by Darcy Burke
“I wrote the note,” she said.
Honoria’s sobs gave way to violent hiccups. Twin spots of color bloomed on the Dowager Duchess’s high cheeks and her dark eyes flashed.
“Clive the Ninth dictated it to me,” Sophie continued. “Word for word. The note is exactly how he asked me to write it, as he was dying. He knew I could copy his hand, and I could not refuse his request. He was suffering.” Sophie took a deep breath. It had been months now. The time for her to master her emotions had come and gone. “But do you see? It’s so strange. He’d been planning that moment for almost a year. He learned to distill an essence from Lady Honoria last summer.”
“And gathered the berries around the same time,” Julian added. “Half a year of planning, and yet he waited until the last minute, when the symptoms of the poison had already begun to incapacitate him, to think of a note?”
“What are you talking about?” Honoria exclaimed, her voice rising on each word. “The perfume—is that why you asked me about distilling the perfume?”
“Quiet, Honoria.” The Dowager circled the sofa to take a seat next to her stepdaughter. She wrapped an arm around Honoria’s shoulders and held tight; the girl began sniffling wetly. “If Sophia wrote the note, why isn’t she a suspect?”
“She was my first suspect,” Julian answered. “I determined her innocence weeks ago.”
The Dowager Duchess snugged Honoria closer to her side and stroked a comforting hand down her stepdaughter’s arm. Honoria buried her face in her step-mother’s shoulder and the Dowager laid her cheek against the girl’s sunshine-blond hair for a brief moment.
Then she straightened her spine and looked Sophie in the eye. “I am barren,” she announced.
Sophie blinked.
“I see you are too polite to say: ‘But madam, that’s quite obvious,’” the Dowager continued, a wry twist to her mouth. “Indeed, after eight years of marriage, it is now obvious to all that my womb will bear no fruit. But I have known since the first onset of my menses, which started late and remained infrequent, even rare. Before I married, I spoke to doctors, who drew the obvious conclusion, and I admit that I subjected the doctors’ theories to vigorous testing in the years before I said my vows. I never conceived.”
“Madam.” Sophie wanted to reach out to the Dowager, but they were too far apart. She ached for the other woman. “I’m so very sorry.”
“As was I,” she replied gravely, then dismissed Sophie’s sympathy with a twitch of one elegant hand. “Though perhaps your sympathy will not survive this revelation: though I knew Clive remained in love with his first wife and saw his second marriage as a painful duty undertaken for the sole purpose of producing heirs, I did not warn him or reject his suit. I married him, and I kept my secret until his intimate attentions—and his increasingly acute anxiety that I should prove fertile—grew burdensome.”
Sophie mirrored the Dowager’s pose, unable to look away from her eyes. “Why are you admitting this?”
“Because you are not wrong, Sophia. Clive’s suicide surprised me less than most. I had expected it, at least a little, because I knew the depth of his despair. I knew it, and, conscious of my own guilt, I resented it.”
Sophie nodded, but Julian laid a hand on her shoulder, his fingers digging in. “There’s more,” he ventured.
The Dowager nodded, shifting her gaze upward. “My husband saw his life as a series of tragedies, and he interpreted good fortune as a kind of punishment. I mean this quite seriously: I heard him say that the strawberry leaves of his title pricked his brow like a crown of thorns. Praise and admiration of any kind could leave him in a state of anguish.
“I thought to myself, more than once: he cannot survive like this. I never imagined that he’d make a scandal of it, but an accident of some kind? There were times—whole years—when I daily expected to learn that he’d taken a bad tumble on his horse, or fallen a great distance, to the surprise of several witnesses.
“But then he changed. Peter Roe’s courtship so enraged my husband that he became a different man. His love for Honoria had always been his best quality, and it invigorated him to have a purpose.”
“A foolish one,” Honoria exclaimed, shoving away from her step-mother. “I hated that he kept me from Peter! It was wrong of him!”
“He would have waited,” agreed Sophie, ignoring Honoria, holding on to the Dowager’s attention. “If he really planned—if that was really his goal—he would have seen Honoria married to someone else first.”
