A Hunt By Moonlight (Werewolves and Gaslight Book 1) (30 page)

He’d never told this story to Catherine. He thought he’d gotten better control of the ’wolf, that such a thing could never, ever happen again. Now he was not so certain.

He shuddered. Maybe society was right to shun and exclude his kind. What business had he, an animal, to marry such a lady as Catherine Fairchild? He should break it off, retire to his country estate and live out his life as a recluse.

“Nonsense, my lord,” said George when he explained the plan and its reasons to the manservant as he laid out Richard’s clothing. “How many accounts have there been of fully human soldiers momentarily losing control in the heat of battle? The fact that you had a moment where your basic instincts rose does not make you a beast, and the fact that you reined them in is a credit to your refinement.”

“Thank you, George. But I fear our long association makes your opinion less than objective. And you can’t understand what I felt in those moments.”

“Do you really think Miss Fairchild won’t follow you to the ends of the earth and bully you back to your senses?”

George had a point there. Richard struggled for a rebuttal.

“My lord, this marriage is the one thing you’ve wanted for yourself, not because your late parents wanted it, or your aunt wanted it, or society expected it. Please don’t put it aside because of a moment’s impulse that you didn't even follow through.”

It wasn’t just the impulse, though. It was the memory of following through once before.
 

George helped him on with his jacket; Richard had long since given up the argument that he could dress himself. “If it bothers you that much, my lord, there’s an easier answer. Just take Miss Fairchild’s remedy from now on.”

Sensible, of course. No matter what the depth of his horror of the wolf within him, if he put aside his emotional reaction to it, he had a rational course that did not involve giving up everything he loved.

George finished brushing the non-existent lint from his lapels. “Of course, you have to decide for yourself how hard it will be to live with the knowledge that a killer is still loose and that you could have chosen to help track him.”

For all his insistence on strict adherence to a servant’s role, George would never let him off when he felt Richard had shirked a duty. Only in the past, ‘duty’ had involved Aunt Rose’s dinner parties and fetes given by tiresome hosts, not giving rein to the animal he had fought so hard to deny.

Richard sighed. Any other month, it would have been irrelevant, at least for another month. But this was one of those rare months in which the moon was full four days in a row, or at least close enough to full to force the change. His first four-moon month, when he was a child, had caught both him and his parents by surprise and had almost led to disastrous discovery.

Catherine had explained to him that the moon was only really full one night a month, but for one day on either side it was close enough to fool the human eye and also, apparently, the curse in his blood. The months where there were four nights of the full moon had something to do with the time of day that the moon reached its absolute apex of fullness. Honestly, the explanation made little sense to him. While he didn’t consider himself stupid by any means, Catherine was the true genius.
 

***

Godwin spent long moments tracing a finger over the ivy pattern that twined in the wrought iron of the bench before answering Miss Fairchild’s question. Royston’s stomach hurt, and he wished he could step in and demand that the question be withdrawn. But that would be bad police work, and Godwin would not appreciate it.

“I suppose it depends on how well the killer knows me. My last case, the one where I took the bullet that shattered my leg, I never considered that a defeat, even though it ended my career.”

“You got your man,” Royston said.

Godwin smiled at him, the same smile he remembered from his youth, the one that told him he’d worked out a problem correctly. “I knew you’d understand.”

“The biggest loss of my career would have been failing to catch the cat burglar who made off with the Countess de Avery’s wedding jewels. He was never caught, and the necklace and earrings were never found, though the magnificent ruby that had been the center stone in the necklace turned up on the market in Austria as a loose stone.”

Godwin was taking his time, working his way to the heart of the question. He’d more than earned that right, and Royston held back any interrogator’s instinct to bring him more directly to the point.
 

Godwin sighed, and closed his eyes as if in pain. “The greatest defeat in my life, though, had nothing to do with the Yard at all. If I had any sense at all, I would have known it for a lost cause from the very beginning.

“I knew Willie’s mother was not in love with me when we married, just as I knew that, whatever she claimed, the child she carried was not mine. I did lie with her once before the wedding—she was very pretty and could be very charming, and I am only flesh and blood. She set out to seduce me as soon as she discovered that she was with child and the father refused responsibility. But I had older sisters who had children, and so I knew by the size of her belly when she came to me insisting that I make an honest woman of her that the timing was all wrong.

“But I felt bad for her, and I loved her even if she did not reciprocate the sentiment. In my line of work, I saw too much of what could become of a woman without education or resources who had a child out of wedlock and what could become of the child, too.”

Royston sat stunned, glad the conversation did not require his participation at the moment. Willie was not Godwin’s son?

“So I pretended to believe her, and I gave her a home and gave her child my name. I had hoped she would be grateful, I had hoped she would…” Godwin cleared his throat. “I hoped she might come to love me.”

“In the beginning, I think she tried. The living I provided her, while not lavish, was better than what she had known before. It seemed to please her to be a married woman, to be a mother—at first.”

Well as he knew Godwin, he only knew this part of his life as shadows, an allusion from his mentor here, a bitter comment from Willie there. At once he wanted to spare his mentor this, to preserve his privacy, and at the same time, he wanted to know the details behind Godwin’s quiet, secret sorrow and the anger that smoldered beneath Willie’s happy-go-lucky surface.

“She quickly grew bored with motherhood. When Willie started toddling about and getting into everything, he became more demanding than a living doll she could dress and take for strolls in the pram. And the very reasons she chose me for marriage were the very things she came to hate about me.

