by Allison Lane
She didn’t hear, her dreamy voice still firmly anchored in the past. “I stared at that note for years, wondering what he’d done that demanded such a penalty. If I’d been there, I could have stopped him. If I’d chastised him less, he would not have accepted guilt for his guest’s crimes. But I’m glad you thought him blameless. I never really believed John’s assertion that Papa was an innocent bystander. John could hardly wed me, then hold my father in contempt.”
“I would rather have had him live. Though he kept his nose in a book, Sir Harold might have told him something that we could use now.”
“But if there was nothing in his journal, Papa could not have helped. Everything he saw or heard wound up in there. He could recall entire conversations by checking its pages – and did on occasion, especially to resolve quarrels.”
“Journal?” Alex gripped the edge of the table.
“Surely you saw it.”
“I had no reason to return. I’d only interviewed him to learn more about Sir Harold. Once Sir Harold died, Sir George canceled the investigation, so I returned to London.”
“If you really think it might help, we can look. I kept all his papers. They are in the attic.”
Alex’s heart leaped. He hadn’t expected actual evidence of that old crime. “Let’s go.” He finished his port, then helped her to her feet, for once barely aware of the sparks the touch ignited.
Eden led the way, talking as she went. “I doubt you will find anything useful. If he was as shocked as you say, then he knew nothing of Sir Harold’s plans.”
He wasn’t about to argue that point, so he changed the subject. “I know you sold his books, but how many trunks will we have to search to find his journal? His study was overflowing.”
“Only one. All I have are his journals, some correspondence, and the notes he was making for his next sermon.”
“He wrote his own?”
“Of course.” She glared at him. “They might not have been the most scintillating sermons in history, but he could put together a good argument when necessary.”
“I did not mean to insult him.”
“I know.” Her shoulders sagged. “And in truth, aside from the classics, he felt most strongly about his connection to Sir Harold, which tied him to several great houses. He bragged about that often, particularly when he’d been found wanting. He ignored the remoteness of that connection, I’m afraid, using it to justify his conviction that he was above menial labor.”
The remark revealed a wealth of pent-up frustration. She was the one who had shouldered her father’s neglected duties, assuming responsibilities far beyond her years. It made his own childhood complaints seem trite. And it strengthened his need to protect her from further insult. She deserved so much more than a life of hard work and constant fear for her future.
“Here we are,” announced Eden, opening the door to a dusty attic. “I think the trunk we want is somewhere back there.” Her candle wavered as she pointed it toward the darkest corner.
Alex set his own candle on a table and began shifting the pieces that stood in the way. Chairs. Chests. Crates. A shaving stand.
Dust rose in clouds, irritating lungs still burning from last night’s fire.
He was coughing by the time he found the right trunk. It was larger than he had expected. Hefting one end tested the weight. Crammed full. He was about to suggest summoning the footman when Eden grabbed the other end.
“I’ll help carry it. I’ve lifted it before,” she added when he hesitated. “Simms has trouble with stairs these days, and the footman is polishing silver.”
Stifling an instinctive protest, he collected his candle and headed downstairs.
* * * *
By the time they reached the study, Eden had abandoned her candle so she could use both hands on the strap. But she made no complaint. It was better to carry the trunk herself than remind the staff that her father had killed himself. The shame would never go away. The servants had been wary of her when she’d first arrived, disliking the rapid change in mistress and fearing that the sin of her father’s death might rub off on them. John had put a stop to that nonsense, but country memories were long. There was no point in jogging them.
She made a production of wiping dust from the trunk while she caught her breath. Only then did she open the latch. “Papa wrote in his journal nearly every day,” she said, sorting the three dozen volumes by date. “You start on these while I go through his papers.” She handed him the last one.
Alex moved closer to the lamp.
Pulling her eyes from his broad back, Eden braced herself for the pain she always felt when thinking of her father. How could he have killed himself, knowing it would condemn his daughters to the workhouse? His betrayal still hurt.
She concentrated on the papers. Letters. Accounts. Sermons. A note to the housekeeper to turn out Eden’s room before she returned.
Tears blurred her vision. She’d thought he’d forgotten her existence. Out of sight, out of mind described his mental processes perfectly.
“Are you sure this is a journal?”
Alex’s question jerked her back to the study. “Of course. He kept them religiously, consulting them whenever questions arose. The only way he could remember something was to write it down. I’ve not read them, though. They were private.”
“This one is not a journal.”
She jumped up to peer over his shoulder. “What is it, then?”
“Poetry, for the most part. Bad poetry.”
“Impossible!” Her hand shook as she took the book and held it closer to the light.
The Nordic gods must scream in fright
To see their heir do nothing right.
This blue-eyed giant daily wails,
Drink the waters, else he fails.
Great Zeus above ignores his woe.
His guardian angels will not sow
A grain of bread to ease his pains,
Which worsen every time it rains.
A man so handsome should not be
In pain that no one else can see
Where—
“Good God.” She shook her head. “This is execrable. What possessed him to try his hand at verse?”
