Axel (15 page)

“If plants can thrive,” she said, “then all will be well. Everything depends on the plants. The beasts would have no fodder, the sheep no grass, the birds no nests, without plants. We’d have no wool, no meat, no vegetables, no flowers, without the plants. No paper, no books, no wooden furniture, no linen, cotton, spirits, or shelter save for what we could fashion of stones. If you safeguard plants, you safeguard life itself.”

She uttered not a lecture, but a sermon. Axel wanted to kiss her, and write down every word she’d spoken, though neither endeavor was the reason for this visit.

“These are my failures,” he said, gesturing to the roses on her right. “I experiment in here. In the other house, I propagate for my own pleasure, and for commercial purposes. I am modestly successful in the flower trade.”

He could live splendidly on what his flowers earned. Only Matthew knew that. One didn’t farm for profit according to the gentry version of high stickling, one rented tenancies and complained about the tenants.

Axel had dismissed that approach as balderdash within a year of his marriage.

“One suspects you of shrewd business instincts,” Abby said. “These plants are marvelously healthy. Why are they your failures?”

Axel explained about the unpredictable results of crossing varieties, the patience required to make even slow progress toward a perfect specimen. Years of devoted recordkeeping and plant tending, observation and experiment, failure upon failure, all for the smallest advance.

“The thorns are quite small on this one,” Abby said as they rounded the end of the table. “Do you consider it a success?”

“I won’t know unless or until it blooms, and I see if the trait breed true,” Axel said. “My very best grafting stock, for example, a fellow whom I refer to as the Dragon, has beastly thorns, but everything I bind to him thrives. Any progress is encouraging, but so often, gain in one sense means loss in another.” He and the late Empress Josephine had commiserated by correspondence on that very point.

The glass house was Axel’s favorite place to be, as if he were one of the roses, not the botanist. He could breathe here, he could sense in what direction light came from. A good place to have a difficult conversation with his guest.

“You mean,” she said, “you can reduce the size of the thorns, but then the blooms will also be smaller, or you’ll lose the fragrance, or the plant never grows more than a foot high?” She sniffed one of the few blooms on the failure table. “This one looks very robust, and it’s larger than the others. Did you not prune it back as far?”

“I did. The damned thing grows like a weed, which would be a fine quality if it didn’t also smell like a weed sunk in brackish water. About what you overheard last night.”

“You aren’t arresting me, but I’m a suspect,” Abby said, turning to face him.

Between the rows of plants, Axel had left only enough room for a person to pass without disturbing the foliage. He and Abby were close enough to embrace, close enough that he could see improvement in her appearance.

She wasn’t as pale, as tired, or as gaunt as she’d been at the time of her husband’s death.

“I will discover who killed Gregory and why,” Axel said. “You can’t feel entirely safe, you can’t move forward in all the ways that matter, unless I find those answers. I will not fail you.”

He’d surprised her, and he’d surprised himself. A magistrate should solve a case because justice was a fundamental tenet of societies bound by the rule of law. Justice was a fine old concept, but in this situation, justice meant finding answers for Abigail Stoneleigh.

Not for the crown, not for the community, not for the ailing king.
For her
.

“But you suspect me. I did not kill my husband, Mr. Belmont.”

“Of course you did not. I thought about this all the way to the vicarage and back. I do not kiss murderesses.”

“You kissed me.”

The humidity was making her hair curl, turning a tidy coiffure heedless of its pins.

“So I did, and you did not object. Do I need to apologize for that kiss?”

Wind rattled the glass panes, though the structure was sturdy. Axel had designed it himself and was accustomed to winter’s threats.

“You need to explain,” Abby said, moving down the row. “If these are your failures, where are your successes?”

“I haven’t any successes, only hopes, and those are at the next table. Nick is a friend.”

“He’s also something of a hope, I’m guessing. Your friend is troubled by the prospect of marriage.”

“Every man should be. What I said to Nick—that I think you’re keeping secrets—is the truth. You did not confide to me how frightened you were to remain at Stoneleigh Manor, where your husband had been murdered. That fear is reasonable, and yet, you tried to hide it.”

