ran down the fifteenth-century leaded glass of the mullioned windows like rivulets of tears. The air was thick with damp and sea salt and a musty scent that was redolent of regret. The stone-floored corridor was cold, even on a July evening. Scotland was always cold, a numbing cold that soaked through layers of superfine and silk and linen to permeate flesh and bone, like a memory that could not be expunged.

Frederick Talbot, fifth Marquis of Glenister, stopped midway down the vaulted corridor and drew a breath. His chest felt as though it had been pummeled black and blue. His throat was tight, his mouth dry. Even when he closed his eyes on the guttering flame of his candle and the aged oak wainscoting of the walls, he could not hold the images at bay. But that wasn’t surprising. They never really left him, even in sleep. He opened his eyes, strode to the end of the corridor, and turned the handle of the study door without knocking.

The air held the pungent scent of good tobacco and better whisky. The room was in shadow, lit only by the yellow glow of a lacquered Agrand lamp on the green baize table by the fireplace. ‘If you’re trying to find your way to a lady’s boudoir,’ Kenneth said, ‘you drank even more at dinner than I realized.’

He was sprawled in one of the high-backed tapestry chairs at the table, gaze fixed on the cards spread before him.

Glenister set down his candle without sparing Kenneth a direct glance. Glass after glass of burgundy and port swirled in his brain, but he crossed to the table that held the decanters and poured himself a whisky. ‘I couldn’t sleep. I never can north of Edinburgh.’

The whiffle of a card being turned over sounded behind him. ‘What an admission for a Scotsman,’ Kenneth said.

‘A Scotsman with an English name and a Scottish title and probably more English blood in his veins than Scots.’ Glenister tossed down the whisky in one draught. It burned his throat, but didn’t drive out the fear. Or the memories. ‘It was a mistake to come here.’ He refilled his glass and turned to stare at his old friend. In the lamplight, Kenneth’s face was as calm and composed as if it had been carved of marble. ‘If you had to have a house party to celebrate this ridiculous betrothal of yours, we should have had it in Richmond. Or Surrey. Or even Argyllshire. Anywhere but here.’

Kenneth’s gaze drifted over the delicate Chinese porcelain on the mantel, the elegant lines of the bronze nude in the corner, the Renaissance oil above the fireplace (Cleopatra reclining upon blue velvet, the work of some Old Master that Glenister knew he should recognize). ‘That would hardly have served the purpose of the visit.’

Glenister crossed to the window. Through a crack between the claret-velvet drapes he could see the dark outline of a pine tree, its branches whipped by the wind. The walls were over a foot thick here, in the oldest part of the house. God knew what acts of betrayal and brutality had leached into the granite in three hundred years. Merely the events of the past quarter century were enough to turn Glenister’s blood to ice and his legs to water. ‘The truth is here. We can’t hide from it. It’s soaked into the damned walls. It lingers beneath the stairs. It’s lurking behind the tapestries and the wainscoting and those bloody pictures you’re so fond of collecting.’

Kenneth’s chair creaked as though he were leaning back. ‘I’ve never known you to wax so poetic. Perhaps you paid more heed to literature lectures at Oxford than I realized.’

‘Shut up.’ Glenister didn’t feel like talking about Oxford.

‘If there’s any truth buried here, it’s a truth only you and I could recognize.’

Glenister spun round. ‘It’s a truth that could destroy both of us. You as much as me. Don’t you forget it.’

Kenneth turned a fresh card over and stared at it as though the suit meant something to him. ‘Men in our position make their own truths, Glenister. We’ve been doing so for the past three decades. I don’t see why now should be any different.’

‘Damn it, Kenneth, do you realize what’s at stake if it all begins to unravel? We’re not boys playing games anymore.’

‘Of course not.’ Kenneth aligned the cards spread on the baize before him so the tops were exactly even. The red and the black shimmered in the lamplight. ‘They never were games.’

The angle of Kenneth’s silvered brown hair and the drape of his paisley silk dressing gown held unquestioned arrogance. His fingers were steady as he turned over another card. The king of clubs. Glenister wondered if his oldest friend had any idea how much he hated him. ‘What the hell do you want with her?’ he demanded.

‘My dear Glenister.’ Kenneth looked up from the cards. ‘If you can’t appreciate your niece’s charms you’re blinder than I realized.’

Glenister’s fingers tightened round his glass. He almost fancied he could hear the crystal crack. ‘You’ve had your pick of women for years. Why marry again now?’

The lamplight bounced off Kenneth’s pewter-hard eyes. ‘Is it so hard to believe I’ve fallen in love?’

‘You?’ Glenister gave a coarse laugh that held echoes of brothels and boudoirs, grottoes and glades, window embrasures and closed carriages. ‘Yes.’

Kenneth returned his gaze to the cards. ‘If you disapprove, you should have withheld your consent to the match.’

Glenister flinched, conscious of a guilt nothing could assuage. ‘You know damn well I couldn’t have.’

‘Of course you could.’ Kenneth reached for his own whisky glass and took a sip. ‘If you were prepared to take the consequences.’

Glenister’s free hand curled into a fist. If he’d had one more drink in him, he’d have smashed his fist into Kenneth’s face. ‘You bloody bastard.’

Kenneth gave him one of those damned mocking looks that had cut him to ribbons for as long as he could remember. ‘You didn’t come looking for me tonight to reminisce, Frederick. Why the devil did you come here?’

‘Because it’s past time the evidence was destroyed.’ Glenister hurled himself at the mahogany mass of the desk in two unsteady steps.

With the speed of a greyhound, Kenneth was on his feet. His fingers closed round Glenister’s arm with the bite of steel. ‘I wouldn’t touch anything if I were you, Glenister. Besides, what you’re looking for isn’t here.’

Glenister tried to jerk away. Kenneth’s fingers tightened until Glenister would have sworn he could feel the imprint on his bones. ‘Honoria’s going to be living in this house with you. If you think I’ll risk her of all people finding out—’

‘My dear Glenister, if you’ll recall we’ve gone to great lengths in the past weeks to ensure she never does. Do you imagine I’m the sort of man who can’t keep secrets from his wife?’

Glenister gripped Kenneth by the lapels of his dressing gown. ‘Give me your word that Honoria will never learn the truth.’

‘I can’t imagine why she would.’

Glenister tightened his grip. ‘Your word. That you’ll never tell her. Swear it.’

Kenneth detached Glenister’s hands from his dressing gown, throwing Glenister back against the desk. ‘I’d be a fool to tell her. Don’t worry. I have what I want. So do you, after a fashion. Go to bed, Frederick: Or if you still can’t sleep, go inflict yourself on one of the housemaids.’

Glenister snatched up his glass and swallowed the last of his whisky. It left a raw void in his chest. He lashed out with the only weapon to hand. ‘What about your son? He’s the sort who asks questions. He’s too damn clever by half and he’s still far too fond of Honoria.’

Kenneth’s face went still for a moment, not with feeling but with the conscious absence of it. He returned to his chair, seated himself, and spread his hands over the cards on the table. ‘He’ll be here himself in a few days. You can leave Charles to me, Glenister. Though all things considered, it really is a pity he didn’t manage to get himself killed in the Peninsula.’