Beneath a Silent Moon (36 page)

Kenneth folded his arms across his chest and stared at his friend for a long, fraught moment. "It's a good story, Frederick. You play the grieving father and guardian very well. But we both know damn well that isn't how it happened. Now I think you'd better tell us the truth."

Aspasia Newland regarded Mélanie with a level blue gaze. "I should have expected this. Why is it that the secrets one most wishes to keep are always the quickest to be discovered?"

Mélanie studied the woman who had been Honoria Talbot's governess. A heart-shaped face, which could not quite be rendered severe by the way her brown hair was scraped into a tight knot. A full-lipped mouth drawn into firm lines of self-restraint. Delicate features set with a wariness as closed as one of Portia's caskets. "My husband and I have no wish to share the information with others."

"That's kind of you, Mrs. Fraser. But the trouble with such secrets is that once they get about they're fiendishly difficult to control. It wouldn't be very good for my charges if their governess was known to have such a reputation."

She glanced at the reflecting pool. Chloe and Colin were sitting on the stone rim sailing a boat back and forth between them, while Jessica's nurse and Miss Dudley, Colin's governess, sat nearby and watched Jessica in her baby carriage. Berowne, Mélanie and Charles's cat, was curled up in a patch of sun on the lawn. Mélanie had told Colin and Chloe about Miss Talbot's death. Colin had turned solemn and Chloe had asked a number of questions, but now they both seemed to have taken the news in stride. Neither had known Honoria Talbot well.

"Chloe already has her mother's reputation to contend with," Mélanie said. "And her mother's birth and fortune to help her do so."

"You're a generous woman, Mrs. Fraser. But you're a stranger to this world. People are freer on the Continent. I wonder if you realize just how rigid the British can be about the morality of such matters." Miss Newland ran a finger round the stiff lace that edged her high-standing collar. "I don't suppose you'd believe I've been debating with myself whether or not to make a confession to you about my involvement with Lord Quentin."

"You'd have had no reason to think the affair had anything to do with Miss Talbot's death." Mélanie scanned Miss Newland's face. "Unless you knew something more. Perhaps concerning Miss Talbot and Lord Valentine?"

Miss Newland's brows lifted.

"We've discovered that Miss Talbot had had a liaison with Lord Valentine for some time," Mélanie said, in the tone she'd have used to say they'd discovered Honoria was fond of painting watercolors.

"I see." Miss Newland smoothed her hands over the dove-gray bombazine of her skirt. "I begin to see why your husband was given the task of investigating Miss Talbot's murder. He's obviously quick to discover information. As you are yourself."

"You knew about Miss Talbot and Lord Valentine?"

Miss Newland looked out across the garden, as elegant and whimsical as a spun-sugar confection from Gunter's, set between the untamed wildness of the cliffs and the sea. "My father was a classical scholar—an Oxford don until he married my mother and was forced to resign his position. After that he eked out a living doing private tutoring. I grew up on the stories of the Greeks and Romans. The Oresteia. Jason and Medea. Paris, Cassandra, Hector, Troilus, and the rest of Priam and Hecuba's brood. When I was a girl, I thought of those stories as fairy tales. But the longer I've lived in the world of the
beau monde
, the less fanciful they seem."

"Glenister House strikes me as a difficult place in which to be employed."

Miss Newland broke off a leaf from the birch tree beside them and twirled it between her fingers. "One has an odd view of a household as a governess. One sees bits of everything and the whole of nothing. I knew Lord Glenister's reputation, of course. But like most men in his position, he was careful to keep his amorous escapades well away from the sphere Honoria and Evelyn inhabited. It was my job to shelter them from their uncle's world. In that sense, you might say my days at Glenister House were my most egregious failure as a governess."

"How old were the girls when you went to Glenister House?"

"Honoria was fourteen and Evie thirteen. Honoria had joined the household at three when her father died. She was used to having her own way in everything. Evie had only been at Glenister House for three years. Her mother eloped with a half-pay officer and gave birth to eight children in quick succession. Lord Glenister took Evie in as a kindness to his sister. Evie missed her own family dreadfully, though she was fiercely loyal to her uncle and cousins. In some ways she was far better at managing things and people than Honoria was herself. Even at thirteen she was beginning to run the household."

"And Lord Quentin and Lord Valentine?"

Miss Newland lifted a brow with all the coolness of the most regal dowager dampening pretensions. "They were away at school. My involvement with Lord Quentin didn't begin until some years later." She did not elaborate. But then, as Mélanie well knew, it was one thing to be honest about the facts. It was quite another to be honest about the feelings that lay beneath.

"When did you first suspect something between Miss Talbot and Lord Valentine?"

Miss Newland frowned down at the leaf clutched between her fingers. "Looking back, I think I suspected the liaison for some time before I'd even admit it to myself. I
didn't want to believe it. Lord Valentine needled Honoria in a way that seemed wholly unromantic, and I couldn't imagine a girl like Honoria running such a risk. I misjudged her."

"In what way?"

