Loving Rose: The Redemption of Malcolm Sinclair (Casebook of Barnaby Adair)

by Stephanie Laurens

  There was, he noted, not a shred of gentleness, of compassion, in her voice; Roger was dead to her, regardless.

  He couldn’t find any fault with that.

  Letting his head sink back on the pillows, he looked around, taking in the furniture and trappings of a regular bedroom. Beyond the window, the sky showed blue, the leafy canopies of trees ruffling beneath the hand of a playful breeze. “Where are we?”

  He looked back at Rose in time to see her smile.

  “In Barnaby and Penelope’s house. They insisted that we all stay here until you’ve recovered enough for us to think of what we wish to do next, of where we want to go.”

  He held her gaze for a long moment, then quietly said, “Us?”

  She nodded decisively. “Us.” Her tone was determined. Her eyes narrowed fractionally, as if daring him to argue.

  Us. His gaze locked with hers, he hesitated—struggled to define the logical way forward, to shape words to give it reality—but, in the end, he bowed to the moment, to the overwhelming emotional compulsion welling within, and said nothing.

  He wasn’t sure . . . what should be. What could be.

  He knew he needed to think things through, but . . . heaving a sigh, he realized he was still too weak.

  His lids grew heavy and drifted down. He started to fight, to try to stay with her, but then he felt her hand stroke over the back of his, then she shifted forward and he felt her lips brush his forehead.

  “Sleep,” she whispered. “We’ll be here when you awake.”

  Reassured at some primitive level, he let go, and did.

  More than a week passed before Thomas could manage the stairs. The day after he proved he could brave them, Penelope organized a dinner party.

  “Come along.” Her arm looped through his, Rose steadied him as he paused at the head of the stairs. “Everyone’s waiting in the drawing room.”

  It took another five minutes of careful, step-by-step negotiation, but, at last, he gained the tiles of the front hall and straightened.

  Rose smiled encouragingly. Arm in arm, they turned toward the door that Mostyn, beaming, stood ready to open.

  As they approached, Thomas still nursing his mending ribs and leaning heavily on his cane, Mostyn obliged and sent the door swinging wide, and they walked into a celebration.

  The others were all there—Barnaby and Penelope, Stokes and Griselda, Montague and Violet, and Richard Percival—the people Thomas had come to know over the last weeks, those he’d worked alongside to save William, Alice, and Rose.

  The children were there, too, not just William and Alice, who were gradually learning to respond to their real names, but also Barnaby and Penelope’s son, Oliver, and Stokes and Griselda’s Megan, rambunctious toddlers both, and it was now more apparent that Violet and Montague were expecting a child, albeit several months from now.

  All the adults were on their feet, watching Thomas, glasses in their hands and huge smiles on their faces.

  He halted, bemused. He’d assumed this was to be an ordinary dinner party; he hadn’t imagined . . .

  Barnaby raised his glass. “To our own conquering hero.”

  “To our conquering hero!” the others echoed, raising their glasses to Thomas, then drinking his health.

  He blinked rapidly. He was, indeed, Thomas again, with his inconvenient emotions and their consequent distractions.

  Someone pressed a glass into his hand.

  He looked at Rose and saw she already had a glass and was sipping, drinking to him with the others.

  He met her eyes, saw them brimming with happiness, and hesitated—and looked inward, as he so often had to, for guidance. As Thomas, thanks to her, he knew what to do.

  Raising his head, he lifted his glass to the others and said, “Thank you.” He paused, then added, “I couldn’t have saved the children without the support and help of you all.”

  Everyone grinned, laughed, inclined their heads in acknowledgment, then all turned and found their seats and sat so they could talk and share the latest news.

  Limping forward to the small sofa that had, apparently, been reserved for him and Rose, Thomas carefully sat, then eased back. Rose sat beside him. He glanced at her and felt gladness—a sense of gratitude, of simple joy at being alive—well and flow through him.

  The talk, unsurprisingly, had turned to those critical moments at Seddington House.

  Stokes, Barnaby, and Penelope, and Montague and Violet, and Richard Percival, in various positions along and across the street, had all had a clear view of the action on the roof.