“Since the journal contains nothing but verse, I’d say he considered himself a poet.”
“You must be joking,” she muttered, flipping pages. But he was right. In her father’s cramped hand were page after page of verse. Skimming convinced her that the page she’d read was typical. “I had no idea. Perhaps he kept his daily accounts in another volume.”
Alex picked up the oldest one, then shook his head. “More poetry. He’d improved in twenty years, though. This is far worse.”
Once she looked at it, Eden had to agree. A quick glance through the other volumes revealed more poems. “Dear Lord.”
Alex set the books aside. “What did you find in his papers?”
“Not much.” She ticked off the piles surrounding the trunk. “Sermons. Ancient accounts. These are reminders – instructions for the housekeeper, a note that I should call on a neighbor when I returned, and so forth. That pile is correspondence.”
“I’ll start there.” He picked up the letters, quickly skimming each one.
Eden finished sorting, then frowned over the small pile of reminders. They did not reflect the mind of a man contemplating suicide. On the other hand, they undoubtedly predated his discovery that Sir Harold was a thief and a killer who had involved his host in his crimes.
“Odd,” Alex said when he finished.
“What is odd?”
“These letters cover a full year before his death, yet there is nothing from Sir Harold.”
“It was a distant connection that—”
“You missed my point. I am aware that it was a distant connection. Higgins had never met anyone from that branch of the family.”
“Nor did he presume to write. While he was proud of the connection, he retained enough sense to know that a man of Sir Harold’s statur
e would not welcome importunities from a mere vicar.”
“But Sir Harold would hardly have shown up on the doorstep without telling his distant cousin that he was coming.”
She frowned. It was a valid point. “I gathered every note I found, and not just from the study. I did not want to leave personal effects for Papa’s successor.” The man had made his condemnation of suicide known, refusing even to speak with her lest he be tarnished by contact with a sinner’s family.
“Then he must have destroyed the letter,” said Alex, pulling her out of her thoughts with a growl that sounded like a curse.
“Papa would never destroy a letter from his exalted cousin.”
“Not deliberately. But it is clear that many other letters are also gone. This one refers to the reply Higgins made to an earlier missive, but that one isn’t here.”
“True, he kept only the letters that contained information he did not wish to forget.”
“So it is possible that Sir Harold’s letter got mixed with others destined for the rag-and-bone man.”
“No. It’s more likely that he tucked it into his journal. That was where his most precious papers always were. Since it is missing, I can only conclude that Sir Harold retrieved it.” Fury burst through her head. The cad must have snooped through her father’s private papers. Might even have read some of the poetry her father had kept so secret.
Alex frowned. “A safe assumption. The question is why he would remove it.” He paced to the fireplace and back. “Unless he wrote it long before contracting the chill that was his excuse for taking the waters. That would prove his theft was planned well in advance. I wish I knew when he first proposed this visit.”
“It couldn’t have been long before he arrived,” she countered. “Papa would have been in alt that Sir Harold was coming, but I knew nothing of it until I returned, and I’d only been gone a month.” Or had her father wished to hide the visit? Maybe that’s why he’d sent Olivia with her. It had not been necessary to protect an eight-year-old from Damon.
But she slammed the door on that thought, for secrecy made him a willing partner in Sir Harold’s theft.
“You seem upset.” Alex cradled her against him, again offering comfort.
“So do you.”
“I am,” he admitted slowly. “This missing letter means something.”
Eden remained silent, hoping his thoughts had not followed the trail hers had taken.
His arm tightened. “I don’t think the date is as important as the letter itself. Yet it makes no sense that Sir Harold would take it to hide his presence. Higgins would notice the loss, and everyone around Marwood had entertained him for a fortnight.”
“My God,” gasped Eden, unable to help herself. She stared up into his eyes.
“What?”
“You said Papa would have noticed the letter was gone. So if Sir Harold took it, he must have killed Papa.”
“No.”
She flinched from his uncompromising denial.
He traced her cheek. “I know murder is a more palatable demise than suicide, Eden, but you forget that I was with him when I received word that Sir Harold’s body had washed ashore.”
She sagged. “Of course. Forgive me.”
He nodded. “Sir Harold would only take the letter if it could harm him. He must have written something that could redound upon him, though I can’t imagine what that might be. His actions at Marwood were hardly subtle, so everyone knew he was guilty of Christine’s death.”
“True. If he hoped Christine would bear the blame for stealing the staff, he should have covered his tracks better.” She shook her head, disgusted at the man’s ineptitude.
“Why? She did steal the staff. He wasn’t even in the house at the time. And killing her was part of his plan.”
“But she wasn’t your original suspect.”
“Not until her maid—”
“Exactly.” She glared at him. “No one would have suspected him if he’d understood ladies enough to have taken Christine’s maid with them.”
