Chapter 14: : Chapter 13

‘Evie?’ Gisèle rapped once on her friend’s door, then turned the handle and poked her head in without waiting for an answer. ‘May I borrow your jade earrings, they’d look quite splen—what on earth’s the matter?’

Evie was sitting at the dressing table of her room at Dunmykel, elbows on the tabletop, face between her hands. The tapers on either side of the looking glass illumined her reflection. Her eyes were red, her cheeks streaked with damp.

‘Just a fit of the blue devils.’ Evie swung round and rubbed her hands over her face. ‘Sorry, Gelly, what did you want?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Gisèle closed the door and walked into the room. ‘You never have the blue devils, Evie. You’re much too sensible.’

‘Maybe I just hide them better than most. You try living with Uncle Frederick and Val and Honoria.’

‘And Quen.’

‘Yes, Quen.’

‘He hasn’t done anything truly horrid since we’ve been here. I suppose throwing up at the betrothal ball was enough for the moment. All things considered, the house party isn’t starting out as hideously as I feared.’ Gisèle flopped back on the feather bed and stared up at the plasterwork ceiling and then over at the pilasters of the window embrasure. Evie’s room was in the seventeenth-century part of the house, new compared to the north wing, but even here she could feel the overlapping layers of history. ‘I forgot how much I love Dunmykel, even if it is hideously cold. You don’t suppose that’s why Honoria wants to marry Father, do you? Because she made up her mind to be mistress of Dunmykel and now that Charles is taken, Father’s her only choice?’

‘Honoria’s never been particularly fond of Scotland.’

‘Yes, but Dunmykel’s so—’ Gisèle straightened up and drew a breath of the salt-laced air. ‘How could anyone not want to live here?’

Evie gave a faint smile. ‘It’s different for you, Gelly. It’s your home.’

Gisèle inched back against the bedpost. ‘Frasers don’t have homes. Just places we live for a bit. I suppose Honoria must have mixed feelings about Dunmkyel—I mean, her father died here, which is a bit gruesome, though I don’t suppose she remembers him much.’

Evie twitched a fold of her skirt smooth. ‘She doesn’t talk about it. But then mere’s a lot Honoria doesn’t talk about. I’ve lived with her for twelve years, and I’m not sure what she’s thinking three-quarters of the time.’

‘But she must have had some reason for accepting Father. Especially when she’s still in love with Charles.’

Evie’s hands closed on the chair back. ‘Gelly—’

‘Oh, of course she is, as much as Honoria’s ever going to be in love with anyone. She’s been fixated on him like a lodestar since we were children. Even I could see that, though it’s not the sort of thing one likes to notice about one’s brother. And now she’s going to marry Father. It’s like a Greek myth. Perseus or Theseus or whoever’s wife was in love with his son. It’s asking for trouble, having all of them shut up here for weeks.’

Evie picked up her comb and began to tidy her side curls. ‘I thought you were determined not to come at all. You were positively gleeful when you got Charles to persuade Lady Frances to let you go to a friend’s house instead.’

Gisèle tugged at a snagged thread in her white lace overdress. The problem with Evie was that she saw far too much and asked far too many pointed questions. Just like Charles. ‘You know how I enjoy doing the opposite of what people expect.’

Evie continued to tend to her hair, but Gisèle could feel the pressure of her friend’s gaze reflected back on her through the glass. ‘I thought perhaps it was something to do with Val,’ Evie said.

‘Well, of course it’s quite agreeable that he’s here.’ Gisèle twisted her pearl bracelet round her wrist while a multitude of scorching thoughts that would no doubt make Evie look at her as though she’d taken leave of her senses tumbled in her head.

Evie set down the comb. ‘Do you want to marry him?’

Gisèle gave a high-pitched laugh that she managed to rein in one step short of hysteria. ‘Dear Evie. Why on earth should marriage have anything to do with it?’

‘Because you’re a nineteen-year-old girl from a good family. You have to marry someone.’

‘By the same logic, so do you.’

‘I’m a poor relation. It’s different.’