  “But we couldn’t see you,” Richard explained. “Not until you flung yourself at Roger.”

  “We didn’t know what to do,” Violet said. “Whether to scream at Phelps and Conner to look—”

  “Or to run inside ourselves.” Stokes shook his head. “It was a horrible few minutes.”

  “Minutes the likes of which I never want to live through again.” The iron-willed declaration came from Penelope.

  Griselda’s brows rose, as if she couldn’t believe her ears.

  Penelope saw, and raised a shoulder. “Well, not if I can avoid it.”

  Griselda laughed. Barnaby caught his wife’s eyes and smiled.

  They adjourned to the dining room and the conversations rolled on.

  Penelope had seated Richard Percival, the odd man at the table, alongside Thomas. Richard seized a moment between courses to capture Thomas’s attention. “I’ve spoken with Rose, and William, too, of course. Given that summer’s approaching and the schools will soon close, we thought, if you’re agreeable, that it would be best for William if we could leave him in your care, to continue his studies under your guidance, at least for the next few months. We have plenty of time to assess schools and decide which one will best suit him, and, of course, he will need to start to get to know the estate, to spend more time there.”

  Thomas hadn’t thought . . .

  Richard tried to read Thomas’s suddenly impassive expression but couldn’t. More tentatively, Richard said, “We realize, of course, that it’s an imposition, and if you don’t feel inclined to take on the responsibility, I’m happy to arrange for Rose and the children to live in Seddington House. We can hire tutors, and—”

  “No.” The word spilled from Thomas’s lips, driven purely by emotion. By reaction. But he didn’t yet know what was to happen. He glanced across the table at Stokes; engaged in an earnest discussion with Montague, Stokes appeared oblivious of, and had certainly given no sign of remembering, their arrangement, but Thomas couldn’t believe Stokes had forgotten it. “It might be best,” Thomas quietly said, bringing his gaze back to Richard’s face, “if we left things as they are for the moment. Until I have time to sort out how matters stand.”

  Richard’s gaze moved past Thomas to Rose, sitting on Thomas’s other side. With a smile, Richard nodded. “Yes, of course. As I said, we have several months before any decisions regarding William’s personal life need to be made.”

  And Thomas’s relationship with Rose was another issue that hung in the balance. A balance that, as far as he knew, was firmly weighted against.

  Eager to deflect any further comments on such issues, he asked, “What about Marmaduke? He’s still William’s co-guardian, I take it?”

  Richard nodded. “However, when it comes to it, Marmaduke has never had any interest in running the estate, and neither Foley nor I imagine he’ll show any more engagement over the details of William’s personal life now William has reappeared—and, incidentally, Foley has notified the courts of that fact, that William is hale and whole and very much alive.”

  Richard paused, then went on, “As for Marmaduke himself, he’s in a sorry state. At the moment, he’s keeping vigil by Roger’s bed. On learning what Roger has been up to, Marmaduke was stunned, shocked—indeed, beyond horrified. He found it hard to accept, at first, but now he knows it’s the truth and he’s a shattered man. I seriously doubt we, or William, need fear any further interferen
ce from that quarter.”

  Thomas glanced across the table to where William sat, with Alice beside him; both children were thrilled to be dining with the adults. “What of society?” Thomas asked. “How much does the ton know?”

  Richard had followed his gaze and understood why he was asking; the ton had a habit of looking askance at the family of blackguards like Roger. “We’ve endeavored to keep the matter as quiet as possible, and, thanks largely to the Adairs, we’ve succeeded well enough. Many do know, of course—that was unavoidable—but all of those are of the ilk to appreciate the need for discretion.”

  Relieved, Thomas nodded. “Good.”

  Rose claimed his attention, and he and Richard were drawn into the wider discussion.

  When the meal was at an end, the trifle disposed of and the poached figs all gone, they repaired to the drawing room. The conversation veered into more general spheres as, with Thomas’s encouragement, Adair and Montague brought Thomas up to date with all the happenings he’d missed during his recent convalescence.

  The children started to yawn, and Rose urged them to retire.

