Beneath a Silent Moon (47 page)

"I'm sorry, too." Charles looked down at her, face serious but eyes soft. "I'm sorry you didn't feel you could tell me the truth. But I'd be an even greater idiot than I've already proved myself if I blamed you for that." He paused. "I'm glad you felt able to confide in Andrew."

Gisèle fingered the lapel of Andrew's coat. "Andrew's a good Mend. He's always been kind to me."

Tommy lifted his brows at Mélanie, as though to say
I can't for the life of me make sense of what's going on between those two
. Mélanie was inclined to agree.

Equipped with torches lit at the kitchen fire, the five of them went through the concealed opening in the lodge's book room and along the passage to the main house. The library was the only room in Dunmkyel that was actually built into the original thirteenth-century keep. It jutted into what had once been the Great Hall on the keep's first floor. A side door in the library gave onto the turnpike stairs that led to the next level of the keep. Charles opened it, holding his torch aloft. They stepped into close air, heavy with the expected smell of dust and damp and inactivity. And another, unexpected smell—sickly, sweet, choking. The smell of battlefields and hospitals and scenes from her own past that Mélanie would never be able to blot out.

"What the devil—" Andrew said.

Charles shifted his torch. The light spilled over the steep granite stairs and onto a crumpled form lying at their base.

Gisèle gasped.

"Stay here, Gelly." Charles gripped her arm, but Gisèle pulled away from him and ran forward. Charles followed her. Something made Mélanie hang back, as did Tommy and Andrew. Brother and sister bent over the body.

It was Gisèle who spoke, in the same flat voice Charles used when emotions threatened to overwhelm him. "It's Father."

A bizarre mosaic of images swam before Charles's eyes. A tuft of graying light brown hair. The gleam of midnight-blue superfine. The red-black sheen of blood—spilled over the floor, spattered on the steps, clinging to the remnants of hair and coat and twisted limbs.

Someone had bashed in Kenneth Fraser's skull, reducing the sardonic features to a pulpy mass. The congealing blood told its own story, but Charles dropped to his knees and reached for his father's wrist. Cold, dead flesh, no trace of a pulse. Charles got to his feet and pulled his sister away from the wreckage on the ground before them. "Yes," he said, "it looks as though it is Father. He's been dead for some time."

Gisèle's breathing sounded like cracked ice. She spun round in his hold, flung her arms round his neck, and buried her face in his cravat.

Charles stroked her hair. "We should move him. Andrew—"

Andrew touched him on the arm. "Belmont and I can see to it."

"It's all right, I'm—"

"You're not 'fine,' Fraser." Tommy brushed past him. "You wouldn't be human if you were. Last I checked, you were still human. Barely." He bent over the body, as did Andrew.

Mélanie squeezed his shoulder. "Darling." It was all she said. It was all he could take. He managed a brief glance into her eyes. He could handle the others, but he feared
Mélanie's comfort would shatter him. "Mel, can you take Gisèle—"

"I'm not a baby, Charles. Don't." Gisèle jerked out of his arms. "I have to go check on Ian."

"I'll go."

"You can come with me." Gisèle started up the stairs.

Charles ran after her. "Examine Father," he said over his shoulder to Mélanie. "See what you can learn."

He followed his sister up two flights of turnpike stairs, worn by centuries, to the old solar. The light of his torch showed the old wooden ladder still in place beneath the trapdoor that led to the top level of the tower. He caught Gisèle's hand. "Let me go first. Just in case."

She looked at him for a moment and then nodded and stepped aside. "Don't be alarmed, Ian," she called as he climbed the splintery ladder and pushed open the trap door.

"Miss Fraser, are you all right?" said an anxious voice from above. "I heard—"

The voice died as Charles climbed another rung of the ladder and lifted his torch into the close damp of the top tower chamber. A startled pair of eyes looked at him from across the room.

"You must be Ian," Charles said. "I'm Gisèle's brother Charles. We haven't met, at least not since you were a boy. It's all right, Gisèle told me what happened last night."

Some of the tension drained from the young man's face. He was probably no more than seventeen, with pale skin gone paler from shock and clear eyes that gleamed green even in the shadows. His right leg was stretched before him at an awkward angle, bound round with several lengths of lint, the lower half of his trouser leg cut away. "I'm sorry, Mr. Fraser. I told Miss Fraser she shouldn't involve herself—"

"My sister is a very strong-willed woman." Charles climbed into the room, ducking his head beneath the low ceiling. The ladder creaked as Gisèle followed.

Ian's gaze darted to her. "I thought I heard voices down below. I couldn't make out the words, but they sounded angry. Then there was some sort of crash. I thought Wheaton had come for me. Then I was worried something had happened to you. I tried to get to the stairs, but I couldn't manage with my leg."

"It wasn't Wheaton." Charles knelt beside the young man. "Someone bludgeoned my father to death at the base of the stairs."

"God in heaven." Ian's gaze went back to Gisèle. "I should have got downstairs if I had to roll all the way."

