She angrily told the voice to go away as Lady Elizabeth finished wiping her eyes. “Mother and father don’t let me go out very often,” she said. “Mother was always talking about how I would have to find a good match and how they weren’t going to let me join the season until they were good and ready. And then they introduced me to Sir Travis and I discovered that I liked him.”
Gwen considered her words, thoughtfully. The choice of Sir Travis seemed odd, given the harridan the poor girl had for a mother. He wasn’t a very high-ranked nobleman... but then, he worked directly for Lord Mycroft. Maybe Lord Mycroft or the Duke of India had put a good word in Lord Bracknell’s ear for Sir Travis. It was certainly possible.
And besides, if Sir Travis were to be raised in the peerage, as was certainly possible if he brought the Airship Treaty to a successful conclusion, all objections would simply melt away.
“He treated me like a queen,” Lady Elizabeth said. “I discovered that I loved dancing with him... we couldn’t dance together too often, my parents said, but he was so much better than the others... and when my father told me that I was going to marry him, I was overjoyed.”
Because it would take you away from your parents? Gwen thought. She couldn’t think of a better reason for Lady Elizabeth to want to be away. Even if Sir Travis turned out to be a monster, he might not be as bad as her parents – and if they went to live somewhere overseas, she would be away from them for good.
“I wanted to tell the entire world,” Lady Elizabeth continued. The bitterness in her voice was almost overpowering. “My parents wouldn’t allow it – they said that no good came of announcing a wedding before it was about to take place. I had to wait, but I dreamed of him all the time...”
Gwen rolled her eyes, but said nothing.
“... And I promised myself that I would be the best wife he could hope for. And then the letter arrived.”
“The letter,” Gwen repeated. Had she found out something about Sir Travis that her parents had considered murder, rather than simply terminating the contract? “What letter?”
“I burned it,” Lady Elizabeth admitted. “But it was already too late.”
She reached out and clutched at Gwen’s hand. “Can I trust you? Really trust you?”
“Yes,” Gwen said, simply.
“You can’t tell anyone, ever,” Lady Elizabeth insisted. She sounded almost hysterical. “Ever! Not my mother, not my father... not whoever you report to... no one!”
Gwen almost pointed out that she’d just confessed to murder in front of the person investigating the case, but kept that to herself too.
“I won’t,” she promised, and hoped that it was a promise she could keep. “What did the letter say?”
Lady Elizabeth looked down at the carpeted floor. “I...”
She shook her head. “I shouldn’t talk about it,” she said. “But I must. I fell in love, you see.”
Gwen scowled as part of the puzzle clicked into place. It wasn’t a very pretty picture.
“I was thirteen when Uncle Moresby came to stay,” Lady Elizabeth said. “He was my father’s second cousin – and his son Jonathon was fifteen. I fell in love with him and he with me – we exchanged letters for a few months, before they left London and went to the colonies. Those letters... they were passionate. I should never have written them.”
Gwen leaned forward. “Did Jonathon come back into your life?”
“The letter I got included a copy of one of the letters I sent to Jonathon,” Lady Elizabeth said. “And then that terrible man visited and said that if I didn’t pay him the sum of seven hundred pounds – he called it a trifling sum – my marriage to Sir Travis would never take place. I knew that once Sir Travis read the letter, he would break the contract – and my parents would kill me. But I couldn’t pay! I had no money!”
Her voice rose to a scream. “And then that man went to Sir Travis and... and he died! It was my fault! I killed the best man I’d ever known!”
Chapter Twenty
Blackmail, Gwen thought.
Her mother had never mentioned the concept, but there had been a little about blackmail in Edmund; A Butler’s Tale. It was simple – and evil. People had secrets, secrets they would pay to conceal... and if someone else happened to find those secrets, they could use them to force the victim to pay or see the secret revealed to the world. Blackmail. A very simple word for a very ugly concept.
Understanding clicked in her mind. Howell. A man who seemed harmless – and yet everyone seemed terrified of him. And he was a wealthy man who clearly had enemies, enemies who might ignore the law and strike directly at his home. If he was a blackmailer, it might explain everything... no wonder no one had wanted Gwen to get involved with him. But she’d been given no choice.