  With sleepy smiles, a bow, and a wobbly curtsy, the pair took their leave of the company and departed for their beds, passing Mostyn in the doorway as he rolled in the tea trolley.

  Stokes shifted in his armchair. “I didn’t want to mention this until the children left—they’ve heard enough of such things and can be told the salient points later, should they ever need to know.” He looked around the group. “Roger Percival breathed his last about noon today, but before he did, he made a full confession.”

  “Wait!” Penelope held up a staying hand. “Let me hand around the cups, then we can all sit back and you can have the floor.”

  Thomas duly accepted a cup and saucer. He took a sip, then caught Stokes’s gaze. “Before you start, perhaps you could fill me in on what actually happened when Roger and I fell. I’m a little hazy on the details after we left the roof.”

  Stokes looked at him, then said, “Because Roger pulled you over, you fell forward, more or less headfirst, closer to the house and somewhat to the side of where he fell. You hit several large branches of a tree and landed in the flowerbed that ran along the front of the house. Roger, in contrast, fell backward—he fell further out from the house, and clear of the tree. He landed half on the gravel path, half in the flowerbed. The raised stone edging of the bed broke his back and punctured a lung. He was never going to recover, but he lingered until today.”

  Thomas nodded. “Thank you.”

  Stokes took the cup and saucer Griselda handed him, sipped, then glanced around the circle of now expectant faces. “We—the police—are now confident that Marmaduke Percival had no idea what his son was about, not at any time. As Richard mentioned, Marmaduke is . . . not exactly simple but very easily led. His son knew that and used it as far as he was able.”

  Stokes paused, sipped, then went on, “Roger was in crippling debt. He first started borrowing money while at school, he and his friend Atwell. Both liked to pretend they were much wealthier than they were, and lived well beyond their means. They egged each other on, and, from the first, both borrowed from the most unscrupulous lenders—the ones willing to lend to schoolboys from good families. Roger never attempted to get money from his father because, by the time he realized how deeply he was sinking and wanted to pay his way out, he’d discovered Marmaduke had very little funds, not enough to make any serious dent in Roger’s debts. So Roger sank deeper and deeper into the mire. He had always played on his connection to the Seddington estate, but as time went on, and William was born, for Roger, matters grew increasingly fraught. Eventually, he had to do something to appease his increasingly aggressive creditors, so he calmly and cold-bloodedly planned to murder his cousin Robert and Robert’s wife, Corinne, and then subsequently to do away with William. After that, Roger’s father would have inherited the estate, and that would have been enough to save Roger.

  “Roger bought a potent sleeping draft, enough to kill Robert and Corinne, and William, too. He drove to Seddington Grange, but as he was nearing the entrance to the drive, he saw Robert drive out, with Corinne by his side. They turned north, away from Roger, so he followed. He saw them halt on a grassy headland above Grimsby and lay out a picnic. He quickly found an inn, bought a bottle of wine, and joined them. He slipped the sleeping draft into their glasses, but he was clever enough not to give them too much. They slept, but they didn’t die.”

  Voice darkening, Stokes went on, “Roger waited until night fell, then he took them in his curricle down to the wharf. He put them on Robert’s yacht, then—and remember all the Percival men can sail—he took the yacht out, wrapped the two bodies, still alive, in the sails, and then capsized the yacht. He made sure the sails would stay with the yacht and that the yacht would float, then—it being a calm sea—he swam back to shore and drove back to London.”

  Stokes looked at Rose. “What you heard on the evening after the funeral was Roger boasting to Atwell, telling Atwell how he’d got himself out of the mire. Atwell hadn’t yet, you see—he was still sinking. And it was just as well that you reacted as you did—Roger planned to dose William with the draft the next day. When you and the children disappeared . . . Roger decided it didn’t really matter. His cousin and wife were dead, and the only person who stood between him, or rather his father, and the estate was a five-year-old boy who had vanished. Roger artfully led his creditors to believe that William would never reappear, that it was simply a matter of waiting out the seven years and then he would have unfettered access to the estate. His creditors were willing to continue to lend to him on that basis. For Roger, William’s disappearance was merely a temporary delay.”

