The Great Game (Royal Sorceress) (24 page)

“Mother,” Lady Elizabeth stammered. “I...”

Gwen rose to her feet. Lady Bracknell looked formidable, certainly far more stubborn than Gwen’s mother, but Gwen had faced worse. Besides, she
had
been invited. “I was called to speak with Lady Elizabeth...”

“You were not invited into our home,” Lady Bracknell thundered. “You may dress up as a man, but that doesn’t give you liberty to
act
like one.”

She swung round and glared at her daughter before Gwen could reply. “And
you
should know better than to send out invitations without asking our permission!”

That was a contradiction, Gwen noted, but there was no point in telling her. Who would have thought – Gwen certainly hadn’t – that there was a mother worse than Lady Mary in London? But Lady Mary hadn’t really been that bad... she felt a moment of sympathy for Lady Elizabeth, who’d had a harpy dictating her every waking moment. It was a miracle she hadn’t turned out any worse.

“That smelly little lesbian is not welcome in our house,” Lady Bracknell continued, one hand raised to strike her daughter. “And...”

“Shut your mouth,” Gwen ordered, drawing on all of her Charm. Lady Bracknell’s mouth snapped shut with an audible crack. The Charm was far from subtle, but it would take a very strong mind to escape its grasp. “Go to your bedroom, sit down on the bed and stay there until your daughter comes to tell you that you can leave. And I suggest that you treat her better in future.”

Lady Bracknell stared at Gwen with unconcealed hatred, mixed with shock, but she obeyed.

Gwen watched her go, then turned back to Lady Elizabeth. The young woman looked absolutely terrified and it was hard to blame her. Even if she hadn’t been scared of the magic Gwen had demonstrated, her mother would not be happy when the Charm wore off. And it would, Gwen knew. Nothing lasted forever.

“Now,” Gwen said, quietly. She kept the Charm out of her voice this time. Even if Lady Elizabeth didn’t sense it, the Charm might not work right on someone who was clearly distraught. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

Lady Elizabeth started to tear up again. Gwen sighed inwardly, removed a handkerchief from her purse and passed it to the girl, allowing her to dab at her eyes. Maybe using so much Charm so blatantly had been a mistake. But Lady Bracknell had deserved to be slapped down hard.

You could have held her upside down until she fainted
, a quiet voice in the back of her head pointed out.
Or you could have put her to sleep, or...

She angrily told the voice to go away as Lady Elizabeth finished wiping her eyes. “Mother and father don’t let me go out very often,” she said. “Mother was always talking about how I would have to find a good match and how they weren’t going to let me join the season until they were good and ready. And then they introduced me to Sir Travis and I discovered that I
liked
him.”

Gwen considered her words, thoughtfully. The choice of Sir Travis seemed odd, given the harridan the poor girl had for a mother. He wasn’t a very high-ranked nobleman... but then, he worked directly for Lord Mycroft. Maybe Lord Mycroft or the Duke of India had put a good word in Lord Bracknell’s ear for Sir Travis. It was certainly possible.

And besides, if Sir Travis were to be raised in the peerage, as was certainly possible if he brought the Airship Treaty to a successful conclusion, all objections would simply melt away.

“He treated me like a queen,” Lady Elizabeth said. “I discovered that I
loved
dancing with him... we couldn’t dance together too often, my parents said, but he was so much better than the others... and when my father told me that I was going to marry him, I was overjoyed.”

Because it would take you away from your parents
? Gwen thought. She couldn’t think of a better reason for Lady Elizabeth to want to be away. Even if Sir Travis turned out to be a monster, he might not be as bad as her parents – and if they went to live somewhere overseas, she would be away from them for good.

“I wanted to tell the entire world,” Lady Elizabeth continued. The bitterness in her voice was almost overpowering. “My parents wouldn’t allow it – they said that no good came of announcing a wedding before it was about to take place. I had to wait, but I dreamed of him all the time...”

Gwen rolled her eyes, but said nothing.

“... And I promised myself that I would be the best wife he could hope for. And then the letter arrived.”

“The letter,” Gwen repeated. Had she found out something about Sir Travis that her parents had considered murder, rather than simply terminating the contract? “What letter?”

