Silent Melody

by Mary Balogh

  “It is the dogs who are the main attraction for Eric Smith,” Sir Henry said. “There is one more in the stables with a litter of puppies. The boy scarcely moved from them yesterday.” It was his first attempt at conversation, though he was making no great effort to ingratiate himself, Ashley noticed. He was glad there was no pretense of friendship between them.

  “Yesterday,” he said quietly. “You were early at Binchley’s cottage. Did you encounter anyone on your way there?”

  Sir Henry looked at him consideringly. “It is no idle question, is it?” he said. “I cannot remember without giving the question concentrated thought if I met anyone or not. Is it important that I go through that process? Perhaps you would like to tell me whom you suppose I met.”

  “Lady Emily Marlowe,” Ashley said. He watched his neighbor closely and despite himself felt sorry that he had come to Penshurst so burdened. If he had known nothing about this man before he came, they might have been friends. But then he might have been deceived in the friendship. Something had happened to Emmy yesterday.

  “Ah.” Sir Henry said no more for a while. His voice was decidedly chilly when he did speak. “I understand, Kendrick, as I understood when we were in London, that you are a jealous and a possessive man. I do not know if your claim to Lady Emily’s affections is real or imaginary, but either way, the lady has my sincerest sympathy. Have you confronted her too? Expressed your displeasure or your cold disapproval to her? Do you imagine that because I was abroad early and because she presumably was out too, we must therefore have enjoyed a clandestine meeting? And would my denial make any difference to these suspicions of yours?”

  “Are you denying it?” Ashley asked.

  “No,” Sir Henry said. “Nor am I admitting it. Unless you can assure me that you are betrothed to the lady, Kendrick, or married to her, I do not recognize your right to question either her movements or mine in relation to her. I was prepared to welcome you to this part of Kent with all the courtesy and even amiability due a neighbor and possible friend. I believe that you absolved me of any such obligation the last time we met in London.”

  They were trading civil insults. The thought of becoming openly uncivil was markedly unpleasant, especially in broad daylight and in the civilized surroundings of Verney’s park. But Ashley had come for answers. He remembered the night before and the desperation in Emily that had drawn him into a repetition of his indiscretion at Bowden. “I am neither married to Lady Emily nor betrothed to her,” he said. “But I will protect her, as I hope I would protect any lady, from harm and from terror. Moreover, she is a guest in my home. I mean to discover what happened to her yesterday morning. I need to know to what extent you assaulted her.” It was as well to call a spade a spade.

  “Terror? Assault?” Sir Henry had stopped walking and stood facing Ashley, with a coldness and a tension in his manner to match Ashley’s own. “I am a gentleman, sir. By my life, instinct directs me to slap a glove in your face, since clearly you believe I have been responsible for both. Good sense, however, tells me that perhaps I should answer your earlier question after all. No, I did not meet or even set eyes on Lady Emily Marlowe yesterday morning. I have not seen her since I walked in the garden with her at Lady Bryant’s ball.”

  Ashley stared hard at him while the dogs circled them, obviously eager for them to move onward. Dammit, Ashley thought, he believed the man. And yet he surely could not expect an instant admission even if he were guilty. Verney’s open, honest face was perhaps his greatest asset. Alice must have trusted it, after all. “I must accept your word as a gentleman,” he said.

  “But with the greatest reluctance,” Sir Henry said, lifting one eyebrow, “and with only a grain of trust. Very well, then. But I am sorry in my heart that something appears to have happened to upset Lady Emily. If she is unable to tell you the cause of her terror, then I can understand your concern. I can even perhaps excuse the conclusion you appear to have jumped to, since I was out riding early and was alone until I took Eric up with me. But I did not see her. Perhaps it will help you to know that my affections are otherwise engaged and have been—to the same lady—since I was a boy. And that at last it appears I may be having some success in engaging the lady’s affections.”

