Chapter 23: : Chapter 22

Charles said nothing until he and Mélanie were seated in the gig and he had given the horse its office. Bits of granite and limewash and slate and thatched roofs flashed by like fragments of memory as he navigated the village’s main street.

He could feel the concerned pressure of his wife’s gaze. Like a warm, smothering blanket. He wanted to pull up the carriage, give her the reins, and stride across the fields, away from her all-knowing expression. But he had to try to explain. He owed it to her, and perhaps to himself.

‘That night I found her—Honoria—in my bed in Lisbon. I told her I was flattered—honored—but I couldn’t possibly—’ His throat felt as if it was stuffed with cotton wool. ‘I told her I’d make her a damnable husband. Which was true.’

‘You told me the same thing. About thirty seconds after you asked me to marry you.’

He felt a bleak smile twist his lips. ‘That was me trying to be fair and let you know what you were getting yourself in for.’

‘And I was alone and pregnant and needed a husband. Miss Talbot didn’t.’

Need. Want. Desire. Love. They twisted and turned until one couldn’t tell where one left off and the other began. ‘There was no question of my marrying Honoria. Christ, she was little more than a child. But I felt as if I’d hurt her. It’s a frightening thing to make oneself vulnerable to another person.’ The words thickened like condensation in the air. He wasn’t sure if he was talking about Honoria or himself. ‘It seemed the least I could do in recompense was not to parade her vulnerability before the rest of the world.’

‘That makes sense.’

He glanced sideways at her. ‘Except that once she was killed I should have told you. I told myself it couldn’t have anything to do with her death, so I was justified in keeping quiet about it. As it turns out, I was wrong.’ He owed her more of an explanation, but he couldn’t be sure enough of his own feelings to offer one. He was afraid that if he spoke at all, he’d strip himself raw and never heal. Instead he fell back on the practicalities of the investigation. ‘Do you believe Val?’

Mélanie looked at him for a moment, then sank back against the squabs. ‘I’m inclined to. Do you?’

‘I’m afraid so. I doubt he could have made it up.’ His fingers tightened on the reins. ‘The bastard. The sick, scheming, immoral—’

‘Charles—’

‘Yes, all right. But why in God’s name—’

‘Was he so successful? The eternal lure of Don Juan. Women like to think he’s looking for his one true love and that they’ll be the one to tame him. And all the time all he wants is another name to add to his infernal list. Il catalogo è questo.’

‘If Father discovered even a quarter of what Honoria and Val were up to—’

‘He might have killed her,’ Mélanie said. ‘But we have no reason to believe he did find out. Lord Valentine could have killed her. He obviously cared more about losing her than he was willing to admit. Lord Quentin was furious with Miss Talbot for breaking up his affair with Miss Newland. Miss Newland knew Miss Talbot could ruin her.’

‘And Gisèle would have been consumed with jealousy if she’d learned about Honoria and Val,’ Charles said, in a flat voice that held all his fears for his sister at bay.

Mélanie tugged at one of her gloves. ‘Why do you think Miss Talbot gave up on Andrew Thirle? Do you think it went farther than she admitted and he turned her down?’

‘If that was the case, why not admit it to Val? She admitted she failed with Simon.’ Charles considered Andrew with what detachment he could muster. ‘Andrew’s never been one to fall quickly for a pretty face. He fancied himself in love with an attractive widow for a month or so when he was at university, but other than that I’ve never known his heart to be seriously engaged.’

‘Do you think he’s in love with Miss Talbot?’

‘Perhaps. I can’t read him as well as I once could. I’m quite sure he was lying about what he was doing in the house last night.’ Charles drummed his fingers on the leather of the carriage seat. ‘If Val’s right, Honoria wasn’t unduly troubled by her pregnancy. And yet I’d swear she was frightened of something last night.’ He again felt the pull of her unvoiced plea. ‘So what the devil was it?’

‘And what drove Glenister to insist on the marriage.’

‘Quite. I’d have thought Glenister would have preferred to see Honoria married to Val and keep her money in the family.’

Mélanie looked at him for a moment. ‘Charles—’ she said in a gentle voice that cut into him like a knife slicing into raw flesh.

‘ ‘Charles’ what? Do I feel like a fool because for all these years I thought Honoria had a schoolgirl infatuation with me and she was playing a game with me the whole time? Of course I do. Do I feel betrayed because my childhood friend wasn’t who I thought she was? Yes to that as well. Does this change my determination to find out who killed her? Of course not. Can I make sense of any of this? Not remotely. So the only thing to do is try to discover more of the facts.’

