Beneath a Silent Moon (33 page)

"Him?"

"That's what it sounded like. I can only assume someone put her up to it—that it was some sort of dare. But whatever was going on, she didn't mean to stop with a kiss. And no one learns how to use her tongue and teeth to that effect without practice. At the time I thought it was no business of mine if she'd slept with half of London. She was to be married in a couple of months and she and Kenneth Fraser seemed well suited. I saw no point in dragging David into a family imbroglio. But now that she's dead—" He looked at Mélanie, eyes gone serious. "I thought you and Charles should know. It's up to you what you do with the information."

Mélanie thought of her husband's tormented face when he refused to discuss Honoria Talbot. She could offer him the truth now, at least a version of it. She wondered if he'd ever forgive her. "Yes. Thank you, Simon."

Jessica stretched out a hand for Mélanie, lost her balance, and toppled to one side. Mélanie caught her just before she hit the floor and swung her up in the air. Jessica's cry of distress changed to a gurgle of delight. "Simon?" Mélanie said, helping Jessica to stand up on her lap. "This isn't a question I'd normally ask a friend, but did you and David sleep together last night?"

"Dear Lord, what we've come to, though I knew you were bound to ask sooner or later. Unfortunately, we both slept alone. David's a bit of a prude when he's under the same roof as his relatives." He reached out to tickle Jessica in the stomach. "If you have to tell David about Honoria's visit to my room, will you let me explain first?"

"Oh, yes. But it isn't David I need to talk to now."

Charles opened the door of the old drawing room, the oak-ceilinged chamber in the north wing that had always been reserved for private family gatherings. Oddly enough, this room with its canvaswork furniture and faded carpets had been one of his mother's favorite spots at Dunmykel. He walked to her Broadwood grand pianoforte and began to pick out a melody at random. He could still tell a hawk from a handsaw. Probably. But could he judge the veracity of his oldest friends? Could Honoria have been in love with Andrew? If so, why had she been so determined to marry Kenneth? Because Kenneth was the father of her baby? Or because Kenneth or Glenister knew who the father was and was using that knowledge to force her hand? It didn't fit Quen's version of an Honoria determined to be in control of any situation. It didn't fit the girl he had grown up with, the girl he remembered from Lisbon, the woman who had appealed to him for understanding on the terrace less than four-and-twenty hours ago.

He stared at his hands and realized, with a shock of surprise, what he was playing.

The door clicked and his wife slipped into the room.

" 'Per pietà ben mio per dona,'" she said. "Perhaps more apt than you know." She closed the door behind her. "Charles, six years ago in Lisbon, did you find Honoria Talbot hiding naked in your bed?"

Memories choked Charles's brain. The Spanish oak and the embroidered silk coverlet of the bed in his rooms in Lisbon. The erratic light of the candle that dangled from his nerveless fingers. Honoria, eyes blue-black and wide with pleading, lips parted, hair spilling over her naked breasts. His own breathing quickened, his thoughts a tumble of confusion, his body taut with unthinking response.

He looked across the familiar jumble of the old drawing room at his wife. At the sea-green eyes that could see things he could keep hidden from most people. So that sometimes his only hope of escape was to barricade himself against her. Perhaps he should have known she'd guess about Honoria. She'd always been able to piece things together quickly, but how the devil—

"She did the same thing to Simon the night he arrived at Dunmykel," Mélanie said.

His fingers thudded against the keys of the pianoforte. "
What
?"

She crossed the room to him. "Listen, Charles, I don't know how this fits with the Elsinore League, but I think I understand at least some of what's been going on." She scanned his face, the way she did with the children when she was forced to break disappointing news. "I know this is difficult, darling. I know it flies in the face of everything you believe about her. But at least hear me out."

He got to his feet. He felt as though he'd been pushed off the cliffs on Dunmykel Bay. "When have I ever failed to hear you out?"

"I know. It's one of the things I lo—it's one of the wonderful things about you." She seized his hands in a firm grip. Her eyes were like polished agate at the bottom of a deep, still pool. "I think Miss Talbot was in your bed for the same reason she was in Simon's three nights ago. Because of a dare."

He bit back an incredulous laugh. "Mélanie—"

Her grip on his hands tightened. "She made every effort to get Simon to take her to bed. When he turned her down flat, she muttered something about 'How am I going to explain it to him.' "

But I love you, Charles
. A beseeching voice. A tremulous voice. A voice that shook with sincerity. "You think a man dared Honoria to seduce me and now Simon." It sounded even more ridiculous when he said it aloud.

"A particular man. The man who gave Miss Talbot his love letters from other women as proof of the success of his seductions."

"Val?"

"It explains why Lord Quentin saw letters from his brother's mistresses among Miss Talbot's things. It explains what she was doing in your bed and later in Simon's."

