Chapter 27: : Chapter 26

Even at a quarter to midnight, a faint glow lingered in the sky. It seemed as though it must be too early for their rendezvous with Tommy. Mélanie kept pace beside Charles as they made their way across the grounds to the chapel. She could not accustom herself to the long Highland summer days.

Charles was silent and purposeful beside her. She matched her stride to his. She was wearing her breeches and shirt again, with a wool coat buttoned close to her throat for warmth and her hair bundled up into a cap. It was a relief to be moving again, to have a clear purpose in mind. Their council with Simon and David had gone round in circles, possibility after possibility discussed and debated, none of them provable, none explaining the whole story.

And yet for all the talk, a great deal remained unvoiced. Such as how Charles felt about the possibility that Lord Quentin was his brother.

The colorless light flattened out the dips and rises in the ground and blurred the line between shape and shadow. The rumble of the sea sounded to the right, an ever-present pull. A salt tang drifted on the air. The rustling of birds and the stir of wind warned of the birch coppice to the left. They were back in the world of darkness and shadows, the world in which she and Charles and Tommy Belmont and Francisco Soro had lived for so long. A world into which Honoria Talbot had somehow stumbled.

Here, as in the London streets the night they’d gone to meet Francisco, her senses were keyed to danger. Even so, it was a moment before she caught the break in the pattern. She seized Charles’s arm. He went still, and she knew he’d heard it as well. Footsteps off to the left, faint but distinct.

‘I’ll go,’ she whispered.

He caught her hand in a hard grip.

‘Don’t be silly, Charles. Whatever Tommy knows, he’s much more likely to confide in you than in me. We can’t afford to be late and we can’t afford not to find out who else is traipsing about the grounds at midnight.’

‘It might—’

‘Be dangerous.’ She disengaged her hand from his own. ‘Hardly a novelty. I have a pistol. I’ll meet you at the chapel. If you aren’t there, I’ll go back to the house. Just take care you don’t murder Tommy. Or let him murder you.’

He pulled her to him, pressed his lips to her hair, and released her.

She slipped through the ghostly white of the birch trees, following the telltale creaks of her quarry. The echo of footfalls on the fallen twigs and leaves told her she was gaining ground. As she emerged from the coppice she caught a flash of white. A skirt. The person she was following was a woman. Or dressed like one.

She dodged to the side, round two close-set trees. A dry branch cracked beneath her foot.

Her quarry spun round. He or she had sharp ears.

‘Who’s there?’ said a voice that belonged unmistakably to Gisèle Fraser.

The chapel was a gray smudge, the holly branches creating a darker tracery against its granite walls, the oak door and the stained-glass window above only faint blurs. Charles climbed the steps, by instinct and memory as much as sight, found the age-worn iron handle, and pushed open the door. The interior was cloaked in darkness. He paused, letting his senses adjust, letting the smell of damp and dust and the lingering spice of scented candles wash over him.

A hand shot out of the darkness, grabbed him, and flung him against the wall. His head slammed into the granite. His senses swam for a moment.

‘Is it true?’ The voice was a harsh rasp in his ear. Wild eyes glittered at him in the darkness.

Charles struggled to draw a breath past the hand that was squeezing the life out of his throat.

‘Is it?’

He caught a note of familiarity beneath the raw desperation in the voice. ‘Tommy—for God’s sake.’

The hold on his throat slackened. ‘Tell me.’

Blessed air rushed into his lungs. ‘If you mean was Honoria killed last night, yes, she was.’

A gasp echoed off the yew rafters. Tommy dropped his hand from Charles’s throat as though the confirmation had drained him of the will to fight. ‘In God’s name, who?’

‘That’s what I’m endeavoring to learn.’ Charles dug a flint out of his pocket. He could see enough now to make out the candles, stuck in tall iron holders at the end of each pew. He lit the two nearest. In the flare of light, Tommy’s face was gray and drawn, marked with the ravages of a day spent alternating between fear and despair and probably downing a bottle or so of whisky.

Tommy turned his head away from the light. ‘I was trying to learn what had become of McGann. The villagers were talking about it. About Honoria. I couldn’t believe—who the devil—’

‘Were you in the house last night?’