‘Gammon. Lord Glenister will give you a dowry.’

Evie’s mouth twisted. ‘It’s not very agreeable being dependent on charity, love.’

‘It’s not charity, he’s your uncle. Anyway, you’d have more of the Glenister money yourself if your grandfather hadn’t—’

‘If my grandfather hadn’t cut my mother off without a shilling after she eloped with a half-pay officer and gave birth to me a scant five months later?’ Evie smiled. ‘It’s all right, Gelly, my mama’s indiscretions are hardly the most scandalous in the Talbot family. They don’t make her daughter very marriageable, though.’

‘Rot. A sensible man wouldn’t care a rush—’

Evie turned back to the mirror. ‘Perhaps that’s the problem, love. Perhaps I don’t want a sensible man.’

‘You’ve never much wanted anyone so far as I can—’ Gisèle leaned forward and nearly toppled off the bed. Sometimes she was so caught up in keeping her own secrets that she forgot other people had them as well. ‘Evie, is that what you were crying about? Is there someone—for heaven’s sake, who—’

‘Don’t be a silly romantic goose, Gelly. Did you want to borrow my earrings? The jade ones?’

Gisèle sprang to her feet. ‘Are you crying because he’s back in London? You must be, it couldn’t be someone here. I mean, there’s only—oh, Lord. You haven’t fallen in love with David, have you?’

Evie was bent over her jewel case. Her shoulders shook. ‘No, Gelly, I’m not such a fool as to fall in love with David.’

‘Or Simon?’

‘Or Simon.’

‘Then it can’t be anyone here, because there’s only Val and—’ Bits and pieces of her friend’s behavior locked together like puzzle pieces in Gisèle’s mind. ‘Quen. Oh, Evie, you love Quen.’

‘Of course I love Quen. He’s practically my brother.’

‘But he isn’t your brother. And I suppose he is rather attractive when he isn’t causing a scene. You don’t just love him. You’re in love with him.’

Evie turned to her and held out the jade earrings. ‘Just take care you don’t lose them the way Honoria always does.’

Gisèle took the earrings but continued to look at her friend. ‘You can’t simply wait about for something to happen. It never will, unless you take matters into your hands.’

Easy enough to say, but as she spoke, Gisèle went cold at the thought of what her words would mean if she applied them to her own situation.

‘Even if I were in love with someone,’ Evie said, ‘perhaps I wouldn’t want anything to happen. Love didn’t exactly turn out well for my mother.’

‘But—’

‘Don’t dawdle, Gelly. Val will be waiting for you.’

‘I love the air here. It’s so clean. It seems any lie would be blown right out to sea and scattered to the four winds.’

Honoria rested her arms on the granite balustrade and looked out over the gardens below and the mass of the sea beyond, the gray water turned to lavender in the glow of the late Scottish sunset. Peach and vermilion and rose-gold streaked the sky. The warm light clung to her pale hair and the yellow fabric of her gown.

Charles stood beside her, breathing in the familiarity of a world that wasn’t his anymore. ‘Are lies being told?’

Honoria glanced over her shoulder. Mozart and candlelight drifted through the French windows from the drawing room behind them. ‘Aren’t lies told at any social gathering?’

‘That sounds unexpectedly arch coming from you.’

‘Does it? Well, I’ve grown up a bit in six years.’ She glanced away and toyed with a fallen leaf that lay on the balustrade.

In the drawing room behind them, the Mozart gave way to the poignant insistence of the Moonlight Sonata. Charles glanced through the French windows. Mélanie was at the pianoforte, with Simon turning the pages of her music. Evie was handing round the tea. Gisèle had her head close together with Val in the most shadowy corner of the room. Quen was slumped alone in another corner, brandy glass in hand. Kenneth, Glenister, David, and Lady Frances had made up a whist table.

Charles turned his gaze to the woman who was about to become his stepmother. ‘I haven’t congratulated you properly.’

‘You don’t do most things by the book, Charles. Even kissing.’

She looked at him. The memory of her bending down and brushing her lips against his own in the library at Glenister House hung in the air between them.

