Chapter 35: : Chapter 34

Colin cuddled up against Mélanie on the nursery window seat and lifted his dark gaze to her face. ‘Did Grandpapa die the same way Noria did?’

‘Not exactly, darling. We’re not sure why either of them died.’

‘But one must have something to do with the other, mustn’t it?’ Chloe, curled up at Mélanie’s other side, twisted the end of her hair ribbon round her finger. ‘I mean two mur—two people dying in two days can’t be a coincidence.’

‘No, it’s probably not coincidence,’ Mélanie said. ‘But we’re not sure what it means.’

Colin wrinkled his nose. ‘I’m sorry Grandpapa’s dead. But he didn’t like me very much.’

Mélanie swallowed. That, as Tommy would say, was a poser. ‘Colin—’

‘He didn’t.’ Colin sounded more matter-of-fact than upset. ‘He always looked at me like I’d been naughty, even when I hadn’t done anything.’

Chloe shifted her position on the window seat, rustling the chintz cushions. ‘I don’t think he liked anyone much. Except sometimes I used to think he liked Mama, and she didn’t know it.’

Mélanie cast a swift, involuntary glance at Lady Frances’s daughter. Chloe looked back at her with an unblinking blue gaze.

Colin tugged at Mélanie’s sleeve. ‘Did Daddy cry? Grandpapa was his father. I’d cry if Daddy died.’

Mélanie’s throat closed. ‘Daddy’s had a lot to worry about. He hasn’t—’

‘Had time to cry,’ Charles said from the doorway.

Colin grinned, started to get up and run to his father, and then sat still. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry your lather’s dead.’

Charles crossed the flowered nursery carpet and knelt before the window seat. ‘I’m sorry, too. But I hadn’t seen much of my father in a long time. Not all fathers and sons get on as well as you and I do. As I hope we always will.’

Mélanie felt Colin relax against her. As usual, he seemed to find the truth far more reassuring than sugar-coated lies.

‘Mama looked like she’d been crying when she was here this morning,’ Chloe said.

Charles touched his young cousin’s arm. ‘She’d known my father for a long time. Longer than any of us.’

Chloe nodded, again unblinking.

The children asked fewer questions than they had when Mélanie had told them of Honoria’s death. Even Chloe seemed a bit worried about the possible answers if she probed too deep. Miss Newland, returned from the funeral with a composed face but eyes rather brighter than usual, proposed to take the children for a walk.

‘Let’s go back to the study,’ Charles said when they had seen Miss Newland and the children off. ‘I want to look at the ledger again.’

He didn’t meet her gaze as they walked down the stairs. Gray shadows of fatigue drew at his face. Last night she’d thought that the only way he could go on was to suppress everything. Now she wondered how far he was from the inevitable collapse.

‘In a lot of ways,’ she said as they rounded the corner on the half-landing, ‘Colin is a remarkably insightful child.’

‘Of course, he’s your son.’ Charles paused, his hand on the newel post. ‘Oh.’

‘He’s quite right,’ Mélanie said, her gaze on the grisaille painting of Terpsichore. ‘You haven’t.’

‘Cried? Why should I?’ Charles released the newel post and continued on down the stairs. ‘Losing Honoria meant something. Losing Father—how can losing someone you never knew mean anything?’

She gathered up the folds of her gown and hurried after him. ‘Because now you’ve lost the chance to ever get to know him.’

‘There wouldn’t have been a hope in hell of that if Father had lived to be a hundred. I faced that fact years ago.’ He cast a swift glance at her, as closed as an infantry square. ‘It’s all right, Mel. You don’t need to keep worrying about me.’

‘I thought if you didn’t want to talk to me, you might want to talk to David. Or Andrew?’

He started across the hall, his footfalls hard and erratic on the marble tile. ‘Why should I talk to anyone?’

‘Because at some point this is all going to hit you, and we really can’t afford to have you collapse. Not until we’ve caught the person or persons who are going about murdering people.’

‘I’m not going to collapse.’

‘Darling, you can’t know that. When my father died it was days before it really hit me what had happened—’

Charles spun round, his hand on the knob of the study door. ‘When your father died you were nineteen, you lived with him and you loved him and you knew you were loved by him. I’m nearly thirty, I haven’t lived under Kenneth Fraser’s roof for ten years, and even then we rarely inhabited the same house.’ He held the study door open for her. ‘And there’s no sense pretending I loved him any more than he loved me.’

Mélanie moved past him into the room. ‘Point taken. Except that last.’

He crossed to the desk and took the key to the dispatch box from his pocket. ‘Not very filial of me, but true nonetheless.’

