Beneath a Silent Moon

Mélanie stared at the lifeless face of the woman lying on the embroidered sheet. The face of the girl Charles had grown up with, the woman who had almost been his stepmother, the friend and companion who had meant something to him that she couldn’t begin to fathom.

Charles touched his fingers to Honoria’s throat, glanced at Mélanie, and gave a slight shake of his head. His gaze was as hard and still as a window on a moonless night. He moved to his father and laid a hand on Kenneth’s arm. It was the first time Mélanie could remember any physical contact between the two men.

Kenneth jerked at his son’s touch. His gaze went to Charles’s face, as though he could not make sense of what Charles was doing there. ‘Dear God, she’s dead.’

His fine-featured, sardonic face was drained of color, his keen eyes vacant, his incisive voice a stunned monotone.

‘Yes.’ Charles steered his father toward a japanned armchair that faced away from the bed.

Mélanie glanced round the room. A set of decanters stood on the folding shelf of a cabinet near the fireplace. She poured some whisky into a glass and gave it to Charles. Charles pressed the glass into Kenneth’s hand. When Kenneth simply stared at it, Charles guided the glass to his lips. Kenneth choked and coughed, but he swallowed some of the whisky, and a little color returned to his face.

Mélanie took a blanket from the bench at the foot of the bed and put it round her father-in-law’s shoulders. Through the silk of his dressing gown, his body felt chilled to the bone. She went to the fireplace and lit the tapers on the mantel and in the gilt wall sconces. The tinderbox rattled in her hands. Hot drops of wax spattered over her fingers.

The candlelight flickered over Kenneth, hunched in the chair, and Charles kneeling beside him. They were not much alike, save for a certain hard-cut, Celtic determination in their faces. Charles’s gaze was fixed on his father as though he was trying to frame a question to which he wasn’t sure he could bear the answer. He helped Kenneth take another sip of whisky, then dropped back on his heels.

‘What happened?’ Charles’s voice was completely neutral, the way it got when he was making a massive effort at control.

Kenneth stared at Charles. He seemed to be truly aware of his presence for the first time. ‘I came into the room. It was dark. I only had a candle.’ He cast a glance about, as though seeking what had become of the candle. Mélanie saw a silver candlestick and an extinguished wax taper on the floor by the bed.

‘And then?’ Charles said in the same steady voice.

Kenneth swallowed. ‘I was beside the bed before I realized—I put out my hand—her skin was so cold.’ He stared down at his right hand, curled round the whisky glass.

Charles closed his hand over Kenneth’s before he could drop the glass. ‘Did you know Honoria was in your room?’

‘Did I—?’ Kenneth’s gaze went to Charles’s face. Comprehension flashed in his eyes. ‘What do you take me for, boy?’ He clenched the handkerchief. ‘She was my fiancee, not my trollop.’

A spasm ran along Charles’s jaw. ‘How long had you been gone from your room?’

‘I don’t—most of the night.’

‘Where were you?’

‘In the library.’ Fraser took another sip of whisky. ‘Reading. Someone must have broken into the house,’ he said, as though he had been too shocked at Honoria’s death to think about who might have killed her until now.

‘Possibly.’ Charles got to his feet and looked down at his father. ‘Sit for a moment, sir. You’re still in shock.’

Kenneth didn’t seem to hear him. Charles took one of the candles from the mantel and exchanged a look with Mélanie. His face was gray, his eyes haunted by what they had witnessed and by the imagined horrors of what might lie behind Honoria’s death. But he merely said, ‘Check the windows.’

He went through the door into the adjoining dressing room. Mélanie cast another glance at Kenneth Fraser, but he was slumped beneath the blanket, staring at the whisky glass in his hands. She took the other taper from the mantel, went to the windows that that ran along the outer wall, and tested the latches. They were all securely bolted on the inside.

She returned to the bed and looked at Honoria Talbot, forcing herself to note pertinent details. Miss Talbot’s skin, which had been so fresh and glowing, was tinged blue-gray instead of pink and white. A thin film of lip rouge stood out on her mouth, like a slash of too-bright paint. Beneath it, her lips were drained of color. Despite the violence of the mark round her throat, there was no sign of a struggle. Almost as though she’d slept through the attack.