‘Were you surprised by the announcement?’ Honoria said.

‘Very. But then I’ve hardly been privy to your inner thoughts in recent years.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Her Wedgwood-blue gaze turned wide and candid and earnest. ‘Perhaps I should have warned you. But I think I wanted to live in the past for a few moments longer.’

‘I didn’t need a warning.’

‘That was presumptuous of me. I only meant—well, it’s bound to be a bit awkward. You can’t have expected to have me as a stepmother.’ She drew the flowered silk folds of her shawl about her shoulders. ‘I’m not very like her, am I?’

‘My mother?’ Charles risked a glance at the gardens his mother had designed, the hedged walkways and parterres, the fountains and statues and ornamental pools turned to dark, smudged silhouettes in the fading light. ‘No. But when it comes to making a success of marriage to my father I wouldn’t count that as a negative.’

Honoria twisted a knot of apricot ribbon on the bodice of her gown. ‘I saw her grave today.’

Charles had an image of the vine-covered churchyard and the sea-weathered granite of the headstones. ‘You went to visit your father’s grave?’

She nodded. ‘It’s years since I’d seen it. I can scarcely remember him.’

‘You were only three.’

‘Yes, but I wish—he used to toss me up in the air. I remember that. But I can’t see his face.’

‘Do you ever talk about him?’ Charles schooled his face not to betray a hint of his suspicions that Cyril Talbot might have been Le Faucon de Maulévrier. ‘With your uncle?’

‘Uncle Frederick doesn’t like to discuss him. I think he feels responsible.’

‘For your father’s death?’

‘It’s silly, of course. But Uncle Frederick was his elder brother. He was here when Papa had the accident with the gun. He should have kept an eye on him—or so he thinks.’ She turned to take a few steps along the terrace. ‘I imagine Quen would feel that way about Val, for all they’re equally irresponsible. Wouldn’t you feel the same about Edgar?’

‘I expect so.’ Charles fell into step beside her. Fallen leaves scrunched beneath their feet. Clouds were gathering in the brilliant sky and the air held the promise of rain. ‘Did you think to visit Giles McGann when you were riding about the estate?’

‘I rode by the day after we arrived here, but the cottage was closed up. Do you know where he’s gone?’

Her eyes were as guileless as when she’d been in leading strings. ‘No one seems to be quite sure,’ Charles said.

‘I do hope he’s all right. I wanted to explain to him about my betrothal. He’ll be as surprised as everyone else, and his opinion matters to me more than most.’

‘Honoria.’ Charles stopped, out of view of the windows from the drawing room. ‘Have you ever heard of something called the Elsinore League?’

‘The what? Charles, I admire Hamlet as much as anyone, but isn’t it going a bit far—’

‘They aren’t anything to do with Hamlet. At least not that we know of. They’re an organization in Paris that a friend of mine was involved with. Someone shot him in London ten days ago.’

‘Good God!’

‘He died warning me about the Elsinore League. He also said the people he worked for were afraid for a woman named Honoria.’

Honoria stared at him as though he’d fired a pistol shot over her tea table. ‘Charles, I can’t begin to understand the life you’ve lived, but obviously it’s a different Honoria. I don’t see what I could have to do with intrigues in Paris or anyone involved in them. You do believe me, don’t you?’

‘I believe you don’t know anything about it. But humor me. Don’t mention this to anyone else. And lock your door at night.’

‘For God’s sake, we’re in Scotland, in your father’s house—’

‘And I’m probably mad, but you’ve thought that for years anyway. Do I have your word?’

‘Yes, all right.’

Charles nodded. ‘Why did Father plan this house party so abruptly?’

‘To get away from all the tiresome congratulations and furtive speculation on the betrothal, I imagine. I don’t think he realized how bad it would be.’

Charles leaned his shoulder against the age-worn granite of the balustrade and looked at his father’s betrothed. The torchlight sharpened the softly curved bones of her face.

‘Why, Honoria?’

‘Why is the speculation so tiresome?’

‘Why are you marrying my father?’

