For Your Arms Only (26 page)

A
lec found Angus Lacey in his study, dozing off over in the chair by the fire. For a moment he stayed in the shadows, noting how much the man had aged. The hand that lay on the book in his lap was gnarled and crooked, veins standing in blue lines across the back. His head drooped to one side as he slept, and for a moment he looked almost dead.

Alec stepped into the room. He had already made sure Morris wasn’t about, and the footman and butler were securely locked in the butler’s pantry. Alec didn’t want to hurt anyone any more than he wanted to be interrupted.

At his footstep, Lacey started awake. “Eh? Morris, close the window,” he muttered, then jerked as he saw Alec. For a moment they regarded each other in silence.

“How dare you,” growled Mr. Lacey. He struggled to his feet and gripped his cane. “Get off my property at once. I have nothing to say to a traitor and a liar.”

Alec stood his ground. “Understood. I, however, have something to say to you.”

The old man’s lips curled in a sneer. “Nothing you say can interest me. Get out.” He started to walk past Alec toward the door.

“No, this time you shall not walk out on me. I have not come for my sake.”

Lacey glared at him with hatred in his eyes…and fear. Alec saw the apprehensive loathing and it struck not fury, but pity, in his chest. Mr. Lacey suspected what he had come about. He didn’t want to hear, not because of his revulsion for Alec, but because he knew Alec had come to confront him with his own sins. “I don’t care whose behalf you’ve come on,” Lacey said. “Say your piece and remove yourself from my sight. If I were a younger man, I’d thrash you myself for coming here.”

He smiled grimly. “No doubt. Allow me to explain my purpose before we come to blows. I think you’ll find it an interesting tale. I was sent back to Marston to inquire into the disappearance of Sergeant George Turner.” The other man’s flinch was small, but Alec saw it. “Sergeant Turner was, to all appearances, a man of modest means, with a few army connections and boundless ambition. From what I can gather, he traded on every favor he’d ever done anyone and his considerable personal charm to move up in the world. He took a house near Marston and set up there with his family as a comfortable man with means and expectations. No one seemed to know much what those means and expectations were, or whence they might come, but he paid his bills and behaved with propriety.”

“This is hardly interesting,” Lacey said, his voice freezing with contempt. A vein pulsed at his temple. “I didn’t know the man.”

“And then one day he simply disappeared,” Alec went on. “He went to London, met an old army superior about a post he wished to take, and then vanished. No word to his family, no letter, not even funds sent on to pay the accounts due a week after he left.” Alec paused, watching Lacey feign indifference. “Eventually his family grew worried enough to inquire of the man he was to meet in London and ask for help finding the sergeant. And so I came back to Marston—rather reluctantly, might I add.”

“As well you should have been, bringing your treachery back on your family! The shock of it might have killed your poor mother.”

Alec bowed his head. “Yes, it might have done; my treachery, as you call it, was terribly hard on my family. But that leads me to another interesting story I would like to tell you.”

“I don’t want to hear it.” Lacey retreated, circling around the chair. Alec moved with him, always keeping between Lacey and the door, like a hunter monitoring his prey.

“I think you do, whether you believe you do or not. It begins several years ago and far away—in Spain, to be precise. When Will fell in love with a Spanish girl.”

Lacey’s eye had begun twitching. “Do not speak of my son.” His voice was the low growl of a cornered animal. Alec refused to relent.

“He married her, and was very happy until word of your displeasure reached him. I don’t know what he wrote to you, but to me he expressed his deep regret. Not for marrying her—he loved her deeply—but for the fact that he had not planned better and couldn’t keep her in the comfort she deserved.”

“A hot-blooded foreigner. She did not deserve my son!”

“She was a Spanish grandee’s daughter, a lady from a good family, and used to a life of ease. She left it all to go on campaign with Will, and to the best of my knowledge she never regretted it.” Alec paused, but Lacey merely snorted. “Of course, we were in different divisions. I didn’t see Will much after Bonaparte escaped Elba and returned to Paris. Our paths crossed once or twice in Belgium, but never for more than a few moments’ conversation. I was grieved to hear of his death.”

