The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla A Pink Carnation Novel (10 page)

Uncle Henry frowned at an invisible speck of dust on his sleeve. “Nothing of any substance. I never had any proof. . . .” He lifted his head abruptly. “Are you sure you want to hear it? It’s all over and gone, years ago. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Those sleeping dogs have a sharp bite,” said Lucien caustically.

What was it that Clarissa had called them? The tainted seed of a cursed race? The legacy of their parents’ murders followed them still.

“Sharper awake, I would think.” Uncle Henry shook his head. “Speaking of dogs, the old setter bitch at Hullingden just had a new litter. If you would like your pick—”

The attempt to change the subject was too obvious to be effective. “What do you know about my parents’ deaths?”

“I wouldn’t say
know
. Suspect. Not know.” Uncle Henry took a deep swig from his glass of claret and made a face over it. “Not as good as I’d thought. No, no, don’t look like that. I’m just getting to it. Even after all this time, I do not find any of this easy to relate.”

Lucien shook his head as his uncle tipped the decanter in the direction of his glass. “I do not find it easy to hear,” he said stiffly.

“But you would have it, nonetheless?” Uncle Henry looked at him with something like resignation. “You are so very much like your father. Not in looks—there’s no denying that you favor your mother’s people—but in temperament. He could never abandon a point either.”

Lucien smiled crookedly. “Perhaps it was because he was never wrong.”

“That,” said Uncle Henry, “is just what your father would have said.” His own smile faded. “But he was wrong. Fatally wrong. If I had seen it sooner, I would have warned him—but what good would it have done? He would never have listened.” He set the decanter aside and leaned forward, his glass cradled between his hands. “How much do you know of the situation in Martinique the year—the year your parents died?”

The question was such a non sequitur that Lucien choked on his own claret.

“Nothing,” Lucien said guardedly. “My mother had maintained no ties to that part of the world.”

Except for the manzanilla tree in the greenhouse. The death apple, they called it, and with good cause. It had been the fruit of the tree that had killed her.

“Or so she would have had us believe.”

“What are you implying?” Lucien asked sharply.

He wasn’t in the mood for any far-fetched theories about Creole conjuring and voodoo magic gone wrong. His mother had been a child of the Enlightenment, a devotee of science, a disciple of reason. She would have laughed such ideas to scorn.

Uncle Henry’s nails beat a soft tattoo against the side of his glass. “You were just a boy, but even you must have been aware of the tumult of the times. There was bloody revolution across the channel, governments rising and falling. . . . Do you remember your grandfather—your mother’s father?”

“A little.” Granpere had been quite old already by the time Lucien had been born, or at least he had seemed so to Lucien. But though he was white-haired and wizened, he had the energy of a much younger man. “And?”

“Your grandfather had radical notions. He meant well, bless him,” said Uncle Henry quickly. “There wasn’t an ounce of harm in him. But he dealt in natural philosophy, not in the daily affairs of men. I’m sure his plants never beheaded their fellows,” he added, in a misguided attempt at humor. He looked up at Lucien. “You know, he divided his plantation among his slaves. It didn’t make him a popular fellow among the planters of Martinique, I imagine.”

“No, I imagine not,” said Lucien. “How does all of this touch on my parents?”

Uncle Henry sighed. “Your mother . . . inherited her father’s views. She was a very outspoken advocate of the early phases of the revolution in France.”

“So were many,” said Lucien guardedly. “Including Mr. Charles James Fox.”

“I’m not saying it was out of the ordinary.” Uncle Henry looked into the flames of the fire. “After all, who could say then how matters would play out? No one could have imagined it. Although by the time of which we speak . . . well, that is as it was.”

“Forgive me, sir,” said Lucien, doing his best to be polite, “but I find your reasoning oblique.”

