Beneath a Silent Moon (49 page)

"Being a pest. It's all right, I can say it. She's my little sister."

Andrew swallowed. "Yes. Then I started to notice that she wasn't just being Lady Bountiful with the tenants, she was asking some very keen questions. She'd come to see me in my office and we'd end up talking for hours and I realized—"

"That she's not a child anymore."

"No, she isn't." Andrew stood by the fireplace, shoulders hunched as though he were struggling against the force of some burden that was too great to bear. "You told me once—one of those nights when you were home from Oxford and we sat up drinking my father's whisky—that you didn't believe you were capable of falling in love. I thought that was a bit bleak. I never doubted I could feel it. I'd seen it. My—parents—loved each other. But I'd never felt it for myself, until—" He shook his head, his eyes dark with unvoiced longing. "It's a funny thing when it finally happens. And when you know you shouldn't—I tried to pretend it wasn't happening. I tried to think of her as my employer's daughter, my friend's little sister." He stared into the cold grate. "I'm older than she is. More than ten years. I should have been stronger."

Andrew had always had scruples, but Charles was surprised at the torment in his friend's voice. "Andrew, if this has something to do with your guilt
over
Donald Fyfe's death—"

"That's the least of it. Let me finish." Andrew's voice had the bleak scrape of an iron shackle. "One night Gelly and Lady Frances dined with my mother and me. It started to snow during dinner and Gelly wanted to see it. We took a walk. She was wearing a white wool cloak and snowflakes caught in her hair." He drew a breath as though about to confess to a mortal sin. "I kissed her. My mother caught sight of us from the sitting room windows. After Gelly and Lady Frances had gone home, she told me—she explained why it had to end at once."

"Whatever she might have feared Father would say—"

"It isn't that. Or not for the reasons you think." Andrew moved to the window and stared at the sliver of night-black glass between the curtains. "Didn't you ever wonder that Maddie and I look so completely unalike? We always used to be embarrassed because people would take us for sweethearts rather than brother and sister. She's my twin and yet we don't even look like siblings."

"A lot of siblings don't."

"But you can see Mother and Father in Maddie. Mother's mouth and eyes, Father's nose and hair. They're knit into the fabric of who she is. Now you can see it in her children as well. I look like I belong to another family. Which makes sense now. Mother wasn't pregnant with twins, Charles. She didn't give birth to twins. She went away to have Maddie. To stay with her parents, the story was. But the truth is she was paid to leave Dunmkyel and have the baby in secret. And to bring back two babies and claim they were both hers."

"Who?" Charles said, though the answer hung between them, poisoning the air. "Who paid her?"

"Can't you guess? The same person who gave her the second baby and paid her to raise it as her own. Your father. Gisèle's father." Andrew turned and looked Charles full in the face. "My father, brother."

Charles stared across his father's study at his oldest friend. "Knowing Father, I don't know why I'm remotely surprised."

"That's all you have to say? Jesus, Charles, I almost—with your sister. Our sister." Andrew pressed his hand over. his eyes.

Charles moved round the desk, watching the man who, like Quen, might be Kenneth Fraser's son. "Andrew, there's something you should know. Actually, I'd have thought you already did know it, given the gossip."

"Charles, nothing can—"

"Hear me out. From my earliest memories, my parents could barely be in the same room without baring their teeth. Gisèle was born twelve years into the marriage. Mother and Father had stopped sharing a bed long since. None of us knows exactly who Gisèle's father is, but it's almost certainly not Kenneth Fraser."

Andrew lifted his head to look at Charles. Hope leaped in his eyes, then was ruthlessly quenched. "Almost," he echoed. "You can't know for a certainty."

"I'm as certain as I can be." Charles leaned against the desk. "Certain enough to have no qualms about you and my sister."

"And if the truth got out?" Andrew strode back to the fireplace. "Even if you're right, the world assumes Kenneth
Fraser is Gisèle's father. If Gelly and I married"—his voice caught for a moment, like rope frayed raw—"and then there was gossip about Kenneth Fraser being my father as well, what would that do to Gelly? What would it do to any children we might have?"

"There's no reason the world should ever know Kenneth Fraser fathered you. It's remained secret for thirty-odd years."

"It's remained secret because I've been out of the way of the world. If I married the Duke of Rannoch's granddaughter, people would pay attention. Secrets have a way of working their way to the surface at inopportune moments. The past twenty-four hours have proved mat."

"Gossip can't destroy a marriage. Not if two people—"

"Really love each other?" Andrew's shoulders shook with bitter laughter. "Christ, Charles, this ought to be funny. You arguing for the power of love to overcome all obstacles."

"It depends on the people involved. You've been steadfast in your loyalties for as long as I've known you, and Gelly showed tonight that she's a lot more mature than I believed her to be. Don't you think she should have a say in this?"