Her gaze moved over his, like the lightest brush of fingertips. ‘I told you. I’m tired of being on the shelf.’ She straightened her shoulders. A hard, brittle shell seemed to close round her. ‘I’ll make him a good wife.’

‘I’m not questioning that. But of all the men you could choose—’

‘Why did you marry your wife?’

He should have seen it coming, but he couldn’t check his inward recoil. ‘She needed me.’ Or rather, she needed a husband. She could have done far better, but that was another matter.

‘I needed you once.’

‘Not in the way Mélanie did. You had far more options.’

‘And so you threw away everything we could have had.’

The possibilities of an alternative life hung before him, like the sun about to sink into the Atlantic. A life of familiarity. A life he had run from and craved and never fully considered because he’d always known it was out of his reach. ‘We would have made each other miserable, Honoria.’

‘Unlike your own marriage, which is deliriously happy?’

The words shot home like a dagger. ‘My marriage is my own business.’

She scanned his face. ‘He isn’t yours, is he? The little boy. Colin.’

‘Colin is unquestionably my son.’ This part was easy, because for him it was the truth.

‘Because you chose to make him your son. She was pregnant. That’s why you married her. Oh, Charles, you stubborn, idealistic fool. To stake your future and your happiness on protecting someone else.’

‘Mélanie wouldn’t thank you for implying she needs protection.’ He gripped the balustrade. ‘Honoria, I told you at Glenister House that you could come to me if you were ever in trouble. For God’s sake, tell me what’s the matter now.’

‘Why should anything be the matter?’

‘Because the girl I’ve known half my life wouldn’t ally herself with Kenneth Fraser.’

Honoria stared at him with eyes darkened to indigo. The sun had sunk below the horizon. The cool light bled the color from her gown and hair, turning her into a creature of shadows. ‘You’re forgetting the half of my life you don’t know.’

‘On the contrary. I want to know what the devil in that life drove you to this madness.’ He caught her hands. ‘This is the rest of your life, Nona.’

‘And I’m only supposed to marry someone to whom I can commit myself in body and soul? My dear Charles. Can you claim that’s what you did?’

Guilt welled up on his tongue like blood from the lash of a whip. ‘I told you. Mélanie needed me. Are you claiming Father needs you?’

‘Perhaps I need him.’

‘There are other men—’

‘Your father is the man I want to marry. The man I have to marry.’

‘Have to?’ He tightened his grip on her hands. ‘For the love of God, Noria, you don’t have to do anything. I’ll get you out of this, whatever it is. I swear it.’

‘Even you can’t fix everything, my sweet.’

‘At least let me—’

She jerked out of his hold. ‘Let go of me, Charles. You don’t have the right to demand anything of me anymore.’

‘She’s afraid.’

‘Of what?’ His wife’s crisp voice was a sharp contrast to Honoria’s anguished tones on the terrace.

Charles unwound his cravat from about his throat and stared at the length of muslin. ‘I’m not sure.’

Mélanie picked up a lead soldier Colin had left on the floor of their bedchamber and set it atop the chest of drawers. ‘Do you think she knows anything about—’

‘Francisco’s death? Giles McGann’s disappearance? The Elsinore League?’

‘Any of it.’ Mélanie dropped down on the chintz-covered dressing table bench and began to unroll her stockings.

‘No. But I think there’s more to her reasons for marrying my father than meets the eye.’

‘You think she’s being coerced?’

‘She as good as admitted something was troubling her, but she said it was something I couldn’t do anything about.’ Charles unbuttoned his waistcoat. The anguished plea in Honoria’s eyes lingered in his memory. He looked at his wife and felt a metallic taste in his throat. Because for a moment he’d let himself imagine the life he might have had? Because Honoria’s words had slapped .home the fact he’d given Mélanie Spanish coin rather than the riches she deserved?

Mélanie dropped a stocking and a pink silk garter into the basket beside the dressing table. ‘Engagements are broken all the time. Why would she think she had no choice but to marry your father? She has a comfortable fortune of her own. When does she come into possession of it?’