‘What house? Dunmykel? No, of course not. What the hell would I have been—’

‘You didn’t use the secret passage?’

‘What secret passage? Charles, in God’s name, what happened to her?’

Charles stared into Tommy’s blue eyes. He’d never thought they could contain such heat. ‘When did you last see her?’

‘In Lisbon.’ Tommy ran a hand over his hair. A little of the habitual sangfroid returned to his features. ‘You know that.’

‘Not yesterday?’

Tommy gathered his forces for a denial, then gave it up, like a swordsman letting his weapon clatter to the ground. ‘Christ, Charles, are you sure one of your grandmothers wasn’t a witch?’

‘In my family, I’m not sure of anything. How the hell did Honoria know you were here?’

Tommy tugged at his carelessly tied cravat. ‘She didn’t. I sent word to her.’

‘Why?’

‘I wanted to know what the devil she was doing throwing herself away on your father.’

Charles held his gaze in the candlelight. ‘You were lovers in Lisbon.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Tommy, this is no time for chivalry.’

‘I’m not—’

‘You don’t have to worry about protecting Honoria’s reputation. Not with me.’

‘She—’

‘She’s dead. I want to find out who did it. I think you do, too.’

Tommy stared at the small circle of candlelight on the flagstone floor. ‘I’d have had to be blind not to notice she was beautiful, but I never expected—to own the truth, I thought she was in love with you.’

‘You’re an observant man, Belmont, but you’re not infallible.’

‘No?’ Tommy’s gaze moved to Charles’s face, black and hard as onyx. ‘Do you remember that picnic we all went on when Honoria and Val and David were in Lisbon with Lord Carfax? We visited some ruined castle or other. I thought she was trying to make you jealous. I still think she was trying to make you jealous.’

The memory flashed in Charles’s mind. Three days after the night he’d found Honoria in his bedchamber. Blankets spread on green sloping ground, hampers of cheese and bread and cold chicken and red wine. Honoria leaning close to Tommy, laughing up at him from beneath the brim of a pale straw bonnet with apricot ribbons. He’d done his best to ignore her behavior because that seemed the most prudent course of action. Just as he’d done his best to ignore a flash of jealousy he’d had no right to feel.

‘You went back to Lisbon early for some meeting or other,’ Tommy said. ‘There was a rainstorm and Honoria and I got separated from the others and took refuge in an abandoned farm house. We’d drunk a fair amount of wine at the picnic and I opened another bottle to warm us up and—’

‘One thing led to another,’ Charles said.

‘Go ahead, say it. I was a cad, a blackguard, call it what you will.’ Tommy strode down the darkened length of the chapel. ‘I stay away from virgins as a rule. Far too much risk of being caught and not very sporting to take advantage of them when they don’t know the rules of the game. Though as it happens—’ He swallowed whatever he’d been about to say.

‘Honoria wasn’t a virgin.’

‘How—no, I think I’d rather not know how the hell you knew that.’

‘Not in the way you’d be pardoned for suspecting.’

‘I asked her to marry me.’ Tommy turned round and looked at Charles through the shadows. ‘The shock on your face speaks wonders for your opinion of my character, Fraser. What, I wasn’t supposed to worry about the consequences of what we’d done because she’d done it with someone else first? I don’t know when the devil she lost her virginity or to whom, but that didn’t change the fact that if word of our tryst got out she’d be ruined. Say what you will about me, I don’t turn tail and run from the consequences of my actions.’

‘No, you don’t.’ Charles regarded his former colleague for a moment. ‘Honoria turned you down?’

‘She was refreshingly honest. She said she didn’t have any more desire to get married at that point than I did, and there was no reason anyone should know what had transpired between us.’ Tommy scraped a hand through his hair. ‘I’ve always wondered if I believed her protestations too readily because I didn’t want to get married myself. Of course, I think I’d have pressed her harder if I’d thought she really cared for me. If I hadn’t suspected the whole thing had been a ploy to make you jealous.’

‘If Honoria wanted to make me jealous, it was out of pique, not love.’

‘Are you sure you know the difference? Jesus, are you sure there is a difference? Pique, love—in the end it all comes down to the same thing. Honoria wanted you. And you wanted her.’

