Chapter 34: : Chapter 33

Honoria Talbot Was laid to rest beneath a sky as gray as the salt-scarred granite of the tombstones in Dunmykel’s churchyard. A light drizzle began to fall midway through the service. Mélanie tugged at the silk-lined brim of the bonnet Blanca had trimmed with black ribbons for the occasion. The damp chill on her skin was a reminder that she was alive. A welcome reminder as she stared down at the lacquered dark wood that held the remains of a girl who had been many things, but who no one could doubt had been vibrant and vital.

She turned her head to look at her husband. His gaze was fixed on the casket, but Mélanie didn’t think he was seeing the shiny black wood. She couldn’t guess what visions haunted his gaze. Honoria as a child? Honoria in his bed in Lisbon? Honoria as his wife and the mother of his children? Perhaps all of them. Perhaps others that she couldn’t even guess at. But whatever he was feeling, he was doing his damnedest to suppress it so he could keep watch on the mourners. The suspects. He was doing a very good job of suppressing it, too, which was good for catching the killer but not for his own health.

They hadn’t talked about his father’s death. She doubted they ever would. On the walk to the chapel, it had occurred to her that the one place she could count on being able to make Charles feel something was in bed. Which was a pity, because they didn’t seem to be doing much sleeping lately, let alone have leisure to indulge in any other activities in their bedchamber.

The sound of Lord Glenister’s ragged breathing punctuated the droning of the minister. Glenister’s eyes were bright and his face red from more than the cold air. Evie stood beside him, her black-gloved hand curled round his arm, her face thin and somber. Lady Frances was at his other side, holding his arm in a way that was oddly maternal, for all they were much of an age. Her rouge stood out like spots of vermilion on her pale cheeks, but Mélanie suspected her grief was more for Kenneth Fraser, whose body still lay in the chapel, than for Honoria Talbot.

Glenister’s two sons stood with their shoulders almost touching, in a greater display of unity than Mélanie had ever seen from them. Quen stared at the coffin as though to keep his gaze focused on it throughout the funeral was a test he had to pass. Val looked at the toes of his boots, the wind-tossed yew branches that overhung the churchyard, the darkening slate of the sky. Everywhere but at the wooden box that held the body of his cousin and lover and of their unborn child.

David was white-faced but wore the determined expression of one who has been trained from the cradle to do his duty on formal occasions. Only his eyes, shadowed by grief and fear, gave him away. Simon looked as though he wanted to put his arm round him but knew David wouldn’t let him. Much as Mélanie felt about Charles.

Gisèle’s brows were drawn in concentration. She would neither look away nor pretend to a grief she didn’t feel. Every so often her gaze moved to Andrew Thirle, standing alone on the opposite side of the grave, as though she was torn between fear of seeing grief for Honoria Talbot in his eyes and a need to comfort him if the grief was there. When Andrew met her gaze, she gave a determined smile. Andrew smiled back, a brief lift of his mouth that did not touch the pain in his eyes. Charles had explained the story of Andrew’s parentage as they were dressing for the funeral, so Mélanie did not find Andrew and Gisèle’s behavior as inexplicable as she had the night before.

Tommy also stood alone, scowling at the coffin with a fierceness that betrayed the fact that keeping up his detached facade required as much concentration as a sword fight to the death against two foes at once (in which Mélanie had seen him engage on more than one occasion).

The children were not at the funeral, but Aspasia Newland had come to pay her respects to her former charge. Like Andrew and Tommy, she stood a little apart from the others. After one brief glance at Quen and another at Evie, she kept her gaze on the coffin. But her expression, more than any of the others’, was impossible to read.

The minister fell silent. The service was over. Charles touched her arm and jerked his head at Glenister.

Aspasia Newland paused beneath the lych-gate and looked over her shoulder at the funeral party. Charles Fraser had crossed to speak with Lord Glenister and Lady Frances. Fraser was always a difficult man to read, but Aspasia would swear she’d seen the ache of grief and the sting of guilt in his gaze as he looked down at Honoria’s casket. Now, however, he closed in on Honoria’s uncle with the relentlessness of a swordsman moving in for the kill.

