Beneath a Silent Moon (21 page)

"We can make more inquiries about McGann in the morning," Charles said. "We won't get much farther discussing this tonight."

His wife nodded, got to her feet, and walked toward him. He wanted to twist his fingers in her hair and cover her mouth with his own and blot out the questions in her eyes.

He wanted to bury himself in her and sever his mind from the tortures of thought. Because he knew just how appallingly selfish he'd already been where she was concerned, he drew back.

Mélanie curled her hand behind his neck and pulled his head down to her own.

"Mel—"

"Don't talk, Charles. And for God's sake, don't think. We've done far too much of that already."

She caught his lower lip between her teeth and parted her mouth beneath his own, seeking, yielding, demanding. He closed his arms round her, accepting what she offered, making an offer in kind.

Spanish coin or not, it glittered bright enough to blind one.

Flames engulfed him again. Honoria trembled in his arms. She was murmuring incoherent sounds of distress, and her breath was quick and panicked against his skin. She sobbed, a raw harsh sound that jerked him out of the scalding fire and acrid smoke to cool linen sheets and thick, enveloping darkness. She wasn't in his arms, she was thrashing beside him, as though caught in a snare. He reached for her, felt the sting of sweat on her skin, and gathered her to him.

The familiar scent of roses and vanilla washed over him. The texture of the hair and the curve of the bones beneath his fingers jerked him back to reality. He was in his bed at Dunmykel, holding not Honoria but his wife. Guided by instinct more than thought, he slid his hand to the place at the nape of her neck that always soothed her when she had one of her nightmares.

Mélanie gripped his shoulder and curved her body against his own, jolted out of whatever remembered or imagined horrors had tormented her.

He smoothed her hair back from her face, reassured by the more regular sound of her breathing. The trust in the way her hand curled on his chest and her head nestled in the hollow of his throat brought a familiar stab of guilt.

He'd married her because he'd thought he could protect her. Dear Christ. He'd thought of himself as a cynic at five-and-twenty, but he'd been a naive, romantic fool. In the light of the past four and a half years, it seemed one of his more laughably arrogant and appallingly shortsighted moments. Protecting her had been an excuse, a smoke screen to cover his own selfish need. He'd gained a witty companion, a partner in adventure, an ardent bedmate. And all the while he'd been able to keep whatever he wanted of himself locked away, telling himself that they shared more than dozens of couples who made marriages of convenience.

He'd got used to sleeping with her curled against him, to not tugging away too much of the quilt at night, to all those cut-glass scent bottles and little silver and enamel boxes of powders and paints crowding his shaving things off shared dressing tables in cramped quarters. He knew how to fasten and unfasten the hooks and buttons and laces and strings on her gowns. She'd got quite good at tying his cravats when he'd broken his arm and his valet Addison had been off for fortnight on a mission in northern Spain. They could pack a valise for each other down to the undergarments and toiletries, order each other's meals, forge each other's signatures. They both knew the exact touch that could soothe or arouse or send the other tumbling into delight.

But such intimacy existed on the still, safe surface of life. In the dark corners beneath lay the fragments of his life that he didn't care to look at himself, much less share with anyone, even Mélanie. Especially Mélanie.

He leaned back against the headboard, stroking his wife's hair, and stared up at the dark walnut bedframe, streaks of black against the pale chintz canopy. Honoria was right, they couldn't go back to the people they'd been. But they couldn't forget those people, those events, those memories. The past echoed through the present, laughing at him for the presumption of thinking it could be left behind.

One had a ghost of a chance of a future only if one turned and confronted the past. And the future had to be thought of. If having children had taught him nothing else, it had taught him that. He'd had to come back to Britain. He couldn't spend the rest of his life running. But he wasn't at all sure it was fair to have inflicted his coming to terms with family and his past on Mélanie and the children. In his darkest moments, he wasn't sure it was fair to have inflicted himself on them at all.

He was still wondering when a raw explosion of sound ripped through the silence of the night. He was half out of the bed, reaching for the pistol he no longer kept beneath his pillow, before he realized the sound had been a scream.

The night air bit into his naked skin as he jumped out of bed and fumbled for his dressing gown. Mélanie was beside him, silk rustling as she knotted the sash on her own dressing gown.

They stumbled out the door without taking time to light a candle. Moonlight spilled through the tall windows and lent a faint illumination to the corridor. Their bedroom was in the old north wing. The cry had not come from the nursery, deep in the north wing, thank God, but from the first bedroom where the corridor widened into the central block. The bedroom occupied by his father.

Charles rapped on the door. "Sir?"

Silence engulfed the corridor. Charles turned the handle and pushed open the door.

The room was cloaked in darkness. Guided by memory, he found a flint and lit the lamp on a table by the door. Yellow light outlined the mahogany four-poster mass of the bed and the dressing-gowned figure of Kenneth Fraser standing beside it. The light bounced off the bronze-green satin of the bed hangings and gleamed against the pristine white of the sheets and the pale gold hair of the woman who lay on them. The woman's face was hidden by the pillows and the fall of her hair, but that particular shade of gold unmistakably belonged to Honoria Talbot.

