Beneath a Silent Moon (25 page)

"That would mean it's someone in the house," David said.

"Whether she was assaulted or went willingly to a lover, the man involved was almost certainly someone in the house." Charles's voice was like a lid pressed down on a seething cauldron.

"Could she have been killed somewhere else and then moved to Mr. Fraser's room?" David asked.

"Possibly," Mélanie said, "if she was moved quickly after she died. But she was strangled with the bellpull from Mr. Fraser's room, so the killer would have had to plan ahead. Or he—or she—might have drugged Miss Talbot and then moved her to Mr. Fraser's room and strangled her. But either way, I don't see how the killer could have known Mr. Fraser wouldn't be in his room."

David pushed himself to his feet. His glass tilted in his hand and splashed whisky over his feet. "If I'd had a shred of sense and understood the trouble she was in—"

"David." Charles crossed to him and gripped him by the shoulders. "You're going to blame yourself. You're going to rethink every moment you spent with Honoria from the day she was born and call yourself every name you can think of. It will get worse before it gets better. But believe me,
believe me
, you couldn't have known. Twist this how you will, it's folly to blame yourself."

His voice and face were compelling, quite as if he weren't flaying himself raw for his own inability to understand. But then Charles was always harder on himself than on other people.

David dashed an impatient hand against his face. His eyes were glassy with tears. "She needed someone and I didn't do anything to take care of her."

"Neither did I."

"And the intruder in the library?" David blinked back his tears and frowned at the basin and ewer on the nightstand. "Where the devil does he fit in? Could he have been Honoria's lover?"

"I doubt it. At least, I doubt Honoria was the person he'd come to meet. When he said, 'You're late,' he didn't sound like a man talking to a lover. And even in the dark, I don't think he'd be likely to mistake me for Honoria."

"What do the Elsinore League have to do with all this?"

"I'm not sure. But Mélanie and I learned more about them today." Charles told him about their meeting with Tommy and his story about Le Faucon de Maulévrier.

"You're telling me Honoria was killed to cover up the truth about the identity of a butcher from the French Revolution?"

"Not necessarily. According to Tommy, he and Castlereagh had intelligence that the Elsinore League were plotting to kill someone to cover up Le Faucon's past. But even if Cyril Talbot himself was Le Faucon, it's difficult to see how Honoria could know anything that would be a threat. She was only three when he died."

"Unless he's still alive." Mélanie dropped down on the edge of the bed. "But then we'd have to assume he risked making contact with his daughter after all these years only to turn round and have her killed."

"Because she was threatening to expose him?" Charles said. "In which case, why the hell hadn't she exposed him already?"

"Precisely." Mélanie drew her feet up onto the walnut bedframe. "Besides, the one thing we're sure of is that she was killed by someone in the house."

"Which brings us back to Father and Glenister. They're the only two who could realistically have known of any connection between Cyril Talbot and Le Faucon. Assuming such a connection existed."

"But even if it did, one would think they'd have wanted to protect Miss Talbot from her father's past."

"Besides," David said, "Soro told Manon the people he worked for feared
for
Honoria, not that they were afraid of her."

Charles nodded. "Quite. As soon as it's light, I want to have another look at the room where she died and also at her own bedchamber. For the moment, her pregnancy and the Elsinore League go no farther than this room. They're leverage of a sort."

Little more could be said or done until the light of morning. David gripped Charles's arm for a moment, squeezed Mélanie's hand, and went to talk to Simon before the morning gathering in the Gold Saloon.

Charles closed the door behind his friend and rested his hand on the oak panels. All the tension of the past two hours seemed to settle between his shoulder blades. "I want to take a look at the secret passage before the intruder or anyone else has a chance to come back and remove evidence."

"Darling—"

"The others won't be awake for another couple of hours. No sense in wasting the time." He crossed to the chest of drawers.

"Charles—"

"I'm all right, Mel." He rummaged in the top drawer and took out his pistol and a powder bag. His movements were swift and jerky, one step short of doing violence to whatever was nearest at hand. "I can do this. But if I stop to think, I'm not sure what will happen. So let's just keep going."

Unlike her husband, Mélanie was still wearing her dressing gown. She went to the wardrobe. Fortunately, she'd packed breeches and a shirt. Experience had taught that one never knew when they might come in handy.

She was half afraid Charles would go downstairs without her, but after he'd loaded his pistol he took hers from the drawer where she kept it and loaded it as well. She scrambled into her clothes and laced on a pair of half-boots. Charles was ready about thirty seconds before she was. Under the circumstances, she counted it as a promising sign that he waited for her.

He handed her her loaded pistol, and they made their way down the pine-wainscoted stairs. The yellow light from the lamps they both carried flickered over the grisaille paintings of the Nine Muses that lined the staircase, the framed royal charter that hung casually in one corner of the hall, the crossed swords over the fireplace.

Charles walked swiftly, scarcely seeming aware of her at his side. Tension radiated off him like heat waves. They turned into the north wing, where the thicker, fifteenth-century walls cooled the air. He opened the door to the library.

