When Maidens Mourn (4 page)

“What brings you here?” he asked, his attention seemingly all for the task of lighting the candle. He was aware of an air of constraint between them, for her recent marriage to Devlin had introduced a new element and subtly shifted the dynamic in a way neither had yet to confront or reveal.

“What makes you think I came for a purpose other than to see you?”

“Because if this were a gesture of familial affection, you wouldn’t be at Carlton House. You would have come to Berkeley Square. Your mother is well, by the way—or perhaps I should say she is as well as she ever is. She’s quite taken with the new companion you found for her.”

Refusing to be distracted, Hero said, “Gabrielle Tennyson was discovered murdered this morning, at Camlet Moat.” When he kept silent, she said, “You knew?”

He watched the wick of the candle catch, flare up bright. “There is little that happens in this Kingdom that I do not know about.”

“There is also little that happens in this Kingdom that you don’t control.”

He glanced over at her. She stood with her back to the window, her hands curled so that her palms rested on the sill. Through the glass behind her he could see a heavy traffic of carriages, carts, and horses streaming up and down the Mall. He said, “Are you asking if I had her killed?”

“After what I overheard last Friday night, the thought naturally does occur to me.” When Jarvis remained silent, she added impatiently, “Well? Did you?”

“I did not.” He drew the broadsheet from his pocket and thrust it into the candle flame. It blackened and smoked for an instant, then caught fire. “Now the question becomes, do you believe me?”

She held herself quite still, her gaze on his face. “I don’t know. I’ve never been able to tell when you’re lying.”

He tilted the paper as the flames took hold, then dropped it onto the cold, bare stones of the nearby hearth. “I take it Devlin has become involved in the investigation?”

“Lovejoy has asked for his assistance with the case, yes.”

“And will you tell your husband that he should add me to his list of suspects, and why?”

She pushed away from the window, her nostrils flaring with a sharp intake of breath. “I am here because Gabrielle was my friend, not as Devlin’s agent.”

“Perhaps. But that doesn’t exactly answer my question.”

Their gazes met. They’d both known this day would come, when she’d find herself caught between what she felt she owed her own family and what she owed her new husband. Only, he hadn’t expected it to come quite so soon.

She said, “I have no intention of betraying you…if you are telling me the truth.”

He found himself smiling. “But then, in that case, you wouldn’t actually be betraying me, now, would you?” He tipped his head to
one side. “And how will your rather headstrong and passionate young Viscount react, I wonder, when he discovers that you have been less than forthcoming with him?”

“I must be true to myself and to what I believe is right. My marriage in no way negates that.”

“And if he doesn’t understand—or fails to agree?”

She turned toward the door. “Then we will disagree.”

She said it evenly, in that way she had. He knew she had analyzed the situation and made her decision calmly and rationally. She was not the kind of woman to waste time agonizing or endlessly analyzing her choices. But that was not to say that the decision had been made lightly or that it would be without emotional consequences. For he had seen the troubled shadows that lurked in the depths of her fine gray eyes. And he knew an upsurge of renewed anger and resentment directed at Devlin, who had put them there.

After she left, he watched the broadsheet on the hearth burn itself out until nothing remained but a blackened ash. Then he went to stand where she had stood, his gaze on the courtyard below. He watched her exit the Palace, watched her climb the steps to her waiting carriage. He watched the carriage bowl away up Pall Mall toward the west, the clatter of her horses’ hooves lost in the tumult of drivers’ shouts and hawkers’ cries and the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels over cobbles.

Turning, he rang for his clerk.

“Send Colonel Urquhart to me,” he said curtly when the man appeared. “Now.”

T
he abandoned isle once known as Camelot lay on the northern edge of Trent Place, a relatively new estate dating only to late in the previous century, when the ancient royal chase had been broken up and sold to help pay for the first round of George III’s wars. The properties thus created had proved popular with the newly wealthy merchants and bankers of the city. Sir Stanley, Trent Place’s latest owner, was a prosperous banker granted a baronetcy by the King in reward for his assistance in financing the country’s long struggle against Napoléon.