“Howell,” she said, out loud. “He did this to you?”
Lady Elizabeth nodded. “I couldn’t pay,” she said. “He will have taken the letters to Sir Travis and... he killed himself.”
Gwen frowned. She wasn’t an expert in the many ways people could commit suicide, but there was nothing about Sir Travis’s death that suggested that he’d killed himself. Even a Mover would have had problems hitting the back of his head with enough force to cave in his skull. Hanging or poison would have been much more likely for a suicide – or Sir Travis could simply have shot himself in the head. And he’d looked peaceful, rather than tormented, when he’d died.
“Tell me,” she said, slowly. “What makes you think he killed himself?”
“He loved me,” Lady Elizabeth insisted. “And he would have seen me as a betrayer!”
That made no sense at all, Gwen knew, although Polite Society might have agreed with that viewpoint. A woman was not supposed to develop attachments to any man, at least before the wedding was arranged and formally announced. It might come back to haunt the happy couple – just as it had come back to haunt Sir Travis and Lady Elizabeth. But she hadn’t even known Sir Travis when she’d written those letters.
“And Howell had the letters,” she mused. “How did he even know they existed?”
“I don’t know,” Lady Elizabeth protested. “Jonathon wouldn’t have given them to him – he just wouldn’t. But I don’t know how else he could have got them!”
Gwen scowled, inwardly. Polite Society often overlooked the small army of servants that everyone who could afford it employed, servants who were sometimes mistreated and started looking for ways to get back at their masters and mistresses. Perhaps one of Jonathon’s servants had discovered the letters and stolen them to sell to Howell. Or maybe Jonathon had been desperate for cash and hadn’t been as honourable as Lady Elizabeth assumed. A man could survive such a scandal far more than a young woman could.
“I shall enquire,” she said. “Why do you think that Sir Travis killed himself?”
“Father said the newspapers never got anything right,” Lady Elizabeth said. “And Howell told me that he was going to visit Sir Travis that night...”
“I don’t think he killed himself,” Gwen said, quietly. She reached out and squeezed Lady Elizabeth’s hand. “Someone killed him.”
Howell? It was possible; Sir Travis might have looked at the letters, then reached for a weapon and threatened Howell. Someone who’d spent so much time in India might not be so concerned about what Polite Society had to say about his wife – or more inclined to fight rather than surrender to blackmail. But Howell had said that he had visited Sir Travis before Talleyrand, which suggested that he hadn’t killed Sir Travis – or that he had simply lied to Gwen. Could he have been beaten? Was that why he’d been in bed?
In that case, Gwen mused, the whole story about offering him a loan is nonsense.
Or was it entirely nonsense? Lady Elizabeth couldn’t have hoped to pay Howell – but could Howell have loaned Sir Travis the money to pay himself? It sounded too complicated for words... and yet it did make a certain kind of sense. If Howell found something that he could use to influence Sir Travis, particularly after he st
arted to work in a more public role, it might be worth whatever he paid him. And Sir Travis might not even know where the money was actually going.
She shook her head. It sounded like too much of a gamble.
“But those letters are still out there,” Lady Elizabeth said. “What happens if he sends them to my mother?”
Judging from Lady Bracknell’s words, Gwen had a feeling that she would not be kind to her daughter if she saw the letters. She might simply disown her daughter – or she might seek to arrange a marriage at once to someone who wouldn’t care if her daughter had been tainted by scandal. And Lady Elizabeth would find it hard to refuse...
Would Howell release the letters? Gwen considered it, trying to think like a blackmailer. Very few people knew that Lady Elizabeth had been engaged at all, so he might well consider simply keeping the letters and waiting to see who she became engaged to next. But if she couldn’t pay – and it was clear that she had little money of her own – it might be pointless to wait. Why not send the letters to Lady Bracknell – or her enemies in society?
“It might not be good,” she said, with studied understatement. “What did you want to do with your life?”
