The Mask Revealed (The Jacobite Chronicles Book 2) (35 page)

A red flower blossomed on Henri Monselle’s shirt, unfolding its scarlet petals with alarming speed. He sank to his knees, stared into the eyes of his enemy, saw the satisfaction momentarily flicker in the sapphire depths and knew his mistake. Then his green eyes glazed and rolled back in his head, and he toppled sideways onto the grass.

The small figure dressed in drab brown, who had watched the scene unfold from the nearby shrubbery where she had concealed herself an hour earlier, waited until her husband, sobbing hysterically, had his back to her, before she carefully backed her frozen body out of the bushes and made her silent way to the hotel, passing the four men dressed in the king’s livery making their way along the road without registering them, or what they might signify.

Silently she made her way up to the room, responding with only a distracted nod to the sleepy greeting of the chambermaid she met on the stairs. Silently she packed, selecting only the essential items for a journey which could be carried in one bag, and left the building, locking the door behind her and leaving the key at the desk with no explanation.

An hour later she was on the stage coach, along with eight other people bound for Calais, and home, wherever that might be.

She responded to the attempts of her fellow passengers to engage her in conversation with polite monosyllabic answers, at first because she was numbed and incapable of more, and later, as she recovered her wits, because she wished to be left alone to think.

She thought.

Until the moment she had seen Henri drop to his knees, fatally wounded, Beth had been prepared to give Alex the benefit of the doubt. She thought he had maybe challenged the Frenchman to a duel as a delaying tactic, to prevent him returning to his bedchamber until the incriminating letter could be discovered. Maybe he had insisted she return to the hotel so that she would not be implicated in his actions in any way.

After witnessing the outcome of the duel however, she could no longer believe that. Henri’s death was deliberate; Beth was in no doubt about that. Alex was brilliant, devious and manipulative. He had never intended that Henri be imprisoned. He had wanted him out of the way permanently, and could not take the time to find a way of disposing of him privately, so had instead contrived a way to do it publicly without being accused of murder. If Henri had been arrested, there was still a chance that he would somehow get a letter to England, or that Louis would release him early enough for him to get to England before the invasion force was ready. The only way to be sure Henri posed no threat was to kill him. She understood that now, and realised that she had been naïve to think that Alex would settle for anything less.

What she could not understand was why he had not entrusted her with his plans. But then, he had not trusted her with the information that plague was raging in the Mediterranean, nor with the situation regarding Jeannie MacGregor, whatever that was. She was certain now that Angus was right. Alex would have killed both Henri and Katerina had he been in the hothouse, and had not trusted her enough to admit that, either. He had not trusted her to resist King Louis’ advances, initially.

He did not trust her.

How could you love someone and not trust them? What had Angus said? It was all about trust and loyalty. The whole clan system was based on it. Whatever Jeannie MacGregor had done, she’d broken the trust of the clan, and Alex had acted. Now, knowing him better, she could make a fair guess as to what the hard decision had been. She did not expect to meet Jeannie if she ever went to Scotland.

She had loved him and trusted him, and now no longer knew what the words meant.

She racked her memory all the way across France, across the English Channel, across south-east England, trying to think of what she had done to betray his trust. Nothing. She had done nothing to endanger him. But still he did not trust her. He was her husband, her chieftain. His distrust put her outside the clan, made a mockery of her marriage.

Because she was grieving, although she did not know it, the death of Henri and the possible death of her marriage, and had no one with whom she could share her troubles, her exhausted, overwrought mind ran wild. Why hadn’t he killed her, if he didn’t trust her? She knew enough to send him and half the MacGregor clan to the gallows. Maybe he had intended to, after the duel. Maybe he was even now galloping across the countryside to intercept her before she could get to the authorities and denounce him. Had he written to Iain and Maggie to warn them she might be coming home, that she was no longer to be trusted? Would they be waiting for her when she knocked on the door, dirks at the ready?

