Chapter 19: : Chapter 18

Silence echoed the length of the servants’ hall when Kenneth Fraser finished his account of Honoria Talbot’s death. The walls were whitewashed rather than hung with gold silk, the furniture covered in black horsecloth rather than figured damask, the rugs loomed in Yorkshire rather than France and Persia. But the horror and disbelief on the faces of the assembled crowd were the mirror image of that of the guests in the Gold Saloon.

Hopetoun, the butler, looked as though he took it as a personal failure that such a tragedy had occurred in a household of which he had charge. Mrs. Johnstone, the housekeeper, stared at Kenneth as though he had announced that fleas had got into the linens. They were sitting at the front of the room. The cook, the underbutler, the chief housemaid, and the valets and ladies’ maids of the various guests were ranged about them. The more junior members of the staff stood at the back of the room.

Kenneth, Glenister, David, and Charles faced the assembly. Mélanie stood to one side. Her role was to observe reactions. The servants often knew what was going on in the house far better than the guests and family.

The silence was broken by the swish of starched skirts and an abrupt thud. One of the kitchen maids had fainted. Mélanie hurried to the girl’s side, fumbling in the pocket of her gown for her vinaigrette.

‘What is that?’ Kenneth’s voice came from the front of the room, sharp with impatience.

‘It’s all right, Mr. Fraser. One of the girls was overcome by the shock.’ Mélanie waved the vinaigrette beneath the girl’s nose. She was a freckle-faced child of no more than fifteen. Mélanie’s maid, Blanca, knelt beside her and chafed the girl’s wrists.

Hopetoun, in a voice still racked by shock, offered condolences on behalf of the staff. While he was speaking, David’s valet got up from his chair and came over to Mélanie, Blanca, and the girl who had fainted.

‘Please don’t fuss about me, Mrs. Fraser,’ the girl murmured as Mélanie and Blanca helped her to her feet. ‘I’m quite all right.’

‘I’m sure you are, but you’ll do better if you sit down for a bit. What’s your name?’

‘Morag, ma’am.’

‘Morag. Marston is kindly offering you his chair. It would be bad manners not to accept the offer.’

Morag gave a shy smile and sank into the chair. A little color had returned to her cheeks, but she plucked at her cotton skirt with nervous fingers.

A sob from the front of the room cut short Hopetoun’s speech. Mélanie looked up from Morag to see Miss Talbot’s maid, a straight-backed young woman in a stylish poplin dress, dissolve into tears. Kenneth drew an exasperated breath.

Charles knelt before Miss Talbot’s maid with the same gentle smile he had given Evie Mortimer. ‘Fitton, isn’t it?’ He offered her his handkerchief, as her own was thoroughly drenched. ‘What time did you leave Miss Talbot last night?’

Fitton twisted the handkerchief between her fingers. ‘Just before midnight, sir. I helped her into her night things and brushed out her hair. She told me she’d wear the striped lilac sarcenet the next day with her violet spencer and her new half-boots.’

‘She didn’t ring for you again?’

‘No, sir. That—’ Her voice caught with realization, as Miss Mortimer’s had done. ‘That was the last time I saw her.’

‘Do you know if your mistress was in the habit of taking laudanum to help her sleep?’

‘Laudanum?’ The surprise was plain in Fitton’s voice. ‘No. That is, I suppose she might have done without telling me. She’d sometimes complain she’d had a restless night.’

‘How long had you been with Miss Talbot?’

‘Just short of two months, sir.’ Fitton brought the handkerchief up to her face. ‘I couldn’t imagine a kinder mistress.’

Charles asked if anyone had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary during the night. No one offered any information. There was little to be gained from prolonging the scene. Kenneth, Glenister, and David went to make arrangements about Honoria’s burial. Charles and Mélanie climbed the stairs in silence. They had had no time to talk since the scene in the Gold Saloon. Charles opened the door to their bedchamber, steered her inside, pulled the door to, and leaned his shoulders against it. His face was set in firm lines, hard, polished armor buckled over the raw pain of last night. How the wounds beneath the armor were festering was another question. ‘Whoever killed Honoria is a damned good actor,’ he said.

Mélanie sank down at her dressing table. She was suddenly aware that she’d had only three hours sleep the night before. The few sips of coffee she’d swallowed roiled in her stomach, and her limbs ached from the exploration in the secret passage. ‘The servants seem even more bewildered than the guests.’

Charles strode across the room. ‘I seriously doubt she was killed by one of the servants.’