“Don’t you speak of his death!” There was real agony in Lacey’s cry.

“The last time I saw him was the night before the great battle at Waterloo. It was pouring rain and we had only a few moments, but he was very odd that night. He made a few requests of me; he seemed to be quite certain of his impending death. I had entirely forgotten it, in my…difficult situation, until today, when I read the journal of Sergeant Turner.”

Lacey jerked. The agony in his expression faded away at the mention of Turner’s name, replaced with a look of such loathing that Alec realized the full truth of what had happened. “Stop,” said Lacey viciously. “I’ll tell you. Here to seek the noble Sergeant Turner, are you? You may find him in hell. That—That
offal
betrayed my son, and held it over my head ever since. I care nothing for his family; if anything, they are better off without him. And if you think to sully my son’s name, I shall pursue you to the end of my days. Who would believe a traitor, after all?”

“You will,” said Alec softly. “You know I speak the truth. Will needed funds after his marriage. Turner offered him a way to make money and in desperation, Will took it.” Lacey recoiled as if Alec had struck him. “And when Will died on the battlefield, Turner planted the letters from the French colonel in my belongings, then blackmailed you with a threat to expose the truth.”

For a long moment, Mr. Lacey simply stood with bowed head, one hand braced on the back of a chair, his body shaking with every breath. “You were dead,” he said heavily. “You were supposed to be
dead
.”

Alec said nothing at this confirmation of his dark suspicion. His family had not been dead, and Lacey knew exactly what he had done to them, neighbors he had once valued as friends.

“He was the lowest of men, utterly without honor. The thought of that beast using my son…” Lacey’s knuckles were white where he gripped the chair.

“You paid him not to speak. You allowed my family and the entire country to think me a traitor.” Alec’s iron control on his temper was finally slipping. “Whatever Turner’s sins, what of
yours
, sir? What honor is there in supporting a lie and ruining my good name? My
father’s
name?”

“You were dead,” repeated Lacey. “He was my only son. I had no choice!”

“When did you kill him?” Alec meant the question to startle Lacey, even goad him into a confession. All his calm and restraint were under terrible strain.

Lacey, though, was unshaken. He raised his head in defiance. “He deserved to die. It was a boon to humanity, ridding the world of his sort. I make no apologies for it. Not only did he lure my son…Not only that, but he held it over my head and he
reveled
in that power.” He shook a fist at Alec. “He was a snake, a poisonous viper who preyed on the sorrows of others, and wasn’t killed soon enough.”

“Then why pay him?”

“I was weak.” He glared up from under his brows. “I suppose now you’ll call down the authorities on me, for the death of that—that rapacious bastard.”

Quite unexpectedly, Alec felt a moment of pity for the old man. Lacey had ruined his own life with hatred and anger and now guilt. Lacey, of all people, didn’t have it in him to stand up and condemn his own son to spare another. “No,” he said quietly. “Not at the moment.” There was little proof of the deed. The diary would incriminate George Turner more than it would Lacey; Alec doubted Turner had even used his name outright. “But you should have this.” He drew Will’s letter from his pocket and held it out.

The older man glared at it, then started as he recognized the handwriting. “Where did that come from?” His voice shook as he reached out to touch the letter with his fingertip, then took it from Alec’s hand.

“He asked me to deliver it, in the event of his death. It was sent home with my personal effects after Waterloo.”

He waited for the meaning to sink in. After a moment Lacey paled and looked up. “Then—no one has seen—”

“I read it.” But Lacey knew. Will could have been exposed as a traitor at any time, by his own hand. Perhaps that was as Will intended it. Alec felt a fierce sorrow clutch at him, that Will had chosen to make his confession and ride to his death. With this man for his father, he must have seen no other honorable choice. He had done his best to atone for his sin, by asking Alec to look after his wife and child, by laying out his confession to the one man who would never have believed it otherwise, and by sacrificing himself in a last dying moment of patriotism and honor. Only through chance had the letter gone missing. George Turner had seized that chance, casting the blame from Will onto Alec, and in doing so sealed Angus Lacey’s loss in a tomb of agonizing uncertainty. If Lacey had had this letter, he might have refused Turner’s demands. Alec might have proven his innocence years ago, or even not been accused at all. Cressida might have never lived in Marston at all, nor asked Hastings for his aid, and then he would have never met her.