The mark on her neck was narrow, probably made by a cord or rope rather than fingers. Mélanie glanced about. The flickering flame of her candle caught something red-tinged on the floor between the bed and the bedside table. She bent down to retrieve it and held it to the light of the candle. The red was not blood but embroidered flowers. It was a tapestry bellpull.

Mélanie touched her fingers to Miss Talbot’s face, smoothed back her hair, lifted her eyelids. Her eyes had the empty, absent stare of death. Her pupils were contracted, dark pinpoints in irises that were as blue as they had been in life.

Mélanie turned back the covers. Miss Talbot’s arms lay loose at her sides. Her diamond betrothal ring caught the lamplight. One leg was turned in slightly, but her nightdress was smooth, as though she had adjusted the folds when she lay down. Mélanie lifted one of her arms and pushed back the frilled cuff of her nightdress. The underside of her arm had the purply look of a bruise. When Mélanie pressed her finger against the darkened flesh, the skin blanched beneath her touch. She removed her finger, and the skin purpled again.

Footsteps sounded behind her. ‘Nothing in the dressing room,’ Charles said in a quiet voice.

No one, was what he meant. ‘It looks as though she’s been dead for at least an hour and not more than four,’ Mélanie said. ‘I doubt we have to worry about an intruder in the house.’

Charles glanced at the body of his childhood friend. ‘She was dragged.’ It wasn’t quite a question.

Mélanie nodded. ‘I’ve seen morphine overdoses. I recognized her eyes. Besides, why else would she appear to have slept through it?’

‘Quite. But we should make sure there’s no intruder in the house all the same.’

‘Do we wake everyone?’ Mélanie asked.

‘Not yet. I’d like to hold off a scene of general hysteria for as long as possible.’ Charles glanced at his father, then back at Mélanie. She had seen that look on his face during the war, when a wrong decision would be paid for in lost lives. ‘Stay with my father.’

‘Charles—’

He brushed his fingers against her cheek. ‘I’ll check the nursery myself. I promise.’ He turned to go, but when he was halfway to the door, he stopped and looked back at his father, who was sitting hunched in the armchair. ‘Sir?’

Kenneth turned his head.

Charles drew a breath. There was a raw note in his voice Mélanie had never heard before. ‘If by any chance she wasn’t dead when you came into the room, you’d best tell me now.’

The realization of what Charles had implied filled Kenneth’s gaze. His eyes turned as cold and sharp as broken glass. ‘What I’ve told you is the truth. I’m damned if I’ll justify myself to my son.’

Charles held his father’s gaze for a long, fraught moment that sent a chill along Mélanie’s nerves. Even after four and a half years as Charles’s wife, she could only begin to guess at the echoes that passed between the two men.

At last Charles gave a curt nod and stepped from the room.

Mélanie rubbed her arms. For all the dangerous, painful, unpleasant eventualities she had considered when they left for Scotland, that Honoria Talbot would be murdered had never occurred to her. Miss Talbot wasn’t Francisco, who had lived a life on the edge for years. And yet Miss Talbot more and more seemed to be at the center of the ever-expanding web of intrigue. Francisco had said it himself. It all comes down to Honoria.

She drew a breath of the night air, and then returned to her father-in-law and knelt on the Aubusson carpet beside his chair.

Kenneth was staring at a painting on the wall by the fireplace. Danaë reclining on gleaming red velvet, her head thrown back, her hand extended to clutch a fistful of gold coins. Kenneth seemed to be scouring the velvet and gold as though answers were hidden in the brushstrokes. His shoulders were hunched beneath the fuzzy merino of the blanket. The candlelight picked out strands of silver in his light brown hair and deepened the shadows beneath his eyes, the creases beside his mouth, the furrows in his forehead.