‘I didn’t—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, man, admit that much. You wouldn’t be human if you hadn’t.’

The pull of a pair of blue eyes. The gleam of pale skin. The grip of desire that for a moment threatened to overwhelm reason. ‘Wanting isn’t the same as—’

‘Loving? Christ, you haven’t gone and turned into a romantic, have you?’ Tommy dropped down on one of the pews. ‘You think what you feel when you reach for Mélanie in the dark is somehow different, better, purer? That you’ve never buried yourself in her to blot out the horrors you’ve seen or to work off your frustration at the latest ambassadorial directive? Don’t tell me there aren’t moments when any warm body would do and she just happens to be the one nearest at hand.’

Images of the previous night flashed before Charles’s eyes. ‘If you value your life, Belmont, you’ll leave my wife out of this.’

‘That’s the problem with you, Fraser, always trying to make things mean some bloody thing or other. It’s the war all over again.’

‘The war?’ Charles was still trying to recover from the bone-deep cut of Tommy’s words about Honoria and Mélanie.

‘You were always looking for truth and justice in the war, always trying to do what was right. You questioned everything to the point of not being sure which bloody side you were on. If you could have just faced the fact that our only goal was to make sure our side won and that it wasn’t going to be pretty doing so, you could have spared yourself and the rest of us a lot of tiresome, tormented brooding.’ Tommy shook his head. ‘At least you used to have the guts to admit you didn’t believe in love.’

‘I never said I didn’t believe in it. I said—’

‘That you didn’t think you were capable of it, whatever that means, and that even if you were, you doubted it would last. Which was a fancy Charles Fraser way of admitting that love’s no more than a thing of airy nothings. You were honest in those days. Now you’re trying to cloak desire in fancy dress instead of accepting it for what it is. What it will always be, regardless of marriage lines and droning clergymen and gold rings. What I felt for Honoria—what you felt for Honoria but were too high-minded to act on—is the same as what you feel for your precious Mélanie. At heart, it’s the same animal urge that drives all of us.’

‘The same animal urge that made you want to stop Honoria from marrying my father?’

Tommy rubbed his hand over his eyes. ‘Fraser, I wouldn’t recognize love if it slapped me in the face and challenged me to pistols at forty paces. But I never forgot Honoria. Jesus, they said she was strangled—’

‘She was drugged with laudanum. She wouldn’t have felt anything. Just what were you planning when you saw Honoria yesterday?’

‘I wanted to make sure she was happy. I couldn’t imagine the girl I knew spending her life with Kenneth Fraser. I sent her a message—yes, I know Castlereagh would skin me alive if he knew—and asked her to meet me in the churchyard.’

‘What did she say?’

‘That she knew her own mind. She seemed—’ Tommy paused. Charles couldn’t see his face in the shadows, but he could hear the frown in his voice. ‘She seemed harder than I remembered.’

‘It’s been six years. I expect we’re all harder.’

‘She didn’t want to talk about her betrothal at all. She said—’ Tommy glanced about. ‘Speaking of marriage, where’s Mélanie?’

‘Following someone. What did Honoria want yesterday?’

‘To know what I was doing here.’ A note of surprise reverberated in Tommy’s voice. ‘She guessed Castlereagh had sent me.’

‘Did she guess why?’

‘Not exactly. She wanted to know what it had to do with your father. And Glenister.’

‘And you told her—’

‘Charles, I told you yesterday—’

‘I know what you told me yesterday. Does what brought you here have anything to do with my father and Glenister?’

Tommy drew a breath. ‘It might. They may have known Le Faucon de Maulévrier. Years ago. Before the Revolution. That’s all Castlereagh told me. That, and that he didn’t want you to know.’

‘He obviously thought my filial scruples were stronger than they are. What did you tell Honoria?’

‘I said it was possible your father and her uncle had been involved in something dangerous. That I couldn’t tell her more now, but if she had the least doubt she shouldn’t marry Kenneth Fraser.’

‘And she said?’

Tommy gripped the back of the pew. ‘She asked what her father had to do with it.’

‘What does Cyril Talbot have to do with it?’

‘Nothing, as far I know. Castlereagh never mentioned him. He died years ago, didn’t he?’