“And failed, apparently. I know you better now, but we were barely cordial previously, and I’ve never been a widow before. I don’t know how one goes on with the magistrate when one’s husband has been murdered.”

Fair question. The magistrate wasn’t entirely sure how to go on either.

“I didn’t want Nick to get the wrong idea,” Axel said, as Abby paused before a swamp rose pining for its home. “That one will revive in spring. I hope. Some wild varieties give up in here, others thrive.”

Axel wanted Abigail Stoneleigh to thrive.

“So you will add me to your collection of hopes,” she said. “I am well read, or I was, and I’m good for amusing lonely viscounts, but my energy is lacking. I’m prone to staring off into space when I recall my husband was killed in his own home, but you expect I’ll come right with enough sunlight, nourishment, and care. Good of you, Mr. Belmont. That still doesn’t explain your kiss.”

Such thorns she had, and she was entitled to them. “Weekes surprised me, or insulted me, I’m not sure which. Shall we sit?”

By imperceptible degrees, the glass house had become comfortable for at least one human specimen in addition to all the plants. An old rug pilfered from the attic lay before one of the hearths. A spare table doubled as a desk, a rocking chair that rocked unevenly had migrated from the nursery.

Abby took that rocker, while Axel took the chair at the table. She unbuttoned her cloak, while he… formulated a lecture.

“I was concerned Nicholas would think I was taking advantage of you,” Axel said, though he hadn’t articulated the concern to himself until he’d been halfway to the vicarage. “I was concerned he’d leap to conclusions about your virtue and my honor. I voiced my suspicion of you mostly to reinforce my role as magistrate in Nick’s mind. I do not suspect you of having any responsibility for your husband’s death.”

This too, had become clear on the way to the vicarage, while the rosy scent of Abby Stoneleigh had yet been fresh in Axel’s mind.

“So you cast guilt in my direction, rather than let your friend think you’re attracted to me?”

Attracted to her? He wasn’t at—well, he was. Somewhat.

“I tried to appear disinterested, in command of all the evidence, and competent as an investigator. I’m sorry for my words. If I had any basis upon which to suspect you of colluding in Gregory’s murder, I’d send you to Weekes’s care while making the case against you.”

She sat back, the quality of her composure at once the same as, and different from, what Axel had observed the night of the murder.

“You suggest I might be both a suspect and not safe, else you’d send me home.”

“You had no motive to kill your spouse,” Axel said. “I’ve puzzled over this and puzzled over this. You genuinely bore the colonel no ill will. You accepted him for the overbearing old martinet he was rapidly becoming. He left you a sort of freedom, even as he isolated you, and you fashioned a meaningful and not unpleasant life. Whoever killed your husband took risks—of significant injury from the colonel’s loaded gun if nothing else. You have no motive to take such risks.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I was meek, so I can’t be guilty.”

“You’re
good
, so you can’t be guilty,” Axel said, scooting his chair close enough to take Abigail’s hands. “You’re also intelligent. If you had decided to do Gregory mortal harm, you’d have been clever about it, made it look like a heart seizure, an apoplexy, a bad fall from his horse. You had all the opportunity in the world—for years—but no motive. You did not kill your husband.”

She used her gloves to swipe at her cheek. “That helps, though if you ever hint, for any reason, that I might do such a thing, I will apply my knee in a location you won’t enjoy.”

She’d warn him first—warn him again.

“Abigail, I am sorry. I’m not a magistrate by natural inclination, nor am I social by inclination. Nicholas’s arrival has surprised me, though I doubt he’ll stay for long. This is apparently the season for surprises.”

“Not every surprise is bad, Mr. Belmont. You surprised me at the mounting block.”

Axel had probably surprised the Deity Himself, as well as the servants gawking from the windows and Ivan the Sluggard.

“I was concerned Weekes would think your biding at Candlewick irregular. He instead thanked me for taking matters in hand, and said Mrs. Turnbull would put you to rights in no time. Your pallor and poor health were remarked upon after Gregory’s service. Mrs. Weekes even referred to you being in a decline prior to your husband’s death.”