She could not be sure what he had felt for Honoria Talbot. She wasn’t sure he was capable of feeling love at all, save perhaps for the works of art he collected. He had done things to her husband for which she would never be able to forgive him. Yet it was impossible to look at the numb disbelief stamped on his face and not feel pity. She touched his arm. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr. Fraser.’

He looked down at her as though he had to remind himself of where he was and with whom, but when he spoke, his voice held a trace of the customary irony. ‘I pride myself on being prepared for most eventualities in life. I must say this is one I hadn’t anticipated.’ He twisted his glass in his hands. ‘Charles must be pleased.’

Her hand closed round the carved arm of the chair. ‘That’s ridiculous, and you know it.’

‘Is it?’ His gaze moved over her. She was keenly aware that the satin ribbons at the neck of her dressing gown had come open and she wore nothing beneath. ‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

For a moment his blue eyes were as keen as ever. She returned his gaze, her blood suddenly still, and found herself questioning every certainty of the past quarter-hour.

Charles rounded the corner of the ground-floor corridor into the north wing. His candle, burned halfway down, cast fitful light on the oak wainscoting, but he was moving more by memory than illumination.

His heartbeat had slowed a fraction, thanks to a glimpse of his son and daughter sleeping peacefully in their canework nursery beds, along with his eight-year-old cousin Chlóe, his Aunt Frances’s youngest child. He’d gone back to his father’s room to tell Mélanie. Kenneth had seemed a bit more himself, and Mélanie had persuaded him to move to the dressing room.

Mélanie was now checking on the rest of the family and guests. Charles’s estimable valet, Addison, had organized the footmen to make sure the house was secure. Charles had hastily changed into a shirt and breeches and taken the ground floor of the north wing for himself. Not that he expected to find anything. He was convinced, with a certainty that gnawed at his vital organs and turned his stomach, that Honoria Talbot’s killer had come from within the house.

Honoria’s lifeless face flashed before his eyes, as it had every few minutes since they’d found her, interrupting the smooth, ceaseless flow of activity. He blinked the image back to some part of his brain where it could be examined later, and turned the knob on the library door.

The door swung inward, the sound echoing off the high ceiling. A rush of cool, musty, leather-tinged air greeted him. The library was the only part of the original thirteenth-century keep to have been incorporated into the current house. The air always smelled different here, as though it, too, had absorbed the history of the room.

Charles drew a breath. The library had been his favorite room at Dunmykel as a child. But now he could not step over the threshold without remembering that this was the room in which his mother had put a bullet through her brain. He stepped into the room, holding his candle aloft so the light fell over the tall ranks of bookshelves, the high-backed chairs, the gateleg table.

And the dark silhouette of a man standing beside the table.

‘You’re late,’ the man said. ‘I was beginning to worry.’

The speaker was of average height, bareheaded and greatcoated, his face indecipherable. His voice was educated and unaccented, wary but not surprised. Nor did he start guiltily or make any move to escape. He stood where he was, waiting for a response, a dark presence in the blue-black shadows.

Charles’s gaze slid to the fireplace. Even in the darkness, he could see the outline of the bookcase that had swung outward, revealing the entrance to Dunmykel’s secret passageway. He edged forward, trying to put himself between the intruder and the escape route. ‘I was unavoidably detained,’ he said, when he knew further seconds without speech would alert the intruder that something was wrong.

He kept his voice as neutral as possible, but apparently it was no match for whomever the intruder was expecting. In two strides the intruder went from the table to the mouth of the passageway. Charles was a pace behind him. The rush of movement extinguished his candle. He dropped it, caught a handful of his quarry’s greatcoat as he flung himself into the passageway, and banged his head on the low lintel of the hidden doorway.

The intruder wrenched free of his grasp. Charles sprang forward in the dark. The force of the jump knocked them both to the ground. He slammed into the cold, hard rock and earth, clutching the intruder’s ankles. As he tried to scramble up, a booted foot caught him in the face.

The force of the kick threw him against the granite wall. Pain sliced through his head, and what vision he had swam darkly. The click of a hammer sounded. He barely had time to feel a cold rush of fear before a bullet ricocheted off the ceiling and a hail of rock fell to the ground between him and his quarry.