His wife had gone to join David Mallinson and Simon Tanner. Mr. Belmont was speaking with Miss Fraser. Mr. Thirle, who had turned to go, lingered by the yew trees, frowning as he watched Mr. Belmont touch Miss Fraser on the shoulder and murmur what were probably condolences. Aspasia had not realized there was anything between Andrew Thirle and Gisèle Fraser, but even across the churchyard she could read the physical ache and mental torment in Mr. Thirle’s posture. The pain of giving up what you most want. A pain lessened not one whit by knowing one is acting for the best.

A similar stab cut through the tightly buttoned fabric of her bodice. At last, because she had made up her mind that she had to do so, she looked at Quen. He was standing between Evie and Lord Valentine, tension radiating off the set of his shoulders and the line of his back. He turned his head in her direction. All this time, and she could still draw him with a glance.

Quen murmured something to his brother and cousin, then came over to join her. A thousand memories washed over her as he crossed the rain-spattered ground. The blood rushed to her skin and her body hummed with a wave of pure animal need that she should be long past at her age.

He stopped about three feet away. Droplets of rain clung to his skin and his coat and the glossy beaver of his hat. His eyes were black, the way they got when he was angry or in pain. Or in the throes of passion, his fingers twisted in her hair, her name a ragged gasp on his lips.

‘Val’s seeing Evie back to the house,’ he said. ‘Or rather Evie’s seeing Val back. As usual, she’s the strongest one in the family, and Val’s picked this rather inconvenient time to display genuine feelings. You wanted to talk?’

His face seemed thinner. He’d aged in the five years since she’d left Glenister House, but he seemed to have aged more in the two days since Honoria’s death. The lines that bracketed his mouth were deeper and his voice had taken on an added weight, as though it had gone from cello to double bass. ‘I’m so sorry, Quen.’ She suppressed the impulse to put out her hand. ‘I haven’t had a chance to tell you.’

He swallowed. For a moment, the newfound maturity was gone and he was as young as Chloe. Then his gaze hardened. ‘I know Honoria made you leave Glenister House. She told me a month since.’

‘Yes.’ Aspasia smoothed the black ribbon she’d tied round the sleeve of her spencer. ‘Mrs. Fraser explained it to me.’

‘You must have hated her.’ He gripped the gatepost and avoided her gaze. ‘Honoria.’

Her fingers clenched involuntarily. ‘I confess to not feeling particularly charitable at the time. In truth, I didn’t feel very charitable when I saw her again in Scotland.’ She swallowed a welling of anger that stripped her throat tike acid.

‘But she didn’t deserve to die. I’m sorry for the pain her loss causes you and Evie, and your father and Lord Valentine.’

Quen frowned into the distance, as though he was searching for something in the curtain of mist that blanketed the landscape. ‘She was—lately I didn’t like her very much. But I did love her. And I miss her.’

‘She was your baby sister in all but name.’

‘Though Val seems to have taken the relationship in a rather different direction.’ His fingers tightened on the wood of the lych-gate. ‘Damn her, why couldn’t she stop her infernal meddling? If she had she might still be alive.’

Aspasia drew a breath. Her lungs felt weighted with lead. ‘You can’t know that.’ She nearly added ‘my love’ and bit the words back just in time. ‘You can’t blame yourself. Honoria had been—’

‘Oh, Christ, don’t start in with the bloody platitudes.’ The lych-gate shook beneath the force of his grip. ‘Not you, Aspasia. You’ve always been better than that.’

‘She was right about one thing at least, Quen. She was right when she told me to leave Glenister House. We couldn’t have continued as we were.’

‘No, of course not.’ He dropped his hand from the gate and fixed his gaze on one of the posts. ‘That’s the way of love affairs.’

She curled her gloved fingers inward to stem the impulse to put her hand on his shoulder. Touching him had always been like holding a brimstone match to hot coals, ever since that moment she’d stumbled on the library steps at Glenister House and found herself in his arms. An accident that truth to tell hadn’t been so very accidental. ‘It wasn’t fair to Honoria and Evie. Any scandal concerning their governess would have reflected on them. I should never—I was selfish—’

‘You were—’ He started to look at her, then glanced away. ‘Oh, God, what does it matter now?’

