Lady Margaret's Mystery Gentleman

by Christine Merrill

  ‘Anything is possible,’ Liv replied. ‘But I cannot think who she might be. I have never seen him pay particular attention to any girl back when Father was alive and we were both going about in society.’

  ‘Perhaps she was inappropriate in some way,’ Peg said, allowing herself a delicious shiver at the thought. Perhaps he might sympathise with an attraction outside one’s social class if he had already experienced one.

  Liv had put a fingertip to her lips, considering. ‘I can think of only one unusual thing I have caught him doing and that was ages ago, before Father died.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I came into the morning room and caught him writing a letter.’

  ‘Not so strange,’ Peg said, disappointed.

  ‘It was his reaction on discovery that made it so,’ Liv said. ‘He turned bright red and spilled the inkwell in his rush to hide what he was doing from me. I have never seen him so embarrassed, before or since.’

  ‘Do you think it was a billet doux?’ she said, her earlier concerns about the murder overshadowed by this delicious bit of gossip.

  ‘I cannot think what else it might have been,’ Liv replied, grinning back at her.

  ‘Then he was in love, once,’ Peg said.

  ‘And may still be, if he does not plan to marry,’ Liv said in triumph. ‘Perhaps our big brother is human, after all.’

  ‘More than we know,’ Peg assured her, thinking of the lock of hair and the thrill of forbidden love, and equally forbidden kisses.

  Just then, Mr Castell appeared in the doorway, ready for the day’s pretend dancing lesson.

  ‘Right,’ Liv said, forgetting all about the conversation they’d been having. ‘I’m off.’

  When Peg had finished helping her out of the window, she turned back to greet him. ‘Hugh is still in love with someone he met before Father died.’

  ‘Interesting,’ he said. But by the bland look he gave her, Mr Castell was not as impressed as he should have been.

  ‘I know it does not prove him innocent,’ she said hurriedly. ‘But it does prove that he is not the murderous automaton that you made him out to be.’

  ‘Not an automaton,’ he agreed with a sympathetic tilt of his head. ‘But we will have to find something better than that to convince me that he is innocent.’

  ‘Where do you wish to search today?’ she said. ‘Not above stairs, I hope.’

  He smiled at her. ‘I am afraid I cannot trust you with my virtue if we stray too close to the bedrooms.’

  She smiled back at him to share the joke. But a part of her regretted that they had decided the interlude in the bedroom was a source of amusement and not something that might be repeated. ‘No more bedrooms,’ she agreed. ‘The study?’

  ‘I was thinking of just the place,’ he said. ‘Has your brother left the house?’

  ‘Just after breakfast,’ she said, walking to the door of the music room and opening it. When she was sure that the hall was empty, she led him to the study, shutting the door quickly behind them. ‘Here you are. What do you mean to do with the time?’

  He looked around him, hesitating, as if he was not quite sure where to begin. She could not blame him, for her brother’s presence seemed to linger in this room, as if he had never left it.

  ‘Come on, then,’ she said, to bully him to action. ‘It is not as if you are going to find a written confession sitting on the desk.’

  In response to her urging, he reached for a desk drawer and gave a futile tug that rattled the lock.

  She smiled at his look of frustration and walked to the desk, removing a pin from her hair as she went. She checked each drawer in turn, picking locks and leaving them open for his inspection. Once she was done, she stepped away and gestured for him to search.

  ‘How did a duke’s daughter learn to do that?’ he said, his reverie broken.

  ‘My father was in the habit of keeping boiled sweets in the bottom drawer,’ she said with a smile. ‘It did not take him long to realise that I stole from him and it took me even less to learn to pick the lock when he tried to keep me out of them.’ She glanced down at the desk. ‘I will put everything back to the way it was once you have had a look at the contents.’ She stepped away from the desk and stationed herself by the door to listen for interruptions.

  He walked around the desk and began to examine the contents, taking care not to disturb the arrangement of the items therein. She could see from where she stood that much of it was uninteresting: extra quills, a dried-out bottle of ink, a stack of receipts. It was a disappointing collection, reminiscent of the things that had been in the desk when it had belonged to her father.

  Then he pulled a stack of journals from the bottom drawer. He smiled up at her and tapped them with his finger. ‘This is exactly the window into the mind of the Duke that I have been hoping to find. And I could not have done it without you.’ He dropped into her brother’s desk chair, as if he belonged there, grabbed the top diary and paged backwards, scanning the entries.

  It was then that the enormity of what she was doing struck her. She had been so sure that Hugh was innocent she had never thought of what might happen if she was wrong. She might have led a stranger directly to the thing that would ruin them all.

  ‘Damn.’ The single word was said in a normal tone, but it seemed overloud in the quiet of the study.

  ‘What did you find?’ she said, hurrying to his side.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, rippling through the pages. ‘Nothing interesting, at least. The evening that Richard Sterling died, he writes that he dined at his club, lost several pounds playing whist, came home and retired early.’

  David paged forward several pages, so agitated that the paper nearly tore beneath his fingers. ‘There is not even a mention that the body had been discovered. It is as if the death did not matter to him in the slightest.’

