Beneath a Silent Moon (18 page)

"No. And Castlereagh knows no more than what you just outlined. Le Faucon would have been in a precarious enough position if his past had come to light under Bonaparte. Under the White Terror, with the current Vicomte d'Argenton one of d'Artois's cronies, he wouldn't have a hope in hell of surviving."

Charles surveyed Tommy. "Castlereagh told me he was afraid the Elsinore League were planning an assassination to stir up trouble between the allies. Surely that would be a bit extreme if Le Faucon fears for his life. He's been content to lie low all these years."

Tommy shifted his position on the settee.

"That isn't it, is it?" Charles said. "You think they may be planning to kill someone but not to stir up trouble. To cover up Le Faucon's past."

"Damn you, Charles. You could always put me in check before I even had my pawns arrayed."

"Who?" Mélanie said. "Whom do you think they might try to kill?"

"That's just it." Tommy sprang to his feet and took a turn about the room. "Until we know who Le Faucon is, we can't begin to guess."

"And you think McGann might know?" Charles said.

"He was a possible lead." Tommy gave a short laugh. "Our only possible lead."

"Did you find anything else in the cottage to indicate where he might have gone?"

Tommy shook his head.

"There are no signs of violence in the cottage," Mélanie said, "but it looks as though Mr. McGann left abruptly, probably late at night."

"Could he have known you were on to him?" Charles asked, his gaze trained on Tommy's face.

Tommy stalked to the dresser and refilled his glass. "I wouldn't have thought so, but I suppose it's possible."

"What will you do now?" Charles asked.

"Keep looking for McGann. At present, he's the best lead I have."

"Let me help make inquiries among the villagers. I can do that more easily than you can."

"Can you give me one good reason why I should trust you, Fraser?"

"Not that I can think of. But I want to find McGann as much as you do."

Tommy looked at Charles for a moment, measuring Charles as Charles had measured him. "All right."

"Where can I find you?"

"Oh, no, I'm not going that far. Let's appoint a meeting time and place. Midnight tomorrow?"

Charles nodded. "There's a chapel on the Dunmykel grounds. Just beyond the birch coppice. It will be deserted at that hour."

Tommy set down his port and straightened his cravat. "I hear your father's to marry Honoria Talbot."

Charles went still for a fraction of a second. "Gossip travels fast, even when one's incognito. Yes. He is."

"She's a lovely girl." A host of different subtexts hung in the air, but Mélanie couldn't settle on any one of them. "For her sake, I hope they're happy."

"So do I," said Charles.

Tommy gave a quick nod, turned to Mélanie, and lifted her hand to his lips. "Enchanting to see you, under any circumstances. I'd say not to let Charles drag you into anything too dangerous, but half the time it seems to be the other way round."

Mélanie summoned up the sort of bright smile that went with champagne and dance cards and hid her true feelings as effectively as a silk fan. "How well you know me, Tommy."

Tommy brushed his lips over her hand, but when he straightened up his gaze had turned serious. "Let me go out through the back. Then wait a bit before you leave." He looked from her to Charles. "These people are dangerous. Le Faucon, whoever he is, is still a powerful man. We know he's ruthless, and now he has nothing to lose. Just because we're in Britain doesn't mean the world's turned safe."

Charles nodded. "Caution sits oddly on your tongue, Belmont. But I take your meaning."

A smile tugged at Tommy's mouth. "Despite everything, I really wouldn't care to see you with your throat cut, Fraser. At least not until after we get to the bottom of this."

Tommy left the room with the swish of well-cut coattails and the click of Hessian boots. Charles went to the door and looked into the hall to make sure he had really left. He came back into the room, leaned against the closed door, and nodded.

"Do you believe him?" Mélanie asked.

Charles prowled across the room. "Do you?"

"I asked you first."

He scowled at the bookshelves. "The paper with Le Faucon's seal on it looked genuine. It was certainly old. They could have faked it, but—"

"It would have been difficult."

"Yes." Charles ran a finger down the faded gilt of a book spine.

