Chapter 17: : Chapter 16

For a moment, none of them spoke. Mélanie stared at the frozen face of the dead girl on the bed before her. Honoria Talbot had broken one of the cardinal rules of her world. A lady was required to bring a spotless maidenhead to her marriage bed. Society might look the other way at what she did after she had married and given her husband an heir, but any transgression before was the stuff of scandal and disgrace. Even a rumor could mean ruin. An illegitimate child would spell social ostracism.

‘That’s impossible,’ David said.

‘Improbable,’ Charles said. ‘But true.’

‘But—’

‘Mélanie’s had two children. I’ve seen pregnant women in the Peninsula, where there was less room for modesty. Unfortunately I’ve seen dead pregnant women.’ Charles’s gaze lingered for a moment on the thatch of blonde hair between Miss Talbot’s legs, as though noting what Mélanie had already seen herself. Then he drew the sheet over Miss Talbot’s body and closed her eyes with a touch as gentle as a caress. ‘Let’s go to our room. It will be easier to talk.’

They closed the door on Kenneth Fraser’s room and adjourned to the bedchamber Charles and Mélanie occupied. Mélanie lit the lamps. The light flickered over the rosy-cream color of the walls and the flowered bed hangings. Though the room had been theirs for less than eight-and-forty hours, she found it an unexpected comfort to be surrounded by the familiarity of her brush and comb and scent bottles, Charles’s shaving kit, Colin’s lead soldiers.

Charles picked up the decanter that stood on top of the chest of drawers, poured three glasses of whisky, and passed them round. If one ignored the tension about his mouth and the numbness on David’s face, it might have been any evening when they had all shared a drink and discussed the play they’d seen or the party they’d attended. Yet the press of emotions in the room was more redolent of a group of soldiers swallowing rotgut after an ambush that has taken the life of one of their comrades.

Mélanie took a sip, savoring the pungent familiarity of the drink. ‘Miss Talbot is hardly the first young woman to find herself in such a predicament. She was three-and-twenty. That’s a number of years with—’

‘The needs and impulses of a grown woman,’ Charles said.

‘But—’ David bit back whatever he had been about to say. His face had gone bloodless and broken, like linen slashed with a carving knife.

Charles tossed down half his whisky. A bruise was starting to show on his jaw, but behind his eyes Mélanie caught a glimpse of raw, open wounds to his soul far worse than any damage the intruder had done. ‘If she was a man, no one would think twice about it. But she was a woman and she got pregnant and if the truth got out her reputation would be in tatters. Damnably unfair, but undeniably true.’ He slammed his hand down on the mantel, rattling the candlesticks and tinderbox. ‘Sweet Jesus, I’ve been a fool.’

‘You couldn’t have known about this,’ David said.

‘Last night Honoria as good as told me she was in some kind of trouble and had no choice but to marry Father.’

‘You think your father seduced her and got her pregnant?’ David rarely even raised his voice, but he looked as though he’d rend Kenneth Fraser limb from limb if he walked into the room. ‘So she had no choice but to marry him?’

‘Possibly,’ Charles said in a voice from which all feeling had been stripped. ‘Or she could have been pregnant by someone else, someone she couldn’t marry, and she accepted Father to cover it up.’

‘This could explain why she was in Mr. Fraser’s bed,’ Mélanie said.

‘Because it was his child?’ David asked.

‘Or because she wanted to make him think it was. If she was already two months along, she couldn’t wait until the wedding night and still pass the baby off as his.’ Mélanie turned to Charles, knowing he had seen what she had in his last look at the body.

Charles nodded. ‘It also appears that Honoria had been intimate with a man at some point last night.’

‘What?’

Mélanie swallowed, wondering which of them David would find it easier to hear the explanation from. ‘There were hairs caught in the hair—between her legs. Hairs that weren’t her own.’

‘And that tells you—’

‘It’s difficult to come up with another explanation,’ Charles said.