He shrugged out of the waistcoat and laid it and the cravat over a chair back. ‘On her marriage or her twenty-fifth birthday, I believe.’

‘Suppose she’d run up gambling debts? One can lose a fortune at the card tables in a Mayfair drawing room on a single evening. Even I’ve heard the stories about the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Bessborough.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘You know her and I don’t?’

‘I wouldn’t have expected Honoria to run up gambling debts.’ His voice sounded stiff to his own ears, like an over-starched cravat. ‘But then I wouldn’t have expected her to become betrothed to my father, either. On the other hand, if all she wanted was access to her money she could have married any of her suitors.’

‘So you think she’s being coerced into marrying your father specifically?’ Mélanie drew her bare feet up onto the dressing table bench. ‘Suppose Glenister’s the one in debt.’

‘To my father?’ Charles leaned against one of the walnut bedposts. ‘And Honoria’s sacrificing herself to redeem the debt? La Belle et le Bête?’

Mélanie unfastened her heavy citrine necklace and began to pull the pins out of her hair. Her garnet silk skirt was tucked up, revealing the curves of her ankles and calves. Her unself-conscious sensuality could not be more different from Honoria’s cool decorum. It tugged at his senses, reminding him that in the scales of their marriage he had gained far more than he had given.

‘I admit it’s convoluted,’ Mélanie said. ‘Why else might Miss Talbot feel coerced to go along with the marriage? To protect someone else she cares about? Her cousins?’

Charles smoothed a hand over the openwork on the Irish linen coverlet. The threads formed a gossamer-fine web. ‘She cares for them, for all they’re often at one another’s throats. Quen or Val could have lost to Father at cards or Father could have bought up their vowels.’

Mélanie snapped open the lid of her dressing case and dropped a handful of pins into one of the velvet-lined compartments. ‘Could she be in love with another man?’

Charles stared at the snowy-white threads and the bits of flowered quilt showing beneath. ‘And marrying Father to protect him? From what she said, I don’t think that’s her reason.’

He looked up and forced himself to meet Mélanie’s gaze. Mélanie looked back at him, as though his statement carried no more weight than anything else he’d said. But she seemed to be trying just a bit too hard to maintain the expression.

‘We can make more inquiries about McGann in the morning,’ Charles said. ‘We won’t get much farther discussing this tonight.’

His wife nodded, got to her feet, and walked toward him. He wanted to twist his fingers in her hair and cover her mouth with his own and blot out the questions in her eyes.

He wanted to bury himself in her and sever his mind from the tortures of thought. Because he knew just how appallingly selfish he’d already been where she was concerned, he drew back.

Mélanie curled her hand behind his neck and pulled his head down to her own.

‘Mel—’

‘Don’t talk, Charles. And for God’s sake, don’t think. We’ve done far too much of that already.’

She caught his lower lip between her teeth and parted her mouth beneath his own, seeking, yielding, demanding. He closed his arms round her, accepting what she offered, making an offer in kind.

Spanish coin or not, it glittered bright enough to blind one.

Flames engulfed him again. Honoria trembled in his arms. She was murmuring incoherent sounds of distress, and her breath was quick and panicked against his skin. She sobbed, a raw harsh sound that jerked him out of the scalding fire and acrid smoke to cool linen sheets and thick, enveloping darkness. She wasn’t in his arms, she was thrashing beside him, as though caught in a snare. He reached for her, felt the sting of sweat on her skin, and gathered her to him.

The familiar scent of roses and vanilla washed over him. The texture of the hair and the curve of the bones beneath his fingers jerked him back to reality. He was in his bed at Dunmykel, holding not Honoria but his wife. Guided by instinct more than thought, he slid his hand to the place at the nape of her neck that always soothed her when she had one of her nightmares.

Mélanie gripped his shoulder and curved her body against his own, jolted out of whatever remembered or imagined horrors had tormented her.

He smoothed her hair back from her face, reassured by the more regular sound of her breathing. The trust in the way her hand curled on his chest and her head nestled in the hollow of his throat brought a familiar stab of guilt.

