Beneath a Silent Moon (50 page)

Andrew flipped the page. "Frankly, I'm surprised he went to the trouble of providing for me."

"So am I. Father wasn't one to take his responsibilities seriously in my experience. Not at any expense to himself." Charles stared at an entry for replastering the Gold Saloon. "Do you know who your mother was?"

"No. I didn't even ask at first. I know who my parents are. Whom I'll always think of as my parents. But I did finally ask Mother who was—who'd given birth to me. She didn't know. Mr. Fraser brought me to her when I was a week old."

"If your mother—the lady who gave birth to you—had been a country girl or a maidservant, one would think Father would have simply paid her money to raise you herself. The fact that he found surrogate parents for you, under such secrecy—it sounds as though your mother was a lady of fashion. Who lacked a husband or wasn't in a position to pass you off as her husband's child."

Andrew stared down at the ledger, gaze fixed and glassy. "Does it matter now? We're supposed to be investigating Miss Talbot's death. And Mr. Fraser's."

"Precisely."

"You think this has something to do with it?"

"I think anything to do with the secrets my father kept may have something to do with why he died. The question is which pieces are important. And how. Let's have a look at Father's dispatch box."

At David's suggestion, Mélanie gathered the oddly assorted band together in his bedchamber. She glanced round the circle of people clustered within the green-trellis-papered walls. Gisèle sitting on a jade satin settee, pleating the fabric of her skirt between her fingers. Tommy lounging on one of the shield-backed chairs, David sitting bolt upright on the other. Simon leaning against the wall by the window. Charles's sister, Charles's friends, Charles's colleague. It was, she realized, the first time she'd presided over such a gathering without her husband present. Yet they were all looking at her with that air of expectancy with which they looked at Charles. The barricades between her and her husband might be stronger than ever, but she seemed to have crossed over a line with the other people in his life. That was something. At least it should be.

Everyone present knew bits and pieces of the evidence uncovered in the past four-and-twenty hours. It took a little time to fill them in on the parts they didn't know, but they were patient and refrained from unnecessary questions. Though the latter might have been due to shock as much as tact.

"You lot don't do anything by halves, do you?" Tommy said when she finished speaking. "I know every family has its secrets, but—" He shook his head "It occurs to me that I may have been unfair to Charles. In this household, he's lucky to have grown up sane. Though come to think of it, I've accused him of insanity on more than one occasion."

"Our family's attitude toward scandal is a bit like Vanbrugh's ideas about architecture," Gisèle said. "Nothing's so perfect it can't be improved upon by excess." Her bright, brittle voice was an echo of the tone Charles had used in the Gold Saloon. "And it looks as though that applies to the Talbots as well. Unless we're all so tangled at this point that we count as one family. How odd that we never knew Quen is Father's son."

Tommy gave her one of his rare smiles that was kind rather than mocking or flirtatious. "Surprised you have another brother?"

"Not really." Gisèle twisted the grimy green ribbon at the waist of her gown. "I mean, I don't really have another brother. Everyone knows Father isn't—wasn't—really my father. You see what I mean, Mr. Belmont? We're straight out of a Greek tragedy, except not nearly so mythic and profound."

"More of a Jacobean drama," Simon murmured.

David was staring across the room at Tommy. "Just exactly why did you ask Honoria to meet you yesterday?"

Tommy crossed his legs. "I told you, I wanted to make sure she was happy."

"Why would the happiness of a girl you'd met briefly in Lisbon six years ago seem important enough to risk jeopardizing this secret mission of yours?"

Tommy returned the fire in David's gaze with the steadiness of a seasoned campaigner. "A gentleman doesn't talk, but I think in this case the facts speak for themselves. I don't blame you if you want to call me to account, but might I suggest you wait until Miss Talbot's and Mr. Fraser's murders are resolved? We really can't afford to have anyone else get killed just now."

David sprang to his feet. "By God, Belmont—"

"Oh, for God's sake, David." Gisèle snapped a length of the green ribbon off in her fingers. "If you're going to defend Honoria's honor, you'll have to resign your seat in Parliament, because confronting Honoria's lovers will be full-time employment." She glanced round the circle of faces. "Mélanie put it as delicately as she could, but I can add the pieces together. It's obvious how far Honoria and Val's games went." She looked at David. "If you want to thrash Val when this is over, I won't have any objection. In fact, I'll help." She turned to Mélanie. "Does Charles think the man who shot at him in the secret passage is the same man who killed Father?"

"He thinks it's possible," Mélanie said. "The man was here to meet someone last night, perhaps Mr. Fraser. He could have come back to see him tonight."

"But why would he kill him?" Gisèle looked at Tommy. "Could the intruder be this Faucon de Maul-whatever-it-is?"

Tommy rolled his eyes at the public nature of his once-secret mission. "Perhaps. It sounds as though he's the man Wheaton brought over from France and Giles McGann escorted up the coast."

