The Unexpected Marriage of Gabriel Stone (Lords of Disgrace) (21 page)

‘Residing with the magistrate,’ Caroline said. ‘How did you all get here? I am so glad to see you, but I only wrote to Louis yesterday. Come in, sit down. James, fetch food and wine.’

‘I never got your letter. I saw the papers and left Cambridge immediately.’ Louis was pale and behind the lenses of his spectacles his eyes were red with exhaustion. ‘I found the others in London at Lord Weybourn’s house.’

The brothers ate while they listened to the news, but Caroline noticed that Louis soon put down his knife and fork. He looked as though he might be sick at any moment.

‘So, either someone saw something at the time that seems incriminating and have only just come forward in response to my father’s probing for scandal in Gabriel’s life, or he is making bricks without straw. But Gabriel is not telling me the entire truth, of that I am certain. If only someone we can trust actually saw what happened.’

There was an aching silence, then Ben put down his cutlery with a clatter. ‘I saw and George, too. Gabriel doesn’t know.’ He looked across the table at his brother sitting beside Louis. George’s face as was white as his clerical bands. ‘He would be furious if he knew we had spoken.’

‘Gabriel can kick you from here to London for all I care,’ Caroline snapped. ‘I only want him alive to be able to do it.’

Louis snatched up his glass, gulped the contents and banged it down again. ‘I did it. I killed Father.’

Chapter Twenty-One

‘L
ady Edenbridge has sent this valise by your valet, my lord.’ The magistrate’s man set the bag down on the ottoman at the foot of the bed. ‘He asked me to pass on her message to please be careful of the leather as it is her ladyship’s new case.’ He passed a professional hand over the surface and nodded approval of its quality. ‘Sir Humphrey is dining alone this evening and requests the pleasure of your company at dinner, my lord. I will come up to assist you at seven o’clock, if that is convenient.’

Such a polite gaoler.
‘Thank you, yes. Please convey my thanks to Sir Humphrey.’ Gabriel waited until the valet had bowed himself out then opened the valise.

It was not like Caroline to fuss over her possessions, let alone send chiding messages at a time like this, which meant she was up to something. He lifted out the carefully packed clothes, then almost dropped one evening shoe in surprise at its weight. The little pistol designed to be carried in a pocket gleamed up at him dangerously. Gabriel shook his head, checked that it was loaded and uncocked and slid it into the breast of his coat. What else had she done?

Even empty the bag was heavy. It did not take him long to find the money and the hairpins. He sat on the edge of the bed, the little twists of wire on one palm, wondering at the strange tightness around his heart and the absurd, inappropriate urge to laugh. He was hysterical...
No, I am happy. Oh, Caroline, you will never give up, will you?
Presumably she imagined him in some dank cell, picking the locks, fighting his way to freedom, and she would give him the tools to escape whatever the cost to herself. ‘I love you, you brave, loyal, beautiful woman.’

How long had he felt like this and not recognised it for what it was? Those unguarded words as he had left her had come from somewhere deep inside, a blinding revelation that the way he felt when he was with her, when he thought about her, was
love
.

The urge to laugh left him as suddenly as it had come, but the grip around his heart did not ease. Of all the times to discover that he could fall in love—and with his own wife, the most unlikely of miracles. Gabriel stamped down on the hope that Caroline might one day come to love him, too. She was as open as she was loyal and honest. She had admitted her physical attraction to him, a daring thing for a young lady to do, so it seemed impossible that she would be reticent about the much more respectable emotion of love.

Better that she never did, given that all he could look forward to was disgrace at the best and death at the worst. He could not, would not, tell the truth about what had happened. Of all the times to find his loyalties stretched on the rack. He could hear his mother’s voice in his head as clearly as he had that day when he had been fourteen and had found her weeping in her bedchamber.
Promise me you will look after your brothers, Gabriel. Swear to me.
And he had sworn, not understanding. Not then.

* * *

Dinner with the magistrate was surprisingly civilised. Sir Humphrey was a widower in his early sixties, a burly, down-to-earth man.

‘You’re better off here,’ he remarked as he gestured to Gabriel to refill his wine glass with the good Burgundy they had drunk with the beef. ‘It will do no harm for it to be known that you surrendered to me of your own free will the moment you heard the rumours. Makes a good impression, that sort of thing. Lady Edenbridge will be safe in that house with all your servants around her, I have no doubt.’

Nor had Gabriel. He would not have left her otherwise, but Corbridge had his orders, and Gabriel’s pistols, and he would lose a large wager with himself if Cris de Feaux wasn’t on her doorstep by tomorrow.