“I know better than to expect… a tidy answer,” agreed the Dowager. “He died, and death isn’t to be understood. It’s madness even to make the attempt. I’ve seen it. But even so, I haven’t been able to let the thought rest. I’d wondered if you had helped him along, Sophia. So if not you, then who?”
“There is no murder,” repeated Julian, an edge to his voice. “Whatever your fears, the evidence tells the story. He brewed the poison and he drank it.”
“Of his own free will,” the Dowager quoted.
Sophie rubbed at her upper arms as though she’d taken a chill.
Julian closed his eyes and began to speak in a clipped monotone. “On the day he died, Clive breakfasted alone. He retired to the library to read the daily papers, then spent the rest of the morning with guests who had been invited to commemorate the donation of a new set of altar cloths to Wirksworth Church in Padley, among them the Roe family. He absented himself from the group in the early afternoon to take a light luncheon with Mr. Malcolm Roe, but subsequently remained in his rooms alone for several hours, until the servants became aware, by the sound of his thrashing, that he required their attention.”
He opened his eyes and continued. “Now that we know belladonna killed Clive, we can say with certainty that he took his poison with luncheon, or soon after.”
“With my uncle.”
“Who Clive hated more than anyone else on earth,” Julian finished. He and Sophie exchanged a look.
Honoria sobbed loudly into her hands. “You’re talking about him as though he was a stranger. He was my father.”
“Is it possible?” the Dowager asked. “Did my husband die… by mistake?”
“Clive wanted to kill Uncle Malcolm,” Sophie said, testing out the words. They felt right. They felt true. “Clive tried to kill Uncle Malcolm, but something went wrong…”
“We don’t need to guess at what happened,” said Julian. “We can ask Malcolm Roe.”
“We will bring him here,” said the Dowager. “And we will demand an explanation.”
“Then we must bring Aunt Jenny as well,” said Sophie. “And Bettina and Peter. If we are going to dispense justice, we will do so as a family. My uncle has profited from his secrets for too long.”
“Secrets?” the Dowager emphasized the plural.
“He and your husband together stole my dowry,” answered Sophie. “Years ago, before he inherited the title.”
The Dowager’s eyes widened. “Did they now,” she said, but her voice didn’t rise in a question. The opposite, in fact: she sounded rather grim.
“Stop it!” cried Honoria. “My papa would never do such a thing!”
“Of course he did,” snapped the Dowager. “Aren’t you glad to have your answer, Honoria? You wondered how he could be so kind to Sophia and so cruel to Peter. You railed against his unfairness, on such clear display. Here is your explanation. He punished the son for his father’s sins; and he paid out his guilt to the girl he’d robbed.”
“No.” Honoria stood. “You’re all wrong.”
“Madam,” said Julian. “Would you take Lady Honoria to lie down for a bit? I’ll summon the Roes.”
Honoria thrashed her fists about, but she looked more like a bee waving its antennae than a credible threat. “I don’t need to lie down!”
“Then we can take the time to talk in private, darling,” soothed the Dowager Duchess, urging Honoria to her feet. “Isn’t that why you came?”
Honoria rubbed at her nose
and moved, docile, as the Dowager guided her. The two women left the room and Julian pulled a small footrest next to Sophie’s chair, upon which he sat astride.
“You’re sure this is what you want?”
Sophie flipped the slipper loose from her injured foot and propped the leg up on her knee so she could look at the wound. “Would you fetch me a wet cloth?”
Julian communicated her request to a servant while Sophie tested the sole of her foot for tenderness. The pottery shard had only punctured her skin in two places, but she had blood smeared all over the underside of her foot, and she’d ruined her shoe.
A footman delivered a little lidded dish to Julian. He set the lid down on the carpet and lifted a square of linen from the water inside, squeezing the excess moisture away before taking her foot in hand and massaging the damp cloth across her instep.
He rinsed the cloth, dragged his thumb along the hard outer ridge of her sole, and squeezed the cloth in preparation for another pass. “Not so bad. How do you feel?”
“The pain has died down. I might have to be careful for a day or two, walking about.”