Simon crossed to the cabinet in the corner. "It sounds as though Le Faucon de Maulévrier—or whoever the man was who Wheaton ferried over to Britain and McGann brought up the coast—was blackmailing Kenneth Fraser to see to his safety." He opened the satinwood doors of the cabinet and retrieved a bottle of whisky. "There's that bit Wheaton remembers about old debts coming in handy and what Miss Fraser overheard her father and Glenister say about 'the members' helping them tidy up a mess of some sort. But if this man was blackmailing Kenneth Fraser, it's hard to see why he'd kill him."

"Perhaps he doesn't need Father anymore now that he's out of France," Gisèle said. "If Father was the one person in Britain who knew who he really was, he'd be a liability."

"And Honoria?" David said. "Where does she fit in?"

Gisèle leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "If she was poking into the past, and she stumbled on something concerning Le Faucon and whatever nasty thing the Elsinore League swept under the carpet years ago—"

"She was killed by someone in the house," David pointed out.

Gisèle blinked. "The only people in the house who would have been afraid of her investigating the Elsinore League are Father and Lord Glenister, and Father couldn't have killed her, so…"

"We don't know that she was killed because of the Elsinore League," Simon said. He was pouring the whisky into a variety of drinking vessels—glasses, mugs, a coffee cup he'd brought up from the Gold Saloon.

"But we know Soro claimed they'd killed at least once and we know Honoria was poking her nose into their business," Tommy said. His voice had its habitual drawl, but his hands were balled into fists.

Mélanie felt herself softening inside as though she were looking at her son rather than her husband's former colleague and frequent rival. "Whyever she was killed, it wasn't because of anything you told her when you met her in the churchyard, Tommy. You said yourself you kept talking at cross-purposes."

"If I'd got her to explain why she was suddenly so interested in the past—" Tommy shook his head.

Mélanie accepted a glass of whisky from Simon. "She wanted to know about her father. We keep coming back to him and the Elsinore League."

Gisèle scowled into her whisky. "What is the effect Honoria has on men? I know she is—was—pretty, but that's not enough to explain how she could make all men besotted with her. Even Charles—" She glanced at Mélanie and drew a breath. "I mean—"

"It's all right." Mélanie took a sip of whisky to cover the fact that it wasn't all right at all. Beneath the smoky taste, something lingered on her tongue, like an afterthought.

"She didn't actually mention her father's death when we met," Tommy said, "even though we were standing in the churchyard right beside his grave."

"Yes, but—" The afterthought clicked into place in Mélanie's head. "Don't drink."

"What is it?" Gisèle said.

Mélanie set the glass down. "Laudanum."

"What is it?" Andrew said as Charles lifted a worn brown leather volume from Kenneth Fraser's dispatch box.

"It seems to be a ledger." Charles set the volume on the desk and opened the front cover. "Recording payments of some sort." He scanned the dates, entered in a bold script that was clearly his father's. Like a blow to the gut, it hit him again that the man with that decisive hand was gone. Dead. Reduced to a wreckage of blood and bone.

"April of 1780 to—" Charles flipped through the entries. The writing stopped well before the last page of the ledger. "October 1785."

Andrew leaned down to read the entries. "A thousand pounds. Two thousand pounds. A thousand again. Three thousand. Good God, there's a small fortune here, even by your father's standards."

Charles turned the pages of the ledger again, more slowly. A few a year, but not at regular intervals. All varied between one and three thousand pounds. Except for the last.

"What the devil was Kenneth Fraser paying twenty-five thousand pounds for?" Andrew said.

"He may not have been paying it out. He may have been taking it in. These dates are before he came into his inheritance. Before he bought Dunmykel."

Andrew frowned down at the ledger. "Your father always insisted I record the details of any transactions. He was meticulous about it, for all he was often an absentee landlord. Yet there's nothing here to indicate what these amounts mean, not even if they're incoming or outgoing. He must have thought whatever it was too dangerous or damaging to record."

Charles nodded. "And he kept the ledger locked away, which implies—"

His words were drowned out by the creak of the door being thrown open. "Charles." Mélanie hurried into the room. "Someone put laudanum in David's whisky."

"David's?"

"I know, it doesn't make any sense, but there's no doubt. I tasted it. Though I might have missed it if we hadn't tasted the laudanum in Miss Talbot's brandy so recently."

"My God," Andrew said, "is some lunatic drugging all the drinks in the house?"

"We checked," Mélanie said. "We checked all the whisky, brandy, sherry, water, anything liquid any of us had in our rooms. David's is the only one that's been doctored. And before you ask, David says the last time he had a drink from the bottle was the night before last. Before Miss Talbot was killed."

"Where are the others?" Charles asked.

"In the old drawing room. I didn't think there was enough room for all of us in here."

"Right. Andrew, bring the dispatch box."

Gray predawn light leached round the white-painted shutters in the old drawing room. The candle sconces by the fireplace and the lamp on the rosewood table created islands of warmth in the cool shadows of the room. Tommy and Gisèle sat on one of the cream silk sofas. David was pacing up and down at the far end of the room. Simon stood beside the pianoforte, staring at a musical score as though it held answers to why someone might be making an attempt on his lover's life.