‘It matters because it ended badly.’

‘As opposed to all the illicit love affairs that end well?’

‘I’m older than you, Quen—’

‘As you never tire of holding over my head—’

‘And I should have been sensible—’

‘Why?’ He spun round, the burning gaze of the boy who had been her lover set in the stark face of the man he had become. ‘Love isn’t sensible. Love’s a fire that can’t be contained. Until it burns itself out. Bloody hell, I sound like a bad poet.’

The fire, which should have turned to ashes long since, warmed her skin beneath the sensible governess-gray bombazine of her gown. ‘But whatever else I did,’ she said, ‘perhaps my worst sin was cowardice. I had to leave, but I shouldn’t have left as I did. At the time it seemed the only prudent course, but I didn’t want you to think—my dear, I didn’t say good-bye because it would have been too painful. I hope you know that.’

‘I—’ He looked away again, ‘I did wonder.’

The rain must be getting worse, because she could feel it through her gown and spencer. Either that or her senses were keyed to feel everything more intensely. ‘I learned long since that happiness isn’t a permanent state. One has to take it in bits and pieces.’ She felt a smile, faint but real, break over her face. ‘There were a lot of bits and pieces in our time together. More than I’ve known before or since. However selfish it was, I’ll always be grateful for that.’

He looked at her then, really looked at her for the first time in five years. ‘I never thought—I—thank you, Spasy.’

The sound of the pet name that no one else but her now scattered family had ever used brought a welling of hot tears to her eyes. She blinked them back and tried to pretend she was standing in front of a schoolroom slate.

‘Will you be all right?’ Quen’s voice stroked along her nerve endings like a caress.

‘Of course. It must be the last two days. In general I’m not overset so easily.’

‘No, I mean—if Lady Frances finds out—’

She’d forgotten how chivalrous he could be. She glanced at her employer, who had gone to speak with the minister. ‘Lady Frances is a very tolerant woman. But even if she should dismiss me, I’ll manage. I’ve been managing rather well for nearly forty years.’

He gripped her arm. ‘If you’re in trouble, come to me.’

‘Quen, I could hardly—’

His fingers dug into her arm. ‘Promise.’

She managed a smile. ‘Are you offering me a position as governess to your daughters?’

He gave a short laugh. ‘I’m highly unlikely ever to set up a nursery. Respectable girls tend to run a mile from me.’

She put her hand over his own before she could think to restrain herself. Her throat tightened with a pang for the loss of something that had never been hers to keep. ‘As a governess, I know to my sorrow that respectable girls find disreputable young men indecently attractive.’

He grinned, with the sort of tenderness one shows not for a lover but for a former lover when the bitterness has passed. ‘The glamour would soon wear off if they had to live with me. Evie could vouch for that.’

Aspasia shook her head. Really, it was a wonder. How could a man with such a keen understanding be so blind. ‘Oh, my dear. Evie’s been head over ears in love with you for years. Haven’t you noticed?’

‘Evie?’ Quen dropped his hand from her arm. ‘Evelyn, my cousin?’

‘Who’s followed you about the room with her eyes since I first came to Glenister House when she was thirteen.’

‘But—’

‘I know, in every other way she seems a highly sensible young woman. But then what were you just saying about love not being sensible?’

‘But she’s only a chi—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Quen. Chloe’s a child. Evie is two-and-twenty. And even at thirteen, she was the most mature person in Glenister House.’

Quen tried to run his fingers through his hair. His hat thudded to the ground. ‘Evie knows me. Probably better than anyone, though I hope to hell she doesn’t realize half the things I’ve got up to. She couldn’t possibly—’

‘Love you?’

He bent down to retrieve his hat. ‘As more than a cousin-brother, she has no choice but to put up with.’

‘If you won’t take my word for it, you’ll have to work it out for yourself. And then see what you want to do about it.’

He shook the raindrops from his hat and stared at it for a moment, as though the dark fabric held visions of a future he’d never considered. ‘I should get back to the house. I don’t want to leave Evie to cope with Val for too long.’ He set the hat back on his head. ‘You’ve always been good at reading people, Aspasia. But Evie and I didn’t stumble out of the pages of one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels.’