And so thoroughly had Axel neglected the activities expected of a wealthy bachelor—no mistress, no regular visits to London, no regular calls on comely widows—that, abetted by Mrs. Turnbull, he’d apparently acquired the qualities of a chaperone himself, at least where a widowed neighbor in poor health was concerned.

A man aspiring to the celibate reputation of an Oxford fellow should have been pleased.

“I’m a shopgirl by rights,” Abby said, “not some baron’s daughter or earl’s niece. My reputation ought not to concern much of anybody, but it concerned you.”

“I ought not to have kissed you.”

The rocking chair came to an abrupt halt. “If you apologize for kissing me, Mr. Belmont, for a harmless little peck on the cheek in the broad light of day, I will show you that I am capable of doing violence to a man after all. Do you know how often I’ve been kissed?”

Not often enough.
Axel’s years of marriage preserved him from the folly of making that observation.

Abby shoved to her feet. “When Gregory came to me on our wedding night, he explained that excessive passion was a young man’s affliction. He would not plague me unduly as a spouse, though he expected wifely decorum at all times from me. I was not to flirt with, encourage, mislead, or bat my eyelashes at any other man. I recall the list, because I possessed none of those skills, and still don’t.”

She was angry. Any botanist knew that spindly foliage could be a function of stress to the roots, and thus Axel rose as well.

“Abigail, it won’t—” He’d been about to say,
It won’t happen again
, to assure her, unequivocally, that he esteemed her too much to allow his gentleman’s manners to be waylaid by another casual slip, another reflex left over from years of married life.

Abby would unman him if he said those things.

He snapped off a pink bud from the nearest of the hopefuls. “You are entirely deserving of kisses, as many as you like of whatever variety you please. I was married for years, and Caroline and I agreed early that we would not part in anger. We kissed at that mounting block more times than I can say, and for the most part, it meant little. An old habit, but a comforting one. I’m sorry Stoneleigh was such an ass, sorry he neglected you in the ways only a husband can care for a wife.”

Her eyes flashed with relief, as if she’d needed, badly, to hear another man convict the colonel of stupidity and neglect.

Axel could do better than that. Much, much better.

“K
isses are like roses,” Mr. Belmont said. “You cultivate them, learn their nuances, and they’ll flourish abundantly.”

He stood at Abby’s elbow, the pink bud in his hand. He tucked the stem into the lapel of Abby’s cape, and abruptly, Abby wanted to cry. Those meaningless gestures at the mounting block were more than she’d had with Gregory. Axel Belmont, as a shy, young husband, had known to offer his wife those kisses, to bring her flowers.

“Who else has seen your hopes and failures, Mr. Belmont?” Had his late wife joined him here? Did he come here to be close to her memory?

Truly, Abby would cry, or smash this entire glass house, if she reflected on how much she wanted to stay away from Stoneleigh Manor. Not because it was the scene of a murder, but because it had been the scene of her marriage.

The callused pad of Mr. Belmont’s thumb brushed Abby’s chin, then his palm cradled her check.

“I will ask this time,” he said. “May I kiss you? This is not a kiss born of old habit, not a mere peck on the cheek. This kiss is a consolation and a pleasure, Abigail, and it belongs only to us.”

A kiss of loss and hope, grief and comfort, combined. Abby closed her eyes, the better to hoard the sensation of Axel’s hand against her jaw. Those hands tended delicate roses, they wielded the knife that cut the graft free from its home.

His boots scraped the plank floor, the scent of him and a sense of heat came nearer as soft warmth pressed against her mouth.

She opened her eyes, ready to complain that that hadn’t been nearly enough of a consolation for years of—

He did it again, touched his mouth to hers, another warning salvo. “A kiss involves two people, Abigail.”

A kiss also involved patience, generosity, tenderness, and courage. By slow, almost courteous degrees, Abby learned that more than lips were involved. A kiss could grow like a vine, to involve tongues, breath, weight, embrace… Even her heartbeat was affected by the time she stood, her arms around Axel Belmont’s waist, her cheek resting against his chest.

“No wonder Gregory was concerned that I’d stray.”

She
should
have strayed, should have found a way to pluck such a glorious intimacy from some quiet garden and pleasure herself with it regularly. Except, unlike her other indulgences, a kiss could not be solitary.