Beneath a Silent Moon (62 page)

"I think the past two days have proved we can't be sure of what anyone might do. Throw the sword down, Charles. I know I could only shoot one of you, but you can't be certain whom it would be."

Charles stared at Evie a moment longer, as though measuring her resolve, then tossed his sword to clatter against Tommy's.

Evie walked toward Tommy. "The papers."

Tommy was staring at her, eyes dark with realization. "You killed her."

"You're not exactly in a position to make accusations, Mr. Belmont."

"In God's name, why? What petty, absurd jealousy—"

"I'm not the jealous sort, Mr. Belmont."

"My God, all that life, all that brilliance—you blotted it out."

"You see, Charles," Evie said, her gaze not leaving Tommy's face, "everything
is
about Honoria. I suppose I
should have guessed you were in love with her, too, Mr. Belmont. Most men were."

"You coldhearted bitch, how dare you—"

"I believe I asked you for the papers."

Tommy regarded her for a long moment that seemed to stretch like a rope pulled to the breaking point. "Unfortunately, you leave me little choice, Miss Mortimer. You're a more resourceful woman than I would have thought. Or, it seems, than Mélanie would have thought." He reached inside his shirt, drew out a packet of papers, and held them out to her.

Evie had to walk close to him to take the papers. Mélanie calculated how many seconds it would take her to snatch her pistol from the table and what would happen if Evie panicked with Tommy close enough to grab her gun.

Evie's slippers whispered against the carpet. The papers crackled as her fingers closed round them. A second later, she collapsed on the floor, a knife hilt protruding from her chest.

Tommy snatched up Evie's gun and pocketed the blood-spattered papers. "Careless. She should never have got so close to me." He backed toward the door, the pistol extended toward Mélanie and Charles. "Don't look at me like that, Fraser, you wanted Honoria avenged as much as I did, but you'd never have had the guts to do it."

Mélanie dropped to the ground and pressed her shawl over Evie's wound, in a hideous repeat of their last moments with Francisco Soro.

"What the hell's in those papers?" Charles said. "Whoever you're working for, you aren't just trying to cover up romantic indiscretions. There's more, isn't there?"

"My dear Charles." Tommy put his hand to the door. "More than you'll ever know."

The door swung shut and the bolt slid into place.

Evie was struggling to draw a breath. "It's all right, sweetheart," Mélanie said. The endearment came to her lips as easily as if she were speaking to her children. "Don't try to talk."

"Quen—Val—tell them—sorry."

"I will."

Charles dropped down beside her. "Lie still, Evie." He touched his fingers to her cheek.

Evie's clouding gaze fastened on his face. "Honoria—there wasn't any other way."

Charles's face tightened with equal parts rage, grief, and guilt. But he merely said, "We'll get you out of here."

"Have you got your picklocks?" Mélanie asked. She pressed her shawl over Evie's chest. She could feel the chill spreading through the girl's body.

"No. I came hideously unprepared."

Mélanie pulled a pin from her hair. "Can you do it with this?"

"Given time." He glanced down at Evie.

"There isn't time." Evie caught at a fold of his coat. "Stay."

"Of course." Charles settled beside her and folded her hand between his own.

A smile twisted her lips. "Look after them for me, Charles."

"Quen's getting quite good at looking after himself."

"He shouldn't be alone. He'll make a shocking mull of things." Her gaze moved over the shadowy paintings—Hamlet and Ophelia; Romeo and Juliet; Olivia, Viola, and Sebastian. "What an odd place to die," she said, and went still.

It was a variation on the aftermath of Honoria's murder. Mélanie went to get David and Simon. Charles went in search of Quen. They had placed Evie on the library sofa, as they had Kenneth the night before.

They gathered in the old drawing room, where Gisèle and Andrew, who had been in the library when they returned to the house, were already waiting. Quen brought Miss Newland with him. "We're going to be married," he said without preamble.

In another set of circumstances, it might have been a surprising announcement. As things were, Mélanie was merely conscious of a vague happiness for them, overlaid by all the sorrows of the night.

Numbness encased them all, like the white-painted walls and linenfold doors of the room. Later, Mélanie thought, when the reality of Evie Mortimer's death and what she had done in life had gnawed its way through their consciousness, it would be worse. For now, that numbness was the only thing that allowed them to listen to the truth of what had happened.

They sat round the unlit fireplace, and she and Charles once again recounted the facts, past and present, that had come to light in the past few hours. Cold facts that could not begin to explain the feelings behind the events or the feelings that those events would now stir.

Strangely enough, it was David who protested that it couldn't be the way they said, who questioned every detail, who made them go over the story again and again. Quen sat by in frozen silence, eyes glazed not with shock or horror but with grief.

"David, don't," Quen said at last, his voice like a lash. "Questioning won't change the facts."

David, who'd been pacing, turned from the fireplace. "You believe it?"

Quen drew a breath, as though he had to sift the air through the mesh of everything he'd learned in the past two days. "It makes a sort of horrible sense," he said. "That's the thing with all these revelations. Honoria and Val, Kenneth Fraser and my fath—Glenister—and my mother. None of the revelations has been half so surprising as they should have been."

Miss Newland gripped his hand. He looked at her for a moment. What he saw in her eyes seemed to steady him.

