Beneath a Silent Moon (22 page)

The mark on her neck was narrow, probably made by a cord or rope rather than fingers. Mélanie glanced about. The flickering flame of her candle caught something red-tinged on the floor between the bed and the bedside table. She bent down to retrieve it and held it to the light of the candle. The red was not blood but embroidered flowers. It was a tapestry bellpull.

Mélanie touched her fingers to Miss Talbot's face, smoothed back her hair, lifted her eyelids. Her eyes had the empty, absent stare of death. Her pupils were contracted, dark pinpoints in irises that were as blue as they had been in life.

Mélanie turned back the covers. Miss Talbot's arms lay loose at her sides. Her diamond betrothal ring caught the lamplight. One leg was turned in slightly, but her nightdress was smooth, as though she had adjusted the folds when she lay down. Mélanie lifted one of her arms and pushed back the frilled cuff of her nightdress. The underside of her arm had the purply look of a bruise. When Mélanie pressed her finger against the darkened flesh, the skin blanched beneath her touch. She removed her finger, and the skin purpled again.

Footsteps sounded behind her. "Nothing in the dressing room," Charles said in a quiet voice.

No one
, was what he meant. "It looks as though she's been dead for at least an hour and not more than four," Mélanie said. "I doubt we have to worry about an intruder in the house."

Charles glanced at the body of his childhood friend. "She was dragged." It wasn't quite a question.

Mélanie nodded. "I've seen morphine overdoses. I recognized her eyes. Besides, why else would she appear to have slept through it?"

"Quite. But we should make sure there's no intruder in the house all the same."

"Do we wake everyone?" Mélanie asked.

"Not yet. I'd like to hold off a scene of general hysteria for as long as possible." Charles glanced at his father, then back at Mélanie. She had seen that look on his face during the war, when a wrong decision would be paid for in lost lives. "Stay with my father."

"Charles—"

He brushed his fingers against her cheek. "I'll check the nursery myself. I promise." He turned to go, but when he was halfway to the door, he stopped and looked back at his father, who was sitting hunched in the armchair. "Sir?"

Kenneth turned his head.

Charles drew a breath. There was a raw note in his voice Mélanie had never heard before. "If by any chance she wasn't dead when you came into the room, you'd best tell me now."

The realization of what Charles had implied filled Kenneth's gaze. His eyes turned as cold and sharp as broken glass. "What I've told you is the truth. I'm damned if I'll justify myself to my son."

Charles held his father's gaze for a long, fraught moment that sent a chill along Mélanie's nerves. Even after four and a half years as Charles's wife, she could only begin to guess at the echoes that passed between the two men.

At last Charles gave a curt nod and stepped from the room.

Mélanie rubbed her arms. For all the dangerous, painful, unpleasant eventualities she had considered when they left for Scotland, that Honoria Talbot would be murdered had never occurred to her. Miss Talbot wasn't Francisco, who had lived a life on the edge for years. And yet Miss Talbot more and more seemed to be at the center of the ever-expanding web of intrigue. Francisco had said it himself.
It all comes down to Honoria
.

She drew a breath of the night air, and then returned to her father-in-law and knelt on the Aubusson carpet beside his chair.

Kenneth was staring at a painting on the wall by the fireplace. Danaë reclining on gleaming red velvet, her head thrown back, her hand extended to clutch a fistful of gold coins. Kenneth seemed to be scouring the velvet and gold as though answers were hidden in the brushstrokes. His shoulders were hunched beneath the fuzzy merino of the blanket. The candlelight picked out strands of silver in his light brown hair and deepened the shadows beneath his eyes, the creases beside his mouth, the furrows in his forehead.

She could not be sure what he had felt for Honoria Talbot. She wasn't sure he was capable of feeling love at all, save perhaps for the works of art he collected. He had done things to her husband for which she would never be able to forgive him. Yet it was impossible to look at the numb disbelief stamped on his face and not feel pity. She touched his arm. "I'm so sorry, Mr. Fraser."

He looked down at her as though he had to remind himself of where he was and with whom, but when he spoke, his voice held a trace of the customary irony. "I pride myself on being prepared for most eventualities in life. I must say this is one I hadn't anticipated." He twisted his glass in his hands. "Charles must be pleased."

Her hand closed round the carved arm of the chair. "That's ridiculous, and you know it."

"Is it?" His gaze moved over her. She was keenly aware that the satin ribbons at the neck of her dressing gown had come open and she wore nothing beneath. "Why don't you ask him yourself?"

For a moment his blue eyes were as keen as ever. She returned his gaze, her blood suddenly still, and found herself questioning every certainty of the past quarter-hour.

Charles rounded the corner of the ground-floor corridor into the north wing. His candle, burned halfway down, cast fitful light on the oak wainscoting, but he was moving more by memory than illumination.