“ ‘Reliable’ became ‘boring’. ‘Good prospects’ turned into ‘you care more about your work than you do about me’.” He grimaced. “I will admit to my share of the blame. The free-spiritedness that I had fallen in love with turned out to be inconvenient in someone who had responsibility for keeping house and watching a child while I worked long hours. The eye for fashion that had made her a peacock among sparrows when I first saw her became a drain on our finances. I could have been more patient, my words less sharp.”

Royston had known that Godwin’s marriage had not been a happy one, had known the union had ended with dissolution, not death, but he hadn’t imagined the circumstances to be this tawdry, this common. That his brilliant mentor could be capable of such ordinary, foolish mistakes, could have faced such an altogether unremarkable betrayal, felt a bit like losing his religion, if he'd had he any to lose.

“We might have worked it out, in the end, save for the one shortcoming I could not forgive—Lily’s liberal attitude toward the company of men. It was the attitude that had taken her into Willie’s father’s bed and then into my own. I discovered that a wedding ring and a child at home did little to abate those tendencies.”

“She was unfaithful,” Royston said for confirmation’s sake, though Godwin’s words left little doubt. He spared a glance to Miss Fairchild—the conversation was treading on the edge of decency. He saw no lady-like blush of discomfort in her face, just deep sympathy.

“My suspicions began almost from the beginning, as soon as she recovered from her lying-in. And still,” he laughed bitterly. “Some detective I am. And still I wanted to ignore the evidence before my eyes. I told myself I doubted without cause, that I had become the stereotype of an older, unhandsome man with a charming young wife.

“Until she miscarried. You have to understand, our marriage was such by that time that she had been sleeping in the child’s room for nearly six months. For Willie’s sake in case of nightmares, that was the fiction, though we both knew the truth of it. The doctor said she had been two months along. The child was not mine.” His voice was heavy with remembered sorrow, weighted with the death of a dream. “I confronted her about it, and she confessed that she had no idea who the father might be." He smiled bitterly. “So you ask me the scene of my greatest defeat. It could be one of any number of beds in London.”

Painful silence fell. A bee buzzed in and out among the flowers, an incongruously pastoral sound.

“So you asked for a divorce then?” Miss Fairchild asked.

“No, not then,” Godwin said. “Though I would have been well within my rights. But I knew what it would have meant for Willie. He adored his mother, for all that she was indifferent to him. In fact, the less attentive she was, the more he seemed to cherish her notice. I knew it would break his heart to separate them, and I didn’t think her capable, financially or otherwise, of caring for the child on her own. Also, I suppose that, deep down, I still harbored some hope that she would settle down and find it in her to love staid, boring, responsible me.”

“So how did it end, then?” Miss Fairchild asked.

“She left me,” Godwin said. “For some fly-by-night salesman, low on money and high on wild schemes. I suppose she had some shred of maternal instinct after all, because she tried to take Willie with her. I refused to let him go. In seeing to it that the boy had my name, she had given me that right legally if not morally.”

Godwin sighed deeply. “Willie always maintained that I kept him out of spite, but I swear that I had the boy’s best interests at heart. I was afraid that Lily and her beau would be too wrapped up in each other and their crazy dreams to remember to feed him and get him off to school. Or, God help me, but it’s true, I was afraid they’d abandon the boy when they realized what a drain on time and money he could be.”

He took a deep breath, visibly trying to pull himself together. “So, my wife ran off to Lord-knows-where with another man, and Willie never saw her again. He blamed me, of course. I intended to do right by the boy. I tried my best. Sometimes I wonder if he wouldn’t have been better off taking his chances with his mother.”

Nonsense,
Royston wanted to say.
Willie loves you.
Only he couldn’t speak the words. Godwin would know them for the lie they were.

His mentor’s shoulders slumped in an attitude of defeat. He looked older now, more worn. Or perhaps Royston was just seeing the man for the first time without the lens of childhood adoration.

“Did Willie know that you are not his father by blood?” Royston asked.

“I’m not certain,” Godwin replied. “I never told him. His mother might have when she was trying to take him away.”

It should have surprised him that father and son had never had such a crucial conversation. It didn’t.

“I tried,” Godwin said. “I tried to raise him up right. Maybe I tried too hard, looked too hard for his mother in him and for whatever shiftless man got her with child and abandoned her. In constantly looking for any hint of irresponsibility and dishonesty, I might have made him believe that such faults were inherent in his character. Maybe I’m to blame for what he’s become, maybe he did it all to spite me. Such a waste. He was such a brilliant, brilliant boy.”

And Royston could hear the thought he would not voice,
If Willie is the killer, perhaps that, too, is my fault.

Royston swallowed hard and tried to think of something comforting to say. He loved Godwin like a father, but he loved Willie like a brother. Putting them together in a room was like lighting a match near a gas leak. Perhaps Willie’s less admirable qualities
had
been inherited. Or perhaps Willie would have failed less if Godwin hadn’t always expected him to fail. It was the only major difference he’d ever had with his mentor, and he’d never found courage to voice it. Would it have changed things if he had?

He thought back to Bessie, his offer to marry her, the child she carried that might or might not be his. Would he have done any better, knowing or suspecting that he had a cuckoo in his nest?

“Who else would know?” Miss Fairchild asked.

She did a fine job asking the questions he was too numb to ask. If she weren’t so keen on alchemy, he’d recommend she take her glamoured self down to the Yard and apply for a job.

“Any of my mates at the time or my superiors, for that matter. Or the neighbors. It wasn’t the sort of thing I could keep quiet. Anyone Willie might have complained to over drinks, I suppose. I’m not important enough for it to have ever hit the papers. Can’t imagine it reaching the circles Winchell or Downey travel in, but once gossip is out, who knows where the wind will take it?”

“Still, we can’t be certain that the killer knew what you considered to be your greatest defeat, and even if he did, there isn’t a location associated with it.”