  ‘Perhaps it did not,’ Peg said gently. ‘Were Hugh and this Mr Sterling close friends?’

  ‘Not as far as I knew,’ David admitted. ‘Scofield was doing his best to make an enemy of him.’

  ‘So, my brother was rude, dismissive and threatening,’ Peg said. ‘Just as he is to everyone else.’

  ‘They argued,’ he insisted. ‘There were many witnesses to it.’

  ‘Just as I witnessed Hugh arguing with Father on the night he died,’ Peg agreed. ‘But that does not prove he killed him. What was the topic of his argument with Mr Sterling?’

  ‘It was a subject not fit for a lady’s ears,’ he said, sounding embarrassingly prim. Apparently, there were a few secrets he was unwilling to share with her. At least, not yet.

  ‘How do you expect me to help if you will not tell me what happened?’ she asked.

  He sighed. ‘They were arguing over a woman.’ He paged back through the journal. ‘There is a brief mention of it here and a line or two about the argument, but nothing in the writing indicates that it was important.’

  ‘It is just as I told you,’ she said. ‘Despite what he might say in public, in private his feelings are quite different.’

  ‘Or he is lying in his journal to make things seem less important than they are,’ Mr Castell countered.

  ‘So, you are not satisfied that my brother had nothing to do with the death of your friend,’ she said, leaning over his shoulder to try to read the entry about the argument.

  ‘No,’ he admitted, shutting the book before she could see.

  ‘But you found nothing in this book to support your theory,’ she reminded him.

  ‘That is not the only murder we must concern ourselves with,’ he countered, rummaging through the drawer for another volume, flipping pages and checking dates. ‘Let us see what he has to say about your father’s death, shall we?’

  She drew back, uncomfortably aware of the violation she committed in searching her brother’s most intimate secr
ets and the fact that what they might find in this book could break her heart.

  He turned the pages slower now, looking for the correct entries. But when he arrived at the date of the murder, he held out the book to show what he had found. All that was left of the entry were ragged scraps where the pertinent pages had been ripped from the book. On the next page, a single line had been written:

  Oh, God, what am I to do now?

  Now he was staring at her, waiting to see her reaction.

  It was hard to come up with one while she was imagining her brother, in a fit of panic, scribbling an entry only to rip it from the book and throw it into the fire. ‘We cannot truly know what this means, without the missing pages,’ she said, more to herself than to him.

  ‘But it does not look good,’ he reminded her. He was trying to be gentle, but she could detect a note of triumph in his voice.

  She stared at the line that remained. ‘Surely, if he had just committed a murder, he would have said, “What have I done?” not “What am I to do?”’

  He thought for a moment. ‘That is an interesting take on the words written, but I am not sure it is significant. People are careless when they are under stress, as your brother clearly was.’

  ‘But we cannot know what he was thinking from a single sentence.’

  He flicked a finger over what was left of the torn pages. ‘But we can see that he wrote something and decided that it was too dangerous to survive, even in a private journal.’

  ‘It was a difficult time for all of us,’ she said, shaking her head.

  ‘And yet I do not think you have a diary in your room with missing pages and cryptic statements.’

  Of course, she did not. At the time, she had been encouraged not to think about the crime at all, much less speak or write of it, lest it be too upsetting to her delicate, girlish sensibilities. Her sister had been told the same. They had gone through the motions of the funeral as if it were a show and displayed all the expected behaviours of grief and mourning. But the family had never discussed what had happened at all. ‘We are really not the sort of people to dwell on misfortune,’ she said at last. ‘There is a certain decorum to be maintained...’

  He was staring at her as if she was speaking a foreign language. Perhaps she was. The words coming out of her mouth sounded like something Hugh might say when he wanted her to be quiet and do as she was told.

  At last he said, ‘I think we have seen all we can here. Let us put the desk to rights and go back to the music room before your sister returns.’

  He put the books back in the desk drawer in the order he’d found them and gestured to her to lock the drawers again.

  She pulled out her hairpin and made quick work of the locks, then went to the door and checked the hall before leading him back to the place they were supposed to be. Once there, with the door properly shut against eavesdroppers, she turned to him and said, ‘Today’s search was interesting, but not conclusive. Where will we be looking in the future?’

  If she truly cared for Hugh, she should not be embracing this investigation with such enthusiasm. Or was it the investigator that attracted her? Her heart kicked up at the thought of more exploration and she was eager to hear his next suggestion.

  He sighed. ‘I think that the rooms we have searched so far are all that will be necessary, in this house.’

  She blinked. Surprised. Was it all over, as quick as this? ‘You have nothing else you want to see here?’

  ‘Unless you can think of something you want to show me,’ he said.

  He must see, by the blank look on her face, that she had no other ideas. Guilty or innocent, her brother was not such a fool as to keep incriminating information in the common rooms where his snooping sisters were likely to find it.

  Still, there must be some good news in this. ‘Does that mean that your investigation is ended?’ she said. ‘Since you have not found anything conclusive, will you leave Hugh in peace?’