Yet a thoughtful frown gathered between his eyes as he walked away. Aspasia watched him go. A cold ache spread through her that had nothing to do with the rain, Evie could be the making of Quen. Aspasia knew she’d done the right thing. The fact that she was quite failing to feel any of the comforting sense of virtue that should accompany that realization might have something to do with her inherent selfishness.

Of course, it also might have something to do with the part she hadn’t told Quen about. The fact that she wasn’t nearly so sanguine as she had managed to appear. That even now she could not think of his murdered cousin without feeling bitterness.

Not to mention guilt.

Charles crossed the rain-spattered churchyard to join Glenister and Lady Frances. His godparents, he realized. Lady Frances was holding Glenister’s arm and murmuring softly to him. They looked more like a couple than Charles’s real parents had ever done.

At his approach, both went still. He stopped a few feet off. ‘It does little good once again to say I’m sorry for what happened to Honoria, but I am. More than I can possibly express.’

The red-rimmed gaze Glenister turned to him had a core of steel. ‘You aren’t in the diplomatic corps anymore, Charles. What do you want?’

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Here?’ It was Lady Frances who spoke. ‘For God’s sake, Charles, Honoria is—’

‘Barely cold in her grave is the usual term, I believe. And whoever put her there is still loose. Time isn’t on our side.’ Charles looked at Glenister. ‘I thought it might be easier to talk away from the house.’

‘There’s nothing easy about any of this.’ Glenister’s gaze said that he had taken the gloves off last night and had no intention of putting them back on. He glanced at Lady Frances. ‘It’s all right, Fanny.’

She nodded, flashed a frowning glance at Charles, and moved off toward the minister. Glenister jerked his head toward the birch coppice and the path back to the house.

They walked a few steps in silence. ‘Well?’ Glenister said.

‘Why was your father paying money to my father?’

‘Why—’ Glenister swung round to look at him. ‘What the devil are you talking about, boy?’

Charles looked through the rain-filmed air at the man who had been both friend and enemy to Kenneth Fraser. ‘I found a ledger in Father’s dispatch box recording payments, and notes from your father that accompanied the payments.’

Surprise or fear or perhaps both flickered in Glenister’s gaze. ‘That’s ridiculous. Father would have had no reason to give money to Kenneth.’

‘Which beggars the question that he seems to have done so. Why?’

‘I haven’t the least idea. You should know better than anyone that a son isn’t always in his father’s confidence.’

‘No, but in my experience friends usually confide in each other. Father was your friend in those days.’

‘Your father’s and my friendship wasn’t based on those sorts of confidences.’ Glenister strode on, boots thudding against the damp leaves. ‘Kenneth was a barrister, don’t forget. There are plenty of reasons Father might have engaged his services.’

‘If Father had been pleading a court case for your father, surely you’d know of it. And payments to a barrister for pleading a case wouldn’t be locked away. Nor would they culminate in a payment of twenty-five thousand pounds.’

Glenister stopped in his tracks. Either his shock was genuine or he was a better actor than Charles had credited. ‘How much?’

‘Twenty-five thousand pounds. You’ve never found a record of it in your father’s papers?’

‘Good God, no.’ Glenister put up a hand to knock a birch leaf from the brim of his hat. ‘That’s as much as Kenneth’s legacy—’

‘I suspect it may well be the legacy. The one that was supposedly from Father’s cousin in Jamaica. The one he bought Dunmykel with.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. We know where the legacy came from.’

‘Do we?’

‘Kenneth would have told me—’

‘He would have told you about the legacy, though he didn’t tell you about the payments from your father?’

Glenister stirred a pile of rain-soaked leaves with the toe of his boot. ‘You may find this difficult to believe, Charles, but most men from time to time find themselves involved in entanglements from which it is difficult to break free. Kenneth was clever and discreet and ambitious. And ruthless, as I know to my cost. Father might have engaged him to negotiate with one or more former mistresses.’

‘To pay them off? Or perhaps to look after children he’d sired?’

Glenister looked at Charles sharply but made no comment.

