Beneath a Silent Moon (19 page)

"You were rather preoccupied, Charles. A little thing known as a war."

"I could have made more of an effort to keep in touch. I could have written to Andrew more often. I could have asked for news." He cast a quick glance at her, then looked back at the path ahead. "Andrew was reading law in Edinburgh when I left Britain. He claimed he had no desire to be immured in the country like his father."

"Did his father want him to take over running the estate?"

"His father was the sort who doesn't push. But he and Andrew quarreled when Andrew was at university. I never found out why. Andrew and I weren't—we didn't talk as much by that time. Then when I was in Lisbon he wrote me that his father was ill and he'd come home and later that he'd decided to stay on and run the estate. I never questioned why." He drew a breath. A layer of defenses was stripped from his face. It was like getting a look at the boy who had gone fishing and climbing with Andrew and borrowed books from Giles McGann. The boy she would never know. "Things were—bad—before I left Britain." He chose the words as though he were picking his way through bits of broken glass in his memory. "Andrew had every right to believe I didn't want news from home. Because it was true. I didn't want it."

Mélanie studied his profile, outlined against the blue-gray of the sky. He seemed to have been whittled down to the bones of his past, so achingly vulnerable that she was afraid he'd break if she touched him. "Even if you'd known what was happening at Dunmykel, there wasn't a great deal you could have done."

He swung his gaze to her. "I could—"

"I know you like to believe you're responsible for everything, Charles, but the estate belongs to your father." She drew a breath, struck by the unreality of the fact that one day it would belong to Charles. Easy enough to think of Charles as lord of the manor. Quite impossible to imagine herself as mistress of this house that radiated history, this multitude of art treasures, these acres of land. Cutting ribbons at village fetes, taking tea with the minister's wife, presiding over harvest dances, reviewing menus and seating arrangements for dinners of twenty-five served on the Spode china with the Fraser crest. Playing the role Honoria Talbot seemed to have been born to play. "It will be different one day when it's yours."

Charles watched her for a moment, his gaze as dense and lightless as the sky just before a thunderstorm. "Yes," he said, "I suppose that would make a difference."

For a moment she thought he meant to say more, but instead he took two long, impatient strides along the path. "Andrew knows or suspects something about why McGann went missing. I'd stake my life on it. Something he doesn't want me to find out."

The small window of confidences was shuttered. She wanted to wrench the shutters open, but that would only make him retreat further. Instead she fell into step beside him, forcing her mind back to the investigation. "Because he's afraid for Mr. McGann?"

"Because he doesn't trust me."

Mélanie frowned at the silvery line of birch that bordered the path. "Charles—it isn't remotely possible that Mr. McGann is Le Faucon de Maulévrier, is it?"

"I'd like to say no for a hundred reasons. But the most obvious is that McGann wasn't gone from Britain long enough at the right times."

She turned her gaze from the trees to her husband's set face. "What about Cyril Talbot?"

Charles paused for a moment. "I only have the vaguest memories of Cyril. At the age of ten, I scarcely knew my father, let alone his friends. But from every description of him, he was as much of a dilettante as my father and Glenister, with rather less wit."

"That could have been a clever cover."

"So it could. And he did spend a great deal of time on the Continent. But if he was Le Faucon, Le Faucon died twenty years ago."

Mélanie pushed a strand of hair beneath the satin-lined brim of her bonnet. "You're certain Cyril Talbot did die?"

Her husband stared at her. "He's buried in Dunmykel churchyard. And no, I wasn't at the funeral—I was staying at my grandfather's when he died. But why in God's name would he have needed to fake his own death? He was safe enough in Britain as Lord Cyril Talbot."

"Suppose there were people who knew Lord Cyril and Le Faucon were one in the same. By faking his death and disappearing, he escaped them."

"But there must have been a body, even if I didn't see it. Difficult to see how he could have managed the deception without help from Glenister and my father and perhaps others at the house party."

"If Lord Cyril was Le Faucon, I could imagine Glenister going to fairly drastic lengths to avert scandal and save his brother's life. On the other hand, it's entirely possible Lord Cyril really did die and someone else has resurrected Le Faucon's network. Or that Lord Cyril wasn't Le Faucon at all."

"Except that Cyril's daughter seems to be in the middle of this."

They had reached the edge of the stream that wound through the estate. Charles stared out over the clear water, but he seemed to be seeing something beyond it. Honoria, Mélanie thought. He's remembering Honoria. He must have walked these same paths with her. She could picture Honoria, a delicate girl in a white frock, stopping to pick wildflowers, while a gangly, teenaged Charles carried a basket and pruning sheers for her. Mélanie couldn't remember the last time she'd had the leisure to pick flowers.

"Francisco was right, wasn't he?" Charles said. "It keeps coming back to Honoria." His eyes darkened with a feeling Mélanie could not put a name to, though it made her insides twist as though someone were pressing a knife beneath her ribs. "I'll talk to her tonight."