  Switching his gaze to Richard, Stokes went on, “And then Roger realized that you were searching for William, and that made everything, in his eyes, so much easier. Through Marmaduke, he learned of your progress, and he kept a distant watch on Curtis and his men. Regardless, Roger felt that, if and when you found William, he would have plenty of time to act. He wasn’t worried either way. But, of course, as time went on and his debts continued to mount, his creditors grew increasingly demanding. That happened recently. However, two years ago, Atwell—school friend and confidant—reached point-non-plus, and, as we’d surmised, on the strength of his knowledge of Roger’s murder of his cousin and his cousin’s wife, Atwell tried to get money from Roger. Atwell died at Roger’s hands. So that’s that murder solved, too.”

  Stokes paused, clearly ordering his thoughts, then continued, “But returning to the present, for Roger, matters were growing increasingly pressing. He had to find William, murder him, and have his body found—he now needed that to assure his creditors that he would one day be able to pay his debts. Roger started watching Curtis’s men. He knew Richard, through Curtis, was closing in on Rose, and he was holding himself ready to act. When his man saw William, Rose, and Alice getting into Penelope’s carriage, Roger could barely hold himself back. He needed William dead as soon as possible, and he was willing to work with whatever situation eventuated.” Stokes paused, then looked at Thomas and dipped his head. “He nearly succeeded, but he didn’t.”

  “And now he’s dead.” Richard Percival didn’t add “and a good thing, too,” but the sentiment hovered in the air, nonetheless.

  Stokes nodded. “The commissioners are delighted that we’ve closed several cases, all nice and neat, with nothing left hanging.”

  Thomas glanced at Stokes, but the man was draining his cup; Thomas concluded that Stokes hadn’t meant anything specific by the remark.

  Penelope, Griselda, and Violet stepped in, introducing and pursuing topics that drew them all from the darkness that had been Roger Percival, that had emanated from him and driven his deeds.

  Gradually, under the ladies’ determined influence, the atmosphere lightened, and, one by one, they were able to laugh and smile again.

  Thomas looked around the circle, listened to the others’ plans for the fut
ure, immediate and more far-reaching, and found himself wishing that he, too, had a future he could look forward to, one he could share with friends like this. Instead, he listened to them expound, and artfully slid around any questions aimed at him. For their part, they assumed he was still recovering and hadn’t yet had time to think further, so they—even Penelope—didn’t press him for answers.

  Letting their warmth, the ambiance of friendship, wash over him, he looked at each one and had no doubt that their friendship would be there, already was there, offered and extended to him should he wish to claim it; he’d gained enough insight into these people to read them clearly, to appreciate and understand.

  To feel their sincerity when the evening finally wound to a close and they all walked into the front hall to make their farewells, and they, each of them, turned to him and wished him well, wished him a speedy and continuing recovery, shook his hand or kissed his cheek, and bade him adieu until next they met.

  He had no idea whether they would ever meet again.

  That was up to Stokes and the police. It was they who held his future in their hands.

  They who would determine what that future was.

  He’d made an agreement, and he wasn’t about to resile from it. Stokes, and Adair, too, had more than delivered on their side of the bargain; it was now up to Thomas to pay the agreed price.

  Stokes and Griselda were the last to leave.

  After farewelling Barnaby, Penelope, and Rose, Stokes turned to Thomas and held out his hand. When Thomas gripped it, Stokes met his eyes. And nodded. “I’ll call tomorrow morning. It’s time I brought you up to date on the police file on Malcolm Sinclair.”

  Thomas felt a chill touch his soul, but, without allowing his easy expression to change in the least, he held Stokes’s gray gaze and inclined his head. “I’ll be here, waiting.”

  With an acknowledging nod, Stokes released his hand and turned to take Megan from Griselda’s arms; a minute later, they’d piled into their carriage and were gone.

  Mostyn closed the front door. Turning away, Rose and Penelope led the way upstairs, heads together as they planned some outing. With a grin, Barnaby fell in by Thomas’s side, and, together, they followed.