‘Sunday tomorrow,’ Sir Humphrey observed. ‘We won’t see the coroner before Monday, I imagine. He lives in Lewes, of course, you’ll recall from the original inquest, it being the nearest town to the house. You’ll not want to go to church tomorrow, I presume?’

‘I have no desire to disrupt a service, which is no doubt what would happen.’

‘Quite. Should I ask the vicar to call in? Perhaps you would welcome some quiet contemplation and prayer with him.’

‘Thank you, no.’ The last thing he needed was quiet contemplation. What he
needed
was to be alone with Caroline, a large bed and a
Not Guilty
verdict. What he
wanted
was his hands around her father’s throat. Neither of those ambitions could be confessed to the vicar. ‘The use of your library would be much appreciated.’ If nothing else the sight of his unwilling guest calmly reading might help convince the magistrate that he had no bloody crimes on his conscience. It was likely to be a long day.

* * *

‘Who the devil?’ Sir Humphrey enquired the next morning as the sound of the knocker reached the breakfast room. ‘We have hardly finished our meal. This is no time to be making calls.’

‘The coroner, perhaps?’ Gabriel suggested, moving aside the London Sunday papers that the footman had placed between the two men. Time enough for the first stagecoach to bring Monday’s budget of gossip, speculation and lies. He was not going to ruin his breakfast with yesterday’s.

‘He’ll still be at his own table. Yes, who is it?’

The footman looked decidedly flustered. ‘The Marquess of Avenmore, Sir Humphrey. And a lady, a clergyman, an army major and a young gentleman and they all say they want to speak to you. I told them you would not be available yet and they said they would wait.’

‘They want to speak to me, you mean,’ Gabriel interrupted. His brothers as well? And he had thought things could not get much worse.

‘No, my lord. They were very definite, it is Sir Humphrey they want to see.’

‘Put them in the study, fetch them refreshments and tell them I will be with them shortly.’ He waited until the man went out and turned to Gabriel. ‘Well? What is this delegation?’

‘A close friend, my wife and my brothers, I assume.’

‘With evidence?’

Gabriel shrugged. ‘I very much doubt it. As I have said all along, there were no witnesses to my father’s fall.’

‘Then if it is not evidence I do not need to wait for the coroner and I see no harm in you joining me. I haven’t had so much excitement since the last time Prinny’s entourage kicked up a riot in town.’

The party waiting for them in the magistrate’s study was certainly more tastefully dressed, and considerably more sober, than the new king’s cronies. Caroline, thank heavens, was pale but perfectly composed, the fine veil thrown back over her bonnet apparently her only concession to the fact that her husband was under house arrest and their name a byword over the nation’s breakfast tables. She was wearing the newest and most fashionable of her London walking dresses and smiled at him in a way that made him catch his breath.

At her side Cris, as elegant and cool as ever, stood to exchange bows with the magistrate. ‘Sir Humphrey? I am Avenmore. May I introduce Lady Edenbridge. Major Stone, the Reverend Mr Stone, Mr Louis Stone. I apologise for this early interruption to your morning, but we have evidence in the matter of the late Earl of Edenbridge’s death.’

‘Evidence? In that case I feel I should wait for the coroner.’ The magistrate looked none too happy.

‘There is none. There can be none,’ Gabriel said. Louis was white and he saw Caroline reach out and touch his hand for a moment.

‘Excuse me, Sir Humphrey.’ It was the nervous footman again.

‘Yes? What now?’

‘Mr Barton, the coroner from Lewes, sir.’

‘Already? Well, send him in, this cannot become much more irregular than it is already.’

Gabriel barely recognised the coroner, but then it had been ten years since the inquest and the man must have been in his fifties then. He stalked in like a dyspeptic heron, peered around and snapped, ‘I’ve come on the Edenbridge matter, Sir Humphrey. What is this? Trying the case already?’

‘Certainly not. Allow me to introduce you.’ The magistrate made the introductions and everyone sat down again, making the study feel uncomfortably small. ‘Apparently Lord Avenmore believes that some of those present have evidence to present.’

‘Do you indeed?’ Barton seemed unintimidated by the presence of a marquess, even Cris at his most arctic. Gabriel felt an unwilling twinge of admiration and an equally unpleasant lurch of apprehension. This old bird was going to show neither fear nor favour.

‘I wish to speak to my brothers in private.’

‘Collusion? I think not, my lord. If they wish to address me, they may do so.’

Louis stood up and Ben, magnificent in full scarlet regimentals, waved him back to his seat. ‘Let me. Lord Knighton has a grudge against my brother because of Gabriel’s elopement with his daughter. He has spread it about that his investigations have revealed a witness to my father’s death, but I know who did witness it and I can attest to the fact that none of those present that day have spoken to any investigator. In other words, he is inventing evidence.’