"He'd have been dead before you could have got down," Charles said. "How long ago did you hear the crash?"

"Three hours. Perhaps four. I haven't much sense of time since I've been here."

"Could you tell if the voices you heard were male or female?"

"I thought they were men. But truth to tell, I couldn't swear to it."

"Let's get you downstairs, lad. The cold won't help you heal, and my wife should look at your leg."

Between them he and Gisèle got Ian down the tower, Charles half carrying him a good part of the way. The need for action, too strenuous to leave room for thought, was a welcome tonic.

Andrew and Tommy had lain Kenneth Fraser on the sofa in the library, wrapped in Tommy's coat. Mélanie was kneeling beside the body. "I'd guess he's been dead about four hours," she said. "Judging by the marks, the weapon looks to have been a rock or something jagged rather than a cudgel. The initial blow probably knocked him out."

Charles nodded. Perhaps later, when he was capable of feeling, he'd be relieved that his father hadn't suffered. "You should look at young Ian," he said, pressing Ian into a chair.

Gisèle walked over to the sofa with deliberate steps. Andrew moved toward her, but she put out her hand to stop him. "No. It's all right." She looked down at their father. "They didn't let me see Mama after she died. I always thought it would have been easier if I had. It never seemed real somehow." She drew a breath. "This is real."

"Yes." Charles squeezed her shoulders and was surprised when she leaned into him for a moment. They stood together looking at their father's body in the room in which their mother had died.

"Do you want to wake everyone?" Andrew asked. "Or wait until morning?"

"To begin with," Charles said, "I want Glenister."

Gisèle looked up at him. "You're going to tell him about Father?"

"I'm going to show him," Charles said.

"Without warning him? Charles, that's monstrous."

"So's murder," Charles replied.

Glenister responded to Charles's knock at his bedchamber door with a quickness that suggested he hadn't been sleeping. Sick dread filled his eyes. "It isn't Evie?" he said. "Or the boys?"

"No." Charles took pity on him thus far. "It isn't anything to do with them. Come down to the library, sir. There's something I want you to see."

Glenister followed him downstairs without attempting to press him for more information. He paused on the library threshold, taking in the assembled crowd, then strode into the room and stopped short at the sight of the body on the sofa. He stared down at the man who had been his—friend? enemy? lover?—as though he could not take in the sight before him. Then he spun away. "Good God, what happened?"

"I thought perhaps you could tell us," Charles said.

"You think I had something to do with—"

"I think it's past time we discussed certain questions. Would you prefer to do it here or in private?"

Glenister held Charles's gaze for a moment. Without another word he turned on his heel and strode into the study. Charles followed.

Glenister crossed to the velvet-curtained windows, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the library. "Someone killed him."

Charles leaned against the closed door. "That much seems obvious. He was overheard arguing with someone."

Glenister's hands closed into fists. "Why the devil would I kill your father?"

"Among other things, because you admitted you'd hated him for years in this very room just hours ago."

Glenister drew in his breath as though to let lose a stream of invective. Then he sighed and regarded Charles with the look he'd used to wear when he'd stopped by the Dunmykel nursery with a box of chocolates. "For God's sake, use your head, lad. Why the devil would I admit I'd sunk so low as to try to use my own niece to get my revenge on Kenneth and then turn round and kill him?"

"Perhaps because you blamed him for Honoria's death."

Glenister's eyes turned tiger bright. "Are you telling me Kenneth killed her?"

"Do you think he did?"

"If I was sure of it, I'd have broken his neck last night. You must believe that."

Charles advanced a half-dozen paces into the room. "Who was the man in the secret passage last night?"

"I haven't the least idea."

"He was here to meet someone. I'd wager a guess that someone was Father or you."

"It's your father's house."

"In which you and Father have indulged in games for more than a quarter-century."

Glenister dropped down on the sofa, pulling his dressing gown close round him. "I thought you believed this man couldn't have killed Honoria."

"I do. But he may well have killed my father. It's time you told me the truth, sir."

"The truth about what?"

"The Elsinore League."

Glenister's fingers closed on the silk at the neck of his dressing gown. "What the hell are the Elsinore League?"

"I was hoping you could tell me. Mr. Wheaton—"

"Who?"

"Wheaton. A smuggler who ran errands for you and my father. He says you drank and whored—"

"Damn it, of course we—"

"And smuggled works of art." Charles flicked a gaze at the Gentileschi painting of Cleopatra.

"If that were true, we wouldn't be the only people in Britain to do so. Damn it, Lord Elgin was hardly aboveboard with those marbles of his."

"Aunt Frances thinks you were lovers."

"What?"

"It's a reasonable assumption," Charles said. "David would like to think acts of debauchery only take place between people of the opposite sex, but I'm not so naive."

"Oh, for God's sake. I didn't even like your father."

"As Aunt Frances would say, liking has very little to do with it. And then there's Castlereagh, who thinks the Elsinore League were a spy ring begun by French revolutionaries."