His heartbeat had slowed a fraction, thanks to a glimpse of his son and daughter sleeping peacefully in their canework nursery beds, along with his eight-year-old cousin Chlóe, his Aunt Frances's youngest child. He'd gone back to his father's room to tell Mélanie. Kenneth had seemed a bit more himself, and Mélanie had persuaded him to move to the dressing room.

Mélanie was now checking on the rest of the family and guests. Charles's estimable valet, Addison, had organized the footmen to make sure the house was secure. Charles had hastily changed into a shirt and breeches and taken the ground floor of the north wing for himself. Not that he expected to find anything. He was convinced, with a certainty that gnawed at his vital organs and turned his stomach, that Honoria Talbot's killer had come from within the house.

Honoria's lifeless face flashed before his eyes, as it had every few minutes since they'd found her, interrupting the smooth, ceaseless flow of activity. He blinked the image back to some part of his brain where it could be examined later, and turned the knob on the library door.

The door swung inward, the sound echoing off the high ceiling. A rush of cool, musty, leather-tinged air greeted him. The library was the only part of the original thirteenth-century keep to have been incorporated into the current house. The air always smelled different here, as though it, too, had absorbed the history of the room.

Charles drew a breath. The library had been his favorite room at Dunmykel as a child. But now he could not step over the threshold without remembering that this was the room in which his mother had put a bullet through her brain. He stepped into the room, holding his candle aloft so the light fell over the tall ranks of bookshelves, the high-backed chairs, the gateleg table.

And the dark silhouette of a man standing beside the table.

"You're late," the man said. "I was beginning to worry."

The speaker was of average height, bareheaded and greatcoated, his face indecipherable. His voice was educated and unaccented, wary but not surprised. Nor did he start guiltily or make any move to escape. He stood where he was, waiting for a response, a dark presence in the blue-black shadows.

Charles's gaze slid to the fireplace. Even in the darkness, he could see the outline of the bookcase that had swung outward, revealing the entrance to Dunmykel's secret passageway. He edged forward, trying to put himself between the intruder and the escape route. "I was unavoidably detained," he said, when he knew further seconds without speech would alert the intruder that something was wrong.

He kept his voice as neutral as possible, but apparently it was no match for whomever the intruder was expecting. In two strides the intruder went from the table to the mouth of the passageway. Charles was a pace behind him. The rush of movement extinguished his candle. He dropped it, caught a handful of his quarry's greatcoat as he flung himself into the passageway, and banged his head on the low lintel of the hidden doorway.

The intruder wrenched free of his grasp. Charles sprang forward in the dark. The force of the jump knocked them both to the ground. He slammed into the cold, hard rock and earth, clutching the intruder's ankles. As he tried to scramble up, a booted foot caught him in the face.

The force of the kick threw him against the granite wall. Pain sliced through his head, and what vision he had swam darkly. The click of a hammer sounded. He barely had time to feel a cold rush of fear before a bullet ricocheted off the ceiling and a hail of rock fell to the ground between him and his quarry.

Mélanie was halfway across the first-floor corridor when she heard footsteps on the stairs. She turned to see her husband step onto the landing. The corridor was lit only by the candles they carried, but she'd know the lean angles of Charles's body and the graceful set of his shoulders anywhere. "Everyone on this floor is safely accounted for," she said.

Charles nodded. He was leaning against the grisaille-painted stair wall. His candle tilted precariously in one hand, leaving his face in shadow. "Did you tell them what happened?"

"No, I fell back on the oldest trick to avoid panic—I lied. I tapped on the doors and said we'd heard a disturbance outside, that we thought it was just the dogs, but I was checking to make sure everyone was all right."

"That's my Mel." An effortful ghost of a smile sounded in his voice. "The servants are all safely accounted for as well, and the house is secure."

"That's a relief, although—" She shifted her candle and got a good look at him for the first time. His face and shirt were smeared with dirt, and dried blood crusted a scrape on his cheek. "Good God, darling." She reached out to smooth his hair back from his forehead and check for further damage. "What have you been doing?"

"Securing the house."

Her fingers froze against his temple. "There was an intruder?"

"
Was
being the operative word." He caught her hand and drew away it from his face. "He escaped down the secret passage."

Her mind went to the panel with the Fraser crest he had shown her on her visit to Dunmykel three years earlier. "He was in the library?"

"Waiting for someone."

"Waiting—?"

"When I first came into the room, he said I was late. He thought I was whomever he'd come to meet. The fact that he was waiting calmly for whomever that was makes me question whether he killed Honoria." Charles passed a hand over his face. "We should wake David and Glenister. They deserve to hear about Honoria as soon as possible."

Mélanie rapped at David's door and asked him to come to Kenneth Fraser's dressing room, while Charles did the same with Glenister. She and Charles met back in the corridor and reached Kenneth's dressing room ahead of Honoria's two guardians.