"Charles." Mélanie looked across the room at her husband, feeling the familiar rush that always came when their minds clicked together over a problem. Some couples no doubt got this feeling from moonlight kisses or leisurely caresses exchanged on sun-dappled sheets. "According to Tommy, Colonel Coroux was found dead in his cell three weeks ago, which is just about the time Francisco and Manon fled Paris. What if Colonel Coroux was murdered and that's what had Francisco so upset?"

Charles's eyes narrowed. "
They have to be stopped before they kill again
. If Tommy's right about Le Faucon trying to cover up his past, Coroux could have been killed because he knew too much."

"Perhaps the messages Manon carried were communications between Coroux and Le Faucon. Coroux was trying to blackmail Le Faucon over his past, and Le Faucon decided the only safe solution was to get rid of him." Mélanie fingered a fold of her skirt. "If McGann was involved with Le Faucon and the Elsinore League and he got wind that Francisco had escaped with the papers and the whole thing was unraveling—"

"Then Giles would have had more than enough reason to disappear," Charles finished in a cold, flat voice.

"Yes. But—"

The thud of horse hooves echoed through the dusty glass of the window. Charles crossed the room and flung open the casement. "Andrew."

Mélanie followed her husband to the window in time to see Andrew Thirle, the Dunmykel estate agent, turn his dapple gray toward McGann's gate. Andrew was the oldest of Charles's small circle of real friends. His father had managed the estate before him, and he and Charles had grown up together at Dunmykel.

"Charles. By all that's wonderful," Andrew said. "I heard you arrived last night. Is McGann back?"

"Apparently not. Where's he gone?"

"That seems to be the mystery."

"What the devil—"

"Wait a bit," Andrew said. "I'll come in."

Andrew looped his horse's reins round the gatepost and made for the door. Charles and Mélanie met him in the entrance hall. "What the hell happened?" Charles demanded.

"We aren't sure." Andrew swept his beaver hat from his unruly chestnut hair. "Mrs. Fraser. It's good to see you again."

Mélanie returned the greeting. Andrew always treated her with careful formality, though she'd told him to call her Mélanie when they met three years ago.

Charles fixed his friend with a hard stare. "What do you mean, you don't know what happened? Where did McGann go?"

"No one seems to know. He's been missing for over a fortnight. At least that's the last time anyone saw him. He took a saddle into the tack shop in the village to be repaired two weeks ago last Thursday."

"He didn't mention business to anyone? Ask anyone to look in on the house or the livestock?"

"No. It took a while to sort out that he was actually gone. Danny Alford took the horses to his house and Meg and Harry Fyfe are feeding the rest of the animals. After a couple of days I took the spare key and had a look inside the cottage to make sure he hadn't fallen ill or suffered an accident." Andrew cast a glance round the hall, as though to make sure there was no sign of McGann's return. "But as you can tell, he must have gone away."

"In the middle of the night without warning, from the look of it."

Andrew flicked a finger through the stack of newspapers on the gateleg table in the hall. "McGann never was the tidiest sort."

"Damn it, Andrew, don't tell me you left it at that."

"What else could I have done?" Andrew's mobile features were set with a wariness Mélanie didn't remember from their meeting three years before. "Look, Charles, I'm as fond of McGann as you are, but he's able to take care of himself. He wouldn't thank any of us for meddling."

"An old friend disappears without a word of warning, and it doesn't even occur to you to wonder—"

"Of course I wondered." Andrew's voice cut against the beams overhead. "I asked questions of everyone who knew him. It's the talk of the village—at least, it was for the first few days. But there's no evidence of foul play. There's no evidence he fell ill. He seems to have left of his own accord. I assume he had his reasons for doing so quietly. Which means he wouldn't want us asking questions."

"Questions about what? Is there anything to even hint at why he might have done this?"

Andrew shook his head. "He's always kept to himself, especially since his wife died. But my mother had him to dinner a week before he went missing and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. If anything, he was in one of his more cheerful moods. He'd just received a copy of Madame de Stael's
De l'Allemagne
from Edinburgh. We had quite a lively discussion about it."

"For Christ's sake, Andrew, if you're keeping something from me—"

"Why would I keep anything from you?"

