Beneath a Silent Moon (58 page)

"Old Lord Glenister was an appalling high-stickler," Lady Frances said. "He cut off poor Georgiana—Cyril and Frederick's sister—without a shilling when she eloped with a man he deemed ineligible. Of course, it didn't help that she gave birth to Evie a scant five months after the elopement. Her reputation never recovered." She shook her head. "When I think of the way Frederick and Cyril carried on their affairs with impunity while their sister suffered miserably for one love affair—which ended in marriage—it's enough to make me take that Wollstonecraft woman seriously."

"Quite," Charles said. "But if Frederick or Cyril had actually married a girl their father had deemed unsuitable, he wouldn't have been able to look the other way."

"No. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if old Lord Glenister had tried to cover up such a marriage. Or if he turned to Kenneth for help in doing so."

Charles ran his finger over the keys. "The sort of woman you say Cyril favored has Andrew's coloring."

Lady Frances pursed her lips. "I would have barely been out of the schoolroom when Andrew was born. I never heard any gossip about Cyril having a by-blow. But if you're asking if Andrew looks as though he could be the son of the sort of woman Cyril favored—yes. Very much so."

"Did Father ever say anything to you that would indicate payment from old Lord Glenister was the real source of his legacy?"

Lady Frances fingered her diamond bracelet. "He hated to discuss the legacy, which in itself may be suggestive." A
fold of her lace overskirt had caught on the diamonds. She disengaged it. "Though he did once say—it was late one night. We were at Dunmykel. In the library. We'd just—suffice it to say, Kenneth was in the condition in which gentlemen are likely to make confidences."

A spasm crossed Charles's face, as though he could have lived without this image of his father and his aunt engaged in such an act in his favorite room at Dunmykel. "And?"

"I was looking at a Caravaggio drawing Kenneth had just bought. I said he'd been lucky to have acquired a fortune that allowed him to indulge his tastes. Kenneth turned his head toward me and said, 'Wise men make their own luck.' Which doesn't precisely fit with his fortune being founded on a legacy that was a lucky chance."

Charles nodded. He moved to the door as though done with the conversation, then turned back to his aunt. "Aunt Frances, did Father ever—"

"What?"

Mélanie felt the air quicken between her husband and Lady Frances.

After a seeming eternity measured by the trickle of wax down the tapers on the mantel, Charles shook his head. "Never mind. It doesn't really matter now."

Gisèle twisted round on one of the two straight-backed chairs on the first-floor landing to look at Mélanie. They were taking their turn keeping watch over the upstairs corridors. The long-case clock by the stairhead had just chimed out a quarter past one. "How on earth did you get Charles to agree to sleep? I'd have thought he'd insist on sitting guard all night."

Mélanie shifted her position on the chair, conscious of the weight of her pistol in the pocket of her gown. "Even Charles knows his limits. Though he's constantly testing them."

"What about you?"

"I know my limits." Mélanie twitched her gray jaconet skirt smooth. "I slept a few hours earlier. Charles will do better without me."

Gisèle studied her as though she were a half-deciphered text. "I used to not be able to make sense of the two of you. You don't act romantic in the least, not the way one expects lovers to act—"

"We're not lovers. We're married."

"But then you do that thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you have a whole conversation just looking at each other, without talking at all," Gisèle said, as though Mélanie was very slow not to have realized what she meant.

"That's what happens when you live with someone for a long time."

Gisèle shook her head. "I've seen lots of married couples. I've never seen anyone quite like the two of you. And then there's the way Charles looks at you when he doesn't think you're noticing."

"How?" Mélanie asked before she could stop herself.

"Like Romeo gazing up at Juliet on her balcony. I hoped—" Gisèle drew in her breath, so sharply that Mélanie felt the stir of air. "If I can't have that, I think I'd rather not be married at all."

Mélanie looked into her sister-in-law's eyes, bright with the reflected flame of the candle on the table between them. Any answer she might have made seemed to stick against painful truths in her throat. What could she say to a girl of nineteen ready to turn her back on love? It's all an illusion? She'd have said that once. Did she even believe it anymore? Could she believe in anything more lasting?

She was spared the necessity of speech by Simon's appearance. "I'll take over." He touched Gisèle on the shoulder. "Go get some rest, Miss Fraser."

"Oh, goodness, I'm not Charles. I couldn't sleep a wink tonight. I'll look in on Ian. Andrew and Evie are sitting with him."

Simon watched Gisèle walk off down the corridor, then sat beside Mélanie. His brows were drawn and an unvoiced fear lurked behind his eyes.

"What is it?" she said.

"I found something tucked away behind David's whisky bottle. I'm damned if I can explain what it means, but I think I know who drugged David's whisky."

"Who?" Mélanie said.

Simon uncurled his clenched palm to reveal a strip of ice-blue silk. "Honoria Talbot."