“I burned it,” Lady Elizabeth admitted. “But it was already too late.”

She reached out and clutched at Gwen’s hand. “Can I trust you?
Really
trust you?”

“Yes,” Gwen said, simply.

“You can’t tell anyone, ever,” Lady Elizabeth insisted. She sounded almost hysterical. “Ever! Not my mother, not my father... not whoever you report to... no one!”

Gwen almost pointed out that she’d just confessed to murder in front of the person investigating the case, but kept that to herself too.

“I won’t,” she promised, and hoped that it was a promise she could keep. “What did the letter say?”

Lady Elizabeth looked down at the carpeted floor. “I...”

She shook her head. “I shouldn’t talk about it,” she said. “But I must. I fell in love, you see.”

Gwen scowled as part of the puzzle clicked into place. It wasn’t a very pretty picture.

“I was thirteen when Uncle Moresby came to stay,” Lady Elizabeth said. “He was my father’s second cousin – and his son Jonathon was fifteen. I fell in love with him and he with me – we exchanged letters for a few months, before they left London and went to the colonies. Those letters... they were passionate. I should never have written them.”

Gwen leaned forward. “Did Jonathon come back into your life?”

“The letter I got included a copy of one of the letters I sent to Jonathon,” Lady Elizabeth said. “And then that terrible man visited and said that if I didn’t pay him the sum of seven hundred pounds – he called it a trifling sum – my marriage to Sir Travis would never take place. I knew that once Sir Travis read the letter, he would break the contract – and my parents would kill me. But I couldn’t pay! I had no money!”

Her voice rose to a scream. “And then that man went to Sir Travis and... and he
died
! It was my fault! I killed the best man I’d ever known!”

Chapter Twenty

B
lackmail
, Gwen thought.

Her mother had never mentioned the concept, but there had been a little about blackmail in
Edmund; A Butler’s Tale
. It was simple – and evil. People had secrets, secrets they would pay to conceal... and if someone else happened to find those secrets, they could use them to force the victim to pay or see the secret revealed to the world. Blackmail. A very simple word for a very ugly concept.

Understanding clicked in her mind.
Howell
. A man who seemed harmless – and yet everyone seemed
terrified
of him. And he was a wealthy man who clearly had enemies, enemies who might ignore the law and strike directly at his home. If he was a blackmailer, it might explain everything... no
wonder
no one had wanted Gwen to get involved with him. But she’d been given no choice.

“Howell,” she said, out loud. “He did this to you?”

Lady Elizabeth nodded. “I
couldn’t
pay,” she said. “He will have taken the letters to Sir Travis and... he killed himself.”

Gwen frowned. She wasn’t an expert in the many ways people could commit suicide, but there was nothing about Sir Travis’s death that suggested that he’d killed himself. Even a Mover would have had problems hitting the back of his head with enough force to cave in his skull. Hanging or poison would have been much more likely for a suicide – or Sir Travis could simply have shot himself in the head. And he’d looked peaceful, rather than tormented, when he’d died.

“Tell me,” she said, slowly. “What makes you think he killed himself?”

“He
loved
me,” Lady Elizabeth insisted. “And he would have seen me as a betrayer!”

That
made no sense at all, Gwen knew, although Polite Society might have agreed with that viewpoint. A woman was not supposed to develop attachments to any man, at least before the wedding was arranged and formally announced. It might come back to haunt the happy couple – just as it had come back to haunt Sir Travis and Lady Elizabeth. But she hadn’t even
known
Sir Travis when she’d written those letters.

“And Howell had the letters,” she mused. “How did he even know they existed?”

“I don’t know,” Lady Elizabeth protested. “Jonathon wouldn’t have given them to him – he just
wouldn’t
. But I don’t know how else he could have got them!”

Gwen scowled, inwardly. Polite Society often overlooked the small army of servants that everyone who could afford it employed, servants who were sometimes mistreated and started looking for ways to get back at their masters and mistresses. Perhaps one of Jonathon’s servants had discovered the letters and stolen them to sell to Howell. Or maybe Jonathon had been desperate for cash and hadn’t been as honourable as Lady Elizabeth assumed. A man could survive such a scandal far more than a young woman could.