“One o’ them constables was tellin’ me this Sir Stanley already ’as a ’ouse in Golden Square what makes the Queen’s Palace look like a cottage,” said Sebastian’s tiger, Tom, as they turned through massive new gates to a meticulously landscaped park. “So why’d he need to buy this place too, just a few miles from London?”

The boy was thirteen years old now, but still small and gap-toothed and scrappy, for he had been a homeless street urchin when Sebastian first discovered the lad’s intense loyalty and sense of honor and natural affinity for horses. In a very real sense, Tom
and Sebastian had saved each other. The ties that bound lord to servant and boy to man ran deep and strong.

Sebastian said, “The possession of an estate is the sine qua non for anyone aspiring to be a gentleman.”

“The seenkwawhat?”

“Sine qua non. It’s Latin for a condition without which something cannot be.”

“You sayin’ this Sir Stanley ain’t always been a gentleman?”

“Something like that,” said Sebastian, drawing up before what had once been a graceful Italianate villa but was now in the process of being transformed into something quite different by the addition of two vast wings and a new roofline. The pounding of hammers and the clatter of lumber filled the air; near a half-constructed wall, a tall, elegantly tailored gentleman in his early fifties could be seen conferring with a group of brickmasons.

“Keep your ears open around the stables,” Sebastian told Tom as the tiger took the reins. “I’d be interested to hear what the servants are saying.”

“Aye, gov’nor.”

“Devlin,” called Sir Stanley, leaving the bricklayers to stroll toward him.

He was a ruggedly handsome man, his chin square, his cheekbones prominent, his mouth wide and expressive. Despite his years, his body was still strong and powerful, and he had a head of thick, pale blond hair fading gradually to white, so that it formed a startling contrast to his unexpectedly sun-darkened features. The effect was more like what one would expect of a soldier or a nabob just returned from India than a banker.

They said the man had begun his career as a lowly clerk, the son of a poor vicar with sixteen children and no connections. Sebastian had heard that his rise to wealth, power, and influence had been both rapid and brutal and owed its success to his wily intelligence, his driving ambition, and a clear-sighted, unflinching ruthlessness.

“What brings you here?” asked Sir Stanley, pausing beside the curricle.

“I’ve just come from Camlet Moat,” said Sebastian, dropping lightly to the ground.

“Ah. I see.” The flesh of the man’s face suddenly looked pinched, as if pulled too taut over the bones of his face. “Please,” he said, stretching a hand to indicate the broad white marble stairs that led up to the central, original section of the house. “Come in.”

“Thank you.”

“I was with Squire John when he discovered the body,” said Winthrop as they mounted the steps. “He’s our local magistrate, you know. Seems some girl from the village showed up at the Grange in the middle of the night, babbling nonsense about white ladies and magic wells and a dead gentlewoman in the moat. The Squire was convinced it was all a hum—actually apologized for coming to me at the crack of dawn—but I said, ‘No, no, let’s go have a look.’” He paused in the entrance hall, a quiver passing over his tightly held features. “The last thing I expected was to find Gabrielle.”

Sebastian let his gaze drift around the vast, marble-floored entrance hall, with its towering, gilt-framed canvases of pastoral landscapes by Constable and Turner, its ornately plastered ceiling picked out in pastel shades evocative of a plate of petit fours. In an age when it was not uncommon for husbands and wives to call each other by their surnames or titles, Winthrop had just referred to Miss Tennyson by her first name.

And Sebastian suspected the man was not even aware of his slip.

“I’d never seen someone who’d been murdered,” the banker was saying. “I suppose you’ve had experience with it, but I haven’t. I’m not ashamed to admit it was a shock.”

“I’m not convinced anyone gets used to the sight of murder.”

Sir Stanley nodded and turned toward the cavernous drawing
room that opened to their left. “It may be frightfully early, but I could use a drink. How about you? May I offer you some wine?”

“Yes, thank you. Sir Henry Lovejoy tells me you don’t work on the island’s excavations on Sundays,” said Sebastian as his host crossed to where a tray with a decanter and glasses waited on a gilded table beside a grouping of silk-covered settees.

Winthrop splashed wine into two glasses. “My wife believes the Sabbath should be a day of rest. On the seventh day, the Lord rested, and so should all of his children.”