Mélanie looked at him sharply. It was unlike Charles to make a blanket statement based on class. ‘Why?’

‘Because as kind a mistress as Honoria may have been, she was the sort who doesn’t look at the household staff as flesh-and-blood human beings. I can’t imagine her getting close enough to any of them for them to have had a motive.’

Harsh words to use about a woman for whom he had seemed to care so deeply. She continued to look at him.

Charles returned her gaze. ‘I was fond of Honoria. I wasn’t blind to her faults.’

A direct answer which at the same time left a vast array of feelings unexpressed. ‘If her death had something to do with the Elsinore League, Le Faucon or whoever’s behind them could have hired one of the servants.’

Charles’s face tensed with the impulse to defend the Dunmykel staff, then went still. ‘Yes. There is that. Addison and Blanca can make inquiries among the staff better than we can. But my instinct is to focus on the guests.’

The guests. As though they were people he scarcely knew. While his impulse was to defend the staff, he seemed determined to give his friends and family no quarter. Mélanie rubbed the sore muscles at the base of her neck. ‘I wouldn’t exactly say any of them gave themselves away.’

‘No.’ Charles passed his hand over his eyes. ‘I’ll say this for Quen and Val and Evie. None of them lack courage.’

‘I’m glad they saw Miss Talbot,’ Mélanie said, thinking of the deaths of her own parents and sister. ‘It makes it easier in the long run.’

‘I hope so. I confess I also had an ulterior motive.’

‘The hope that one of them would give themselves away?’

‘Or not, as the case may be.’ He perched on the edge of the writing desk. ‘Val was sick. Evie could scarcely bear to look at Honoria, though she forced herself to in the end. Quen stared at her for a good minute. What do you make of that?’

‘Possibly no more than that Lord Quentin is the sort who likes to confront his demons head-on. He’s always struck me as tougher than Lord Valentine, underneath the debauchery. Of course, he also made that comment about Miss Talbot being a heavy sleeper.’

‘So he did. One could argue that if he had inappropriate knowledge of her sleeping habits, he wouldn’t have said anything of the sort. Or that he wasn’t thinking clearly enough to make such a judgment and it was a revealing slip of the tongue.’

Charles ran a finger over the pristine surface of a stack of writing paper. ‘One of the men here may have been the father of her baby and almost certainly bedded her last night. Val. Quen. Glenister.’ His mouth tightened for a moment. ‘Father. David and Simon, though I’ve never known either of them to so much as look at a woman. And me, of course. You know, I expect I could have slipped out of our bedroom without waking you.’

Mélanie fingered a fold of her skirt. She’d exchanged last night’s shirt and breeches for a cambric morning dress, scalloped and threaded through with peach silk ribbon. The ensemble of a decorous wife. ‘That depends. Your talent for moving quietly against my knack for waking at the smallest disturbance.’ She walked over to him and smoothed his disordered hair. ‘Dearest, you know I don’t Like to make assumptions. But I’d stake my life on it that you didn’t murder Honoria Talbot.’

‘Bless you for that.’ He leaned in and brushed his lips across her forehead. ‘ ‘Render me worthy of this noble wife.’ ‘

‘Charles, if it ever comes to the point where I have to stab myself in the leg to gain your confidence—’

‘Don’t worry, if I ever consider assassinating a would-be emperor, I’ll be sure to confide in you.’

He probably would, too. He just wouldn’t turn to her for solace when the plan collapsed round his ears.

She hitched herself up on the edge of the writing desk beside him. ‘If Glenister’s the one who got her pregnant, it would explain why she couldn’t marry the baby’s father.’

Charles nodded, his gaze on the stack of writing paper.

Mélanie thought of the rooms they had found off the secret passage and the sort of games in which Glenister and Kenneth Fraser had indulged. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘You’ve known him all your life.’

‘Would Glenister have seduced his niece and ward? Christ, Mel, Edgar and Gisèle and I saw little enough of our parents growing up, let alone their friends.’ He picked up a crystal paperweight and turned it over in his hand, watching the light bounce off the faceted glass. ‘When I was about six I overheard one of the housemaids tell another that she’d stumbled into the room occupied by the lady thought to be Father’s mistress only to find her in bed with Glenister. It didn’t cause any noticeable friction between Father and Glenister. The Glenister House set treat seduction as the ultimate game.’