By the time she got to the door in question, ten gruelling days later, she no longer cared what reception she received. She had used the last of her ready money to pay for the carriage from Dover, had not even had sufficient funds to pay for a hackney from the terminus in Fleet Street and had walked over a mile to the house, changing her bag from hand to hand with increasing frequency as her tired muscles protested.

She dropped her bag on the step, knocked on the door and waited, swaying with exhaustion, for Iain to open it, his face set in the superior footman’s expression.

After a short time the door opened. A man appeared. It was not Iain, and he was not wearing a superior expression. Beth found herself looking into the face of the man she had last seen when she had been trying to murder him, over a year ago in Manchester. On Christmas Eve.

She knew immediately who he was, although he did not have the exceptional height of his brothers, or the beautiful slate blue eyes. But he did have the athletic, muscular build, and the sensual mouth that turned up at the corners, threatening always to break into a smile. And he also had the impossibly long sweeping lashes, framing eyes of a clear grey, which now flickered over her shoulder, scanning the square before returning to her.

Alex had not written then, to warn them of her coming.

“Duncan, I presume,” she said, before he could introduce himself. In that second, as the familiar mouth curved upwards in a smile, she could see in her mind’s eye the way it should have been, Alex and Angus standing behind her grinning at her mortification as she discovered that the brother she had been so eager to meet was the man she had almost killed. Now she knew why they had refused to describe him. In other circumstances she would have felt embarrassed, blushed, apologised, then rounded on her laughing husband and his brother, threatening dire revenge. Now she was too tired to feel anything.

Duncan MacGregor moved forward onto the step and took her hands in his.

“
Fàilte, mo phiuthar,
” he said.

Welcome, sister.

She looked into his eyes, saw only welcome, acceptance, trust. Trust. She opened her mouth to respond, uttered instead an inarticulate moan of despair, and was drawn quickly into the hall, into the strong, comforting embrace of her brother-in-law, where she broke down, completely and utterly.

She found that she was not too tired to feel anything, after all.

It was to Duncan’s credit that he let her cry, helplessly and noisily like a child, clinging to him until the wails had given way to sobs and the sobs to hiccups, and did not press her to tell him the reason for her distress, although he had expected his brothers to accompany her, and they were not here, and he did not know why.

When she finally calmed down enough to become aware of her surroundings, she was in the kitchen sitting on Duncan’s lap, her face buried in his shoulder, which was very wet. One hand stroked her hair, the other was warm on her back. Over her head his troubled grey eyes met those of Iain, who was sitting opposite, his thin face pinched with anxiety. Maggie, ever practical, poured a large measure of whisky into a glass, then sat with it in her hand, waiting for Beth to recover sufficiently to drink it.

“Oh God, I’m sorry,” Beth faltered as soon as she could speak, her voice muffled by Duncan’s shirt. She looked round sheepishly, saw Iain’s expression, understood, felt the glass thrust into her hand.

“They’re all right,” she said, and swallowed the contents of the glass in one gulp, coughing and grimacing, then feeling the warm glow begin to spread downwards to her stomach. “At least they were all right the last time I saw them.”

Iain closed his eyes and let the breath he had been holding out in a rush.

“When was that?” Duncan asked quietly. He had stopped stroking her hair, but his hand was still splayed across her back. She needed the physical contact badly, but he was a stranger, and must be mortified at having this lunatic throw herself at him. She made a move to get up, and his arm wrapped round her shoulders, restraining her gently. “It’s all right,
a ghràidh,
bide a while
,
” he said. His voice was deep, soothing and warm, like the whisky. He didn’t seem embarrassed. She stayed where she was, resisted the urge to snuggle into him, felt her eyes start to close and opened them with an effort.

“Ten days ago,” she answered his question. “I’m sorry I frightened you. I’m tired, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong. With them. They should be on their way back by now.” The whisky, taken on an empty stomach, was starting to make its presence felt already. “I’m sorry,” she said again, looking up at her brother-in-law. “What you must think of me, I have no idea. The first time I meet you I try to stab you, and the second time I try to drown you.”