“Commendable,” said Sebastian. Through a long bank of tall windows he could see an angular, bony woman he recognized as Lady Winthrop standing at the edge of an old-fashioned garden of box-edged parterres filled with roses. Despite the heat, she wore a long-sleeved sprigged muslin gown made high at the neck and trimmed with only a meager band of lace. She was younger than Winthrop by some fifteen or twenty years, a second wife as plain as her husband was handsome, her eyes small and protuberant and close set, her chin receding, her head thrust forward in a way that made her look forever inquisitive.

Or aggressive.

She was in the process of giving directions to a cluster of gardeners equipped with wheelbarrows and shovels. As Sebastian watched, she waved her arms in extravagant gestures as she delivered her instructions. Piles of rich dark earth and stacks of brick lay nearby; the Winthrops were obviously expanding their gardens as well as their new house. Watching her, Sebastian wondered if Lady Winthrop also referred to Miss Tennyson as “Gabrielle.” Somehow, he doubted it.

Winthrop set aside the decanter to pick up the two glasses. “At first, in her naivety, my wife actually expected the brutes to be grateful. But she soon discovered how mistaken she was. All they do is grumble about being forced to go to church services.”

“It’s required?”

“Of course.” Winthrop held out one of the glasses. “Religion is important to the order of society. It reconciles the lower classes to their lot in life and teaches them to respect their betters.”

“So it does,” said Sebastian, studying the banker’s faintly smiling face as he took the wine handed him. But he was unable to decide whether Winthrop agreed with his wife or quietly mocked her. “So, tell me, do you honestly believe you’ve found King Arthur’s Camelot?” He took a sip of the wine. It was smooth and mellow and undoubtedly French.

“Honestly?” The banker drained his own glass in two long pulls, then shook his head. “I don’t know. But the site is intriguing, don’t you agree? I mean, here we have a place long associated with the kings of England—a place whose name actually was Camelot. I’m told the word is of Celtic origin. It probably comes from ‘Camulus,’ the Celtic god of war. Of course, Miss Tennyson says—said,” he amended hastily, correcting himself, “that it could also mean ‘place of the crooked stream.’ Personally, I prefer to think it is named after the god of war.” Turning away to pour himself more wine, he raised the decanter in silent question to Sebastian.

Sebastian shook his head. He had taken only the one sip.

“The important thing,” said Winthrop, refreshing his own drink, “is that we know the name dates back to well before the time of William the Conqueror. The corruption of ‘Camelot’ to ‘Camlet’ is quite recent, within the last hundred years or so.”

Sebastian studied the older man’s handsome features. His manner could only be described as affable, even likeable. But Sebastian couldn’t get past the knowledge that the previous owner of Trent Place had been forced to sell the estate to Winthrop at a steep loss—and then blown his own brains out the next day.

Sebastian took another sip of his wine. “How did you meet Miss Tennyson?”

“By mere chance, actually, at a lecture presented by the Society of Antiquaries. She’d been doing research on the history of Camlet
Moat and approached me when she learned I’d recently purchased the estate. Until then, I’d barely realized the moat existed. But the more I learned about it, the more intrigued I became.”

“And you began the excavations—when?”

“A month ago now. We’d hoped to begin earlier, but the wet spring delayed things.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“Far more than I’d anticipated, certainly. Foundations of stone walls five feet thick. Remnants of a forty-foot drawbridge. Even an underground dungeon complete with chains still hanging on the walls.”

“Dating to when?”

“Judging from the coins and painted tiles we’ve come across, probably the thirteenth or fourteenth century, for most of it.”

“I was under the impression King Arthur was supposed to have lived in the fifth or sixth century, after the Roman withdrawal from Britain—that is, if he lived at all.”

“True.” Winthrop turned away to reach for something, then held it out. “But look at this.”

Sebastian found himself holding a corroded metal blade. “What is it?”

“A Roman dagger.” Winthrop set aside his wine and went to open a large flat glass case framed in walnut that stood on its own table near the door. “And look at this.” He pointed with one blunt, long finger. “These pottery vessels are third- or fourth-century Roman. So is the glass vial. And see that coin? It’s from the time of Claudius.”