He’d married her because he’d thought he could protect her. Dear Christ. He’d thought of himself as a cynic at five-and-twenty, but he’d been a naive, romantic fool. In the light of the past four and a half years, it seemed one of his more laughably arrogant and appallingly shortsighted moments. Protecting her had been an excuse, a smoke screen to cover his own selfish need. He’d gained a witty companion, a partner in adventure, an ardent bedmate. And all the while he’d been able to keep whatever he wanted of himself locked away, telling himself that they shared more than dozens of couples who made marriages of convenience.

He’d got used to sleeping with her curled against him, to not tugging away too much of the quilt at night, to all those cut-glass scent bottles and little silver and enamel boxes of powders and paints crowding his shaving things off shared dressing tables in cramped quarters. He knew how to fasten and unfasten the hooks and buttons and laces and strings on her gowns. She’d got quite good at tying his cravats when he’d broken his arm and his valet Addison had been off for fortnight on a mission in northern Spain. They could pack a valise for each other down to the undergarments and toiletries, order each other’s meals, forge each other’s signatures. They both knew the exact touch that could soothe or arouse or send the other tumbling into delight.

But such intimacy existed on the still, safe surface of life. In the dark corners beneath lay the fragments of his life that he didn’t care to look at himself, much less share with anyone, even Mélanie. Especially Mélanie.

He leaned back against the headboard, stroking his wife’s hair, and stared up at the dark walnut bedframe, streaks of black against the pale chintz canopy. Honoria was right, they couldn’t go back to the people they’d been. But they couldn’t forget those people, those events, those memories. The past echoed through the present, laughing at him for the presumption of thinking it could be left behind.

One had a ghost of a chance of a future only if one turned and confronted the past. And the future had to be thought of. If having children had taught him nothing else, it had taught him that. He’d had to come back to Britain. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life running. But he wasn’t at all sure it was fair to have inflicted his coming to terms with family and his past on Mélanie and the children. In his darkest moments, he wasn’t sure it was fair to have inflicted himself on them at all.

He was still wondering when a raw explosion of sound ripped through the silence of the night. He was half out of the bed, reaching for the pistol he no longer kept beneath his pillow, before he realized the sound had been a scream.

The night air bit into his naked skin as he jumped out of bed and fumbled for his dressing gown. Mélanie was beside him, silk rustling as she knotted the sash on her own dressing gown.

They stumbled out the door without taking time to light a candle. Moonlight spilled through the tall windows and lent a faint illumination to the corridor. Their bedroom was in the old north wing. The cry had not come from the nursery, deep in the north wing, thank God, but from the first bedroom where the corridor widened into the central block. The bedroom occupied by his father.

Charles rapped on the door. ‘Sir?’

Silence engulfed the corridor. Charles turned the handle and pushed open the door.

The room was cloaked in darkness. Guided by memory, he found a flint and lit the lamp on a table by the door. Yellow light outlined the mahogany four-poster mass of the bed and the dressing-gowned figure of Kenneth Fraser standing beside it. The light bounced off the bronze-green satin of the bed hangings and gleamed against the pristine white of the sheets and the pale gold hair of the woman who lay on them. The woman’s face was hidden by the pillows and the fall of her hair, but that particular shade of gold unmistakably belonged to Honoria Talbot.

Kenneth didn’t react to the opening of the door or the flare of light. He was staring at Honoria as though transfixed.

‘Sir?’ Charles said again.

Kenneth made no response, not even a turn of his head. Charles crossed to the bed in two strides. Mélanie picked up the lamp and followed him. They both saw the sight on the bed at the same moment. Charles went still. Mélanie stumbled against him and clutched his arm to keep from falling.

Honoria was stretched out beneath the satin counterpane and embroidered linen sheet, arms at her sides, eyes closed, face still. Too still. Her skin had a waxy sheen that was all too familiar from countless field hospitals. Above the lacy yoke of her nightdress, an angry line of bruising showed round her throat.

Charles put his fingers to where the pulse should have been beating in her throat. He felt nothing but the cold emptiness of death.