‘ ‘She’s beautiful and therefore to be wooed,’ ‘ Mélanie quoted. ‘ ‘She is a woman, therefore to be won.’ ‘

‘Quite.’ Charles returned the paperweight to the desk. ‘It’s possible Glenister seduced Honoria. Or took her by force.’ His fingers whitened round the paperweight. ‘It’s also possible Father bedded her before they were betrothed and then again last night.’

‘We’re back to where we were last night. If your father was her lover, why didn’t they make love in his room? If she and your father made love in the secret rooms we found, how did she end up in your father’s bed?’

He drew a breath. ‘If she was pregnant by another man and went to Father’s room so she could pass the baby off as his—Father can’t abide anyone trying to make a fool of him.’

‘That would be a crime of passion,’ Mélanie said. ‘It doesn’t explain the laudanum.’

‘She might have taken the laudanum herself.’

‘Perhaps if she simply meant to retire for the night, but I’ve never heard of anyone taking a sleeping draught before embarking on a seduction. Besides, if your father killed Miss Talbot, I’d think he’d prefer to have a Dogberry like Gilbert McKenzie investigate rather than you.’

‘Unless he’s playing a very clever game. My father is one of the cleverest gamesters I know.’ Charles stared at the green and gold leather of the desktop between them. ‘I just wish I knew what the devil the game is that he’s playing now.’

‘Lady Frances was right. Having you investigate is the only option.’

He swung his gaze to her. ‘Mel, I’m almost thirty years old. From my earliest memories of banging my nursery spoon and riding a hobbyhorse to the moment we took our candles and went up to bed last night, Father’s attitude toward me has swung between complete boredom and out-and-out contempt. Yet now he’s willing—eager, even—to have me investigate his fiancee’s murder, with all the bloody questioning and digging into the past that that’s bound to involve. Which makes me wonder—’

‘If he’s using you, thinking he can manipulate you to get the result he wants.’

‘Father and Glenister, and perhaps even David, think they can control the investigation through me, for all my fine words to the contrary. Tidy away the messy bits. Avoid a prosecution, if that proves inconvenient. None of them want a family member in the Old Bailey.’

She looked at him in the slanting sunlight. The bones of his face stood out, harsh and bleak, robbed of the humor and tenderness that usually lit his features. ‘Darling. Last night, you told your father that if Miss Talbot hadn’t been dead when he came into the room, he should tell you now. What would you have done if he’d said yes?’

‘I don’t know,’ Charles said after a moment. ‘I’m not sure I want to know.’ He shifted his position, swinging his booted foot against the leg of the writing desk. ‘You haven’t asked me yet.’

‘Haven’t asked you what?’

‘Why I didn’t tell you Father had asked me to break the entail.’

Pain lanced her chest, but she refused to admit it. ‘I confess I was curious, but I assumed you had your reasons.’

‘I think I was trying to sort out how I felt about it myself.’ He pushed himself to his feet, walked to the window embrasure, and stood looking out at the sea. ‘It’s Father’s house. He has a perfect right to leave it to whomever he wants.’

Mélanie glanced at the age-darkened oak of the floorboards, the bits of fifteenth-century stone that still showed round the window, the plaster crest on the mantel. ‘But you love Dunmykel,’ she said.

‘Unfortunately, yes. I probably shouldn’t.’

‘You can’t control what you love. Or whom.’

‘No. But it’s hardly my first loss. Or my greatest.’ He turned from the window. ‘And God knows we have more important things to worry about.’

She got to her feet and walked toward him, feeling as though she was picking her way through a wood set with mantraps. ‘Charles, I’m so sorry. I don’t think I said that properly last night. I know she—was important to you.’ The words sounded inadequate, like a bare-bones synopsis of a complex love story.

She put her hand on his arm. He flinched as though she had touched a half-healed wound.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I—thank you.’ He moved to the door. ‘The next step is to look at Honoria’s room.’

Addison was standing guard outside Honoria Talbot’s bedchamber, shoulders straight, coat without a wrinkle, pale blond hair combed smooth. ‘No one’s even tried to approach,’ he reported.

‘Thank you,’ Charles said. ‘We’ve had a talk with the staff. I’ll interview some of them privately later, but you might start doing some informal questioning of your own. They’re more likely to talk to you than to me or Mélanie. In particular, we want to know if any of them is a likely candidate to have been hired or blackmailed by the Elsinore League.’

Addison nodded. Charles had told him about the league before they left London. ‘Right, sir.’