‘Good God, are you telling me your father ravaged her in his bed—’

‘No. At least, not in Mr. Fraser’s bed,’ Mélanie said. ‘There was no—there was no indication that lovemaking had taken place there and she’d plainly washed afterward.’

‘You mean she’d been—’

‘All we can say for a certainty is that she was intimate with a man at least twice,’ Mélanie said. ‘Two months ago and again last night. We don’t know that either time was consensual.’

Charles’s gaze jerked to her face, an unspoken apology in his eyes. ‘Very true. If she was raped two months ago, she might have been too afraid to tell anyone.’

‘But surely—’ David said.

‘She’d have told Glenister?’ Charles asked, as the words died on his friend’s lips. ‘Or Val or Quen? It’s not the easiest thing to confide in a father figure or a foster brother. If she told anyone, she might have told Evie, but Honoria doesn’t—didn’t—confide easily. And she’d have feared the—’

‘Stigma,’ Mélanie said.

Charles looked straight at her, eyes dark with the desire to protect her or Honoria or both of them and bitter with the knowledge that it was too late to do so for either of them. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘She could have confided in me,’ David said. ‘Or in you. We wouldn’t have judged her—Christ, as if anyone could judge a woman who—’

‘A number of people do,’ Charles said. ‘We wouldn’t have judged her, but Honoria might have judged herself. You said yourself that you and she weren’t confidants. And she and I haven’t exactly been on confiding terms in recent years.’

‘If she was raped that could explain how she was pregnant,’ Mélanie said, ‘but it doesn’t explain whom she was intimate with yesterday.’

‘No,’ Charles agreed. ‘Though it’s possible the same man—or even another man—assaulted her again last night.’

‘That would mean it’s someone in the house,’ David said.

‘Whether she was assaulted or went willingly to a lover, the man involved was almost certainly someone in the house.’ Charles’s voice was like a lid pressed down on a seething cauldron.

‘Could she have been killed somewhere else and then moved to Mr. Fraser’s room?’ David asked.

‘Possibly,’ Mélanie said, ‘if she was moved quickly after she died. But she was strangled with the bellpull from Mr. Fraser’s room, so the killer would have had to plan ahead. Or he—or she—might have drugged Miss Talbot and then moved her to Mr. Fraser’s room and strangled her. But either way, I don’t see how the killer could have known Mr. Fraser wouldn’t be in his room.’

David pushed himself to his feet. His glass tilted in his hand and splashed whisky over his feet. ‘If I’d had a shred of sense and understood the trouble she was in—’

‘David.’ Charles crossed to him and gripped him by the shoulders. ‘You’re going to blame yourself. You’re going to rethink every moment you spent with Honoria from the day she was born and call yourself every name you can think of. It will get worse before it gets better. But believe me, believe me, you couldn’t have known. Twist this how you will, it’s folly to blame yourself.’

His voice and face were compelling, quite as if he weren’t flaying himself raw for his own inability to understand. But then Charles was always harder on himself than on other people.

David dashed an impatient hand against his face. His eyes were glassy with tears. ‘She needed someone and I didn’t do anything to take care of her.’

‘Neither did I.’

‘And the intruder in the library?’ David blinked back his tears and frowned at the basin and ewer on the nightstand. ‘Where the devil does he fit in? Could he have been Honoria’s lover?’

‘I doubt it. At least, I doubt Honoria was the person he’d come to meet. When he said, ‘You’re late,’ he didn’t sound like a man talking to a lover. And even in the dark, I don’t think he’d be likely to mistake me for Honoria.’

‘What do the Elsinore League have to do with all this?’

‘I’m not sure. But Mélanie and I learned more about them today.’ Charles told him about their meeting with Tommy and his story about Le Faucon de Maulévrier.

‘You’re telling me Honoria was killed to cover up the truth about the identity of a butcher from the French Revolution?’

‘Not necessarily. According to Tommy, he and Castlereagh had intelligence that the Elsinore League were plotting to kill someone to cover up Le Faucon’s past. But even if Cyril Talbot himself was Le Faucon, it’s difficult to see how Honoria could know anything that would be a threat. She was only three when he died.’

