It Happened One Night: Six Scandalous Novels

by Grace Burrowes

  The prickle of unease came again, more strongly. “You’re suggesting Gregory wasn’t in London when he said he’d be there, and wasn’t off shooting when he was supposed to be on some grouse moor. Now we learn that Sir Dewey, who’s never been to a local meet and doesn’t own a single hunter, has a sudden compulsion to spend the last weeks of winter chasing foxes far to the north.”

  The coach came to a halt, and the moment for solving riddles was abruptly overtaken by the moment for saying good-bye. Unease turned to dread, then oddly, to… certainty.

  Axel had promised his lady answers. The good-bye would have to wait.

  “Hennessey,” Axel said, “you will excuse us. Let the staff know Mrs. Stoneleigh will return later this evening, and please be sure all is in readiness for her.”

  Abigail’s expression was wary and curious. “Mr. Belmont, what are you about?”

  “I’m kidnapping you, madam. One doesn’t like to make a habit of felonious behavior, but we must pay a call on Sir Dewey Fanning. You raise questions to which only he will have the answers.”

  “Ma’am?” Hennessey said, as the coach door swung open.

  Abby didn’t spare the open door so much as a glance. “You will excuse us, Hennessey.”

  Cold air wafted in, and for an instant, Axel was tempted, truly tempted, to kidnap the woman he loved. He’d wanted to see Abigail become independent, self-determined, and confident, but at the same time, he needed to know she was safe.

  “I’ve had enough of being kidnapped, Mr. Belmont,” Abby said, when Hennessey had stepped down.

  Well, damn. Probably for the best. “I understand. If Sir Dewey is hiding secrets, confronting him might be dangerous. I’ll call on him myself. If I learn of anything—”

  Abigail pulled the door closed and secured the latch. “Axel, you need not kidnap anybody. We’ll go together, and I agree, we need to go now. Sir Dewey’s note said he’d be leaving in the morning. Please tell John Coachman to drive on, or we’ll lose all the light.”

  No kidnapping then, and no saying good-bye. Not just yet. They’d carry on together. Like a good, healthy graft, or a robust cross. Together was a fine concept, as was anything that delayed the moment Axel had to bid his lady farewell.

  Two sentiments blended for Abby as the coach rattled down the drive and Axel took an elegant, business-like pistol from beneath the seat. First, she admitted to a ferocious protectiveness toward Axel Belmont. Not simply attraction, respect, affection, or admiration…

  She’d slay dragons for him, without question, because he’d already slain dragons for her. Her fears, doubts, poor health, insecurities, and not a little ignorance had gone down to defeat at the professor’s capable hands.

  The second emotion was nowhere near as fine and noble—sheer relief, to put off the moment of parting. The staff had worked hard to scrub, clean, reorganize and re-arrange Stoneleigh Manor’s interior, but nothing could change the memories Abby had of the place.

  Nor make her memories of Candlewick any less dear.

  “Sir Dewey told me he occasionally called on Gregory at the odd hour,” Axel said, switching to the forward facing seat and taking Abby’s hand. “I thought that meant calling in the middle of a morning ride, but I’m guessing you might have occasionally found Sir Dewey in Gregory’s study sharing a nightcap.”

  Oh, how lovely, to hold Axel’s hand again. They’d spent most of the afternoon intimately entwined, but the simple clasp of hands was precious too.

  “Now that you bring it up, yes. In years past, I’d find Sir Dewey with Gregory in his study at a late hour. I assumed he’d come in the front door, but I suppose…”

  “Sir Dewey might have used the French doors. I would have an easier time viewing him as a killer if more of what he’d said had rung false.”

  Honest men did not easily see perfidy in others—neither did honest women. “He told you Gregory had been importing erotica, didn’t he?”

  “Sir Dewey spoke in delicacies and innuendo, and as if his knowledge was from years past. Nicholas cast doubt on the profitability of importing erotica, there being a surfeit of prurient material available domestically.”

  Darkness overtook daylight while the horses trotted on, until the lamps of Sir Dewey’s gateposts came into view.

  “You don’t want Sir Dewey to be a murderer,” Abby said. “Neither do I.”