‘Charles, you can’t—’

‘You weren’t here. You didn’t watch me growing up. You know a lot, but you can’t know what it was like. You can’t know what Kenneth Fraser meant to me, when I don’t even know myself.’

‘That’s precisely why—’

He dropped the key on the desk. It clattered against the penknife. ‘What the hell is this, Mel? Now that we’re living in Britain you suddenly think you have to go all wifely and fuss over me?’

‘I’ve been fussing over you for years. You always complain about it.’

‘You fuss over me when I have a bullet wound or a knife cut or a blow to the head. You don’t fuss over—’

‘Your soul?’

He gave a sharp laugh. ‘I wouldn’t worry about my soul. It has a nice protective layer of scar tissue.’

‘Damn it, Charles, you don’t need to prove you can handle everything on your own.’

‘So says the woman who deliberately allowed herself to be beaten black and blue a few hours ago.’

‘That’s last night’s argument, darling.’

‘Which is still relevant this morning. Speaking of injuries—’ He grasped hold of her chin with a gentle touch that belied his harsh voice and turned her face to the light from the window. ‘You should put some ice on that bruise.’

She tugged away. ‘I’m fine.’

His gaze moved over her. ‘It’s always worse the morning after a beating like that.’

She folded her arms, ignoring a twinge of protest in her ribs, ‘I told you, I’m fine.’

‘I’m supposed to take your word for that?’ His gaze turned gun-metal hard. She could feel the pressure against her bruised throat and jaw. ‘If you’re so keen on soul-baring confidences, perhaps we should try it the next time you have one of your nightmares.’

The air round them was suddenly filled with mines and mantraps and unsheathed knives. She swallowed. ‘A palpable hit. Though lately I’m not the only one who’s been having nightmares.’

‘No.’ He picked up the key again but went still as his gaze moved to the box. ‘Someone’s tampered with the lock.’

Mélanie leaned forward and saw what he’d seen—scratches round the brass of the lock, the sort made by attempts to pry a lock open without the correct instruments. ‘You’re sure those weren’t there last night?’

‘I made special note of it.’ Charles unlocked the box and pushed back the lid. ‘And I made special note of how I left the contents. The notes were perpendicular to the lid, not parallel.’

They lifted out the contents and went through them item by item. Nothing was missing, but some of the papers showed smudges that hadn’t been there the previous night.

‘Anyone could have done it with a hairpin and enough time,’ Charles said. ‘The question is, why search now.’

‘Because with your father dead, you’d be going through the papers. Someone feared what you’d discover.’

‘Something more than the notes and the ledger, or the lock-picker would have taken them. Something Father had concealed away. Something Honoria might have stumbled across looking for information about her own father?’

They regarded each other across the dispatch box, the tension of a few minutes before washed under the safer waters of the investigation. ‘We went through her room meticulously,’ Mélanie said.

‘And I’d swear we searched every corner of the study last night,’ Charles said. ‘I’ll have Addison go through Father’s room.’ He flipped open the ledger. ‘Glenister claims not to know anything about his father’s payments to Kenneth. He suggested Kenneth was negotiating with one or more of old Lord Glenister’s former mistresses who were proving difficult.’

‘Do you believe him?’

‘I think he’s hiding something. Exactly what he’s hiding and how much of the truth he’s told us are open to debate.’

Mélanie looked down at the dates in the ledger. ‘Did Glenister think your father might have been arranging for the care of old Lord Glenister’s by-blows?’

‘He said he didn’t know of any bastard children of his father’s, but it was possible.’

She flipped to the last entry in the ledger and stared at the yellowed paper and black ink. ‘When was Andrew born?’

‘August. The fifteenth.’

‘Of what year?’

‘Seventeen eighty-five. Oh, Christ.’

‘The last payment to your father is less than three months after Andrew’s birth.’

Charles frowned at the entries. ‘According to Andrew, Father went on paying for his upbringing for years. There’s no record of later payments in the ledger.’

‘Perhaps your father stopped recording the payments. Or perhaps he had an understanding with old Lord Glenister that he’d take the money for Andrew out of the twenty-five thousand pounds.’

Charles grimaced, the way he did when he was cursing himself for being a fool. ‘I wondered how the devil Father found the money to pay for his bastard before he came into his legacy.’

Mélanie smoothed her finger over a scratch in the leather of the desktop. ‘Lord Valentine said Miss Talbot was keen to play their game with Andrew at first. Then the night of the murder she told him Andrew wouldn’t work. If old Lord Glenister was Andrew’s father and Miss Talbot learned the truth of Andrew’s birth, she’d have known Andrew was her uncle.’

‘And she drew the line at incest?’

‘Most people draw the line somewhere.’