Miss Newland smoothed the crumpled leaf. "I didn't realize that her concern for the rules of society was a sham. She wanted to succeed at the social game, but not because she took it seriously. Because it was an avenue to power. She liked to be in control—of situations, of her environment, of the people about her."

It was a cold analysis of a girl who had been little more than a child when she was in Miss Newland's charge. Miss Newland must have realized it, for she gave Mélanie a bitter smile. "You think I might betray more maternal warmth? Given what you've already learned about my past, I think we're beyond appearances, Mrs. Fraser."

Mélanie made no comment. She wasn't at all sure they had got to the truth of Miss Newland's relationship to the Glenister House family. "What convinced you of Miss Talbot's affair with her cousin?"

"The crudest of evidence. I walked into the library at an inopportune moment to find them engaged in an activity that had nothing to do with books." Miss Newland dropped the birch leaf on the ground and clasped her doeskin-gloved hands together. "They didn't appear particularly embarrassed. Honoria asked me to wait for her in her sitting room. She joined me there a quarter-hour later and told me if I breathed a word of what I'd seen she'd reveal my liaison with Lord Quentin. I knew she was a strong-minded young woman, but I don't think it was until then that I realized what nerves of steel she possessed."

"She put you in a difficult position."

"Yes. Whatever I may think of the strictures placed upon unmarried women, there's no escaping the fact mat Honoria risked ruin." Miss Newland's gaze moved to her current charge, Chloe, trailing her blue satin sash in the water as she stretched out an arm to retrieve the toy boat. "I could not in good conscience collude in her love affair with her cousin.
Dear me, what a shocking hypocrite I sound talking about conscience. Chloe, dear," she called out, her voice raised, "be careful."

Chloe sat up, the boat clutched in one hand, and waved to her governess. Miss Newland waved back. "On the other hand, if I exposed Honoria's love affair to her guardians, I would bring censure upon Honoria and disgrace upon myself. Honoria would probably have been forced to marry Lord Valentine, which did not seem to me to be a solution that would ensure happiness for either of them. I would have been turned off without a reference." She turned her gaze to Mélanie. "I confess I also felt a certain fellow feeling for Honoria. It's difficult for a woman, particularly an unmarried woman, to take control of her life."

Memories clustered behind Mélanie's eyes, threatening to turn her thoughts from the matter at hand. "So your only solution was to leave."

"Yes."

"It must have been difficult to leave Lord Quentin."

Miss Newland touched the locket she wore on a black velvet ribbon round her throat. "Difficult enough that I knew I had allowed the affair to continue far too long." Her gaze lingered on a statue on the edge of the lawn, an Italian marble water nymph, her legs and arms bent in sensuous curves, an open shell clutched in one hand with blatant suggestion. "A sensible woman in my position learns to live without pleasure, Mrs. Fraser. I'm afraid I'm not that sensible. But I have learned one can't afford to take pleasure too seriously or to let any one person become vital to one's happiness."

The words might have come out of Mélanie's own mouth five years ago. The problem, of course, was that a person could become vital to one's happiness without one realizing what was happening until far too late.

"You didn't tell Lord Quentin about his brother and Miss Talbot?" Mélanie said over the cottony taste in her mouth.

"No. It would have put him in an intolerable position with Honoria and Lord Valentine, and he has enough trauma in his family as it is." She turned to look at Mélanie, her face shadowed by the overhanging branches of the birch tree. "Honoria still had the power to ruin me, of course. Which I suppose gives me an excellent motive to have killed her."

Glenister stared at Charles's father across the gilt and leather of the study. "I don't know what you're talking about, Kenneth."

"You can spare us the protestations, Frederick. You aren't a good enough actor to pull them off." Kenneth turned to Charles. "I never particularly wanted you to hear the truth of this, but I don't see another option."

Charles sat back on the bench, feeling as though he had stumbled into an alternate version of reality. His father, who had never in his life confided in him, was volunteering information without prompting. Signal fires of alarm went up in his head.

"Will you tell the story," Kenneth said to Glenister, "or shall I?"

"I don't see what story there is to tell."

"As you wish. Correct me if you disagree with my version of events." Kenneth turned back to Charles, though every word he spoke seemed to be a dart aimed at Glenister. "Some years ago—you and Edgar would have been scarcely out of leading strings and it was before Quen and Val were born—Glenister and I were comparing notes on our latest amorous adventures. Which after a time do have a certain sameness, I confess. I don't remember the names of the ladies in question, but as I recall, Glenister professed a preference for married ladies of quality over courtesans—is that how it was, Frederick?"

"I don't remember," Glenister said in a tight voice.

"Sad what age does to the memory. In any event, Glenister remarked that while married ladies who had already produced an heir were fair game, no gentleman could or would foist a bastard heir on another gentleman. I took his words as something of a challenge. I've always enjoyed challenges. I wagered him—what were the stakes, Glenister? A racehorse? A yacht? Ah, yes, my new curricle team against a bronze of his I'd always coveted. The terms of the wager were that I could seduce a married lady who had not yet given her husband an heir. Glenister said he thought I'd finally set myself up for a failure. Those were your words, weren't they, Frederick? I swear I remember correctly."