Beneath a Silent Moon (53 page)

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.

Colin cuddled up against Mélanie on the nursery window seat and lifted his dark gaze to her face. "Did Grandpapa die the same way Noria did?"

"Not exactly, darling. We're not sure why either of them died."

"But one must have something to do with the other, mustn't it?" Chloe, curled up at Mélanie's other side, twisted the end of her hair ribbon round her finger. "I mean two mur—two people dying in two days can't be a coincidence."

"No, it's probably not coincidence," Mélanie said. "But we're not sure what it means."

Colin wrinkled his nose. "I'm sorry Grandpapa's dead. But he didn't like me very much."

Mélanie swallowed. That, as Tommy would say, was a poser. "Colin—"

"He didn't." Colin sounded more matter-of-fact than upset. "He always looked at me like I'd been naughty, even when I hadn't done anything."

Chloe shifted her position on the window seat, rustling the chintz cushions. "I don't think he liked anyone much. Except sometimes I used to think he liked Mama, and she didn't know it."

Mélanie cast a swift, involuntary glance at Lady Frances's daughter. Chloe looked back at her with an unblinking blue gaze.

Colin tugged at Mélanie's sleeve. "Did Daddy cry? Grandpapa was his father. I'd cry if Daddy died."

Mélanie's throat closed. "Daddy's had a lot to worry about. He hasn't—"

"Had time to cry," Charles said from the doorway.

Colin grinned, started to get up and run to his father, and then sat still. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry your lather's dead."

Charles crossed the flowered nursery carpet and knelt before the window seat. "I'm sorry, too. But I hadn't seen much of my father in a long time. Not all fathers and sons get on as well as you and I do. As I hope we always will."

Mélanie felt Colin relax against her. As usual, he seemed to find the truth far more reassuring than sugar-coated lies.

"Mama looked like she'd been crying when she was here this morning," Chloe said.

Charles touched his young cousin's arm. "She'd known my father for a long time. Longer than any of us."

Chloe nodded, again unblinking.

The children asked fewer questions than they had when Mélanie had told them of Honoria's death. Even Chloe seemed a bit worried about the possible answers if she probed too deep. Miss Newland, returned from the funeral with a composed face but eyes rather brighter than usual, proposed to take the children for a walk.

"Let's go back to the study," Charles said when they had seen Miss Newland and the children off. "I want to look at the ledger again."