Charles leaned against the desk and turned sideways to look at her. ‘If old Lord Glenister was Andrew’s father, there’s no particular reason anyone should have wanted to keep it secret. Unless, of course, the identity of his mother is a matter of secrecy.’

‘It almost has to be to explain why Andrew was smuggled away.’

‘A married lady. Or an unmarried girl of good family. Potentially scandalous. But enough to still cause a scandal thirty-odd years later? So great a scandal someone would kill to conceal the truth?’

‘Was old Lord Glenister’s wife alive in 1785?’

‘No, she died giving birth to Georgiana, Evie’s mother.’

‘So at the time Andrew was conceived, Glenister senior would have been a widower.’

Charles’s gaze sharpened as if he were focusing on a rifle target. ‘A secret marriage?’

‘Do you think it’s possible?’

‘Anything’s possible. But I’m not sure where it gets us. Andrew being old Lord Glenister’s legitimate son wouldn’t threaten the current Lord Glenister’s inheritance. He’d still be the firstborn.’

Mélanie pushed a thick wave of hair back from her forehead. She’d managed to pin it up in a chignon, but it was stiff with sweat and salt from last night’s adventures. She couldn’t remember when she’d last had a bath. ‘What if old Lord Glenister isn’t the Talbot who fathered Andrew?’

‘You mean what if old Lord Glenister hired Father to deal with his son’s mistress?’ Charles paused a moment, the idea taking shape. ‘Or his son’s wife?’

‘Suppose Glenister, the current Lord Glenister, had made a secret marriage when he was young. Perhaps a ring and marriage lines were the price of one of his seductions. A shopkeeper’s daughter from Oxford. A tenant on one of the family estates. He managed to keep the marriage secret, but eventually she became pregnant and he told his father. Was old Lord Glenister particularly particular about the family bloodlines?’

‘So much so that he’d pay the lady to go away and foster the child out rather than have a shopkeeper’s or tenant’s grandchild as the future Marquis of Glenister? Possibly. He cut off Evie’s mother’s inheritance when she eloped.’

‘If the lady was still living when Glenister married Lord Quentin and Lord Valentine’s mother, the prior marriage would bastardize them.’

‘Which is ironic considering Quen apparently is a bastard in any case.’ Charles drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘If Honoria discovered her uncle had made a prior marriage—’

‘Theoretically it gives Lord Quentin a motive to get rid of her. But—’

‘I can’t see Quen killing her to protect his inheritance. Or Glenister killing his beloved niece to protect the inheritance of the son who isn’t his anyway. Besides, what would Honoria have had to gain from revealing the information?’ Charles frowned at the leaded glass panes of the windows. ‘Oh, good God.’

‘What?’

‘Honoria kept asking Tommy about her father. But suppose she wasn’t thinking about revolutionaries being smuggled out of France. Suppose Cyril Talbot didn’t have anything to do with Le Faucon, or at least Honoria didn’t know anything about that part of his life. Suppose her father’s intrigues with the Elsinore League involved an unsuitable woman whom he—’

‘Married.’ Mélanie stared at her husband as the idea locked into place in both their minds. ‘If Cyril Talbot made a secret marriage and fathered Andrew, then Andrew would be Miss Talbot’s brother. Which would certainly explain her deciding she couldn’t seduce him.’

‘And the truth could bastardize Honoria and take away her inheritance. Which gives Honoria a motive to kill someone else, but I can’t see how it could motivate anyone to kill her.’

Mélanie sighed and leaned against the desk beside him. ‘It’s all speculation in any case. That any of the Talbots fathered Andrew.’

‘Andrew has Glenister’s coloring. More than he resembles Father.’ Charles ran his hand through his hair. ‘I wish to the devil we could prove it, even if it has nothing to do with the murder. It might convince Andrew to stop being so pigheadedly noble where Gisèle is concerned.’

‘Have you thought about having Lady Frances talk to him about Gisèle’s parentage?’

‘All she could do is reiterate that Gisèle almost certainly isn’t Kenneth Fraser’s daughter. Andrew would just say what he said to me—that we can never know the truth for an absolute certainty. And that even if we could be sure, he doesn’t deserve to be happy, that he’s bound to make Gisèle miserable because she’s nineteen and can’t know her own mind and he didn’t go to the right schools. ‘The hind that would be mated by the lion.’ Why the devil can’t he see that what they have is—’

‘Special,’ Mélanie said. Charles’s gaze flickered to her face. ‘I saw them last night,’ she added.

He turned, his back to the desk, and folded his arms across his chest. ‘The way they looked at each other. Like—’

‘Romeo and Juliet.’

He cast a sidelong glance at her, then looked away. ‘I want Gelly to be happy.’ He fiddled with a silver paperweight on the desk. ‘I want her to have—’

‘What you’ll never have yourself.’ Amazingly, her voice was without bitterness. She couldn’t blame him. Neither of them had ever promised the other anything more.