Mélanie had heard about the secret passage, but she had not actually explored it on her one previous visit to Dunmykel. She watched now as Charles walked to the fireplace without hesitation and pressed the bend in the griffin's tail on the Fraser crest carved into the pilaster beside the fireplace. One of the bookcases flanking the fireplace slid to the side with the soundlessness of well-oiled hinges. The lamps wavered in a draft of dank air. Charles glanced back at her, then ducked his head under the lintel and stepped into the passage.

The floor was hard-packed dirt, the walls granite. A turn-bled pile of rock a few feet from the entrance showed where the intruder had shot rock from the ceiling to delay Charles. Charles crouched down and tilted his lamp so the light fell over the spilled chips of granite. Booted footprints showed in the dust from the fallen rock, but the intruder had neglected to drop anything convenient, such as more coded papers with the seal of the Elsinore League.

"I could have run after him," Charles said, his gaze going to where the footsteps trailed off as the dust had rubbed off the intruder's boots. "But I thought he had too much of a start. It seemed more important to go back upstairs than to indulge in a fruitless pursuit."

"Besides, he had a gun and you didn't. He might have reloaded." Mélanie cast a sharp look at her husband. In his present mood, she wasn't sure he'd have caviled at such a consideration.

"True," Charles said, and walked on without further comment. "The passage was built in the sixteenth century," he added a moment later. His voice sounded bizarrely normal, especially in contrast to the erratic breathing that underlay it.

"To smuggle priests in and out of the house?"

"In this family? Hardly. It connects to the lodge. The lord of the manor at the time was having an affair with the steward's wife."

"You don't think the intruder escaped into the lodge?"

"I doubt it. The passage branches off. One branch leads to the lodge, the other runs to a cave and the beach."

The passage diverged a few yards on. They traced one path to a wooden panel similar to the one that opened onto me Dunmykel library. This one, Charles explained, gave onto the book room in the lodge. As there was no sign that the intruder had gone into the lodge, they traced the path back and took the other fork. Mélanie scanned the hard-packed, uneven ground for further clues. Even so, she didn't glimpse the patch of red, brighter than the red-brown of the earth, until she had nearly stepped in it. She crouched down and pointed. "Blood."

Charles touched his fingers to the splotch and held them up to the lamp. "Quite a pool of it. And not yet completely dry."

"Did you wound the intruder?"

"I didn't think so. It's possible he broke his nose when he fell, but you wouldn't think a nosebleed would drip this much onto the floor, not by the time he got here."

"Miss Talbot didn't bleed," Mélanie said.

"No," Charles agreed.

"Then—"

"I'm not sure."

They went on. She caught a whiff of salt in the air. A gust of wind blew out Charles's lamp. He stopped and fumbled with a flint. They rounded a bend. The sound of the sea rumbled toward them. Up ahead a light glowed.

Charles grabbed her wrist and pulled her against the wall. They both blew out their lamps and slid their pistols from their pockets.

"Curse those miserable idiots," a voice muttered from the direction of the light. "We'll be here all night. Why couldn't they have sorted as they unloaded?"

A second voice mumbled something in reply, the words indistinguishable. Charles inched closer along the wall. His foot must have struck a loose bit of rock. The rock clattered, echoing in the stillness. Footsteps pounded in the opposite direction.

Mélanie and Charles ran forward. The passage turned and widened into a cave. A lamp set in a niche cast a wash of light over the sea-scarred walls and the stacks of crates that filled the interior. Charles ran to the mouth of the cave. Mélanie snatched up the lamp and ran after him.

Footprints in the sand beyond the cave showed where the two men had run off, but they were out of view. A rush of cold water hit Mélanie's feet. The tide was coming in.

"We can't catch them," Charles said, his gaze going from the dark, undulating mass of the sea to the cliffs above them.

They ducked back into the cave. Charles pulled out his flint and relit their own lamps.

"Did you know about the cave?" Mélanie asked, scanning the crates. More boxes than she'd used to move their household from Paris to London. Most of the crates were lined up against the walls, but a jumbled pile had been left in the middle of the cave.

"Oh, yes. But it was always empty when we played here as children." He used his picklocks to pry open the nearest crate and lifted out a bottle. He held it up to the lamplight. "Brandy."

"Smugglers?"

"So it seems. Apparently we interrupted them in the midst of sorting a shipment."

Examination of the other crates yielded tea, champagne, port, and bordeaux. "Not a bad vintage, either." Mélanie set down a bottle. "Do you think the intruder in the library was a smuggler?"

"Meeting with a confederate in the house?" Charles returned a tin of tea to its crate.

Mélanie was standing at the side of the cave. The light from her lamp flickered over the granite wall. Amid the scarring of sea and wind, a rectangular depression stood out, unexpectedly symmetrical. "Charles, what's that?"

"What?"

She reached up to touch the depression. The granite slid in her hand and a panel of rock groaned open.