"Yes, but—" David shook his head. "The idea that Honoria wanted Evie to be caught in my room as some sort of revenge for Simon—" He couldn't even say it. "It's preposterous. And she should have known I'd never—"

"Wouldn't you?" Simon, leaning against the piano, turned to fix his lover with a hard, even stare. "If Evie had been publicly caught in your bed and faced social ruin, you'd have felt in honor bound to offer to marry her. Don't deny it. You wouldn't be the man I lo—you wouldn't be yourself if you'd done otherwise."

David looked back at him. "But why the devil would Honoria—"

"Pique." Quen scraped his hands over his face. "Honoria couldn't abide being made a fool of. I knew that, even if I didn't—even if there was a lot about her I didn't understand."

Andrew had said nothing at all. He was staring at the candlelight on the swirls of green and gold on the carpet, as though answers lay in the intricacies of the pattern. Now he raised his gaze to Charles's face. "If Cyril and Georgiana
Talbot were my parents—Evie Mortimer was my sister. They both were. Miss Mortimer and Miss Talbot."

"At least by blood. Not in the way Maddie is."

"If I'd known—"

"But you didn't," Mélanie said. "None of us did, until too late."

Gisèle spread her hands over her skirt, stained with dust and dirt and blood that must be Evie's. When they'd brought Evie into the library, Gisèle had knelt beside her for a long interval. "She was crying," Gisèle said now. "The night of the—the night Honoria was killed. Evie almost never cried. I should have known something was wrong."

Charles crouched beside her chair and squeezed her hands. "You couldn't have guessed this, Gelly. It takes a great deal to drive someone over that edge. You couldn't have known Evie was teetering on it."

"But she was my friend. I should have—" Gisèle rubbed her hand across her eyes. "Evie'd always do absolutely whatever she thought necessary to sort a situation out. She'd always seemed so sweet and reasonable, but she could be quite ruthless, really. I suppose she must have decided—"

Quen nodded. "She never shirked what she thought needed to be done. I loved her for it. I never guessed—" His hands went white-knuckled. "I don't think I can even remember ever seeing Uncle Cyril and Aunt Georgiana together. But there's a painting of them at Glenister House. Uncle Cyril must have been seventeen or so, Aunt Georgiana would have been sixteen. They're in a garden, laughing together. I'd always look at that painting and think how happy they looked, so much more at ease with each other than most siblings. I never thought—"

"That they were lovers," Andrew said.

Gisèle wrinkled her nose. "It seems so—I mean, no offense, Charles, but I can't imagine anyone
wanting
to—"

"Who's to say what drove them?" Charles squeezed Gisèle's hands again and got to his feet. "The lure of the forbidden? The comfort of the familiar? The fact that perhaps they saw each other little enough that they didn't really feel like brother and sister? If the intrigues of their parents' generation were anything like their own, it's always possible they really
weren't
brother and sister, at least not by blood. But whatever bound them together, it seems to have drawn them back to each other for years."

"From my conception to Miss Mortimer's," Andrew said.

Gisèle stretched out her hand to him, then let it fall in her lap.

"Uncle Cyril went away to school when he was eight," Quen said. "Aunt Georgiana would have only been seven. After that they wouldn't have seen much of each other. I suppose at some point he must have come home and—"

"They looked at each other and didn't see a brother and sister anymore," Andrew said. "I think—I think I can understand how it might have happened."

"But—" Gisèle's eyes darkened the way Charles's did when he was piecing evidence together. "Oh, Andrew, did you think Father—did you think I was—is that why—good God, why didn't you
tell
me?"

Andrew looked back at her without flinching. "That was only part of it. There are a lot of reasons why it would never work, Gelly."

"There aren't any that matter," Gisèle said.

Quen stared at the flame of one of the tapers on the mantel. "I said I'd kill whoever took Honoria's life. It seemed so simple. But if Evie were still alive, I don't know what the devil I'd feel—save relieved to have her back."

"They were both in my charge," Miss Newland said. "I should have—"

Quen gripped her hand and shook his head. "No."

Simon tore his concerned gaze away from David. "Tommy Belmont—he was working for Le Faucon?"

"He as good as admitted as much and that Le Faucon was the man Wheaton conveyed from France to London and McGann escorted up the coast to Dunmykel."

"I still can't make sense of it," Quen said. He seemed to find it a relief to focus on the Elsinore League rather than Evie. "Le Faucon, the Elsinore League, my father—the man
I thought was my father—and the man who apparently really is. Can you explain it, Charles?"

"I can try, though a lot of it's speculation." Charles walked to the fireplace and wiped a trickle of wax from one of the candlesticks. "Our fathers—Glenister and Kenneth Fraser—formed a club at Oxford called the Elsinore League. We can't be sure of the exact membership, but I imagine it included a number of wealthy and powerful young men from Britain as well as foreigners they met at university and on the Grand Tour. They drank, they whored, I expect they gambled. Expensive habits. Kenneth Fraser was probably one of the poorer members of the league at this time. But he'd come to the notice of his friend's father. Old Lord Glenister started employing Kenneth to do secret errands for him when Kenneth was still at Oxford. Kenneth kept a ledger recording the payments he received from old Lord Glenister, and he concealed the notes he received with the payments in the binding of the ledger. The notes are cryptic, but I imagine old Lord Glenister employed Kenneth to tidy up his sons' peccadilloes. And possibly his own as well. But none of these tasks could have been as serious as the predicament old Lord Glenister brought to Kenneth in 1785. His seventeen-year-old daughter Georgiana was with child and arranging a marriage with the baby's father was impossible, as the father was his own younger son."