“I’ll be ready for ye the third time,” he said, smiling. “Dinna fash yourself, lassie, I’m no’ so easily got rid of.”

She sniffed, and smiled weakly. The whisky was rendering her pleasantly fuzzy. Her eyes started to close again. It was warm in the kitchen. There were bunches of festive greenery hung around the fireplace. She remembered sitting on another knee, in another kitchen, worried voices murmuring around her as Thomas, Jane and Graeme tried to ascertain how she had been injured. There were no voices around her now, but the atmosphere held the same tension. She struggled awake again, opened her eyes.

“I came home ahead of him, that’s all,” she said, her voice slurring slightly. “We had an argument.”

“Now that I find awfu’ hard to believe,” said Duncan. “Alex being so docile and even tempered an’ all, and you looking to be the same.”

She laughed, and let her eyes close again, relaxing. It was good to be home.

Over the next few days her relationship with Duncan continued as it had begun, relaxed and friendly. He did not press her at breakfast the following morning to reveal the details of what had gone on in France, although it was clear that he was worried. When Beth saw her face in the dining room mirror she understood why. Her eyes were so shadowed by fatigue they appeared bruised, and her skin had the pallor of deep grief or sickness. She looked like someone who had just suffered a bereavement, as, in a manner of speaking, she had.

While they were eating, a letter arrived from Sir Anthony Peters, dated the twenty-sixth of December. Duncan read it aloud. It was short, and stated only that he had been arrested for duelling, that he did not expect to be incarcerated for long, and that he would return home as soon as possible. He had obviously been supervised while writing the letter, and whilst it told them that he was alive and well, it did nothing to reassure the three Scots that he would remain so. Beth then explained what had happened, about Angus’s adventures in the hothouse, the trip to Rome, France, and the finding and dispatching of Henri. She did not tell them that she had not been privy to Alex’s plans, merely that they had argued about a silly personal matter and she had left for home ahead of him.

If Duncan did not have the blue eyes of his brothers, they certainly held the same intensity, and she was uncomfortably aware from his scrutiny of her face as she finished her tale that he did not believe she had told him the whole story.

She was right. Duncan did not know his sister-in-law well, but the erratic letters he had received from Angus from various locations in Europe had sung the praises of this fragile-seeming English rose. She was strong, adventurous, courageous, hot-tempered, good-humoured, stubborn, wonderful. Reckless as he could be, Angus was not stupid, and was a good judge of character. Duncan could well imagine how a woman possessing many of the qualities her husband also possessed, would clash violently with him on occasion, on many occasions, probably. He could
not
imagine such a woman walking out on her husband in a childish sulk because of a trivial personal argument, leaving him to deal alone with the consequences of killing the king’s servant.

Nothing he saw over the next two days changed his opinion, as Beth wandered wraithlike around the house waiting as they all were for Alex and Angus to return, although she would not admit it. Whatever the argument had been about, it was not trivial. Something was very wrong with his brother’s marriage, but Duncan had to trust that whatever it was, she would have told him if Alex had been put in danger because of it. He let it be known, subtly, that he was there for her if she needed to confide in someone, and left it at that.

She
was
tempted to confide in him. If he did not possess the dynamic fiery charisma of his brothers, he had a quality she needed far more at the moment; a rocklike dependability and calmness that soothed her. She knew the welcome she had received from Duncan, Iain and Maggie had been genuine, for which she was more grateful than they would ever know. It meant she could stay in the bosom of what she now considered to be her family, at least until Alex returned or sent a letter telling them she could not be trusted. By that time, she thought, she would be strong enough to cope with that.

On her second day in London, already tired of passively waiting, she wrote two short letters to Manchester, then, whilst waiting for the replies, she busied herself as best she could, helping Maggie with the household chores, taking down the festive greenery on Twelfth Night, and discussing with Iain and Duncan the problems of smuggling goods direct to Leith now that the weather was so treacherous, and the alternative problems of landing the goods on the south coast of England and then transporting them north by land.