‘One of the kitchen maids fainted at the news,’ Mélanie said. ‘A girl named Morag, with fair hair and freckles. I suspect it was more than shock. Ask Blanca to speak to her. She was there when the girl fainted.’

‘Thank you, Mrs. Fraser,’ Addison said in an impersonal voice that belied his far from impersonal interest in Mélanie’s maid. ‘I’ll see to it.’

Charles turned the knob of the door to Miss Talbot’s room and then looked back at Addison. ‘You might also investigate if it seems at all likely that one of the women on the staff spent any part of last night with my father.’

Addison returned Charles’s gaze for a moment, face at once neutral and sympathetic. ‘I’ll keep that in mind, sir.’

Charles opened the door of Miss Talbot’s bedchamber. The curtains were still drawn, leaving the room in shadow. A faint scent of violet and jasmine lingered in the air, along with the chalky smell of face powder and the tang of lavender.

The bedchamber was scrupulously tidy. Fitton must have put things to rights before Miss Talbot sent her to bed. A dressing gown of ice-blue silk and Brussels lace lay across the foot of the bed in neat folds. The satin-banded coverlet was smooth, save for the corner where it was turned back to reveal the lace-edged sheet. Mélanie lifted the bedclothes carefully and pulled them to the foot of the bed. Unlike the bed in the chamber in the secret passage, this undersheet was pristine. ‘It looks as though Miss Talbot didn’t even lie down in her own bed last night,’ she said. ‘And she quite definitely wasn’t intimate with a man here.’

Charles dipped his fingers in the water in the ewer on the satinwood nightstand and brought them to his lips. ‘No laudanum. I would think it would have had to be in something stronger to disguise the taste in any case.’

Mélanie went to the table on the opposite side of the bed. A book lay beside the crystal Agrand lamp. Byron, Don Juan. Hardly surprising reading matter for a young woman. She opened the drawer in the table. A stack of handkerchiefs and something else that rattled. She reached into the back of the drawer and retrieved a small, three-quarters-empty glass bottle filled with a clear liquid. She unscrewed the top and sniffed for confirmation. ‘Laudanum. Most definitely. I wouldn’t exactly say it was hidden, though it wasn’t in plain view.’

‘So perhaps she did take too much laudanum on her own. Or perhaps she took a small amount on her own and the murderer drugged her with more.’

‘Or perhaps she didn’t take it at all and the murderer planted this in her room.’

Charles’s gaze swept the room. The pink-flowered basin and ewer on the nightstand, the silk-draped dressing table, the painted beech wardrobe and writing desk. ‘You look at the dressing table. I’ll take the wardrobe and writing desk.’

The dressing table was a stark contrast to the tidiness of the rest of the room. A dressing case fitted with gilded mirrors spilled open. A thin film of face powder dusted the tabletop, a perfume atomizer lay on its side, a thin ivory-handled brush was smeared with lip rouge. Mélanie held the silver-backed hairbrush up to the light of the window. Several blonde hairs were caught in the bristles. ‘She seems to have tended to her appearance before she left the room. I remember she was wearing lip rouge when she—when I saw the body.’

Charles nodded without looking up. He was lifting papers from Miss Talbot’s writing case. ‘Nothing so far but letters to girlhood friends and a bill from her dressmaker.’

Mélanie opened each of the silver boxes in the dressing case, but they contained no more than the ribbons and hairpins and jewelry that might be expected. She tugged open the dressing table drawer. Another stack of embroidered handkerchiefs, gloves of net and kid and silk in white, ecru, beige, lavender, lemon yellow. She lifted out the handkerchiefs and found nothing beneath them, then did the same with the gloves. A folded sheet of paper fluttered to the ground.

She caught the paper and spread it open. Pressed paper, cream-colored and heavy, covered in a strong black scrawl. She held it to the light of the window.

My darling—

It’s no good, I’m bloody awful at pretending I don’t care. I love you—surely you know that? If I haven’t said it, blame it on pride, not lack of feeling. Shall I swear it by the blessed moon? I won’t presume to swear by myself—I could scarcely hit upon a more profane object. Yet in this, believe me, love, I speak true. I can’t believe you—of all women—would let fear of a society you laugh at stand in the way of our happiness—

Mélanie turned the paper over. Nothing was written on the back. If there was a second page, it wasn’t in the drawer. ‘Charles. I’ve found something. A love letter.’ He crossed to her side and stared down at the paper. ‘Do you recognize the hand?’ Mélanie asked. He nodded. ‘It’s Quen’s.’