Small arms closed round his neck like a vise. Panicked breathing thudded against his chest. Molten flames shot up about them. He glanced round for a means of escape. He couldn't feel the heat of the flames. Glass enclosed them, protected them, imprisoned them. The flames beat against it.

What's happening, Charles
? Honoria's voice sounded in his ear, desperate and insistent.

Charles sat up in bed, digging his fingers into his scalp, caught between sleep and waking. He could still feel Honoria cringing to him, though he knew she wasn't there.

The black streaks of the bedposts. The shadowy mass of dressing table and chairs. The lingering scent of his wife's perfume. He was surrounded by his room at Dunmykel, yet the pounding of his heart and the sweat pouring through his hair made the dream world as vivid as reality.

Mélanie
. He wanted to run to her and pour out his fears into her lap. But he couldn't burden her. He couldn't lay himself open. He pushed back the bedclothes, pulled on his boots, and stumbled to the door, dressed in the shirt and breeches he'd been sleeping in. Mélanie was to the left, in the central corridor, where she could keep watch on all the occupied bedchambers save their own, deepest into the north wing. He ignored the tug of her presence (insistent, battering, seductive, like the notes of the sonata she loved to play) and turned to the right, toward what he knew he had to face.

The far end of the north wing. The day nursery, smelling of chocolate and buttered bannocks, filled with ghostly shapes in the darkness. He crossed to the windows by instinct, tugged back the curtains, jerked open the shutters. Cool black glass. Protecting, imprisoning. As it had in the dream. As it had when he was a boy of ten and looked out the window of another nursery to see a molten glow on the lawn beyond.

The memory, buried for years, returned in a flood. He'd been staying at his grandfather's. He'd woken and looked out the window of the nursery in his grandfather's house to see the glow of flames out the window. Not a fire, but the lamps and flambeaux of a carriage arriving late at night. He'd looked down and seen the Marquis of Glenister ascending the steps of his grandfather's house, shoulders stooped beneath a burden the ten-year-old Charles had not understood.

What's happening, Charles
? Honoria had slipped into the nursery and tugged at his nightshirt, demanding an explanation he couldn't give. All he could do was hold her close, imparting a comfort he feared was as false as his own mother's promises.

The nursery door had jerked open. The thud of the oak and the rattle of the hinges reverberated through his memory. A dark figure had half fallen into the room.
Dear God
. Glenister's voice, hoarse but still recognizable. He'd wrenched Honoria out of Charles's arms and buried his face in her bright hair. Tears spilled from his eyes. Charles had never seen his father or any of his father's friends cry before.

Sweetheart
. Glenister had stroked Honoria's hair.
I'm so sorry. So very sorry. But I'll make amends. I swear it. I'll take care of both of you
.

Charles, aged nine-and-twenty, stood alone in the day nursery at Dunmykel, picturing Glenister holding Honoria only days after he'd killed her father.

Both of you?

Mélanie fingered the strip of silk. "It's definitely Miss Talbot's. I saw her dressing gown when Charles and I searched her room."

Simon nodded. "It's the one she wore to my room and dropped on the floor. The question is, why the devil would Honoria have drugged David's whisky? If she was trying to drug me and thought she'd have a better chance at having her way with me if I was unconscious, she knew less about men than I thought."

Mélanie stared at the shimmering silk. "She could have been planning to seduce David. But again, I can't see what she'd have to gain from drugging him unconscious first. It doesn't make sense."

"No. I wish to God I knew what mischief she'd been planning, but it doesn't get us any closer to knowing who drugged Honoria herself."

"Quite. The two may be completely unrelated."

Simon stared into the shadows in the arched recesses between the wall sconces. "If Glenister killed her, David won't let it go."

"Neither will Charles."

"I can't stop David. I wouldn't want to stop him, truth to tell. But it can be a dangerous thing, trying to bring down a peer." Simon turned to look at her. "How long can Charles keep this up?"

"I don't know."

Simon's gaze lingered on her face. "He's always driven himself hard, from when I first knew him at Oxford. I used to be
amazed
at how long he could go without sleep and still render a coherent argument. Sometimes in Latin." He gave a faint smile, but his eyes stayed serious. "Later, after his mother died, I couldn't believe how he could go on devouring Ludlow and Hume and Suetonius and sit up arguing politics in a coffeehouse as if nothing had happened. But—in the end none of us is truly immune to feeling."

For a moment Mélanie thought he meant to say more, but instead he tented his hands together and stared at his fingertips.

She looked at the first of the grisaille paintings on the stair wall. Erato, the gray shadings of her form washed golden by the candlelight. In the flickering light, she almost seemed to be moving. "Simon. Did you ever wonder if Hamlet might have feared he was really Claudius's son rather than the king's?"

Simon raised his brows but didn't question the change in subject. "Anything's possible. I staged a production of
Hamlet
once where Laertes insisted on playing the part as though he was driven by an incestuous passion for Ophelia, which has about as much or as little textual evidence. I told him it was an interesting thought, but we weren't doing '
Tis Pity She's a Whore
this season. What's the matter?"