‘And who were those witnesses?’

Witnesses, plural?
Gabriel looked at Louis again and saw that Caroline had put her hand on his forearm.

‘My eldest brother, the present Lord Edenbridge, you know about, sir. There were also myself and my other two brothers.’

‘You were not there,’ Gabriel interrupted. ‘And Louis was unconscious.’

‘Allow Major Stone to finish, if you please. Where were the servants? As I recall, we were told they were all below stairs or in various rooms not within sight of the hall and landing.’

‘Yes, sir. There was to be a dinner party that evening. The staff were either in the kitchens, or in the dining room or preparing the drawing room. My brother George and I were in the room where we studied because our tutor had left us an exercise in Latin translation before he went into Lewes. We heard a loud crash.’

‘Yes, I knocked over a valuable Chinese vase that stood at the head of the stairs,’ Gabriel stated. ‘You were nowhere in sight.’ He felt Caroline’s gaze on him as though she had prodded him with her finger, but he did not look in her direction. He wasn’t under oath, not yet.

‘That is not true,’ Louis said and all eyes turned to him. ‘I knocked it over and I was trying to hide the pieces, which was stupid of me. But I knew if I didn’t then Gabriel would take the blame like he always did and he would be the one who was whipped.’

‘Louis—’

‘No. We should have spoken up long ago, right from the beginning, but we were all too afraid. We let you pretend you were the clumsy one, or the one who had done something out of mischief. Father soon believed you were wicked—you didn’t have to try very hard to fake the evidence and protect us.’

‘Damn it, Louis!
Will you be quiet?
’

George, Ben and Sir Humphrey all began to speak at once.

‘No, Gabriel,’ Caroline said, her quiet voice stilling the noise like one chime of a bell. ‘No, Louis will not be quiet. He is going to tell the truth and so, finally, are you.’

At a stroke she was going to uncover all the wounds he had spent such pain and misery covering up, would shatter his brothers’ memories of their childhood, would make him break his vow to his mother. He knew why—she had a passion for truth, she had a fierce loyalty to him as her husband. But his loyalties were older than their marriage and he could not allow how he felt about her to shake them.

‘You are my wife and you will do as I tell you. Now, be silent.’ He had never spoken to Caroline like that before, had never thought he would. In his own voice he heard echoes of his father, of hers, and he saw her go white even as he felt the stab of nausea in his gut.

‘No,’ she said again. ‘We are all going to disobey you. Your wife, your brothers and your friend. We have made a conspiracy against your secrets. The truth matters and, besides, our child is not going to grow up believing she or he had a murderer for a father. Go on, Louis.’

It took perhaps two seconds for her words to hit home, then the rest of the room vanished from his consciousness.
Our child? Caroline is expecting our child? But that is impossible.

He came back to himself to find everyone, his wife included, had their attention fixed on Louis, who must have simply carried on with his story. ‘...it was idiotic to try to hide the damage, but I was in a panic. Then I heard Father coming. He had heard the crash, of course, and he had his whip. I expect he thought it was Gabriel again. He rushed towards me, shouting.’

‘We’d heard the noise and we were just coming out of the corridor when we saw you running up the stairs, Gabriel,’ Ben said. He stood at attention as though he was making a report to his commanding officer.

‘Father slashed at Louis, who grabbed at the whip. Father jerked it back and Louis let go, so it flew back and it hit Father’s face. Louis crashed into the newel post and Father tripped over his body—he was going too fast and was off balance because of the blow to his face. He went down the stairs, hit the banisters on the curve—I think that was what broke his neck—tumbled past you, Gabriel, and hit the floor. I saw you run back down to him, then all hell broke loose. George started retching and I dragged him away so he couldn’t see. By the time I came out again you were telling people the story you told at the inquest. I couldn’t contradict you, and besides, there was all the fuss over Louis.’

He turned to the Coroner. ‘If there had been any danger of Gabriel being blamed I would have spoken at the inquest, sir. But George and I were frightened for Louis. He was only a child and when he came round he couldn’t recall anything about it. Provided Gabriel was safe, we thought it was best to say nothing.’

‘And now you conveniently recall it all, young man?’ the Coroner said to Louis.

‘Now, yes. For years I just had nightmares, flashes of memory that I thought were a kind of waking dream. Then it all began to get worse about six months ago when I started working closely with Gabriel.’ He looked round at Ben and George. ‘When I read the newspaper accounts, I suspected it was real memories and went to talk to my brothers. I suppose you’ll want to arrest me now, Sir Humphrey.’