Swept Away (19 page)

He lifted an amused eyebrow. “Ah, so that rankled, did it?”

“You despise me,” Julia added, ignoring his comment. “And you must realize that I despise you. What kind of a marriage would we have?”

“A long and rancorous one, if the past day is any indication,” he replied. He turned, fixing her with a steely gaze. “Listen to me. It is my intention to marry you. It does not matter how I feel about you. I told you before—it is a question of honor. Of duty. I was caught in the same compromising position as you. It is true that my punishment by Society would not be as severe. But ever afterward, there would be a certain taint to my name. I would be known as the scoundrel who seduced you, then did not marry you, who left you carrying the burden for our indiscretion.”

“But I was to blame!” Julia protested. “I knew what I was doing. You did not even know who I was or that I was of good birth. I pretended to be a woman of loose morals. I am prepared to face the consequences of those actions—whatever you might say about us Armigers.”

“No,” he agreed with sarcastic inflection, “I certainly did not know who you were or what you were about. I hope to God that if I had I would have behaved with more sense. However, whatever the circumstances, I was also in the wrong. I acted rashly. I could have—I should have—left when I cut my bonds. Instead, I stayed and seized you because I was furious. It was my fault that you were at that inn and my fault as well that we were caught in—uh—the manner we were caught.”

His eyes dropped to her mouth, and Julia was forcibly reminded of the passionate kiss in which they had been discovered. She remembered the taste of his lips, the texture, the searing heat, and she could not suppress a tremor.

“Besides,” he continued in a flat voice, turning back to look at the road, “even if we had not been caught, I was involved with you in, uh, intimate ways that only a husband should be privy to. Having seen you, touched you—” His voice grew hoarse.

Heat surged up in Julia, and she turned her face away. How could merely his words arouse her this way? “No. Please. We did not—I mean, in the most important way, we were not—”

“No, we did not make love,” he responded harshly. “I did not take your virginity. At least that sin cannot be laid at my door. However, I knew you in ways that are a husband's prerogative. It is my obvious duty, my obligation, to make that morally and legally right.”

“But I don't want to marry you!” Julia burst out, goaded past endurance. “The most important thing in the world to you may be what people think of you, but it is not to me. I cannot live in a sham of a marriage. I would rather live all the rest of my days in shame than tie myself to the man who ruined my brother!”

“I did not ruin Selby!” His dark eyes glittered with rage. “Are you mad? How can you possibly think I stole that money? Or used it to ruin Selby? Selby was my friend.”

Julia rolled her eyes. “Heaven save me from friends like you.”

“This makes no sense. What makes you think that I took Thomas's money?”

Julia cast him a contemptuous look. “You, of all people, should know that.”

“Humor me.”

“Well, I don't know how to prove it, if that is what you are trying to find out. That's why I was hoping to get you to confess.”

“By seducing me?” He frowned in thought. “I do remember you asking some odd questions that night in the box at Vauxhall Gardens.” A sardonic smile touched his lips. “What were you planning to do? At the peak of passion say, ‘Oh, by the way, did you embezzle money from Thomas's trust?' It would have been a trifle dampening to the moment, don't you think?”

“It didn't work. Obviously.” She scowled at him. “It became clear to me that I wasn't good enough at it.”

“Oh, you were quite good,” he assured her, and his eyes lit for an instant with an unholy fire.

“Not at getting the information I wanted.”

“So you decided to kidnap me instead.”

“Yes. Well, that had been our plan from the first, but it proved rather difficult in the actuality. Nunnelly said you must work out at Jackson's.”

“On occasion. Who, by the way, is this Nunnelly chap to whom I owe the knot on my head?”

“You mustn't blame him,” Julia said earnestly. “It was all my idea. He is so loyal to me that he would do anything for me. But he would never have done it if I had not told him to.”

“A servant, then, rather than a hired assassin.”

“He wasn't going to kill you!” Julia retorted, aghast.

“I beg your pardon, but, you see, I had no way of knowing that he meant only to knock me over the head and tie me up, not kill me. What if I had been carrying a gun one of those times when he accosted me? I could have shot him. It was a caper-witted scheme.”

“Thank you very much. Obviously I am not as expert at criminal activities as you.”

“Ah, yes, back to the subject at hand. You were going to tell me why you decided I am a thief.”

“When you start with the knowledge that Selby did not do it, as Phoebe and Thomas and I did, it is much easier.”

“And that knowledge is based on…?” His voice lifted inquiringly.

“On our knowledge of Selby,” Julia retorted.

“I see. Then you have no evidence that would prove that he did not do it.”

“Of course I do not. If I had, we would have made it known long ago. But I know my brother, and he would never have done such a thing. If, by any stretch of the imagination, he would have considered stealing money, he would certainly not have taken it from Thomas, who was like a younger brother to him.”

“Very admirable sentiments from a sister. But a man will do things that are against his nature if he is subject to an overwhelming urge. Sometimes the very nicest of men can have a hidden vice, and that vice can lead them to steal and—”

“Are you talking about Selby?”

“Yes. Selby was an inveterate gambler. He lost a great deal of money. No doubt he needed to pay his gambling debts, and he seized on the idea of taking it from the trust. Perhaps he even intended to give it back when he was in luck again, but, of course, that never happens.”