  “He was kind to his dog, Abigail. Indulgent toward his staff, decorated for bravery. He was protective of you. I nearly hated him for that, but I respected him too. What the hell?”

  The coach had slowed to make the turn and then pulled to a jostling halt. The way was narrowed by banks of snow on either side of the drive, and thus the path forward afforded space for only one coach to pass at a time.

  Which meant Sir Dewey’s coach, traveling in the opposite direction, had also come to a bouncing, swaying stop.

  Axel stepped down from the coach, the pistol at his side. Abigail climbed out unassisted and took up a place behind him.

  “Sir Dewey,” Axel called, “you will come out with your hands in the air, and you will explain why you’re leaving the shire at an hour when the roads grow treacherous.”

  “Mr. Belmont has a lovely gun,” Abigail added, her voice colder than the winter night. “Do as he says.”

  The coach door opened, and Sir Dewey emerged, two gloved hands held aloft. The lamps cast lurid shadows over his features, and yet, his expression was not that of a murdering madman.

  “The gun isn’t necessary,” Sir Dewey said, sounding weary. “I have a mortal dislike for guns and stand before you unarmed.”

  “You stand before us untruthful,” Abigail retorted, sidling out from behind Axel. “What in the perishing damnation is going on, Sir Dewey? You have prevaricated if not lied outright, and denied the king’s man the answers he’s been diligently seeking. Did you kill Gregory?”

  Right to the point, and she was staying clear of Axel’s line of fire.

  “I did,” Sir Dewey said. “I shot the colonel, and will sign any document you please to that effect, but I must ask again that the gun be put aside.”

  A trickle of perspiration ran down the side of his face, despite the cold.

  Axel should have been relieved to have found an answer to the riddle of Gregory Stoneleigh’s death. He felt instead a staggering sense of self-castigation.

  Of course, Sir Dewey had killed Gregory Stoneleigh. Of course.

  “If you attempt to flee, I will shoot you,” Axel said. “My aim is excellent, and I am vexed enough to put a bullet in your handsome arse.” The entire investigation lay before Axel like a series of misguided crosses, aiming to strengthen one set of characteristics, while concentrating weakness in another.

  “You have my word, I will not attempt to flee,” Sir Dewey said. “Perhaps we might continue this discussion indoors, for I would do nothing to put Mrs. Stoneleigh at risk of harm.”

  “Spare me your chivalry,” Abigail spat. “And start walking.”

  Axel lowered the gun, but remained behind Sir Dewey for the duration of the march up the drive. Only when they were ensconced before a blazing fire in the elegant library did Axel set the pistol aside.

  “The most common motives for murder,” he said, “are passion, greed, and revenge. I looked for somebody with a proper motive for murder, when I should have been looking, not for the person with a motive to kill Gregory Stoneleigh, but for the person Stoneleigh was most likely to have been aiming for when he died. You killed Stoneleigh in self-defense.”

  Sir Dewey had taken up a place near the fire, one hand propped on the mantel. At Axel’s statement, he didn’t nod, so much as he bowed his head.

  Abigail remained by Axel’s side, exactly where he preferred she be.

  “You shot in self-defense,” she said, “confirming Gregory was a menace to all in his ambit save his blighted dogs and hunters. Nonetheless, when you had every opportunity to explain the situation to one of the most rational, intelligent, diligent magistr
ates in the realm, you withheld that information. Why?”

  “Might we put the gun out of sight?” Sir Dewey asked. He gaze was on the fire, but with a studied detachment, such as a person terrified of dogs might employ when confronted with the realization that a mastiff gnawed a bone across the room.

  “Abigail, what say you?”

  She set the gun on the sideboard and came back to Axel’s side, while a large, long-haired black cat stropped itself against Sir Dewey’s boots.

  “I am uneasy around guns,” Sir Dewey said. “I’ll not provoke anybody to firing one if I can help it.”

  “You can help,” Abigail snapped, “by telling the truth. You and Gregory went haring all over the realm, and you weren’t pursuing any kind of gentlemanly sport. What were you about?”

  A snippet of conversation emerged from Axel’s memory. “Explain what the colonel might have been doing in Harrogate, for example. Foxes and grouse do not frequent spa towns, as best I recollect.”