  Ashley’s head went back, almost as if he had been struck. Zounds but the words were wicked. Deliberately so? Verney had loved another woman since boyhood? He had never cared at all for Alice? Well, he had come for answers and he would not be diverted. “Why did you treat my wife so badly?” he asked.

  Sir Henry stared back at him before breaking eye contact and bending to pat one of his panting dogs on the head. He began to walk onward and Ashley fell into step beside him.

  “I have regretted the harshness with which I spoke to her and the coldness with which I treated her during that final month before she left for India,” Sir Henry said. “I was perhaps unjust. Certainly I was hasty. I should have taken more time for consideration. Undoubtedly she was devastated by the power of her own feelings, and my words only made matters worse for her. At the time I did not care. Any fondness I had ever had for her was forgotten. I cared for Katherine—and for myself. And yet a part of me, a guilty part of me, could not help being secretly glad of the gift Alice had presented to me. And so I lashed out at her to cover my own guilt. I am sorry—woefully inadequate words. Did I do her lasting damage?”

  “I believe,” Ashley said, “your question must be rhetorical, Verney.” He had abandoned her—apparently quite abruptly and quite cruelly—for Katherine Binchley. And Katherine in her turn had abandoned him in order to marry Smith. It seemed hardly just that Verney was now having a second chance with her.

  Sir Henry sighed. “The answer is apparently yes,” he said. “Your coldness to me is understandable, then. But I cannot help but wonder if any permanent damage to Alice’s happiness was not caused more by personal guilt than by anything I said to her.”

  Guilt? Guilt at having lain with her seducer, the man she had loved? The man she had been unable to forget? Ashley knew what it was to see red at that moment. His fist beneath one side of Sir Henry’s jaw caught the man unprepared. He reeled backward and only just kept his footing. His hands balled into fists and he glared with anger. But he did not use his fists, Ashley was disappointed to find. He would have welcomed a good fight.

  “She was your wife,” Sir Henry said, breathing hard. “I must remember that. I am sorry. Sorry for the whole sordid mess and for your doubtless painful attempts to come to terms with it. But perhaps ’twould be as well, Kendrick, if we kept our distance from each other in future, maintaining merely a distant courtesy as neighbors.”

  “Perhaps,” Ashley said coldly, “it would. Answer one more question for me before I take my leave. Did you kill Gregory Kersey?” The question hung between them almost like a tangible thing. But he would not withdraw it if he could have, Ashley thought. Verney was correct: Ashley was trying to come to terms with the past, though he doubted that knowing the full truth would help ease him of his own guilt. Perhaps he felt somehow honor-bound to understand the wife he had been unable to save better than he had ever understood her while she lived. Had she known that her lover was also her brother’s murderer? Had that knowledge added to her torment?

  Sir Henry blanched and the hand that had been rubbing at his jaw stilled. “Did I kill Greg?” he said in little more than a whisper. He closed his eyes. “Oh, God. Is that what she told you?”

  “’Tis a possibility that has struck me,” Ashley said. “Did Kersey find out the truth? Did he confront you?”

  “He had always known,” Sir Henry said. “We quarreled bitterly over her, yes. There was a marked coolness between us up to the time of his death, though we had been close friends for too long and were still too close as neighbors to be fully estranged. We were shooting together that morning—along with several other neighbors.” He paused to draw a deep breath. “No, I did not kill him. I wonde
r if Alice believed I did. She never accused me of it. But if she did believe it, then that would mean . . . Ah, who knows? The past is best left in the past, buried with the two of them.”

  “Why did Ned Binchley retire so abruptly after the death of Gregory Kersey?” Ashley asked.

  Sir Henry sighed again. “You would have to ask him,” he said. “Though it was not retirement. Alice dismissed him.”

  “Why?” Ashley frowned.

  “I believe,” Sir Henry said, “that she did not realize he owned his cottage. Sir Alexander had made it over to him after a number of years of good service. I suppose Alice thought dismissing him would be a good way of ridding herself permanently of Katherine. There—I have answered your question after all.”