He jerked his hands from her grip. "It fits some of the facts without making any sense at all. You can argue that I didn't know Honoria, but what has everyone kept saying about her? That she wanted to be in control. And you're suggesting that she risked everything for—not even for love but for—"

"Power. Control."

"How the hell would risking her reputation give her control?"

"As an unmarried virgin, she was in a powerless position. A pawn. The most she could do was defend her virtue. This let her be a player in the game."

"The game?"

"The oldest game of all, darling. The game of the Glenister House set. The game your father and Miss Talbot's uncle excel at."

"But you can't assume Honoria would have cared—"

"She must have lived and breathed it growing up in Glenister House. She'd have watched her uncle conduct his intrigues and then Lord Quentin and Lord Valentine."

"You think I don't know? I grew up in that world, too."

"And you walked away from the intrigues. But you can't assume Miss Talbot felt the same. Besides, she couldn't run off to Lisbon."

He saw Honoria as a little girl in a white frock twisting the adults round her finger when she, Evie, and Gisèle got up to some mischief or other. And then for a moment he saw her as she'd been last night on the terrace.
You don't have the right to demand anything of me anymore
. "It's a reach."

"Think, darling. Forget your need to defend her memory. Forget the girl you thought you knew. Forget the girl you loved."

"I didn't—"

"You did love her, Charles, one way or another. No sense pretending now. But look at the facts. Why else would she have tried to seduce Simon? He's by far the greatest challenge at the house party. If she'd succeeded, she could have been sure he wouldn't have told anyone, and even if he had, who would have taken Simon's word over hers? Having failed with him, I expect she'd have turned her attention to someone like Andrew Thirle—"

"She did. I mean, she—dear God." Andrew's account of Honoria's rides with him echoed in Charles's head. He closed his eyes for a moment while the sense of having been a fool washed over him.

He opened
to
eyes to find Mélanie's gaze slashing into his own, pinning him where he stood, forcing him to confront the truth. He drew his tattered defenses about him and said the few words that needed to be said.

"We have to talk to Val."

Charles pulled the gig (the carriage the Dunmkyel grooms had been able to ready most quickly) up in front of the limewashed facade of the Griffin & Dragon, tossed the reins to a stable boy, and helped Mélanie down from the carriage. Val had left for the village just after the gathering in the Gold Saloon. Charles would lay a monkey he was to be found in the inn.

The varnish on the front door was peeling and a couple of the windows had cracks he didn't remember, but the primroses spilling out of the window boxes were as plentiful as ever. The familiar smells of local brewed ale and cider greeted him when he opened the door, as though they had leached into the wood and stone. Instead of escorting Mélanie to the coffee room, where under normal circumstances they would have refreshed themselves, he steered her down a twisting, low-ceilinged slate-flagged passage to the common room with its rough stone walls and high-backed benches and gleaming dark bar. The buzz of conversation, audible from the passage, came to an abrupt halt at their entrance. Someone clunked a tankard down on a deal tabletop. Someone else hastily extinguished a pipe. A score of curious gazes turned their way, much as when he'd taken Mélanie to one of the Regent's receptions at Carlton House a month since.

Bits and pieces of his own past shone back at him from the startled eyes and wind-chapped faces. Men with whom he had played village cricket, men who had given him rides on cart horses and handed him peppermints over shop counters. Men to whom he was now a stranger, returned from an alien world, seemingly heir to the man whose policies had threatened their livelihood and sent much of their kin off to seek work in factories in the south.

A slosh and a clatter broke the silence. A towheaded boy, who probably had not been born when Charles left Britain, had dropped the ale pot he carried.

"Mind what you're doing, Dugal." Stephen Drummond, whose father owned the Griffin & Dragon, cast a glance at the boy and then walked toward Charles and Mélanie.

"Ch—Mr. Fraser." His grin of greeting changed to a cautious nod.

"Hullo, Stephen." Charles checked his impatience to find Val and smiled at his boyhood friend. Stephen had smuggled ale out of the tavern on more than one occasion to share with Charles and Andrew on fishing expeditions. "How's your father keeping?"

Stephen's blue eyes closed a shade further. "He died last winter."

"I'm sorry to hear it," Charles said, aware as he spoke how inadequate the words sounded.

Stephen nodded again. Charles introduced Mélanie, who was continuing to draw a number of surprised looks. But then Mélanie always attracted attention, one way or another.

"Mrs. Fraser." Stephen inclined his head and then nodded toward the towheaded boy, who was now mopping up the spilled ale. "Dugal, my eldest." He looked back at Charles. "I married Alice Ellon the year after you left for the Continent."

The name conjured up a memory of a girl with coppery plaits and a smattering of freckles who had played with Andrew's twin sister. "He's a fine lad. I didn't realize about you and Alice."

"No reason you should." Stephen shifted his weight from one foot to the other, creaking the leather of his boots. "Mrs. Fraser might be more comfortable in the coffee room. I can have coffee sent in. Or tea. Was there something in particular you wanted, sir?"