“He’d been married for years and sired two daughters. That—”
“—doesn’t make him an expert on ladies,” she insisted, whirling away so she could think. Alex’s touch scrambled her head. It was even worse tonight, despite that they’d spent hours apart after arriving. “If he’d taken the maid, then claimed ignorance of Christine’s flit, he would never have been suspected when two bodies turned up in a river. Especially if the other items were with those bodies, hinting that the staff had washed downstream. He would have sworn that the silly girl had made more of their friendship than was there, then suggested she’d tried to follow him. No one would have questioned his innocence.”
“So he wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“But the rest of the plan was well-conceived. So why did he forget the maid? No lady can conduct clandestine liaisons without her maid’s knowledge. Maids always know their mistress’s lovers.” Carver certainly suspected her own recent activities, but Eden shoved the thought aside and met his raised brows. “Yes, I can name Christine’s other men. Richard wasn’t one of them, though he tried often enough. Christine refused, pretending that loyalty to John prevented her from following her heart. Her tragic protestations made Richard love her all the more, of course – which blinded him to her ongoing affair with his father.” She returned to the subject before Alex could ask further questions. “But at the very least, Christine should have insisted on bringing her maid. Ladies can’t dress without help.”
* * * *
Alex’s head reeled, for he had never considered the maid. At the tender age of twenty-three, he’d also known little about ladies. His mother had died when he’d been eight, and he had no sisters. Thus he’d never questioned why the maid had remained behind or why she had been so furious. Now he knew. She’d been insulted and abandoned. Another vital clue he’d overlooked.
He opened the journal and studied the poems. The reference to unseen illnesses might refer to Sir Harold. Higgins had so valued the connection that he must have made the most of it. But if this described Sir Harold, then Alex had fallen into a carefully crafted trap.
His stomach clenched. The book fell from nerveless fingers.
“What’s wrong?” demanded Eden, staring.
“I’ve been a fool.” He barely forced the words past the bile rising in his throat. He’d been worse than a fool. Instead of making brilliant deductions, he’d allowed a schemer to thread a ring through his nose and lead him down a garden path. No wonder it had been so easy. Despite the instinct that claimed it was too easy, he’d accepted praise for his acumen, letting his conceit grow into a smugness that must have annoyed everyone he met. His face heated at memory of his boasting. Why had Sidmouth tolerated him?
“How a fool?”
He shook his head, circling the room several times as he fought his stomach under control. Thoughts crashed through his head. He should have recognized Higgins as an inept dreamer whose weakness could be exploited by an unscrupulous man – that much had been obvious during their brief interview. He should at least have suspected trouble when Eden described the suicide note Higgins had scrawled on a scrap of paper.
Scrap? Its only message a phrase Higgins penned to everyone? It had likely been ripped from some other apology.
Another circuit finally fit the facts into their proper pattern. He returned to Eden’s side. “You were right. Your father was murdered. So was Sir Harold.”
“What?” She blanched.
He caught her before she could faint, set her gently on a chair, then handed her a glass of wine. “Thanks to a furious maid and your father’s abominable poetry, I finally know what really happened ten years ago.”
He drained his own glass, inhaled deeply, then began. “Our culprit – we’ll call him X, for I don’t yet know if he is Montagu, Barclay’s employer, or someone else. Whoever he was, he wanted the Sarsos staff badly enough to scheme for it. He might already have acquired the chalice and spoon
, but those thefts had been easy to hide, for they’d occurred in foreign lands. The staff was in England, where he would find it harder to escape.”
Eden’s mouth hung open.
“To hide his true identity, he studied residents of nearby towns, searching for anyone he could use. My apologies, but your father was a perfect dupe. He bragged about his cousin, making much of the connection though everyone knew they had never met.”
“Are you saying that it wasn’t Sir Harold who stayed with Papa?”
“Sir Harold’s portrait hung over the fireplace in Sir Michael’s study. Did you notice it?” He waited for her nod. “Now read this.” He handed her the last poem. “I believe it describes your father’s houseguest.”
It only took her a minute. “My God!”
“Exactly. Higgins writes about a blond giant with blue eyes. A Viking, whose strong constitution belies his supposed ill health. It does not describe Sir Harold, whose dark hair was turning silver at the temples, whose eyes were dull brown, and whose physique might be described as elegantly slender.” A less charitable man might have called him skeletal, which had added another layer of horror to his dream image.
She met his gaze.
“Exactly. Your father may be a bad poet, but I don’t think him fanciful. You were right that this is a journal. It records his daily life and the people he met. Thus the man who called on him claiming to be Sir Harold Iverson, was really X. The missing letter clinches it. Why would he retrieve the letter unless he feared it would expose him as a fraud? I would wager his hand is nothing like Sir Harold’s.”
“And it also explains the maid,” she said, nodding. “He wanted her to reveal Christine’s plans so you would immediately identify Christine and Sir Harold as the thieves.”
“Which I did.” Alex’s fist smashed onto the mantel. He’d been a bigger dupe than he’d just accused Higgins of being. A child would have been more prescient. In his arrogance, he’d never considered that other men might also be capable of playing roles. They might even do it better.