  “Yes,” Ashley said curtly. “Yes, I see now.” And he did, too. Alice had been in love with Verney and he, unable to win Katherine Binchley’s affections, had taken advantage of Alice’s devotion and had lain with her. That fact had caused a quarrel and a deep rift between her brother and her lover. And then, after all, Verney had abandoned her for Katherine. Had Katherine Binchley teased him—held back from him one moment, encouraged him the next? Alice’s brother had died—perhaps at Verney’s hands—Verney had abandoned her, and Katherine was still at the cottage with her father, the steward at Penshurst. And so Alice had tried to get rid of them, and failing at that, had gone to India to join her father. It was little wonder that she had been emotionally scarred for life.

  “I have comforted myself with the thought that they are both now at peace,” Sir Henry said. “Alice and Greg, I mean. The thought would not bring you so much comfort, of course. You did not even know him, and Alice was your wife. And, of course, there was the child, your son. I am sorry. I wish you would believe that. But I understand that you blame me for some things and can never be disposed toward me in any friendly manner. I am sorry for that too. Can we agree at least to be civil?”

  “Yes,” Ashley said curtly. It was all they could do. And he knew he must let the matter drop now. He had the truth, or as much of it as he would ever have. He had to learn to live with past unhappiness, past guilt. Somehow he had to live on and find some new meaning in life. He thought of Emily. She deserved better. She deserved light and wholeness. He had so little that was of any value to offer her. Even the gift of freedom he had given her less than a week ago had turned sour. There had been their night of intimacy, a night during which he had bound her to him bodily over and over again. He had to offer her once more the protection of his name. And of a love that weighed heavily upon him because there was no real honor to offer with it. He had lost his honor during a certain night in India.

  Sir Henry Verney was holding out his right hand. Ashley had been looking at it, unseeing—until almost too late.

  “No,” he said sharply as he watched the hand close upon itself and begin to drop to Sir Henry’s side. “Please.” He extended his own hand and they shook. “The past is, as you say, past.”

  He was on his way back to Penshurst a few minutes later, not sure if anything had been accomplished. Of one thing he felt sure, though—perhaps foolishly. It was not Verney who had caused Emmy’s fear. Someone else had done that.

  22

  “HENRY?” Barbara Verney stepped out onto the terrace as Ashley rode away from the stables. She looked at her brother with some concern.

  “I walked into a tree,” he said ruefully, touching his jaw.

  “I suppose his fist met the same fate,” she said. “What happened? He was so very pleasant with Mama and me, but I could not fail to notice the way the two of you glowered at each other.”

  “I could cheerfully run him through with my sword,” Sir Henry said, “and yet I cannot help feeling pity for him, Barbara. He has come here a year after Alice’s death to try to fit the pieces together, to make sense out of them. It was, perhaps, a difficult marriage. One does not know exactly what she told him—what truths she withheld, what lies she might have told. He asked me if I had killed Greg.”

  “Ah,” she said, grimacing.

  “I had to choose my words with great care,” he said. “I am not at all certain that he understands the central truth.”

  “Ah,” she said again. “Perhaps he merely suspects, Henry. Perhaps he finds it difficult, if not impossible, to ask the question outright. Perhaps that is why there is a look of tension about him. He must need to know. Perhaps you should have told him.”

  “How?” he said, blowing out his breath from puffed cheeks. “We cannot even be quite certain ourselves. And ’tis not something you should even know is possible, Barbara. You are a lady.”

  “And should delicately swoon at far less,” she said. “Nonsense. But there is an unaskable question . . .” She took his arm and walked away from the house with him. “I have never been able to ask you. But I have always wondered. And now the question has been raised in a different form by Lord Ashley. Do you believe she killed him?” She bit her lip now that the question was asked.

  “Egad!” he said. “I have no proof. I am not sure I would want proof. ’Tis unthinkable—though I did accuse her of it in the first flush of shock.”

  “Or suicide,” she said. “Murder was spoken of, though never with Alice as a possible suspect. Suicide was whispered of at first as a possibility, but no one could think of a motive. There was a powerful one, of course.”