  ‘Since I do not have the answers I want, my investigation is nowhere near finished.’ He reached out to take her hand. ‘It is only your part in it that is coming to an end.’

  She snatched her hand away, hurt that this sweet gesture was merely his way of saying goodbye. ‘After all that has happened, you mean to leave me behind?’ It was unfair of her to complain. They had known each other only a few days. But the time they’d spent together felt much longer and more intimate.

  ‘I do not want to leave you,’ he replied, a look of surprise on his face as if he had not planned to admit any such thing. ‘But there are places that I mean to go that young ladies should not follow.’

  ‘And things I cannot know, like the details of the argument between my brother and your friend,’ she said, exasperated. ‘Yet you have no trouble telling me that you think my brother is a murderer. Let us ignore the strictures of society for a moment. What other truth could be worse than that?’

  He winced. ‘There is so much wrong in this that I hardly know how to answer. Despite the scandal, you are a lady from one of the greatest families in England. I should not have involved you in any of this. I should not even be speaking to you, much less considering...’ He stopped himself, as if unwilling to admit what he was thinking.

  She pressed her advantage. ‘If you are right and my brother is dangerous, surely anywhere you take me will be safer than leaving me here. And I could continue to provide some much-needed objectivity.’

  ‘You mean you would argue with me on every point,’ he said and could not help smiling.

  ‘Someone must,’ she reminded him. ‘Your mind was made up long before you began this search. The courts do not presume guilt and neither should you.’

  ‘I am not as unreasonably biased as you make me sound,’ he insisted, but added nothing to support the claim.

  ‘You will have to prove that to me,’ she replied. ‘And if you mean to give up the pretence of dance lessons, I will never see you again.’ There was the real problem, out loud and in the open. Though he might think he had got all that was useful out of her, she was not ready to let him go.

  She watched the struggle on his face, pleased to see that he was no more eager to part from her than she was from him. ‘I will find a way,’ he said at last. ‘I am not quite sure where I will be taking you, or how we will get there. But you are right, you have been of help so far and could continue to be so.’

  ‘You will not regret it,’ she said. Then she remembered her sister’s warning that taking too much was getting her nowhere. So, she took a step towards him, arms outstretched, eyes closed.

  Apparently, the offer was too tempting to resist. He met her halfway, enfolding her in an embrace and finding her lips with his. It was as delightful as it had been in her room and, in some ways, even more dangerous. Here, they did not have to worry about discovery for the duration of the lesson. They had time and he was using it well, taking the liberty of exploring her mouth with his tongue.

  She accepted him with a sigh, relaxing in his arms and rubbing against his body until her breasts were pressed tight against his chest, feeling them tingle despite the many layers of fabric that protected her.

  As if he understood, he slipped a hand between them, running a finger through the delicate chiffon ruffles that rose all the way to her throat, guarding her skin from the touch of his lips. He traced the outline of her body with his fingertip, drawing a line from throat to belly, making her imagine the delights that freedom from this house might offer.

  He sighed and ended the kiss, setting her gently back on her feet with an apologetic shake of his head. He touched the tip of her nose lightly with the tip of his finger and pushed her back several inches to put a safe distance between them. ‘Lady Margaret, we must stop indulging ourselves before something truly inappropriate happens.’

  ‘Please,’ she said with a smile, ‘no more honorifics. Call me Margaret. Better yet, ca
ll me Peg, as my friends do.’

  ‘That is all you have got from my warning?’ he said, lifting his eyes to heaven.

  ‘And may I call you David?’ she added, ignoring his warning. ‘We have kissed several times now. It seems a shame to be so formal when we are alone.’

  ‘Instead of Mr Castell,’ he reminded her. ‘Not Lord Castell. Like your normal acquaintance would be named.’

  ‘I am aware of that, David,’ she said, taking the liberty on herself since he had refused to offer it.

  ‘And I am not even a proper mister,’ he admitted. ‘I am a bastard son. Though my father has acknowledged me and seen to my education, I will never be more than what I am now.’

  ‘I do not think a title is the most important thing about a man,’ she said. ‘In fact, I have given it very little thought, up to this point.’

  ‘That is because everyone, including you, has been assuming you will marry a gentleman with either wealth or power or family, or all of the above,’ he reminded her.

  ‘My brother would say that I should not consider marriage at all,’ she said, surprised that the conversation had taken this turn after only a few kisses.

  ‘Your brother also said he would kill me for what I have done so far,’ David reminded her.

  ‘And as I keep assuring you, once you get to know him, you will find you have nothing to fear.’

  He laughed. ‘No matter what happens, I doubt the time will ever come when I “get to know” your brother.’

  ‘That is probably true,’ she said, feeling strangely sad over the fact. He must think her terribly foolish to have said such a thing. It proved how little she knew about the normal course of flirtations, which were supposed to end long before anything got serious.

  But a part of her mind was wondering what would happen if David and Hugh did talk. Would they be able to overcome their mutual loathing? And since her brother seemed to hate all men that took interest in his sisters, was there anything that David could say that would make him seem like a worthy suitor?