For the first time, Alec didn’t know which course he would have preferred, had he been offered the choice. Innocence, without Cressida…or five years of guilt, but with Cressida at the end? There was no question that he had found more peace and happiness with her than he’d ever expected in his life. Knowing what he had done, even what he had been accused of doing, she accepted him and trusted him and gave him her heart. Alec had never met another woman like her, and knew he could appreciate the depth of her faith and love as he could never have done before Waterloo.

“What happened to Turner?” he asked again. Cressida and her family deserved to know his fate, whatever the man had done in his life.

“He came here late at night,” murmured Lacey. He was still staring hollow-eyed at the letter in his hands. “Some months ago. He wanted money—always money. He set up house in Marston to torment me, to flaunt his presence in my face at every opportunity. There were papers, he said, in William’s hand. As this letter…” He turned it over, handling it as gingerly as if it were spun of glass. “Just as this letter. Papers he would sell me, one page at a time, and I paid him to conceal my son’s weakness.” His voice broke on the last word. “I sent Morris to try to find them, but he never could.”

Alec remembered the man sneaking around Cressida’s stable on that long-ago day when he had first gone to see the Turners, and another small puzzle piece fell into place. Of course; it had been Morris.

“And then that villain came and said he would sell me the last of them, save one,” Lacey went on, his voice heating with fury again. “He said he intended to move to London, and I suppose defraud other men more prosperously situated. If he had offered every page I would have paid him and been done with it, burned it all and gone to my grave with the shame. That last page, though, he meant to hold forever, no doubt to bleed me even more when he had run through the money. He was a leech, a conniving, amoral excuse for a man, and I am not sorry he’s dead, no matter what it costs me.”

“What did you do to him?”

“Morris took him away,” Lacey muttered. “I don’t know where, nor do I care.” With trembling hands he unfolded the letter and began to read.

Alec watched the lines of his face grow deeper, and felt Lacey’s pain almost as his own. Will’s last letter was damning, in detail and in scope: how he had married in a reckless burst of passion and love, how devastating his father’s disapproval had been, how his finances had grown desperate. How he had been seduced into giving information to the French, and how he believed he had gotten away with it when Bonaparte was sent into exile the first time, only to realize he had compromised himself too far when the Emperor returned and marched on Belgium. And most tragic of all, his belief that the only honorable atonement for him was death on the field of battle, repaying the blood he had cost England with his own. Alec felt the force of his own grief for Will, and at the same time a great emptiness where he had expected to feel vindication. The driving need for proof had nursed him through many a lonely and bitter night, when he had imagined the triumph and the release of clearing his name. He had imagined confronting the true traitor, the one whose sins had been laid at his feet, and never dreamed it would be his dearest friend in the world. He finally had answers, but there was no joy in them for him.

“He asked me to look after his wife and child,” Alec said as Lacey seemed to shrink before his eyes. “Do you know where they are?”

Lacey bowed his head and closed his eyes. He gave a tiny shake of his head.

Alec let out his breath. What ought he to do now? His instinct was to let Stafford deal with it. Whatever punishment Lacey deserved, Stafford would be better equipped to impose it. But it was murder. He didn’t see how he could simply walk out now and wait to see what Stafford did, knowing that Stafford had cards in his hand that Alec knew nothing about. For all he knew, Stafford and Hastings might be well-pleased to hear Turner was dead, and thank Lacey instead of arrest him.

A shriek outside the door interrupted his thoughts. Alec spun around, flexing his hands and automatically assuming a half crouch, ready to defend himself even as he wondered who the bloody hell would be screaming. It was a woman, and he didn’t think Lacey had any maids, just a footman and butler besides the all-purpose Morris…

The door opened and Morris stumped in, dragging a struggling female form in his arms. Alec’s heart seized even before he saw her face.

“Morris,” cried Lacey in astonishment. “What the devil?”