  “’Tis best not spoken of, Barbara,” he said. “’Tis best forgotten about. They are both dead.”

  “But poor Lord Ashley is alive and troubled,” she said. “Perhaps you should not have chosen your words with such care, Henry. Which ones did you choose more rashly? The ones you spoke just before colliding with a tree?”

  Her brother thought for a moment. “I believe I said something about her having felt guilty,” he said. “I said that if she was unhappy in India, perhaps ’twas guilt that made her so.”

  “Ah,” his sister said sadly, “then he does suspect, Henry. Poor man.”

  “We must keep out of it,” he advised. “’Twere well to keep quiet, Barbara. ’Tis none of our concern after all. It never was.”

  “Except that Gregory was your friend,” she said, “and you loved Katherine.”

  “’Twere best to leave the past in the past,” he said.

  She examined his jaw closely. “I wonder if Mama will believe the story about the tree,” she said.

  “She will when I tell her I was chasing the dogs,” he told her.

  She laughed.

  • • •

  Emily was relieved to find when she left her room that Anna had not gone riding with Luke and the children. It was unusual for her not to do so. But her reason for staying at home was soon obvious, though she did not state it. She merely said that she wished to walk to the village and wanted Emily to accompany her.

  Of course. Ashley had gone out alone, probably on some estate business, and the children had been eager for their usual morning outing with their parents. But Anna had decided—or had been appointed—to stay to watch over Emily. They all knew that something had frightened her yesterday.

  Emily was relieved, even though she had never before feared solitude. And a walk, she thought, would be just the thing. She was tired, and part of her would have liked nothing better than to stay in her room or to find a secluded corner somewhere so that she could relive the events of the night—the repeated and glorious lovemakings interspersed with periods of relaxation and even sleep. Part of her wanted to consider the meaning of what had happened and its implications for the future. She was not sure if last night had changed everything or nothing. But part of her did not want to have to confront the issues—or to be afraid of what, or who, might be lurking behind her. The exercise and air and the company of her sister would help to clear out her head.

  But it was not to be as pleasant a morning as she had hoped for. As she and Anna were preparing to leave the house,
Major Cunningham came upon them, discovered their purpose and destination, and offered his escort. Anna smiled warmly and agreed. And so, when they set out on their walk, the major stepped between them and offered an arm to each.

  In addition to everything else, Emily thought, taking his arm though she inwardly cringed, he had seen her and Ashley this morning, and it would have been evident even to an imbecile that they had been returning from a night spent together. Ashley had still been wearing his rather crumpled evening clothes. And his arm had been about her waist. She could feel power in the major’s arm and sense it in his military bearing. He frightened her even as he smiled and conversed pleasantly with Anna, even as he turned to her occasionally with some polished gallantry that needed no verbal reply.

  Eric Smith was swinging on the gate outside the cottage, apparently a favorite activity with him. He waved and started prattling as soon as they came within earshot. He wanted to know where James and George were. Emily did not see Anna’s reply.

  “I am going to have a dog,” he announced. “Uncle Henry and Aunt Barbara said I might have one of the puppies if Mama and Grandfer would say yes. Uncle Henry took Mama into the garden last night when he brought me home, and when she came back, she said yes.”

  Uncle Henry and Aunt Barbara must be Sir Henry Verney and his sister, Emily thought, taking the opportunity to disengage her arm from the major’s in order to step forward to ruffle Eric’s hair and to bend and kiss him on the cheek. They must have come home from London, then. Her stomach fluttered when she remembered what Ashley had said about Sir Henry at Lady Bryant’s ball. She hoped the two men would not come face-to-face any time soon.

  Katherine Smith had come outside. She smiled fleetingly at Emily, but she was looking very pale and tense. Anna presented Major Cunningham. Mrs. Smith curtsied slightly, but she barely looked at him. She did, however, invite them inside for a cup of tea. Mr. Binchley met them at the door and ushered them into the sitting room.