‘Unless he’s still alive.’ Mélanie dropped down on the edge of the bed. ‘But then we’d have to assume he risked making contact with his daughter after all these years only to turn round and have her killed.’

‘Because she was threatening to expose him?’ Charles said. ‘In which case, why the hell hadn’t she exposed him already?’

‘Precisely.’ Mélanie drew her feet up onto the walnut bedframe. ‘Besides, the one thing we’re sure of is that she was killed by someone in the house.’

‘Which brings us back to Father and Glenister. They’re the only two who could realistically have known of any connection between Cyril Talbot and Le Faucon. Assuming such a connection existed.’

‘But even if it did, one would think they’d have wanted to protect Miss Talbot from her father’s past.’

‘Besides,’ David said, ‘Soro told Manon the people he worked for feared for Honoria, not that they were afraid of her.’

Charles nodded. ‘Quite. As soon as it’s light, I want to have another look at the room where she died and also at her own bedchamber. For the moment, her pregnancy and the Elsinore League go no farther than this room. They’re leverage of a sort.’

Little more could be said or done until the light of morning. David gripped Charles’s arm for a moment, squeezed Mélanie’s hand, and went to talk to Simon before the morning gathering in the Gold Saloon.

Charles closed the door behind his friend and rested his hand on the oak panels. All the tension of the past two hours seemed to settle between his shoulder blades. ‘I want to take a look at the secret passage before the intruder or anyone else has a chance to come back and remove evidence.’

‘Darling—’

‘The others won’t be awake for another couple of hours. No sense in wasting the time.’ He crossed to the chest of drawers.

‘Charles—’

‘I’m all right, Mel.’ He rummaged in the top drawer and took out his pistol and a powder bag. His movements were swift and jerky, one step short of doing violence to whatever was nearest at hand. ‘I can do this. But if I stop to think, I’m not sure what will happen. So let’s just keep going.’

Unlike her husband, Mélanie was still wearing her dressing gown. She went to the wardrobe. Fortunately, she’d packed breeches and a shirt. Experience had taught that one never knew when they might come in handy.

She was half afraid Charles would go downstairs without her, but after he’d loaded his pistol he took hers from the drawer where she kept it and loaded it as well. She scrambled into her clothes and laced on a pair of half-boots. Charles was ready about thirty seconds before she was. Under the circumstances, she counted it as a promising sign that he waited for her.

He handed her her loaded pistol, and they made their way down the pine-wainscoted stairs. The yellow light from the lamps they both carried flickered over the grisaille paintings of the Nine Muses that lined the staircase, the framed royal charter that hung casually in one corner of the hall, the crossed swords over the fireplace.

Charles walked swiftly, scarcely seeming aware of her at his side. Tension radiated off him like heat waves. They turned into the north wing, where the thicker, fifteenth-century walls cooled the air. He opened the door to the library.

Mélanie had heard about the secret passage, but she had not actually explored it on her one previous visit to Dunmykel. She watched now as Charles walked to the fireplace without hesitation and pressed the bend in the griffin’s tail on the Fraser crest carved into the pilaster beside the fireplace. One of the bookcases flanking the fireplace slid to the side with the soundlessness of well-oiled hinges. The lamps wavered in a draft of dank air. Charles glanced back at her, then ducked his head under the lintel and stepped into the passage.

The floor was hard-packed dirt, the walls granite. A turn-bled pile of rock a few feet from the entrance showed where the intruder had shot rock from the ceiling to delay Charles. Charles crouched down and tilted his lamp so the light fell over the spilled chips of granite. Booted footprints showed in the dust from the fallen rock, but the intruder had neglected to drop anything convenient, such as more coded papers with the seal of the Elsinore League.

‘I could have run after him,’ Charles said, his gaze going to where the footsteps trailed off as the dust had rubbed off the intruder’s boots. ‘But I thought he had too much of a start. It seemed more important to go back upstairs than to indulge in a fruitless pursuit.’