"Brilliant, Charles. How exactly would you suggest I explain it?"

"So you haven't told her any of this?"

"You think I'd tell her that the man she fancies herself head over ears in love with may be her own brother?"

"So instead you told her it couldn't go any further between the two of you and didn't offer an explanation."

Andrew's jaw clenched. "More or less."

"Which has her thinking that you love someone else or that she's in some way inadequate. It can be particularly painful to be nineteen, Andrew. Even imagined slights hurt like salt on a wound."

"Do you think I haven't wanted to write to her these past months?" The words seemed to be ripped from Andrew's throat. "Haven't picked up the pen and written only to toss the letters on the fire? Haven't tormented myself with imagining what might have been? My God, you don't know how sickeningly happy I was when she arrived at Dunmykel just now. I had to do something—anything—to push her away. Even letting her think I cared for Miss Talbot. Because when I'm with her a part of me doesn't care that there's no hope for us. A part of me wants her anyway. Even believing she's my sister."

"And now I'm telling you she's not your sister."

"Think, Charles. Even if it weren't for my parentage, what do I have to offer Gisèle? I'm an Edinburgh lawyer turned estate manager. Not to mention a former smuggler. She's an heiress, a duke's granddaughter. She could—"

"Oh, for God's sake, don't go all lending-library novel about the disparity of fortune bit. Gelly's got enough money for both of you."

"And you don't think people would comment on that?"

"Is that what you're letting stand in the way of my sister's and your happiness? That people would call you a fortune hunter? I thought you were tougher than that."

"Are you so sure marrying me would make her happy?"

"Gelly demonstrated that fairly convincingly this evening."

"I'm not talking about tonight, I'm talking about five years from now. Ten years from now. She's nineteen, Charles. I'm almost two-and-thirty. Her family were smashed to bits when she was eight years old. It hurt her more than anyone realizes when your mother died and then when—"

"I left."

"Yes." Andrew looked him full in the face. "I understand why you did, but Gelly doesn't. She's got used to people leaving her. Sometimes I think she's grabbing onto me like a spar in a shipwreck. How long would it be before she realized what she'd thought was love was really infatuation, before she decided she wanted someone closer to her age, someone who moved in the same world, someone who could let her be a grand London hostess—"

"Someone like Val Talbot?"

Andrew grimaced. "Someone of good character who could offer her all those things. Jesus, what kind of a man would I be if I married her knowing I can't give her what she deserves?"

Mélanie's face the day he'd asked her to be his wife flickered before Charles's gaze. He had spelled out precisely what he was offering her—protection, his name, care for her child. A cold substitute for what she deserved. "You don't know you can't give her what she deserves, Andrew. You can't know it."

"What the hell do I have to offer her?"

Charles recalled the way Andrew had looked up at Gisèle when he recovered consciousness in the cottage, his gaze stripped naked with vulnerability. "Yourself."

Andrew gave a mirthless laugh.

"Don't scoff. It's a damnably difficult gift to give."

"Damn it, if you're such an expert on marriage—"

"What?"

"Look, Charles. I know you just found your father's body smashed to pieces. I know this must be hell for you. But I saw how much it hurt Mélanie in the tower just now when you could scarcely even look at her."

Only someone who knew him so well could strike so effective a blow. Charles swallowed, tasting the emptiness inside himself. "I said giving yourself was a great gift. I never claimed to be much of a success at gift-giving myself." He scraped a hand through his hair. "I hate to see you and Gelly unhappy."

Andrew shook his head. "Same old Charles. You still haven't learned that you can't fix things for everyone." He strode back to the desk. "Let's look at your father's papers."

"Our father's."

"He never—" Andrew cast a glance round Kenneth Fraser's study. The paintings Kenneth had collected hung on the walls, the bronzes and marbles stood on the desk and tables, the smell of the snuff Kenneth had blended in London lingered in the air. "I can't think of him that way. I had a father."

"A far better one." Charles moved back round the desk.

Andrew stared down at the blotter. "I told you Father never confronted me about the smuggling. But not long after he lied to the excisemen for me, I overheard him say to Mother that he'd always worried blood would tell. I didn't understand it. Not then."

"I saw him with you, Andrew. He loved you. The way a parent should love a child."

"I think he did, though God knows I didn't give him a lot of reason to in the last years of his life. The devil of it is, I'll never be able to ask him about any of it now." Andrew opened a ledger. "What do you want to look at first?"

Charles stared down at the columns of figures in the ledger. Routine estate expenses, but the dates made him realize something about Andrew's story. "Father didn't own Dunmykel yet when you were born."

"No, it still belonged to his godfather." Andrew ran his finger down the page. "But he must have been familiar enough with the estate to realize my parents would be good people to take charge of his by-blow."

"He hadn't yet come into his legacy from his uncle in Jamaica, either. He was a London barrister without much to his name in the way of fortune."