‘Did your father have by-blows?’ Charles asked.

‘None that I know of. But as I said, I was hardly in his confidence.’

‘Did your father have anything to do with the Elsinore League?’

‘Of course not. We hardly wanted our parents to observe our antics. The Elsinore League were Kenneth’s and my friends from university.’

‘And a few more you met abroad.’

‘A few.’

‘Did your father know about the Elsinore League?’

‘I sincerely hope not. Good God, would you have wanted Kenneth to know if you’d—’

‘I seriously doubt I ever did anything my father would have found remotely shocking.’

Glenister gave a short laugh. ‘You’ve always been honest, I’ll give you that.’ He started walking again. ‘Whatever the reason, surely any payments my father made to Kenneth can’t have anything to do with Honoria’s death. They’re ancient history.’

‘Like the Elsinore League?’

‘Precisely. Look, Charles, the Elsinore League were a young men’s club, an excuse for drinking champagne and claret and making outrageous wagers and sampling the pleasures of the demimonde. Whatever fancies you may have in your head, that’s the truth, pure and simple.’

‘I’m no longer sure any of us is capable of telling the truth,’ Charles said. ‘Or that I’d recognize it if we did so.’

Quen paused inside the drawing room and stared through the French windows at the slender, chestnut-haired, gray-gowned figure on the terrace. Evie. As familiar as the taste of whisky, the turn of a card, the rattle of dice. As familiar, but as pure as a whiff of Highland air amid the smoke and scent and liquor of a gaming hell. Surely, surely he’d have known if her feelings for him were more than cousinly. Yet could he claim to have known Honoria? Or Val?

He turned the handle and stepped onto the terrace. ‘You’ll get wet.’

She looked round and smiled, though her eyes were dark. ‘I like the fresh air. It clears away the unwelcome ghosts.’

He joined her at the balustrade. ‘Where’s Val?’

‘I persuaded him to lie down. I don’t think he slept more than an hour or two last night.’

‘Nor did you.’

‘Yes, but Honoria wasn’t going to have my baby.’ She cast a sidelong glance at him. ‘Did you know? About Honoria and Val?’

‘Not until Val told me last night. I seem to have been the only one in the family not in on the secret.’ Quen’s hands tightened on the granite. ‘I wanted to thrash Val, but he seems to have picked now of all times to grow a conscience. I couldn’t do anything to him worse than what he’s doing to himself.’ He looked down at the pale curve of Evie’s cheek beneath the close-fitting plaited straw of her bonnet. ‘How long have you known?’

She stared at her black-gloved hands, resting on the balustrade. ‘I’ve suspected almost from the first. I’ve been certain for two years at least. I—’

He started to touch her shoulder, unconsciously as he would have done before Aspasia’s words in the churchyard, then dropped his hand. ‘You couldn’t have controlled Honoria, Evie. No one could.’

She stared out across the gardens at the gray, churning sea. ‘The last thing Mama said to me when she put me in the carriage to go live at Glenister House was ‘Be a good girl.’ I nodded so solemnly, as though it was as simple as remembering to clean my teeth or put on fresh linen every morning.’

‘Evie—’

‘No, listen, Quen, you don’t know. You don’t know me. I’m not sure I want—but the last few days have been so precarious. I’m afraid if I don’t tell you the truth now I’ll never get a chance.’

‘The truth about what?’

. She drew a breath. ‘When I first came to Glenister House, I’d hear the gossip and the whispers. I’d try to sort out the entanglements in the Glenister House set, who was sharing whose bed. It was years before I realized it didn’t matter. Sooner or later everyone slept with everyone else. Even then it never occurred to me that I—oh, God, Quen, I’m so ashamed.’

‘Why?’

‘Because when I realized what was happening between Honoria and Val, my first reaction wasn’t shock or horror or even concern for Honoria.’ Her hands tightened, pulling at the fabric of her gloves. She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead. ‘It was why couldn’t this be Quen and me.’

Truth. Clear, incontrovertible, and devastating. He stood still, robbed of the power of speech or even thought.

Evie drew a sharp breath and leaned into him, and he closed his arm round her.