Mélanie continued to look at him. He had the strangest sense that he was bleeding inwardly.

Her hand lay on the carriage seat between them. The top button of her glove was undone. He stared at the pale, exposed skin and had an image of himself tugging at her laces, pushing her gown from her shoulders, tasting the warmth of her flesh. Then he saw Val pawing and sucking the naked skin of the girl in the inn. And the paintings of Shakespearean characters disporting in his father’s secret love nest. ‘I owe you an apology for last night.’

‘Charles, I’m not sure what you’re talking about, but you can scarcely be held responsible for anything you did or said after we found Miss Talbot’s body—’

‘Not after we found Honoria. Before.’

She was silent for a moment, but he knew at once that she understood what he referred to. ‘Darling, we’ve been married more than four years. However well we do or don’t know each other, surely you can’t have any doubt that I enjoyed that part of the evening.’

‘I wasn’t—it shouldn’t ever be like that between us. Without thought.’

‘As I recall, I was the one who didn’t want to think. Besides, legally you can take whatever you want from me.’

‘That’s barbaric.’

‘That’s marriage.’

‘Not our marriage.’ He drew a long, uneven breath. ‘I hate to think that what passes between us has anything to do with—’

‘Lord Valentine and the girl at the inn? Lord Valentine and Miss Talbot? But on the crudest level it does. Love-making doesn’t always have to mean more than an exchange of pleasure. Surely there’s no harm if the pleasure is mutual.’

‘That reduces us to rutting animals.’

‘Perhaps animals have the right idea. They don’t try to think about everything so much.’

‘It cheapens what we have.’

They were driving down a lane overhung with yew trees. The face Mélanie turned to him was laced with shadows. ‘Nothing honest can cheapen what we have. Perhaps the question is, what do we have?’

A question they had never confronted in a marriage born of circumstance and exigency. A question to which even now he could not give an answer.

Dunmykel’s pale walls flashed into view. Charles turned the gig over to a groom and they went upstairs to Val’s bedchamber without further speech. He opened the mahogany wardrobe while Mélanie held a lamp. Behind the rows of Hessians, topboots, and silver-buckled shoes stood a green glass bottle. Charles uncorked it. The smooth, supple, seemingly undiluted aroma of good cognac. He took a sip and swirled it in his mouth. Rich, mellow, velvety. And something else, a faint, sickly sweet undertaste that probably would have been undetectable if one hadn’t been looking for it.

He handed the bottle back to Mélanie. She took a sip and nodded. ‘Laudanum.’

Charles recorked the bottle. ‘Lord knows Val’s capable of idiocy, but if he doctored Honoria’s brandy, I doubt he’d be fool enough to leave the bottle in his wardrobe and tell us where it is.’

‘So Miss Talbot drugged it herself—which I still find hard to believe if she was planning to go to your father’s room—or someone else doctored the bottle while it was in her room.’

Charles nodded. ‘Glenister’s the next one to talk to.’

‘And I should talk to Miss Newland about her affair with Lord Quentin and what Miss Talbot knew about it.’ Mélanie moved to the door. She turned back for a moment as though she meant to say more, scanned his face, and then swept from the room with a rustle of Parisian-stitched skirts.

‘Come in, Charles.’

His father and Glenister were seated side by side on the high-backed needlepoint chairs that flanked the fireplace in the study. Difficult to believe these were the same two men who had come to blows last night in Kenneth’s dressing room. Kenneth’s face was gray and the lines in his skin stood out more sharply than usual, but his features were under iron control. Glenister had shed his anguished bewilderment as a snake sheds its skin. They looked like generals ranged together against a common enemy, his father and his father’s closest friend, the one determined to marry the other’s ward, the other equally determined to enforce the marriage, despite the fact that the ward was pregnant with his son’s child.

‘You’ve learned something?’ Kenneth asked.

‘Yes, as it happens.’ Charles seated himself on a cushioned bench and leaned back, holding both men with his gaze. ‘Honoria was with child.’

The words lingered in the air like smoke from a pistol shot. The blood drained from Kenneth’s face. ‘If this is your idea of some sort of game, Charles—’

‘It’s no game, as I think your friend can tell you.’

Kenneth swung round in his chair. Glenister was staring straight ahead. He looked as though he had swallowed poison but was not surprised to have found it in his glass.

