Beneath a Silent Moon (16 page)

The lamplight bounced off Kenneth's pewter-hard eyes. "Is it so hard to believe I've fallen in love?"

"You?" Glenister gave a coarse laugh that held echoes of brothels and boudoirs, grottoes and glades, window embrasures and closed carriages. "Yes."

Kenneth returned his gaze to the cards. "If you disapprove, you should have withheld your consent to the match."

Glenister flinched, conscious of a guilt nothing could assuage. "You know damn well I couldn't have."

"Of course you could." Kenneth reached for his own whisky glass and took a sip. "If you were prepared to take the consequences."

Glenister's free hand curled into a fist. If he'd had one more drink in him, he'd have smashed his fist into Kenneth's face. "You bloody bastard."

Kenneth gave him one of those damned mocking looks that had cut him to ribbons for as long as he could remember. "You didn't come looking for me tonight to reminisce, Frederick. Why the devil did you come here?"

"Because it's past time the evidence was destroyed." Glenister hurled himself at the mahogany mass of the desk in two unsteady steps.

With the speed of a greyhound, Kenneth was on his feet. His fingers closed round Glenister's arm with the bite of steel. "I wouldn't touch anything if I were you, Glenister. Besides, what you're looking for isn't here."

Glenister tried to jerk away. Kenneth's fingers tightened until Glenister would have sworn he could feel the imprint on his bones. "Honoria's going to be living in this house with you. If you think I'll risk her of all people finding out—"

"My dear Glenister, if you'll recall we've gone to great lengths in the past weeks to ensure she never does. Do you imagine I'm the sort of man who can't keep secrets from his wife?"

Glenister gripped Kenneth by the lapels of his dressing gown. "Give me your word that Honoria will never learn the truth."

"I can't imagine why she would."

Glenister tightened his grip. "Your
word
. That you'll never tell her. Swear it."

Kenneth detached Glenister's hands from his dressing gown, throwing Glenister back against the desk. "I'd be a fool to tell her. Don't worry. I have what I want. So do you, after a fashion. Go to bed, Frederick: Or if you still can't sleep, go inflict yourself on one of the housemaids."

Glenister snatched up his glass and swallowed the last of his whisky. It left a raw void in his chest. He lashed out with the only weapon to hand. "What about your son? He's the sort who asks questions. He's too damn clever by half and he's still far too fond of Honoria."

Kenneth's face went still for a moment, not with feeling but with the conscious absence of it. He returned to his chair, seated himself, and spread his hands over the cards on the table. "He'll be here himself in a few days. You can leave Charles to me, Glenister. Though all things considered, it really is a pity he didn't manage to get himself killed in the Peninsula."

Tension from a myriad of disquieting possibilities pulled at Charles's face as he lifted the knocker on the door of the granite cottage. But Mélanie also caught a spark of schoolboy anticipation in his eyes at the reunion with his old friend. Giles McGann meant a great deal to him. And yet until McGann's name had appeared on the list she had decoded, Charles had never mentioned McGann to his wife.

The clang of the iron knocker on the deal planks echoed through the damp morning air. Mélanie glanced round the short expanse of garden between the house and the road beyond. Someone had taken care in laying it out, but now weeds spilled over the beds of primroses and wood anemones and sprang up between the cobblestones that formed the path to the house.

Charles clanged the knocker again and called out, "Giles."

The word echoed in the fog-choked air. Charles frowned and without further speech walked round to the back of the cottage. The spreading branches and spiky needles of a Scots pine half hid the back door, lower and narrower than at the front. Charles knocked and called McGann's name again. When another minute passed with no answer, he felt about on the ledge above the doorframe and retrieved a tarnished key.

Mélanie followed him into a stone-floored kitchen. Copper pans glinted on the walls in the murky light, but no aroma of recently prepared food lingered in the air. Instead the room had a musty smell, as though it were some time since a fire had been kindled or the windows opened. She touched her fingers to the deal table. A film of dust showed on the French gray of her glove.

Charles pushed open the kitchen door and went into a narrow hall, calling McGann's name. He opened a door off the hall onto a sitting room, crossed to the window, and pushed back the faded print curtains to let in the fitful morning light Bookshelves lined the room, crowded with books of all shapes and sizes, stuck in at odd angles and stacked crosswise to make the most of the space. Not unlike Charles's study at home.

His gaze roamed over the bookshelves, the smoke-blackened fire grate, a fire screen so faded it was impossible to tell what it depicted, a tarnished brass ink pot and penknife on the writing desk against the far wall. Each one seemed to hold a story. Part of the tapestry of memories of which Mélanie knew nothing.

A book lay open on a three-legged table beside a threadbare velvet wing-back chair. A candlestick with dried wax pooled round the pewter base and a glass stood beside the book. Mélanie crossed to the table and held the glass to the light. Sediment crusted the bottom, and it still had a faint, nutty whiff of port.