Charles stared at Andrew for a moment, then slammed his hand down on the table. "Did you write to me when you realized McGann had gone missing? Did I miss the letter because I left London?" He read the answer in Andrew's face. "Why the hell didn't you at least write?"

Andrew shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He was two years Charles's senior, Mélanie knew, but in that moment he had the look of a schoolboy picking his way through a conversational mire. "I thought about it. But what could I have told you? There's no reason to suspect anything untoward has happened. Besides—" He glanced away.

"What?" Charles said.

Andrew looked back at Charles. "You haven't wanted to have much to do with Dunmykel or anything associated with it for the past nine years."

"What the devil's that supposed to mean?"

"You've been back to visit—what? twice?—since you left Britain."

"What the hell does that have to do with—"

"The world hasn't stood still here any more than it has on the Continent. Do you have any idea what I deal with day to day? Thanks to your father's Clearances, it's next to impossible for a lot of the tenants to make a living with their cattle. I'm trying to repair cottages without the money to do so, scrape together food to get families through one more winter, scrounge up peat and firewood—let's just say that the fact that an able-bodied man like McGann apparently disappeared of his own free will hasn't been at the top of my list of concerns."

Charles scraped his hand through his hair. "I know things have been difficult. But I assumed—"

"That we could weather the storm better than the average Highland estate?"

"That you'd have written to me if it was that bad."

Andrew met his gaze as though they were confronting each other on the cricket field. "Did you write to me for my advice on the intricacies of Continental diplomacy? This isn't your world anymore, Charles. Any more than the embassy in Lisbon or the Congress of Vienna is mine."

"Christ, Andrew, you should know I want to know when anything's amiss at Dunmykel, whether it's the tenants starving or McGann disappearing."

"That's just it, Charles." Andrew's friendly blue eyes had turned marble hard. "You made it clear you wanted to get as far away as possible from Dunmykel and your family. I can understand. God knows I tried to run from my own family, with less provocation, though I could only afford to go as far as Edinburgh. But it hardly inspired me to come running after you with the estate's problems. Dunmykel hasn't been your concern for a long time."

"I never—" Charles swallowed. Mélanie saw Andrew's words hit home like a hammer blow in her husband's eyes.

Andrew put out a hand as though to touch Charles on the shoulder, then let it drop to his side. "Look, I didn't mean—"

Charles squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. "I'm sorry, Andrew. I've no call to take my worries out on you."

Andrew scanned Charles's face. "The last few days can't have been easy. It must have come as a shock."

"It?" Charles said.

"Your father's betrothal to—to Miss Talbot." Andrew didn't so much as glance at Mélanie as he spoke, but Mélanie suspected that had she not been present more words would have been exchanged between the two friends about Honoria Talbot. Andrew must have known Miss Talbot on her childhood visits to Dunmykel.

"My father's always had a knack for surprises," Charles said.

Andrew returned Charles's gaze as though they were passing a memory back and forth between them. "McGann didn't know about the betrothal, did he?" Charles said.

"No. We none of us knew until your father and Lord Glenister and Miss Talbot arrived. McGann will be pleased to see Miss Talbot as mistress of Dunmykel."

"I daresay. Though pardonably concerned about her marrying my father."

"He's bound to be as surprised as the rest of us. He's always had a soft spot for Miss Talbot. Mother says it's the resemblance."

"Resemblance?"

"To Miss Talbot's mother," Andrew said. "You didn't know? No, I suppose you wouldn't. I didn't know myself until Mother started reminiscing a few months ago. Apparently Miss Talbot's mother visited Dunmykel as a girl several times with her family before her marriage, before Mr. Fraser bought the estate. According to my mother, McGann was quite taken with her. Nothing could come of it, of course. The gulf between their stations was far too wide. But it's natural he'd care for her daughter."

Charles regarded Andrew for a long moment, as though searching for a trace of his boyhood friend. "You know even more about McGann than I realized. You're sure you can't shed any light on why he disappeared?"

"Quite sure," Andrew replied.

"Andrew's right." Charles strode along the worn ground of the path back to the house, booted feet thudding against the beaten-down grass as though he could pound some sort of sense out of it. "I had no call to turn my back on Dunmykel as I did."