Beneath a Silent Moon (55 page)

His fingers tensed beneath her own. "I—"

"Oh, good, here you are." Tommy strode into the room and pushed the door to behind him. "The others are all in the dining room. Miss Fraser's organized a sort of dinner. She's nearly as cool-headed as you are, Fraser, and a good deal less annoying."

Charles turned from the desk to face Tommy. The vulnerability was gone, closed over by layers of hard-won scar tissue. "Is Glenister there?"

"Large as life, though he's keeping to himself. I don't know what you said to him, but he looks as though he'll plant a facer to the next person who tries to talk to him. At least he's stopped threatening to leave, probably because his sons and Miss Mortimer are acting as though there'll be another murder if he attempts to do so." Tommy hitched himself up on the corner of the desk. "Look, you don't have to tell me any more family secrets or nonsense about who slept with who thirty years ago—"

"Whom." Charles leaned against the paneled wall.

"What?"

"Who slept with whom."

"Right. Who slept with whom and who happens to really be whom's father or mother. I already know more than I ever wanted to about the liaisons of the Fraser and Talbot families." Tommy's gaze sharpened like the point of a sword-stick. "But if you've found anything in that dispatch box that has to do with Le Faucon and this Elsinore League business I need to know."

"We haven't," Charles said. "At least, nothing we can be sure of."

"Spare me the verbal fencing, Fraser. What about what you can't be sure of?"

Charles and Mélanie exchanged glances. Difficult to gauge how much to reveal or not reveal when it was impossible to know how the pieces fit together. "Glenister's father was paying money to my father," Charles said.

Tommy's eyes narrowed. "Why?"

"We're not sure."

"But presumably because of something they both wanted to keep secret."

"Quite."

"Let me guess." Tommy picked up the silver paperweight and tossed it in the air. "It could have to do with more of these who was sleeping with
whom
details, which is why the two of you are looking so reticent. Or it could have to do with the Elsinore League."

Charles folded his arms over his chest. "That's it in a nutshell. According to Glenister, the Elsinore League were a club of young men sowing their wild oats and had nothing to do with Le Faucon de Maulévrier. Even assuming Glenister's telling the truth, Le Faucon could still have been a member of the league. But we can't connect Glenister's father to the Elsinore League. Can you?"

"Not based on what Castlereagh told me. Of course, Castlereagh doesn't seem to have told me the whole of it."

"Old Lord Glenister was a political force," Charles said. "More so than his son."

"He was a Tory?" Mélanie asked.

"A conservative Whig. But he opposed the Revolution."

"Other than Cyril Talbot, the only one we can link to revolutionaries so far is Simon Tanner's father," Tommy said.

"We can't link Simon's father to anything. Save that he supported the Revolution."

Tommy swung his leg against the side of the desk. "Perhaps—"

A rap at the door cut into his words. Charles straightened his shoulders, instinctively braced against intrusion. "Come in."

The door opened. A man with bushy white hair and thick brows stepped into the room. Mélanie felt more than saw Charles's sudden stillness. He and the white-haired man regarded each other for a long moment, choked with memories.

"Hullo, Charlie," the man said.

"Hullo, Giles," said Charles.

Charles scarcely moved a muscle, but Mélanie read a host of emotions in the tightening of his jaw and the widening of his eyes. Relief that Giles McGann was alive. Surprise at his reappearance. Fear of what was to come. Bitterness at the bite of betrayal.

McGann regarded Charles in silence. He had piercing blue eyes set in a lined face that retained a hint of boyish mischief. "I heard about your father," he said at last in a rough, musical voice. "And Miss Honoria." He drew a sharp breath, his gaze clouded with grief. "I'm sorry."

Charles swallowed. Mélanie suspected he was struggling to find his voice, though when he spoke, he sounded normal enough. "Did you know we were looking for you?"

"Not for a certainty. But I guessed."

Charles sucked in a breath and released it. "You bastard. I was afraid you were dead."

"Yes, I'm sorry about that. I couldn't—"

"Take the risk? Or my father couldn't?"

McGann's eyes darkened to cobalt. "Charlie—"

Tommy sprang off the desk. "Loath as I am to interrupt this touching reunion, would you mind telling us where the devil you've been, McGann? You are Giles McGann, aren't you?"

"Thomas Belmont," Charles said. "A diplomatic colleague. And this is my wife, Mélanie."

"Mr. Belmont." McGann nodded at Tommy and then turned to Mélanie with the same appraising gaze she received from everyone in Britain from London duchesses to the Dunmykel grooms. On the whole, though, the servants and tenants were friendlier than the duchesses, and McGann was friendlier than most. "Mrs. Fraser. I'm pleased to meet you at last. Charlie wrote that you were beautiful, but I see he understated the matter."

"You're a very kind man and a charming liar, Mr. McGann." Mélanie tried not to stress the word
liar
, but it seemed to linger in the air. "Knowing Charles, I'm sure he didn't write anything of the sort." And yet it seemed he had written to McGann after they were married. Still without making any mention of his old friend to his wife.