Kenneth didn't react to the opening of the door or the flare of light. He was staring at Honoria as though transfixed.

"Sir?" Charles said again.

Kenneth made no response, not even a turn of his head. Charles crossed to the bed in two strides. Mélanie picked up the lamp and followed him. They both saw the sight on the bed at the same moment. Charles went still. Mélanie stumbled against him and clutched his arm to keep from falling.

Honoria was stretched out beneath the satin counterpane and embroidered linen sheet, arms at her sides, eyes closed, face still. Too still. Her skin had a waxy sheen that was all too familiar from countless field hospitals. Above the lacy yoke of her nightdress, an angry line of bruising showed round her throat.

Charles put his fingers to where the pulse should have been beating in her throat. He felt nothing but the cold emptiness of death.

Mélanie stared at the lifeless face of the woman lying on the embroidered sheet. The face of the girl Charles had grown up with, the woman who had almost been his stepmother, the friend and companion who had meant something to him that she couldn't begin to fathom.

Charles touched his fingers to Honoria's throat, glanced at Mélanie, and gave a slight shake of his head. His gaze was as hard and still as a window on a moonless night. He moved to his father and laid a hand on Kenneth's arm. It was the first time Mélanie could remember any physical contact between the two men.

Kenneth jerked at his son's touch. His gaze went to Charles's face, as though he could not make sense of what Charles was doing there. "Dear God, she's dead."

His fine-featured, sardonic face was drained of color, his keen eyes vacant, his incisive voice a stunned monotone.

"Yes." Charles steered his father toward a japanned armchair that faced away from the bed.

Mélanie glanced round the room. A set of decanters stood on the folding shelf of a cabinet near the fireplace. She poured some whisky into a glass and gave it to Charles. Charles pressed the glass into Kenneth's hand. When Kenneth simply stared at it, Charles guided the glass to his lips. Kenneth choked and coughed, but he swallowed some of the whisky, and a little color returned to his face.

Mélanie took a blanket from the bench at the foot of the bed and put it round her father-in-law's shoulders. Through the silk of his dressing gown, his body felt chilled to the bone. She went to the fireplace and lit the tapers on the mantel and in the gilt wall sconces. The tinderbox rattled in her hands. Hot drops of wax spattered over her fingers.

The candlelight flickered over Kenneth, hunched in the chair, and Charles kneeling beside him. They were not much alike, save for a certain hard-cut, Celtic determination in their faces. Charles's gaze was fixed on his father as though he was trying to frame a question to which he wasn't sure he could bear the answer. He helped Kenneth take another sip of whisky, then dropped back on his heels.

"What happened?" Charles's voice was completely neutral, the way it got when he was making a massive effort at control.

Kenneth stared at Charles. He seemed to be truly aware of his presence for the first time. "I came into the room. It was dark. I only had a candle." He cast a glance about, as though seeking what had become of the candle. Mélanie saw a silver candlestick and an extinguished wax taper on the floor by the bed.

"And then?" Charles said in the same steady voice.

Kenneth swallowed. "I was beside the bed before I realized—I put out my hand—her skin was so cold." He stared down at his right hand, curled round the whisky glass.

Charles closed his hand over Kenneth's before he could drop the glass. "Did you know Honoria was in your room?"

"Did I—?" Kenneth's gaze went to Charles's face. Comprehension flashed in his eyes. "What do you take me for, boy?" He clenched the handkerchief. "She was my fiancee, not my trollop."

A spasm ran along Charles's jaw. "How long had you been gone from your room?"

"I don't—most of the night."

"Where were you?"

"In the library." Fraser took another sip of whisky. "Reading. Someone must have broken into the house," he said, as though he had been too shocked at Honoria's death to think about who might have killed her until now.

"Possibly." Charles got to his feet and looked down at his father. "Sit for a moment, sir. You're still in shock."

Kenneth didn't seem to hear him. Charles took one of the candles from the mantel and exchanged a look with Mélanie. His face was gray, his eyes haunted by what they had witnessed and by the imagined horrors of what might lie behind Honoria's death. But he merely said, "Check the windows."

He went through the door into the adjoining dressing room. Mélanie cast another glance at Kenneth Fraser, but he was slumped beneath the blanket, staring at the whisky glass in his hands. She took the other taper from the mantel, went to the windows that that ran along the outer wall, and tested the latches. They were all securely bolted on the inside.

She returned to the bed and looked at Honoria Talbot, forcing herself to note pertinent details. Miss Talbot's skin, which had been so fresh and glowing, was tinged blue-gray instead of pink and white. A thin film of lip rouge stood out on her mouth, like a slash of too-bright paint. Beneath it, her lips were drained of color. Despite the violence of the mark round her throat, there was no sign of a struggle. Almost as though she'd slept through the attack.