Uncle Henry lifted his glass, letting the firelight play off the deep red liquid. “Let me be plain, then. In the spring of 1794, the revolutionaries abolished slavery. The monarchists in Martinique appealed to us for help. They were afraid of invasion, insurrection. . . . Naturally, we came to their aid.” He looked up at Lucien. “Your mother’s sympathies were, in this instance, with the other side.”

This wasn’t much of a surprise. “My mother was a great believer in the
Rights of Man
.”

The firelight cast long shadows across Uncle Henry’s face. Long lines formed on either side of his mouth.

“It was your father who had oversight for the planning of the expedition. It was all meant to be quite secret: the number of ships, our tactics, the timing of our attack—all of it information for which the French were quite eager.”

The implication was clear. Lucien stared incredulously at Uncle Henry. “My father was a Tory, sir.”

“Your father could deny your mother nothing,” snapped Uncle Henry. He slumped back in his chair, saying heavily, “I am not saying that your father was involved in this matter. Good God, Lucien, do you think I would care to believe ill of my own brother? But your father tended to turn a blind eye where your mother was concerned. He loved her past reason.”

“What are you trying to say?” Lucien asked tightly.

“If you must have it . . . Your mother was passing information to the French,” Uncle Henry said baldly. “Information she received from your father.”

His mother, a spy? “My mother was a botanist.” Plants seldom took sides in the affairs of nations.

“With strong political views. I am sure she meant well by it,” Uncle Henry added clumsily. “She had no idea—how could she?—that it would end as it did.”

Setting his glass down, Uncle Henry looked intently at Lucien. “I have always believed that it was her contact who killed her. Who killed them both.”

Chapter Five

“Her contact?” Lucien echoed.

Spies . . . contacts . . . The whole story was fantastical. Lucien dug back into his memories, his mother in her greenhouse, his father in his bookroom, both engaged in their respective pursuits, light streaming through the long windows. Whenever he remembered the house of his youth, he remembered light, glinting off the glass panes, sparkling off the mirrors, catching the curves of the gilded picture frames.

Everything had been airy and open, no place for clandestine meetings or murmured secrets.

As for his parents, the very idea of his mother betraying his father’s trust in that way—it just didn’t bear considering. They had been the very picture of marital harmony.

Unless it was just that, a picture, a construction of artifice and illusion. Pictures, by their very nature, lied.

“That’s absurd,” Lucien said flatly. He had the evidence of his own eyes, didn’t he?

For the few hours a day in which his parents had visited his schoolroom. What about all those other hours? What about all those aspects of their lives of which he knew nothing?

“Is it?” Uncle Henry looked grave. “You were very young at the time, too young, perhaps, to realize how high feelings ran. And your mother . . . She was never one to mask her beliefs.”

“True.” That much, Lucien couldn’t argue with; both parents had been outspoken in their beliefs. Their debates seemed to delight them both, his father’s cynical pragmatism pitted against his mother’s more abstract ideals. “But belief and action are very different things.”

“For some, perhaps,” said Uncle Henry quietly. He rose, using the poker to stir the coals on the grate. Ash sifted down, the smell acrid in the small room. “For some.”

Lucien opened his mouth to argue. And closed it again.

He couldn’t believe that his mother would ever have betrayed his father’s trust in the normal course of things—but what if the freedom of an island of men weighed on the other side of the balance? It didn’t take much imagination to see where a few paltry snippets of information would seem a minor price to pay.

Even if it meant placing his father’s honor in jeopardy?

Everything Lucien had thought black-and-white was suddenly murky; his head ached as it had the first summer he had spent in Louisiana, when he had contracted marsh fever and woken to find that his tongue was too big for his mouth and the sun made his eyes ache.

“What made you suspect my mother of . . . relaying information?” Lucien asked gruffly.

Uncle Henry paused with the poker in his hand. After a moment he said, “Small things. Your father complained of papers gone missing, his desk disarranged. He was always very nice in his arrangements.”

“The servants—,” Lucien began.