  The fire popped, and Sir Dewey started. Abby, by contrast, remained calm. The shire should start appointing widows to serve as magistrate, so steady were her nerves.

  “Gregory was addicted to the opium,” Sir Dewey said. “Addicted and growing worse. All those so-called shooting trips to the north, the removes to Melton in hunt season, the weeks spent allegedly in London, were Gregory’s attempts to get free of the opium. He failed. Inevitably, he failed.”

  Axel endured another spike of self-castigation, for evidence of Stoneleigh’s dependence—the twenty pipes, the mandatory trips to Farleyer’s, the erratic moods—was obvious only in hindsight.

  “Opium?” Abigail murmured. “Why should that matter? Many people rely on a regular dose, and few are the worse for it.”

  “Might we be seated?” Sir Dewey asked.

  “Take the arm chair,” Abby said. “Mr. Belmont, if you’d join me on the sofa?”

  Sir Dewey threw himself into the chair nearest the hearth. Gone was the witty, urbane veteran, and in his place was an exhausted man burdened by a sad tale.

  “Mrs. Stoneleigh asks why Gregory Stoneleigh, of all His Majesty’s subjects, could not manage a cordial relationship with a medicinal commonplace,” Sir Dewey began. “I don’t know the answer to that, but I can tell you the sheer humiliation of addiction drove the colonel. He could not abide what the cravings did to him, could not stand to be vulnerable to a white powder obtained from half way around the world at significant cost.”

  “Why not simply tell Stoneleigh to get help from some obliging physician?” Axel asked. “Why involve yourself in the situation at all? Were you still entangled in the business?”

  The cat hopped into Sir Dewey’s lap. Purring commenced, loud enough to be heard across the room.

  “I’m knighted for bravery,” Sir Dewey said, “but my ability to form coherent sentences is jeopardized by the presence of a gun. There’s more to the tale, though the retelling is difficult.”

  He stroked the cat gently, and the creature settled in his lap. Axel did not want to hear this difficult tale, and yet, he’d promised his lady that he’d find her the truth.

  “Say on, Sir Dewey. I’ve an investigation to conclude, and I’m sure Mrs. Stoneleigh is interested in what you have to tell us.”

  Sir Dewey had nearly been one of Gregory’s victims too. This thought tolled through Abby with the clarity of a bell, and the solemnity too. This soldier, a man in his prime, had also been in some regard tainted by Gregory Stoneleigh’s lies and schemes. If a wealthy officer, a knight of the realm in full control of his situation, had fallen prey to Gregory’s machinations, what chance had a grieving shop girl had?

  “Tell us your story, Sir Dewey,” Abby said. “Don’t consider it a confession. Consider it an explanation.”

  Axel’s gaze was approving. Despite the circumstances, Abby kissed him, and a ghost of a smile curved his lips. The brave knight was pale, nervous, and exhausted, while Axel looked good. The sight of him, the simple sight of him, fortified Abby as nothing else could.

  She went to the sideboard and poured Sir Dewey a finger of brandy.

  When he accepted the glass, his hand trembled minutely. “My sincere thanks.” He downed the brandy in a single toss, and passed back the glass.

  “I am not nervous of guns,” Sir Dewey said. “I am entirely undone by them. I was taken captive in India, and day after day, the guards would play a game with me. They would lay out eight pistols, put a bullet in one of them, and then rearrange the guns, very rapidly while I watched. I was to choose a succession of pistols. Each one I chose was then fired against my temple. By the time I escaped, even saying certain words caused me to shake uncontrollably.”

  Axel got up and poured a second serving of brandy. He offered it first to Sir Dewey, who declined, then to Abigail. She took a sip and passed the remainder back to him before he resumed his place beside her, drink in hand.

  “You have suffered much,” Axel said, “and some of the damage was permanent.”

  “I hope not,” Sir Dewey replied. “But years later, I am still not… I can hold a gun. I can even fire a gun, apparently. A relief, that, as awful as the admission is. Shall you see me hanged, Belmont?”

  Despite Sir Dewey’s casual tone, despite even Abby’s anger at him, her heart hurt for him too. He had been brave, he was brave still—also broken.

  “Gregory’s gun was loaded,” Abby said. “Both chambers. That’s how we knew he didn’t take his own life.”