“I was going to be a helpmeet,” Lady Elizabeth said, bitterly. “I know French, Spanish, Russian, Turkish and Hindi – I could have gone with Sir Travis and helped him in his work. Or I could have handled other matters for him, if he’d had to go on business...”
Her voice trailed away. “But instead I killed him,” she added. “I caused him to die.”
“I don’t think so,” Gwen assured her. She made a mental note to ask Lestrade to search Mortimer Hall for the compromising letters. They hadn’t been discovered in the safe she’d cracked open. “Like I said, someone killed him. And there is no reason to believe that it was something to do with your letters.”
Lady Elizabeth looked up at her through tear-filled eyes. “You really think so?”
“Yes,” Gwen said, firmly. It would have been nice to have the case solved there and then, but Lady Elizabeth wasn’t the murderer – and she was sure that Sir Travis hadn’t committed suicide. “You are not to blame.
“But I need to know,” she added. “Did you have any other suitors?”
“Mother kept them away from me,” Lady Elizabeth said. “She even supervised my dance card. No one could add their name twice...”
Gwen winced in sympathy. She hadn’t attended many balls with her mother, but even Lady Mary had refrained from being that controlling. But then, Gwen’s mother had had an unfair advantage. Very few young men had wanted to dance with the girl they’d been told was a devil-child. If Lady Elizabeth had been under that sort of control, it was a surprise that she’d even managed to write one letter to Jonathon. Maybe Lady Bracknell just hadn’t considered him a serious candidate for her daughter’s affections.
It was possible, she supposed, that Lady Elizabeth had an admirer that she didn’t know about, someone who had fallen in love with her after just one dance. Such things did happen and they were considered major scandals when they finally came to light, if only because the girl would be blamed for leading the poor man on. But anyone who had been seriously interested in her would have tried to court her more openly... unless Lady Bracknell had refused to let it go any further.
“Charming,” Gwen muttered. She would have to ask Lady Bracknell who else had tried to ask for permission to court Lady Elizabeth. “What do you want to do now?”
“Mother will probably send me to a convent,” Lady Elizabeth said. “Or try to find another man.”
The latter was more likely, Gwen decided. After all, no one knew about the engagement – or about the compromising letters. And Lady Elizabeth would be a good catch for anyone, as long as her reputation remained unblemished.
“And she’s not going to be happy about what you did to her,” Lady Elizabeth added. “Can’t you make her forget?”
“I don’t think so,” Gwen said, ruefully. A skilled Charmer could make someone forget something, but it never seemed to go away permanently. It was merely buried at the back of someone’s mind, awaiting something that would release the memory. “It wouldn’t stay forgotten.”
Society’s rules said that she should leave Lady Elizabeth to her fate, no matter how little she deserved punishment. And Lady Bracknell would punish her daughter for compromising herself so badly – of that, Gwen had no doubt. If she’d had even a hint that the letters existed, she would have married Lady Elizabeth off as quickly as possible.
Gwen shook her head. No one should have to be treated like that.
“I have an idea,” she said. “Would you like to come work at Cavendish Hall?”
Lady Elizabeth stared at her in absolute disbelief. “Are you serious?”
“Yes,” Gwen said. “You’re an educated girl – and I need a secretary who happens to be female. And you have a high position in society, so my detractors can’t complain that someone from the lower orders is looking at their letters.”
“Oh,” Lady Elizabeth said. She smiled, wanly. “Too few men willing to open your letters?”
Gwen nodded. She received hundreds of letters every day – and Doctor Norwell had proved himself reluctant to open them when she wasn’t at Cavendish Hall. Lord Mycroft’s clerks didn’t have that reluctance, but she couldn’t keep them indefinitely. Lady Elizabeth would make a good secretary – and she could say that she was keeping the girl somewhere where she could see her, if anyone asked. On the other hand...
“Howell might see your new position as a chance to force you to spy for him,” she added, slowly. “You would have to refuse if he contacted you.”
Lady Elizabeth paled. “I’m never going to get away from it, am I?”