“I shall enquire,” she said. “Why do you think that Sir Travis killed himself?”

“Father said the newspapers never got anything right,” Lady Elizabeth said. “And Howell told me that he was going to visit Sir Travis that night...”

“I don’t think he killed himself,” Gwen said, quietly. She reached out and squeezed Lady Elizabeth’s hand. “Someone killed him.”

Howell? It was possible; Sir Travis might have looked at the letters, then reached for a weapon and threatened Howell. Someone who’d spent so much time in India might not be so concerned about what Polite Society had to say about his wife – or more inclined to fight rather than surrender to blackmail. But Howell had said that he had visited Sir Travis before Talleyrand, which suggested that he
hadn’t
killed Sir Travis – or that he had simply lied to Gwen. Could he have been
beaten
? Was that why he’d been in bed?

In that case,
Gwen mused,
the whole story about offering him a loan is nonsense
.

Or was it
entirely
nonsense? Lady Elizabeth couldn’t have hoped to pay Howell – but could Howell have loaned Sir Travis the money to pay himself? It sounded too complicated for words... and yet it did make a certain kind of sense. If Howell found something that he could use to influence Sir Travis, particularly after he started to work in a more public role, it might be worth whatever he paid him. And Sir Travis might not even
know
where the money was actually going.

She shook her head. It sounded like too much of a gamble.

“But those letters are still out there,” Lady Elizabeth said. “What happens if he sends them to my mother?”

Judging from Lady Bracknell’s words, Gwen had a feeling that she would
not
be kind to her daughter if she saw the letters. She might simply disown her daughter – or she might seek to arrange a marriage at once to someone who wouldn’t care if her daughter had been
tainted
by scandal. And Lady Elizabeth would find it hard to refuse...

Would Howell release the letters? Gwen considered it, trying to think like a blackmailer. Very few people knew that Lady Elizabeth had been engaged at all, so he might well consider simply keeping the letters and waiting to see who she became engaged to next. But if she couldn’t pay – and it was clear that she had little money of her own – it might be pointless to wait. Why
not
send the letters to Lady Bracknell – or her enemies in society?

“It might not be good,” she said, with studied understatement. “What did you want to do with your life?”

“I was going to be a helpmeet,” Lady Elizabeth said, bitterly. “I know French, Spanish, Russian, Turkish and Hindi – I could have gone with Sir Travis and helped him in his work. Or I could have handled other matters for him, if he’d had to go on business...”

Her voice trailed away. “But instead I killed him,” she added. “I caused him to die.”

“I don’t think so,” Gwen assured her. She made a mental note to ask Lestrade to search Mortimer Hall for the compromising letters. They hadn’t been discovered in the safe she’d cracked open. “Like I said, someone killed him. And there is no reason to believe that it was something to do with your letters.”

Lady Elizabeth looked up at her through tear-filled eyes. “You really think so?”

“Yes,” Gwen said, firmly. It would have been nice to have the case solved there and then, but Lady Elizabeth wasn’t the murderer – and she was sure that Sir Travis hadn’t committed suicide. “You are not to blame.

“But I need to know,” she added. “Did you have any other suitors?”

“Mother kept them away from me,” Lady Elizabeth said. “She even supervised my dance card. No one could add their name twice...”

Gwen winced in sympathy. She hadn’t attended many balls with her mother, but even Lady Mary had refrained from being
that
controlling. But then, Gwen’s mother had had an unfair advantage. Very few young men had wanted to dance with the girl they’d been told was a devil-child. If Lady Elizabeth had been under
that
sort of control, it was a surprise that she’d even managed to write
one
letter to Jonathon. Maybe Lady Bracknell just hadn’t considered him a serious candidate for her daughter’s affections.

It was possible, she supposed, that Lady Elizabeth had an admirer that she didn’t know about, someone who had fallen in love with her after just one dance. Such things did happen and they were considered major scandals when they finally came to light, if only because the girl would be blamed for leading the poor man on. But anyone who had been seriously interested in her would have tried to court her more openly... unless Lady Bracknell had refused to let it go any further.

“Charming,” Gwen muttered. She would have to ask Lady Bracknell who else had tried to ask for permission to court Lady Elizabeth. “What do you want to do now?”