“Knew better than to touch your father’s papers.” Uncle Henry replaced the poker in its stand. “Your mother seemed . . . distracted those last few months. Distraught. Her behavior was erratic. She pleaded a headache and retired early from the theater but returned home late. On another day, I came across her in a part of town she didn’t usually frequent—inquiring after a rare plant, she told me, but then why not take the carriage?”

“I don’t remember any of this,” said Lucien frankly.

“Why would you? You were in the schoolroom. Although,” Uncle Henry added thoughtfully, “there was that tutor of yours. What was his name?”

“Sherry,” Lucien said. “Thomas Sheridan.”

He hadn’t thought about Sherry in years, although he had missed him sorely when he found himself shipped off to Eton after his parents’ deaths. Sherry had neither browbeaten the pupil nor toadied to the future duke; from the first, he had treated Lucien as an equal, engaging him in debate, taking him on expeditions, forcing him to articulate his ideas and challenge his own preconceptions.

Sherry’s regime had done much to exercise his mind, but it had left him entirely unprepared for all the pettifoggery of public school.

That had been one of the nastier rumors set about after his parents had died: that his mother had been in the throes of an affair with Sherry, that the two of them had plotted to do away with the duke.

Lucien looked narrowly at his uncle, but Uncle Henry was lost in his own memories. He stood before the fire, staring into the flames.

“Sheridan,” said Uncle Henry. “That was it. She picked that tutor for you herself, you know, out of nowhere. A young man. An Irishman.”

Yes, Sherry had been young, probably not much older than Lucien was now. Lucien remembered him with his wavy hair always escaping from its queue, his cravat askew, and ink stains on his cuffs. Sherry’s face had been too long to be handsome, but he made up for what he lacked in looks with the liveliness of his expression.

Lucien had a fleeting image of his mother in consultation with Sherry, the two of them standing by the window embrasure in the schoolroom. His mother was a small woman and Sherry had been tall; she had had to tilt her head up to speak to him, her profile limned in the light streaming through the casement.

They had shared many ideals, his mother and Sherry. Had they shared more than ideals?

Lucien felt cold beneath his heavy brocade waistcoat. “Being Irish is hardly an indictment.”

“It is when the Irishman is involved in incendiary circles,” said Uncle Henry frankly. He looked at Lucien’s face and enlightenment dawned. “You didn’t think I was going to bring up that nonsense about— Good God, my boy! Do you think I would accuse your mother of
that
?”

Despite himself, Lucien felt himself relax a little before the full impact of Uncle Henry’s words kicked in.

No. Not of infidelity. “Just of another kind of betrayal,” he said.

Uncle Henry clasped his hands behind his back. “She might not have seen it as such. Your father was always so . . . urbane. She might not have realized the depth of his convictions.”

“Putting a peer of the realm at risk of being convicted of treason is hardly a small thing,” said Lucien sharply. His father had been, as his uncle said, urbane, but he hadn’t held his honor cheap. “You think Sherry was—was in league with foreign forces?”

Uncle Henry heaved a sigh that seemed to come straight from his boots. “It might explain why your mother hired him so precipitously.” His expression turned wry. “Ignoring, I might add, all the fine candidates I proffered for her perusal.”

Lucien was not amused. “And you think he killed her.”

There were deep lines on either side of Uncle Henry’s mouth. “It was a possibility, yes, but—”

“But you had no proof.” Lucien’s fingers were digging into his knees, making wrinkles in the smooth fabric of his breeches. Why was Uncle Henry telling him this only now? Why not twelve years ago, when something might have been done? Of course, twelve years ago, he had been only a boy, but Uncle Henry might have told someone, someone with the authority to investigate. “Why didn’t you confide your suspicions to the magistrate?”

Uncle Henry’s expression was gently reproachful; he made Lucien feel like a boy caught speaking out of turn. “Do you remember the magistrate in charge of the case?”

“Sir Matthew Egerton.” The name came out of the depths of Lucien’s memory. A middle-aged man in a brown coat and an old-fashioned bagwig, with a round, rather florid face. “We didn’t get on.”