Beneath a Silent Moon (24 page)

"But that's just it," Charles said in a gentle voice. "Someone did."

Lady Frances looked at Mélanie. "Did he leave his room during the night, my dear?"

Mélanie ignored her husband's gaze. "No," she said. "I'm quite sure I'd have known if he had."

Glenister frowned. "You might not have woken—"

"I suspect she would have," said Lady Frances.

"Yes," said Mélanie.

Glenister stared at her. "But—"

"Charles was holding me."

Glenister, a roue of more than thirty years' standing, coughed in embarrassment. Mélanie didn't add that Charles had been holding her because she'd woken, gasping and sweat-drenched, from one of the nightmares that still troubled her sleep far too often.

"You see," David said. His determination had overcome his usual tendency toward prudishness.

Lady Frances pressed her hands over her silken lap. "Obviously the only solution is to turn the matter over to Charles. We need to discover the truth, and Charles is the best equipped to do so."

"Don't look to me for argument," Kenneth said. "I think it's the wisest course of action."

Charles stared at his father. Kenneth looked back at him. His own gaze gave away nothing.

Glenister nodded. "I agree. Good God, we can't have strangers—"

"Airing our dirty linen," Lady Frances finished for him.

"Whatever we learn," Charles said, "there'll be no covering up the truth, no private vengeance. We turn the evidence over to the proper authorities."

An uneasy silence hung in the air. Neither Kenneth nor Glenister was used to acknowledging any authority but themselves. David, for all his good nature, was an earl's son, bred up to lead. Lady Frances was a duke's daughter, used to having her own way at the snap of her fingers.

"Agreed," David said at last. No one argued with him, which gave the illusion of consensus.

"How do we tell the others?" David asked.

Charles glanced at the mantel clock. It was just past three. "First thing in the morning, we'll gather everyone in the Gold Saloon and tell them all at once."

Kenneth moved to the door. "I see little more to be done until then. It's foolish to think of sleep, but I'm going to one of the guest rooms."

Lady Frances got to her feet. "Kenneth—"

He looked at her over his shoulder. "Fanny, you of all people should know I'm the last man on earth who needs to be coddled. I think I've spent sufficient time in a state of maudlin breakdown for one night. You needn't fear a repeat performance."

Glenister stared at the door as it closed behind Kenneth. "I always knew Kenneth was cold-blooded, but by God—"

"He was in shock when he found her, Lord Glenister," Mélanie said. "I suspect irony is Mr. Fraser's way of controlling his feelings."

"I sometimes wonder if Kenneth has feelings," Glenister muttered.

"So do I," said Lady Frances. "But I'll vouch for the fact that he was feeling something tonight, though I can't for the life of me tell you what it was."

Glenister glanced round the dressing room, as though looking for answers he could not find in the mirrored glass and Chippendale furnishings. His gaze went to the door to the bedroom. The reality of what had happened to his niece slammed home in his eyes. His face crumpled. He gave a sob, desperate and awkward, as though he had forgotten how to do so.

Lady Frances put her arm round him. "Life can be the very devil, Frederick. Come with me, you shouldn't be alone."

Glenister clutched her arm like a drowning man clutching a spar and allowed her to lead him from the room.

David looked after his uncle by marriage. "I should cry. I can't—I don't think I can really believe it's happened."

Charles drew a raw breath. "I told you we had time to get to the bottom of this. I'm sorry."

"That's hardly—oh, Christ. You aren't blaming yourself, are you, Charles?"

"Not to such an extent that I won't be able to function." Charles crossed to the door to the bedroom and turned the handle. "We need to examine Honoria further. Why don't you wait in here, David."

"I'm coming with you."

Charles nodded. "Mel, would you mind holding the lamp?"

Mélanie held the Italian bronzed lamp while Charles pulled back the sheet carefully so he could check for any threads or hairs caught against the linen. He undid the tiny row of buttons and peeled back Miss Talbot's nightdress. If her cool, naked flesh held any memories, he schooled himself not to reveal them. His face betrayed nothing as he lifted her arms, pushed aside her hair, looked inside her mouth.

It was Mélanie who noticed the slight swell of Miss Talbot's abdomen first. Not surprising, perhaps, in a woman who claimed to have a weakness for sweets. And yet—Mélanie reached out to touch the curve of flesh. "Charles."

He followed the direction of her gaze. His face froze, as though for a moment he would not acknowledge the reality of what lay before him. He laid his hand over Miss Talbot's stomach, the way Mélanie remembered him feeling for the stirring of their children within her womb.

"What?" David said from across the room. "What is it?"

Charles looked up at his friend. "Honoria was about two months pregnant."

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."