  Sir Dewey looked away, into the fire. “Belmont had said only that Gregory’s gun was not the one that had killed him. I hadn’t been… I hadn’t been sure. My mental faculties have… I’ve vacillated between an urge to confess, which will bring scandal down on my siblings if I’m convicted of murder, and silence, which brought dishonor to me, and left Mrs. Stoneleigh without answers.”

  “You truly did fire in self-defense,” Axel said. “Why didn’t you simply sever all ties with Stoneleigh and warn Abigail of his problems?”

  “Mrs. Stoneleigh was not well,” Sir Dewey said, “and a wife would have no authority to deal with a husband’s addiction. Stoneleigh had brought his habit home with him from India. I know this, you see, because I am the person who introduced him to the sedative qualities of opium.”

  Sir Dewey’s hand paused on the cat’s back, as if the past had become more real to him than the present.

  “The patent remedies are a pale imitation of the relief the pure product can yield,” he said, “and when I escaped from my captors, I became dependent on the drug. Guns are a fact of military life, and there I was, dreading every morning inspection.”

  Abby knew how that felt. Dreading every breakfast meal, praying for hunt season to start early, praying for a late spring, regardless of the impact on the crops, because a late spring would have meant Gregory tarried at Melton.

  Or wherever Sir Dewey had taken him.

  Axel was sitting too close to her for propriety, thigh to thigh. She took comfort from his nearness and hoped he took comfort from hers.

  “Are you addicted now?” she asked.

  “Mercifully, no,” Sir Dewey said. “I weaned myself, I left India, I let time work what healing it could. I surrounded myself with people I trust, I allowed myself only moderate use of spirits, and I forced myself into increasing proximity with guns, by the most gradual degrees. I started with a painting that included a gun as a detail and made myself study it from across the room.”

  “All very commendable,” Axel said, “but what has this to do with Gregory Stoneleigh?”

  Sir Dewey seemed calmer now, but also infinitely sad. As if all the charm and manners he wore so consistently had weighed as much as armor, which for the first time, Abby was seeing him without.

  “Stoneleigh learned his opium habit from me, sent his servants to buy it where mine bought my supply. I eventually explained to him why I’d begun using the drug, hoping I could prevent him from growing dependent. He was at first scornful of my weakness, then he bl
amed me for his inability to control his habit.”

  “He ridiculed your honor,” Abby said. “He ridiculed my intellect, my innocence, my grief, my reading, my music, and made sure everybody in the neighborhood had reason to suspect me of mental incompetence.”

  Sir Dewey sat up straighter at Abby’s recitation. “I kept telling myself—and Gregory told me too—that a once honorable officer had been ruined because of me, because of a comment I’d made over tea that an occasional pipe could make life more bearable.”

  Abby shared a look with Sir Dewey, an acknowledgment of both victimhood and survivorship.

  “Disabuse yourself of the notion that you ruined a competent officer,” Axel said. “I’ve corresponded with some of Stoneleigh’s military acquaintances. He was a harsh commanding officer, at best.”

  “Commanded from the rear,” Sir Dewey muttered. “He was liberal with the lash, and parsimonious with commendations.”

  “You didn’t ruin him,” Abby said. “And he didn’t ruin you.” Damn Gregory Stoneleigh to the blackest pit, for he’d surely condemned Sir Dewey to endless suffering.

  “You are generous,” Sir Dewey said. “I had to try though, to free the colonel from the drug. He demanded it of me, blamed me for his situation, and threatened to reveal my cowardice to all and sundry. I did try repeatedly, Mrs. Stoneleigh, but the measures that had proven effective for me had taken years, with false starts and false dawns. The colonel wanted instant resolution of his cravings. All issues of dependence aside, I fear he was losing his reason.”

  The cat rubbed its head against Sir Dewey’s chin, and Abby swallowed past a lump in her throat. Gregory had denied her even a pet of her own. At least Sir Dewey had had the comfort of the mute beasts.

  “Stoneleigh had certainly lost his moral compass,” Axel said, “if ever he possessed one. You might have weaned him from the drug, you could not have repaired his integrity. One wonders if the drugs were to assuage his guilty conscience, assuming he had any conscience at all.”