“That was when he was young.” Julia dismissed the idea with a wave of her hand. “I know he gambled too much then. He told me so himself. Where do you think I had heard of Madame Beauclaire's? But not after he met Phoebe. Marrying her and having Gilbert changed that. He had been quite settled those last four years. He was never so bad that he endangered the estate or anything like that. But after he married Phoebe, he took an interest in the estate, and he was doing quite well at his death. I am certain of it, because Phoebe hates to go over the books with the estate manager, and she always makes me come along with her to discuss business. I know how well he left her and Gilbert provided for. Selby had no need for the money.”

“Sometimes a need can be hidden.”

“You are saying that Selby had a need for money which no one could discern. What piffle! The truth of it is that Selby had no reason to take money from Thomas, and certainly no inclination. And even if he had had both, he had far too much honor ever to do it. The three of us knew Selby. That is how we know that he did not do it. Therefore we were able to look at the incident without being distracted by all the—” She made a vague, encompassing gesture.

“Facts?” Deverel suggested.

“By all the false clues,” Julia corrected.

“You mean as I was.”

“No. I mean as you intended everyone else to be.” She clutched her hands together tightly, a little scared at speaking so boldly to Stonehaven.

He regarded her stonily. “Go on.”

“Well, since we knew that Selby was not guilty, it was obvious that someone must have set it up to make it appear that he was. It had to have been someone who was familiar with the trust and the people involved and who knew my brother well enough to have heard about his use of the name Jack Fletcher. Who would have thought that his playing such a silly little game would result in such tragedy?”

“So, of course, you assumed that out of all the people who knew Selby and knew the trust,
I
was the only candidate.”

Julia refused to shrink before the acid tone of his words. She gazed back at him steadily. “The most logical one, certainly. There were only three other trustees. Fitz isn't intelligent enough to think up something like this, and Varian was a better friend of Selby's than you. And you were the one who brought up the whole thing. You showed everyone the letters and bruited it about that Selby had stolen from the trust. It was clear to me—and to Phoebe and Thomas, too—that the person who had actually done the thievery and who had laid the trap for Selby would be the one to spring it.”

“So because I found Selby's thievery and did not hide it, I am now the culprit?”

“Who better to show everyone the evidence than the one who invented it?” Julia returned hotly. “No one could miss all the clues you so carefully planted if you made sure they saw them. Why else were you so quick to tell? So loud in your complaints?”

“What would you have me do?” he exclaimed, his eyes flashing. “Stand around when I found that someone had stolen from Thomas's trust? Not say anything because the man who had stolen it was someone I had known since he first came on the town? Is that your idea of honor? Because it is not mine. Walter had been my very dear friend for years, and I could not have betrayed him by overlooking malfeasance, even when it was done by a friend. Do you think it was easy for me to accuse Selby? Do you think that I did not hope and pray that he would have some reason, some explanation, for what happened? But he did not. He could not answer for any of the letters. He had no reason for the expenditures. All he did was deny and deny, without any evidence to back him up. It was clear that Selby had done it. Obvious to everyone. There were four letters in his handwriting, with his signature, requesting money from the trust. That money went to a false name which Selby was known to have used for years and years. It hardly matters whether it had been a joke or not. It was Selby's alter ego. Everyone knew it. And Selby could not give any reason for writing the letters, could not show that the money had gone to something to benefit Thomas St. Leger.”

“Of course he could not!” Julia retorted. “Because he did not do it. How can one refute evidence that is false? How could he tell why he wrote the letters when he did not write them? He denied it because it was the truth, but you had constructed the web so cleverly that he could not get out of it. His denials only made him seem more guilty.”

“He seemed guilty because he
was
guilty,” Deverel snapped. He drew a deep breath and forced himself to speak more calmly. “He was your brother, and you loved him deeply. I know that it was very hard for you to accept that he could have done such a thing. It was hard for me to believe it, too. But once I saw the evidence, it was impossible to believe anything else. My God, Julia, he committed suicide. Isn't that a clear enough indication of his guilt?”

“He did not commit suicide!”

“What else can you call it when a man puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger?” Deverel retorted harshly.

“A hunting accident. That kind of thing happens all the time. He was probably cleaning it, and it went off. He had gone there to hunt, after all.”

“No. I talked to the caretaker of his hunting lodge. He said that Selby had not hunted at all. He went there, and he shot himself, and that was all.”

“He would not have committed suicide,” Julia repeated stubbornly. “I know that Phoebe fears that that is what happened. I think she believes that he was driven to it by the way everyone turned against him. But he was too strong. He would not have left us that way.”

“My God, woman! What will it take to convince you? The man killed himself. He left a note saying so and confessing to the embezzlement!”

There was a moment of shattering silence.

“What? What did you say?”

Stonehaven sighed. “Selby left a note saying that he was taking his own life because he could not bear the shame anymore, because he was so guilty over what he had done. He admitted that he had taken the money.”

“I don't believe it.” Julia's voice quavered on the words. “I don't believe you.”

“Ask Varian St. Leger. He was at my house when I got the note from Selby, asking me to meet him at his hunting lodge. It was not far from my house, you see. I didn't want to go. I presumed he had come to beg and plead, or to argue with me again. But, of course, I did go, and Varian rode along with me. We found him in his study, dead. There was a note on the desk beside him. In it he begged everyone's pardon and admitted his guilt.”

“But how—I—I knew you and Varian found his body, but I—no one said anything about a note.”

“No. It was…Varian and I agreed that it would not help anyone to give Lady Armiger the note. There were things in it that a grieving family should not see.”

“How dare you!” Julia clenched her fists. She would have liked to punch him. “How dare you keep that from us? We had a right to know. Phoebe should have been able to read her husband's last words. What made you think you had the right to keep them from us?”