Julian nodded. He repeated the process a third time: rinsing the cloth, squeezing it, tenderly ministering to her glorified scratches. “I should fetch the Roes. If I go in person, I can deflect your uncle’s objections to an unplanned visit. Which will be inevitable, in the wake of your confrontation this afternoon.”
“Then go.” Sophie squeezed her hands into fists, nails pricking into her palms. “He says he cares for nothing more than his family. I want him to see how the people he loves feel about his crimes.”
“What if they forgive him, Sophie?”
“They may.” Sophie lifted her chin. “But I do not.”
Chapter 24
The small dining room seated eight around a heavy, round, wooden table. The chairs were heavy, too, made of a wood so dense that a footman had to shift them for the ladies. Sophie placed herself at Julian’s right and lined her left foot up against his right, an invisible declaration. They were allies. They would stand together.
Malcolm took the opposite seat, his belligerent expression reflected in the polished wood. Jenny ranged herself to her husband’s right, as Sophie had. Between them, Lady Honoria and Peter sat together, leaving Bettina sandwiched between the Dowager Duchess and Malcolm.
And just like that, before anyone had spoken a word, Sophie knew how the meeting would go. They all might stand together as family against the wider world, but here they’d broken into their constituent parts—and Sophie was no longer a Roe.
This placed her in the minority.
“I thought you’d invited us for supper?” asked Jenny. She’d added a feather and trio of rosettes to her freshly dressed hair, wore pearls at each ear. Finery for High Bend. “Are you having trouble with the servants, Sophie?”
“I’m afraid I indulged in subterfuge, Mrs. Roe,” apologized Julian, cool and collected in gray. “Though if you have the appetite for it, Cook has prepared something to serve a little later.”
“You’ll want to remember this,” noted Malcolm, folding his arms over his chest. “He begins as he means to go on: with a lie.”
“And you have begun with an attack,” said Sophie, and six heads turned in her direction. “But I don’t think you’ll keep it up for long.”
“Sophie, you shouldn’t speak to your uncle so disrespectfully—”
Sophie turned her gaze on her aunt. Jenny fell silent.
“When I first told Aunt Jenny that my husband suspected me of murder, she had one piece of advice for me: ‘let him hurt you’.” Underneath the table, Julian squeezed her thigh. She hadn’t told him about that conversation. “She said that, given his title, I must offer him a small sacrifice of pain in order to prevent him from demanding a greater one, later.”
She propped her forearms on the table and leaned into them. “Here is your small pain, Uncle: confess.”
Malcolm measured her with his gaze, and she measured him back. Steel-gray hair swept neatly away from his forehead. A fine suit of clothing, the black of his coat bold and crisp, his cravat white as new. He dressed himself in clothes of better quality than she’d worn while living under his roof.
And still he’d behaved as though feeding her, housing her, tolerating her had been a burden. He’d been a parasite, but he’d acted like a host.
Malcolm’s upper lip twitched. His faded eyes gleamed with malice.
“Confess to what?” asked Peter, looking from one side of the table to the other. “What is this about?”
Malcolm lifted a shoulder. “I have nothing to say.”
“Are you sure about that, Mr. Roe?” Julian asked, his silky voice rich with threat. “Think how badly this could go.”
“Very well.” Malcolm steepled his fingers on the table. “After my brother and his wife died, Sophie inherited substantial wealth. The previous Duke of Clive and I decided, mutually, to empty her accounts and split the money between us. If that shocks you, it shouldn’t. If you’re sitting at this table you’ve likely benefited from our actions—either Clive’s or mine. Ask yourself how many of the comforts you’ve enjoyed you’d be willing to give up. Ask yourself, as I have: where’s the harm?”
Malcolm spread his hands, palms up. “If we measure a deed by its effects, mine was no crime. Sophie is a duchess. Peter happily married. Bettina well dowered.”
It took a moment for Sophie to put a name to what she felt, listening to this reply. The puzzled shock. The mix of confusion and horror. But when she finally found the word—ambush, she’d been ambushed—she wondered how she hadn’t expected it.
“My husband is right,” said Jenny into the shocked silence. “The time for bitterness has come and gone.”