She showed the glass to Charles. "It's dried," she said. "It's been here for days. Perhaps longer."

Charles grimaced. "McGann's never been the tidiest housekeeper. But—"

He went back into the hall and quickly climbed the steps to the first floor. Mélanie followed him into the bedroom at the head of the stairs. The oak bed was made up, the quilt and sheet turned back, a faded blue wool dressing gown tossed over the foot of the bed. As though in readiness for the occupant. Save that there was a film of dust on the linens as well.

Fear gathering in his eyes, Charles opened the scarred doors of the wardrobe to reveal a full set of clothes.

He touched his fingers to the frayed gray wool of a coat, as though trying to conjure memories of the man who had worn it. "If he left of his own free will, his departure was abrupt. Perhaps—"

They both went still. A creak had sounded from the floor above that had nothing to do with the stirring of wind. Charles moved toward the door. She followed, holding her sarcenet skirts taut, sliding her half-boots over the floorboards with as little noise as possible.

They climbed the stairs to the second floor, testing the treads to avoid telltale squeaks. They hadn't brought their pistols with them. A mistake, perhaps, but experience had taught that weapons could create as many problems as they solved.

The second-floor landing opened onto a corridor shrouded in shadows. Heavy worsted curtains were drawn over the windows, letting in only meager light. Doors opened on either side of the corridor. Charles jerked his head toward the door to the left. Mélanie flattened herself against the curtains, ready to spring on anyone fleeing from the room.

Charles turned the door handle, eased the door open, and stepped into the room. He disappeared out of her line of sight. Silence followed. Her senses keyed to the room beyond, she scarcely registered the stir of the curtains at her back. Not until an arm closed round her throat and she felt the press of a knife against her ribs.

"Don't look round, whatever you do," a voice said in her ear. "Just stand still while I go down the stairs, and you have nothing to fear."

Mélanie went limp in her attacker's hold. He stumbled beneath the force of her weight. She caught his wrist and twisted away from him just as Charles lunged through the open doorway and came to a frozen stop. His eyes blazed with fear and fury, then narrowed. "Belmont, you reprobate. Get the bloody hell away from my wife."

The Honorable Thomas Belmont, second son of the Earl of Lovel, put up a hand and straightened the intricate muslin folds of his cravat. "You really ought to keep a better eye on her, old boy. You never can tell who may be skulking behind the curtains. My profoundest apologies, Mélanie."

Mélanie righted her bonnet. "You're getting shockingly lazy, Tommy. You should have known
I
could get away from such a commonplace neck hold."

"Not one of my more shining moments." Tommy leaned back against the faded curtains and gave Mélanie the smile he'd given her while waltzing with her in an embassy ballroom; while she was bandaging a knife cut in his arm in an Andalusian bam; while he sighted down a rifle barrel in the Cantabrian Mountains. "I don't suppose you'd believe I came to Scotland for the fishing?"

"Yes, actually," Charles said. "But not the sort of fishing one does in a lake or a stream. I take it Castlereagh sent you?"

"Not exactly a brilliant deduction, Charles, considering we both used to work for the man."

"And you still do." Charles's gaze was as hard as the knife Tommy had pressed to Mélanie's side.

Tommy grimaced. "He'd skin me alive if he knew I was talking to you. He warned me not to let you know I was here. He said you'd be difficult, which was a bit redundant—you're always bloody difficult."

"Which is why you put a knife to Mélanie's ribs and tried to make your escape."

"Should have known it wouldn't work. But I had to at least make an effort."

Charles folded his arms across his chest. "Last we heard you were in Paris."

"I still am, officially." Tommy looked from Charles to Mélanie, much like Colin when he'd been caught climbing on a chair to peek into drawers that were supposed to be off limits. "Oh, for God's sake, Fraser, stop it with the damned high-handed expression. It was tiresome before we were a year into the war. I agree that explanations are called for, but perhaps we could go downstairs? I think I saw a bottle of port in the sitting room. I don't know about the two of you, but I could do with a drink."

They trooped downstairs in silence. Charles produced three chipped glasses from a dresser in the corner, dusted them with his handkerchief, and poured out the port. Change the surroundings slightly and they might have been in the embassy library in Lisbon. Or sitting round a campfire in the Spanish mountains on the way to meet a contact or deliver a document.

"Quite like old times." Tommy dropped down on the settee. "Charles poking his nose into inconvenient places and asking awkward questions and annoying our superiors and generally making life hellish for those of us who just like to get the job done and get on with the dancing and drinking."

"Questions are awkward only when you find the answers inconvenient, Belmont."

"Damned right I find them inconvenient. You have a tiresome habit of forgetting whom we're fighting."

"An interesting argument, coming from a man who just held a knife on my wife."

"You know bloody well I'd never have—"

"Oh, for God's sake, you two." Mélanie clunked her glass down on a three-legged table. "Stop behaving as though you're on the playing fields of Harrow."