McGann's eyes glinted. "Let's say I've learned to read between the lines when it comes to Charlie."

Tommy coughed. "As I said, I'm loath to interrupt—"

"You want to know where I was. Or rather, you want to know why I disappeared."

"Because Father asked you to, I presume," Charles said.

McGann raised his untidy brows.

"Why else would you return now that he's dead?" Charles's gaze hardened. "I wasn't aware you and my father were on such close terms."

"There's a lot you don't know, Charlie."

"So I've come to realize in the last few days." Charles regarded McGann with the wariness he would accord an enemy agent.

McGann took a turn about the hearthrug. His gaze lingered on the Fragonard oil, luminous in the shadowy light from the window. "Your father always did have a fondness for beautiful things. Like me and my books. It was the one way I ever felt any sort of kinship with him. Only your father has—had—more blunt to spend. If it wasn't for that—well, let's say the last thirty years might have been very different."

Charles leaned against the wall and tracked McGann's every movement with his eyes. "Different how?"

McGann tugged at his frayed coat. "A lot of his friends like to collect as well. Picked up a taste for it on the Grand Tour, I dare swear."

"We already know about Wheaton and the smuggling ring," Charles said. "You worked with them."

McGann flushed but did not shy away from Charles's gaze. "So I did. You've been gone from Dunmykel for a long time, Charlie. You were a clever lad, but even as a boy I don't think you quite realized—times have been difficult for a long while now, long before your father's Clearances."

"Smuggling was a way to hold off starvation."

"For some. I can make no such claim. For me it was a way to buy a few more books, an extra bottle of whisky. And perhaps to have a bit of adventure."

"The lure of danger?" Tommy cast a sidelong glance at Charles. "We wouldn't know anything about that, would we?"

"What did you do for the smugglers?" Charles said.

"Nip down to the cove every now and again and pick up a parcel from a fishing boat and keep it for a week or so."

"Who came to collect them from you?"

"Your father himself, more often than not. Lord Glenister once or twice. Occasionally some other of their friends. I didn't know them all by name. We'd have a code word for the exchange. Characters from Shakespeare usually. Funny, a grown man knocking on one's door in the dark of night and muttering 'Peaseblossom' or 'Bardolph.' "

"How do you know the parcels contained works of art?" Tommy asked.

"For a certainty? I suppose I don't. The parcels were the right size and shape and once or twice the wrapping slipped and I got a glimpse of a bit of bronze or the corner of a frame."

"Which doesn't preclude other things being hidden in the pictures or the statues," Tommy said.

"I suppose not, but why the devil would anyone—"

"You didn't just collect parcels." Charles watched McGann with a stillness that gripped like a vise. "You traveled to the south recently. To escort someone to Dunmykel."

McGann's eyes narrowed. "You've learned a great deal."

"Not nearly enough. Who was he?"

"I don't know. He called himself Jean Lameau. The only thing I'm certain of is that that wasn't his real name."

"Had you seen him before?"

"Oh, yes. He'd been a guest at house parties your father gave at Dunmykel. Back in the early days. I hadn't seen him for close on twenty years. But he had the sort of eyes one doesn't forget. The sort that seem to be able to see into any dark corner he chooses."

Tommy took a step toward the door, probably to block the exit in case McGann had any thoughts of bolting. "Tell us everything you can about him."

"I very nearly have, Mr. Belmont."

"Was he French?" Charles asked.

"He wanted us to believe so. Wanted us to believe it a bit too badly, I'd say. Either that or he was trying too hard to put on a gentleman's accent. I don't think the voice he spoke in came naturally to him. But I couldn't guess what his true voice would sound like, or what it would reveal about his origins."

"What did you talk about?" Charles said.

"Books, oddly enough." McGann touched his fingers to the leather binding of a volume on the card table. "At first he tended to look at me as though he was more interested in the view past my shoulder. But then he came down into the cabin and found me reading and we struck up a conversation. He wasn't averse to talking, provided it was impersonal."

"What sort of books did you discuss?" Charles asked.

"Oh, for God's sake—" Tommy said.

Charles flashed a look at him. "It might be important."

"Shakespeare," McGann said. "The Greeks. Dante. A few seventeenth-century poets. He avoided anything overtly political."

"You think that's why he was leaving France?" Charles asked. "Because of politics?"

"Isn't that why most people have left France in the past three decades, one way or another? But exactly what Lameau's politics were or why he was forced to flee France or what he'd been doing in London before I picked him up, I couldn't tell you."

"Did he ever say anything at all that stood out to you?" Charles said.

"No, he—" McGann frowned. "There was something, though I never could make head nor tail of what it meant. Just before we disembarked, apropos of nothing at all, he said, 'Do you think it really is possible to pawn a heart, Mr. McGann?'"

" 'Pawn a heart'?" Charles repeated.

"Those were the words. I said it was difficult enough to give a heart in my experience. I'd never thought much about pawning one. Lameau smiled and said giving might be simpler. Pawning could create debts that came back to haunt one."