No.
Sophie’s chest tightened, and she swallowed to ease the swelling in her throat. She had been so sure that her uncle had acted alone. That years of hiding his misdeed would make this moment, the moment of revelation, a fit punishment.
It had never even occurred to her that Jenny might know. The woman who’d scolded and cajoled and dried Sophie’s tears, who’d been a surrogate mother since she was twelve, should have defended her. Fought for her. Not collaborated in her ruin.
“And so I have missed my chance?” Sophie pushed herself upright. She kept her palms flat on the table, to still her shaking. “You stole my inheritance—and now you wish to steal away my anger, too?”
“We love you, Sophie.” Jenny patted her husband’s hand. “I had misgivings, of course. But I never doubted that. I knew you’d be safe with us.”
“Love,” said Sophie flatly. “When I had chilblains in the winter from walking back and forth to Padley in old boots—you thought that was love?”
“Your own stubbornness sent you out into the cold,” said Malcolm. “You should have trusted us to take care of you.”
Sophie gaped. “After you stole from me?”
“But you didn’t know about that, Sophie,” said Jenny.
Sophie was speechless. She could not make sense of their answers, except to feel how smoothly they repelled her accusations. She didn’t understand. Why weren’t they sorry? She had confronted them, they had admitted to wrongdoing, and now they ought to be sorry.
“Peter?” Julian asked sharply. “Bettina? Did you know about this theft?”
Bettina shook her head.
So did Peter. He kept his face down, looked neither left nor right, but said quietly, “I don’t like it.”
“Just Mr. and Mrs. Roe, then,” said Julian. “You realize I could send you to prison, don’t you? How will you pay for your keep behind bars, after we’ve taken back what you stole?”
Malcolm laughed. “You don’t want that kind of scandal, Your Grace. If you want an apology—”
Sophie interrupted. “Don’t be so confident. I have walked about with a black mark on my face for the past ten years, and I have survived. Do you think I care about a black mark on my reputation?”
The
smug, glittering light in Malcolm’s eyes died. Good. Let him be afraid. Let him wonder how he’d manage, starting again from nothing.
“It wouldn’t be much of a scandal,” added Julian, lazy and sly. “Who knows you outside of Padley, Mr. Roe? Not a wide circle of acquaintance, I fear.”
“Is that why we’re here?” Bettina demanded. “So you can take the money back? Leave me without a dowry so that you can pile another chest of gold coins in a bank vault somewhere, next to who knows how many just the same? If it was so bad not having a dowry, why would you do it to me?”
Sophie fell against the back of her chair as though she’d been shoved.
“I believe we have concluded the preliminaries,” intruded the Dowager, husky and knowing. “Young Bettina has certainly grasped why it is in your best interest to answer my next question honestly, Mr. Roe. Can you tell us what happened when you met with my husband on the afternoon that he died?”
Malcolm stiffened. “You know what happened. Clive killed himself.”
“You have answered a different question than the one I asked, Mr. Roe,” said the Dowager. “I don’t know what happened in that room, while the two of you were alone.”
“This is outrageous. I won’t let you make a villain of me.”
“I don’t need to make a villain of you. You’ve done that yourself.” The Dowager raised her eyebrows. “Now. What do you remember? I want it all. Step by step.”
“Clive tried to kill me,” Malcolm spat. “I’d asked for a private meeting to discuss Peter and Honoria, and I’d expected an unpleasant encounter. Clive was ashamed of having taken Sophie’s money, and his reproach extended first to me, and then to my children. He let his grudge get in the way of good sense and simple human kindness.”
Julian, at Sophie’s side, snorted. Sophie looked down, and he responded by placing his hand over hers, warm and dry. A star of warmth blossomed in her breast.
“Predictably,” Malcolm continued, “Clive cared not a whit for his daughter’s happiness, and only for his own. So I delivered an ultimatum, one I had hinted at earlier without speaking the words outright: I told Clive that if he continued to withhold his consent, I would tell Sophie what became of her inheritance. He had come to value Sophie’s good opinion because, I imagine, so few people thought so highly of him as she.”