"Evie?" Gisèle rapped once on her friend's door, then turned the handle and poked her head in without waiting for an answer. "May I borrow your jade earrings, they'd look quite splen—what on earth's the matter?"

Evie was sitting at the dressing table of her room at Dunmykel, elbows on the tabletop, face between her hands. The tapers on either side of the looking glass illumined her reflection. Her eyes were red, her cheeks streaked with damp.

"Just a fit of the blue devils." Evie swung round and rubbed her hands over her face. "Sorry, Gelly, what did you want?"

"It doesn't matter." Gisèle closed the door and walked into the room. "You never have the blue devils, Evie. You're much too sensible."

"Maybe I just hide them better than most. You try living with Uncle Frederick and Val and Honoria."

"And Quen."

"Yes, Quen."

"He hasn't done anything truly horrid since we've been here. I suppose throwing up at the betrothal ball was enough for the moment. All things considered, the house party isn't starting out as hideously as I feared." Gisèle flopped back on the feather bed and stared up at the plasterwork ceiling and then over at the pilasters of the window embrasure. Evie's room was in the seventeenth-century part of the house, new compared to the north wing, but even here she could feel the overlapping layers of history. "I forgot how much I love Dunmykel, even if it is hideously cold. You don't suppose that's why Honoria wants to marry Father, do you? Because she made up her mind to be mistress of Dunmykel and now that Charles is taken, Father's her only choice?"

"Honoria's never been particularly fond of Scotland."

"Yes, but Dunmykel's so—" Gisèle straightened up and drew a breath of the salt-laced air. "How could anyone not want to live here?"

Evie gave a faint smile. "It's different for you, Gelly. It's your home."

Gisèle inched back against the bedpost. "Frasers don't have homes. Just places we live for a bit. I suppose Honoria must have mixed feelings about Dunmkyel—I mean, her father died here, which is a bit gruesome, though I don't suppose she remembers him much."

Evie twitched a fold of her skirt smooth. "She doesn't talk about it. But then mere's a lot Honoria doesn't talk about. I've lived with her for twelve years, and I'm not sure what she's thinking three-quarters of the time."

"But she must have had some reason for accepting Father. Especially when she's still in love with Charles."

Evie's hands closed on the chair back. "Gelly—"

"Oh, of course she is, as much as Honoria's ever going to be in love with anyone. She's been fixated on him like a lodestar since we were children. Even I could see that, though it's not the sort of thing one likes to notice about one's brother. And now she's going to marry Father. It's like a Greek myth. Perseus or Theseus or whoever's wife was in love with his son. It's asking for trouble, having all of them shut up here for weeks."

Evie picked up her comb and began to tidy her side curls. "I thought you were determined not to come at all. You were positively gleeful when you got Charles to persuade Lady Frances to let you go to a friend's house instead."

Gisèle tugged at a snagged thread in her white lace overdress. The problem with Evie was that she saw far too much and asked far too many pointed questions. Just like Charles. "You know how I enjoy doing the opposite of what people expect."

Evie continued to tend to her hair, but Gisèle could feel the pressure of her friend's gaze reflected back on her through the glass. "I thought perhaps it was something to do with Val," Evie said.

"Well, of course it's quite agreeable that he's here." Gisèle twisted her pearl bracelet round her wrist while a multitude of scorching thoughts that would no doubt make Evie look at her as though she'd taken leave of her senses tumbled in her head.

Evie set down the comb. "Do you want to marry him?"

Gisèle gave a high-pitched laugh that she managed to rein in one step short of hysteria. "Dear Evie. Why on earth should marriage have anything to do with it?"

"Because you're a nineteen-year-old girl from a good family. You have to marry someone."

"By the same logic, so do you."

"I'm a poor relation. It's different."

"Gammon. Lord Glenister will give you a dowry."

Evie's mouth twisted. "It's not very agreeable being dependent on charity, love."

"It's not charity, he's your uncle. Anyway, you'd have more of the Glenister money yourself if your grandfather hadn't—"

"If my grandfather hadn't cut my mother off without a shilling after she eloped with a half-pay officer and gave birth to me a scant five months later?" Evie smiled. "It's all right, Gelly, my mama's indiscretions are hardly the most scandalous in the Talbot family. They don't make her daughter very marriageable, though."

"Rot. A sensible man wouldn't care a rush—"

Evie turned back to the mirror. "Perhaps that's the problem, love. Perhaps I don't want a sensible man."

"You've never much wanted anyone so far as I can—" Gisèle leaned forward and nearly toppled off the bed. Sometimes she was so caught up in keeping her own secrets that she forgot other people had them as well. "Evie, is that what you were crying about? Is there someone—for heaven's sake, who—"

"Don't be a silly romantic goose, Gelly. Did you want to borrow my earrings? The jade ones?"

Gisèle sprang to her feet. "Are you crying because he's back in London? You must be, it couldn't be someone here. I mean, there's only—oh, Lord. You haven't fallen in love with David, have you?"