‘Besides, he had a gun and you didn’t. He might have reloaded.’ Mélanie cast a sharp look at her husband. In his present mood, she wasn’t sure he’d have caviled at such a consideration.

‘True,’ Charles said, and walked on without further comment. ‘The passage was built in the sixteenth century,’ he added a moment later. His voice sounded bizarrely normal, especially in contrast to the erratic breathing that underlay it.

‘To smuggle priests in and out of the house?’

‘In this family? Hardly. It connects to the lodge. The lord of the manor at the time was having an affair with the steward’s wife.’

‘You don’t think the intruder escaped into the lodge?’

‘I doubt it. The passage branches off. One branch leads to the lodge, the other runs to a cave and the beach.’

The passage diverged a few yards on. They traced one path to a wooden panel similar to the one that opened onto me Dunmykel library. This one, Charles explained, gave onto the book room in the lodge. As there was no sign that the intruder had gone into the lodge, they traced the path back and took the other fork. Mélanie scanned the hard-packed, uneven ground for further clues. Even so, she didn’t glimpse the patch of red, brighter than the red-brown of the earth, until she had nearly stepped in it. She crouched down and pointed. ‘Blood.’

Charles touched his fingers to the splotch and held them up to the lamp. ‘Quite a pool of it. And not yet completely dry.’

‘Did you wound the intruder?’

‘I didn’t think so. It’s possible he broke his nose when he fell, but you wouldn’t think a nosebleed would drip this much onto the floor, not by the time he got here.’

‘Miss Talbot didn’t bleed,’ Mélanie said.

‘No,’ Charles agreed.

‘Then—’

‘I’m not sure.’

They went on. She caught a whiff of salt in the air. A gust of wind blew out Charles’s lamp. He stopped and fumbled with a flint. They rounded a bend. The sound of the sea rumbled toward them. Up ahead a light glowed.

Charles grabbed her wrist and pulled her against the wall. They both blew out their lamps and slid their pistols from their pockets.

‘Curse those miserable idiots,’ a voice muttered from the direction of the light. ‘We’ll be here all night. Why couldn’t they have sorted as they unloaded?’

A second voice mumbled something in reply, the words indistinguishable. Charles inched closer along the wall. His foot must have struck a loose bit of rock. The rock clattered, echoing in the stillness. Footsteps pounded in the opposite direction.

Mélanie and Charles ran forward. The passage turned and widened into a cave. A lamp set in a niche cast a wash of light over the sea-scarred walls and the stacks of crates that filled the interior. Charles ran to the mouth of the cave. Mélanie snatched up the lamp and ran after him.

Footprints in the sand beyond the cave showed where the two men had run off, but they were out of view. A rush of cold water hit Mélanie’s feet. The tide was coming in.

‘We can’t catch them,’ Charles said, his gaze going from the dark, undulating mass of the sea to the cliffs above them.

They ducked back into the cave. Charles pulled out his flint and relit their own lamps.

‘Did you know about the cave?’ Mélanie asked, scanning the crates. More boxes than she’d used to move their household from Paris to London. Most of the crates were lined up against the walls, but a jumbled pile had been left in the middle of the cave.

‘Oh, yes. But it was always empty when we played here as children.’ He used his picklocks to pry open the nearest crate and lifted out a bottle. He held it up to the lamplight. ‘Brandy.’

‘Smugglers?’

‘So it seems. Apparently we interrupted them in the midst of sorting a shipment.’

Examination of the other crates yielded tea, champagne, port, and bordeaux. ‘Not a bad vintage, either.’ Mélanie set down a bottle. ‘Do you think the intruder in the library was a smuggler?’

‘Meeting with a confederate in the house?’ Charles returned a tin of tea to its crate.

Mélanie was standing at the side of the cave. The light from her lamp flickered over the granite wall. Amid the scarring of sea and wind, a rectangular depression stood out, unexpectedly symmetrical. ‘Charles, what’s that?’

‘What?’

She reached up to touch the depression. The granite slid in her hand and a panel of rock groaned open.