He turned a surprised gaze to her. ‘I want her to have what you deserved to have.’ He glanced down at his fingers, curled round the paperweight. ‘When I saw the way Andrew was looking at Gelly, all I could think—I’m sorry I never looked at you that way.’

Her throat closed. ‘I can’t see you climbing a balcony, darling. Unless it was to steal documents from the room beyond.’

‘You deserve someone who could—you deserve a Romeo.’

She touched his hand where it lay on the desk between them. ‘I’m not much of a Juliet myself, Charles. At least not for a long time.’ And she didn’t really want a Romeo. Even if Charles was able to make such protestations, she was scarcely the sort to believe them. And yet—she had engraved a quote from Romeo and Juliet on the watch she’d given him their second Christmas together.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.

She hadn’t realized how true the quote was until she visited Scotland with Charles three years ago and walked along the beach at Dunmykel Bay with him and Colin. It had hit her then, how indissoluble her tie to him had become. Even then she’d scarcely let herself use the words. And she’d thought she could be content with what he had to offer to balance his own side of the equation.

Now she looked at her husband’s familiar face and saw the selfish, desperate depths of her own greed. She wanted total surrender. By yonder blessed moon. Love, lord, ay, husband, friend. Soul’s idol. I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.

His fingers tensed beneath her own. ‘I—’

‘Oh, good, here you are.’ Tommy strode into the room and pushed the door to behind him. ‘The others are all in the dining room. Miss Fraser’s organized a sort of dinner. She’s nearly as cool-headed as you are, Fraser, and a good deal less annoying.’

Charles turned from the desk to face Tommy. The vulnerability was gone, closed over by layers of hard-won scar tissue. ‘Is Glenister there?’

‘Large as life, though he’s keeping to himself. I don’t know what you said to him, but he looks as though he’ll plant a facer to the next person who tries to talk to him. At least he’s stopped threatening to leave, probably because his sons and Miss Mortimer are acting as though there’ll be another murder if he attempts to do so.’ Tommy hitched himself up on the corner of the desk. ‘Look, you don’t have to tell me any more family secrets or nonsense about who slept with who thirty years ago—’

‘Whom.’ Charles leaned against the paneled wall.

‘What?’

‘Who slept with whom.’

‘Right. Who slept with whom and who happens to really be whom’s father or mother. I already know more than I ever wanted to about the liaisons of the Fraser and Talbot families.’ Tommy’s gaze sharpened like the point of a sword-stick. ‘But if you’ve found anything in that dispatch box that has to do with Le Faucon and this Elsinore League business I need to know.’

‘We haven’t,’ Charles said. ‘At least, nothing we can be sure of.’

‘Spare me the verbal fencing, Fraser. What about what you can’t be sure of?’

Charles and Mélanie exchanged glances. Difficult to gauge how much to reveal or not reveal when it was impossible to know how the pieces fit together. ‘Glenister’s father was paying money to my father,’ Charles said.

Tommy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why?’

‘We’re not sure.’

‘But presumably because of something they both wanted to keep secret.’

‘Quite.’

‘Let me guess.’ Tommy picked up the silver paperweight and tossed it in the air. ‘It could have to do with more of these who was sleeping with whom details, which is why the two of you are looking so reticent. Or it could have to do with the Elsinore League.’

Charles folded his arms over his chest. ‘That’s it in a nutshell. According to Glenister, the Elsinore League were a club of young men sowing their wild oats and had nothing to do with Le Faucon de Maulévrier. Even assuming Glenister’s telling the truth, Le Faucon could still have been a member of the league. But we can’t connect Glenister’s father to the Elsinore League. Can you?’

‘Not based on what Castlereagh told me. Of course, Castlereagh doesn’t seem to have told me the whole of it.’

‘Old Lord Glenister was a political force,’ Charles said. ‘More so than his son.’

‘He was a Tory?’ Mélanie asked.

‘A conservative Whig. But he opposed the Revolution.’

‘Other than Cyril Talbot, the only one we can link to revolutionaries so far is Simon Tanner’s father,’ Tommy said.

‘We can’t link Simon’s father to anything. Save that he supported the Revolution.’

Tommy swung his leg against the side of the desk. ‘Perhaps—’

A rap at the door cut into his words. Charles straightened his shoulders, instinctively braced against intrusion. ‘Come in.’

The door opened. A man with bushy white hair and thick brows stepped into the room. Mélanie felt more than saw Charles’s sudden stillness. He and the white-haired man regarded each other for a long moment, choked with memories.

‘Hullo, Charlie,’ the man said.

‘Hullo, Giles,’ said Charles.