“It could be worse,” Gwen told her, sharply. “You could have people whispering that your mother lay with a devil before you were born.”
“But if the letters did come out,” Lady Elizabeth said, “you would have to sack me...”
“Why?” Gwen asked. “I don’t care about your reputation in society – and neither should you.”
She shook her head. “As long as you don’t actually betray me, you will always have a place at Cavendish Hall,” she said. “And if Howell contacts you, you can tell me and we can work something out.”
No one would have dared blackmail one of Master Thomas’s people, not when he took a paternal interest in his subordinates. But Gwen’s reputation was nowhere near as fearsome...
Yet, she told herself. Something would definitely have to be done about Howell.
“If you want to come with me, pack a bag of clothes and we can go now,” she said, firmly. “Or you can come later...”
Lady Elizabeth stood up. “I’ll come now,” she said. “Just let me get cleaned up before I pack.”
Gwen watched her go, then closed her eyes and concentrated on a mental impression of Gareth St. Peter, one of Cavendish Hall’s Talkers. Gareth!
Lady Gwen, his mental voice echoed back, two seconds later. As always, it felt difficult to push her thoughts so far. And to think that a Talker could send a mental message right around the world! What can I do for you?
Gwen concentrated. The problem with mental communication was that it was hard not to send plenty of unwanted impressions along with the message. Talkers tended to be more than a little neurotic, simply because they had few secrets from their brethren. And very few people had secrets from them.
Lady Elizabeth is going to be staying at Cavendish Hall for the foreseeable future, Gwen sent. Have one of the smaller suites prepared for her, then have one of the sealed offices next to mine opened up and cleaned out.
Understood, he sent back. I shall pass on the message. Inspector Lestrade left another message for you, Milady. He needs to see you at Mortimer Hall.
Gwen blinked. Did he say why?
No, Milady, Gareth said. He just said that it was important.
I’ll go there directly, Gwen said. Tell Martha to help Lady Elizabeth settle in.
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She broke the mental connection and staggered, feeling sweat forming on her forehead. Laymen claimed that mental communication should be effortless, proving – once again – just how little laymen actually knew. Even experienced Talkers had problems maintaining a link without eventually collapsing – or risking madness. Master Thomas had warned Gwen to use mental communication as little as possible... although she’d had the impression that it was to prevent her from giving away too many secrets while she was using the talent. It was so hard to control one’s thoughts.
It wasn’t far from Bracknell Hall to Mortimer Hall, she reminded herself. She could put Lady Elizabeth in the carriage and have the coachman take her to Cavendish Hall, while Gwen herself walked or flew to Mortimer Hall. Or she could just have the carriage take her there first and pick up another cab to take her back home afterwards. Shaking her head, she stood up and called for a servant. The maid who answered didn’t seem to find it odd when she asked to be pointed to Lady Bracknell’s room.
Lady Bracknell was sitting on the bed, a thoroughly murderous expression on her face that became fear when she saw Gwen. Clearly, her mind wasn’t formidable enough to break the Charm outright, although that wouldn’t last. Charm, particularly blatant Charm, rarely did, unless it was renewed time and time again. Gwen couldn’t help being torn between two different emotions; pleasure that Lady Bracknell had finally run into someone stronger than she was and guilt for acting too much like Lord Blackburn. He’d believed that magicians were naturally superior to non-magicians and Charmers were superior to ever other kind of magician.
“Your daughter is going to be taking up employment at Cavendish Hall,” Gwen said, without preamble. “It is a very important job that only an educated woman of high birth can do, so I trust that you will raise no objections. Should someone ask, you can tell them that you are honoured that your daughter is serving her country.”
Lady Bracknell’s face seemed to darken with unspeakable rage. She would probably be horrified at the thought of her daughter being outside her control – and only realise that most of the magicians in Cavendish Hall were either male or from lower class backgrounds later. Gwen made a mental note to ensure that someone was serving as a chaperone before Lady Bracknell even realised that was going to be a problem. Gwen might not have any suitors, but the same couldn’t be said for Lady Elizabeth.
The Great Game (Royal Sorceress) Page 19