Kenneth’s gaze turned molten. ‘Frederick—’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Kenneth. How could I—’

‘Mélanie guessed and I bullied Val into a confession,’ Charles said. ‘Why were you determined to pass off your own grandchild as my father’s son or daughter, sir?’

Glenister pushed himself to his feet. ‘Just because we agreed to allow you to investigate doesn’t mean I have to sit here and listen to your impertinence, Charles.’

‘Would you rather I brought Val in and let you listen to his?’

Glenister’s mouth thinned. ‘By God—’

‘Val says Honoria was carrying his child and that he informed you of this fact shortly after her betrothal to my father was announced. He said you threatened to pack him off to Jamaica if he didn’t keep quiet about the pregnancy.’

‘Why the devil would I—’

‘That’s what I’m asking, sir.’

Glenister spun away and strode to the fireplace.

‘Frederick?’ Kenneth said in a quiet voice that was as dangerous as a lit fuse.

‘You’re taking Charles’s word over mine?’

‘Yes. But if you prefer, we can ask Val for the story.’

Glenister’s hands tightened on the gray marble of the mantel. ‘Val had been—apparently the affair had gone on for some time. Since Honoria was fifteen. That should give you a sense of the sort of man my younger son is. Would you want him married to your daughter?’

‘No.’ Kenneth was on his feet, gaze trained on Glenister. ‘But he isn’t my son.’

‘And God help me, he’s mine.’ Glenister looked at his old friend, head held high. ‘I had no notion of what was going on between him and Honoria until he came to me the day after your betrothal was announced and claimed Honoria was pregnant with his child. You must believe that.’

Kenneth continued to stare at him. Charles remembered that look from childhood. It could cut one to ribbons more effectively than the slice of a birch rod.

‘The boys were little more than babies when my wife died,’ Glenister said. ‘I indulged them. I indulged Honoria. Perhaps Evelyn was lucky that she was older when she came to our household.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I knew about Quen’s and Val’s escapades. They seemed harmless enough, if a bit crude. The sort of thing—’

‘You got up to yourself,’ Charles said.

‘If you like.’ Glenister risked a brief glance at Kenneth’s icy face, then stared at the wainscoted wall opposite. ‘Quen seemed the most likely to step over the line. I confess I was proud of Val.’

‘Until you learned he’d seduced Honoria,’ Kenneth said.

‘Damn it, a gentleman doesn’t—I thought he knew.’

‘Perhaps someone needs to write up a manual of gentlemanly conduct,’ Charles murmured. ‘They could be awarded when one leaves Harrow or Eton or when one receives membership at Brooks’s or White’s.’

‘This is no time for your radical nonsense, Charles. God knows I wouldn’t want my sons to be monks, but certain women are off limits.’

‘Difficult for the women who fall on the other side of the dividing line.’

‘Those sort of women know how the game is played. And if they don’t—’

‘Worse luck for them?’

Glenister grimaced but made no comment. ‘I was horrified by Val’s revelations. But much as it grieves me as a parent to say so, the thought of Honoria married to Val seemed even more horrific. I thought the best thing for Honoria was a stable marriage. To a man I trusted.’ He turned to Kenneth. Kenneth looked back at him with a gaze that could cut diamonds.

‘Because it had worked so well for my mother?’ Charles said.

‘Your mother and Honoria were very different women.’ Glenister looked Kenneth straight in the eye. ‘I’m sorry, Kenneth. But I was thinking of Honoria. With you she would have had stability, a household of her own, protection.’

Kenneth’s gaze offered no break in his defenses. ‘It didn’t occur to you to tell me, I suppose?’

‘Would you have married her if you’d known?’

Kenneth made no answer.

‘So I thought,’ Glenister said. ‘And damn it, it isn’t as though the baby would have been your heir. You already have a firstborn son.’

Kenneth cast a brief glance at Charles. ‘So I do.’ He turned his gaze back to Glenister. ‘Of course, if I’d gone ahead with breaking the entail, Honoria’s child by your son might have inherited this estate.’

Glenister looked away. ‘I know. I’m sorry. But I had to do what was best for her.’ His voice cracked, like wood smashed by a boot heel. ‘I may have failed as a father, but I owed her that much.’

Kenneth folded his arms across his chest and stared at his friend for a long, fraught moment. ‘It’s a good story, Frederick. You play the grieving father and guardian very well. But we both know damn well that isn’t how it happened. Now I think you’d better tell us the truth.’