‘In 1797. What else did Honoria say to you?’

‘We ended up talking at cross-purposes. She was trying to get me to explain something I didn’t understand and I was trying to get her to explain why she was marrying Kenneth Fraser. My God, is that why she was killed?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Charles watched a rivulet of white wax hiss into the iron candlestick. ‘What happened then?’

‘She left.’

‘Just like that?’

‘All right, I made a fool of myself and tried to kiss her. Did kiss her. God knows why. To see if there was anything left? Because I thought it was my last chance?’

‘Did she kiss you back?’

‘Ah—yes, actually.’ Tommy coughed. ‘I asked her to marry me. I meant it. More than I did six years ago, though God knows what sort of a mull I’d have made of it if she’d actually said yes. Our work doesn’t exactly fit us for marriage, as you used to say in the old days—’ He looked up at Charles. ‘I suppose four and a half years of wedlock has changed your mind about that as well.’

Charles wiped the dripping wax from the candle. It stung his finger.

‘Shoe’s on the other foot, is it?’ Tommy said. ‘Can’t say I’m surprised. Mélanie’s a remarkable woman, but it can’t be easy—’

‘We were talking about Honoria.’

‘So we were. Say what you will, if she’d taken me, perhaps she wouldn’t—Charles, so help me, did your father—’

‘He seems to have an alibi. Was that the last time you saw Honoria?’

‘Of course. Christ, are you asking me—’

‘The same question I’ve asked of just about everyone.’

The pew scraped against the flagstones as Tommy pushed himself to his feet. ‘You think I broke into the house, broke into your father’s room, and strangled Honoria?’

‘How do you know she was in my father’s room?’

‘Gossip travels fast. Charles, after Honoria left me yesterday, I asked some questions round the village, I went back to my camp, and I went to sleep. You have my word on it. I know that means absolutely nothing to you—’

‘Not nothing.’ Charles glanced at the stained-glass window over the door, the blues and reds lit faintly by candlelight. What kind of religion venerated a virginal mother? ‘Just not a guarantee.’

Mélanie hesitated in the shadows of the birch coppice. If she stayed still, Gisèle might decide the sound had been a deer or a badger. On the other hand, she might decide to return to the house instead of continuing on whatever errand she was in the midst of. Or she might already be on her way back to the house, in which case Mélanie would learn nothing by following her. While if she spoke, she might be able to persuade her young sister-in-law to talk.

Mélanie stepped out of the shadows. ‘Gisèle? Don’t be alarmed. I’m sorry to have startled you.’

‘What—Mélanie?’

Mélanie crossed the open ground. ‘It’s a little late for an evening stroll.’

‘I couldn’t sleep. I often walk late at night in the summer. I like the Highland evenings.’ Gisèle’s gaze swept over her. ‘What are you doing out? Good God, Mélanie, what are you doing in those clothes?’

‘I think skulking’s the term. Breeches are handier than a frock for clambering over rocks. I suggest trying it if you do this sort of thing often.’

‘I don’t. I mean, I often walk, but I don’t—’

‘Do whatever else it is you’re doing?’ Mélanie studied Charles’s sister in the meager light. Gisèle’s pearl earrings and ringleted hair might seem out of place, but beneath the girlish softness was a strength Mélanie hadn’t noticed before. ‘Look, Gisèle, I realize you don’t know me very well, but I think you might be surprised at how helpful I can be.’

‘You don’t—’

‘Understand?’ An image of speaking to her daughter in twenty years’ time flashed into Mélanie’s mind. ‘Try me.’

Gisèle’s gaze darted over Mélanie’s face.

‘I know I’m not Charles,’ Mélanie said.

‘No, you aren’t Charles.’ Gisèle gave a brief, hard laugh. ‘It’s not really my secret to tell. It could put people in danger—’

Mélanie caught the sound of rustling in the underbrush. She seized Gisèle’s wrist a half-second before three men rushed at them out of the trees.

‘Run,’ Mélanie hissed, pushing her sister-in-law away from her.

‘But—’

‘Charles is in the chapel. Go.’

Gisèle stumbled off just as rough hands caught Mélanie from behind.